Battaglia Comunista abandons the marxist concept of decadence, part ii

In the first part of this article (Intenational Review n°119) we recalled that for marxism, and contrary to the view developed by Battaglia,[1] [1] the decadence of capitalism is not the eternal repetition of its contradictions on a growing scale, but poses the question of its survival as a mode of production, according to the terms used by Marx and Engels. By rejecting the concept of decadence as defined by the founders of marxism and subsequently taken up by the organisations of the workers’ movement, some of whom deepened it further, Battaglia is turning its back on a historical materialist understanding, which teaches us that for a mode of production to be transcended, it has to enter a phase of senility (Marx) where their relations of production become obsolete and become an obstacle to the development of the productive forces (Marx again). And when the latter tells us in the Principles of a Critique of Political Economy (the Grundrisse) that “the universality towards which it is perpetually striving finds limitations in its own nature, which at a certain stage of its development will make it appear as itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, leading thus to its own self-destruction”(translated from notebook IV of the chapter on capital, by David McLellan in Marx’s Grundrisse, 1971, p 112), there is no “fatalism” in this idea of “self-destruction” as Battaglia claims. This is because while the decadence of a mode of production is the indispensable condition for a “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” (Marx, Communist Manifesto), it’s the class struggle which, in the last instance, cuts through the socio-economic contradictions. And if it is unable to do this, society then sinks into a phase of decomposition, into the “mutual ruin of the contending classes”, as Marx puts it right at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto. There is nothing automatic or inevitable in the succession of modes of production, nothing that leads to the conclusion that, faced with increasingly insurmountable contradictions, capitalism will simply retire from the scene of history.

Battaglia's zig-zags in recognising the concept of decadence

During the discussion around the adoption of its platform at the first National Conference in 1945, the Central Committee of the reconstituted Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt) gave one of its militants - Stefanini, a former leading member of the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left (1928-45) - the task of presenting a political report on the union question. In this report he “reaffirmed this conception that the trade union, in the phase of the decadence of capitalism, is necessarily linked to the bourgeois state” (proceedings of the first National Conference of the PCInt). This report, presented on the third day of the conference, was in contradiction with the platform that had been discussed and voted on the previous day.[2] [2] Furthermore, a number of militants supported the position developed by Stefanini in the name of the Central Committee, although the latter, at the end of the discussion, still called upon the conference to adopt the position taken in the Platform,[3] [3] and felt it necessary to present a motion at the end of the conference calling for “the reconstruction of the CGIL”[4] [4] and “the conquest of the leading organs of the trade union” (ibid, motion of the Central Committee on the union question).

Furthermore, despite its explicit affirmation that it is in political and organisational continuity with the Italian Fraction,[5] [5] and despite the presence of members of the Fraction in the leadership of the new party, the Platform voted at this conference (in fact a founding congress) made no reference at all to what had been the cement, the political coherence of the positions of the Fraction: the analysis of the decadence of capitalism. At the same time the party nominated an International Bureau to coordinate its organisational extensions abroad; and these – with due respect for theoretical cacophony – continued to defend the analysis of the decadence of capitalism in their publications![6] [6] Which goes to show that with such a method of regroupment as its basis, there was a real programmatic heterogeneity on virtually all the political positions it adopted. When we read the proceedings of this conference, it is obvious that a profound political confusion reigned throughout![7] [7]

With such a confused political basis, it is not surprising that, like the Loch Ness monster, the notion of decadence keeps reappearing at one time or another. This was notably the case at the trade union conference of the PCInt in 1947, where, in contradiction with the 1945 Platform, it was stated that “In the current phase of the decadence of capitalist society the trade union is destined to serve as an essential instrument of the policy of conservation and thus to assume the precise functions of a state organism”.[8] [8] This explosive cocktail mixed at the very foundations of the PCInt did not stand the test of time for long; the party split into two parties in 1952, one around Bordiga (Programma Comunista), which marked a return to the political positions of the 1920s; the other around Damen (Battaglia Comunista), which referred more explicitly to the political contribution of the Italian Fraction.[9] [9] It was at the moment of this split that Bordiga was to develop certain critical considerations about the concept of decadence.[10] [10] However, despite the re-appropriation of certain positions of the Fraction, the analysis of decadence was still left out of the new political platform adopted by Battaglia after the 1952 split.

Some time afterwards, in its efforts towards the regroupment of revolutionary forces and in discussion with our organisation, Battaglia finally adopted the analysis of the decadence of capitalism in the context of the dynamic opened up by the International Conferences of the Groups of the Communist Left between 1976 and 1980.[11] [11] Battaglia published two long studies on decadence in its review Prometeo at the beginning of 1978 and in March 1979,[12] [12] as well as texts for the first two conferences.[13] [13] We thus saw Battaglia, on the back of its publications, adopting a new programmatic point which marked its acceptance of the framework of decadence: “the growth of inter-imperialist conflicts, trade wars, speculation, generalised local wars, are signs of the process of the decadence of capitalism. The structural crisis of the system is pushing capital beyond its ‘normal’ limits, towards a solution at the level of imperialist war”. After the death of Damen senior – the founder of the PCInt and the initiator of the cycle of conferences - in October 1979, this point on decadence disappeared from its basic positions starting with Prometeo n°3 in December 1979, i.e. just before Battaglia excluded us at the end of the third conference in May 1980. It was also significant that the analysis of decadence, which was at the centre of Battaglia’s contributions for the first two conferences, totally vanished from its contributions for the third conference, where we saw an analysis which prefigured the current position… all this in very discreet manner and without any explanation, either to its readers or the other groups of the proletarian political milieu! To conclude, we should also note that Battaglia now proposes to abandon something that it still affirmed in the 1997 platform of the IBRP: the existence of a qualitative break, marked by the First World War, between two fundamental and distinct historical periods in the evolution of the capitalist mode of production, even if this was no longer explained by using the marxist concepts of the ascendance and decadence of a mode of production.[14] [14]

After these multiple political zigzags, Battaglia has the cheek to complain about being “tired of discussing about nothing when we have work to do trying to understand what is happening in the world”:[15] [15] how can you not be tired when you are forever changing your spectacles and can never know which one is the best for “understanding what is happening in the world”! Today anyone can see that Battaglia has deliberately chosen long-sighted glasses even though it’s suffering from myopia.

