Battaglia Comunista abandons the marxist concept of decadence, part i

In the previous issue of the International Review (n°118) [1], we recalled at length, and with the support of passages from their major writings, how Marx and Engels defined the notions of the ascendance and decadence of a mode of production. We saw that the notion of decadence lies at the very heart of historical materialism in the analysis of the succession of different modes of production. In a forthcoming article, we will also demonstrate that this concept was central to the political programmes of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, and of the marxist left that emerged from them, in which the groups of the Communist Left today have their origins.

We have begun the publication of a new series of articles,[1] [2] on “The theory of decadence at the heart of historical materialism”, in response both to perfectly legitimate questions on the subject and, above all, the confusions which are being put about by those who have given in to the pressure of bourgeois ideology and abandoned this basic tenet of marxism. The article published by Battaglia Comunista and blushingly titled “For a definition of the concept of decadence”[2] [3] is a prime example. We have already had the occasion to criticise some of its main ideas.[3] [4] However, the publicity given to this article, its translation into three languages, the fact that it has opened a discussion within the IBRP on the question of decadence, and the introduction that the CWO has published in its own review,[4] [5] prompt us to return to the subject and to respond more thoroughly to it.

According to Battaglia, two reasons make it necessary to “define the notion of decadence”:

· firstly, to remove certain ambiguities in the currently accepted definition of capitalism's decadence, the most serious of these being a view of the disappearance of capitalism as something “economically ineluctable and socially predetermined” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°32), in other words a “fatalist” view of capitalism’s death;

· secondly, to establish the idea that, as long as the proletariat has not overthrown capitalism, “the economic system reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions, without creating in this way the conditions for its own self-destruction” (ibid). The idea of decadence thus supposedly “makes no sense if it is used to refer to the mode of production’s capacity for survival” (Internationalist Communist n°21).

We challenge the idea that marxism contains the slightest ambiguity which might lead one to a fatalist vision of capitalism's death, and thence to the idea that, under the pressure of ever more overwhelming contradictions, the system would simply retire from the historical stage. For marxism, on the contrary, in the absence of a “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” the outcome could only be “the common ruin of the contending classes” (Communist Manifesto), in other words the disappearance of society itself. As we intend to demonstrate, the only ambiguity exists in the ideas of Battaglia Comunista. We should point out that Battaglia involuntarily acts as spokesman for all the bourgeois ideologues who claim that marxism is “fatalist”, and who emphasise the role of “human will” in the unfolding of history. Battaglia does not, of course, call marxism into question. On the contrary, in the name of marxism (or at least, of its own version of marxism), it sets out to refute as “fatalist” a conception which, in reality, as we saw in the previous article, lies at marxism's very heart.

As for the second reason that Battaglia gives for defining the notion of decadence, this is completely contrary to marxism, for which capitalism “demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived”,[5] [6] it becomes a “regressive social system”,[6] [7] “it checks the development of productivity”.[7] [8]

Its methodological errors lead Battaglia into the worst kind of aberration: “Even in the progressive phase (...) crises and wars arrived punctually, just like the attacks on the conditions of labour-power”.[8] [9] Battaglia thus ends up adopting the old bourgeois banalities, which minimise the qualitative extensions of these scourges during the barbaric 20th century, on the grounds that war and poverty have always existed. In so doing, Battaglia ends up pretending that the main expressions of capitalism's decadence simply do not exist.

According to Battaglia then, there are not two fundamental phases in the evolution of the capitalist mode of production, but successive periods of ascendancy and decadence which follow the major phases of the evolution of the rate of profit.

Using this approach, the wars of the decadent period – which are one of the expressions of the system's mortal crisis, and which are a growing threat to humanity's survival – take on the role of “the regulation of relations between the sections of international capital” (ibid.). This inability to understand reality is a major factor in a serious under-estimation of the gravity of the world situation. The IBRP is thus increasingly at odds with reality, which can only compromise its ability to understand the world, whose analysis is a part of its intervention in the working class. It diminishes the impact of this intervention by basing it on lame and unconvincing arguments.

Did Marx and Engels have a fatalist vision of capitalism's decadence?

Battaglia begins its article with the claim that the concept of decadence contains ambiguities and that the first of these lies in a fatalist view of the end of capitalism: “The ambiguity lies in the fact that decadence, or the progressive decline of the capitalist mode of production, proceeds from a kind of ineluctable process of self-destruction whose causes are traceable to the essential aspect of its own being (...) the disappearance and destruction of the capitalist economic form is an historically given event, economically ineluctable and socially predetermined. This, as well as being an infantile and idealistic approach, ends up by having negative repercussions politically, creating the hypothesis that, to see the death of capitalism, it is sufficient to sit on the banks of the river, or, at most, in crisis situations (and only then), it is enough to create the subjective instruments of the class struggle as the last impulse to a process which is otherwise irreversible. Nothing is more false” (ibid.). Let us say straight away that this ambiguity exists only in Battaglia's head. Marx and Engels, who were the first to develop this notion of decadence and to put it to extensive use, were in no way fatalists. For the founders of marxism, there is no ineluctable and automatic mechanism behind the succession of modes of production; socio-economic contradictions are settled by the class struggle, which constitutes the motive force of history. To paraphrase Marx, men make their own history, but within predetermined historical conditions: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (The 18[th] Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852, Chapter 1 [10]).[9] [11] As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “Scientific socialism has taught us to comprehend the objective laws of historical development. Men do not make history according to their own free will. But they make history nonetheless. Proletarian action is dependent upon the degree of maturity in social development. However, social development is not independent of the proletariat but is equally its driving force and cause, its effect and consequence. Proletarian action participates in history. And while we can as little skip a stage of historical development as escape our shadow, we can certainly accelerate or retard history” (The Junius pamphlet, 1915, Chapter 1 [12]).[10] [13]

An old ruling class never abdicates power, it defends it to the limit by force of arms. The notion of decadence thus contains no ambiguity as to the possibility of an “ineluctable process of self-destruction”. However much an old mode of production may have disintegrated on the economic, social, and political levels, if no new social force has emerged from within the old society, or if it has been unable to develop sufficient strength to overthrow the old ruling class, then there can be no death of the existing society, or construction of the new. The power of the ruling class and its attachment to its privileges are significant factors in the survival of a social form. The decadence of a mode of production creates the possibility and the necessity of its overthrow, but not the automatic emergence of the new society.

There is therefore no “fatalist ambiguity” in the marxist analysis of the succession of modes of production, as Battaglia leaves us to understand. Marx even points out that, if the outcome of the class struggle is not settled by the victory of a new class, bringing with it new relations of production, then the period of a mode of production's decadence can mutate into a period of generalised decomposition. This historical possibility is developed at the very outset of the Communist Manifesto [14], where Marx, after declaring that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”,[11] [15] continues with an “either... or” to illustrate the two possible alternative outcomes to class contradictions: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”. There are many historical examples of civilisations which have undergone such a stalemate in the class struggle, condemning them to “the common ruin of the contending classes”, and therefore to stagnation, collapse, or even a return to previous stages of development.

Battaglia's anathemas, according to which the concepts of decadence and decomposition are “foreign to the method and arsenal of political economy” (Internationalist Communist n°21), are thus nothing short of ridiculous. The militants of this organisation would do better to return to their classics, beginning with the Manifesto and Capital where the two notions have an important place (see International Review n°118). Some groups or individuals may have developed incomprehensions or opportunist deviations around the notion of decadence – and the “fatalist” vision is certainly one of them. This is another question. But the method which consists of discrediting the notion of decadence by attributing to it the errors which others have committed in its name is the same as that used by the anarchists to discredit the notions of the party or the dictatorship of the proletariat on the basis of the crimes of Stalinism. Another question is the frequent impatience, or the optimism, of many revolutionaries, Marx amongst them. How many times has capitalism not been prematurely buried in the texts of the workers' movement! This was the case notably for the Communist International and its affiliated parties, including the Italian Communist Party (whether the Bordigists like it or not): “Capitalism's crisis is still open, and will inevitably deepen until capitalism dies” (Lyon Theses, 1926).[12] [16] This understandable and minor sin, which should nonetheless be avoided as much as possible, is only a danger if revolutionaries prove unable to recognise their mistakes when the balance of forces between the classes is reversed.

A conception of historical materialism completely opposed to marxism

In its struggle against the “fatalism” which is supposedly intrinsic to the marxist idea of decadence, Battaglia unveils its own vision of historical materialism: “The contradictory aspect of capitalist production, the crises which are derived from this, the repetition of the process of accumulation which is momentarily interrupted but which receives new blood through the destruction of excess capital and means of production, do not automatically lead to its destruction. Either the subjective factor intervenes, which has in the class struggle its material fulcrum and in the crises its economically determinant premise, or the economic system reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions, without creating in this way the conditions for its own self-destruction”. For Battaglia then, as long at has not been destroyed by the class struggle, capitalism continues to “receive new blood through the destruction of excess capital and means of production”, and so “the economic system reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions”. Battaglia here is at the antipodes of Marx's view of the decadence of a mode of production, and of capitalism in particular: “Beyond a certain point, the development of the productive force becomes a barrier for capital; in other words, the capitalist system becomes an obstacle for the expansion of the productive forces of labour”.[13] [17] In his second draft of a letter to Vera Zassoulitch, Marx considered that “the capitalist system is past its prime in the West, approaching the time when it will be no more than a regressive social regime” (cited in Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, RKP, p103), and in Capital he tells us that capitalism “is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived” (see above). The terms that Marx uses to describe the decadence of capitalism are unambiguous: “senile”, “regressive social regime”, “an obstacle for the expansion of the productive forces of labour”, etc. And yet Battaglia can still say that “decadence (...) is meaningless when we refer to the ability of a mode of production to survive” (Internationalist Communist n°21).

These few reminders of the marxist definition of decadence will let the reader judge for himself the difference between the historical and materialist vision of capitalism's decadence developed by Marx, and Battaglia's own special viewpoint where, while capitalism certainly undergoes crises and growing contradictions,[14] [18] it is continually renewed (unless the class struggle intervenes), “receives new blood”, and “reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions”. It is true that Battaglia has the excuse of not knowing that Marx wrote about decadence – “To the extent that the word itself never appears in the three volumes constituting Capital” (Internationalist Communist n°21, p23) – and that Marx only mentions the idea of decadence once in his entire work: “Marx limited himself to giving a definition of capitalism as progressive only in the historical phase in which it eliminated the economic world of feudalism, proposing itself as a powerful means of development of the productive forces inhibited by the preceding economic form, but he never went beyond this in the definition of decadence except for the famous introduction to A contribution to the critique of political economy”.[15] [19] In our opinion, rather than pronouncing grandiloquent excommunications aimed at the notions of decadence and decomposition, supposedly foreign to marxism, Battaglia would do better to consider what Marx had to say about Weitling: “Ignorance is not an argument”. Then they might go back to their classics, and in particular to Capital, which they apparently consider as their bible.[16] [20] For our part, we refer the reader to the description of Marx's concept of decadence in International Review n°118.

Marxist method reduced to the study of specific economic mechanisms

The process of decadence as Marx defines it goes far beyond a mere “coherent economic explanation”: it corresponds, first and foremost, to the historical obsolescence of the social relations of production (wage labour, serfdom, slavery, tribalism, etc.) at the basis of different modes of production (capitalism, feudalism, slave-owning societies, the Asiatic mode of production, etc.). The entry into a period of decadence means that the very foundations of a mode of production are in crisis. The secret, the hidden foundation of a mode of production, is “The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers”. “Upon this (...) is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves”, and it is this that “reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure”.[17] [21] Marx could not be more explicit: “The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer”.[18] [22] The social relations of production are thus much more than mere “economic mechanisms”: they are above all social relations between classes since they give material form to the different forms historically taken by the extortion of surplus labour (wages, slavery, serfdom, tribute, etc.). When a mode of production enters into decadence, it means that these specific relations between classes are in crisis, have become historically inappropriate. This is the very heart of historical materialism, in a world quite unknown to Battaglia, obsessed as they are with their “coherent economic explanation”.

As Battaglia puts it, “Nor is the evolutionary theory valid, according to which capitalism is historically characterised by a progressive phase and a decadent one, if no coherent economic explanation is given (...) The investigation of decadence either individuates these mechanisms which regulate the deceleration of the valorisation process of capital, with all the consequences which that brings with it, or it remains within a false perspective, which prophesises in vain (...) But the listing of these economic and social phenomena, once they have been identified and described, cannot, by itself, be considered as a demonstration of the decadent phase of capitalism. These are only the symptoms, and the primary cause which brings them into existence is to be identified in the law of the profit crisis” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°32, our emphasis). On the one hand, the implication here is that there exists today no coherent economic explanation of decadence, while on the other Battaglia decrees peremptorily that those phenomena which, classically, have been used to characterise the decadence of a mode of production, are irrelevant.

Before we consider a particular economic explanation, we should point out that the notion of decadence means that the social relations of production have become too narrow to contain the continued development of the productive forces, and that this collision between the social relations of production and the productive forces affects every aspect of society. The marxist analysis of decadence does not refer to a quantitative economic level of any kind, determined outside the social and political mechanisms of a given social form. On the contrary, it refers to the qualitative level of the relation that ties the relations of production themselves to the development of the productive forces: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto (...) Then begins an era of social revolution [23]”.[19] [24] The era of the old society's decadence opens, not with the blockage of the development of the productive forces, but with the definitive and irreparable “conflict”. Marx is precise as to the criteria: “From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters”. To be rigorous, we should take this to mean that a society never expires until the development of the productive forces has begun to be definitively hindered by the existing relations of production. Decadence can be defined as a series of dysfunctions, whose effects accumulate from the moment that the system has exhausted its capacity for development. From the marxist viewpoint, the period of a society's decadence is characterised, not by a complete and permanent halt in the growth of the productive forces, but by quantitative and qualitative upheavals caused by this constant conflict between obsolete relations of production and the development of the productive forces.

Whenever Marx tries to determine the criteria for capitalism's entry into its decadent period, he never gives any precise economic explanation, but only at most this or that general criterion in coherence with his analysis of crises; he proceeds more by historical comparisons and analogies (see our article in the previous issue of this Review). It may not make Battaglia happy, but Marx did not need the national statistics or the economic reconstructions of profitability that Battaglia uses[20] [25] to pronounce on capitalism's maturity or obsolescence. The same is true for the other modes of production; Marx and Engels used very little in the way of precise economic mechanisms to explain their entry into decadence. They characterised these historical turning points on the basis of unequivocal qualitative criteria: the appearance of an overall process hindering the development of the productive forces, a qualitative development of conflicts within the ruling class, and between the ruling class and the exploited classes, the hypertrophy of the state apparatus, the emergence of a new revolutionary class bearing new social relations of production and driving a period of transition that heralded revolutionary upheavals, etc. (see our article in the previous issue).

This was also the method adopted by the Communist International, which did not need to wait for the discovery of all the components of a “coherent economic explanation” to identify the opening of the period of capitalism's decadence with the outbreak of World War I.[21] [26] The war, and a whole series of other qualitative criteria on other levels (social, economic, and political), allowed the CI to see that capitalism had completed its historical mission. The whole communist movement agreed on this general diagnosis, even though there were major disagreements as to its economic causes and its political implications. The economic explanations varied between those put forward by Rosa Luxemburg on the basis of the saturation of world markets,[22] [27] and Lenin's explanation on the basis of his arguments developed in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism.[23] [28] And yet all, Lenin first amongst them, were convinced that the “epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie” had ended, and that the world had entered “the epoch of the reactionary obsolete bourgeoisie”.[24] [29] Indeed the differences were such in the analyses of the economic causes of decadence that Lenin, although profoundly convinced of the fact, nonetheless defended the idea that “On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before”.[25] [30] Trotsky, working from the same theoretical basis as Lenin, concluded shortly afterwards that the development of the productive forces had come to a halt, while the Italian Left considered that “The 1914-18 war marked the extreme point in the phase of expansion of the capitalist regime (...) In the ultimate phase of capitalism, that of its decline, historical evolution will be settled fundamentally by the class struggle” (Manifesto of the “Bureau international des Fractions de la Gauche communiste”, Octobre n°3, April 1938).

It might seem illogical to identify the decadence of a mode of production on the basis of its expressions, and not on the basis of a study of its economic foundations, as Battaglia would like, since the former are no more “in the last instance” than a product of the latter. This is, however, the way in which revolutionaries – including Marx and Engels – have worked in the past, not because it is generally easier to recognise the superstructural expressions of a phase of decadence, but because this is where the first expressions appear historically. Before it appears on the quantitative economic level as a hindrance to the development of the productive forces, the decadence of capitalism appears above all as a qualitative phenomenon on the social, political, and ideological levels, through the aggravation of conflicts in the ruling class leading to the First World War; through the betrayal of the Social-Democracy, and the unions' passage into the capitalist camp; through the eruption of a proletariat capable of overthrowing bourgeois rule and establishing the first measures of working class social control. On the basis of these characteristics, revolutionaries at the beginning of the 20th century identified capitalism's entry into decadence. Nor did Marx wait for the “coherent economic explanations” contained in Capital to pass sentence on the historically obsolete nature of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto: “The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered (...) The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them (...) Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society”.

Battaglia thus refuses to define the decadence of a mode of production according to the method adopted by our predecessors, starting with Marx and Engels. Apparently under the impression that they are more marxist than Marx, they think that they can set up as materialists by endlessly repeating that the concept of decadence must be economically defined if it is not to be rendered null and void. In doing so, Battaglia demonstrates that its materialism is of the most vulgar kind, as Engels would have told them, in the same vein as he wrote, in a letter to J Bloch [31]: “According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (...), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary (...) Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree (...) Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction (...) Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly”.[26] [32] Whether it be in defining decadence, explaining the causes of wars, analysing the balance of class forces or the present evolution of the capitalist economy, vulgar materialism is Battaglia's trademark.[27] [33] And let it be said in passing, that Battaglia's plea for a “coherent economic explanation” of capitalism's decadence hardly does justice to all those revolutionaries who have already proposed one, from Rosa Luxemburg, to the Italian Fraction,[28] [34] to the ICC, and even to the CWO whose first pamphlet is titled The economic foundations of decadence! It is characteristic of marxism to take as a starting-point the previous theoretical gains of the workers' movement, to deepen them, or to criticise them and propose alternatives... But marxist method is not Battaglia's strong suit: thinking that revolutionary coherence starts with themselves, they prefer to reinvent everything from scratch.

