The text we are publishing here is a part of the report on the International Situation presented and debated at the Conference of the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF), held in July 1945 in Paris. Today, when the world bourgeoisie is enthusiastically commemorating the high deeds of the victory of 'democracy' over Hitlerite fascism - which is supposed to be the sole reason for the second world war - it is necessary to remind the working class not only of the true imperialist nature of this bloody butchery which left 50 million dead and piles of smoking ruins all across Europe and Asia, but also of the real significance of the capitalist 'peace' which followed it.
Such was the aim that this small minority of revolutionaries gave itself at this Conference, by showing, against all the lackeys of the bourgeoisie, from the Socialist Parties and the Communist Parties to the Trotskyist groups, that under capitalism in its imperialist phase, 'peace' is just an interval between wars, whatever labels these wars might adorn themselves with.
From 1945 to this day, the innumerable localized armed conflicts, which have already left at least as many dead as the 1939-45 World War, the world economic crisis which has lasted for 20 years and the crazy acceleration of the arms race, have amply confirmed these analyses. The perspective put forward by these comrades is more valid than ever: proletarian class struggle leading to communist revolution as the only alternative to a third world war that would threaten the very survival of humanity.
Report on the international Situation
Gauche Communiste de France (Left Communists of France): July 1945
extracts
I. War and Peace
War and peace are two moments of the same society; capitalist society. They do not appear as mutually exclusive historical opposites. On the contrary, war and peace under capitalism are complementary, indispensable to each other, successive phases of the same economic system.
In the epoch of ascendant capitalism, wars (whether national, colonial or of imperial conquest) represented an upward movement that ripened, strengthened and enlarged the capitalist economic system. Capitalist production used war as a continuation by other means of its political economy. Each war was justified and paid its way by the opening up of a new field for greater expansion, assuring further capitalist development.
In the epoch of decadent capital, war, like peace, expresses this decadence and greatly accelerates it.
It would be wrong to see war as negative by definition, as a destructive shackle on the development of society, as opposed to peace, which would then appear as the normal and positive course of development of production and society. This would be to introduce a moral concept into an objective, economically determined process.
War was the indispensable means by which capital opened up the possibilities for its further development, at a time when such possibilities existed and could only be opened up through violence. In the same way, the capitalist world, having historically exhausted all possibility of development, finds in modern imperialist war the expression of its collapse. War today can only engulf the productive forces in an abyss, and accumulate ruin upon ruin, in an ever-accelerating rhythm, without opening up any possibility for the external development of production.
Under capitalism, there exists no fundamental opposition between war and peace, but there is a difference between the ascendant and decadent phases of capitalist society (and in the relation of war to peace), in the respective phases. While in the first phase, war had the function of assuring an expansion of the market, and so of the production of the means of consumption, in the second phase, production is essentially geared to the means of destruction, ie to war. The decadence of capitalist society is expressed most strikingly in the fact that, while in the ascendant period, wars had the function of stimulating economic development, in the decadent period economic activity is essentially restricted to the pursuit of war.
This does not mean that war has become the aim of capitalist production, since this remains the production of surplus value, but that war becomes the permanent way of life in decadent capitalism. If war and peace have never expressed an opposition which can be identified with the opposition between classes, still less in the present epoch can the proletariat make 'peace' a platform for its revolutionary struggle against decadent capitalism.
To the extent that the alternative of war or peace is not simply designed to deceive the proletariat, to lull its vigilance and to make it quit its class terrain, this alternative expresses only the apparent, contingent, momentary basis for the regroupment of the imperialist constellations with a view to new wars. In a world where zones of influence, markets for the disposal of products, sources of raw materials, and countries where labor-power can be super-exploited are definitively divided amongst the great imperialist powers, the vital need of the young, less favored imperialisms clash violently with the interests of the older, more favored imperialisms, and are expressed in bellicose and aggressive policies aimed at winning by force a new division of the world. The imperialist 'peace' bloc in no way represents a policy based on a more humane, moral concept, but simply the intention of the more well-heeled imperialisms to defend by force the privileges acquired in previous acts of banditry. 'Peace' for them in no way means a peacefully developing economy - impossible under capitalism but methodical preparation for the inevitable armed competition and, at the right moment, the merciless crushing of competing imperialisms.
The working masses' profound aversion to war is all the more exploited in that it offers a magnificent terrain for the mobilization for war against the enemy imperialism - which is portrayed as the instigator of war.
Between the two wars, Anglo-Russo-American imperialisms used the demagogy of 'peace' as camouflage for a war they knew to be inevitable, and as a way of ideologically preparing the masses for this war.
The mobilization for peace is an expression of conscious charlatanism on the part of all the lackeys of capital and, at best, a mirage, the empty and impotent wail of the petit-bourgeoisie. It disarms the proletariat by presenting it with that most dangerous of illusions - a peaceful capitalism.
The struggle against war can only be effective and purposeful when it is indissolubly tied to the revolutionary struggle for the destruction of capitalism. Against the deceitful alternative of war or peace, the proletariat sets the only alternative posed by history: Imperialist war or proletarian revolution.
II. Imperialist war
On the eve of the war, the International Bureau of the Communist Left made the mistake of seeing it above all as the direct expression of the class struggle, a war of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. It denied, completely or partly, the existence of inter-imperialist antagonisms exacerbating and determining the world holocaust. Starting from the incontestable truth that there are no new markets to conquer, and hence that war is ineffectual as a means of resolving the crisis of overproduction, the IB arrived at the incorrect and simplistic conclusion that imperialist war was no longer the product of capitalism divided into warring states, competing for global hegemony. Capitalism was presented as a solid and unified whole, which has recourse to imperialist war with the sole aim of massacring the proletariat and blocking the rise of the revolution.
The fundamental error in the analysis of the nature of imperialist war was compounded by a second mistake in the appraisal of the balance of class forces at the moment when war broke out.
‘The era of wars and revolutions' does not mean that the development of war corresponds to the development of revolution. These two courses, though their source lies in the same historical situation of capitalism's permanent crisis, are nevertheless essentially different, and the relationship between them is not directly reciprocal. While the unfolding of war becomes a factor directly precipitating revolutionary convulsions, it is never the case that revolution is a factor in the outbreak of imperialist war.
Imperialist war does not develop in response to rising revolution, quite the reverse. It is the reflux following the defeat of revolutionary struggle - the momentary ousting of the menace of revolution - which allows capitalism to move towards the outbreak of a war engendered by the contradictions and internal tensions of the capitalist system.
The incorrect analysis of the nature of imperialist war must lead, fatally, to presenting the moment of the outbreak of war as the moment of revolutionary upsurge, and inverting the two moments, giving a false understanding of the existing balance of forces.
The absence of new outlets and new markets where the surplus value embodied in products made during the productive process can be realized, opens up the permanent crisis of capitalism. The shrinking of the exterior market has as a consequence the restriction of the interior market. The economic crisis continues and grows.
In the imperialist epoch, the final elimination of isolated producers and groups of small or middle producers by the victory and monopoly of the large concentrations of capital, the trusts and cartels, corresponds on an international level to the elimination of small states or their complete subordination to the few great imperialist powers that dominate the world. But just as the elimination of small capitalist producers· doesn't do away with competition, which grows from small struggles scattered on the surface to gigantic struggles on the same scale as the concentration of capital, so the elimination of small states and their enslavement by four or five monster imperialist powers doesn't mean any lessening of inter-imperialist antagonisms.
On the, contrary, these antagonisms are concentrated, and what they lose in number and extent, they gain in intensity and their shocks and explosions shake capitalist society to its foundations.
The more the market contracts, the more bitter become the struggle for sources of raw materials, and for the mastery of world market. The economic struggle between different capitalist groups concentrates more and more taking on its most finished form in struggles between states. The aggravated economic struggle between states can only be finally resolved by military force. War becomes the sole means, not of resolving the international crisis, but through which each state tries to overcome its problems at the expense of its rivals.
The momentary solutions found by individual imperialisms in economic or military victories have the effect not simply of worsening the situation of opposing imperialisms, but of still further aggravating the world crisis, and of destroying huge quantities of the values built up over decades and centuries of social labor.
Capitalism in the imperialist epoch is like a building where the construction materials for the upper stories are taken from the lower ones and the foundations. The more frenetic the upward building, the weaker becomes the base supporting the whole edifice. The greater the appearance of power at the top, the more shaky the building is in reality. Capitalism, compelled as it is to dig beneath its own foundations, works furiously to undermine the world economy, hurling human society towards catastrophe and the abyss.
"A social formation does not die until all the productive forces it opened up are developed," said Marx, but this doesn't mean that it will disappear of itself once its mission is over. For this to happen, a new social formation corresponding to the state of the productive forces, and able to open the way to their development, must take over the direction of society. In doing so, it throws itself against the old social formation, which it can only hope to replace through struggle and revolutionary violence. If it survives, the old formation retains control over society, guiding it not towards new fields of development of the productive forces, but, according to its new and henceforth reactionary nature, towards their destruction.
Society pays for each day of capitalism's continued survival with a new destruction. Each act of decadent capitalism is a moment in this destruction.
In a historical sense, war in the imperialist epoch is the highest and most complete expression of decadent capitalism, its permanent crisis, and its economic way of life: destruction.
There is no mystery about the nature of imperialist war. Historically it is the concretization of the decadence and the destructiveness of capitalist society, which reveals itself in the accumulation of contradictions and in the exacerbation of inter-imperialist antagonisms, which serve as the concrete basis and immediate cause for the unleashing of war.
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The object of war production is not the solution of an economic problem. Its origins are the result of the state's need, on the one hand, to defend itself against the dispossessed classes and maintain their exploitation by force, and on the other to maintain its economic position and better it at the expense of other imperialist states, again by force. The permanent crisis makes the solution of inter-imperialist differences by are struggle inevitable. War and the threat of war are latent or overt aspects of the situation of permanent war in society. Modern war is essentially a war of materials. With a view to war, a monstrous mobilization of a country's entire economic and technical resources is necessary. War production becomes at the same time the axis of industrial production and society's main economic arena.
But does the mass of products represent an increase in social wealth? To this we must reply categorically, no. All the values crated by war' production are doomed to disappear from the productive process to be destroyed without reappearing in the next cycle. After each cycle of production, society chalks up, not a growth in its social heritage, but a decline, an impoverishment of the totality.
Who pays for war production? In other words, who realizes war production?
In the first place, war production is realized at the expense of the working masses, who are drained by the state (through various financial devices taxes, inflation and supplementary loans and other measures) of value, with which it constitutes a new buying power. But the whole of this mass can only realize part of war production. Most of it remains unrealized and awaiting its realization through war - that is through banditry carried out on the defeated imperialism. In this way, a kind of forced realization takes place.
The victorious imperialism presents the bill of its war production under name of 'reparations', carves its pound of flesh from the defeated imperialism, and imposes its law on it. But the value contained in the war production of the defeated states, as other small capitalist states, is complete and irrecoverably lost. If one drew up a balance sheet for the operation of the entire world economy, taken as a whole, it would be catastrophic, although certain individual imperialisms might be wealthier. The exchange of goods through which surplus value can be realized only functions partially with the disappearance of the extra-capitalist market, and tends to be replaced by forcible 'exchange', brigandage on the weakest countries by the strongest, by means of imperialist war. This presents us with a new aspect of imperialist war.
III. Transforming imperialist war into civil war
As we said above, it is the cessation of class struggle, or more precisely the destruction of the proletariat's class power and consciousness, the derailing of its struggles (which the bourgeoisie manages through the introduction of its agents into the class, gutting workers' struggles of their revolutionary content and putting them on the road of reformism and nationalism), which is the ultimate and decisive condition for the outbreak of imperialist war.
This must be understood not from the narrow, limited viewpoint of one nation alone, but internationally.
Thus the partial resurgence, the renewed growth of struggles and strike movements in Russia (1913) in no way conflicts with our assertion. If we look a little closer, we can see that the power of the international proletariat on the eve of 1914 - its electoral victories, the great social democratic parties, the mass union organizations, pride and glory of the 2nd International - were only a facade hiding a ruinous ideological condition under its veneer. The workers' movement, undermined and rotten with opportunism, could only topple like a house of cards at the first blast of war.
Reality cannot be understood through the chronological photography of events, but must be seized in its underlying, internal movement, in the profound modifications which occur before they appear on the surface and are registered as dates. It would be committing a serious mistake to remain faithful to the chronological order of history, and see the 1914-18 war as the cause of the collapse of the 2nd International, when in reality the outbreak of the war was the direct result of the previous opportunist degeneration of the international workers' movement. The fanfares of internationalism sounded all the louder on the outside, while within the nationalist tendencies triumphed. The war only brought into the open the 'embourgeoisement' of the parties of the 2nd International, the substitution of their original revolutionary program by the ideology of the class enemy, their attachment to the interest of the national bourgeoisie.
The internal process of the destruction of the class consciousness revealed its completion in the outbreak of war in 1914 which it itself had conditioned.
World War 2 broke out under the same conditions. We can distinguish three necessary and successive stages between the two imperialist wars.
The first was completed with the exhaustion of the great revolutionary wave after 1917, and sealed by a string of defeats, with the defeat of the left and its expulsion from the Comintern, with the triumph of centrism, and with the USSR's commitment to its evolution towards capitalism through the theory and practice of 'socialism in one country.'
The second stage was that of international capitalism's general offensive aimed at liquidating the social convulsions in Germany, the centre where the historical alternative between socialism and capitalism was decisively played out, through the physical crushing of the proletariat, and the installation of the Hitler regime as Europe's gendarme. Corresponding to this stage came the definitive death of the Comintern and the collapse of Trotsky's Left Opposition, which, incapable of regrouping revolutionary energies, engaged in coalitions and fusions with opportunist groups and currents of the socialist left, and in the practices of bluff and adventurism which led it to proclaim the formation of the 4th International.
The third stage was that of the total derailment of the workers' movement in the democratic countries. Under the mask of the defense of 'liberties' and 'workers' conquests' threatened by fascism, the real aim was to yoke the proletariat to the defense of democracy - that is, its national bourgeoisie, its national capital. Anti-fascism was the platform, the modern capitalist ideology which the parties that had betrayed the proletariat used as wrapping for their putrid merchandise of national defense.
In this third stage occurred the definitive passage of the so-called Communist parties into the service of their respective capitals, the destruction of the class consciousness through the poison of anti-fascism, the adhesion of the masses to the future inter-imperialist war through their mobilization into the 'popular front', the derailment of the strikes of 1936, the 'anti-fascist' Spanish war. The final victory of state capitalism in Russia was revealed in its ferocious repression of the slightest impulse to revolutionary action, its adhesion to the League of Nations, its integration into an imperialist bloc and its installation of a war economy in preparation for imperialist war. This period also saw the liquidation of numerous revolutionary groups and left communists thrown up by the crisis of the CI, who, through their adherence to 'anti-fascist' ideology, and the defense of the 'workers state' in Russia, were caught up in the cogs of capitalism and lost forever as expressions of life of the proletariat. Never before has history seen such a divorce between the class and the groups that express its interests and its mission. The vanguard found itself in a state of complete isolation, reduced quantitatively to negligible little islands.
The immense revolutionary wave which burst out at the end of the first imperialist war threw international capitalism into such terror that it had to dislocate the proletariat's very foundations before unleashing another war.
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Imperialist war doesn't solve any of the contradictions of the system that engenders it. It's a phenomenon that takes place thanks to the momentary eclipse of a proletariat struggling for socialism, but which provokes the most profound instability in society and drags humanity towards the abyss.
On the other hand, though conditioned by the eclipse of the class struggle, war can also be a powerful factor in the awakening of the class consciousness and revolutionary combativity of the masses. Thus does the dialectical and contradictory course of history reveal itself.