At this point, the reader will have seen that far from being the expert in marxism it claims to be, Battaglia is adept at surfing the opportunity of the moment and looks more like a quick-change champion. And it’s not over yet. The latest zigzags take the biscuit. For those who read Battaglia’s prose, it is now evident that this organisation wants to rid itself once and for all of a notion which it considers, according to its own terms in a statement dated February 2002 and published in Internationalist Communist Review n°21,[16] [16] “as universal as it is confusing (…) alien to the critique of political economy (…) foreign to the method and the arsenal of the critique of political economy”. We are also asked “What role then does the concept of decadence play in terms of the militant critique of political economy, i.e. for a deeper analysis of the characteristics and dynamic of capitalism in the period in which we live? None. To the extent that the word itself never appears in the three volumes constituting Capital”.[17] [17] But then why on earth did Battaglia, two years later (in Prometeo n°8, December 2003) feel the need to launch a grand debate in the IBRP on this “confusing” concept which “can’t explain the mechanisms of the crisis”, which is “foreign to the critique of political economy”, which only appears incidentally in Marx and which is supposedly absent from his masterpiece? Yet another change of clothes. Did Battaglia suddenly remember that the first pamphlet published by its sister organisation (the Communist Workers Organisation) was entitled precisely The Economic Foundations of Decadence? The CWO quite rightly considers that “the notion of decadence is a part of Marx’s analysis of modes of production” and was at the heart of the creation of the Third International: “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” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°32). Has Battaglia realised that it is not that easy to dispose of such a central acquisition of the workers’ movement as the marxist notion of the decadence of a mode of production?

Bearing this in mind, it is hardly surprising that in its contribution opening the debate, Battaglia has nothing to say about the definition and analysis of the decadence of modes of production developed by Marx and Engels, nor about their efforts to chart the circumstance and moment in which this happens to capitalism. Similarly, Battaglia imperiously ignores the position adopted at the foundation of the CI, analysing the First World War as the unequivocal sign of the beginning of the period of decadence for capitalism. Equally, Battaglia, which claims to be the political heir of the Italian Fraction, is silent about the fact that the latter made decadence the framework of its political platform. Thus, instead of taking position on the heritage left us by the founders of marxism and deepened by generations of revolutionaries, Battaglia prefers to hurl anathemas (the idea of fatalism) and spread confusion on the definition of decadence… and at the same time announce a debate within the IBRP and a major programme of research: “the aim of our research will be to verify whether capitalism has exhausted its push to develop the productive forces, and if this is true, when, to what extent, and above all why”. When you want to abandon a historic concept of marxism, it is easier to write on a blank page than to pronounce on the programmatic gains of the workers’ movement. This was exactly what the reformists did at the end of the 19th century. As for us, we await the results of this “research” with considerable impatience; and we will be happy to confront them with marxist theory and the reality of the present historical evolution of capitalism. But it should be said that the arguments that are already being used by Battaglia don’t augur very well. From this rapid historical survey of the different positions Battaglia has taken up on decadence we can already say that while the Juniors have replaced the Seniors, the opportunist method remains the same.

A return to the idealism of the utopian socialists

For Battaglia, as for the utopian socialists, the revolution is not the product of any historic necessity whose roots lie in the impasse of capitalist decadence, as Marx, Engels and Luxemburg taught us: “the universality towards which it is perpetually striving finds limitations in its own nature, which at a certain stage of its development will make it appear as itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, leading thus to its own self-destruction”(Marx, op cit) “The task of economic science is rather to show that the social abuses which have recently been developing are necessary consequences of the existing mode of production, but at the same time also indications of its approaching dissolution, and to reveal within the already dissolving economic form of motion, the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses” (Engels, Anti-Dühring part II, ‘Political Economy: Subject Matter and Method’); “From the standpoint of scientific socialism, the historical necessity of the socialist revolution manifests itself above all in the growing anarchy of capitalism which drives the system into an impasse” (Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, ‘The opportunist method’). For marxism, the “self-destruction” (Marx), “dissolution” (Engels) and “impasse” (Luxemburg) that come with the decadence of capitalism are an indispensable condition for going beyond this mode of production; but they do not at all imply its automatic disappearance, since “only the hammer blow of revolution, that is, the conquest of political power by the proletariat, can break down this wall” (Luxemburg, op cit, ‘Tariff policy and militarism’). The “Self-destruction” (Marx), “dissolution” (Engels), and “impasse” (Luxemburg) that come with the decadence of capitalism create the conditions for revolution, they are the granite base without which “socialism ceases to be an historical necessity. It then becomes anything you want to call it, except the result of the material development of society” (Social Reform or Revolution, ‘The opportunist method’). Just as the centuries of Roman and feudal decadence were necessary for the emergence of the objective and subjective conditions required for the dawn of a new mode of production, the impasse of the decadence of capitalism is what proves to the proletariat that this mode of production is historically reactionary. Contrary to what Battaglia thinks, “It is not true that socialism will arise automatically and under all circumstances from the daily struggles of the workers. Socialism will be the consequence only of the ever growing contradictions of capitalist economy and the comprehension by the working class of the suppression of these contradictions can only come about through a social transformation” (ibid, ‘Practical consequences and general characteristics of revisionism’).

Marxism does not say that the revolution is inevitable. It does not deny will as a factor in history: it demonstrates that will is not enough; that it is realised in a material framework which is the product of an evolution, a historical dynamic, which it has to take into account in order to be effective. The importance which marxism gives to understanding the “real conditions”, the “objective conditions” is not a denial of consciousness and will. On the contrary it is the only firm basis for affirming them. If capitalism “reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions”, (Battaglia), where can we find the objective foundations for socialism? As Rosa Luxemburg reminds us, “According to Marx, the rebellion of the workers, the class struggle, is only the ideological reflection of the objective historical necessity of socialism, resulting from the objective impossibility of capitalism at a certain economic stage. Of course, this does not mean (it still seems necessary to point out to the ‘experts’) that the historical process has to be, or even could be, exhausted to the very limit of this economic impossibility. Long before this, the objective tendency of capitalist development in this direction is sufficient to produce such a social and political sharpening of contradictions in society that they must terminate. But these social and political contradictions are essentially only a product of the economic indefensibility of capitalism. The situation continues to sharpen as this becomes increasingly obvious. If we assume, with the ‘experts’ [like Battaglia], the economic infinity of capitalist accumulation, then the vital foundations on which socialism rests will disappear. We then take refuge in the mist of the pre-marxist systems and schools which attempted to deduce socialism solely on the basis of the injustice and evils of today’s world and the revolutionary determination of the working classes (…) The absolute and undivided rule of capital aggravates class struggle throughout the world and the international economic and political anarchy to such an extent that, long before the last consequences of economic development, it must lead to the rebellion of the international proletariat against the existence of the rule of capital” (The Accumulation of Capital, An Anti-critique, ‘The critics’ 1972 US edition).