Battaglia rejects the major expressions of decadence

After casting doubt on the value of the (supposedly “fatalist”) concept of decadence, after peremptorily declaring that there is no coherent economic explanation of decadence, and that without it the concept is worthless, and after redefining the marxist method, Battaglia goes on to reject its main expressions: “it is absolutely insufficient to refer to the fact that, in the decadent phase, economic crises and war, like the attacks on the world of labour-power, occur with a constant and devastating rhythm. Even in the progressive phase (...) crises and wars arrived punctually, just like the attacks on the conditions of labour-power. An explicit example of this is given by the wars between the great colonial powers at the end of the 18th century and over the whole of the 19th century, up to the outbreak of the First World War. The example could be extended by listing the social attacks and the frequent military attacks on class revolts and insurrections, which played themselves out in the same period” (Revolutionary Perspectives, n°32). In other words, all the wars and crises since the beginning of the 20th century don't mean anything – they've always existed!

With incredible carelessness as to both marxism and plain historical reality, Battaglia simply throws overboard all the theoretical gains of the past workers' movement. What does Battaglia tell us? That wars and social struggles have always existed – which is blindingly obvious – but what conclusion do they draw from this? That there is consequently no qualitative break in the history of capitalism – and that is just plain blind!

When they deny any qualitative break in the development of a mode of production, Battaglia rejects Marx's and Engels' analysis, dividing the existence of each mode of production into two qualitatively different phases. For anyone who knows how to read, the language used by Marx and Engels demonstrates without the slightest ambiguity that there are two distinct historic periods within a mode of production: "dependent upon the degree of maturity in social development", "At a certain stage of their development", "the capitalist system is past its prime in the West, approaching the time when it will be no more than a regressive social regime", capitalism “demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived”, etc. In the first article in this series, we have also seen that Marx and Engels identified a decadent phase for each mode of production that they defined (primitive communism, the Asiatic mode of production, slavery, feudalism and capitalism), and that they considered this phase as qualitatively different from the one that preceded it. In an article on the feudal mode of production, entitled “The decadence of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie”, Engels demonstrates the power of historical materialism by defining feudal decadence through its major expressions: stagnating productive forces, a hypertrophied (monarchical) state, the qualitative development of conflicts within the ruling class, and between the ruling class and the exploited classes, the emergence of a transition between the old and the new social relations of production, etc. The same is true for Marx's definition of capitalism's decadence, that is to say a period where “The growing discordance between the productive development of society and the relations of production hitherto characteristic of it, is expressed in acute contradictions, crises, convulsions”,[29] [35] and he considers these conflicts, crises, and convulsions as qualitatively different from the preceding period, since he uses terms such as “regressive social regime", “becoming senile”, etc.

Only a minimum of historical knowledge is necessary to understand the absurdity of Battaglia's assertion that there is no qualitative break between ascendancy and decadence, expressed in their crises, wars, and social struggles.

1 – Throughout capitalism's ascendant phase, its economic crises certainly grew in both depth and extent. But you have to have Battaglia's nerve (or ignorance) to believe that the enormous crisis of the 1930s can be seen as merely in a continuum with the crises of the 19th century! To start with, Battaglia simply forgets the way that the revolutionaries of the time analysed the relative diminution of the crises of the last twenty years (1894-1914) of capitalism's ascendant period (which encouraged the growth of reformism): According to the Communist International [36], “The two decades preceding the [First World] War were the epoch of an exceptionally powerful capitalist ascension. The periods of prosperity were marked by their intensity and long duration, the periods of depression, of crisis, were marked by their brevity”;[30] [37] this hardly coincides with Battaglia's “theory” of the continuous aggravation of economic crises. Moreover, a truly remarkable dose of bad faith is needed to avoid seeing that the crisis of the 1930s is out of all proportion compared to those of the 19th century, both in terms of its duration (some ten years), its depth (halving of industrial production), and its extent (more international than ever). More fundamentally, whereas the crises during capitalism's ascendancy were resolved through increased production and an extension of the world market, the crisis of the 1930s was never overcome, and ended only with World War II. Battaglia confuses here the heartbeats of a growing organism, and the death rattles of one in its last agony. As for the present crisis, it has lasted for thirty years, and the worst is still to come.

2 – As far as social conflicts are concerned, it is certainly true that the whole ascendant period witnessed increasing tensions between the classes, culminating in general political strikes (for universal suffrage and the eight-hour day) and in the mass strike of 1905 in Russia. But one would have to be blind not to see that the revolutionary movements between 1917 and 1923 are of a different order altogether. These are no longer local or national movements, or even insurrections, but a six-year international wave whose duration has nothing in common with the movements of the 19th century. There is also a vital qualitative difference: these movements were not, for the most part, economic but directly revolutionary, posing the problem, not of reform, but of the seizure of power.

3 – Finally, as far as war is concerned, the contrast is still more striking. During the 19th century, the function of war was to assure each capitalist nation the unity (wars of national unification) and/or the territorial expansion (colonial wars) necessary to its development. In this sense, despite the disasters that it brought in its wake, war was a moment in capitalism's progressive advance; its cost was simply a necessary expense in the widening of the market and therefore of production. This is why Marx considered certain wars to be progressive. The wars of this period were generally: a) limited to two or three contiguous countries; b) of short duration; c) caused little damage; d) fought between standing armies which mobilised only a small part of the economy or of the population; e) undertaken for rational prospects of economic gain. For both victors and vanquished, they determined a new economic expansion. The Franco-Prussian war (1870) is a typical example: it was a decisive step in the formation of the German nation, in other words it laid the foundations for a formidable expansion of the productive forces and formation of the largest sector of Europe's industrial proletariat. Moreover, the war lasted less than a year and caused relatively few casualties, nor did it constitute a serious handicap for the defeated country. During the ascendant period, wars are essentially the product of an expanding system: a) 1790-1815, wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire (which contributed to the overthrow of feudal power throughout Europe); b) 1850-1873, Crimean War, the American Civil War, wars for national unification (Germany, Italy), Mexican and Franco-Prussian wars; c) 1895-1913 Spanish-American, Russo-Japanese, and Balkan wars. By 1914, there had been no major war for a century. Most of the wars between the great powers had been relatively short, lasting months or even weeks (war between Prussia and Austria in 1866). Between 1871 and 1914, no European power had been invaded. There had never been a world war. Between 1815 and 1914, no war between the great powers had been fought outside their neighbouring region. All this changed in 1914, which inaugurated an age of slaughter.[31] [38]

In the period of decadence, by contrast, wars are the product of a system whose dynamic leads only to a dead-end. In a period where there can no longer be any question of the formation of truly independent nation-states, all wars are imperialist. The wars between the great powers: a) tend to become world wars because their roots lie in the contraction of the world market relative to the requirements of capital accumulation; b) their duration is far longer; c) they are immensely destructive; d) they mobilise the entire world economy, and the whole population of the belligerent countries; e) from the viewpoint of global capital, they lose any progressive economic function and become wholly irrational. They are no longer elements in the development of the productive forces, but of their destruction. They are no longer moments in the expansion of the mode or production, they are the convulsions of a dying system. In the past, wars ended with a clear winner and the outcome of the war did not prejudice the future development of the protagonists, whereas in the two world wars, both victors and vanquished emerged exhausted from the war, to the profit of a third gangster, the United States. The victors were unable to force the vanquished to pay war reparations (contrary to the huge ransom in gold paid by France to Prussia after 1870). This shows how, in the period of decadence, the expansion of one power can only be on the ruins of others. Previously, military power guaranteed the conquest of economic positions. Today, the economy is increasingly at the service of military strategy. The division of the world into rival imperialisms, and the resulting military conflicts between them, have become permanent aspects of capitalism's existence. This was the analysis of our predecessors of the Italian Left: “Since the opening of the imperialist phase of capitalism at the beginning of the century, evolution oscillates between imperialist war and proletarian revolution. In the epoch of capitalist growth, wars opened the way for the expansion of the productive forces through the destruction of outmoded relations of production. In the phase of capitalist decadence, wars have no other function than the destruction of excess wealth...” (“Resolution on the formation of the International Bureau of the Fractions of the Communist Left”, in Octobre n°1, February 1938, p5). Battaglia today rejects this analysis, and yet still claims to be the heir of the Italian Left.

All this is contained in the analyses of the revolutionaries of the previous century,[32] [39] and Battaglia only makes itself ridiculous in trying to ignore our predecessors with a sarcastic question: “And when, according to this mode of posing the question, did the transition from the progressive to the decadent phase occur? At the end of the 19th century? After the First World War? After the Second?”. They know – or they should know – perfectly well that for the whole communist movement, including for their fellow founder of the IBRP, the Communist Workers Organisation, World War I signs capitalism's entry into decadence: “At the time of the formation of the Comintern in 1919, it appeared that the epoch of revolution had been reached and its founding conference declared this”.[33] [40]

In this article, we have tried to show that there is nothing fatalist about the marxist vision of capitalism's decadence, and that the history of capitalism is not an endless repetition of cycles. In the next article, we will continue our critique of Battaglia, above all to point out the implications of abandoning the notion of decadence on the level of the proletariat's political struggle.

C.Mcl

 

The international wave of workers’ struggles of 1968-72 put an end to the long period of counter-revolution which descended on the proletariat following the defeat of the revolutionary attempts of 1917-23. One of the clearest expressions of this was the re-appearance of a whole number of proletarian groups and circles who, despite enormous inexperience and confusion, tried to repair the broken links with the communist movement of the past. During the 1970s, when the immediate (and indeed immediatist) optimism generated by the revival of the class struggle was still very much alive, proletarian political currents like the ICC or the Bordigist ICP went through a phase of accelerated and even spectacular growth. However, the construction of a communist organisation – as with the progress of the class struggle as a whole - proved to be a much more difficult and painful process than many of the ‘generation of 68’ first believed; and not a few of that generation of militants or ex-militants have gone from facile optimism to an equally superficial pessimism, concluding that the period of counter-revolution never came to an end, or expressing their disappointment in the working class by abandoning revolutionary politics altogether.

This is not the place to go into all the reasons for the huge difficulties and seemingly endless crises that revolutionary organisations have faced over the last two decades. They include the ideological fall-out from the collapse of the Eastern bloc; the subsequent reflux in the class struggle; the pernicious effects of capitalism’s ever-advancing decomposition – all subjects requiring a much deeper development than we can attempt here. But throughout all these difficulties the ICC has held fast to what it proclaimed back in the 1970s: that the working class has not suffered a fundamental historical defeat, and that there has been, despite the general narrowing in the extent of overt class consciousness, a process of real “subterranean maturation” of consciousness going on at a deeper level, a process which expresses itself most visibly in the re-appearance of a whole new generation of elements seeking once again to re-appropriate the essentials of the communist programme.

The ICC has written numerous articles in its territorial press about the evolution of the zone of transition between the politics of the bourgeoisie and the politics of the working class. This has certainly been an extremely heterogeneous process and is hampered by any number of ideological pitfalls, in particular anarchism and the various forms of “alternative world” ideologies. But it has been extremely widespread, indeed global, in its ramifications. At the same time we have been seeing the emergence of groups and discussion circles which from the very beginning define themselves as sympathetic to the positions of the communist left.

In this overall context, a particularly significant development has been the appearance of this new generation in the two countries which – precisely because the revolution reached its greatest heights there – experienced the very nadir of the counter-revolution: Russia and Germany. Our sections in Germany and Switzerland have been particularly active in intervening in this new German milieu, as can be seen from the large number of articles devoted to it in the territorial press in that language (some of which have also been published in English, French and other languages. See for example World Revolution n°269 and 275).

At the same time, the ICC as a whole has made a major effort to follow and participate in the development of the milieu in Russia. From the Moscow conference on Trotsky in 1997, which we wrote about in International Review n°92, readers of our press will be aware of the considerable number of articles we have published on the new groups in Russia – debates with the Southern Bureau of the Marxist Labour Party on decadence and the national question, on similar issues with the International Communist Union; the publishing of internationalist statements against the Chechen war by the Moscow revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists (KRAS) and the Group of Proletarian Revolutionary Collectivists; an account of the ICC public meeting held in Moscow in October 2002 to mark the publication in Russian of our book on decadence (see for example International Review n°101, 104, 111, 112, 115 and World Revolution n°260 [84]). More recently, as recounted in International Review n°118, we have helped to set up an internet discussion site [85] with some of the internationalist elements in Russia (KRAS [86], GPRC [87] and more recently the ICU), with the aim of broadening and deepening the key debates animating this milieu.

In June 2004 we continued this work by sending a delegation to the conference convened by the Victor Serge Library and the Praxis study and research centre, which outlined the aims of the meeting as follows: “…to discuss the character, the goals and the historic experience of democratic and libertarian socialism as a complex of ideas and social movements (…):

-          Socialism and democracy (…)

-          Socialism and freedom (…)

-          The international character of democratic and libertarian socialism (…)

-          The actors in the socialist transformations (…)

-          Socialist education (…)”. 

It goes without saying that we have a number of fundamental differences with the “democratic” and “libertarian” ideas put forward in this circular and with the Praxis group; indeed we have already mentioned some of these in our description of the October 2002 public forum, notably with regard to the Chechen war. However, it has been our experience that this group has been consistently able to provide a forum for open debate for the emerging elements in Russia, and the June conference was a good example of that. Not only were many of the key themes announced in the circular deeply relevant to the problems facing revolutionaries, but as with previous conferences this one attracted a very wide range of participants. Thus, alongside a number of Russian and “Western” academics putting forward varieties of democratic ideology from social democracy to Trotskyism and “alternative worldism”, there were also several representatives of the authentically internationalist milieu growing up in Russia today.

The ICC submitted three texts to the conference which were aimed at outlining a communist response to the questions posed in the circular – on the real meaning of proletarian internationalism, on the mythology of democracy and the proletarian alternative of workers’ councils, and on the reactionary character of all trade unions in this historical epoch (see our web site). We were not surprised to find that the debates at this conference tended to highlight the dividing line between those for whom internationalism means class solidarity across and against all national divisions, and those for whom it means “friendship between nations” or support for “national liberation movements”; nor that this divide also coincided with the gap between those for whom the revolutionary and worldwide overthrow of capitalism is the only progressive step for humanity in this period, and those who can still see the benefits of all kinds of partial movements and struggles for ‘reforms’ inside the system.

At the same time, as confirmed by the many discussion meetings which took place alongside the formal conference, there remain major disagreements among the internationalists themselves – on the question of the decadence of capitalism, on the nature of the October revolution, on the organisation question and indeed on the fundamental method of marxism. In this issue of the International Review we are publishing a brief critique of the contributions made by the KRAS (on the October revolution) and by the GPRC (on their idea that computerisation is a necessary precondition for the proletarian revolution), and there is no question that discussions on these and many other issues will continue (the initial contributions on these questions are already on the internationalist website.

We have just completed the publication in this Review of a short series on ‘The birth of Bolshevism’ in 1903-1904. One hundred years later, it is still possible to make fruitful comparisons between the situation facing Russian revolutionaries in Lenin’s day, and the one confronted by today’s milieu. The tasks of the hour remain fundamentally the same: reappropriate (or learn for the first time) marxist positions and understand the necessity to build a centralised organisation of revolutionaries which has overcome the extreme dispersal of the existing groups and circles. Also comparable is the overall social context, in that we can discern on the horizon (even if a more distant one than in 1903) huge social conflicts and mass strikes which will certainly be as significant historically as those of 1905 in Russia; the significance of this being that revolutionaries today do not have infinite time at their disposal for the work of constructing a political organisation capable of intervening in and influencing such movements. One thing, however, has evolved since the early years of the 20th century, and that is that the building of such an organisation will not take place separately in each country in relative isolation from the international communist movement: it is already being posed on an international level. The issues facing revolutionaries in Russia are essentially the same as those facing revolutionaries in all countries; and this is precisely why the debates we have talked about in this article need to be approached not only within a general framework of internationalist principles, but also in a concretely international sense. We therefore actively encourage all those - inside Russia and outside it – who agree with the basic framework of the internationalist discussion forum to begin sending their own contributions to the site and to participate in future conferences organised by the Russian milieu.

ICC, August 2004

 

 

The acceleration of the world crisis of capitalism is more and more reducing the margin of manoeuvre open to the bourgeoisie, which, in the logic of capitalist exploitation, has no choice but to attack the living standards of the entire working class head-on and with increasing violence.

Violent and frontal attacks on the working class

Each national bourgeoisie is adopting the same measures: redundancy plans which don’t leave any economic sector untouched; relocation of plant and investment; increasing hours of work; dismantling of social protection (pensions, health, unemployment benefits); wage cuts; the growing precariousness of employment and housing; deterioration of working and living conditions. All workers, whether at work or on the dole, whether still active or retired, whether they are in the private sector or the public sector, will from now on be confronted with these attacks on a permanent basis.

In Italy, following attacks on pensions similar to those in France and a wave of redundancies in the FIAT factories, there have been 3,700 job cuts (over a sixth of the workforce) at the Alitalia airline.

In Germany, the Socialist and Green government led by Schroeder, with an austerity programme baptised “Agenda 2010”, has begun to cut health insurance, increase the policing of work stoppages, increase sickness contributions for all employees, increase pension contributions and raise the retirement age which is already set at 65. At Siemens, with the agreement of the IG-Metall union and under the threat of relocating to Hungary, it is making the workers work between 40 and 48 hours instead of the previous 35 without any wage increase. Other big enterprises are negotiating similar agreements: DeutscheBahn (the German railways), Bosch, Thyssen-Krupp, Continental, as well as the entire automobile industry (BMW, Opel, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Daimler-Chrysler). The same is true in Holland, a state where workers have for a long time been supposed to have worked shorter hours. The Dutch minister of the economy has announced that the return to the 40 hour week (with no compensatory payments) would be a good way of re-launching the national economy.

The “Harz IV plan”, which is due to come into effect at the beginning of 2005 in Germany, shows the direction that all bourgeoisies, and first and foremost those in Europe, have begun to take: reducing the length and amount of unemployment benefits and making it harder to obtain them, notably by forcing people to accept offers of employment which pay a lot less than the jobs they have lost.

These attacks are not limited to the European continent but are taking place on a world scale. While the Canadian aircraft builder Bombardier Aerospace intends to cut between 2,000 and 2,500 jobs, the US telecommunications firm AT&T has announced 12,300 lay-offs, General Motors 10,000 more, posing a threat to its Swedish and German plants, and the Bank of America has announced 4,500 lay-offs in addition to the 12,500 planned last April. Thus in the USA, where unemployment is reaching record levels (they are talking about “growth without jobs”), more than 36 million people, 12.5% of the population, live below the poverty line. In 2003 1.5 million more people had precarious jobs while 45 million are deprived of any social protection. In Israel, whole municipalities are bankrupt and municipal employees have not been paid in months. Not to mention the frightful conditions of exploitation facing workers in the third world, where there is a race to lower wages as a result of frenzied competition on the world market.