The piling up of ruins, the enormous destruction, the millions of corpses, the poverty and famine - all this, growing and developing day by day, confronts the proletariat and the laboring masses with an acute, direct dilemma: revolt or die.
The patriotic lies, the chauvinist fog, are dissipated and only make the proletariat more aware of the atrocious futility of the imperialist butchery. War becomes a powerful motor accelerating the revival of the class struggle and is rapidly transformed into civil, class war.
During the third year of this war, there appeared the first symptoms of a process of disengagement from the war by the proletariat. Still a deeply subterranean process, difficult to discern and even more difficult to measure. Against the Russophiles and Anglophiles, against the platonic friends of the revolution, above all the Trotskyists who hide their chauvinism under the argument that there is a greater possibility for the outbreak of revolutionary proletarian movements in the democracies, and who see the victory of the democratic imperialisms as a precondition for the revolution, we for our part located the centre of the revolutionary ferment in the European countries, more precisely in Italy and Germany, where the proletariat had suffered more from physical destruction than the destruction of its consciousness, and had only adhered to the war under the pressure of violence.
The war had sapped the strength of the German gendarme. The extremely fragile economies of these imperialisms, which had not been able to avoid social convulsions in the past, were bound to be shaken by the first difficulties, the first military reverses. Our 'revolutionaries of tomorrow', who are chauvinists today, triumphantly pointed to the mass strikes in America and Britain (while condemning and deploring them because they weakened the power of the democracies) as proof that the democracies offered more advantages to the struggle of the proletariat. Apart from the fact that the proletariat can't determine which type of regime suits it best at a given moment under capitalism, and that to make the proletariat choose between democracy and fascism is to make it abandon its own terrain of struggle against capitalism, the example of the strikes in Britain or America didn't indicate a greater maturation of the masses in these countries, but rather showed that capitalism was more solid in these countries and could more easily put up with partial struggles by the proletariat.
Far from denying the importance of these strikes, and while fully supporting them as expressions of the fight for immediate class objectives, we didn't conceal their limited and contingent significance.
Our attention was above all concentrated on the places where the vital forces of capitalism were going through a process of decomposition and of profound revolutionary ferment where the slightest external manifestation could take on an extremely explosive character. Looking out for such symptoms, attentively following this evolution, preparing ourselves to participate in these explosions - this had to be and was our task in this period.
A part of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left accused us of impatience, refusing to see the draconian measures taken by the German government in the winter of 1942-43, both at home and on the fronts, as anything but the continuation of fascist policies, and denying that they reflected an internal molecular process. And it's because they denied it that they were surprised and overtaken by the events of July 1943, when the Italian proletariat broke out against the imperialist war and opened the road to civil war.
Enriched by the experience of the first war, incomparably better prepared for the eventuality of a revolutionary threat, international capitalism reacted in solidarity, and with extreme skill and prudence towards a proletariat decapitated of its vanguard. From 1943 on, the war was turned into a civil war. In affirming this we are not saying that inter-imperialist antagonisms disappeared, or that they ceased to have an effect on the continuation of the war. These antagonisms remained and could only amplify, but to a lesser degree, acquiring a secondary character in comparison to the grave threat that a revolutionary explosion represented for the capitalist world.
The revolutionary danger became the central concern of capitalism in both blocs; it was this which was uppermost in determining the course of military operations, their strategy and the way they were carried out. Thus, through a tacit agreement between the two rival imperialist blocs, and with the aim of circumventing and stifling the first flickers of revolution, Italy, the weakest and most vulnerable link, was cut in two halves.
Each imperialist bloc, through its own particular means, through violence and demagogy, ensured that order was maintained in either half.
This division of Italy, in which the vital industrial centers of the north were confided to Germany and delivered over to the ferocious repression of fascism, was to be maintained in spite of all military considerations until after the collapse of the government in Germany.
The allied landing, the circuitous advance of the Russian armies allowing the systematic destruction of industrial centers and proletarian concentrations, obeyed the same central objective: they were preventative destructions to counter-act the threat of an eventual revolutionary explosion. Germany itself was to be the theatre for a level of destruction, a massacre unprecedented in history.
Faced with the total collapse of the Germany army, with massive desertions and uprisings by soldiers, sailors and workers, repressive measures of the most savage ferocity were the reply both internally and externally: the last reserves of manpower were hurled into battle with the conscious aim of exterminating them.
Unlike during the First World War, when once it had embarked on a course towards revolution, the proletariat kept the initiative and obliged world capitalism to stop the war, during the last war, as soon as the first signal of revolution appeared - in Italy in July 1943 - it was capitalism which seized the initiative and waged an implacable civil war against the proletariat, preventing by violence any concentration of proletarian forces, not stopping the war even after the collapse and disappearance of the Hitler government and even after Germany had begged for an armistice, in order to stamp out any revolutionary threat from the German working class by means of a monstrous carnage, a pitiless preventative massacre.
When one considers that the terrible bombardments which the allies directed against Germany destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and massacred millions of human beings, but left intact 80% of the factories, as the allied press has informed us, one can see the true class meaning of these 'democratic' bombardments.
To the skeptics, who saw no civil war either on the side of the proletariat, or of capitalism, because it didn't take place according to known, classical schemas, we suggest that among other things they meditate seriously on these figures.
The original and characteristic trait of this war, which distinguishes it from that of 1914-18, is its sudden transformation into a war against the proletariat while pursuing its imperialist aims. This methodical massacre of the proletariat didn't stop until the danger of socialist revolution had momentarily and partially its true been expunged.
How was this possible? How can we explain this momentary and undeniable victory of capitalism over the proletariat ... How did the situation appear in Germany? The zeal with which the allies carried out a war of extermination, the plan for the massive deportation of the German proletariat, put forward in particular by the Russian government, the methodical and systematic destruction of the towns, posed the threat that the extermination and dispersal of the German proletariat would be such that, before it could make the least class gesture, it would be out of the fight for years.
This danger really existed, but capitalism was only partially able to carry out its plan. The revolt of the workers and soldiers, who in some towns came out on top over the fascists, forced the allies to precipitate and to finish this war of extermination earlier than planned. Through these class revolts, the German proletariat succeeded at two levels: in undoing capitalism's plan, forcing it to bring the war quickly to an end, and in unfurling its first revolutionary class actions. International capitalism was able to gain a momentary control of the German proletariat and prevent it from leading the world revolution, but it didn't succeed in eliminating it definitively ...
L'Etincelle (The Spark) No 1,
January 1945
Organ of the French Fraction of the Communist Left
Manifesto
The war continues. The 'liberation' might have made workers hope for an end to the massacre and the reconstruction of the economy, at least in France.
Capitalism has responded to these hopes with unemployment, famine, mobilization. The situation which the proletariat suffered under German occupation has got worse, only now there's no German occupation.
The resistance and the Communist Party promised democracy and profound social reforms! The government has maintained the censorship and strengthened its police force. It has engaged in a caricature of socialization by nationalizing a few factories, with full compensation for the capitalists! The exploitation of the proletariat remains and no reform can make it go away.
However, the resistance and the Communist Party are in full agreement with the government: they don't give a damn about democracy or the proletariat. They have but one goal: war. And for this they need the 'sacred unity' of all classes. War for revenge, for the renewal of France, war against Hitlerism, the bourgeoisie claims.
But the bourgeoisie is afraid! It is afraid of proletarian movements in Germany and France. It's afraid of what will happen after the war! It needs to muzzle the French proletariat: it is increasing its police forces, which tomorrow will be used against the workers.
It needs to use the French workers to crush the German revolution; so it is mobilizing its army.
The international bourgeoisie comes to its aid. It is helping it to reconstruct its war economy in order to shore up its own class rule.
The USSR is the first to help out; it has signed a pact of struggle against the French and German workers.
All the parties, the Socialists, the 'Communists' are helping out as well: "Down with the fifth column, with the collaborators! Down with Hitlerism! Down with the brown maquis!"
But all this noise is just an attempt to hide the real origin of the present misery: capitalism, of which fascism is just the offspring. To hide the betrayal of the lessons of the Russian Revolution, which took place in the middle of the war and against the war. To justify collaboration with the bourgeoisie in the government. To throw the proletariat once again into the imperialist war. To make workers believe that proletarian movements in Germany are just the fanatical resistance of Hitlerlsm!
Comrade workers! More than ever the tenacious struggle of the revolutionaries during the first imperialist war, of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht must be our struggle! More than ever the first enemy to knock down is our own bourgeoisie! More than ever, in the face of the imperialist war, the necessity for civil war is making itself felt!
The working class no longer has a class party: the 'Communist' Party has betrayed, is betraying now, will betray again tomorrow. The USSR has become an imperialism. It is relying on the most reactionary forces to prevent the proletarian revolution. It will be the worst gendarme against the workers' movements of tomorrow; right now it has begun the mass deportation of German workers in order to break their class strength.
Only the left fraction, which has broken away from the "rotting corpses" of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, represents the revolutionary proletariat today. Only the communist left refused to participate in the derailment of the working class by anti-fascism and, right from the start, warned it against this new trap. It alone denounced the USSR as a pillar of the counter-revolution after the defeat of the world proletariat in 1933!
At the outbreak of the war, it alone stood against any 'Sacred Unity' and proclaimed that the class struggle was the only struggle for the proletariat, in all countries, including the USSR. And it alone understands how to prepare the ground for the future class party, rejecting all compromises and united fronts, and, in a situation ripened by history, following the hard road trodden by Lenin and the Bolshevik fraction before the First World War.
Workers! The war isn't just fascism! It's also democracy and 'socialism in one country', it's also the USSR. It's the whole capitalist regime, which, in its death throes, is dragging the whole of society down with it! Capitalism can't give you peace; even when the war ends, it can't give you anything anymore.
Against the capitalist war, the class solution is civil war! Only through civil war leading to the seizure of power by the proletariat today can there arise a new society, an economy of consumption and no longer of destruction!
Against partisanism and the war effort! For international proletarian solidarity.
For the transformation of imperialist war into civil war.
The Communist Left (French Fraction)
China, Poland, Middle east, struggles in Russia and America
Capitalist convulsions and workers' struggles
In a few months, the world has witnessed a whole series of remarkable events: events which reveal what is really at stake in the present historical period. China in the spring, the Russian workers' strikes in the summer, the situation in the Middle East with Iran's new "peaceful" political orientation as well as bloody and menacing events such as the systematic destruction of Beirut and the French fleets' warlike gesturing off the Lebanese coast. And finally, on the front page of all the papers, the formation in Poland of the first government under a Stalinist regime to be controlled neither by a "communist" party nor even by one of its puppets ("peasant" party or the like) reveals how unprecedented the situation is in these countries.
For bourgeois commentators, each of these events generally has a specific explanation which has nothing to do with any of the others. And when they do try to establish some common link between them, some general framework in which they can be placed, then these are put to work for today's hysterical campaigns for "democracy". And so we are told that:
- "China's present convulsions are tied to the problem of the succession to the ageing autocrat Deng Xiaopirig ";
- "the workers' strikes in Russia are explained by the country's specific economic difficulties";
- "the new direction of Iranian politics is due to the death of the mad paranoiac Khomeini";
- "the bloody battles in Lebanon, and the French military expedition, are caused by the excessive appetite of Hafez el-Assad, the 'Bismarck' of the Middle East";
-"only by starting with the country's specificities can we understand the situation in Poland" ....
But all these events are supposed to have one point in common: they are described as part of the universal struggle between "Democracy" and "totalitarianism", between those who defend and those who suppress the "Rights of Man".
Against the bourgeois vision of the world which sees no further than the end of its nose, against the lies repeated endlessly in the hope that the workers will take them for the truth, revolutionaries must show what is truly at stake in the latest events, and place them in their true framework.
At the heart of today's international situation lies the irreversible collapse of society's material base, the insurmountable crisis of the capitalist economy. The bourgeoisie has welcomed the last two years as a 'recovery', or even 'an end to the crisis': it has gone into raptures over growth rates 'unheard of since the 60s'; it can do nothing about reality, which remains as stubborn as ever: the recent ‘good performance' of the world economy (in reality, of the advanced countries' economies) has been paid for by a new headlong flight into generalized debt, which heralds convulsions still more brutal and dramatic than their predecessors. Already, the threatened return of galloping inflation to most countries, and especially to that model of 'economic rectitude', Thatcher's Britain, is beginning to cause concern.... All the bourgeoisie's euphoric declarations will have no more effect than the rain dances of prehistoric man: capitalism has reached a dead-end. In such a situation of open crisis, the only perspective that it has been able to offer humanity since its entry into decadence at the beginning of the century has been the flight towards war, which can only end in worldwide imperialist conflict.
Lebanon and Iran: War yesterday, today, and tomorrow
This is confirmed by the latest events in Lebanon. Once known as 'the Switzerland of the Middle East', this country has had no respite for fifteen years. Its capital has been blessed by the attentions of so many 'liberators' and 'protectors' (Syrians, Israelis, Americans, French, British, Italians) that it is on the point of being wiped off the map. A veritable modern Carthage, Beirut is being systematically demolished: week after week, hundreds of thousands of shells are transforming it into a mound of ruins, where its surviving inhabitants live like rats. This is no longer caused by the confrontation of the two great imperialist powers: the USSR which once supported the Syrians, has been forced to restrain its ambition by the West's massive show of force in 1982. But although in the last instance, the antagonism between the two great imperialist blocs determines the overall aspect of today's military confrontations, they are not alone in the use of armed force. As the capitalist crisis plunges deeper into disaster, the small powers' particular demands are becoming more pressing, especially when they realize that they have been duped as is the case with Syria today.
In 1983, the Syrians agreed with the US bloc to break its alliance with the USSR in return for control over a part of Lebanon. It even policed its zone of occupation against the PLO and the pro-Iranian groups. But in 1988, the US bloc decided that Russia had too many problems of its own to attempt a return to the Middle East: it no longer had any need to respect its previous agreement. Its remote control of the Christian General Aoun's offensive aimed to push Syria back behind its own borders, or at least to reduce its claims, and to leave the control of Lebanon in the hands of more reliable allies - Israel and the Christian militia - while at the same time putting the muslim militia in their place. The result is a massacre, whose main victims are the civilians on both sides.
Once again, there has been a careful division of labor within the Western bloc: the USA pretends to be impartial, in order to pick up the pieces once the situation is ripe, while France has been directly involved through the dispatch of an aircraft carrier with six other warships which nobody, with the best will in the world, can believe are there for 'humanitarian reasons' as Mitterrand would have it. In Lebanon too, the crusades for the 'rights of man' and 'freedom' are nothing but fig-leaves to hide the most sordid imperialist calculations.
In Lebanon today is concentrated the barbarism of dying capitalism. It is proof that all the talk of peace over the last year is just that: talk. Even if the intensity of some conflicts has diminished, there is no real perspective of peace in our time: quite the reverse.