It is not because the immense majority of human beings are exploited that socialism is today a historical necessity. Exploitation reigned under slavery, feudalism and under capitalism in the 19th century without socialism having the least chance of being realised. For socialism to become a reality, it is not only necessary for the means of installing it (working class and means of production) to be sufficiently developed. It is also necessary that the system which it has to replace – capitalism – has ceased being a system indispensable to the development of the productive forces and has become a growing obstacle to it, i.e. that it has entered its phase of decadence: “The greatest conquest in the development of the proletarian class struggle was the discovery that the point of departure for the realisation of socialism lies in the economic relations of capitalist society. As a result, socialism was changed from an ‘ideal’ dreamed by humanity for thousands of years to an historical necessity” (Social Reform or Revolution, ‘Economic development and socialism’). The inevitable error of the utopians resided in their view of the march of history. For them, its outcome could be decided by the good will of certain groups of individuals: Babeuf or Blanqui put their hopes on small groups of determined workers; Saint-Simon, Fourier or Owen even addressed themselves to the benevolence of the bourgeoisie for carrying out their projects. The appearance of the proletariat as an autonomous class during the revolution of 1848 was to show that socialism could only be accomplished by a class. It confirmed the thesis that Marx had already set out in the Communist Manifesto: since the division of society into classes, the history of humanity has been the history of the class struggle. From then on the evolution of society could only be understood within the framework which determined these struggles, i.e. in the evolution of the social relations which link men together and divide them into classes for the production of their means of existence: the social relations of production. To know whether socialism is possible you therefore have to decide whether or not these social relations of production have become a barrier to the development of the productive forces and thus demand the replacement of capitalism by socialism. For Battaglia, on the other hand, whatever the global historic context in which capitalism is evolving, “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 premises, 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” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°32).Thus the class struggle, combined with an episode of economic crisis, is enough to open up the possibility of a revolutionary outcome: “Despite capitalism's undoubted success at containing the class struggle its contradictions persist. As Marxists we know they cannot be contained for eternity. The explosion of these contradictions will not necessarily result in victorious revolution. In the imperialist era global war is capital's way of 'controlling', of temporarily resolving, its contradictions. However, before this happens the possibility remains that the bourgeoisie's political and ideological grip on the working class may be broken. In other words, sudden waves of mass class struggle may occur and revolutionaries have to be prepared for these. When the class once again takes the initiative and begins to use its collective strength against capital's attacks, revolutionary political organisations need to be in a position to lead the necessary political and organisational battles against the forces of the left bourgeoisie”.

For Battaglia there is no need to decide whether the social relations of production have become historically obsolete, no need for the opening up of a period of decadence, because the system “receives new blood through the destruction of excess capital and means of production”, and, after each crisis “ the economic system reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions”.

The conditions needed for revolution

The fact that Marx was able to say that “all this shit of political economy ends up in the class struggle”, even though he spent a good part of his life on the critique of political economy, shows that while it is the class struggle that provides the decisive factor, the motor of history, he still accorded a great deal of attention to its objective foundations, to the economic, social and political context in which it unfolds. To repeat this after him, like Battaglia does, is just to kick an open door because no one, from Marx himself to the ICC, claims that only one of these factors (economic crisis or the class struggle) is enough to overthrow capitalism. On the other hand, what Battaglia does not understand is that, even together, these two factors remain insufficient! The point here is that periods of economic crisis linked to class conflicts have existed since the first days of capitalism, without in any way opening up the possibility of overthrowing capitalism. What Marx showed through historical materialism is that at least three conditions are indispensable: an episode of crisis, class conflicts, but also the decadence of a mode of production (in this case capitalism). This is what the founders of marxism understood very well: after thinking on a number of occasions that capitalism had had its day, they were able to revise their diagnosis each time (for a brief history of the analysis Marx and Engels made of the conditions and moment of the arrival of decadence we refer the reader to n°118 of the International Review). Engels was to conclude this inquiry in his 1895 introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, when he writes that “History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent (...) this only proves, once and for all, how impossible it was in 1848 to win social reconstruction by a simple surprise attack”.

But that’s not all, because what Battaglia has never understood is that a fourth condition is required for the outbreak of a period favourable to victorious insurrectional movements: the opening of a historic course towards class confrontations. In the 1930s, the first three minimal conditions (economic crisis, social conflicts and the period of decadence) were present, but they were present in a historic course leading towards imperialist war. Understanding this was the major contribution of the Italian Fraction. In coherence with the analysis of the Communist International which defined the period opened up by the First World War as “the era of wars and revolutions”, it was the Fraction which developed the analysis of the historic course towards class confrontations or towards war. The Gauche Communiste de France (1942-1952) – and after that the ICC – took up and developed this analysis but they were not its progenitors as Battaglia untruthfully claims: “The schematic conception of historic periods – itself historically belonging to the French Communist Left to which the ICC owes its existence – characterises historic periods as revolutionary or counter-revolutionary on the basis of abstract deliberations about the condition of the working class” (Internationalist Communist n°21). This falsification of birth certificates allows Battaglia to dishonestly throw discredit on our political ancestors while at the same time claiming the inheritance of the Italian Fraction without really having to pronounce on its essential theoretical contributions.