Most of these attacks are presented as indispensable “reforms”. The capitalist state and each national bourgeoisie claim that it is acting in the general interest, for the good of the community, to preserve the future for our children and future generations. The bourgeoisie wants us to believe that it is trying to save jobs and guard unemployment, sickness and pension benefit funds, whereas in fact it is in the process of dismantling social protection for the working class. In order to get workers to accept such sacrifices, it claims that these “reforms” are all about “solidarity” between “citizens”, that they will make society fairer and more equal, as opposed to any defence of egoistic privileges. When the ruling class talks about greater equality, its real aim is to reduce the living standards of the working class. In the 19th century, when capitalism was still in full expansion, the reforms carried out by the bourgeoisie really did tend to raise the living standards of the working class; today capitalism can’t offer any real reforms. All these pseudo-reforms are not the sign of capitalism’s prosperity, but of its irreversible bankruptcy.

The working class is beginning to respond to the attacks of the bourgeoisie

The resolution we are publishing below was adopted by the central organ of the ICC last June.

The central aim of this text is to demonstrate the existence of a “turning point” in the evolution of the class struggle, an analysis we already put forward after the struggles of spring 2003 in France and Austria against the “reform” of pensions. Through this text we want to answer the questions posed by some of our readers and sympathisers who have expressed doubts about the validity of this analysis.

Since 2003, the reality of the class struggle in the shape of a number of social movements has given a much more tangible confirmation that there is indeed a turning point in the class struggle at an international level.

Despite the strength and omnipresence of union control over the struggles, despite workers’ hesitation to enter into struggle faced with bourgeois manoeuvres aimed at intimidating them, despite the proletariat’s lack of self-confidence, it has become clear that the working class is beginning to respond to the attacks of the bourgeoisie, even if this revival is still a long way below the level of the attacks themselves. The mobilisation of the Italian tram drivers and the British postal workers and firemen in the winter of 2003, then the movements of the FIAT workers at Melfi in the south of Italy in the spring against redundancy plans - in spite of all the weaknesses and isolation of these struggles - were already signs of a revival of class militancy. But today there are many more examples and they are more significant. In Germany last July, more than 60,000 workers at Mercedes-Daimler-Chrysler took part in strikes and demonstrations against threats and ultimatums by the bosses. The latter demanded that workers either accept certain “sacrifices” regarding their working conditions, increase productivity (this applied in particular to the workers of the Sindelfingen-Stuttgart factory in Bade-Wurtemberg), and accept job-cuts at Sindelfingen, Unturkheim and Mannheim – or face the relocation of the plants to other sites. Not only did the workers of Siemens, Porsche, Bosch and Alcatel, who all faced similar attacks, take part in these mobilisations; at the same time, when the bosses tried to foment divisions between the workers of different factories, many workers from Bremen, to where the jobs were to be relocated, associated themselves with the demonstrations. This is a very significant embryo of workers’ solidarity. In Spain, the workers at the shipyards of Puerto Real near Cadiz in Andalusia, as well as in Sestao in the Bilbao region, launched a very hard movement against privatisation plans which involved thousands of job-cuts – plans set in motion by the left-wing government despite its previous promises to the contrary.

More recently, a demonstration organised by the unions and “alternative worldists” in Berlin on 2 October, which was supposed to “close” a series of “Monday protests” against the government’s Hartz IV plan, attracted 45,000 people. On the same day, a gigantic demonstration took place in Amsterdam against the government’s plans, and it had been preceded by important regional mobilisations. Officially there were 200,000 participants, constituting the biggest demonstration in the country for ten years. Despite the main slogan of the demo, “No to the government, yes to the unions”, the most spontaneous reaction of the participants themselves was surprise and astonishment at the size of the demo. It should also be remembered that Holland, alongside Belgium, was one of the first countries to see a revival of workers’ struggles in the autumn of 1983.

Each of these movements is a sign of the reflection going on in the working class. The accumulation of attacks by the bourgeoisie is bound to sap the illusions that the ruling class is trying to spread. Workers are becoming increasingly anxious about the future which this system of exploitation is reserving for their children, for the future generations. Conscious of its responsibility in the slow maturation of consciousness going on in the class, the ICC has intervened very actively in these struggles. It produced leaflets and distributed them widely in Germany in July and in Spain in September. On 2 October, both in Berlin and Amsterdam, it achieved record sales for its press, which had already been the case during the struggles of spring 2003 in France. These are further illustrations of the significance and potential of the current turning point.

Wim 11.10.04

Resolution on the evolution of the class struggle

At its plenary meeting in Autumn 2003, the central organ of the ICC highlighted the fact that there is a change in the evolution of the international class struggle: “The large-scale mobilisations of the spring of 2003 in France and Austria represent a turning point in the class struggles since 1989.” However the report adopted by the plenary meeting judged that “both internationally and within each country, the level of militancy is still embryonic and very uneven” and it goes on to say that: “More generally, we must be able to distinguish between situations where, so to speak, the world wakes up the next morning and it is no longer the same world, and changes that take place at first almost unnoticed by the world at large, like the almost invisible alteration between the ebb and flow of the tide. The present evolution is undoubtedly of the latter kind. In this sense, the recent mobilisations by no means signify a spectacular immediate alteration of the situation…”

Eight months after these perspectives were adopted by our organisation, we must ask to what extent they have been verified. That is the aim of the present resolution.

1. One thing that has certainly been confirmed is the absence of any “spectacular immediate alteration of the situation” given that following the struggles in Spring 2003 in various European countries, France in particular, there has been no massive or striking movement in the class struggle. In this sense, there is no decisive element that enables us to confirm the idea that the struggles of 2003 represent a real change in the development of the balance of class forces between the classes. So it is not by looking at the situation in the class struggle over the last year that we can establish the validity of our analyses, this must rather be done by examining all the elements of the historic situation which determine the present phase of the class struggle. The basis for this kind of examination is the analytical framework that we have developed for understanding the present historic situation.

2. In the context of this resolution, we can give no more than a summary of the determinant elements in the situation of the class struggle:

- The entire world situation from the end of the 1960s has been marked by the end of the counter-revolution which weighed on the proletariat during the 1920s. The historic resurgence of the workers' struggles, characterised in particular by the general strike of May 68 in France, the “Italian hot autumn” of 69, the “Cordobazo” in Argentina the same year, the strikes in the winter of 1970-71 in Poland, etc, opened up a course towards the confrontation between classes. Faced with the worsening of the economic crisis, the bourgeoisie was unable to use its “classic” response - world war - because the exploited class no longer marched behind the flag of its exploiters.

- This historic course towards class confrontations, and not towards world war, has been maintained to the extent that the proletariat has not suffered a direct defeat or a profound ideological defeat leading to its mobilisation behind bourgeois banners such as democracy or anti-fascism.

- However this historic resurgence has encountered a series of difficulties, especially during the 80s, because of the manoeuvres used by the bourgeoisie against the working class but also because of the organic break experienced by the communist vanguard following the counter-revolution (absence or lateness in the emergence of the class party, lack of politicisation of the struggles). One of the growing difficulties encountered by the working class is the increasing decomposition of moribund capitalist society.

- It is the most spectacular manifestation of this decomposition - the collapse the so called “socialist” regimes and of the Eastern bloc at the end of the 1980s - that is at the root of the serious reflux in consciousness within the class, as a result of the impact of the campaigns around the “death of communism” which the collapse made possible.

- This reflux of the class was further aggravated at the beginning of the 1990s by a series of events which accentuated the feeling of impotence on the part of the working class:

· the crisis and the Gulf war in 1990-91;

· the war in Yugoslavia from 1991 onwards;

· the plethora of wars and massacres in many other places (Kosovo, Rwanda, East Timor, etc) with the frequent participation of the big powers in the name of “humanitarian principles”.

- The massive use of humanitarian themes (as in Kosovo in 1999 for example), which exploit the most barbarous expressions of decomposition (such as “ethnic cleansing”), has added another source of disorientation for the working class, especially for those in the more advanced countries who are invited to applaud the military adventures of their governments.

- The attack on the United States on 11th September 2001 has allowed the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries to develop a new series of mystifications around the theme of the “terrorist threat”, and of the necessary fight against this threat; these mystifications were used in particular to justify the war in Afghanistan at the end of 2001 and the Iraq war of 2003.

- On the other hand, during the 1990s there was a pause (in the form of a certain downturn in unemployment) in the inevitable worsening of the economic crisis, which could otherwise have offered an antidote to the campaigns that followed 1989 around the “failure of communism” and the “superiority of liberal capitalism”; because of this the illusions created by these campaigns persisted throughout the decade and were reinforced by those created around the “success stories” of the Asian “dragons” and “tigers” and around the “new technological revolution”.

- Finally, the fact that the left parties came to power in the vast majority of the European countries in the second half of the 1990s, an event that was made possible both by the reflux in the consciousness and the combativity of the class and also by the relative calm at the level of the intensification of the economic crisis, has enabled the ruling class (and that was its main aim) to carry out a series of economic attacks against the working class while avoiding the massive mobilisations of the latter, which are one of the conditions for the renewal of its self-confidence.

3. On the basis of all of these elements we can identify a real change in the balance of forces between the classes. We can get an initial idea of this alteration simply by observing and comparing the situation prevailing at the time of two important episodes in the class struggle during the last decade in France, a country which has acted as a sort of “laboratory” at the level of the class struggle and the bourgeoisie's manoeuvres to counter it, ever since 1968 (but also during the 19th century). These two important episodes are the struggles of autumn 1995, mainly in the transport sector, against the “Juppé plan” to reform the Welfare system and the recent strikes in the public section in spring 2003 against the reform of the pension system obliging workers in this sector to work a greater number of years to receive a lower pension.

As the ICC stressed at the time, the struggles of 1995 were an elaborate manoeuvre on the part of different sectors of the bourgeoisie to refurbish the unions’ prestige at a time when the economic situation did not yet oblige them to undertake violent attacks, and in order to allow the unions to encapsulate and sabotage the future struggles of the proletariat more effectively.

By contrast, the strikes of spring 2003 followed a massive attack against the working class that was necessary to deal with the deepening capitalist crisis. The unions did not intervene in these struggles in order to polish up their image, but rather did their best to sabotage the movement and ensure that it ended in a bitter defeat for the working class.

However, in spite of the differences, these two episodes in the class struggle have characteristics in common: the main attack affected all sectors or broad sectors of the working class (in 1995 the “Juppé plan” for reform of the Welfare system, in 2003 reform of public sector pensions) and was accompanied by a specific attack against a particular sector (in 1995 reform of the pension system for railway workers, in 2003 the “decentralisation” of a number of staff within the national education system) which appeared to be the spearhead of the movement because it expressed greater and broader combativity. After several weeks of the strike the “concessions” made in relation to the specific attacks made it possible to get the sectors concerned back to work, which aided the general return to work because the “vanguard” had stopped struggling. In December 1995, the movement of the rail workers came to a halt when the proposed reform of their pension system was abandoned; in 2003, the government's “backdown” on the “decentralisation” measures concerning certain categories in the school system, contributed to the return to work in the education sector.

In spite of this, the return to work took place in a completely different atmosphere on these two occasions:

- in December 1995, although the government retained the “Juppé plan” (which had also received the support of one of the main unions, the CFDT), the prevailing mood was one of “victory”: on one point at least, the pension system of the railway workers, the government had quite simply withdrawn its proposal;

- at the end of spring 2003 on the other hand, the insignificant concessions made on the position of certain categories of personnel in the national education system, was in no way felt as a victory, but quite simply as the reluctance of the government to give way on anything else, and the feeling of defeat was aggravated further by the authorities’ announcement that the strike days would be deducted in their entirety from wages, contrary to what had previously happened in the public sector.

To try and make a general assessment of these two episodes in the class struggle, the following points can be emphasised:

- in 1995, the feeling of victory that was spread forcefully throughout the working class, greatly helped to renew the credibility of the unions (a phenomenon that was not restricted to France but involved most of the European countries, especially Belgium and Germany where bourgeois manoeuvres similar to those used in France were put into operation, as we have pointed out in our press);

- in 2003, the marked feeling of defeat which was produced by the spring strikes (in France but also in other countries such as Austria) did not discredit the unions as they managed not to drop their mask and, in certain situations, even came across as being more “militant” than the rank and file. However, the workers’ feeling of having been defeated marks the beginning of a process in which the unions will lose credibility, once the sheer extent of their manoeuvring makes it possible to demonstrate that under their leadership the struggle is always defeated, and that they always work towards such a defeat.

In this way, the perspective for the development of the struggles and the consciousness of the proletariat is much better after 2003 than after 1995 because:

- the worst thing for the working class is not a clear defeat but rather the sense of victory after a defeat that is masked (but real): it is this sense of “victory” (against fascism and in defence of the “socialist fatherland”) which has been the most efficient poison to plunge and maintain the proletariat in the counter-revolution during four decades of the 20th century;

- the union, the main instrument of control over the working class and for sabotage of the struggles, has entered into a trajectory in which it will be weakened.

4. If the existence of a transformation in the struggles and the consciousness of the working class can be assessed in an empirical way by means of the simple examination of the differences between the situation in 2003 and that of 1995, the question is raised: why has this change taken place now and not, for example, five years ago?

It is already possible to give a simple answer to this question: for the same reasons that the anti-globalisation movement, which began just five years ago, has now become a real institution whose demonstrations mobilise hundreds of thousands of people and the attention of the whole media.

To be more precise we can present the following elements in reply:

After the enormous impact of the campaigns around “the death of communism” from the end of the 80s, an impact that was in proportion to the enormous importance of the event marked by the internal collapse of those regimes that were presented for more than half a century as “socialist”, “workers”, “anti-capitalist”, a certain period of time, in fact a decade, was necessary for the fog of confusion created by these campaigns to evaporate, for the impact of their “arguments” to diminish. Four decades were necessary for the world proletariat to emerge from the counter-revolution, a quarter of this time was necessary for it to raise its head from the blows received from the spearhead of this same counter-revolution, Stalinism, whose “stinking corpse has continued to poison the atmosphere that it breathes” (as we wrote in 1989).

It was also necessary to counter the idea, promoted by Bush senior, that the collapse of the “socialist” regimes and of the Eastern bloc would make possible the opening up of a “new world order”. This idea was brutally belied from 1990-91 onwards by the crisis and the Gulf war and then by the war in Yugoslavia which lasted until 1999 with the offensive in Kosovo. After this came the September 11th attacks and now the Iraq war, while at the same time the situation in Israel-Palestine continues to degenerate. Day after day it becomes increasingly evident that the ruling class cannot put an end to these imperialist confrontations and to world chaos, any more than it can put an end to the economic crisis that constitutes the backdrop to the former.

The recent period, mainly since the start of the 21st century, has once more brought to the fore the obvious fact of capitalism’s economic crisis, after the illusions of the 1990s about the “resurgence”, the “dragons” and the “new technological revolution”. At the same time, this new evolution of the capitalist crisis has led the ruling class to intensify the violence of its economic attacks against the working class, to generalise the attacks.

However, the violence and the increasingly systematic nature of the attacks against the working class has not yet provoked any massive or spectacular response or even a response comparable in breadth to that of 2003. In other words, why did the “alteration” in 2003 appear in the form of a change in direction and not as an explosion (such as was seen for example in 1968 and the years that followed)?

5. There are various levels of response to this question.

In the first place, as we have often pointed out, there is the slow development of the historic resurgence of the proletariat: for example, there were 12 years between the first major event of this historic resurgence, the general strike in May 1968 in France and its culmination, the strikes in Poland in the summer of 1980. Likewise, there were 13½ years between the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 and the strikes of spring 2003; that is, a longer period of time than between the beginning of the first revolution in Russia in January 1905 and the revolution of October 1917.

The ICC has already analysed the reasons for the slowness of this development in comparison with that which preceded the 1917 revolution: today the class struggle is provoked, not by imperialist war, but by the economic crisis of capitalism, a crisis which the bourgeoisie is quite capable of slowing down, as it has amply shown.

The ICC has also highlighted other factors which have contributed to slowing down the development of the struggle and the consciousness of the proletariat, factors linked to the organic break imposed by the counter-revolution (and which has delayed the construction of the party) and to the decomposition of capitalism, especially the tendency towards despair, to flight and to cocooning which has affected the proletariat.

In other ways, to understand the slowness of this process we must also take into account the impact of the crisis itself. In particular the fact that it is expressed by a rise in unemployment, which constitutes an important inhibition on the working class, especially on those of the new generation, who are traditionally the most combative but who are today often thrown into unemployment without even being able to experience associated work and solidarity between workers. When workers are made redundant as a result of massive lay-offs, this can create an explosive situation, although this is not easily expressed in the classic form of the strike because the strike is by definition ineffective against redundancies. But insofar as the rise in unemployment is simply a result of not replacing those who retire, as is often the case today, workers who fail to find a job often have difficulty knowing how to react.

The ICC has often demonstrated that the inexorable rise in unemployment is one of the most conclusive demonstrations of the definitive failure of the capitalist mode of production, one of whose essential historic functions was the massive and world wide extension of wage labour. However, at the moment unemployment is mainly a factor of demoralisation for the working class, one that inhibits its struggle. Only in a much more advanced stage of the class movement (in fact, when the perspective for overthrowing capitalism reappears, if not massively, then at least significantly within the ranks of the proletariat) will the subversive character of this phenomenon become a factor in the development of the class’ struggle and consciousness.

6. This is in fact one of the reasons for the slow development of workers' struggles today; the relative weakness of the class’ response to the growing attacks of capitalism: the feeling, still very confused but which can only develop in the coming period, that there is no solution to the contradictions of capitalism today, whether at the level of its economy or other expressions of its historic crisis, whose irresistible character is shown up more clearly by each passing day, such as the unending military confrontations, the growth of chaos and barbarism.

This phenomenon of the proletariat's hesitation before the greatness of its task has been stressed by Marx and marxism since the middle of the 19th century (in particular in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). This phenomenon partly explains the paradox in the present situation: on the one hand the struggles have difficulty spreading despite the violence of the attacks that the working class is suffering. On the other hand, there is evidence of a development within the class of a deepened reflection, even if this mainly below the surface today, which can be seen in the appearance of a series of elements and groups, often young, who are turning towards the positions of the Communist Left.

In this situation, it is important to take a clear position on the scope of the two aspects of the present situation which contribute to the relative passivity of the proletariat:

- the impact of the defeats that it suffered during the recent period, which the bourgeoisie has done all in its power, in particular through its arrogant declarations, to ensure leads to the greatest level of demoralisation possible;

- the systematic blackmail used around the question of “delocalisation” to oblige the workers of the more developed countries to accept major sacrifices.