And this is how we should understand the latest evolution of the situation in Iran. The Iranian government's new orientation, its readiness to cooperate with the American 'Great Satan', are not fundamentally due to Khomeini's death. They are essentially the result of years of pressure by the same 'Great Satan', along with all its closest allies, aimed at bringing Iran to heel after its attempt to escape the control of the US bloc. Barely two years ago the US showed Iran that 'things had gone on long enough' by sending the biggest armada since World War II to the Persian Gulf, and by increasing its support for the 8-year Iraqi war effort. The result was not long in coming: last year, Iran agreed to sign an armistice with Iraq and to open peace negotiations. This was a first success for the Western bloc's offensive, but it did not go far enough. It also required that Iran pass into the control of political forces capable of understanding their own 'best interest', and muzzling the fanatical and utterly archaic religious cliques which had led into this situation. Last winter's 'Rushdiecide' declarations were the last attempts by the cliques gathered around Khomeini to take control of a situation that was slipping from their hands: the Imam's death put an end to their ambitions. In fact, his remaining authority made Khomeini the last barrier to a changing situation, in the same way that in Spain during the 1970's Franco became the last obstacle in the way of a 'democratization' ardently desired by the national bourgeoisie and the American bloc as a whole. The speed with which the situation is evolving in Iran, where the new president Rafsanjani has formed a government of 'technocrats' excluding all the old 'politicians' (except himself), shows that the situation has been 'ripe' for a long time, and that the serious forces of the national bourgeoisie are in a hurry to put an end to a regime which has succeeded in reducing the economy to ruins. This bourgeoisie is liable to lose its illusions fast: in the midst of the world economy's present disaster, there is no room for the 'reemergence' of an under-developed country, still less one that has been bled white by eight years of war. For the great powers of the Western bloc, by contrast, the overall result is a good deal more positive: the bloc has taken a new step forward in its strategy of encircling Russia, added to its success in forcing the USSR to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. However, the 'pax Americana', which is being reestablished in this part of the world at the cost of the most dreadful massacres, in no way heralds a definitive 'pacification'. As it tightens its grip on the, Russian bloc, the West is only raising the insurmountable tensions between the two imperialist blocs to a still higher level.
The various Middle-Eastern conflicts only serve to highlight one of the present period's overall characteristics: bourgeois society's advanced state of decomposition after 20 years of worsening economic crisis. Lebanon, even more than Iran, bears witness to this state of affairs, with its rule by armed gangsters, its never-declared and never-ending war, its daily terrorist bomb attacks, and its 'hostage-takers'. The wars between the bourgeoisie's rival factions have never been a tea-party, but in the past at least they had rules for 'organising' their massacres. Today these rules are swept aside every day: further proof of this society's decomposition.
But this situation of barbarism and social decomposition is not limited to today's wars, and methods of warfare. This is how we should also understand this spring's events in China, and this summer's in Poland.
China and Poland: Convulsions of the Stalinist regimes
These two, apparently diametrically opposed, series of events, reveal in fact identical situations of profound crisis and decomposition affecting the so-called 'communist' regimes.
In China, the terror which has swept over the country speaks for itself. The massacres in June, the mass arrests, the series of executions, the daily intimidation and denunciations bear witness, not to the regime's strength, but to its extreme fragility and the convulsions that threaten to topple it. We were given a vivid illustration of this during Gorbachev's visit to Beijing in May when, incredibly, the student demonstrations upset the program for the visit by Perestoika's inventor. The power struggle within the party apparatus between the 'conservative' clique and the 'reformers' who used the students as cannon fodder was not simply about the succession to the aging Deng Xiaoping. It revealed essentially the degree of political crisis that is shaking this apparatus.
This kind of convulsion is not new to China. The so-called 'Cultural Revolution' for example, covered a whole period of confusion and bloody confrontations. Nonetheless, during the ten years that followed the overthrow of the 'gang of four', the situation gave the impression of having been somewhat stabilized under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In particular, the opening towards the West and the 'liberalization' of the Chinese economy allowed a small degree of modernization to take place in some sectors, creating the illusion that 'peaceful' development had at last arrived in China. Last spring's upheavals have put an end to these illusions. Behind the facade of 'stability' the conflicts had sharpened within the party between the 'conservatives' who considered that 'liberalization' had already gone too far, and the 'reformers' who felt the movement should be continued on' the economic level, and even extended. The party's last two general secretaries, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Zhiang, supported the latter line. The former was chased from his position in 1986 after being dropped by Deng who had at first been his patron. The latter, who was the prime mover of the student demonstrations in spring because he counted on them to impose the domination of his line and his clique, suffered the same fate after the terrible repression in June. This put an end to the myth of 'Chinese democratization' under the aegis of the new 'helmsman' Deng. On this occasion, some 'specialists' recalled the fact that Deng had made his career as an organizer of repression, and in using the greatest brutality against his enemies. To be more precise, this is typical of the careers of all China's leaders. Brute force, terror, repression, massacres: these are virtually the only methods of government for a regime which would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions without them.
And when occasionally a one-time butcher, a converted torturer, sounds the bugle of 'democracy', whetting the appetite of the petty bourgeois intellectuals in China, and the worthy media souls world-wide, his fanfares are quickly reduced to silence. Either (like Derig Xiaoping ) he is intelligent enough to change his tune in time, or he goes down the chute.
The events of spring and their sinister epilogue are a clear demonstration of the acute crisis that reigns in China. But this kind of situation is not unique to China, nor does it spring solely from its considerable economic backwardness. What is happening today in Poland shows that all the Stalinist-type regimes are undergoing the same crisis.
The formation of a government led by Solidarnosc, in other words by a political formation other than a Stalinist party or one of its puppets, is not only unprecedented historically in a country of the Soviet glacis. It is equally significant of the degree of crisis within Poland itself. The Solidarnosc government is not the result of a decision planned and executed deliberately by the national bourgeoisie, but of the latter's weakness, which this decision can only increase.
In fact, these events express the bourgeoisie's loss of control over the political situation. The different stages and results of this loss of control were desired by none of the participants at the 'round table' of early 1989. In particular, neither the bourgeoisie as a whole, nor any of its individual fractions, have been able to master the 'semi-democratic' electoral game worked out during these negotiations.
As soon as the June elections were over it became clear that their result - a crushing defeat for the Stalinists and the 'triumph' for Solidarnosc - were as much an embarrassment for the latter as for the former. The situation that has emerged today is a clear sign of the crisis' gravity, and clearly presages future convulsions.
In Poland today, we have a government led by a member of Solidarnosc, but whose key posts (key especially for a regime which relies essentially on force to control society) of the Interior and Defense Ministries remain in the hands of the POUP (in fact of their two previous ministers), in other words, of a party which only a few months ago had still not legalized Solidarnosc, and had imprisoned its leaders. And although all these fine folk are in complete and unbreakable agreement against the working class (we can trust them on this point, at least), the 'cohabitation' between the representatives of two political formations whose economic and political programs are diametrically opposed is liable to be anything but harmonious.
Concretely, the economic measures decided by a ruling group which swears only by 'liberalism' and the 'market economy' are likely to be bitterly resisted by a party whose whole program and reason for existing go against such a perspective. And this resistance will not only appear inside the government. It will come mainly from the entire party apparatus, the hundreds and thousands of 'Nomenklature' bureaucrats whose power, privileges, and income depend on their 'management' (if such a term can be said to have any meaning in the present state of chaos) of the economy.
We have already seen, in Poland as in most of the other Eastern bloc countries, the difficulty of applying the kind of measure planned by the 'experts' of Solidarnosc, even when they have been decided and are applied by the party leadership. Today, while it is obvious that, for the workers, management by these 'experts' will mean an even greater decline in their living conditions, it is much less clear how it can lead the economy to anything other than still greater disorganization.
But this is not an end to the new government's problems. It will be constantly confronted by a 'parallel' government formed around Jaruzelski, and essentially made up of members of the POUP. In reality, this is the government that will be obeyed by the whole existing economic and administrative apparatus, which is also one and the same as the POUP. The Mazowiecki government, hailed as a 'victory for democracy' by all the Western media campaigns, has hardly been formed and its prospects already appear as a simple development of the reigning economic and political chaos.
Solidarnosc's creation in 1980 as an independent trade union, designed to channel, derail, and defeat the immense workers' combativity of the previous summer, brought about at the same time a situation of political crisis which was only resolved with the coup d'etat and repression of December 1981. The fact that the union was outlawed once it had finished its job of sabotage showed that the Stalinist type regimes cannot tolerate with impunity the presence of a 'foreign body' not directly under their own control. Today's formation of a government led by this same trade union (the historically unprecedented formation of a government by a trade union itself says much as to the aberration of the present situation in Poland) can only reproduce on a still grander scale the same kind of contradictions and convulsions. In this sense, the 'solution' of ferocious repression adopted in December 1981 cannot be excluded. Kiszczak, Minister of the Interior during the state of siege, is still at his post ...
The convulsions shaking Poland today, though they may take on an extreme form in this country, are by no means specific to it. All the countries under Stalinist regimes are in the same dead end. Their economies have been particularly brutally hit by the world capitalist crisis, not only because of their backwardness, but because they are totally incapable of adapting to an exacerbation of inter-capitalist competition. The attempts to improve their competitivity by introducing some of the 'classical' norms of capitalist management have only succeeded in provoking a still greater shambles, as can be seen from the utter failure of 'Perestroika' in the USSR.
This shambles is also developing on the political level, with the attempts at 'democratization' designed to let off steam and channel the huge and growing discontent which has been growing for decades within the whole population. This can be seen in the Polish situation, but also in what is happening in Russia: the nationalist explosions provoked by a loosening of central power are a growing threat to the USSR. The cohesion of the whole Eastern bloc is similarly affected: the hysterical declarations by the 'fraternal' parties of East Germany and Czechoslovakia against the 'revisionists' and 'assassins of marxism' in power in Poland and Hungary are not just playacting; they reveal the degree of division that is developing between the different Warsaw Pact countries.
What is in store for the Stalinist regimes is thus not a 'peaceful democratization', still less an economic 'recovery'. With the deepening of the worldwide capitalist crisis, these countries have entered a period of convulsions to an extent unheard of in a past which is nonetheless rich in violent upheavals. The events of this summer give us an image of a world plunging into barbarism: military confrontations, massacres, repression, economic and political convulsions. And yet at the same time, the only force which can offer society another future has raised its head: the proletariat has made its presence most massively felt, precisely in Russia.
USSR: the working class enters the struggle
The proletarian struggles which, for several weeks in July and August, mobilized more than 500,000 workers in the mines of the Kuzbas, the Donbas, and the Siberian North are of great historical importance. They are by far the most massive proletarian movement in the USSR since the revolutionary period of 1917.
But above all, because they have been fought by the proletariat which was subjected most brutally and deeply to four decades of the terrible counter-revolution unleashed all over the world after 1920, they are a brilliant confirmation of the course of history today: the perspective opened by capitalism's acute crisis is not one of world war, but of class confrontations.
These struggles were not as widespread as those in Poland in 1980, nor even as many in the central capitalist countries since 1968. However, they open a new perspective for the Russian proletariat, which for more than half a century has been forced to tolerate in silence the most appalling living conditions. They prove that the workers can express themselves on their class terrain, even in the heart of 'real socialism', against both repression and the poison of nationalist and democratic campaigns.
They are also, as in Poland in 1980, the proof of what the proletariat can do in the absence of the classic organs for the control of the class struggle: the trade unions. The movement's rapid spread from one mining centre to another through the dispatch of mass delegations, the collective control of the struggle through mass meetings, the organization of mass meetings and demonstrations in the streets overcoming the separations between different factories, the election of strike committees responsible to the mass meetings, are the elementary forms of struggle that the working class adopts when the terrain is not, or hardly, occupied by the professional saboteurs.
Faced with the movement's size and dynamic, and to avoid it spreading to other sectors, the authorities had no other choice, temporarily, than to give in to the workers' demands. However, it is obvious that most of these demands will never be really satisfied: the catastrophic economic situation in the USSR makes it impossible. The only demands that are not likely to be put into question are precisely those that reveal the movement's limits: 'autonomy' for factories, allowing them to fix the price of coal and to sell on the domestic and world markets anything not bought up by the state.
Just as in 1980, the constitution of a 'free' trade union proved to be a trap which rapidly closed on the workers, so this 'victory' will very soon be transformed into a means to increase the exploitation of the miners, and to divide them from other sectors of the working class, who will have to pay more to heat themselves. The large-scale struggles of the Russian miners are thus, like the struggles in Poland, an illustration of the political weakness of the proletariat in the Eastern bloc
In this part of the world, despite the great courage and combativity they have shown against an unprecedented series of attacks, the workers are still very vulnerable to nationalist, trade unionist, democratic, or even religious (in the case of Poland) mystifications. As a result, the political convulsions which regularly and increasingly rock these countries are mostly turned against the workers' struggles, as we have seen in Poland where the banning of Solidarnosc between 1981 and 1989 allowed it to polish up its image, damaged by its role as a 'social fireman'. In the same way, the 'political' demands made by the Russian miners (resignation of local party apparatchiks, new constitution, etc), were used to boost Gorbachev's present policy.
This is why the struggles in Russia this summer are a call to the whole world proletariat, and especially in the heart of capitalism where its most powerful and experienced battalions are concentrated. These struggles bear witness to the depth, strength, and importance of today's class combat. At the same time, they highlight the responsibility of the proletariat in the heartlands. Only the confrontation and denunciation in struggle of the most sophisticated traps laid by the world's strongest and most experienced bourgeoisie will allow the proletariat in the Eastern bloc to confront these same traps victoriously. The struggles mobilizing more than 100,000 workers in the hospitals, and the telecommunications and electrical industries, which have taken place in the United States, the world's greatest power, this summer at the same time as the struggles in the world's second power, are the proof that the proletariat in the central countries is continuing in this direction. In the same way, the great combativity which has appeared over several months in Britain against the union sabotage set up by the world's politically strongest bourgeoisie, especially in the docking and transport industries, are another step down this road.
FM 7/9/89
The International Communist Current has just held its 8th Congress. With the delegations from the ICC's ten sections, delegates from the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista (GPI) of Mexico, and from Communist Internationalist (CI) of India also took part in the Congress. Their active and enthusiastic participation brought a new breath of energy and confidence to our discussions, from the periphery of capitalism where the proletarian struggle is most difficult, where the conditions for militant communist activity are least favorable; their presence gave the tone to the whole Congress. The GPI delegation was mandated to seek its militants' entry into our organization; their candidature was discussed and accepted at the Congress opening session. We will come back to this later.
This Congress was held at a moment of rapid historical acceleration. Capitalism is leading humanity to disaster. Every day, living conditions for the vast majority of human beings worsen dramatically; hunger riots proliferate; for billions, life expectancy is declining; all kinds of catastrophes claim thousands of victims, and wars, millions.
The situation of the working class throughout the world, including in the rich developed countries of the northern hemisphere, is also getting constantly worse; unemployment is rising, wages falling, job and living conditions worsening. The working class has not remained passive and as it resists, step by step, the attacks against it, it is developing its struggle, its experience, and its consciousness. The dynamic of developing workers' struggles has been confirmed most recently in the massive strikes this summer in Great Britain and the USSR. In both East and West, the international proletariat is fighting back against capital.
It is clear what is at stake: capitalism is leading us towards a still more brutal collapse into economic disaster, and to a 3rd World War. Only the proletariat's resistance is preventing today, and can prevent tomorrow, the unleashing of another world-wide holocaust: only the development of its struggle can open humanity's way to the revolutionary perspective of communism.
We will not enter here into the Congress' debates on the international situation. We refer our readers to the resolution adopted by the Congress, and to its presentation in this issue of the International Review. Suffice it to say that the Congress confirmed the validity of our previous orientations, and their acceleration, in the three aspects of the international situation: the economic crisis, inter-imperialist tensions, and the class struggle. It reaffirmed the validity and the immediacy of the historic course towards class confrontations: recent years have not put this perspective in question; despite its weaknesses and difficulties, the proletariat has not suffered any major defeats which could overturn this course, and capitalism's road to world war remains blocked. More particularly, the Congress confirmed, against the lies and propaganda of the bourgeoisie but also against the doubts, hesitations, lack of confidence and skepticism currently reigning amongst the groups of the proletarian political milieu, the continuing reality of the wave of workers' struggles which has been developing on an international level since 1983.