The necessity for a historical framework for elaborating class positions

“Has capitalism outlived itself? Or to put it differently: Is capitalism still capable of developing the productive forces on a world scale and of heading mankind forward? This is a fundamental question. It is of decisive significance for the proletariat…” (Trotsky, Europe and America, 1926). This question is indeed fundamental, decisive for the proletariat as Trotsky says, because working out whether a mode of production is ascendant or decadent means knowing whether it is still progressive for the development of humanity or whether historically speaking it has had its day. Knowing whether capitalism still has something to offer the world or whether it has become obsolete implies consequences that are radically different as regards the strategy and political positions of the proletariat. Trotsky was well aware of this when he continued his reflections about the nature of the Russian revolution: “If it turned out that capitalism is still capable of fulfilling a progressive historical mission, of increasing the wealth of the peoples, of making their labour more productive, that would signify that we, the Communist Party of the USSR, were premature in singing its de profundis; in other words, it would signify that we took power too soon to try to build socialism. Because, as Marx explained, no social system disappears before exhausting all the possibilities latent in it”. Those who are abandoning the theory of decadence should meditate on these words of Trotsky because they will end up concluding that the Mensheviks were right, that it was indeed the bourgeois revolution that was on the agenda in Russia and not the proletarian revolution, that the foundation of the Communist International was based on an illusion, that the methods of struggle which were applicable in the 19th century are still valid today and so on. Trotsky, as a consistent marxist, replied without hesitation: “But the war itself was not an accidental phenomenon. It was the blind revolt of the productive forces against capitalist forms, including those of the national state. The productive forces created by capitalism could no longer be contained within the framework of the social forms of capitalism” (ibid). This diagnosis – the end of the historically progressive role of capitalism and the significance of the First World War as marking the passage from its ascendant to its decadent phase – was shared by all the revolutionaries of that time, including Lenin: “From the liberator of nations which it was in the struggle against feudalism, capitalism in its imperialist stage has turned into 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 adopting socialism or of experiencing 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” (Socialism and War, ‘The present war is an imperialist war’. Collected Works, Vol 21, p.301-2).

If, in Battaglia’s terms, you argue that capitalism “reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions”, not only are you turning your back on the materialist, marxist foundations of the possibility of revolution as we have just seen, but you also prevent yourself from understanding why hundreds of millions of human beings will decide one day to risk their lives in a civil war to replace this system with another, because, as Engels says: “So long as a mode of production still describes an ascending curve of development, it is enthusiastically welcomed even by those who come off worst from its corresponding mode of distribution. This was the case with the English workers in the beginnings of modern industry. And even while this mode of production remains normal for society, there is, in general, contentment with the distribution, and if objections to it begin to be raised, these come from within the ruling class itself (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) and find no response whatever among the exploited masses” Anti-Dühring Part II, ‘Political Economy: Subject matter and method’). Whereas when capitalism enters its phase of decadence, we have the material and (at certain moments) the subjective bases for the proletariat to find the conditions and the reasons to make the insurrection. Thus Engels continues as follows: “Only when the mode of production in question has already described a good part of its descending curve, when it has half outlived its day, when the conditions of its existence have to a large extent disappeared, and its successor is already knocking at the door — it is only at this stage that the constantly increasing inequality of distribution appears as unjust, it is only then that appeal is made from the facts which have had their day to so-called eternal justice. From a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morality and justice does not help us an inch further; moral indignation, however justifiable, cannot serve economic science as an argument, but only as a symptom. The task of economic science is rather to show that the social abuses which have recently been developing are necessary consequences of the existing mode of production, but at the same time also indications of its approaching dissolution - and to reveal within the already dissolving economic form of motion, the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses” (ibid).

This is what Battaglia, by abandoning the concept of decadence, is now starting to forget: its “economic science” no longer serves to show “the social anomalies”, “the indications of the approaching dissolution” of capitalism, which is what the founders of marxism exhorted us to do; it serves instead to repackage leftist and alternative worldist prose about the survival of capitalism through the use of finance capital, the recomposition of the proletariat, the “new industrial revolution” based on the microchip etc “The long resistance of western capital to the crisis of the accumulation cycle (or to the concretisation of the tendency to the rate of profit to fall) has up until now avoided the vertical collapse which has hit the state capitalism of the Soviet empire. Such a resistance has been made possible by four fundamental factors: (1) the sophistication of financial controls at an international level; (2) a profound restructuring of the productive apparatus which has brought about a dizzying rise in productivity…(3) the consequent demolition of the previous class composition, with the disappearance of the tasks and roles that have become out of date and the appearance of new tasks, new roles and new proletarian forces (…) The restructuring of the productive apparatus has arrived at the same time as what we can call the third industrial revolution experienced by capitalism…the third industrial revolution is marked by the microprocessor” (Prometeo n°8, ‘Draft theses of the IBRP on the working class in the current period and its perspectives’).

When Battaglia did defend the concept of decadence, it affirmed very clearly that “Two world wars and the present crisis are the historical proof of what the continued existence of an economic system as decadent as capitalism means at the level of the class struggle”,[18] [18] whereas having abandoned it, it now thinks that “the solution of war appears as the principal means of resolving capital’s problems of valorisation” and that wars have the function of “regulating relations between different sectors of international capital”, or, as it says in the IBRP platform of 1997 “global war can represent for capital a momentary way of resolving its contradictions”

Whereas at its IVth Congress, in the 'Theses on the Trade Unions Today and Communist Action',[19] [19] Battaglia was still capable of referring to the following passage from its trade union conference of 1947: “In the current phase of the decadence of capitalist society the trade union is destined to serve as an essential instrument of the policy of conservation and thus to assume the precise functions of a state organism”, we are now told that today the trade union is still able to defend the immediate interests of the working class when the decennial curve of the rate of profit is on the rise: “Everything that union struggles won on the reformist terrain, i.e. on the terrain of union and institutional mediation, in the domain of health, insurance, schooling, in the ascendant phase of the cycle (in the 50s and partly in the 70s) ” and a counter-revolutionary role when the curve is descending: “The trade union – always an instrument of mediation between capital and labour as regards the price and conditions of the sale of labour power – has modified not the substance, but the sense of mediation: it’s no longer workers’ interests which are represented and defended against capital, but the interests of capital which are defended and masked within the working class. This is because – especially in the period of crisis in the accumulation cycle – the mere defence of the immediate interests of the workers against the attacks of capital directly puts into question the stability and survival of capitalist relations” (Prometeo n°8, ‘Draft theses…’). The unions therefore have a dual function according to whether the rate of profit is up or down. A real triumph for vulgar materialism, this one.

Even the nature of the Stalinist and social democratic parties is up for reconsideration! They are now presented as parties which did defend the immediate interests of the workers, since they had once “played the role of mediating the immediate interests of the proletariat within the western democracies, in coherence with the classic role of social democracy”, whereas after the fall of the Berlin Wall “the failure of ‘real socialism’ led them to maintain their role as national parties but also to abandon the class as the object of democratic mediation (…) the fact remains that the working class thus finds itself completely abandoned to the increasingly violent attacks of capital” (ibid). Are we dreaming? Are we really seeing Battaglia shedding tears over the fact that bourgeois institutions like the Stalinists and social democrats have supposedly lost their former ability to defend the immediate interests of the workers?