For some time to come, these elements will work in favour of “social peace” to the benefit of the bourgeoisie, and the latter will not hesitate to exploit this “vein” to the full. However, when the hour of massive struggles comes, as it will because the mass of workers cannot do otherwise faced with the breadth of the attacks, then the sum of humiliations suffered by the workers, the enormous feeling of impotence and demoralisation, the “every man for himself” which has weighed it down throughout the years, will be turned into its opposite; the refusal to submit, the determined search for class solidarity, between sectors, between regions and between countries, the opening up of a new perspective, that of the international unity of the proletariat with the aim of overturning capitalism.

ICC, June 2004

Presentation

We are publishing below extracts from a long article by the comrades of the Nucleo Comunista Internacional in Argentina which makes an in-depth analysis of the so-called “piquetero” movement, denouncing its anti-working class nature and the self-interested lies with which leftist groups of every hue “have dedicated themselves to deceiving the workers with false hopes to make them believe that the aims and means of the piquetero movement contribute to advancing their struggle”.

This task of deception, falsifying events, and preventing the proletariat from drawing the real lessons of this movement and thus arming themselves against the traps of the class enemy, which is aided by the invaluable contribution of the semi-anarchist group the GCI[1] [92] with its pseudo-Marxist language, is clearly denounced by the comrades of the NCI.

The bourgeois origins and nature of the piquetero movement

There may be those who consider that many of the organisations of the unemployed have their origins in the poverty, unemployment and hunger that have worsened in the large slums of Gran Buenos Aires, Rosario, Cordoba, etc, over the last 5 or 6 years. This is not the case. The origin of the piquetero movement lies in the so-called “Manzaneras” which were controlled by the wife of the then governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Eduardo Duhalde, in the 1990s. These had a dual function: on the one hand, social and political control and providing the means to mobilise extensive layers of the desperate poor to support the bourgeois fraction represented by Duhalde, and on the other hand, the control of the distribution of food to the unemployed (one egg and half a litre of milk a day), since there were no unemployment plans, benefits etc, then. But as the unemployment figures grew geometrically, along with the protests of the unemployed, the Manzaneras began to disappear from the scene. This left a political vacuum that had to be filled. This was done by a choice bunch of organisations, most of which were run by the Catholic Church, leftist political organisations and so on. The last to appear on the scene was the Maoist Partido Comunista Revolutionario with its Corriente Clasista y Combativa; the Trotskyist Partido Obrero had formed its own apparatus for the unemployed (Polo Obrero) and was followed by other organisations.

These first organisations had their baptism of fire in Buenos Aires, at a mass level, with the blockading of the strategic Route 3, which links Buenos Aires with Patagonia in the extreme south . They demanded increased unemployment benefits: benefits that were to be controlled and managed by the consultative councils that included the municipality, the piqueteros, the Church, etc, or to put it another way: the bourgeois state.

These “work plans” and the different benefits thus allowed the bourgeoisie to exercise social and political control of the unemployed through the various piquetero organisations, be they Peronist, Trotskyist, Guevarist, Stalinist or trade unionist run by the CTA.[2] [93] These organisations then began to fan out throughout the working class districts hardest hit by unemployment, hunger and marginalisation. The spreading of these structures was above all carried out with money from the bourgeois state. They demand only two things of the unemployed in order to be able to receive benefits and food parcels (5Kg): to mobilise behind the flags of the organisation, and to take part in political actions if the organisation possessed a political structure, and to vote for the propositions of the group that they “belong to”. All this on pain of losing their wretched benefits of 150 pesos a month (50 dollars).

But these movements’ demands on the unemployed did not stop there. The unemployed also found themselves obliged by some of these organisations to carry out a series of duties where fulfilment is recorded in a ledger where those with the highest score gained by participating in meetings, demonstrations, and voting for the official position kept their benefits, while those who disagreed with the official position lost points, benefits, and eventually the right to take part in the plan. Moreover, these organisations also extract a percentage or a fixed sum from the unemployed with the idea of “dues”. This money is used to pay the officials of these organisations, to pay for locals (meeting rooms) – which were used by the unemployed organisations and the political groups upon which the former depend etc. The handing over of these dues is obligatory, and to this end, the so-called “referees” from each district local of the various unemployed movements accompany the unemployed to the bank where they have handover their money as soon as they have received their benefits.

In 2001, before the inter-classist events of 19th and 20th December, the so-called piquetero assembly was dominated by the Polo Obrero, the Maoist Corriente Clasista y Combativa, and the Federación de Tierra y Vivienda.

The positions adopted by these assemblies and those that followed clearly demonstrated the nature of the different piquetero groups, as an apparatus in the service of the bourgeois state. This nature did not change later after the split between the Polo Obrero and the other two currents, leading to the formation of the Bloque Piquetero.

The Partido Obrero says that the aim of the unemployed or the “piquetero subject” as the Partido Obrera like to call it in its monthly publication Prensa Obreara, is to turn the piquetero movement into a movement of the masses, which is understood to be the mass of the unemployed, active workers and all the middle sectors that are being pushed into the working class and the dispossessed. This means that the working class must integrate itself into a wide inter-classist front and must struggle, not on its own terrain, but, on a totally alien terrain. This shows the correctness of the ICC's position, which we defend, when its classifies the events of the 19th and 20th December as an inter-classist revolt.

The Partido Obrero does not mince its words in a shameless paragraph from its XIIIth Congress where it says “Whoever controls the masses food controls the masses....”. In other words, despite the PO’s declamations, about its control of the food being used to try and stop the bourgeoisie's control of the masses, what this shows in reality is the same attitude as that of the bourgeoisie, which is to control the social plans, to control the food parcels, in order thus to control the unemployed. This attitude is not exclusive to the Partido Obrero, but is that of all the piquetero movements, groups and regroupments.

These few examples show that the unemployed movements which have occupied the mass media, nationally and internationally, and which have led the radicalised petty-bourgeoisie to imagine that they are seeing the beginning of “a revolution”, the existence of “workers's councils” etc, are a perfect swindle.

To consider, as the Partido Obrero does, that the piquetero movement is the most significant workers' movement since the Cordobazo,[3] [94] and the other struggles of the same period, is to discredit the latter which were not a popular rebellion or in anyway inter-classist, but on the contrary were working class struggles that developed workers' committees, which took charge of various functions, such as defence, solidarity committees etc.

A critic might say that this is the position of the leadership of the piquetero movements and organisations, but that what is important is the dynamic process or the piquetero phenomena: its struggles, its demonstrations, its initiatives.

The answer is simple, and is the same we gave in Revolución Comunista n°2,[4] [95] with, our critique of the IBRP’s[5] [96] positions on the “Argentinazo” of the 19th and 20th December: that this current’s positions are simply idealist wishful thinking. The piquetero organisations are its leaders, its bosses, nothing more. The rest of the piqueteros with their masked faces burning tyres, are prisoners of the 150 pesos a month and the 5kg of food that the bourgeois state grants them via these organisations. And as we have said above, all this must be done on pain of loosing said “benefits”.

To summarise, the piqueteros absolutely do not represent a development of consciousness, on the contrary, they are a regression in workers' consciousness, since they introduce an alien ideology into the working class: that whoever manages the food manages consciousness, as the PO put it. This bourgeois position, this perverse logic, can only lead to the defeat of the working class and of the unemployed, since the function of leftism is to defeat the working class and extinguish class autonomy; no matter how “revolutionary” the slogans it adopts.

The GCI lie about the nature of the piquetero movement

Inaccuracies, half-truths, and mystifications are of no help to the world proletariat; on the contrary, they further worsen the errors and limitations of the struggles to come. However this is the attitude of the GCI when it writes in its journal Comunismo (n°49, 50 and 51), that “for the first time in the history of Argentina the revolutionary violence of the proletariat has brought down a government (…) the distribution of expropriated goods amongst the proletariat and the ‘popular’ kitchens supplied with the result of the recuperations (…) Confrontations with the police and other forces of the state, such as mercenary Peronist street gangs, especially on the day that Duhalde assumed the presidency of the government....”. The GCI, with its attitude and its lies sows confusion in the international working class, stopping it from drawing the necessary lessons from the events in Argentina in 2001.

In the first place it was not “revolutionary violence” that overthrew the De La Rua government, on the contrary, this bourgeois government fell as the result of inter-bourgeois faction fights. Neither have the “expropriated goods” been shared out, the looting was not as the GCI says “a generalised attack on private property and the state”, but the actions of desperate, starving people, who never thought, even momentarily, about attacking private property, but were rather concerned with quelling their hunger for a couple of days.

In the same way, they continue with their falsifications, when they talk about the rise of Duhalde as a struggle between the “movement” of the proletariat and the Peronist street gangs, this is false, this is a lie, the confrontation that took place on the day that Duhalde became president, was between factions of of the bourgeois state apparatus, on the one hand Peronism, and on the other the leftist MST,[6] [97] the PCA[7] [98] and other less important Trotskyist and Guevarist groups. The working class was absent that day.

Perhaps for a moment one might think that these “errors” of the GCI are due to an excess of revolutionary enthusiasm, in all good faith. But when one reads the rest of this journal it is possible to see that this is not the case: its role is to sow confusion that serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. The GCI lies to the international working class and feeds the piquetero mystification, when it says that: “...The affirmation of the proletariat in Argentina could not have taken place without the development of the piquetero movement, the spearhead of the proletarian associationism, during the last ten years.” and “In Argentina, the development of this class force in recent months has such a potential that proletarians in work are joining it (…). During the last years a whole great struggle has been coordinated and articulated through the pickets, the assemblies and coordinating structures of the piqueteros...”. It would be worrying if these affirmations were being made by groups within the Proletarian Political Milieu, but they are not strange coming from the mouth of the GCI, a semi-anarchist group that adopts the petty-bourgeois and racist ideology of Bakunin. But what concerns us is the deception that this publication is carrying out on its readers.

The piquetero movement, as we have already said above (with the exceptions of Patagonia and Norte de Salta) is heir to the Manzaneras, and the supposed associationism that was generated by the pickets, is nothing more than the obligation imposed upon each of those benefiting from the “work plan” or benefits in order not to lose the crumbs that the bourgeois states throws them. There exists no solidarity within them, quite the contrary, it is each against all, seeking to obtain benefits to the detriment and at the cost of the hunger of others.

Therefore, we cannot, in any way, classify the pickets as something of great significance for the working class and it is a shameless lie to talk of the “coordination” of the employed workers with the piqueteros. The GCI continues with its mendacity when it says that “the generalised associationism of the proletariat in Argentina is without a doubt an incipient affirmation of the autonomization of the proletariat (…) direct action, a powerful organisation against bourgeois legality, an action without the mediation of intermediaries (…) an attack on private property (…) these are extraordinary affirmations of the tendency of the proletariat to constitute itself as a destructive force against the whole of the established order...”. These affirmations are without a doubt a clear demonstration of their open intent to deceive the international working class in order to avoid it drawing the necessary lessons. The GCI definitely carry out a great service for the bourgeoisie and the ruling class. It cannot swindle the working class without distorting the meaning of events, actions and slogans: the slogan “get rid of them all” (ie, the politicians) is not a revolutionary call, but rather, a call for everyone to look for an “honest bourgeois government”.

We have ask ourselves what the GCI means when it refers to the proletariat. For this group the proletariat is not defined by the role it plays in capitalist production, that is, if they are the owners of the means of production or if they sell their labour power. For the GCI, the proletariat is a category that includes the unemployed (which are indeed part of the working class) as well as the lumpenproletariat and other non-exploiting social strata and layers, as we can see in its publication Comunismo n°50.

The position of the GCI, considering the lumpen as within the category of the proletariat, is nothing more than a veiled effort to present it as a new revolutionary social subject, in order to separate the unemployed from belonging to the working class. Far from being against the Left, the GCI, has many similar positions to those adopted by Argentinean leftism, such as the Partido Obrero when it creates a sub-category of workers, the “piquetero workers”. And we see this when the GCI tries to explain its vision (which is semi-anarchist and “guerrilaist” and has nothing to do with Marxism) about this proletarian subject and says about the lumpen that they are “the most decided elements against private property” due to being the most desperate elements.

What has to be asked about this formulation is: is the lumpenproletariat a social layer distinct from the proletariat? For the GCI it is not, for them the lumpen is the most put upon sector of the proletariat. Here the GCI are clearly assimilating the unemployed with the lumpenproletariat, which is absolutely false. This absolutely does not imply that the bourgeoisie does not try to demoralise these detachments of workers without work through isolation and that it likewise tries to lumpenise them in order that they lose their class consciousness. However, there is a great difference between this and the GCI's position, since to think, no matter how tangentially, that the lumpen is the most desperate sector of the proletariat and that this desperation implies “no respect for private property”, is false. The lumpenproletariat is fully integrated into the present capitalist society with its “take what you can, every man for himself”. As for its “no respect for private property” this is nothing but the desperation of this social layer.

The GCI's underhand proclamation about the end of the proletariat, does nothing but echo the ideologies and theories spread by the bourgeoisie in the 1990's, when it says that these futureless social strata are part of the proletariat, and denies the character of the working class as the only revolutionary social class in our epoch and the only class that has the perspective of communism and the destruction of the system of exploitation that capitalism imposes.

It is false to characterise the revolt of 2001 as proletarian and revolutionary; it is a lie that the proletariat challenged private property. The associative structures to which the GCI refer are an integral part of the state apparatus, used to divide the working class, since whatever the structure of the piquetero groups, they never thought about or posed the destruction of private property nor did they pose the communist perspective.

In reality, the GCI bally-hoo about the pickets and the piquetero groups, is used to divide the working class, and to deny the revolutionary character of the proletariat. The GCI uses a marxist phraseology, but this group is nothing more than a deformation of bourgeois ideology.

Furthermore, the GCI has launched an open attack on the ICC, and against the position that this Current defends about the events of 2001. We firmly consider that the position adopted by the ICC on the events in Argentina is the only one able to draw the correct lessons from this popular revolt, whilst that of the IBRP is purely and exclusively based on the fetish of the “new vanguard” and the “radicalised masses of the peripheral nations”. The GCI (like the Internal Fraction of the ICC) adopted a non-proletarian and clearly anarchist petty-bourgeois position. (…)

Our little group draws the same lessons on the inter-classist revolt in Argentina as the comrades of the ICC, without being blinded by the IBRP's Third World impressionism, nor by the “proletarian revolutionary action” of the lumpen put forward by the GCI.

It is absurd to assimilate the Argentinean inter-classist rebellion with the Russian revolution of 1917. What are reference to Kerensky doing in the analysis of the 2001 rising? The answer is they are meaningless. (…) The analogy of the GCI's is clearly self-serving. It is not a matter of errors or hasty analysis or idealist visions, quite the opposite, it is purely and simply the product of its ideology that distances it from dialectical materialism and historical materialism, whilst it embraces anarchist positions, that are a difficult mix to swallow, in its superficial terminology it adopts the petty-bourgeois ideology of the desperate and futureless middling strata.

The positions of the IFICC

It is worth mentioning here the positions of the IFICC.[8] [99] This group, despite its pretence of being the “real ICC”, its self-proclamation as “the only continuity with the revolutionary programme of the ICC”, clearly demonstrates that it is doing nothing but tailing along behind the IBRP and the latter’s incorrect analyses of Argentina. This group’s answer to a note published in Revolucion Comunista gives a clear idea of its positions: “…unlike all the other communist forces, the present-dat ICC has rejected the reality of the workers’ struggles in Argentina (…) we think that the movements in Argentina were a movement of the working class (…) a schematic vision thinks that the proletariat of the peripheral countries has nothing else to do but to wait for the proletariat of the central countries to open the road to revolution. Such a vision obviously has implications, consequences for one’s orientations and even for the militant attitude towards the struggle. Already in the 1970s, this incorrect, vulgar, mechanical incomprehension tended to find expression in the ICC’s press. Today, we think that this vision has returned in strength in the present-day ICC’s positions, in the an absolute, and therefore idealist, vision of decomposition, which has led ‘our’ organisation to adopt an indifferent, even defeatist position towards, and even to denounce, the struggles of the Argentine workers en 2001-2002 (see the ICC’s press of the time)”.[9] [100]

These long quotations from the IFICC’s publication clearly show the same errors as those of the IBRP, and of the GCI, behind which the IFICC trails along in a completely unprincipled way. They all agree that the popular revolt in Argentina was a workers’ struggle. Nothing could be more false.

It is true that the position of the ICC, and of our little group, is different from that of the other communist currents, notably the IBRP. But this is not, as the IFICC falsely claims, a defeatist position. We are tired of repeating that it is necessary to learn the lessons of the struggles, in order not to make mistakes and to fall into impressionism, as apparently has happened to these groups with respect to the piquetero experience. To say that there was not a workers’ struggle in Argentina on 19th December 2001 in no way implies being a deserter of the class struggle, as the IFICC pretends. Their position is typical of the despairing petty bourgeois who try at any cost to see workers’ struggles where they do not exist.

The most industrialised are in a more favourable position for a revolutionary workers’ struggle than the nations on the periphery. The conditions for proletarian revolution, understood as a break with the ruling class, are more favourable in countries where the bourgeoisie is strongest, and where the productive forces are most developed (…)

Like the GCI, the IFICC has done nothing but develop a policy of slander and insults against the ICC. And such an approach has led it to deny the undeniable, and to accept the unacceptable, in the first place that the struggle of 2001 in Argentina was a workers’ struggle, and to put forward the mystification that the unemployed movement, the “pickets”, etc., are class organs when the concrete practice of the class struggle demonstrates the opposite.

For a proletarian perspective

The piquetero currents which as a whole control around 200,000 unemployed workers, are not unions in the exact meaning of the word, but they have union aspects: paying dues, blind obedience to the group managing the plan, or the one delivering the food parcels etc., and fundamentally above all their permanent character. It does not matter that they are controlled by the Leftist parties or by the CTA in the case of the FTV. Thus, since the early struggles of the unemployed in 1996 and 1997 in Patagonia where the unemployed organised themselves through committees, assembles etc., the leftist parties have managed to infiltrate themselves, as organs of capital and have sterilised the struggle of the employed and unemployed workers.

But some critics could say: “Could not these groups be regenerated by the action of the rank and file? Do you mean that the unemployed should abandon the struggle?” The answer to these questions is quite simply: NO. The piquetero organisations,are appendages of the parties of the Left, whether they are “independent” or arms of the main unions, as is the case of the CTA with the FTV and its official leader D'Elia, are irretrievably part of capital, the bourgeois apparatus. Their purpose is the division and dispersal of the struggles, sterilising the unemployed until they are transformed into an integral part of the urban landscape, without revolutionary perspective, and isolated from their class.