The GPI and CI were both formed around, and on the basis of, our general analyses of the present period; and specifically of the recognition of a historic course towards class confrontations. The interventions by the Indian delegate, and by the ICC's new militants in Mexico, were thus fully integrated into the demonstration by the whole Congress of its confidence in the proletarian combat, and in its struggles today. The Congress' ability to do this was vital, and the resolution it adopted answered this need clearly. It also, as the reader will see, went further in clarifying the different characteristics of the present period, and decided to open a debate on the question of social decomposition.
Defense and reinforcement of the revolutionary organization
This general understanding of what is at stake historically today is the framework wherein revolutionary organizations, which are both a product of the world proletariat's combat and active participants in it, must mobilize, and prepare to take part in their class' historic struggle. Their role is vital: on the basis of the clearest possible understanding of the present situation and its perspectives, it is down to them, today, to take on the vanguard political struggle within the workers' struggles.
This is why the perspectives for our organization's activity drawn up by the Congress are one with our analysis of the present historical period. After evaluating positively the militant work accomplished since the 7th Congress, the resolution adopted on our activities reaffirmed our existing orientation:
"The activities of the ICC in the coming two years must be in continuity with the tasks undertaken since the revival of class combats in 1983, tasks outlined at our two previous Congresses in 1985 and 1987 which give priority to intervention in the workers' struggles, to active participation in orienting the struggle, and showing the need for a greater and more long-term militant commitment faced with the perspectives:
- of new integrations coming out of the present wave of class struggle, in the first place the constitution of a new territorial section, which in the short term is one of the most important issues facing the ICC;
- of a more important role for the organization in the process leading to the unification of workers' struggles (...)
The organization's most recent experience has allowed us to highlight several lessons which must be fully integrated into the perspectives for our activities:
- the need to fight for the holding of open mass meetings, which aim right from the start to widen the struggle, to spread it geographically ( ... )
- the need for unitary demands, against demagogic attempts to outbid everyone else, and against sectional particularities;
- the necessity of not being naive faced with the action of the bourgeoisie on the ground, so as to be able to foil the maneuvers aimed at recuperating the struggle by the unions and the coordinations that are developing today;
- the need to be in the forefront of intervention in the constitution and the action of the struggle committees (...)."
In the present period, intervention in the workers' struggles determines every aspect of a revolutionary organization's activity. To carry out their tasks of intervention, revolutionaries need solid centralized political organizations. The question of the political organization and its defense has always been a central one. Communist organizations are subject to the pressure both of bourgeois, and of petty-bourgeois ideology, which appears in individualism, localism, immediatism, etc. This pressure is still stronger on today's communist groups, due to the effects of the social decomposition that affects the whole of capitalist society. As the resolution on activities emphasizes:
"Bourgeois society's decomposition, in the absence of any perspective of an immediate way out, exerts its pressure on the proletariat and its political organisations (... )".
This increased pressure on communist groups makes the question of the defense of the revolutionary organization still more crucial. This was the second element of the Congress' discussion on our activities. The resolution reaffirms that, against this danger, "the ICC's greatest strength lies in its international, unified, and centralized nature". In this sense, the Congress required of all the organization, all its sections and all its militants, to strengthen the ICC's organizational fabric, its collective work, its international centralization, to develop a more rigorous functioning and a greater militant commitment. The object is to counter today's particular effects of decomposition on revolutionary political groups, such as localism, individualism, or even destructive activities and maneuvers.
Revolucion Mundial's constitution as a section of the ICC
Confidence in the proletarian struggle; confidence in the role and intervention of revolutionaries; confidence in the ICC; as we have said, this is what was at stake in the Congress. The presence of the delegate from CI, the candidature of the comrades from Mexico, as well as their interventions during the debates, were all illustrations of their own confidence on these three levels which placed these comrades in the same dynamic as the rest of the Congress. Apart from the various texts and resolutions it adopted, the Congress' clearest demonstration of confidence was its adoption of the resolution integrating the comrades of the GPI into the ICC, and the formation of a new section in Mexico. Here are the most important extracts:
"1. A product of the development of the class struggle, the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista is a communist group which was constituted with the ICC's active participation - on the basis of the ICC's political positions and of its general orientations, in particular that of intervention in the class struggle ( ... )
2. The GPI's first Congress saw the ratification by all its militants of ( ... ) the political class positions developed by the group. In close collaboration with the ICC, it opened up a process of political reapropriation and clarification, and drew out the main lines for establishing a coherent political presence by the group in Mexico.
3. One year later, the GPI's second Congress -- like the ICC -- drew up a positive balance-sheet of this process of political clarification. In fact, the group had:
- acquainted itself with, confronted, and taken position on the different currents and groups of the political milieu, defended the programmatic, theoretical, and political positions of the ICC,
- developed the same orientations as the ICC, of intervention in workers' struggles and in the proletarian political movement,
- assumed a political presence at both a local and an international level,
- maintained a lively, intense and fruitful internal political life.
4. The GPI's second Congress has successfully confronted and overcome the group's councilist weaknesses, which were expressed in the process of political clarification:
- on the theoretical level by the unanimous adoption of a correct position on class consciousness and the party,
- on the political level by the unanimous demand for the opening of the process of it militants' integration, to which the ICC reacted favorably.
5. Seven months later, the ICC's VIIIth Congress evaluates this process of integration positively. The comrades of the GPI have unanimously, after in-depth discussion, pronounced their agreement with the ICC's Platform and Statutes. Apart from this, the GPI has, since the opening of this process, assumed the tasks of a true section of the ICC, by a regular and frequent correspondence, by taking positions in the ICC's debates, by intervening in the class struggle, and ensuring the regular publication of Revolucion Mundial ( ... ).
6. The VIIIth Congress of the ICC ( ...)j, conscious of the difficulties for the organization of integrating a group of militants in a relatively isolated country, considers that the process of the GPI comrades' integration with the ICC is drawing to a close. Consequently, the Congress pronounces itself for the integration of the GPI militants into the organization, and their constitution as the ICC's section in Mexico".
Following this decision by the Congress, the Mexican delegation declared, as it had been mandated to do, the dissolution of the GPI. Needless to say, from this moment on, the delegates intervened in the Congress as delegates of Revolucion Mundial, the new section in Mexico, and as full members of the ICC. The high degree of political clarity expressed in its preparation for the Congress, and its delegation's energetic and important participation in the debates shows that the formation of the new section represents a considerable reinforcement of the ICC both politically and in terms of its presence on the American continent.
A reinforcement of the proletarian political milieu
This dynamic of political clarification, militant commitment, and regroupment, with the ICC in particular, is not unique to the comrades of RM. At the Congress' closure, the delegate from CI, a group with which we have been in close contact for years, posed his candidature to our organization; we have accepted this candidature. This integration and the publication of Communist Internationalist as the ICC's organ in India opens the perspective of our organization's political presence, and its 12th section, in a country (and in the Asian continent) where revolutionary forces are all but non-existent and where, despite a great combativity as we have seen in India particularly, the proletariat is dispersed and lacking in historical and political experience.
Nor, it should be said, is this process of movement towards and integration in the ICC something peculiar to the countries of the periphery. We have witnessed, and taken part in a renewal of contacts and a dynamic towards militant commitment in Europe, where the ICC and the major communist groups and currents are already present.
But let us be clear about one thing: however enthusiastic we may be over this increased militant strength, there can be no question, for us, of triumphalism. We are all too aware of what is at stake historically, of the proletariat's difficulties and the weakness of revolutionary forces.
These new integrations are a success for the ICC, which since its foundation has claimed and worked to be a real international pole of political reference and regroupment. They confirm the validity of our political positions in the periphery and the developed countries of every continent; they confirm the orientation of our intervention towards the proletarian political movement. But, and we are extremely aware of this, they also give us new and greater responsibilities: on the one hand, we must make these integrations a complete success; on the other, our militant responsibility towards the world proletariat is increased.
The emergence of elements and political groups in countries of the periphery (India, Latin America), the appearance of a new generation of militants, are the product of a historical period and of today's workers' struggles. Moreover as we have seen, it is essentially on the basis of a more or less clear recognition of the historic course towards class confrontations, and of the reality of the present wave of struggles, that these groups have been formed.
The question of the course of history is the central one "separating" the groups of the proletarian political movement. Over and above their existing programmatic differences, this is what determines today the various groups' and currents' dynamics: either towards intervention in the struggle and in the revolutionary movement, towards discussion and political confrontation, and eventually regroupment; or towards skepticism at the struggle, refusal and fear of intervention, retreat into sectarianism, dispersal, discouragement, and sclerosis.
The recognition of the development of the workers' struggle, and revolutionaries' readiness to intervene in them, lies at the basis of revolutionary groups' ability to confront their responsibilities: within the struggle itself, of course, but also towards those elements and groups that appear throughout the world, and towards the need to develop centralized and militant organizations capable of acting as poles of reference and regroupment.
In our opinion, the strengthening of the ICC represents a strengthening of the entire proletarian political movement. These are the first real and significant regroupments for a decade, in fact since the formation of the ICC's section in Sweden. They mark a break with the proliferation of splits, dispersion, and loss of militant forces. For all proletarian political groups, for all emerging revolutionary elements, this should be an element of confidence in the present situation, and a call to militant sense of responsibilities.
History is accelerating on every level
Already, we can make a positive evaluation of the 8th Congress. It reaffirmed our confidence in today's workers' struggles, and our conviction that they will develop during the coming period; it reaffirmed our orientation towards intervention in these struggles. The Congress strengthened further the ICC's international and centralized nature with a view to its defense. It integrated new comrades, and formed a new section and new publications: Revolucion Mundial, and Communist Internationalist. This was a truly "world" Congress, with the participation of comrades from Europe, America, and Asia.
History is accelerating.
The Congress was able to take its place within this historic framework. The 8th Congress of the ICC was a product of this historical acceleration; we have no doubt that it will also be a moment and a factor within it.
The international Situation
Presentation of the resolution
We're publishing here the Resolution on the International Situation adopted by the 8th Congress of the ICC. This Resolution is based on a very detailed report which is too long to publish in this Review. However, given the synthetical character of the Resolution we judged that it would be useful to precede it with some extracts, not from the report itself, but from the presentation made on it at the Congress, extracts which we have accompanied with a number of statistics taken from the report.
Usually, the report for a congress looks at the evolution of the situation since the preceding congress. In particular, it examines the extent to which the perspectives drawn up two years before have been verified. But the present report doesn't limit itself to examining the past two years. It attempts to make a balance-sheet of the whole 1980s, the years we've called the 'years of truth.'
Why such a choice?
Because at the beginning of the decade, we announced that it was going to be a turning point in the evolution of the international situation. A turning point between:
* a period in which the bourgeoisie was still trying to hide from the working class - and from itself - the gravity of the convulsions of its system;
* and a period in which these convulsions would reach such a level that the ruling class could no longer hide the fact that capitalism had reached a dead-end: a period in which this fact would become plain to the whole of society.
This distinction between the two periods would obviously have its repercussions on all aspects of the world situation. In particular it would underline exactly what was at stake in the struggles of the working class.
For the present congress, which is the last congress of the '80s, it is thus important to verify the validity of 'this general orientation we adopted ten years ago. In particular it is important to show that this orientation has in no way been refuted, above all in the face of doubts and fluctuations which exist in the proletarian political milieu and which lead to an under-estimation of what's at stake in the present period, especially the importance of the struggles of the working class.
On the economic crisis
It is vital that this congress arrives at a real clarity on this subject. In particular, even before drawing out the catastrophic perspective for the evolution of capitalism in the years ahead, it is necessary to emphasize the gravity of the crisis right now.
Why is it necessary to make such a balance-sheet?
1) For one obvious reason: our capacity to draw out the future perspectives for capitalism depends closely on the validity of the framework we use for analyzing the past situation.
2) Because, and this too is obvious, a correct evaluation of the present gravity of the crisis will to a large extent determine our capacity to pronounce on the real potential of the current struggles of the class, particularly in response to the under-estimations which exist in the political milieu.
3) Because there have been tendencies within the organization to under-estimate the real seriousness of the collapse of the capitalist economy, based on a one-sided interpretation of the figures usually provided by the bourgeoisie, such as 'Gross National Product' or the volume of the world market.
Such an error can be very dangerous. It could lead us to get trapped in a view similar to that of Vercesi1 at the end of the '30s, when he claimed that capitalism had henceforward overcome its crisis. This view was based on the growth of the crude figures of production without any concern for what was being produced (in reality, mainly weapons) or without asking who was going to pay for it.
It's precisely for this reason that the report, as well as the resolution, base their appreciation of the considerable aggravation of the capitalist crisis throughout the '80s not so much on these figures (which on their own seem to indicate that there's been 'growth', particularly in these last few years), but on a whole series of other elements which, taken together, are much more significant. We refer to the following elements:
- the dizzying growth in the debt of the under-developed countries, but also of the main world power as well as the public administrations of all countries;
- the continuous rise in arms spending, but also in all the unproductive sectors such as, for example, the banking sector - and this to the detriment of the productive sectors (production of consumer goods and the means of production);
- the acceleration of the process of creating industrial deserts, which has meant the disappearance of whole chunks of the productive apparatus and thrown millions of workers into unemployment;
- the enormous aggravation of unemployment throughout the '80s and, more generally, the considerable development of absolute pauperization within the working class of the most advanced countries.
On this latter point, it's worth making a comment that will help denounce the present campaigns of the bourgeoisie about the impending improvement of the situation in the USA. The figures given in the report show that there's been a real impoverishment of the working class in this country. But we also draw the attention of the congress to the report by the US section at its last conference (see International Review 64). This report clearly shows that the bourgeoisie's figures indicating a so-called drop in unemployment to the level it was in the '70s are in fact an attempt to mask a tragic aggravation of the situation: the real level of unemployment is three times higher than the official level;
- finally, one of the most basic expressions of the worsening convulsions of the capitalist economy is provided by the increasing number of calamities hitting the under-developed countries: the malnutrition and famine which claim more and more victims, the catastrophes that have turned these countries into a true hell for hundreds of millions of human beings.
In what way should we consider these different phenomena as highly significant manifestations of the collapse of the capitalist economy?
As far as generalized debt is concerned, we have here a clear expression of the underlying cause of the capitalist crisis: the general saturation of markets, lacking real solvent outlets for the realization of surplus-value, production has to a large extent been poured into fictitious markets.
We can take three examples:
1. During the 1970s, there was a considerable increase in imports by the under-developed countries. The commodities purchased came mainly from the advanced countries, which made it possible for production there to revive for a while. But how where these purchases to be paid for? Through the loans taken out by the under-developed countries from their suppliers (see table 1). If the buying countries were really reimbursing their debts, we could consider that these commodities had really been sold, that the value they contained had effectively been realized. But we all know that these debts will never be reimbursed2. This means that, globally speaking, these products haven't been sold against a real payment, but against promises of payment, promises that can never be kept. We say globally speaking, because the individual capitalists who effected these sales may have been paid. But this doesn't alter the real problem. What accrued to the capitalists has been advanced by the banks or states which for their part will never be reimbursed. This is the true significance of all the present negotiations (designated by the term 'Brady plan') which aim to make major reductions in the debts, of a certain number of under-developed countries, beginning with Mexico (in order to avoid a situation where these countries openly declare their bankruptcy and cease all repayments). This 'moratorium' on a part of the debts means that, from now on, it is officially envisaged that the banks or the lending countries will not recover the whole of what they've loaned.