Similarly, instead of understanding the system of social security at the end of the second world war as a particularly pernicious policy of state capitalism aimed at transforming solidarity within the working class into economic dependence on the state, Battaglia sees it as working class conquest, a real social reform: “During the 1950s, the capitalist economies got back on course… This was undeniably manifested in an improvement in workers’ living conditions (social security, collective bargaining, wage increases…). These concessions were made by the bourgeoisie under pressure from the workers…” (IBRP, in Bilan et Perspectives no. 4, p 5-7). Even more serious is the fact that Battaglia even sees “collective bargaining”, the agreements which allow the unions to act as police in the factories, as an example of “social gains wrested through powerful struggles”.

We don’t have the space here to go into detail about all the political regressions that have followed Battaglia’s definitive abandonment of the framework of decadence for elaborating class positions. We will come back to these regressions in other articles. We simply want to show a few examples that will enable the reader to understand that between abandoning decadence and adopting typically leftist positions, the road is very short, terribly short! And when Battaglia spends page after page telling us that it is necessary to understand the new changes going on in the world and that we are incapable of doing this,[20] [20] it doesn’t see that by abandoning the framework of decadence, it is following the same path as the one taken by the reformists at the end of the 19th century: it was also in the name of “understanding the new realities at the end of the 19th century” that Bernstein and Co. justified their revision of marxism. By definitively abandoning the theory of decadence, Battaglia believes it has made a great step forward towards understanding “the new realities of the world”. In fact it is on the verge of returning to the 19th century. If “understanding the new realities of the world” means swapping the marxist lens of decadence theory for the lenses of leftism, then no thanks! We can see very clearly how the recurring absence of the notion of decadence from its successive platforms (with the exception of its integration into its basic positions at the time of the International Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left) is at the origin of all Battaglia’s opportunist deviations since its inception.

Conclusion

Behind its very theoretical pretensions, Battaglia’s critiques of the concept of decadence are in the end no more than a re-edition of the ones put forward by Bordiga 50 years ago. In this sense, Battaglia is going back to its original Bordigist roots. The criticism of the alleged “fatalism” of the theory of decadence was already made by Bordiga at the Rome meeting of 1951: “the current affirmation that capitalism is in its descending branch and cannot climb up again contains two errors: one fatalist, the other gradualist”. As for Battaglia’s other criticism of the theory of decadence, according to which capitalism “gains new strength through the destruction of capital and excess means of production” and that thus “the economic system reproduces itself, re-living all its contradictions at a higher level”, this was also put forward by Bordiga at the same Rome meeting: “The marxist vision can be represented by as so many ascending branches reaching their zenith…”; and in his Dialogue with the Dead: “capitalism grows without stopping and beyond all limits…” However, we have seen that this is not the vision of marxism, either of Marx: “the universality towards which it is perpetually striving finds limitations in its own nature, which at a certain stage of its development will make it appear as itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, leading thus to its own self-destruction"[21] [21] or Engels: [22] [22]

What marxism affirms is not that the communist revolution is the inevitable result of the mortal contradictions which take capitalism to the point where it renders itself impossible (Engels) and pushes towards its self-destruction (Marx), but that, if the proletariat is not able to carry out its historical mission, the future will not be that of a capitalism which “ reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions” and which “grows without stopping beyond all limits” as Battaglia and Bordiga claim, but that the future of capitalism is barbarism, the real thing, the barbarism that has not ceased developing since 1914, from the butchery of Verdun to the Cambodian or Rwandan genocides by way of the Holocaust, the Gulag and Hiroshima. To understand what is meant by the alternative socialism or barbarism is to understand the decadence of capitalism.

When flattery takes the place of a political line

In the above article, as well as in the first part (International Review n°119), we examined in detail how Battaglia Comunista, under the cover of “redefining the concept” is actually abandoning the marxist notion of decadence which is at the heart of the historical materialist analysis of the various modes of production in history. We also demonstrated the typically parasitic method of the “Internal Fraction of the ICC”, which uses flattery to gain favour with the IBRP. In n°26 of its Bulletin, in an article entitled ‘Comments on an article by the IBRP, Automatic collapse or proletarian revolution’, the IFICC persists in this method. Thus Battaglia’s article is warmly saluted: “We want to salute and underline the importance of the publication of this article…” and is not seen for what it is: a grave opportunist deviation which distances itself from historical materialism in understanding the political, social and economic conditions of the succession of modes of production. The IFICC even dares to assert, with the superb dishonesty which is its hallmark, that Battaglia in its article “explicitly recognises the existence of an ascendant phase and another, decadent phase in capitalism”. For our part, we don’t take our readers for brainless imbeciles like the IFICC does. We will let them judge the validity of this affirmation by reading our two critical articles.[23] [23]

Evidently, in due deference to the parasitic method, the praise heaped on Battaglia must be accompanied by a swift kick in the direction of the ICC: we are now accused of developing “a new theory of the automatic collapse of capitalism” (Bulletin n°26), thus relaying Battaglia’s charge of fatalism against the marxist concept of decadence and, by ricochet, its rejection of the marxist concept of decomposition: “We cannot finish this rapid survey of theories of the ‘collapse’ without evoking the theory of social decomposition defended by the ICC today (…) We want to draw attention to the way this theory…has more and more become a theory whose characteristics are analogous with past theories of collapse (…) It is certain, as the IBRP points out, that both the theory of ‘collapse’ and the theory of ‘decomposition’ end up having ‘negative repercussions on the political level, generating the hypothesis that to see the death of capitalism, it’s enough to sit on the sidelines’” (ibid). And the IFICC repeats ad nauseam that the ICC “refuses to answer the fundamental question we are posing: the ‘official’ introduction by the 15th Congress of the ICC of a third way substituting for the historic alternative between war and revolution, is it or is it not a revision of marxism?” (Bulletin n°26, ‘Truth can sometimes be found in the details’). Let us make it clear that at its 15th Congress the ICC did no more than reaffirm what marxism has always defended since the Communist Manifesto, i.e. that “a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large” (Marx) is not at all inevitable since, as he said, if the classes in struggle are unable to find the strength needed to cut through the socio-economic contradictions, society will sink into a phase of “the mutual ruin of the contending classes”. Marx did not defend a phantasmagoric “third way”: he was simply consistent with historical materialism which refutes the fatalist vision according to which social contradictions will be resolved automatically by the victory of one of the two classes in struggle. According to the IFICC, we refuse to recognise that “the historic impasse can only be momentary” (Bulletin n°26, ‘Comments…’). Indeed, with Marx, we refuse to recognise a merely “momentary” historical impasse; along with him, we think that a blockage in the relations of force between the classes can indeed lead “to the mutual ruin of the contending classes”. To paraphrase the IFICC, we throw the question back at them: the IFICC’s introduction of the idea that “the historic impasse can only be momentary”, is this or is it not a revision of marxism?