In the same way, we are not saying that the unemployed should abandon the struggle, on the contrary they have to redouble it. Nevertheless, it is necessary to constantly explain that unemployed workers cannot gain their demands or reforms within this system, therefore, the unemployed have to struggle shoulder to shoulder with the employed against this system, and that in order to do this it is necessary to break with isolation, not only in relation to the employed but among the unemployed themselves. An isolation that the bourgeoisie has skilfully created through the leftist parties and the piquetero currents which have established their own separate groupings, and have thus introduced divisions within the unemployed, which has generated a way of thinking that sees one’s neighbour or comrade in the district as a potential adversary and enemy that could take your benefits and food.

This trap has to be broken. The unemployed have to break out of the isolation that capital has imposed on them and unite with the whole of the working class, of which they are part. But this means a great transformation in the way it organises itself: not by means of permanent organs, but by following the examples of the workers in Patagonia in 1997, or in Norte de Salta, where there was unity within the class and where the organisation of the struggle was through assembles, general assemblies with revocable mandates, even though they were eventually brought under the control of the Leftist parties.

Nevertheless, the experience of these struggles is valid, since the unemployed have to struggle against the miserable benefits they are given, against the price increases in public services, etc., which in a certain way is the same struggle as that carried out by the employed for wages. The unemployed must participate as a support in the class struggle and transform its struggles into an integral part of the general struggle against capital.

The piquetero currents have created the term “piquetero” in order to establish not only a separation from the employed, but also with those unemployed who are not controlled by their organisations. Through the creation of new social categories and new social subjects such as the “unemployed piquetero”, these groups of the unemployed try to divide and exclude millions of employed and unemployed workers, which only benefits the ruling class.

The pipueteros, as is the case with the Zapatistas, were and are tools in the service of capital., Their “fashion” of balaclavas, burning tyres in the middle of motorways, is only a “marketing” by capitalism in order to say two things to the class as a whole: on the one hand that there are millions of unemployed ready to take the jobs of the employed for less money, and in this way to paralyse the development of class struggle, and on the other hand, by means of the programmes set up by the various piqueteros groups – more food parcels and 150 pesos a month in benefits, genuine work in capitalist factories – that nothing is possible outside capitalism, even when they talk about a workers’ and popular government.

It is thus necessary for unemployed workers to break free from the traps of the bourgeoisie, and break from the piquetero organisations by abandoning them, because as with the unions and the Left parties they are integral to capital. Despite what leftism says, the unemployed are workers and not “piqueteros”. Such a description means dividing the unemployed from the rest of the working class, and their transformation into a caste; this is what the positions of the Left of capital mean.

Employed and unemployed workers as a whole have to tend towards class unity, since both sectors belong to the same social class: the working class, and there is no solution within this system, since it is bankrupt. Only the proletarian revolution can destroy this system that can only bring poverty, hunger, marginalisation. This is the challenge.

Buenos Aires June 16th 2004.

 

 

 

The latest developments on the international scene have plunged the world still further into “an endless fear”, an insane succession of terrorist attacks, bombings, kidnappings, hostage taking and murder. In Iraq, this has reached levels that could have barely been imagined only a few years ago. The savage killings in the Russian town of Beslan in North Ossetia bear witness to the fact that the rest of the world, especially its most strategic areas, will not be spared either. The situation is so bad that talk of chaos is no longer the domain of a few “catastrophists”, but has become an ever more present subject in the media and the political world.

The Beslan massacre reveals the depths of the barbarity into which capitalist society is sinking: children taken as hostages and tortured[1] [114] by Chechen terrorists whose contempt for their fellow human beings is almost beyond belief. The terrorists' behaviour is an expression of hatred, no longer for institutions or governments, but for other human beings whose misfortune it is to belong to a different nationalist clique. On the opposite side, the Russian state has not hesitated for an instant to massacre civilians in order to defend its authority. The result is only too obvious: the destabilisation of the whole Russian Caucasus, unleashing a whole series of ethnic or religious confrontations, the organisation in the different republics of gangs whose proclaimed purpose is the persecution of rival ethnic groups.

Iraq is riven by a war of each against all. The media and certain leftist groups talk of “national resistance”.[2] [115] It is nothing of the kind. There is no such thing as a “national liberation struggle against the American invader”. There is, on the contrary, a flourishing of all kinds of groups based on clan, local, or tribal loyalties, on ethnic or religious group, who are fighting both amongst each other and against the occupying forces. Each religious group is divided into opposing cliques. The recent attacks against journalists, or against people from countries not even involved in the war, highlight still further the blind and anarchic nature of this war. In total confusion, the whole population is taken hostage, deprived of drinking water and electricity, victim of attacks from all sides, subjected to a terror still more cruel than in the days of Saddam.

This situation cannot be understood on the basis of its immediate, local, partial aspects. Only a world wide, historical framework allows us to grasp its roots and its perspectives. We have regularly contributed to this framework, and we will simply retrace some of its main elements here.

Terrorism becomes a crucial factor in the evolution of imperialism

Immediately after the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, and against the grandiose promises of a “new world order” made by George Bush senior, we declared that the perspective was, on the contrary, that of a new world disorder. In an orientation text published in 1990,[3] [116] we predicted that the end of the bloc system would “open the door to a still more savage, aberrant, and chaotic form of imperialism”, characterised by “more violent and more frequent conflicts, especially in areas where the proletariat is weak”. This tendency has been constantly confirmed during the last 15 years. It is not simply the mechanical result of the disappearance of the bloc system, but one of the results of capitalism's entry into its terminal phase of decadence, characterised by a generalised decomposition [117].[4] [118] In terms of military activity, chaos is the most obvious mark of decomposition. It is expressed, on the one hand by a proliferation of conflicts where imperialist tensions have broken out into open warfare,[5] [119] and by the proliferation of multiple, contradictory imperialist interests within each zone of conflict; and on the other hand, by the growing instability of imperialist alliances, making it impossible for the great powers to stabilise the situation, even temporarily.[6] [120]

On the basis of this analytical framework, we declared at the time of the first Gulf War that “only military force will be able to maintain a minimum of stability in a world threatened by rising chaos” (ibid) and that, in this world “of murderous disorder, the American cop will try to maintain a minimum of order by the increasingly massive use of its military power” (ibid).

However, in today's conditions, the use of military force can only spread the conflicts and make them still more difficult to control. We can see this in the USA's failure in the Iraq war, where it is caught in a quagmire with no way out. The difficulties confronting the world's major power damage its authority as the world's policeman, and encourage the activities of all the rival imperialisms, including even those – like Al-Qaeda and some of the Iraqi and Chechen gangs – who do not even aspire to control a state. The chessboard of international relations has become an enormous scrum of merciless conflicts, turning into a nightmare the lives of vast sections of the world's population.

This chaos, and the generalised disintegration of social relations, explain the extension of terrorism today as a weapon in the wars between imperialist rivals.[7] [121] During the 1980s, terrorism [122] was the “poor man's H-bomb”, used by weaker states (Syria, Iran, Libya, etc.) to gain a hearing in the imperialist arena. During the 1990s, it became a weapon in the imperialist competition between the great powers, with their secret services using – more or less directly – the activity of gangs like the IRA or ETA. With the bomb attacks of 1999 in Russia, and the attack on the Twin Towers, we see that “the great powers use blind terrorist attacks by kamikaze fanatics, aimed directly at the civilian population, to justify the unleashing of imperialist barbarism” (ibid). Increasingly, the tendency today is for some of these gangs, notably the various Chechens and Islamists, to declare their independence of their previous patrons, to play their own cards at the imperialist poker game.[8] [123]

This is the most striking expression of the chaos reigning in the relations between imperialisms, and of the inability of the great powers, playing sorcerer's apprentice, to control them. Nonetheless, however megalomaniac their pretensions, these little warlords cannot play an independent role, since they are infiltrated by the secret services of other powers who are each trying to use them for their own ends, which only adds to the general and unprecedented confusion at the level of imperialist rivalries.

The Middle East, epicentre of world chaos

The Middle East, bounded in the east by Afghanistan, in the north by Turkey and the Caucasus, in the south by Saudi Arabia, and in the west by the eastern coast of the Mediterranean (Syria, Palestine, etc.), lies at the strategic heart of the planet, both because it contains the world's largest energy reserves, and because it lies at the crossroads of the sea and land routes of imperialist expansion.

The states in this region are under pressure to break up in a civil war between different bourgeois fractions. The epicentre is Iraq, whose shock waves are spreading in all directions: constant terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, which are only the tip of the iceberg in a hidden struggle for power; open war between Israel and Palestine; warlordism in Afghanistan; the destabilisation of the Russian Caucasus; terrorist attacks and armed conflict in Pakistan; bomb attacks in Turkey; a critical situation in Iran and Syria.[9] [124] We have already noted this fact in the editorial of this Review (n°117) [125], concerning the situation in Iraq, which continues to degenerate as we write: “the war in Iraq (...) is entering a new phase, that of a kind of international civil war which is spreading throughout the Middle East. In Iraq itself, there are increasingly frequent confrontations not only between the “resistance” and US forces, but also between the “Saddamites”, Wahhabite Sunnis (the sect which gave birth to Bin Laden), Shiites, Kurds, and even Turkmen. In Pakistan, a discreet civil war is in progress, with the bomb attack against a Shiite procession (40 dead), and a large-scale military operation in progress as we write in Waziristan. In Afghanistan, all the reassuring declarations about the consolidation of the Kabul government cannot hide the fact that the latter’s writ runs no farther than Kabul itself, and that only with difficulty, while civil war continues to rage throughout the southern part of the country. In Israel and Palestine, the situation is going from bad to worse, as Hamas has started to use young children to carry its bombs”.

We have seen the same phenomenon in many African countries (Congo, Somalia, Liberia, etc.), which have foundered in interminable civil wars, but that this should be happening at the world's strategic heart has immensely serious repercussions, which will dominate the world situation.

At the strategic level, German imperialism's “natural” needs for expansion into Asia are thus partly blocked. British interests are also threatened by the destabilisation in the Middle East. This chaos is like a shrapnel bomb whose blast is affecting Russia (as we can see in the Caucasus, the tragedy of Beslan being only one example among many), Turkey, India, and Pakistan, and which may end up affecting regions still further away: Eastern Europe, China, North Africa. The Middle East is also the planet's main energy reserve, and its destabilisation cannot help having serious consequences for the economic situation in the industrialised states, as a result of the rise in oil prices. But the most striking factor in the present situation, is the inability of the great powers to put even a temporary stop to the process of destabilisation. This is true for the USA, whose “war against terror” has shown itself to be a powerful means for spreading terrorism and military conflict. On the other side, the honeyed appeals of the rival powers (France, Germany) for establishment of a “multilateral” world order based on “international law” and “international co-operation” are mystifications designed to sow confusions in the heads of the workers concerning the bourgeoisie's real intentions. These banana skins slipped under the feet of the American mammoth are also the only real means of opposition that these countries possess, given their utter military inferiority.

The United States, as we have seen, is confronted with a “black hole” which not only threatens to swallow up a large proportion of its troops,[10] [126] but also threatens its authority and prestige.

World capitalism is up against an insurmountable contradiction: the brute force of militarism, applied by the world's greatest power, is the only way to contain the spread of chaos, while its continued use will not only be unable to stop the latter, but is becoming a major agent in its spread.

Only the proletariat can offer another way out

Although the US Army is by far the most powerful force on the planet, demoralisation is setting in among the troops and replacements are more and more limited. The world is not in the same situation as it was when World War II broke out, and when the proletariat – defeated in the first revolutionary wave and enrolled under the flags of nationalism – provided enormous reserves of cannon fodder.

Today, the proletariat is not beaten and even the world's most powerful state does not have the room for manoeuvre to enlist millions of workers. The balance of class forces is thus a key element in society's evolution.

Only the proletariat can put an end to capitalism's decline into barbarism. It is the only force able to offer humanity another perspective. The development of revolutionary minorities around the world is the expression of a subterranean maturation of class-consciousness within the working class. They are the visible part of the proletariat's efforts to give a class response to the situation. The road is hard, and there is no shortage of obstacles in the way. And one of these obstacles is all the illusions in all the false “solutions” proposed by different factions of the bourgeoisie. Many workers mistrust Bush's shameless warmongering, and realise that the “war on terror” has done no more than encourage war and terrorism. But they have greater difficulty in seeing through the pacifist mystifications put forward by Bush's rivals – Schröder, Chirac, Zapatero and Co. - and still more in seeing through the bourgeoisie's ardent supporters in defending these themes: the leftists and anti-globalists. We can have no illusions: all these factions of the bourgeoisie are cogs in the deadly machine that is driving all of society to the abyss.

The entire history of the last century confirms the analysis put forward by the first congress of the Communist International [75]: “Human culture has been destroyed and humanity is threatened with complete annihilation (...) The old capitalist ‘order’ has ceased to function; its further existence is out of the question. The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class - the working class. The proletariat has to establish real order - Communist order. It must break the rule of capital, make wars impossible, abolish the frontiers between states, transform the whole world into a community where all work for the common good and realise the freedom and brotherhood of peoples ”.[11] [127]

If it is to raise itself to the level necessary for this titanic task, the proletariat must patiently and tenaciously develop its class solidarity. Capitalism in its death throes wants to accustom us to horror, to make us consider the barbarism for which it is responsible as somehow “normal”. The workers can only react with indignation against such cynicism, and with solidarity towards the victims of these endless wars and the massacres perpetrated by all the capitalist gangs. Disgust and the rejection of everything that decomposing capitalism imposes on society, solidarity among members of a class all of whose interests are common, are essential factors in the development of a consciousness that another perspective is possible, and that a united working class has the strength to impose it.

Mir, 26/09/2004

 

 

 

What is the most effective means of struggle, when one’s “own” job or plant is no longer considered to be profitable? Does the strike weapon lose its effectiveness, where the capitalist in any case intends to close the plant, or when whole companies are on the verge of bankruptcy? Such questions are being posed today very concretely, not only at Opel, Karstadt or Volkswagen, but everywhere, as a result of the capitalist economic crisis, plants and companies are being “rescued” or shut down. And nowadays, that is taking place everywhere. Not only in Germany, but in America and also in China. Not only in industry, but also in the hospitals or the civil services.

The Need to Struggle – But How?

Already during the mid 1980s big defensive struggles took place against mass redundancies. For instance at Krupp Rheinhausen or in the British coal mines. At that time, whole branches of industry such as mining, steel or ship building were virtually shut down.

But today, unemployment and plant closures have become ever-present. This has led, at first, to a widespread feeling of intimidation. Lay-offs have mostly been accepted without resistance. However, the struggle this summer at DaimlerChrysler set a new signal. There, the employees hit back spectacularly against the attempts of the bosses to blackmail them. The solidarity actions, in particular of the workers in Bremen, with their fellow workers under direct attack in the Stuttgart-Sindelfingen plant, demonstrated that the workers are fighting back against the attempts to play them off against each other.

And now, the strike action at Opel above all in Bochum, as a first response to the announcement of mass lay offs, has again underlined the determination not to passively accept mass redundancies.

Nevertheless, the question of the possibilities and goals of the struggle under such circumstances has to be posed. We know that the struggle at DaimlerChrysler, like the ones at Krupp Rheinhausen or of the British miners in the 1980s, ended in defeat. And we have seen again and again – today also – how the trade unions and the factory council, whenever the workers put up resistance, also adopt the language of struggle, but at the same time declare that there is no alternative to submitting to the logic of capitalism. What is at stake, they claim, is to avoid things coming to the worst. They want to put through the “rescue” of the company, they say, and therefore the necessary sackings, in the most “social” manner possible. Thus the settlement at the Karstadt-Quelle department store chain, where the direct elimination of 5,500 jobs, the selling off of 77 stores, and horrendous wage cuts (“saving” 760 million Euros up to 2007) were agreed to, was presented by the Verdi union as a victory for the workers.

For at least two centuries, wage labour and capital has been fighting over wages and working conditions i.e. about the degree of exploitation of wage labour by capital. Had the exploited not always struggled, from one generation to the next, the workers of today would be little better than slaves who can be exploited at the bosses’ will or even worked to death.

But in addition to this question of the degree of exploitation, which was also posed for the slaves and serfs of earlier times, the modern economy poses a second problem, which only appears when the market economy and wage labour are dominant. Here, the question is: what is to be done, when the owner of the means of production is no longer able to profitably exploit the labour power of the labourer? Throughout the history of capitalism, this question has always been directly posed to the unemployed. But today, with a chronic crisis of overproduction on the world market, when the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production is becoming increasingly visible, this becomes a question of life or death for all wage labourers.

The perspective of the working class against the perspective of capital

The employers, the politicians, but also the trade unions and the factory councils – all those who are involved in the management of the plant, the company or the state – consider the workers and employees as part of a given company, whose welfare is inseparably dependent on the interests of the employer. From this point of view, it is of course always harmful when “company members” oppose the profit interests of the company. After all, the company only exists in order to make profits. Following on from this logic, the chairman of the general factory council of Opel, Klaus Franz, declared categorically, from the outset: “We know that lay-offs cannot be avoided.” That is the logic of capitalism. But it is not the only possible standpoint, from which one can consider the situation. If you approach things, not as the problem of Opel or of Karstadt, or of Germany, but as a problem of society as a whole, completely different perspectives emerge. If you consider the world, not from the point of view of a single plant or company, but from the point of view of society, from the point of view of human well being, the victims no longer appear as belonging to Opel or Karstadt, but as part of a social class of wage labourers, who are the main victims of the capitalist crisis. Seen from this perspective, it then becomes clear that the sales woman at Karstadt in Herne, the production line man at Opel in Bochum, but also the unemployed worker in eastern Germany or the almost enslaved, illegal construction worker who has come from the Ukraine, share a common fate and interest – not with their exploiters, but with each other.

The side of capital is aware that this other perspective exists. It is precisely this other perspective which it fears. The ruling class knows: As long as the workers at Opel or Volkswagen see the problem only from the point of view of Opel or VW, they will in the end “come to reason”. But when the workers find their own perspective, when they discover their common interest, completely different perspectives of struggle arise.