Table 1. Total debt of under-developed countries (in billions of dollars)
|
1970 |
1975 |
1980 |
1985 |
1988 |
Current debt |
70 |
170 |
580 |
950 |
1320 |
Mean annual increase for the period |
|
20 |
82 |
74 |
123 |
(Source: Banque mondiale, 1988)
2) Another example is the explosion of the USA's foreign debt. In 1985, for the first time since 1914, America became a debtor vis-as-vis the rest of the world. This was a considerable event, at least as important as the USA's first trade deficit since the first world war (1968) and as the first devaluation of the dollar since 1934 (1971). The fact that the planet's' main economic power, which for years had been the world's financier, should now find itself in the situation of some under-developed country or a second-rate power, like France for example, says a lot about the degradation of the whole world economy and represents a new stage in its collapse.
By the end of 1987, the net foreign (the total of debts minus the total of credits) of the USA had already risen to 368 billion dollars (or 8.1% of GNP). The world champion of foreign debt was no longer Brazil; Uncle Sam had already gone three times better. And the situation isn't about to improve, because the main cause of this debt, the deficit in the balance of trade remains at a considerable level. What's more even if this deficit were to be miraculousl y reabsorbed, the USA's foreign debt would continue to grow to the extent that, like any Latin American country, the states must continue to borrow in order to pay back the interest on its debts. On top of this, the balance between American investment abroad, and foreign investment in America, which was still 20.4 billion dollars in the black in 1987 - a fact which limited the financial consequences of the trade deficit - went into the red in 1988 and has continued to slide since then (see table 2).
On the basis of these projections, the external debt of the USA is thus is destined to grow very considerably in future: it's due to reach 1000 billion dollars in 1992 and 1400 billion in 1997. And so, just like the debts of the third world countries, the American debt has no chance- of being reimbursed.
Table 2. US Foreign debt (annual figures in $ billions)
|
71-75 |
76-80 |
81-85 |
1986 |
1988 |
1990 |
Current account |
|
-5 |
-56 |
-139 |
-132 |
-108 |
Balance of trade Balance of investment |
|
-26 |
-74 |
-144 |
-121 |
-89 |
Revenue |
|
|
|
23 |
-3 |
-20 |
(Source: OCDE, decembre 1988; après 1987, les valeurs sont estimees)
3) The third example is that of the budget deficits, the astronomical accumulation of debts by all states (see tables 3 and 4). At the last Congress, we already pointed out that it was to a large extent these deficits, and particularly the federal deficit of the USA, which had permitted a timid revival of production in 1983.
And it's the same problem again today. These debts will also never be reimbursed, except at the price of even more astronomical debts (table 3 shows that simply the interest is already more than 10% of state expenditure in most of the advanced countries: this is already becoming a major item in national budgets). And the production bought through these debts, which is to large extent armaments, will also never really be paid for.
Table 3. Evolution of net national debt
|
1980 |
1985 |
1987 |
United States |
19.7 |
27.8 |
30.3 |
Japan |
17.3 |
26.8 |
25.9 |
West Germany |
14.3 |
21.9 |
23.0 |
France |
14.3 |
23.8 |
26.6 |
Great Britain |
47.5 |
46.6 |
43.4 |
Italy |
53.6 |
80.9 |
89.1 |
Average 7 major countries |
22.0 |
31.4 |
33.4 |
Belgium |
68.9 |
110.5 |
116.7 |
(Source: OCDE, decembre 1988)
Table 4. Interest payments of the Central Administration (percentage of expenditures)
|
1980 |
1985 |
1987 |
United States |
8.7 |
13.2 |
13.3 |
Japan |
10.3 |
17.2 |
17.7 (*) |
Italy |
14.8 |
17.3 |
18.7 (*) |
(*) 1986.
(Source: OCDE, decembre 88)
In the final analysis, during these years, a good part of world production hasn't been sold but simply given. This production may correspond to goods that are really made, but it's not a production of values, ie of the only thing that interests capitalism. It hasn't allowed a real accumulation of capital. Global capital is reproduced on an increasingly narrow basis. Taken as a whole, capitalism hasn't grown richer. On the contrary, it has grown poorer.
And capitalism has grown all the more poor for the fact that we've seen a spectacular growth in armaments3 and unproductive expenditure in general (see table 5).
Table 5. Growth in military spending according to official figures (in billions of 1986 dollars)
|
1980 |
1987 |
% growth |
United States |
194.5 |
275.2 |
41.5 |
Japan |
15.2 |
20.5 |
35.2 |
Italy |
11.2 |
13.9 |
25.5 |
United Kingdom |
23.5 |
27.0 |
15.0 |
France |
26.1 |
29.0 |
11.2 |
Spain |
6.5 |
7.2 |
10.3 |
West Germany |
21.6 |
22.5 |
4.2 |
East Germany |
3.5 |
5.4 |
52.2 |
South Korea |
3.7 |
5.3 |
44.1 |
Taiwan |
3.3 |
4.7 |
40.4 |
(Source: SIPRI, Yearbook 1988)
Arms can't be counted in the 'plus' column in the general balance-sheet of world production on the contrary, they have to go in the minus column. Contrary to what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in The Accumulation of Capital in 1912, and to what Vercesi said at the end of the '30s, militarism is not at all a field of accumulation for capital. Armaments may enrich the individual capitalists who sell them, but not capitalism as a whole since they can't be incorporated into a new cycle of production. At best, when they're not used, they constitute a sterilization of capital. And when they are used, they result in a destruction of capital.
Thus, to get a real idea of the evolution of the world economy, to get some idea of the real values produced, you'd have to subtract from the official production figures (GNP for example) the figures for the debts in the period under consideration, as well as the figures corresponding to arms expenditure and all the unproductive expenses. In the case of the USA, for example, in the period 1980-87, merely the growth in the state's debt is higher than the growth of GNP; 2.7% of the GNP for the growth of debt, 2.4% for the average yearly growth of GNP itself. Thus, for the decade just ending, if you merely take into account the budget deficits, you can already see that there's been a regression in the main world economy. A regression that in reality is much more significant, because of:
1) other debts (foreign debt, debts of particular: enterprises, of local administrations, etc);
2) enormous unproductive expenditure.
In the last analysis, even if we don't have exact figures enabling us to calculate on a world scale the real decline of capitalist production, we can conclude just from the preceding example how real this global impoverishment of society is.
It's only in this framework - and not by seeing the stagnation or fall in GNP as the manifestation par excellence of the capitalist crisis - that we can grasp the real significance of the 'exceptional rates of growth' that the bourgeoisie has been rejoicing about these last two years. In reality, if we subtract from these formidable 'rates of growth' everything appertaining to the sterilization of capital and to debt, we would have a plainly negative growth rate. Faced with an increasingly saturated world market, a rise in production figures can only correspond to a new rise in debts - one even more considerable than the previous increases.
It's by seeing the real impoverishment of the whole of capitalist society, the real destruction of capital throughout the 80s, that we can understand the other phenomena analyzed in the report.
Thus, the creation of industrial deserts is a flagrant illustration of this destruction of capital. Table 6 gives us a concrete, statistical picture of this reality, which involves the blowing up or demolishing of newly-built factories, the transformation of certain industrial zones into eerie landscapes of desolation and ruin, and above all, massive redundancies for the workers. For example, this table shows us that in the USA, between 1980 and 1986, jobs fell by 1.35 million in industry while growing by 3.71 million in the hotel and restaurant sectors and 3.99 million in the financial-insurance-business sectors. The socalled 'reduction in unemployment' which the American bourgeoisie talks about so much has in no way meant an improvement in the real productive capacity of the American economy: in what way is the 'reconversion' of a skilled metal worker into a hot-dog seller something positive for the capitalist economy, not to mention for the worker himself?
Similarly the rise in real unemployment, the absolute impoverishment of the working class and the sinking of the under-developed countries into a state of total deprivation (for an impressive tableau of this, see the article in IR 57, 'Economic Balance Sheet of the 1980s: the barbaric agony of Capitalism') are manifestations of this global impoverishment of capitalism, of the historic impasse of this system4, an impoverishment which the ruling class makes the exploited and the poverty-stricken masses pay for.
Table 6. Development of employment by sector of the economy (in millions and percentage variation)
|
1974 |
1980 |
1987 |
1987/80 |
GERMANY |
|
|
|
|
Mines, etc |
0.26 |
0.23 |
0.21 |
-8.1% |
Industries |
9.62 |
8.99 |
8.25 |
-8.2% |
Construction |
2.18 |
2.09 |
1.73 |
-17.2% |
Commerce, hotels, etc |
4.3 |
4.28 |
4.15 |
-3.1% |
Finance, assurances, etc |
0.69 |
0.74 |
0.83 |
+11.5% |
GREAT BRITAIN |
|
|
|
|
Mines, etc |
0.36 |
0.36 |
0.21 |
-42.1% |
Industries |
8.03 |
7.08 |
5.40 |
-23.8% |
Construction |
1.69 |
1.62 |
1.53 |
-5.5% |
Commerce, hotels, etc |
4.47 |
4.82 |
5.06 |
+5.0% |
Finance, assurances, etc |
1.62 |
1.84 |
2.61 |
+41.9% |
UNITED STATES (*) |
|
|
|
|
Mines, etc |
0.72 |
1.07 |
0.81 |
-24.9% |
Industries |
20.42 |
20.84 |
19.49 |
-6.5% |
Construction |
5.15 |
5.82 |
6.55 |
+12.4% |
Commerce, hotels, etc |
20.62 |
24.40 |
28.11 |
+15.2% |
Finance, assurances, etc |
8.56 |
11.60 |
15.60 |
+34.4% |
(Source: OECD, national accounts, 1988)
(*) 1986, not 1987
This is why the so-called 'growth' the bourgeoisie has boasted about since 1983 has been accompanied by unprecedented attacks on the working class. These attacks obviously aren't the expression of some deliberate 'wickedness' on the bourgeoisie's part, but rather of the authentic collapse of the capitalist economy over the course of these years. A collapse which the bourgeoisie has managed to prevent from appearing too openly, in the form of an overt recession, by playing tricks with the law of value, by strengthening state capitalist policies at the level of the blocs, and by diving headlong into debt.
A remark on this question of 'recession.' In the interests of clarity, the resolution uses the term 'open recession' to mean the stagnation or fall in the capitalist indicators themselves, which reveals openly the reality that the bourgeoisie tries to hide, and to hide from itself: the collapse of value production.
This collapse, as the report shows, continues even during moments the bourgeoisie counts as phases of 'recovery.' It's this last phenomenon which the resolution describes as 'recession.'
To conclude this part on the economic crisis, we must underline once again that the considerable aggravation of the crisis of capitalism, and of attacks against the working class, throughout the '80s, is an unambiguous confirmation of the perspective we drew up ten years ago. Similarly, we have to underline that this situation can only get considerably worse, on a world scale, in the period ahead, because capitalism today is in a total impasse.
On the imperialist conflicts
On this question, which hasn't raised any major debates, the presentation will be very brief and will limit itself to reaffirming a few basic ideas:
1) It's only by basing oneself firmly on the framework of marxism that one can understand the real evolution of imperialist conflicts: beyond all the ideological campaigns, the aggravation of the capitalist crisis can only lead to an intensification of the real antagonisms between the imperialist blocs.
2) A manifestation of this intensification, the offensive of the US bloc, and the success it has achieved, enable us to explain the recent evolution of Russian diplomacy and the USSR's withdrawal from various positions it could no longer hold onto.
3) This diplomatic evolution therefore in no way means that we're beginning to see an attenuation in the antagonisms between the great powers - on the contrary; nor that the conflicts which have ravaged the numerous points on the globe are now going to disappear. In a whole number of places, wars and massacres continue and can intensify from one day to the next, bringing in their wake an increasing toll of corpses and calamities.
4) In the present pacifist campaigns, one of the decisive elements is the necessity for the whole bourgeoisie to hide from the working class what's really at stake in the present period, at a time when its struggles are developing and deepening.
The evolution of the class struggle
The essential aim of the presentation here is 'to make explicit the overall balance sheet of the class struggle in the '80s.
In order to provide the broad outlines of this balance sheet, to see how far the movement has come, we have to see briefly where the proletariat was at the beginning of the decade.
The beginning of the 1980s was marked by a contrast between:
* on the one hand, the weakening of the proletarian struggle in the big working class concentrations of the advanced countries of the western bloc, in particular of western Europe, following the main battles of the second wave of struggles (1978-79);
* on the other hand, the mighty confrontations in Poland in the summer of 1980, which were the culminating point in this wave. This weakening of the struggle of the decisive battalions of the world proletariat was due to a large extent to the strategy of the left in opposition which the bourgeoisie adopted right from the start of the second wave. This new card of the bourgeoisie surprised the working class and in some ways broke its élan. This is why the combat in Poland took place in a general context that was unfavorable, in a situation of international isolation. This situation obviously made it easier to derail the struggle onto the terrain of trade unionism, of democratic and nationalistic mystifications, and, consequently, facilitated the brutal repression of December '81.
In turn, the cruel defeat suffered by the proletariat in Poland could only aggravate, for the time being, the demoralization, demobilization and disarray of the proletariat in other countries. In particular, it made it possible to polish up the image of trade unionism both east and west. This is why we talked about a reflux, a defeat for the working class, not only at the level of its will to fight, but also at the ideological level.
However, this reflux didn't last long. From the autumn of '83, a third wave of struggles began to develop, a particularly powerful wave which showed that the combativity of the proletariat was intact, and which was characterized by massive and simultaneous struggles.
Faced with this wave of workers' struggles, the bourgeoisie in many places adopted a strategy of dispersing its attacks, with the aim of fragmenting the struggles; this strategy was accompanied by a policy of immobilization by the unions wherever they had lost most credibility. But from the spring of '86, the generalized struggles in the public sector in Belgium, as well as the railway workers' strike in France that December, showed the limits of this strategy, owing to the considerable aggravation of the economic situation which compelled the bourgeoisie to carry out increasingly frontal attacks. From this point, and for a whole historic period to come, the essential question posed by these experiences of the class, and by the very nature of the capitalist offensive, was that of the unification of struggles. That is to say a form of mobilization not limited to a simple extension, but one in which the working class takes direct charge of extension through its general assemblies, with the aim of forming a united front against the bourgeoisie.
Faced with these necessities and potentialities of the struggle, it's obvious the bourgeoisie doesn't remain inactive. It deploys in a still-more systematic manner than before the classic weapons of the left in opposition:
- the radicalization of the traditional unions
- the use of base unionism
- the policy which entails these organs going one step ahead of the struggle in order to defuse it.
But also, especially where trade unionism is most discredited, it is using new weapons like the coordinations, which complete or precede the work of the unions. Finally, in numerous countries the poison of corporatism with the aim of trapping the workers in a false choice between 'extension through the unions' and 'self-organized' isolation in one trade.
For the moment, this collection of maneuvers has succeeded in disorienting the working class and impeding the movement towards the unification of struggles. This doesn't mean that the dynamic of the movement has been put into question, since even the radicalization of bourgeois maneuvers is, just like all the present media campaigns, pacifism and the rest, a sign of the growing potential for wider and much more conscious combats.
In this sense, the overall balance sheet we have to draw up for the '80s is not one indicating a stagnation of class struggle, but one indicating a decisive advance. This advance can be gauged in the contrast between the beginning of the 80s, which saw a momentary strengthening of trade unionism, and the end of the period, in which, as the comrades of World Revolution put it, "the bourgeoisie is maneuvering to set up 'anti-union' structures in the struggles of the working class."
The report also makes explicit the historical framework in which the proletarian struggle is unfolding today, a framework which explains the slow pace of its development, and the difficulties faced by the proletariat, difficulties which the bourgeoisie systematically exploits in its various maneuvers. A number of elements advanced here have already been evoked in the past (slow rhythm of the crisis itself, though this is tending to accelerate today), the weight of the break in organic continuity with the past workers' movement and the inexperience of the new generations of workers). But the report makes a particular point on the question of the decomposition of capitalist society, something which has given rise to numerous debates in the organization.