In reality, in its parasitic and destructive approach to the proletarian political milieu, the IFICC is not seeking to ‘debate’ as it claims; it simply uses everything it can to add support to its delirious thesis about the ‘degeneration’ of the ICC. In doing so it reveals its ignorance of the elementary foundations of historical materialism, seeing only its own characteristics when it looks at others, in this case automatism and fatalism in the resolution of historic contradictions between the classes.

In our article in International Review n°118 we showed, with the support of numerous citations from their entire work, including the Manifesto and Capital, that the concept of the decadence of a mode of production has its real origins in Marx and Engels. In its crusade against our organisation, the IFICC doesn’t hesitate to borrow from the arguments of those academicist or parasitic groups who claim that the concept of decadence has its origins elsewhere than in the founders of marxism. Thus for the IFICC (Bulletin n°24, April 2004), the theory of decadence was born at the end of the 19th century: “We have presented the origin of the notion of decadence around the debates on imperialism and the historic alternative between war and revolution which took place at the end of the 19th century faced with the profound changes that capitalism was going through”. This lends support to a similar idea defended by Battaglia (Internationalist Communist no. 21), for whom the concept of decadence is “as universal as it is confusing… alien to the critique of political economy”, and which, in addition, “never appears in the three volumes constituting Capital”; or again that Marx only evoked the notion of decadence once in his entire work: “Marx limited himself to giving a definition of capitalism as progressive only in the historic phase in which it eliminated the economic world of feudalism, proposing itself as a powerful means of the 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”. Between flattery and prostitution the line is quickly crossed. The IFICC, which has the cheek to present itself as the great defender of the theory of decadence, has already crossed it.

C. Mcl

"In Western Europe revolutionary syndicalism in many countries was a direct and inevitable result of opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism. In our country, too, the first steps of "Duma activity" increased opportunism to a tremendous extent and reduced the Mensheviks to servility before the Cadets (...) Syndicalism cannot help developing on Russian soil as a reaction against this shameful conduct of 'distinguished' Social-Democrats".[1] [53] These words of Lenin's, which we quoted in the previous article in this series, are wholly applicable to the situation in France at the beginning of the 20th century. For many militants, disgusted by "opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism", the French Confédération générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labour - CGT) served as a beacon for the new "self-sufficient" (to use the words of Pierre Monatte[2] [54]) and "revolutionary" syndicalism. But whereas the development of "revolutionary syndicalism" was an international phenomenon within the proletariat of the time, the specific social and political situation in France made it possible for anarchism to play a particularly important role in the development of the CGT. This conjunction between a real proletarian reaction against the opportunism of the 2nd International and the old unions on the one hand, and the influence of anarchist ideas typical of the artisan petty bourgeoisie on the other, formed the basis of what has since become known as anarcho-syndicalism.

The role played by the CGT as a concrete example of anarcho-syndicalist ideas has since been eclipsed by that played during the so-called "Spanish revolution" by the Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT), which can be considered as the veritablem prototype of an anarcho-syndicalist organisation.[3] [55] Nonetheless, the CGT, founded fifteen years before the Spanish CNT, was heavily influenced, if not dominated, by the anarcho-syndicalist current. In this sense, the experience of the struggles led by the CGT during this period, and above all of the attitude adopted by the CGT at the outbreak of the first great imperialist slaughter in 1914, thus constitutes the first great theoretical and practical test for anarcho-syndicalism.

This article (the second in the series begun in the last issue of this Review) will thus examine the period from the foundation of the CGT at the 1895 Limoges congress, up to the catastrophic betrayal of 1914 which saw the vast majority of trades unions in the belligerent countries give their unswerving support to the war effort of the bourgeois state.

What do we mean by the "anarcho-syndicalism" of the CGT? Let us recall that the previous article in this series (see International Review n°118) made several important distinctions between revolutionary syndicalism properly so called, and anarcho-syndicalism:

– On the question of internationalism: the two major organisations to be dominated by anarcho-syndicalism (the French CGT and the Spanish CNT) both sank with the defence of the "Union sacree"[4] [56] in 1914 and 1936 respectively, whereas the revolutionary syndicalists (notably the Industrial Workers of the World, violently suppressed precisely because of their internationalist opposition to the war in 1914) remained - despite their weaknesses - on a class terrain. As we shall see, the CGT's opposition to militarism and war prior to 1914 was more akin to pacifism than to proletarian internationalism for which "the workers have no country": the anarcho-syndicalists of the CGT were to "discover" in 1914 that French workers did in fact have a duty to defend the fatherland of the French revolution of 1789 against the yoke of Prussian militarism.

– On the level of political action, revolutionary syndicalism remained open to the activity of political organisations (Socialist Party of America and Socialist Labor Party in the US, the SLP and - after the war - the Communist International in Britain).

– On the level of centralisation, anarcho-syndicalism is by principle federalist: each union remains independent of the others, whereas revolutionary syndicalism favours the growing political and organisational unity of the class.

This distinction was not at all clear to the protagonists of the time: up to a point, they shared a common language and common ideas. However, the same words did not always have the same meaning, nor imply the same practice, depending on who used them. Moreover, unlike the socialist movement, there was no syndicalist international where disagreements could be confronted and clarified. To be schematic, we can say that revolutionary syndicalism represented a real effort within the proletariat to find an answer to the opportunism of the socialist parties and unions, while anarcho-syndicalism represented the influence of anarchism within this movement. It is no accident that anarcho-syndicalism developed in two countries relatively less developed industrially, and more deeply marked by the weight of the small artisans and peasantry: France and Spain. It is obviously impossible, in the space of one article, to give a detailed account of such a complex and turbulent moment in history, and one should always beware of the danger of schematism. That said, the distinction remains valid in its main outline, and our intention here is therefore to see whether or not the principles of anarcho-syndicalism, as they were expressed in the CGT before 1914, proved adequate in the face of events.[5] [57]