Adopting the viewpoint of society as a whole

This is why the representatives of capital are always trying to persuade us that the catastrophes caused by their economic system are the result of the “inadequacies” and “specificities” of each company or country. Thus they claim that the problems at Karstadt are the result of bad sales strategies. Opel, for its part, is supposed to have failed to follow the example of DaimlerChrysler or Toyota, who have been successful with the development of new, attractive, often diesel run models. It is also claimed that the fact that 10,000 of the 12,000 jobs scheduled by General Motors for elimination in Europe will be in Germany, is a kind of revenge of the American bourgeoisie for the German Iraq policy! As if DaimlerChrysler had not similarly blackmailed its employees just a few months ago! As if German companies, for instance Karstadt-Quelle, don’t sack their workers just as mercilessly! Reality itself disproves such arguments. On October 14th, not only the elimination of thousands of jobs at Karstadt was decided on, and announced at Opel, but the perspective of similar cuts at the “Spar” supermarket chain was revealed. And the same day, news of a new “rescue” round at the Dutch company Philips was leaked.

When, on the “black Thursday” of October 14th, it was announced that in all 15,500 jobs are to be axed at Karstadt-Quelle and Opel in the coming three years, the “negotiating partners”, the politicians and the “commentators” were in a great hurry to carefully distinguish between the two cases.

One might expect that where the employees of two major concerns are facing exactly the same fate, the similarity of the situation and the interests of the workers affected, would predominate. But exactly the opposite is presented. As soon as the leading negotiator for the Verdi trade union, Wiethold, had, on Thursday afternoon, almost joyfully announced the “rescue” of Karstadt, the media immediately gave out the message: Now that the future of Karstadt has been assured, Opel is left as the remaining worry. While the staff of the department store chain are thus supposed to go back in “relief” to their jobs, it is allegedly only the workforce at Opel which has to worry about its future.

But the only difference in the situation of the employees of the two companies is that the terrible attacks, which are already decided on at Karstadt-Quelle – mass redundancies, partial closures, massive blackmail of the work force – are still pending at Opel. Both work forces are expected to accept wage cuts to the tune of a total of 1.2 billion Euros, are in part to lose their livelihood, in order to save profits – not jobs!

The assertion that the situation of the Karstadt employees is fundamentally different from that at Opel is completely unfounded. For the Karstadt workers, in any case, nothing has been “saved”. Verdi speaks of a “rescue job, which deserves the name”, and a “success for the workers” because an “employment guarantee” has been given, and the wage contract saved. That is what it sounds like when the defeats of the working class are sold as victories. What value do “job guarantees”, wage contracts and other promises have, when even multi-national companies are fighting for their survival? In reality the victims of the rescue of Karstadt are still in exactly the same situation as the workers at Opel, but also Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler, Siemens or in the public sector.

The negotiations at Karstadt were concluded in such a hurry because it was known that General Motors was going to announce its salvaging plan for Europe October 14th. Until now, it always belonged to the unwritten laws of the ruling class never to simultaneously attack several big sectors of the working class, in order to avoid encouraging the appearance of a feeling of workers’ solidarity. But today, the sharpening of the crisis of world capitalism limits more and more this consecutiveness of attacks. Under such circumstances, the bourgeoisie at least wanted to assure that on the day, when the bad news broke from Detroit, Karstadt could be presented as a “success”.

The methods of solidarity in the struggle

Mass redundancies, the threat of bankruptcy, do not mean that the strike weapon has become superfluous. The downing of tools at Mercedes or Opel are an important signal, a call to struggle.

Nevertheless, it is unfortunately true that in such situations, the strike as a means of intimidating one’s opponent, loses much of its effectiveness. The struggle of the unemployed, for instance, has in any case to do without this weapon. But also, where the exploiters intend to get rid of those whom they exploit, the strike loses a good part of its menacing power.

The means which we need in face of the present level of the attacks of capital is the mass strike of all workers. Such a defensive action of the whole working class would give the class the self confidence it needs to counter the arrogance of the ruling class. Moreover, such massive mobilisations would be able to change the social climate, promoting the recognition that human needs have to become the guideline of society.

This putting in question of capitalism would in turn increase the determination of the employees and the unemployed, to defend their interests in the here and now.

Of course, such massive, common, solidarity actions are not yet possible. But this in no way means that one cannot struggle and achieve something now. But it is necessary to recognise that the strike is not the only weapon of the class struggle. Everything which, here and now, promotes the recognition of the common interests of all workers, and everything which revives the tradition of workers’ solidarity, scares the ruling class, makes it less self-assured in its attacks, making our opponent more obliged to make at least temporary concessions.

In 1987 the workers at Krupp Rheinhausen, threatened with the closure of the plant, opened up their daily assemblies to the population, to the workers of other plants and to the unemployed. Today it is even more unacceptable that the workers at Opel, Karstadt, Spar or Siemens don’t come together to discuss their common situation. During the mass strike of 1980 in Poland, the workers of a whole city came together on the grounds of the biggest factory in each town. There, they raised common demands and took their struggle in their own hands.

The struggle at Mercedes already demonstrated, what the attacks at Opel or Karstadt have confirmed – the great feeling of solidarity of the working population with those under attack. Under such circumstances, demonstrations through the cities can become a means of calling out the workers of other plants and the mobilising of the unemployed, developing a common solidarity.

The Mercedes struggle also showed that the workers are beginning to understand that, in face of mass redundancies, they must not allow themselves to be divided up. Even the capitalists have had to realise that they can no longer try and split the workers in such a gross manner as between Stuttgart and Bremen last summer. The Opel general factory council announced, in face of the attacks, the priority of the unity of the different General Motors plants. But what does it mean when Social Democrats and Trade Unionists speak of solidarity? Since these institutions are part and parcel of capitalist society, “unity” in their mouths can only mean that the different plants, while competing against each other, try to agree on prices. The chairman of the Opel factory council thus declared that he would be meeting with his Swedish colleague from Saab, to discuss which bid each of the plants would be making (against each other!) for the new GM models. The factory councils, like the trade unions, are themselves part of the capitalist competitive struggle.

The common struggle of the workers can thus only be waged by the workers themselves.

The need to call capitalism into question politically

Faced with the depth of the crisis of contemporary capitalism, the workers also have to overcome their unwillingness to deal with political questions. We don’t mean bourgeois politics here, but that the workers deal with the problems of society as a whole, and with the question of power.

The mass redundancies of today confront us with the reality of a society, in which we are not part of this or that company, but objects of exploitation, “cost factors” who can be pitilessly tossed aside. These attacks make clear what it means that the means of production do not belong to society as a whole, and do not at all serve the needs of society. Instead, they belong to a tiny minority. Above all, they are submitted to the blind and more and more destructive laws of competition and the market, which plunge an ever growing part of humanity into pauperisation and unbearable insecurity. Laws which undermine the most elementary rules of human solidarity, without which, in the long run, no society is possible. And the wage labourers, who produce almost all the goods and services which humanity needs to live, slowly are beginning to realise that under this social order they have nothing to say.

The crisis at Karstadt or Opel is not the result of bad management, but the expression of a long drawn-out, chronic, destructive overproduction crisis developing from decade to decade. This crisis leads to the dwindling of the purchasing power of the working population. This in turn hits retailing, the car industry, the whole of industry harder and harder. Accentuated competition obliges the capitalists to lower their costs, which further reduces mass purchasing power, and further sharpens the crisis.

Within capitalism, there is no way out of this vicious circle.

ICC. 15.10.2004

 

Presentation of the GPRC’s text

“Why, 80 years after the October revolution, does capitalism still dominate the world”. To reply to this question, according to the GPRC [85], it is necessary to use the method of historical materialism and pose another question: “was the level of the development of productive forces of mankind (first of all in the most highly-developed countries) in the 19th - first half of 20th centuries sufficient to make proletarians capable to organise the ruling over production, distribution & exchange by all the society as a whole?”

In other words “had the process of the capitalist production disciplined, united, organised the working class before the beginning of the 20th century sufficiently to make it capable not only to ‘expropriate the expropriators’ - take away the means of production from the capitalists - but also to keep them in its hands, organise the ruling over economics and not lose the control over the leaders, not let leaders become new exploiters?”

The GPRC invites us to understand the characteristics of the working class in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, imprinted on it by the process of production: It “practised associated labour” but “To lead all the labour-process of the factory as a whole, somebody which stands over the workers & manages them is necessary. It doesn’t mean that industrial & agricultural workers before the 2nd half of the 20th century never, nowhere & in no cases had interacted in the process of ruling their labour.” Such relations are characterised first and foremost “inter-contacts, but by solitude of workers which rule their operations, in their inter-relations … Manufacture, and later - large machine industry cooperate labour-process, but don’t unite workers in collective … So, workers, which are not united in collective, can`t elaborate ruling decisions. May be, they could if only control their leaders, elect them & change, & those elections not should be only decoration, behind of which the leaders` manipulation over subordinates is hiding?”

For the GPRC, the basic problem is the following: “the more people collect themselves in a group, the more difficult them to communicate with each other & the more time they must give to try discuss and solve their problems. To overcome this barrier, such technical means are necessary which allow very many people to receive the same information, change information & make common decisions in so short terms as those which are necessary for several people to do all it without any technical means. At the 19th - the 1st half of 20th centuries the development of the production forces still had not given such means for people. But without them the workers` control over leadership & the self-governing of labourers on the whole are possible just on the level of very little enterprises…”

The GPRC cites Lenin in State and Revolution:

“The workers, after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, shatter it to its very foundations, and raze it to the ground; they will replace it by a new one, consisting of the very same workers and other employees, against whose transformation into bureaucrats the measures will at once be taken which were specified in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election, but also recall at any time; (2) pay not to exceed that of a workman; (3) immediate introduction of control and supervision by all, so that all may become ‘bureaucrats’ for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a ‘bureaucrat’”

But for the GPRC, although these measures are valid, they can have no real effect in the conditions of the development of the productive forces at the time of the Russian revolution. This changed in the second half of the 20th century because of the qualitatively new level of the development of the productive forces, which allowed in particular for the computerisation of production, a far more rapid way of dealing with an important mass of information coming from the great mass of workers; it meant that the analysis of this information could be disseminated among all the workers, and this could be repeated as often as necessary in order to arrive at a synthesis of individual opinions and elaborate the final decision.

“The computer is what can unite workers practising associated labour in a collective whole….”. The more their work is computerised the more they can take collective decisions and the easier it is for them to control the leaders who remain necessary to coordinate actions and decisions, in cases where the collective can’t do this itself

“When humanity will enter again into the period of great social shocks, similar to the 1st half of the 20th century… much will repeat itself - the treachery of many workers` leaders and organisations which enjoyed the trust of proletarian masses before it, and the defeat of the revolutionary movement in many countries. “The objective causes which caused such phenomena 70 - 80 years ago, are still actual today, and any kind of lectures about ‘lessons of history’ read to workers can’t remove their effect”.

“Computer systems can’t create socialism just by themselves. The world proletarian revolution is necessary for transition of mankind to socialism. But proletarian revolution can become world & socialist only in the epoch of computers & computer systems. Such is the dialectics of the transition to socialism”.

ICC reply

The GPRC poses a vital question: “why 80 years after the October revolution, does capital still dominate the world?” And to reply, there is indeed no other method than historical materialism.[1] [142]

The aim of the proletarian revolution is to replace relations of production based on scarcity with relations of production based on abundance. It is therefore necessary for capitalism to have sufficiently developed the productive forces to make it possible to lay down the material conditions for such a transformation of society. This is the first condition for the victory of the proletarian revolution; the second is provided by the development of an open crisis of bourgeois society, proving that capitalist relations of production need to be replaced by other relations of production.

Revolutionaries have always paid particular attention to the evolution of the life of capitalism in order to evaluate whether the level attained by the development of the productive forces, and the insurmountable contradictions resulting from this development, permit the victory of the communist revolution. In 1852, Marx and Engels recognised that the conditions for the proletarian revolution were not yet ripe at the time of the revolutionary upsurges of 1848 and that capitalism still had to go through a whole process of development for this to be the case. In 1864, when they took part in the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association, they thought that the hour of the revolution was nigh, but even before the Paris Commune of 1871, they realised that the proletariat was not yet ready because capitalism still had an enormous capacity for the development of its economy.

Thus, the two revolutions which had taken place up to that point, 1848 and the Commune, failed because the material conditions for the victory of the proletariat did not exist. It was during the course of the period that followed, which saw the most powerful development of capitalism in its entire history, that the conditions really did begin to ripen. At the end of the 19th century, the whole of the non-capitalist world had been divided up among the old bourgeois nations. From now on, for each one of them to gain access to new outlets and territories they had to muscle in on their rival’s spheres of influence. At the same time as a growth in military tensions, fuelled behind the scene by the great powers, the latter began to arm themselves to the teeth. This rise in imperialist tensions and militarism prepared the conditions for the outbreak of the First World War, and with it the outbreak of the revolutionary crisis of society. The first imperialist world butchery of 1914-18, as well as the international revolutionary wave which arose in reaction to this barbarism, demonstrated that the objective conditions for the revolution had now been established. For the proletarian vanguard at the time of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave, the First World War marked the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist system and its entry into its phase of decadence, signifying clearly that the only possible alternative for society from now on was “socialism or barbarism”.

Despite the evidence of this fundamental change in the world situation, the GPRC thinks that the capitalist system still had a progressive role to play in aiding the maturation of the conditions for the revolution. For the GPRC, it was still necessary for capitalism to permit the invention of the computer and to generalise its use, because this is the only thing that can counter the tendency for leaders to betray the workers, a betrayal which is seen as the main reason for the failure of the Russian revolution. Thanks to this formidable technological progress, which makes it possible to “synthesise” the opinion of a considerable number of workers, the latter will finally be able to do without representatives in the taking of decisions. Before stopping to consider this singular explanation for the failure of the Russian revolution, we have to point to a problem of method which derives precisely from an inadequate application of historical materialism

The 80 years and more which have passed since the failure of the revolutionary wave have shown that not only has the prolongation of capitalism’s death-agony not created better conditions for the revolution, but, on the contrary, the material conditions for such a society have become increasingly fragile, as is shown by the present situation of chaos and generalised decomposition across the planet. The revolutionary proletariat will be able to take many inventions realised under capitalism, including those developed in its decadent phase, and use them in the interests of the revolution and the liberation of the human species. This applies to the computer and many others. Nevertheless, however important such discoveries have been, their existence should not obscure the real dynamic of decadent capitalism, which is leading towards the ruin of civilisation. If the first revolutionary wave had succeeded in defeating the bourgeoisie not only would this have spared humanity from the worst epoch of barbarism in the whole of history, but it would also have allowed for inventions which would have enabled mankind to free itself from the reign of necessity; and alongside such developments the current computer would have looked like a prehistoric tool.

The living experience of the revolution, seen in all its true grandeur, refutes the GPRC’s theory of the inevitable betrayal of the leaders. In the ascendant phase of the revolution, the workers councils, with their system of elected and recallable delegates, showed that they were the organs par excellence that allowed the proletariat to develop its struggle both on the economic and political levels, that they constituted the “finally discovered for of the proletarian dictatorship”. The movement gave rise to proletarian leaders who expressed and defended, with courage and abnegation, the general interests of the proletariat. As for the party it did nothing less than put itself at the head of the revolution, to guide it towards victory in Russia while working for the extension of the world revolution, particularly at its most decisive point - Germany.

The world revolutionary wave receded as a result of a series of major defeats for the proletariat, not least the crushing of the uprising of January 1919 in Berlin. Isolated, exhausted by civil war, the Russian revolution could only perish and this is effectively what happened, with the extinction of the power of the workers’ councils and of all proletarian life within them, the process of bureaucratisation and the rise of Stalinism in Russia and the Bolshevik party in particular. In this counter-revolutionary process, many former revolutionaries betrayed and joined the ranks of Stalinism; workers placed in positions of responsibility in the state became servile defenders of the interests of the bureaucracy or even outright members of it.

Betrayals of the proletarian cause by its leaders, by organisations which had thitherto been proletarian, is not a specificity of the period of the reflux of the international revolutionary wave; it is a basic given of the historic combat of the working class. It is the consequence of a growing opportunism towards the ideology of the ruling class, leading to complete capitulation in front of it. Nevertheless, in the face of opportunism, such an outcome is not fixed in advance and is not dependent on whether or not the proletariat can use computers. It depends on the general balance of forces between the classes, as has been illustrated, in opposite directions, by the upsurge and then the reflux of the revolutionary wave. But it also depends on the intransigent political combat which revolutionaries are able to wage against all the manifestations of concessions to bourgeois ideology.

The tasks which the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities faced at the beginning of the century were huge. They had to fight the growing opportunism within the Second International, the result of which was the passage of most of its parties into the camp pf the bourgeoisie at the decisive moment of the world imperialist war. At the same time those revolutionaries who remained loyal to marxism and the historic struggle of the proletariat had to understand, and get their class to understand, nothing less than the implications for the class struggle of the dawn of a new epoch – the entry of capitalism into decadence. If the revolutionary wave was defeated, it was to a large extent because the working class at the time had not understood in a broad and deep enough way that its former parties had gone over to the enemy and had become spearheads of reaction against the revolution, that the trade unions had become organs of the capitalist state in the workers’ ranks; and it was also because the world party of the revolution, the Communist International, had appeared on the scene too late. It was thus the subjective conditions of the revolution which weren’t ripe, not the objective conditions. Hence the importance of the political combat for the generalisation of lessons drawn by generations of revolutionaries about what remains the greatest experience the proletariat has ever been through.

It is also the case that the weight of hierarchy on the brains of the living cannot be fought outside the struggle for the abolition of classes and can only disappear totally when a communist society has been created. The division of labour is not a characteristic unique to class societies. It existed in the societies of primitive communism and it will exist in developed communist society. It is not the division of labour which engenders hierarchy; it is class society which imposes a hierarchical character on the division of labour, making it a way of dividing the exploited and ensuring the domination of the ruling class. The problem with the contribution of the GPRC is precisely that by polarising around the problem of hierarchy seen in itself, outside of any consideration of class antagonisms, it situates itself outside the field of political combat.