It was indispensable to raise this question for several reasons:
a) First, it's only recently that this question has been clearly brought out and made explicit by the ICC (though we had already identified it in relation to terrorist attacks in Paris in the autumn of '86).
b) It's important to examine to what extent a phenomenon that affects the revolutionary organizations (and which is particularly underlined in the activities report) also weighs on the class whose avant-garde these organizations are.
The presentation won't go back over what's said in the report. We will limit ourselves to putting forward the following points:
1) For a long time the ICC has been saying that the objective conditions in which workers' struggles are developing today (capitalism's plunge into an economic crisis that hits all countries simultaneously) are much more favorable to the success of the revolution that the conditions that lay at the origin of the first revolutionary wave (le, the first imperialist war).
2) Similarly, we've shown that the subjective conditions are also more favorable to the extent that today there are no bi g workers' parties, like the Socialist parties, whose betrayal within the decisive period itself could, as in the past, throw the proletariat into disarray.
3) At the same time, we've also pointed to the specific difficulties and obstacles encountered by the present historical resurgence of class struggle: the weight of the organic break, the distrust of politics, the weight of councilism (see in particular the resolution on the international situation adopted by the 6th Congress of the ICC).
It was important, therefore, to say - in accord with what we've written about the difficulties encountered by the organization that the phenomenon of decomposition is a real weight in the present period and will continue to be so for some time to come; that it constitutes a very serious danger that the class will have to face up to if it is to protect itself from it and find the means to turn it back against capitalism.
While it is necessary to be aware of the gravity of this phenomenon, that obviously doesn't mean that all aspects of decomposition are an obstacle to the development of consciousness in the proletariat. The objective elements which clearly expose the total barbarism that society is sinking into can only increase the workers' disgust for the system and thus contribute to the development of class consciousness. Similarly, at the level of ideological decomposition, elements like the corruption of the bourgeois class, of the collapse of the traditional pillars of its ideological domination also contribute to an understanding of the bankruptcy of capitalism. But on the other hand, all the elements of ideological decay which weigh on the revolutionary organization also weigh, and still more heavily, on the class as a whole, making all sorts of difficulties for the development of the class struggle and of class consciousness.
But this observation should in no way be a source of demoralization or skepticism.
1) Throughout the '80s, despite this negative weight of decomposition, which has been systematically exploited by the bourgeoisie, the proletariat has still been able to push forward its struggles in response to the aggravation of the crisis which, as we've so often said, has once again shown itself to be 'the best ally of the working class.'
2) The weight of decomposition is a challenge that has to be taken up by the working class. By struggling against its influences, particularly by strengthening its class unity and solidarity through collective action, the proletariat itself will be forging the weapons for the overthrow of capitalism.
3) In this combat against the weight of decomposition, revolutionaries have a crucial role to play. Just as the recognition that this weight affects our own ranks isn't something that should demoralize us but, on the contrary, should strengthen our vigilance and determination, the recognition that the working class itself is encountering these difficulties should also lead to greater determination and conviction In our intervention in the class.
To conclude this presentation, we'd say that the discussion on the international situation should not only lead to greater clarity in our ranks but also:
- to a greater confidence in the validity of the analyses upon which the ICC was formed and has developed, and in particular our confidence in the development of the class struggle towards increasingly profound and generalized confrontations, towards a revolutionary period;
- to a greater determination to carry out the responsibilities which the proletariat has conferred on us.
Resolution on the international situation
1) The acceleration of history throughout the 80s has highlighted the insurmountable contradictions of capitalism. The 80s have been years of truth.
Truth about the deepening of the economic crisis.
Truth about the aggravation of imperialist tensions.
Truth about the development of the class struggle.
As reality appears more and more clearly, the ruling class has nothing but lies to offer: "growth", "peace" and "social calm".
The economic crisis
2) During this decade, the living standards of the working class have been subjected to the strongest attack since the war:
- massive development of unemployment and temporary work
- attacks on wages, reduction of buying power
- amputation of the social wage.
While the proletariat of the industrialized countries has suffered from growing impoverishment, the majority of the world population has found itself at the mercy of famine and rationing.
3) The bourgeoisie, against all the evidence that the exploited of the world feel in their bones, is singing hymns to the new-found "growth" in its economy. This "growth" is a myth.
This so-called "growth" in production has been financed by a frenetic resort to credit and through the gigantic trade and budget deficits of the USA, in a purely artificial manner. These credits will never be repaid.
This indebtedness has essentially been used to finance arms production - ie , it is capital earmarked for destruction. While whole branches of industry have been dismantled, those sectors which show the strongest rates of growth are those concerned with arms and unproductive activities in general - services like advertising and banking, or pure waste sectors, such as the drug market.
The ruling class has only been able to maintain the illusion of economic activity through the destruction of capital. The false "growth" of the capitalists is really a recession.
4) In order to arrive at this "result", governments have had to resort to state capitalist measures to an unprecedented degree: record debt, war economy, falsification of economic figures, financial manipulations.
Contrary to the illusion that privatization represents a dismantling of state capitalism, the role of the state has been reinforced. Under the imposition of the USA, there has been a development in international "cooperation" between the Western powers, ie a strengthening of the imperialist bloc.
5) Within the eastern bloc, "perestroika" corresponds to a recognition of economic bankruptcy. State capitalist methods Russian style - the state's total grip over the economy and the omnipresence of the war economy - have resulted in nothing but a growing bureaucratic anarchy in production, a gigantic waste of wealth. The USSR and its bloc are bogged down in economic underdevelopment. Gorbachev's new economic policies will not change this.
In the east as in the west, the capitalist crisis is accelerating while attacks on the working class are intensifying.
6) No state capitalist measure can lead to a real revival in the economy, or even all such methods put together. They are a huge fiddle vis-a-vis the laws of the economy. They aren't a remedy but a factor aggravating the disease. Their massive utilization is the most obvious symptom of the disease.
As a consequence, the world market has become more and more fragile: growing fluctuation of currencies, frenzied speculation, crises on the stock exchange without the capitalist economy coming out of the recession it dived into at the beginning of the 80s.
The weight of debt has grown terribly. At the end of the 80s, the USA, the first world power, has become the most indebted country in the world. Inflation has never disappeared: it has continued to knock at the doors of the industrialized countries, and, under the inflationary pressures of debt, it is now going through an irreversible acceleration at the heart of developed capitalism.
7) At the end of the 80s, state capitalist policies are revealing their impotence. Despite all the measures taken, official growth rates are irresistibly declining and announce the open recession that's coming, while the index of prices slowly rises. Inflation, which has been artificially hidden, is about to return in force to the heart of the industrial world.
During this decade, the ruling class has followed a policy of putting things off till tomorrow. This policy, even when used more and more massively, is reaching its limits. In the immediate it will be less and less effective, while the practice of stealing from the future will eventually have to be paid for. The years ahead will be years of a further plunge into economic crisis, when inflation will increasingly go hand in hand with recession. Despite the international tightening of control by the state, the fragility of the world market will keep growing: there will be more and more bankruptcies in industry, commerce and in the banks themselves.
The attacks against the living conditions of the proletariat and humanity in general can only be dramatically accentuated.
Inter-imperialist tensions
8) The 1980s opened with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran, resulting in the dismantling of the west's military front line to the south of Russia, and the invasion of Afghanistan by the troops of the Red Army.
This situation, spurred on by the economic crisis, pushed the American bloc into launching a wide-scale imperialist offensive aimed at consolidating its own bloc, disciplining small recalcitrant imperialisms (Iran, Libya, Syria), expelling Russian influence from the peripheries of capitalism and imposing a quasi-blockade on the USSR, smothering it in the narrow limits of its own bloc. In the final analysis the aim of this offensive is to strip the USSR of its status as a world power.
9) In the face of this pressure, incapable of keeping up with the arms race and of modernizing its obsolete weapons to the necessary level, incapable of winning the proletariat's adherence to its war effort, as can be seen from the events in Poland and the growing unpopularity of the Afghan adventure, the USSR has had to retreat.
The Russian bourgeoisie has been able to take advantage of this retreat by launching, under Gorbachev's guidance, a major diplomatic and ideological offensive on the theme of peace and disarmament.
The USA, which has to deal with the growing discontent of the proletariat inside its own bloc couldn't then appear as the only war-like power and has in turn taken up the refrain of peace.
10) Having begun with the bellicose diatribes of the bourgeoisie, the 80s are ending with enormous ideological campaigns about peace.
Peace under capitalism in crisis is a lie. The bourgeoisie's speeches about peace serve only to camouflage imperialist antagonisms and the intensifying war preparations, to hide from the working class the true historic stakes, war or revolution, to prevent the workers becoming conscious of the link between austerity and the war preparation and lulling the class into a false sense of security.
The disarmament treaties have no value. The weapons put on the scrapheap only constitute a tiny part of the arsenal of death that belongs to each bloc and are mainly the obsolete ones. And, since trickery and secrecy are the rule in this domain, nothing can really be verified.
The western offensive continues as the USSR is trying to profit from the situation by reducing the technological gap and modernizing its weapons while creating a mystifying aura of political innocence.
The war goes on in Afghanistan, the western fleet is still massed in the Gulf, weapons still talk in the Lebanon etc ... The budgets of the armies continue to swell, if necessary fuelled in a discrete manner. Even more destructive weapons are in the pipeline for the 20 years ahead of us. Nothing has fundamentally changed despite all the soporific sermons, and the spiral of war is going to accelerate.
In the west, the USA's proposals to reduce its troops in Europe simply expresses the bloc leader's insistence that the European powers make a greater contribution to the overall war effort. This process is already under way with the formation of 'joint armies', the plan for a European air fighter, the renovation of the Lance missiles, the Euclid project, etc. Behind the famous 'Europe of 1992' is a Europe armed to the teeth in order to confront the other bloc.
The present retreat of the Russian bloc contains the seeds of tomorrow's military face-offs. The perspective is the development of imperialist tensions, the intensification of the militarization of society and a Lebanon-style decomposition, particularly in the countries most affected by inter-imperialist conflicts and the less industrialized countries, like Afghanistan today. In the- long term this process will also take place in Europe if the international development of the class struggle is not enough to become an obstacle to it.
11) As long as the bourgeoisie doesn't have a free hand to impose its 'solution' - generalized imperialist war and as long as the class struggle isn't sufficiently developed to allow its revolutionary perspective to come forward, capitalism is caught up in a dynamic of decomposition, a process of rotting on its feet which is experienced at all levels:
- degradation of international relations between states as manifested in the development of terrorism
- repeated technological and so-called natural catastrophes
- destruction of the ecosphere
- famines, epidemics, expressions of the generalization of absolute pauperization
- explosion of "nationalities", or ethnic conflicts
- social life marked by the development of criminality, delinquency, suicide, madness, individual atomization
- ideological decomposition marked among other things by the development of mysticism, nihilism, the ideology of 'everyone for himself', etc ...
The class struggle
12) The mass strike in Poland lit up the 1980s and showed what was at stake in the class struggle for the period. The deployment of the bourgeois strategy of the left in opposition in Western Europe, union sabotage and military repression against the workers in Poland, resulted in a short but difficult retreat by the working class at the beginning of the decade.
The western bourgeoisie took advantage of this situation in order to launch a redoubled economic attack (brutal development of unemployment), while accentuating its repression and waging media campaigns about war, aimed at furthering the retreat by demoralizing and terrorizing the workers, and getting them used to the idea of war.
However the 80s have above all been years of development of the class struggle. From 1983 on, under the whip of a succession of austerity measures, the international proletariat rediscovered the road of struggle. In the face of massive attacks, the combativity of the proletariat was demonstrated in massive strike movements on all continents and above all in Western Europe; at the heart of capitalism where the most experienced battalions of the world working class is concentrated.
Thus the workers struggle sprang from one continent to another: South Africa; Korea; Brazil; Mexico, etc and in Europe: Belgium 83; British miners 84; Denmark 85; Belgium 86; French railway workers 86; Spain 87; West Germany 87; teachers in Italy 87; hospital workers in France 88, etc.
According to the bourgeoisie, the truth of the class struggle doesn't exist. With all its strength it tries to hide it. The statistical fall in strike days lost in comparison to the 70s which has been used to fuel the ideological campaigns aimed at demoralizing the working class, does not take any account of the qualitative development of the struggle. Since 1983, short and massive strikes have been more and more numerous, and despite the news blackout imposed on them, the real development of workers' militancy has bit by bit made itself felt.
13) The wave of class struggle which has developed since 1983 poses the perspective of the unification of struggle. This process is characterized by:
- massive and often spontaneous struggles linked to a general discontent affecting all sectors
- a tendency towards a growing simultaneity of struggles
- a tendency towards extension as the only way of imposing a rapport de force on a ruling class that is united behind its state
- to realize this extension, increasing moves by workers to take charge of the struggle themselves against union sabotage
- the appearance of struggle committees
This wave of struggle not only expresses the growing discontent of the working class, its intact combativity, its will to struggle, but also the development and deepening of its consciousness. This process of maturation is taking shape on all aspects of the situation confronting the proletariat: war, social decomposition, the impasse of capitalism, etc, but it is taking shape more particularly on two points which are essential since they determine the proletariat's relationship to the state:
- distrust towards the unions is developing all the time; internationally through repeated confrontation with these forces of control and a tendency for workers to leave the union
- the rejection of the political parties of the bourgeoisie is intensifying as can be seen for example, by continuous struggles during electoral campaigns and a growing abstention from elections.
14) Far from the way the state media try to minimize the question, social convulsions are a central and permanent preoccupation of the ruling class in the west as in the east. First, because they interfere with all the other questions on an immediate level, secondly because the workers' struggle bears the seeds of a radical challenge to the existing state of affairs.
Just as the preoccupation of the ruling class is expressed in the central countries by an unprecedented development of the strategy of the left in opposition, it is also manifested in:
- the will of the western bloc's US leaders to replace the overt 'dictatorships' in the countries under their control by 'democracies' better equipped to deal with social instability by including a 'left' that is capable of sabotaging workers' struggles from within (the lessons of Iran have been drawn)
- the policies of the Gorbachev team which is doing the same thing in its bloc in the name of 'Glasnost' (here the lessons of Poland).
15) Faced with the discontent in the working class, the bourgeoisie has nothing to offer except more austerity and repression. Faced with the truth of the workers struggle, the bourgeoisie has nothing but lies and its capacity to maneuver.
The crisis makes the bourgeoisie intelligent. Given the loss of credibility in its political/union apparatus for controlling the working class, it has had to use this apparatus in a more subtle manner:
- first, by maneuvering its 'left' in close connivance with all the different parts of the state machine: a repulsive 'right' is thus used to reinforce the credibility of the left; the media, the forces of repression all play their role etc. The policy of the left in opposition has been strengthened in all countries, in spite of electoral vicissitudes
- then, by adapting its organs of social control in order to block and sabotage workers' struggles from the inside:
* radicalization of the classical trade unions
* increasing use of leftist groups
* development of base, rank and file unionism
* development of structures outside the unions, which claim to represent the struggle: coordinations.
16) This capacity of the bourgeoisie to maneuver has up till now held back the tendencies towards extension and unification contained in the present wave of struggle. Faced with the dynamic towards massive struggles and extension of the movements, the ruling class encourages everything that divides· and isolates the workers: corporatism, regionalism, nationalism. Faced with this dynamic, the bourgeoisie is ready to launch preventative actions in order to push the working class into struggle in unfavorable conditions. In every struggle the workers are obliged to confront a whole coalition of bourgeois forces.