The Commune and the IWA

The workers' movement during this period was profoundly marked by an event, and a historical tradition: le Paris Commune, and the International Workingmen's Association (IWA, also known as the First International). The experience of the Commune, the first attempt by the working class to seize power, drowned in blood by the Versailles government in 1871, left French workers with a deep distrust of the bourgeois state. As for IWA, the CGT explicitly claimed a direct descent from the International, as for example in this text by Emile Pouget:[6] [58] "The Party of Labour finds its organic expression in the CGT (...) the Party of Labour descends in direct line from the International Workingmen's Association, of which it is the historical prolongation".[7] [59] More specifically, for Pouget, one of the CGT's main propagandists, the Confederation found its inspiration in the federalist wing of the IWA (ie, the supporters of Bakunin), and in the slogan "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves", against the "authoritarian" supporters of Marx. The irony inherent in this affiliation completely escaped Pouget, as indeed it has escaped the anarchists ever since. The famous expression that we have just cited comes, not from the anarchist Bakunin, but from the opening paragraph of the IWA's statutes, drawn up by none other than that dreadful authoritarian Karl Marx, several years before Bakunin joined the International. Bakunin, by contrast, whom the anarchists of the CGT took as their reference, preferred the secret dictatorship of the revolutionary organisation, supposed to be the "revolutionary general staff":[8] [60] "Rejecting any power, by what power or rather by what force shall we direct the people's revolution? An invisible force--recognised by no one, imposed by no one--through which the collective dictatorship of our organization will be all the mightier, the more it remains invisible and unacknowledged?".[9] [61] We should insist here on the difference between the marxist view of class organisation, and that of the anarchist Bakunin: it is the difference between the open organisation of proletarian power by the mass of workers themselves, and the vision the "people" as an amorphous mass, which needs the guidance of the invisible hand of the "secret dictatorship" of revolutionaries.

The historical context

Anarcho-syndicalism developed in France against a very specific historical background. The 20th century before 1914 is a watershed, where capitalism reached its apogee, only to plunge into the appalling massacre of the First World War which marked capitalism's definitive decadence as a social system. From the Fashoda incident of 1898 (where British and French troops faced off in the Sudan, in a competition for the domination of Africa), to the Agadir incident 1911 (when Germany sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir in an attempt to profit from France's difficulties in Morocco), and to the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, generalised European war became an ever more present and more alarming danger. When war finally broke out in 1914, it came as a surprise to nobody: neither for the ruling class, which had for years been engaged in a frantic arms race, nor for the workers' movement (resolutions against the danger of war had been voted by the Second International's congresses of Basel and Stuttgart, as well as by the congresses of the CGT).

Generalised imperialist war raises capitalist competition to a higher level, and it demands nothing less than the organisation of the entire strength of the nation for victory. The bourgeoisie was obliged to undertake a fundamental modification of its social organisation: state capitalism, where the state directs all the nation's economic and social resources in a fight to the death against the opposing imperialism (nationalisation of key industries, industrial regulation, militarisation of labour, etc.). Labour power must be organised to run war industries, and the workers must be ready to accept the resulting sacrifices. Above all, it is necessary to attach the working class to the defence of the nation and to national unity.[10] [62] The result is an enormous swelling in the apparatus of social control, and the integration of the trades unions into this apparatus. This development of state capitalism represents a qualitative mutation of capitalist society which is one of the fundamental characteristics of its decadence. Needless to say, the bourgeoisie did not understand that the change in epoch that appeared in broad daylight in 1914 represented a critical moment for its social system. However, it understood very well - especially the French bourgeoisie with the experience of the Paris Commune behind it - that before it could launch a military adventure, it was necessary first to tame the workers' organisations. The years preceding 1914 thus saw the preparation for the integration of the unions into the state.

The period before the war was thus an ambiguous one: on the one hand, an apparent increase in the power and the success of the proletarian movement, crowned by reforms voted in parliament supposedly to improve the workers' condition; on the other, these reforms had the aim of attaching the working class to the state, in particular by incorporating the trades unions into the management of these reforms.

For their part, the defeat of the Commune left the workers with a deep distrust towards any attempt by the state to involve itself in their affairs. The first union congress held after 1871 (the Paris congress of 1876) refused to accept the offer of a 100,000 franc government subsidy; the delegate Calvinhac declared: "Oh! Let us learn to do without this support, typical of the bourgeoisie for whom governmentalism is an ideal. It is our enemy. Its purpose in our affairs can only be to regulate; and you can be sure that the regulation will always be to the benefit of the rulers. Let us demand only complete freedom, and our dreams will be realised when we decide to look after our affairs ourselves" (quoted in Pelloutier's L'histoire des Bourses..., p86).

In principle, this position should have met with the steadfast support of the anarcho-syndicalists, violently opposed as they were to anything resembling "political" (ie., in their view, parliamentary or municipal) action. Reality, however, was more nuanced. The first of the Labour Exchanges,[11] [63] in whose development Fernand Pelloutier[12] [64] and the anarcho-syndicalists were to play such an important part, and whose Federation was to become a component of the CGT, was founded in Paris in 1886 following a report, not by the workers' organisations but by the city council (Mesureur report of 5th November 1886). Throughout their existence, until they merged completely with the CGT, the Exchanges maintained a turbulent relationship with local municipal councils: they might be supported, even financed, by the state at one moment, only to be suppressed at another (the Paris Labour Exchange was closed by the army in 1893, for example). Georges Yvetot[13] [65] (who succeeded Pelloutier after the latter's death) even admitted that part of his salary as secretary of the Fédération nationale des Bourses was partly subsidised by the state.

This ambiguity in the anarcho-syndicalists' attitude towards the state appeared even more sharply during the debate within the CGT on the attitude to adopt towards the new law, voted by Parliament in 1910, on workers' and peasants' pensions (the law on the "Retraite ouvrière et paysanne", known as the ROP). Two tendencies appeared: one rejected the ROP because it objected in principle to any state interference in the affairs of the working class, including retirement and pensions, while the other was in favour of winning an immediate reform by making a compromise with the state. The CGT's difficulties in taking position on this law prefigured the rout of 1914. For many militants of the CGT, the real symbol of betrayal was not so much the call to defend France and its revolutionary tradition, but the participation of the "revolutionary" Jouhaux,[14] [66] and even, despite his doubts, of the internationalist Merrheim,[15] [67] in the "Standing committee for the study and prevention of unemployment" set up by the government to deal with the economic disorganisation caused by the mobilisation of French industry for war production.

Given that anarcho-syndicalist principles were so strong within it, how did the CGT switch from its fierce defence of its own independence from the bourgeois state, to participation in the same bourgeois state in order to drag the workers into the imperialist war?