In fact, the GPRC is desperately looking for a purely technical solution to a problem which is fundamentally political and which the living experience of the working class had already solved, even before the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, with the first appearance of the soviets in 1905. Discussions in such workers’ assemblies don’t have the aim of “democratically” drawing out an average opinion based on a synthesis of all the individual opinions of the workers. They are on the contrary an indispensable means for debate and political combat, enabling the mass of workers to advance away from the influence of the left and extreme left of the bourgeoisie. In taking decisions and electing delegates it’s not a question of each worker working alone in front of a computer screen, but of voting with raised hands in general assemblies alongside their comrades in the struggle. This is the basic mode of operation for all workers’ assemblies from the lowest to the highest level of centralisation. The GPRC’s recipe is the antithesis of this kind of unitary organ of the working class and can only lead to the negation of the values the proletariat needs to develop in its struggle: confidence in your class comrades and in your elected delegates; creative activity through collective and contradictory discussion. In fact the GPRC is mixing up two ideas: consciousness and knowledge. For the workers to become conscious, they need a certain amount of knowledge: in particular, they have to know about the world in which they are waging their struggle, the enemy they are fighting in all its many guises (official bourgeoisie, state, forces of repression, but also unions and left parties), the goals and means of this struggle. However, consciousness can by no means be reduced to knowledge: in general, a university specialist in history, sociology or economics will have much more knowledge of these subjects than a conscious revolutionary worker. However, his class prejudices, his adherence to the ideals of the ruling class, prevent him from using this knowledge in the interests of a real consciousness. By the same token, what allows workers to become conscious is not an excess of knowledge as such, but above all their ability to free themselves from the grip of the dominant ideology. And this capacity is not acquired in front of a computer screen displaying all the statistics in the world, or all possible and imaginable syntheses. It is acquired through the experience of the class, past and present, through action and collective debate. All things to which the specific contribution of the computer is minimal, in any case less than the press which the working class already had at its disposal in the 19th century.

The GPRC argues that it is useless to go back to the lessons of history to understand the defeat of the Russian revolution. It would be the worst thing for the proletariat if it was to turn away from the essential lessons bequeathed to it by the Russian revolution[2] [143] above all concerning the conditions for its degeneration, because these lessons are a vital contribution to the capacity of the next revolutionary wave to overcome capitalism:

- isolated in one proletarian bastion, the revolution is doomed;

- the state of the period of transition, or semi-state, which will inevitably arise after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, has an essentially conservative function of guaranteeing the cohesion of society, within which class antagonisms still exist.[3] [144] Thus, it’s not an emanation of the proletariat and cannot be the instrument for the forward march towards communism. This role falls exclusively to the working class organised in workers’ councils, and to its vanguard party. Furthermore, in periods of reflux in the class struggle, this state will tend to fully express its intrinsically reactionary nature against the interests of the revolution;

- this is why the identification between the workers’ councils and the state can only result in the proletariat losing its class autonomy;

- for the same reason the identification between the party and the state can only lead to the party losing its essential role as the political vanguard of the proletariat and to its transformation into an organ of state management. The fact that the Bolshevik party fell into this situation led to it carrying out the repression of Kronstadt, a tragedy for the proletariat, and to gradually embodying the rising counter-revolution.

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Essentially, the purpose of the KRAS' text [85],[1] [150] is to highlight the reasons for the defeat of the Russian revolution: “For most of the 'lefts', the Russian revolution of 1917-21 remains an 'unknown revolution', as it was described by the exiled anarchist Voline, 60 years ago. The main reason for this situation is not a lack of information, but the great number of myths that have been built around it. Most of these myths are a result of the confusion between the Russian revolution and the activities of the Bolshevik party. It is not possible to free oneself from these confusions without understanding the real role of the Bolsheviks in the events of this period (...) A widespread myth holds that the Bolshevik party was not just a party like any other, but the vanguard of the working class (...) All the illusions on the 'proletarian' nature of the Bolsheviks are disproved by their systematic opposition to the workers' strikes as early as 1918, and the crushing of the Kronstadt workers in 1921 by the guns of the Red Army. This was not a 'tragic misunderstanding', but the crushing by armed power of the 'ignorant' rank and file. The Bolshevik leaders pursued concrete interests and carried out a concrete policy (...) Their vision of the state as such, of the domination over the masses, is significant of individuals without any feeling for equality, for whom egoism dominates, for whom the masses are merely a raw material without any will of their own, without initiative and without consciousness, incapable of creating social self-management. This is the basic trait of Bolshevik psychology. It is typical of the dominating character. Arshinov spoke of this new stratum as a 'new caste', the 'fourth caste'. Willy-nilly, with such a viewpoint the Bolsheviks could not carry out anything other than a bourgeois revolution (...) Let us try first of all to see what revolution was on the agenda in Russia in 1917 (...) the Social-Democracy (including of the Bolshevik variety) always overestimated the degree of development of capitalism and the extent of Russia's 'Europeanisation' (...) In reality, Russia was more a 'third-world' country, to use a present-day term (...) The Bolsheviks became the protagonists of a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie, of capitalist industrialisation without private capitalists (...) Once in power, the Bolsheviks played the part of a 'party of order' which did not try to develop the social character of the revolution. The programme of the Bolshevik government had no socialist content...”

The KRAS also puts forward other arguments, which we will deal with in the body of this article. The main elements of its thesis can be summed up as follows:

- The Bolshevik party was in continuity with the old Social-Democracy, and was a bourgeois, anti-working class party.

- The Russian revolution was a bourgeois revolution, because no other sort of revolution was possible in Russia in 1917.

- The economic measures adopted after 1917, and the policy of the Bolshevik party, were not really socialist, because they failed to achieve a true self-management in the hands of the working class.

A historical debate – with historical errors of method

One thing that a large number of apparently radical critiques of the Bolshevik party have in common, is the flagrant lack of an international framework for understanding the situation in Russia. This methodological error ignores the essential distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Capitalism as a mode of production dominates the entire planet, and can therefore only be overcome on a worldwide scale by an international class: the proletariat. The existence of the bourgeois class, on the contrary, is inseparable from the framework of the nation state. Thus, the Russian revolution was not simply the concern of the Russian proletariat, but the response of the whole proletariat to the contradictions of capitalism in this epoch, and in particular to the first sign of the system's bankruptcy, threatening the very existence of human civilisation: the First World War. The Russian revolution was the advance guard of the international revolutionary wave (1917-23), and the proletarian dictatorship in Russia was thus right to turn for help to the international proletariat, and first and foremost to the proletariat in Germany, which held the keys to the fate of the world revolution.

The relations of production can only be transformed after the proletariat has taken power on a world scale. Contrary to periods of transition in the past, the transition from capitalism to communism will not be the result of a necessary process independent of human will, but will demand the conscious action of a class that uses political power to extirpate from society, little by little, all the components of capitalism: private property, the market, wage labour, the law of value, etc. But it will only be possible to put this into operation once the proletariat has beaten the bourgeoisie militarily. Until this definitive victory has been won, the demands of a worldwide civil war will take priority over the transformation of relations of production where the proletariat has already seized power, no matter what the degree of development of these countries. We cannot therefore have any illusions about the possibility of immediate social transformation after the revolution, especially when it has not yet spread to enough countries to significantly alter the international balance of class forces. There are certainly measures that must be taken wherever possible immediately after the seizure of power: expropriation of private capitalists, equality of wages, help for the disabled and the poor, free distribution of certain goods and services, and a reduction in working hours, above all so that workers can involve themselves in the taking of decisions. But these are not in themselves measures of socialisation, and they can perfectly well be recuperated by capitalism.

The ideas by the KRAS are not unique to anarchists. They are very close to the positions of the councilist current, as they were formulated notably in 1934 by the GIK (Gruppe Internationaler Kommunisten) in their famous Theses on Bolshevism. The same kind of critique was developed by the Workers' Opposition group in Russia itself. The latter criticised the lack of self-management in the factories in Russia immediately after the revolution. Obsessed as they were with the possibility of putting in place socialist measures in production, which in their eyes would have been a real “proof of socialism”, it is no accident that members of the Workers' Opposition like Alexandra Kollontai were to be found, at the end of the 1920s, in the Stalinist camp. There is a common logic underlying the illusion of “socialism in one factory”, and the counter-revolutionary Stalinist slogan of “socialism in one country”. In both cases, this is nothing other than the perpetuation, under another name or even another form, of relations of exploitation which cannot be abolished until the rule of capital has been broken on a world scale.

The questions raised in the KRAS' text are thus not new; they belong to the history of the workers' movement. The inability of the GIK or the Workers' Opposition to deal with events in Russia in an international framework led them into a dead-end, which meant that they were unable to draw the real lessons from events, and led to the discouragement of their members. In the end, councilism fell into the method of fatalism: if the revolution was defeated, then this is because it was condemned to failure from the start. From there it was but a step to the idea that only a bourgeois, not a proletarian, revolution was possible at the time. In a sense, the GIK's Theses on Bolshevism are a rewriting of history and the conditions of the time, in order to “explain” a posteriori that the Russian revolution was defeated because it was an adventure doomed to failure.

The approach adopted by Rosa Luxemburg was the opposite to that of the councilists.[2] [151] In the final chapter of her pamphlet The Russian revolution [152], devoted to a critique of certain aspects of Bolshevik policy, she summed up the problems confronting the Bolsheviks in these words: “In Russia, the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to 'Bolshevism'”.[3] [153]

Difficulty in posing the problem at a world historical level

Just as each revolution has its own specific geographical framework (national for the bourgeoisie, world wide for the proletariat), the revolution is not possible at any point in time, but is determined by historical factors. First among these is the dynamic of the dominant mode of production, and the level of contradictions affecting it. The historical function of revolutions has always been to break the chains of the old mode of production, which has become a fetter on the development of the productive forces, and as a result an active factor in the crisis of society. This was the case for the great bourgeois revolutions against feudalism, for example in England in the 17th century or in France at the end of the 18th century, but it was also the case for the Russian revolution against capitalism in 1917. To be more precise, every mode of production goes through an ascendant phase, during which it is able to encourage the development of the productive forces and allows society to advance. But the ascendant phase is followed by a decadent phase, when it becomes a hindrance to the development of the productive forces and a factor of social stagnation. Historically, capitalism in its ascendant phase was the first mode of production which has been able to conquer the entire planet, and to build a world market. This task accomplished, the beginning of the 20th century opens a new epoch characterised by the development of unprecedented rivalries between the great powers to share out the world market. The most important expression of this new period was the First World War, which marked the brutal beginning of capitalism's decadent phase. Such a change in society cannot be without consequences for the function of the ruling class of a system which is decadent, and whose continued existence constitutes a threat to human survival, everywhere in the world including Russia!

The KRAS does not position itself clearly as regards the historical and international context of the Russian revolution, whose outcome was precisely determined by this context. Its argument contains certain ambiguities. While on the one hand, its critique of the Bolsheviks remains stuck within the Russian framework, the same article contains other passages which deal with the problem in another, more correct, light: “Nor should we forget the international social situation. World capitalism was in a very specific historical situation, at the watershed of a period of primary industrialisation [frühindustrielle Stufe] and a new 'taylorist-fordist' stage of capitalist industrialisation (...) It was still possible to eliminate world capitalist industrialism before it began to destroy the bases of human life and to atomise society”.

This passage contains a correct idea: that World War I and the Russian revolution both took place in a historical period characterised by a profound change in the life of capitalism as a whole. Why not then draw the logical conclusion for the analysis of the revolution in Russia, and stop treating it as something specifically Russian? And why not, therefore, conclude that with this change in the life of capitalism, the worldwide overthrow of the capitalist order was henceforth on the agenda? Despite their loyalty to the proletarian cause, the councilists and the Workers' Opposition failed to understand this. With quite different motives, the Mensheviks used the same method to condemn the proletarian revolution, on the grounds of Russia's insufficient industrialisation and the enormous weight of the peasantry. They ended up declaring that Russia was not yet ripe for revolution, and handing the power over to the bourgeoisie. We do not intend to compare the KRAS to the Mensheviks, but we do want to highlight the dangers of the method that it shares with the councilists and the Workers' Opposition. Today, in 2004, the same method would lead to the conclusion that the proletarian revolution is impossible anywhere in the Third World. Such a conclusion would obviously be absurd: capitalism is a global system, which has never succeeded in completely industrialising the world during its ascendant phase, and is obviously not going to do so in its decadent phase.

The Russian revolution was not an exclusively Russian event: it was the first assault by the world working class on the barbaric social system responsible for World War I.

The KRAS should decide: bourgeois or proletarian revolution?

“Let us first try to see what revolution was on the agenda in Russia in 1917”. We entirely agree with this way of posing the question of the Russian revolution. The problem is, that the KRAS does not stick to the method it proposes.

The KRAS declares several times that, due to Russia's insufficient economic development, the Bolsheviks' task was limited to carrying out a bourgeois revolution. This is nonsense, from the standpoint of a historical vision of capitalism as a decadent system world wide. By contrast, certain passages in their text contradict this declaration, and show clearly that a proletarian revolution was on the march in Russia: “Nonetheless, one cannot understand the Russian revolution merely as a bourgeois revolution. The masses rejected capitalism, and fought it vehemently – including the Bolsheviks' state capitalism (...) From their efforts and desires sprang the form that the world social revolution had to take in Russia. The combination of a revolution of the workers in the cities, with the revolution of the peasant communes [Gemeindebauern] in the countryside (...) The events of October 1917, through which the Petrograd Soviet overthrew the bourgeois provisional government were the result of the development of the movement of the masses after February, and in no way a Bolshevik conspiracy. The Leninists simply used this revolutionary atmosphere among the workers and peasants”. Perfectly true: the events of October 1917, during which the Petrograd soviet overthrew the bourgeois provisional government, were the result of the masses’ development after February, and in no way a Bolshevik conspiracy.

But the KRAS proves itself unable to draw the logical conclusion from this approach, and to “understand which revolution was really on the agenda”. It stops half-way, to defend the idea of two parallel revolutions, of different kinds: the first (bourgeois), supposedly justified by Russia's underdevelopment and incarnated by the Bolsheviks, and the other (“from below”), apparently motivated by the rejection of capitalism, set in motion by the masses: “in parallel with this 'bourgeois' (political) revolution which revolves around state power, another revolution developed from below. The slogans of self-management of labour and the socialisation of the land developed and became more and more popular, the working masses began to carry it out from below in a revolutionary way. New social movements developed: workers and peasants councils...”.

A simultaneous bourgeois and proletarian revolution is a contradiction in terms, from the viewpoint of the maturation of the conditions underlying each respective revolutionary form: the former corresponds to capitalism's ascendancy, the latter to its decadence. And the World War, whose fires were still raging at the very moment of the October 1917, is the most striking illustration of the historical bankruptcy and decadence of the capitalist mode of production. The Russian proletariat's overthrow of the bourgeoisie is first and foremost the direct consequence of the latter's participation in the worldwide slaughter.

Once we have established the proletarian nature of the 1917 Russian revolution, the question is obviously posed of the class nature of the Bolshevik party, and the role it played in the death of the Revolution and the victory of the counter-revolution.

The class nature of the Bolshevik party

The degeneration of the revolution, and of the Bolshevik party whose transformation into the spearhead of the counter-revolution was encouraged by the mistakes of the Bolsheviks – which, however, were in many cases not specific to the Bolsheviks but characteristic of the immaturity of the workers' movement as a whole.

It is thus true that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had an incorrect vision, which owed something to the schematism of bourgeois ideology, that the seizure of political power by the proletariat consisted in the seizure of power by the party. But they shared this idea with the all the currents of the Social Democracy, including its left wing. It is precisely the experience of the revolution in Russia, and of its degeneration, which made it possible to understand that in this domain, the schema of the proletarian revolution is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeoisie. Despite her well-known differences with the Bolsheviks on the organisational question, Rosa Luxemburg, for example, continued until her death in January 1919 to hold to this incorrect viewpoint: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany, never except by the proletariat's conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle of the Spartacus League” (“What does the Spartacus League want?”, published 14[th] December 1918, in Die Rote Fahne [154][4] [155]). Should we conclude that Rosa Luxemburg was also a “bourgeois Jacobin”, as the anarchists and councilists describe Lenin? And if this were the case, where was the “bourgeois revolution” taking place in the industrial Germany of 1919?

The victory of the counter-revolution in Russia was the result first and foremost of the defeat of the world revolutionary wave, and of the isolation of the proletarian bastion in Russia, and it would be an error of method to attribute the primary responsibility to false conceptions within the workers' movement. If the world revolution had spread, these conceptions would have been overcome in the course of the proletariat's forward march to revolution, on both the practical and the theoretical level, through the critique of what had already been accomplished.

The degeneration of the Bolshevik party was the result of a false conception of its role as regards the state, which led it to see its role as the vanguard of the proletariat as being identical with managing the state. This put it in a situation of increasing antagonism towards the proletariat, which led to the crushing of the Kronstadt revolt, led and justified by the Bolsheviks.[5] [156]

Understanding the Bolshevik party's mistakes, and the process of its degeneration, is not to excuse them but on the contrary to take part in the clarification which will be vital to the outcome of the workers' struggles in the future. But simply to declare from the outset that the Bolshevik party was bourgeois, as the KRAS does, is a very simplistic and at the same time convenient way to avoid posing certain questions, and calling into question certain prejudices. It is certainly not the means to apprehend the living process of the class struggle.

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At the beginning of 2004, we had an exchange of e-mails with the CRI[1] [163] which claims to be breaking from the logic of official Trotskyism in the name of a return to “authentic” Trotskyism. This group also sent us a collection of documents, which we studied along with the texts published on its web site. As a result, we sent the group a detailed reply, which we reproduce below. In it, we demonstrate on the basis of Lenin’s writing that there is no possibility of defending proletarian positions within Trotskyism today. Breaking with a particular Trotskyist organisation without making a complete break with the whole logic of Trotskyism, can only, as far as the question of war is concerned, lead to supporting one bourgeois faction against another.

We recognise the fact that you declare, both in your correspondence and in your texts as a whole, that your action aims to take part in the struggle of the working class, and that your “historical objective” is the communist revolution. However, the history of the workers' movement has, tragically, taught communists that there have been parties which claim to defend the working class and the victory of socialism or communism, yet whose real objective – whether or not their militants were conscious of the fact – was the defeat of the working class, the continuation of capitalist exploitation, and the sacrifice of millions of proletarians for the interests of their national bourgeoisies in the imperialist wars of the 20th century.

The history of the 20th century has amply demonstrated that there is one essential criterion which determines the real class nature of any organisation that claims to belong to the proletariat: that is, internationalism. It is no accident that we find the same currents which took clear positions against the imperialist war in 1914, and which pushed forward the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal (especially the Bolsheviks and the Spartakists), at the head of the revolution, while the social-chauvinist, or even the centrist currents (Ebert and Scheidemann, or the Mensheviks), formed the spearhead of the counter-revolution. Nor is it by chance that both the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the Inaugural Address of the First International in 1864, end with the words: “Workers of all countries, unite!”.

Today, war continues to lay waste the planet, and the defence of internationalism continues to be the decisive criterion for deciding whether or not an organisation belongs to the camp of the working class. In these wars, the only attitude true to the interests of the working class is to reject any participation in either of the warring camps, to denounce all those bourgeois forces which call on the workers, under any pretext whatsoever, to give their lives for any of the capitalist camps, and to put forward, as the Bolsheviks did in 1914, the only possible perspective: intransigent class struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.