However, despite the difficulties it is encountering, the dynamic of the working class struggle has not been broken. On the contrary it is still developing. The potential combativity of the working class is not only intact, it is growing stronger. Under the painful spur of the austerity measures which can only get worse, the working class is being compelled to fight and confront the forces of the bourgeoisie. The perspective is the development of the class struggle. The weapons of the bourgeoisie, because they are going to be used more and more frequently, are destined to be unmasked.
17) The apprenticeship the proletariat is acquiring about the bourgeoisie's capacity for maneuvering is a necessary factor in the development of its consciousness, of its strengthening faced with the enemy in front of it.
The dynamic of the situation is pushing it to impose its force through a real extension of its struggles which is geographical extension against the divisions organized by the bourgeoisie which aim for a sectionalist, corporatist or regionalist imprisonment, against the proposals for a phony extension made by the unionists and leftists.
In order to achieve the necessary widening of its combat, the working class can only count on itself, and above all on its general, mass assemblies. These assemblies should be open to all workers, must assume sole authority for the conduct of the struggle, the priority of which must be geographical extension. Flowing from this, the sovereign general assemblies must reject everything which tends to stifle them (calls to refuse entry to other workers, for example) and deprive them of their control over the struggle (eg organs of premature centralization that the bourgeoisie today has no hesitation about encouraging and manipulating or worse, those it imposes from the outside: coordinations, union strike committees). The future unification of struggles depends on this dynamic.
The lack of political experience in the present generation of the proletariat due to almost half a century of counter-revolution is a heavy weight. It is further reinforced by:
- the distrust and rejection of anything to do with politics, the result of decades of disgust with the political maneuvering of the bourgeoisie, in particular with those parties claiming to be part of the working class
- the weight of the surrounding ideological decomposition upon which, more and more, the bourgeoisie will base its maneuvers to reinforce atomization, ‘each man for himself', to undermine the growing confidence of the working class in its own strength and in the future its combat implies
The capacity of the working class, tomorrow, to confront the capitalist state, to overthrow it and open the door to the future, depends on its capacity, today, to reinforce its collective action, its unity and its class solidarity, to overcome its political weaknesses, draw the lessons of its struggles, to develop its political experience.
In this process towards unification, in the political combat for extension against the union maneuvers, revolutionaries have a vanguard, decisive and indispensable role to play. They are an integral part of its struggle. The capacity of the class to translate its combativity into a maturation of consciousness depends on their intervention. The future outcome of the struggle depends on their intervention.
18) The proletariat is at the heart of the international situation. If the 80s are years of truth this truth is above all that of the working class. The truth of a capitalist system which is leading humanity to ruin through the barbaric decomposition already underway, at the end of which lies the apocalyptic war which the bourgeoisie is preparing more and more madly.
The 80s have shown what's at stake and what the proletariat's responsibilities are: socialism or barbarism, war or revolution! The future of humanity depends on its capacity to take up these responsibilities in the years ahead, to put forward its revolutionary perspective in and through the struggle.
1 Vercesi was the main animator of the left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy. His political and theoretical contribution to the Fraction, and to the whole workers' movement, was considerable. But at the end of the 30's he developed an aberrant theory about the war economy being a solution to the crisis, which disarmed and disoriented the Fraction when it was faced with the Second World War.
2 What's more the bourgeois ‘experts' themselves say this clearly:
"Practically no one thinks today that the debt can be reimbursed, but the western countries insist on elaborating a mechanism which would hide this fact and avoid such harsh terms as ‘cessation of payments' and ‘bankruptcy'" (W Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, 30 January 1989. What this author forgets to talk about are the real causes for this caution and prudery. The fact is that for the bourgeoisie of the great western powers to openly proclaim the complete bankruptcy of their debtors would be to recognize the bankruptcy of their financial system and, underneath that, of the whole capitalist economy. The ruling class today is a bit like one of those cartoon characters who continue running after they've gone over the edge of a precipice and who only fall when they realize where they are.
3 The relatively smaller increase in West Germany's military expenditure (if you compare it to that of its commercial rivals) is certainly connected to this country's ‘good' economic performance over the past few years.
4 The famines and the absolute impoverishment of the working class we've seen in recent years aren't new phenomenon in the history of capitalism. But apart from the sheer breadth they take on today (and which is comparable only to the situations created at the time of world wars), it's important to distinguish what pertained to the introduction of the capitalist mode of production into society (which indeed arose in "blood and filth", as Marx said, based as it was on the creation of an army of paupers and beggars, on the workhouses, on children's night-work, on the extraction of absolute surplus-value ...) to what pertains to the death agony of this mode of production. Just as unemployment today doesn't represent an ‘industrial reserve army' but expresses the incapacity of the capitalist system to continue one of its historic task - the generalization of wage labor - so the return of famine and of absolute impoverishment (after a period in which it was replaced by relative impoverishment) signals the total, historical bankruptcy of this system.
We are publishing here the first part of an article which aims at a clearer definition of the relationship between Party and Fraction as it has developed step by step through the history of the revolutionary movement. This first part will deal with the work of the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party during the 1930s, concentrating especially on the decisive years from 1935 to 1937, dominated by the Spanish Civil War: it aims, in particular, to answer the comrades from Battaglia Comunista's criticisms of "the Fraction", ie the group formed at the end of the 1920's as a "fraction" of the Italian Communist Party, struggling against the latter's Stalinist degeneration.
We have already answered these criticisms on various specific points elsewhere1. Here, we intend to examine at a more general level the historical relationship between "fraction" and party. This question may seem secondary, now that fifty years have passed since communists considered themselves as fractions of the old parties which have since passed over to the counter-revolution. But as we will see in this article, the Fraction is not merely a matter of statistics (being a part of the Party); essentially, it expresses the continuity between the old party's program, and the elaboration of the new party's program, enriched with the proletariat's new historical experience. This is the fundamental meaning of this way of working, of this red thread running through past history, which we want to bring out for the new generations, for those groups of comrades throughout the world looking for a class coherence. Against all those imbeciles who amuse themselves by 'making a clean sweep' of all the workers' movement that preceded them, the ICC reaffirms that only on the basis of this continuity in political work will it be possible for the World Communist Party to emerge, as the indispensable weapon of the battles that await us.
Let us first set out systematically, and without deforming them, the positions of Battaglia against which we are writing. In the article "Fraction and Party in the experience of the Italian Left", we find developed the idea that the Fraction, founded in 1928 at Pantin, in the Paris suburbs, by exiled militants, rejected the Trotskyist notion of the immediate formation of new parties, because the old parties of the Communist International had not yet passed officially from opportunism to the counter-revolution. "This comes down to saying that (...) if the communist parties, despite being infested with opportunism, had not yet passed bag and baggage into service with the class enemy, then the construction of new parties could not yet be put on the agenda". This is absolutely true, even if as we shall see, this was only one of the conditions necessary for the Fraction's transformation into the Party. It is also worth remembering that the comrades who founded the Fraction in 1928 had already, in 1927, had to rid themselves of an activist minority who then considered the CP's as counter-revolutionary ("Leave the Moscow International!" as they said), and who, under the illusion that the 1929 crisis was an immediate prelude to revolution, adopted the position of the German Left which in 1924 had already given birth to a short-lived "new" "Communist Workers' International".
Continuing its historical reconstitution, Battaglia recalls that the Fraction " ... has above all a role of analysis, education, and preparation of militants; it develops the greatest possible clarity on the phase when it will act to form the Party, at the moment when the confrontation between the classes will sweep away opportunism" (Report for the 1935 Congress). "Up to then" continues Battaglia, "the terms of the question seemed clear enough. The Fraction-Party problem was resolved 'programmatically' since the former depended on the process of degeneration going on in the latter, ( ... ) and not on an abstract theoretical elaboration which would have raised this particular type of revolutionary organization to an unchanging political form, valid in all historical periods of stagnating class struggle ( ... ). The idea that the transformation of Fraction into Party can only be envisaged in 'objectively favorable' situations, ie during a recovery of the class struggle, rests on the idea that only in this situation, or in its accompanying storms, would the definitive betrayal of the Communist Parties be verified in fact".
The CPs' betrayal was openly declared in 1935, when Stalin and the PCF [French CP] (imitated by all the others) supported the rearmament measures decided by the bourgeoisie government in France "to defend democracy". Faced with this official passage to the class enemy, the Fraction published the manifesto "Leave the Communist Parties, they have become instruments of the counter-revolution", and called a Congress to answer these events as an organization. According to Battaglia's article:
"If we are to follow the schema developed during the preceding years, the Fraction should have fulfilled its task as a function of this event, and gone on to build the new party. But although the perspective remained, when it came to putting it into practice there appeared within the Fraction several tendencies which tried to put off the problem rather than to resolve its practical aspects.
In Jacobs' report, around which the debate should have developed, centrism's betrayal and the Fraction's new slogan of leaving the Communist Parties [did not imply] "its transformation into a party, nor did it represent the proletarian solution to centrism's betrayal; this solution can only be given by tomorrow's events, for which the Fraction is preparing today." ( ... )
For the reporter, the answer to the problem of the crisis in the workers' movement could not be the attempt to close up the scattered ranks of revolutionaries in order to give the proletariat, once again, its vital political organ, the party ( ... ), but was rather to launch the slogan of leaving the CP's, without any other indications of what should be done, because "there exists no immediate solution to the problem posed by this betrayal". ( ... )
While it was true that the damage done by centrism had finished by immobilizing a politically disarmed class in the hands of capitalism ( ... ), it was no less true that the only possibility of organizing any kind of opposition to imperialism's attempt to solve its own contradictions through war necessarily meant the reconstruction of new parties ( ... ), so that the alternative of war and revolution should not be merely an empty slogan.
Within the Fraction's Congress, Jacob's theses created a strong opposition which ( ... ) disagreed with the reporter's 'wait-and-see' analysis. For Gatto ( ... ), it was urgent to clarify the relationship between Fraction and Party, on the basis not of petty mechanical formulae, but of the precise tasks demanded by the new situation: "we agree that we cannot found' the party immediately, but there may also be situations which force the necessity of its formation on us. The reporter is drematieing; and this can lead to a kind of fatalism".
This was not a vain concern: "the Fraction was to go on waiting until its dissolution in 1945".
Battaglia then claims that the Fraction remained paralyzed by this disagreement, noting that "the 'partyist:' current, although stuck in the most absurd immobility, nonetheless remained coherent with the positions expressed at the Congress, whereas the 'wait-and-see' current, and especially its most prestigious element, Vercesi, had no shortage of hesitations and changes of direction".
On this point, Battaglia's political conclusions are inevitable: "to say that the party can only emerge during a revolutionary situation when the question of power is on the agenda, and that during periods of counter-revolution, the party 'must' disappear or give way to fractions" means "depriving the class of a minimum political reference point in the hardest and most delicate periods", with "the sole result of being overtaken by events".
We have tried here to set out Battaglia's position as faithfully as possible, in order to it accessible to comrades who do not read Italian. To sum up, according to Battaglia:
a) from its foundation until the 1935 Congress, the Fraction saw its transformation into a Party as dependent on the recovery of the class struggle, while
b) the same minority that in 1935 defended the formation of the Party remained politically coherent but in practice completely immobilized during the years that followed (ie during the factory occupations in France and the Spanish Civil War):
c) the fractions (considered as "not very well-defined organisms", or "substitutes") were unable to offer the proletariat a minimum political reference point during the periods of counter-revolution.
These are three deformations of the history of the workers' movement. Let us see why.
Battaglia maintains that the link between the fraction's transformation into the party, and the class struggle, is a novelty introduced in 1935, which cannot be traced back to the Fraction's birth in 1928. But if we are going back in time, why stop in 1928? Much better return to 1922, to the legendary Rome Theses (approved by the 2nd Congress of the Italian CP), which by definition constitutes the Italian Left's basic text:
"The return to the organization of a true class Party, under the influence of new situations and encouragements to action that events exert on the working masses, takes place in the form of a separation of a part of the Party which, through its debates on the program, the critique of experiences unfavorable to the struggle, and the formation within the Party of a school and organization with its own hierarchy (the fraction), reestablishes a continuity in the life of a unitary organization founded on the basis of consciousness and discipline. From this emerges the new Party".
As we can see, the Left's most fundamental texts are extremely clear on the fact that the fraction's transformation into the party is possible only "under the influence of new situations and encouragements to action that events exert on the working masses".
Let us return to the Fraction, and its basic text on the question: Towards the 2-3/4 International, published in 1933 and considered by Battaglia as "much more dialectical" than the 1935 position:
"Our fraction will be able to make the transformation into a party to the extent that it correctly expresses the evolution of the proletariat, which will once again be precipitated onto the historical stage, and will demolish the present balance of class forces. While always maintaining, on the basis of the trade union organizations, the only position that makes the mass struggle possible, our fraction must fulfill the role that is proper to it: the formation of militants both in Italy and in exile. The moment for its transformation into the Party will be the moment of capitalism's imminent collapse".
On this point, we should consider directly the section cited in Battaglia's text on the 1935 Congress, where the comrades consider that "the terms of the question seemed clear enough". This text states word for word that the transformation from Fraction to Party is possible "in the moments when the confrontation between classes sweeps away opportunism", in other words in a moment of rising class struggle. The terms of the question certainly seem clear enough here. A few lines further on we read: "The class therefore recognizes itself in the Party from the moment when historical conditions upset the balance of class forces; the affirmation of the party is then the affirmation of the class' capacity for action".
You can't get clearer than that! As Bordiga often said, you just have to know how to read. The trouble with looking at history through the distorting spectacles of a preconceived idea, is that you are obliged to read the opposite of what is written.
But the most extraordinary is that, for the sake of their argument, the comrades of Battaglia are forced to ignore what they themselves have already written concerning the Fraction's 1935 Congress:
"Here we should recall that the Italian Left abandoned the name 'Left Fraction of the Italian CP', to become the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left at a Congress held in 1935. This was forced on them by the fact that, contrary to what they had foreseen, the opportunist CPs open betrayal of the proletariat did not wait for the outbreak of World War II. ( ... ) The change in name marked both the adoption of the Fraction's position relative to this 'turn' by the official CPs, and the fact that objective conditions still did not allow the formation of new parties".
This passage is taken from the Political Preface of May 1946, in which the PCInternazionalista (Battaglia) presented its Programmatic Platform, recently adopted at the Turin Conference, to militants abroad. This same basic text, which sets out to explain the historic affiliation between the Italian CP of Livorno 1922, the Fraction in exile, and the PCInt of 1943, is clear on one of the key points of separation with the Trotskyists, which concerned: "... the necessary objective conditions for the communist movement to form new parties with a real influence on the masses, conditions which Trotsky either ignored, or thought existed in the current situation, due to an incorrect analysis of the existing perspectives. Following the experience of the Bolshevik Fraction, it [ie the Italian Left] established that the course towards the formation of the party was essentially one where the class struggle takes place in revolutionary conditions and therefore the proletarians are led to regroup around a marxist program restored against the opportunists, and defended up until then only by a minority".
As we can see, the PCInt of 1943 had not changed a comma of the Fraction's position on this question; moreover, it officially considered the Fraction's political positions as its own. On the contrary, it is Battaglia which has abandoned these positions, and which has succeeded in the same discussion in lining up at least four different positions. In fact, Battaglia considers the correlation between the renewal of the class struggle and the reconstruction of the Party as:
But let us leave Battaglia's self-serving zigzags to one side, and return to the 1935 Congress.
As we can see from the above, it was not the Congress' majority that introduced new positions, but on the contrary the minority which called into question those that the Fraction had always held, moreover by adopting the positions of the Fraction's adversaries. One report replied to the accusations of fatalism hurled at the Fraction by all those, and first and foremost the Trotskyists, who rejected the Fraction's work in favor of the illusion of "mobilizing the masses"; Gatto accused the report of "fatalism". Piero declared that "our orientation must change, we must make our press more accessible to the workers" by competing with the pseudo ‘workers of the opposition' who specialized in "attracting the masses" thanks to a systematic adulation of their illusions. Tullio drew the apparently logical conclusions: "when we say that without a class party there is no leadership, then we mean that this is equally vital in moments of depression"; he forgot that Bilan had already replied to Trotsky:
"From the idea that the revolution is impossible without a Communist Party, the simplest conclusion is drawn that we must build the new Party at once. It is as if we were to deduce from the premise that the workers can no longer defend their elementary demands without an insurrection, the conclusion that we must unleash the insurrection immediately" (Bilan, no.1).
Battaglia's attempt to present the debate as a confrontation between those who wanted a Party already well-tempered when the revolutionary onslaught began, and those who wanted to improvise it at the last moment, does not stand up to examination. To the absurd alternative, "is it necessary to wait for revolutionary events to happen before moving to establish the new party, or, inversely, would it not be better for events to occur with the party already present?", the majority at the Congress had already replied once and for all: "If our problem was only a problem of will, then we would all be in agreement, and nobody would bother to discuss it".
The problem at the Congress was not a question of will, but of willfulness, as the years that followed were to demonstrate.
When Battaglia presents the 1935 debate as one between those who wanted the party irrespective of objective conditions, and those who "took refuge" in waiting for such conditions, they forget what the 1946 Preface had already clearly stated: that the 'Party-builders' did not merely under-estimate or ignore objective conditions, they were inevitably pushed to "claim that such conditions existed, on the basis of a false analysis of the perspectives". This seems to escape Battaglia completely: but this is what was at the heart of the discussion in 1935. The activist minority did not merely state its "disagreement with the Party's formation solely in a period of proletarian recovery", it was inevitably forced to develop a false analysis of the perspectives which would allow it to declare that, if a true proletarian recovery had not yet occurred it was nonetheless just around the corner, that it was necessary to take the leadership of the first steps, and so on and so forth. The minority did not develop this reversal of the Fraction's analysis of the course towards imperialist war openly at the Congress; they had probably not yet realized where their mania for founding parties was bound to lead them. This ambiguity explains why alongside the out and out activists who for the most part came from the defunct Reveil Communiste, there were comrades like Tullio and Gatto Mamone, who split with the minority as soon as it became clear what was really under discussion. But although the minority had not yet revealed the full extent of their disagreements (and unanimously approved the Jacobs report), this was already entirely clear to the majority's most lucid members:
"It is easy to see this tendency when we examine the position held by some comrades over the recent class conflicts, where they claim that the fraction could assume the leadership of these movements despite the present state of decomposition in the proletariat, completely in abstraction from the real balance of class forces" (Pieri).
"So, as the discussion has proved, we are supposed to think that we could have intervened to lead today's movements of despair (Brest-Toulon) and give them a new direction ( ... ). To think that the fraction can lead movements of proletarian desperation is to compromise its intervention in the events of tomorrow" (Jacobs).
The months following the Congress were to see a growing polarization between the two tendencies. In his article "A little clarity, if you please" (Bilan, no 28, January 1936), Bianco attacked the open rejection by some members of the minority, of Jacobs' report, which they had only just accepted. The attack was particularly directed against "comrade Tito, who is full of fine phrases like 'changing the line', and not just being present but 'taking the lead, the direction of the movement for communist rebirth ': abandoning, in order to form an international organism, all 'obstructionist a prioris' and 'our scruples over principle' ".
The final shape of the different groupings was already apparent (although Vercesi, in the same issue of Bilan, tried to minimize the extent of the differences). Already, in the Fraction's Italian review Prometeo, Gatto had distanced himself from the minority, restating that "the Fraction will express itself as a Party in the heat of events", and not before the proletariat unleashes "its battle for emancipation".
But if we are to understand the extent of the errors that the minority was on the point of making, then we must take a step back, and consider the balance of forces between the classes during these decisive years, and the way in which the different left forces analyzed them. The Italian Left described the period as counter-revolutionary on the basis of brutal reality: 1932, the political liquidation of the reactions against Stalinism, with the exclusion from the Left Opposition of the Italian Left and other forces that could not accept Trotsky's zig-zags; 1933, the crushing of the German proletariat; 1934, crushing of the Spanish proletariat in the Asturias; 1935, crushing of the Austrian proletariat, and the French workers' enrolment under the tricolor flag of the bourgeoisie. Trotsky closed his eyes to this mad race towards worldwide butchery to keep up the moral of his troops or him, the German CP, rotten to the core, was still, even in 1933, "the key to the world revolution"; and when the German CP collapsed in the face of Nazism, that meant that the way was clear for the foundation of a new party and even a new International, and if the militants controlled by Stalinism did not join it then it was social-democracy's left wing that "was evolving towards communism", and so on ...
Trotsky's opportunist maneuvers provoked splits on the Left, of those who refused to follow this line: the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes in Belgium, Union Communiste in France, the Revolutionary Workers' League in the USA, etc. Until 1936, these groups seemed to stand half-way between the Italian Left's rigor and Trotsky's acrobatics. The test of 1936 was to prove that their solidarity with Trotskyism was much greater than their differences. In reality, 1936 was the last desperate class upsurge of the European proletariat. The period between May and July 1936 witnessed the French factory occupations, the wave of struggles in Belgium, the Barcelona proletariat's response to Franco's coup, after which the workers remained in complete control of Catalonia for a week. But this was the last convulsion. Within a few weeks, not only had capital succeeded in bringing these actions under control, it had managed to denature them completely by transforming them into moments of the Sacred Union in defense of democracy. Trotsky ignored this recuperation; he proclaimed that "the revolution has begun in France" and encouraged the Spanish proletariat to enroll as cannon fodder in the anti-fascist militia, to defend the republic.
All the left dissidents, from the LCI to the UC, from RWL to a large fraction of the council communists, let themselves be taken in, in the name of the "armed struggle against fascism". Even the minority of the Italian Fraction adhered, in reality, to Trotsky's analyses, declaring that the situation remained "objectively revolutionary", and that in the zones controlled by the militia, collectivization was being carried out "under the noses of the governments in Madrid and Barcelona" (Bilan no 36, Documents of the minority). The bourgeois state has survived and is strengthening its control over the workers? This is nothing but a "facade", an "empty envelope, a simulacrum, a prisoner of the situation", because the Spanish proletariat when it supports the bourgeois Republic does not support the state but the proletarian destruction of the state. Consistent with this analysis, many of the minority's members left for Spain to enroll in the government's anti-fascist militias. For Battaglia, these perilous 360 degree about-turns mean "remaining coherent with their positions in the most absurd immobility". This is a strange idea of coherence and immobility!
In reality, the minority had completely abandoned the Fraction's analytical framework, to adopt Trotsky's dialectical acrobatics; these, the Fraction had already denounced when it wrote of the democratic Republic's massacre of the Asturian miners in 1934:
"The repent terrible massacre in Spain should put an end to all those balancing acts which maintain that the Republic is certainly a 'workers' conquest' to defend, but only under 'certain conditions', and above all 'to the extent that' it is not what it is, or on condition that it 'becomes' what it can never become, or if, far from having its actual meaning and objectives, it should be on the point of becoming the organ of working class domination" (Bilan no 12, October 1934).
Faced with the war in Spain, only the Italian Fraction's majority (and a minority amongst the councilists) stuck to Lenin's defeatist position. But only the Fraction drew all the lessons from this historical turning point, denying the continued existence of backward regions where it would be possible to struggle temporarily for the bourgeoisie or for national liberation, and denouncing as bourgeois and an instrument of imperialist war all the forms of anti-fascist militia. This political position was vital to remain internationalist in the looming imperialist massacre, and so to be able to contribute to the rebirth of the future World Communist Party. The Fraction's positions from 1935 (Sino-Japanese war, Italo-Abyssinian war) to 1937 (Spanish Civil War) are thus the historical watershed which marked the Italian Left's transformation into the Internationalist Communist Left, and which was point of selection for all the revolutionary forces from that moment on.
By 'selection', we mean in reality, not in somebody's theoretical schemas. The collapse of the Ligue des Communistes in Belgium was answered by the appearance of a minority, which formed the Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left. In France, the collapse of Union Communiste was answered by the emergence of a few militants who joined the Italian Left, and who then founded, in the midst of imperialist war, the French Fraction of the Communist Left. In the New World, the collapse of the Revolutionary Workers' League and of the Mexican Liga Comunista was followed by a split of a group of Mexican and immigrant workers, who founded the Grupo dos Trabajadores Marxistas on the positions of the International Communist Left. Even today, only those who place themselves in direct continuity with these positions of principle, without quibbling or searching for some "third way", have any chance today of contributing to the rebirth of the class party.
It is well known that the ICC recognizes the totality of this programmatic demarcation. But what is Battaglia's position?
"The events of the Spanish Revolution highlighted both the strong and the weak points of our tendency: the majority in Bilan appeared tied to a theoretically impeccable formula, which nonetheless had the defect of remaining a simplistic abstraction; the minority on the other hand, dominated by the urge to take part in events whatever the cost, was not always sufficiently prudent to avoid the traps of bourgeois Jacobinism, even on the barricades.
Since the objective possibility existed, our comrades in Bilan should have posed the problem, just as our party was to do later with the partisan movement, by calling the fighting workers not to fall into the trap of imperialist war strategy".
This position, which we have taken from a 1958 special issue of Prometeo devoted to the Fraction, was not incidental but restated on several occasions2. Here Battaglia declares itself for a third path, separate both from the abstractions of the majority and the participation of the minority. But is it really a third path, or just a reformulation of the minority's position?
What is the minority accused of? Inertia, a willingness to be right in theory without taking the trouble to intervene in order to defend a correct orientation amongst the Spanish workers. This accusation repeats, word for word, those put forward at the time by the minority, the Trotskyists, the anarchists, the POUMists, etc: "to tell the Spanish workers that they are in danger, and not to intervene ourselves to combat this danger, is a sign of insensitivity and dillettantism" (Bilan no 35, Texts of the minority). Not only are these accusations identical; more to the point, they are shameless lies. The majority immediately took up the combat alongside the Spanish workers, on the class front, and not in the trenches. Unlike the minority, which abandoned the struggle in Spain at the end of 1936, the majority continued its political activity there until May 1937, when its last representative, Tullio, returned to France to announce to the Fraction and to the workers of the world, that the anti-fascist Republic had just massacred the workers on strike in Barcelona.
The majority's presence in Spain was certainly less visible than that of the minority, who published their communiques on the presses of the Partido Obrero del Unificacion Marxista (POUM) in government, and who became brigadier- generals on the Aragon front, like their spokesman Condiari. The majority's representatives by contrast (Mitchell, Tullio, Caridali ) acted in strict secrecy, in constant danger of arrest by the Stalinist squads, or of denunciation by the POUMists and anarchists, who regarded them more or less as fascist spies. Under these terrible conditions, these comrades continued the struggle to rescue at least a few militants from the spiral of imperialist war, confronting not only danger, but also the hostility and contempt of the militants with whom they debated. Even the most lucid elements, such as the anarchist Berneri (later assassinated by the Stalinists), were ideologically shaken to the point where they became the active promoters of the extension of the war economy - and the resulting militarization of the working class - to every factory, and remained totally incapable of understanding where the class frontier really lay, to the point of writing: "the Trotskyists, Bordigists, and Stalinists, are only divided on a few tactical points" (Guerre de Classe, October 1938). Even when every door slammed shut in their faces, the comrades of the majority continued to knock at them: emerging from the POUM headquarters after yet another fruitless discussion, they found the Stalinist killers waiting for them, and only escaped with their lives by pure luck.
Let us note in passing that the same minority which in 1935 insisted that the party should be ready before the decisive class confrontations, in Spain declared that the revolution had arrived, and would win, in the complete absence of so much as an ounce of class party. The majority, on the contrary, set the party at the heart of its analysis, and declared that there could be no question of revolution, since no party had been formed, nor was there even the slightest tendency in this direction, despite the minority's intense propaganda to prove the opposite. It was not the members of the majority who under-estimated the importance of the party ... and of the Fraction. When we consider the collapse of the minority, who in the end deluded themselves into taking the POUM - a member of the government in the bourgeois republic - for the party, then we can see how correct were the majority's warnings to the 1935 Congress of the danger of "adulterating the very principles of the Fraction".
For Battaglia, the minority was guilty of being "not always (!) sufficiently prudent to avoid the traps of bourgeois Jacobinism, even on the barricades". What does such a vague expression mean? The difference between the majority and the minority was that the former intervened to convince at least a tiny vanguard to desert the imperialist war, while the latter intervened to take part in it by volunteering for the government militia. Battaglia certainly holds a remarkable trump card if they know a way of participating in imperialist war which is sufficiently "prudent" not to play the game of the bourgeoisie... What does it mean to say that the majority should have behaved like the PCInt "towards the partisan movement"? Perhaps the majority should have called for a "united front" with the Stalinists, Socialists, anarchists and POUMists, as the PClnt did in 1944 when it proposed a united front to the Agitation Committees set up by the Italian CP and Socialist Party with the anarcho-syndicalists? Battaglia presumably thinks that "since the objective conditions existed", such "concrete" proposals would have allowed the Fraction to pull out of its hat the Party which was so sorely lacking. Let us hope that Battaglia has no other cards up its sleeve, no other miraculous expedients capable of transforming an objectively counter-revolutionary situation into the exact opposite; this is certainly possible, "but only under certain conditions", and above all "to the extent that it is not what it is", or on condition that "becomes what it cannot become" (Bilan no 12).
The real problem is that Battaglia departs from the Fraction, whose tradition it nonetheless claims, on at least two essential points: the preconditions for the formation of a new party, and the attitude to take in a globally counter-revolutionary period towards the confrontation with superficially proletarian groupings such as the anti-fascist militias. In a forthcoming article on the period between 1937 and 1952, we will see how this incomprehension appeared in the PCInt's formation in 1943, and in its attitude towards the partisans.
In considering this tragic period in the history of the workers' movement, we also intend to demonstrate the falsehood of Battaglia's affirmation that the Fraction was incapable of "giving the class the slightest political orientation in the toughest and most delicate periods"3.
Beyle
1 On the Spanish Civil War, see the articles in the International Review nos 50 and 54. On the Italian Fraction and its political oppositions, see the various articles and documents published in the International Review, and our pamphlet La Gauche Communiste d'Italie, published in French and Italian (shortly to appear also in Spanish and English) as well as the supplement on the relationships between the left Fraction of the Italian CP and the International Left Opposition, 1929-33.
2 In an article "The ICC and the course of history" published in Battaglia Comunista no 3, 1987, Battaglia comes on a bit strong: "In the 1930s, the Fraction (...) considered the perspective of war was inevitable", which supposedly led them "make political mistakes" such as "eliminating any possibility of revolutionary intervention in Spain, even before the proletariat's defeat".
3 These attacks on the Fraction, of which Battaglia claims to be the heir, are all the more significant in that they are appearing just as several Bordigist groups are beginning to rediscover the Fraction, after the silence maintained by Bordiga (see the articles published in Il Comunista of Milan, and the reprinting by Il Partito Comunista of Florence of the Fraction's manifesto on the war in Spain). Are Battaglia and the Bordigists changing places?
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1996/state-capitalism-after-world-war-ii
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/french-communist-left
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/poland
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/china
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/middle-east
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/russia
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/america
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/life-icc
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/2044/rome-theses
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/2045/foundation-italian-fraction
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/contribution-discussion
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/2042/party-and-fraction-marxist-tradition
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2043/ottorino-perrone-vercesi