Any attitude which leads to calling the workers to line up behind one or other armed camp comes down to adopting the role of recruiting sergeant for capitalist war, an accomplice of the bourgeoisie, and therefore a traitor. This was exactly how Lenin and the Bolsheviks considered the social democrats who, in the name of the struggle against “Prussian militarism” on one side, and against “Tsarist oppression” on the other, called the workers to mutual murder in 1914. And, unfortunately, whatever the CRI's good intentions may be, it has adopted in relation to Iraq precisely the same nationalist policy that Lenin denounced in 1914.

When, in its press, the CRI gives its “unconditional support to the Iraqi people's armed resistance to the invader”, in reality it is doing nothing other than calling on the Iraqi proletarians to become canon-fodder in the service of this or that fraction of the national bourgeoisie, which today considers its capitalist and imperialist interests outside or against an alliance with the United States (whereas other bourgeois fractions prefer to ally themselves with the US in defence of their interests). We should point out, moreover, that the dominant fractions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie (which lined up for decades behind Saddam Hussein) have been, depending on the circumstances of the moment, either the best allies of the USA (especially during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s), or members of the “axis of evil” supposedly devoted to the destruction of the same.

To justify this policy of support for certain fractions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie, the CRI (as it did in its forum at the Fête de Lutte ouvrière) invokes Lenin's position during World War I, when he wrote, for example in Socialism and War [66]: “if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be 'just', 'defensive' wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave-owning, predatory 'great' powers” (Chapter 1, “The Principles of Socialism and the War of 1914-1915”).

However, what the CRI forgets (or chooses to forget) is precisely that a major axis of this text (as indeed of all Lenin's writing in this period) is the ferocious denunciation of the pretexts put forward by the social-chauvinists to justify their support for imperialist war on the basis of this or that country or nationality's “national independence”.

Thus, on the one hand, Lenin can declare that: “In fact, the German bourgeoisie has launched a robber campaign against Serbia, with the object of subjugating her and throttling the national revolution of the Southern Slavs...” (War and Russian Social-Democracy [164]) and he can also write that “In the present war the national element is represented only by Serbia’s war against Austria (...) It is only in Serbia and among the Serbs that we can find a national-liberation movement of long standing, embracing millions, ‘the masses of the people’, a movement of which the present war of Serbia against Austria is a ‘continuation’. If this war were an isolated one, i.e., if it were not connected with the general European war, with the selfish and predatory aims of Britain, Russia, etc., it would have been the duty of all socialists to desire the success of the Serbian bourgeoisie as this is the only correct and absolutely inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the national element in the present war”. On the other hand, however he continues: “Marxist dialectics, as the last word in the scientific-evolutionary method, excludes any isolated examination of an object, i.e., one that is one-sided and monstrously distorted. The national element in the Serbo-Austrian war is not, and cannot be, of any serious significance in the general European war. If Germany wins, she will throttle Belgium, one more part of Poland, perhaps part of France, etc. If Russia wins, she will throttle Galicia, one more part of Poland, Armenia, etc. If the war ends in a ‘draw’, the old national oppression will remain. To Serbia, i.e., to perhaps one per cent or so of the participants in the present war, the war is a ‘continuation of the politics’ of the bourgeois-liberation movement. To the other ninety-nine per cent, the war is a continuation of the politics of imperialism, i.e., of the decrepit bourgeoisie, which is capable only of raping nations, not freeing them. The Triple Entente, which is ‘liberating’ Serbia, is selling the interests of Serbian liberty to Italian imperialism in return for the latter’s aid in robbing Austria. All this, which is common knowledge, has been unblushingly distorted by Kautsky to justify the opportunists” (The Collapse of the Second International, 1915, Chapter 6 [165]).

As far as Serbia is concerned, we should point out that in 1914 the Serb Socialist Party categorically rejected and denounced, “the resistance of the Serb people against the Austrian invader”, just as the latter was bombarding the civilian population of Belgrade and also that the internationalists of the time saluted it for doing so.

To return to the present day, it is “common knowledge” (and we could add that those who refuse to acknowledge the fact “unblushingly distort” reality) that the war waged by the United States and Britain against Iraq (just like the war launched in August 1914 by Austria and Germany against “little Serbia”) has imperialist implications which go far beyond Iraq itself. Concretely, in opposition to the countries of the “coalition”, there is a group of countries, such as France and Germany, with antagonistic imperialist interests. This is why France and Germany did everything they could to prevent the American invasion last year, and have since refused to send any troops to Iraq. And the fact that they have just voted in the United Nations for a resolution presented by Britain and the US means nothing other than that diplomatic agreements, are just as much part of the latent war between the great powers as their diplomatic disputes.

Despite all its declarations of friendship with the United States, trumpeted notably on the occasion of the ceremonies to commemorate the 1944 Normandy Landings,  French imperialism stands to gain from the USA's difficulties in Iraq. In the final analysis, what the CRI's support for the “resistance of the Iraqi people” boils down to, is to take the side of “its” own bourgeoisie. And there can be no question of calling on Lenin to justify such a policy, since Lenin himself called on socialists “primarily to strive against the chauvinism of their “own” bourgeoisie” (Position and Tasks of the Socialist International [166], 1st November 1914).

If the CRI really wants to follow Lenin's example in the defence of internationalism, then they must take account of reality and give up on fairy tales: support for the “resistance of the Iraqi people against the invader” is purely and simply a betrayal of internationalism, and therefore a chauvinist, anti-proletarian policy. It is against such policies that Lenin wrote: “The social-chauvinists repeat the bourgeois deception of the people that the war is being waged to protect the freedom and existence of nations, and thereby they go over to the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat” (Socialism and war, Chapter 1).

That said, support for the “resistance of the Iraqi people”, in other words for the anti-American fractions of the Iraqi ruling class, is not merely a betrayal of internationalism from the standpoint of what is at stake in Iraq in terms of the antagonisms between the great imperialist powers; and it is not only a betrayal of internationalism from the standpoint of the proletariat of the great powers but it is equally a betrayal of internationalism from the standpoint of the Iraqi workers, who are being invited to buy a pig in a poke and get themselves killed in the defence of the imperialist interests of their own bourgeoisie. For there can be no question that the Iraqi state is anything other than imperialist. In fact, in today's world, all states are imperialist, from the most powerful right down to the smallest of them. Thus “little Serbia”, which historically has been a favourite prey for the imperialist appetites of greater powers such as Germany and Russia (and France), behaved during the 1990s as a model imperialist state, complete with massacres and “ethnic cleansing” in order to build a “Greater Serbia” at the expense of the other nationalities of ex-Yugoslavia. All that, of course, within a European context dominated by the antagonisms between the various powers which “defended” either Croatia (Germany and Austria), or Bosnia (the United States), or again Serbia (France and Britain).

The Iraqi state is in no way an exception to this general rule. On the contrary, it is one its most edifying examples.

Ever since its independence from the British sphere of influence following World War II, Iraq, thanks to its strategic location and its oil resources, has constantly been a stake in the rivalries between the great powers. After a period as a “client” of the USSR, it switched to the Western bloc (notably through a spectacular rapprochement with Germany, and especially France) during the 1970s, as Soviet influence in the Middle East declined. Between 1980 and 1988, in one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts since 1945 (1,200,000 dead), Iraq was the spearhead of the Western offensive against Khomeini's Iran, which had declared holy war on the American “Great Satan”. The Western powers, and especially the US, gave Iraq their unfailing support, notably through the despatch to the Persian Gulf, in 1987, of a large fleet which engaged the Iranian forces on a daily basis, and finally forced Iran to agree to a ceasefire in the summer of 1988, despite the heavy defeats that it had inflicted on Iraq.

Obviously, Saddam Hussein did not send hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers and peasants in uniform to get killed on the Iranian front from 1980 onwards (and in passing massacre 5,000 Kurdish civilians at Halabja on 16th March 1988), just to give pleasure to the United States. In fact, the Iraqi bourgeoisie was pursuing its own war aims. Apart from subjugating by terror the Kurdish and Shi'ite populations, its objective was to seize the Shatt al-Arab waterway (the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates) from Iranian control. The war was also intended to allow Saddam Hussein, and Iraq, to pose as the leader of the Arab world. In short, this war was a perfectly imperialist one.

The war of 1990-91 was of the same nature. The imperialist objectives of the USA and its allies at the time, in “Operation Desert Storm”, have already been amply demonstrated and denounced. But the pretext for the crusade against Iraq was the latter’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990. Obviously, marxists have no interest in the question of who was the “aggressor” and who was the “aggressed”, nor do they leap to the defence of Sheikh Jaber's bank account and oil reserves. That said, Iraq's military expedition against Kuwait in August 1990 was nothing other than the operation of one imperialist bandit (to use Lenin's expression) against another. The fact that these are little bandits makes no difference whatever to the fundamental nature of their policies, nor to the attitude the proletariat should take towards this kind of war.

One last remark on the imperialist nature of states today. An argument often given to support the idea that states like Iraq are not imperialist, is that they do not export capital. This argument claims to follow Lenin's analysis developed in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which lays particular emphasis on this aspect of imperialist policy. But the use of this one-sided view of imperialism by self-styled “Leninists” in order to justify their betrayal of internationalism is of the same vein as the use made by the Stalinists of another of Lenin's articles during World War I (taken totally out of context moreover): “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world—the capitalist world—attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states” (On the slogan for a United States of Europe [167]).

For the Stalinists (who generally leave out the last sentence in this quotation), “This was the greatest discovery of our epoch. It became the guiding principle for all the action of the Communist Party in its struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution and the construction of socialism in our country. Lenin's theory on the possibility of the victory of socialism in a single country laid down a clear perspective for the proletariat's struggle, gave free rein to the energy and initiative of the proletarians in every country to march against their national bourgeoisie, and filled the communist party and the working class with a firm confidence in victory” (from the Preface to the selected works of Lenin published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, Moscow, 1975).

This method is not new. It has always been used by the renegades, the falsifiers of marxism. The German Social Democrats used this or that incorrect or ambiguous formulation from the founders of marxism to justify their reformist politics and their betrayal of socialism. In particular, they completely wore out this quotation from Engels' 1895 preface to Marx's pamphlet The class struggles in France [168]: “The war of 1870-71 and the defeat of the Commune transferred the centre of gravity of the European workers’ movement in the meantime from France to Germany, as Marx had foretold. In France it naturally took years to recover from the blood-letting of May 1871. In Germany, on the other hand, where industry – fostered, in addition, in positively hothouse fashion by the blessing of the French milliards  – developed at increasing speed, Social-Democracy experienced a still more rapid and enduring growth. Thanks to the intelligent use which the German workers made of the universal suffrage introduced in 1866, the astonishing growth of the party is made plain to all the world by incontestable figures (...) With this successful utilisation of universal suffrage, however, an entirely new method of proletarian struggle came into operation, and this method quickly took on a more tangible form. It was found that the state institutions, in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organised, offer the working class still further levers to fight these very state institutions. The workers took part in elections to particular diets, to municipal councils and to trades courts; they contested with the bourgeoisie every post in the occupation of which a sufficient part of the proletariat had a say. And so it happened that the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers’ party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion”.

Rosa Luxemburg denounced the anti-proletarian use to which an incorrect idea of Engels had been put, at the founding congress of the KPD: “Engels [had] no chance to see the practical results of this application of his theory. I am certain that those who know the works of Marx and Engels, those who are familiar with the living, genuine revolutionary spirit that inspired all their teachings and their writings, will he convinced that Engels would have been the first to protest against the debauch of parliamentarism-only, against the corruption and degradation of the labour movement which was characteristic of Germany before the 4th of August. The 4th of August did not come like thunder out of a clear sky; what happened on the 4th of August was the logical outcome of all that we had been doing day after day for many years. I am certain that Engels and Marx, had he been alive – would have been the first to have protested with the utmost energy, and would have used all his forces to keep the vehicle from rolling into the swamp. But Engels died in the same year that he wrote the Preface” (Our programme and the political situation [169]).

To return to the idea that the export of capital is the only expression of imperialist policy, we should point out that this is wholly foreign to what Lenin himself wrote in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. Quite the contrary: “To the numerous "old" motives of colonial policy, finance capital [which according to Lenin was the major driving force behind imperialism] has added the struggle for the sources of raw materials, for the export of capital, for spheres of influence, i.e., for spheres for profitable deals, concessions, monopoly profits and so on, economic territory in general” (Chapter X, “The place of imperialism in history” [170]).

In reality, the one-sided deformation of Lenin's analysis of imperialism has much the same aim as the use made by the Stalinists of the short passage quoted above concerning the “construction of socialism in a single country”: to try to make us believe that the system set up in the USSR after the revolution of October 1917 and the defeat of the world wide revolutionary wave which followed it was neither capitalist nor imperialist. Since the USSR did not have the financial wherewithal to export capital (other than on a completely insignificant scale compared to the Western powers), then according to this view, its policies could not be imperialist. And this would supposedly remain true, even when these policies took the form of territorial conquest, the extension of the USSR's “spheres of influence”, the pillage of raw materials and agricultural resources, even the dismantling of the industrial capacity of occupied countries. Policies, in short, that are very similar to those carried out by Nazi Germany in occupied Europe (which involved very little exportation of capital, and much plain pillage). This analysis of the nature of imperialism was obviously put to good use by Stalinist propaganda, against all those who denounced the imperialist behaviour of the Soviet Union. But we should also remember that the Stalinists were not alone in refusing any idea that the USSR could be capitalist or imperialist. Their work of mystification received the loyal support of the Trotskyist movement, with Trotsky's analysis of the USSR as a “degenerated workers' state” where capitalist social relations had disappeared.

This article is not the place to demonstrate the incoherence of Trotsky's analysis of the relations of production in the USSR. We refer the reader to various articles already published in these pages (notably, to “The unidentified class: Soviet bureaucracy as seen by Leon Trotsky”, in International Review n°92). However, it is important to point out that it was in the name of the “defence of the USSR and the workers' victories” that the Trotskyist movement supported the Allied camp during World War II, notably by taking part in the “resistance” movements: in other words, it adopted the same policies as the social-chauvinists in 1914. In short, it betrayed the workers camp and joined that of the bourgeoisie.

The “arguments” used by the Trotskyist movement to justify its participation in imperialist war are not the same as those used by the social-chauvinists during World War I, but that makes not a jot of difference to the question. In reality, their nature is the same, since both come down to making a fundamental distinction between two forms of capitalism, and calling for the support of one against the other in the name of a choice of the “lesser” between two evils. During World War I, the avowed chauvinists called for the defence of the fatherland. The social chauvinists called for the defence of “German civilisation” against “Tsarist despotism” on the one hand, and for the defence of the “France of the great French Revolution” against “Prussian militarism” on the other. During World War II, De Gaulle defended “eternal France”, while the Stalinists (who also referred to “eternal France”) called for the defence of democracy against fascism and of the “socialist fatherland”. As for the Trotskyists, they came hot on the heels of the Stalinists and called for participation in the “Resistance” in the name of the “defence of the workers' victories in the USSR”. In doing so they became, like the Stalinists, recruiting sergeants for the Anglo-American camp in an imperialist war. By giving their support to National Unity governments during World War I, the socialist parties passed definitively into the bourgeois camp. By adopting the theory of “building socialism in one country”, the Stalinist parties made a decisive move towards the service of their national capitals during the 1930s, a move completed with their support for their respective bourgeoisies' rearmament programmes, and their active preparation for the coming war. The Trotskyist current passed into the capitalist camp by participating in World War II. This is why, to return to the proletariat's class terrain, there is no alternative to a definitive break with Trotskyism. There is certainly no future in any attempt to rediscover “real Trotskyism”. The currents within the 4th International who were determined to remain true to proletarian internationalism understood this: currents like those of Munis (Trotskyism's official representative in Spain), of Scheuer in Austria, of Stinas in Greece, or of the “Socialisme ou Barbarie” group in France. It was also true for Trotsky's own widow, Natalia Sedova, who broke with the 4th International at the end of World War II, on the question of the defence of the USSR and the latter's participation in imperialist war.

If you, yourselves, sincerely want to undertake the struggle for the working class, as you say you do, then there is no other alternative than to break clearly with the whole Trotskyist movement, and not just with this or that current within it.

You can turn the problem whichever way you like, you can invoke Trotsky, Lenin, or even Marx, you can recite by heart Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, you can close your eyes and block your eyes, you can put your head in the sand or anywhere, nothing can change this hard reality: a group which today, in France, gives its support to the “Iraqi resistance”, not only works as a recruiting sergeant to turn Iraqi workers into cannon-fodder in the service of the most retrograde fractions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie (whether they be Sunni or Shi'ite), but also offers its support to the imperialist interests of its own bourgeoisie, while at the same time encouraging the growth of anti-American feeling among the French workers. It is no different from those that Lenin described as social-chauvinists: socialist in words, bourgeois and chauvinist in action.

As for those arguments that seek to adopt a “marxist” air by using this or that phrase from Lenin or Marx to justify participation in imperialist war, Lenin has already answered them: “From the liberator of nations that capitalism was in the struggle against feudalism, imperialist capitalism has become the greatest oppressor of nations. Formerly progressive, capitalism has become reactionary; it has developed the forces of production to such a degree that mankind is faced with the alternative of going over to Socialism or of suffering years and even decades of armed struggle between the “great powers for the artificial preservation of capitalism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges and national oppression of every kind” (Lenin, Socialism and war, Chapter 1, “The present war is an imperialist war” [66]).

“The Russian social-chauvinists (headed by Plekhanov), refer to Marx’s tactics in the war of 1870; the German (of the type of Lensch, David and Co.) to Engels’ statement in 1891 that in the event of war against Russia and France together, it would be the duty of the German Socialists to defend their fatherland; and lastly, the social-chauvinists of the Kautsky type, who want to reconcile and legitimatise international chauvinism, refer to the fact that Marx and Engels, while condemning war, nevertheless, constantly, from to 1870-1871 and 1876-1877, took the side of one or another belligerent state once war had broken out. All these references are outrageous distortions of the views of Marx and Engels in the interest of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists (...) Whoever refers today to Marx’s attitude towards the wars of the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie and forgets Man’s statement that “the workers have no fatherland”, a statement that applies precisely to the epoch of the reactionary, obsolete bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the socialist revolution. shamelessly distorts Marx and substitute, the bourgeois for the socialist point of view” (ibid, “False references to Marx and Engels”).

We hope that these arguments will help you to continue your reflection, and to make a complete break with Trotskyism in general and all the bourgeois conceptions that it brings with it, rather than merely breaking with a particular Trotskyist organisation.

Communist greetings, ICC (June 2004)