The role of the anarchists in the CGT

Although the CGT was considered a "beacon" by other revolutionary syndicalists, it should be said that the organisation was not "anarcho-syndicalist" as such. Whereas in Spain, the CNT was closely linked to the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica), and competed with the Socialist Party and its union the UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores), in France the CGT was the only national organisation to bring together several hundred union federations. Amongst the latter, some were frankly reformist (in particular the book-workers' union led by Auguste Keufer, who was to be the CGT's first treasurer), or strongly influenced by the Guesdist[16] [68] revolutionary militants of the POF (or of the SFIO[17] [69] after the unification of French socialist parties in 1905). There were also some major unions (such as the reformist "old miners' union" led by Emile Basly) which remained outside the Confederation.

One can even say that the anarchists played only a minor role in the reawakening of the workers' movement in France after the defeat of the Commune. To begin with, the working class was suspicious of anything resembling a supposedly "utopian" vision, as we can see in these words of the founding committee of the 1876 workers' congress: "We wanted the congress to be exclusively working class (...) We should not forget that all the systems, all the utopias, that workers have ever been accused of never came from them; they all came from doubtless well-intentioned bourgeois, who sought remedies for our misfortunes in ideas and fine phrases, rather than seeking advice from our needs and from reality" (quoted in Pelloutier, op.cit., p77). It was doubtless this lack of radicalism in the working class which pushed the anarchists (with some exceptions such as Pelloutier himself) to abandon the workers' organisations in favour of the propaganda of the "exemplary act": bombings, bank raids, and assassinations (the anarchist Ravachol[18] [70] is a classic example).

During the twenty years that followed the 1876 congress, it was not the anarchists but the socialists, in particular the militants of Jules Guesde's POF, who played the most important political role within the French workers movement. The workers' congresses of Marseilles and Lyon saw the victory of the POF's revolutionary theses against the "pro-government" tendency of Barberet, and in 1886 it was again the POF which proposed the creation of the Fédération nationale des Syndicats (FNS). Our intention here is certainly not to sing the praises of Guesde and the POF. Guesde's rigidity - allied to a poor understanding of what the workers' movement really is, and a strong dose of opportunism - meant that the POF tried to limit the role of the FNS to support for the Party's parliamentary campaigns. Moreover, it was against the will of the party leaders that its militants supported - despite their reservations as to the class' level of organisation and so ability to carry it out - the resolutions, at the congresses of Bouscat, Calais, and Marseilles (1888/89/90), declaring that "the general strike, in other words the complete cessation of all work, can lead the workers towards their emancipation". It is thus clear that the resurgence of the workers' movement after the Commune owes a good deal more to the marxists, with all their faults, than to the anarchists. Another example in the same vein (though without in the least belittling Pelloutier's tremendous efforts) is the creation of the FNB, which also owed much to the socialists: the first two secretaries of the FNB were members of Edouard Vaillant's[19] [71] Central Revolutionary Committee.

Until 1894, and the assassination of the French president Sadi-Carnot by the anarchist Caserio, most anarchist militants paid little attention to the trades unions, being much more preoccupied with their "propaganda by the deed" approved by the 1881 international anarchist congress in London. Pelloutier himself recognised this in his famous "letter to the anarchists"[20] [72] of 1899: "Up to now, we anarchists have carried out what I would call our practical propaganda (...) without the slightest unity of viewpoint. Most of us have fluttered from one method to another, without much forethought and without following anything up, at the whim of circumstances. Someone who talked about art yesterday, will be giving a conference on economic action today and thinking about an anti-militarist campaign for tomorrow. Very few have been able to determine a systematic line of action and to hold to it, to obtain a maximum of clear and evident results in a given direction through a continuity of effort. Thus although our written propaganda is marvellous and has no equal in any collectivity - unless it be the Christian collectivity at the dawn of our epoch - our practical propaganda is extremely mediocre (...)

I propose (...) neither a new method, nor unanimous agreement with this method. I only think that, in order to hasten on the 'social revolution' and bring the proletariat to the point where it is able to benefit fully from it, we should not only preach to the four corners of the horizon the individual's mastery of himself and his action, but also prove experimentally to the working masses, within their own institutions, that such a self-government is possible, and also arm them, educate them in the necessity of the revolution against the enervating suggestions of capitalism (...)

For several years, the unions have had a very high and noble ambition. They believe that they have a social mission to fulfil, and instead of considering themselves as purely instruments for resisting economic depression, or merely as officers in the revolutionary army, they intend amongst other things to sow within capitalist society the seeds of those free producers' groups which seem destined to give shape to our communist and anarchist conception. Should we then abstain from their task, and run the risk of seeing them one day discouraged by their difficulties and falling into the arms of the political parties?".

Emile Pouget expressed the same concern much more crudely in 1897, in his Père Peinard: "If there is one grouping that we should stuff with anarchos, then it's obviously the union (...) we made a big mistake in sticking to affinity groups".[21] [73]

These passages reveal the profound difference between anarchism and marxism. For the marxists, there is no separation between the working class and the communists. The latter are part of the proletariat and express the interests of the proletariat as a distinct class in society. As the Communist Manifesto already put it in 1848: "The Communists (...) have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement (…) The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes". Communism[22] [74] is inseparable from the proletariat's existence within capitalism: first because communism only becomes a material possibility from the moment that capitalism has unified the planet in a single world market, secondly because capitalism has created the only class capable of overthrowing the old order and building a new society on the basis of world wide associated labour.

For the anarchists, it is their ideas that count, and these are not anchored in any particular class. For them, the proletariat is only useful inasmuch as the anarchists can use it to give their ideas form, and influence its action. But if the proletariat appears momentarily to be out of the picture, then any other group will suit just as well: the peasantry of course, but also craftsmen, students, "oppressed nations", women, minorities... or simply "the people" in general, who are to be galvanised into action thanks to the "propaganda of the deed".

This anarchist view of the proletariat as a mere "means", made many anarchists view the rise of revolutionary syndicalism with some suspicion. Hence Errico Malatesta's reply to Monatte's theorisation of revolutionary syndicalism, in 1907 at the international anarchist Congress in Amsterdam: "The workers' movement is to me nothing more than a means - the best of all the means that are offered to us (...) the syndicalists are trying to make the means into an end (...) and so syndicalism is becoming a new doctrine and threatening the very existence of anarchism (...) Even if it adorns itself with the thoroughly useless adjective 'revolutionary', syndicalism is not and never will be anything other than a legalist and conservative movement - without any other attainable goal -and even that is not sure! - than the improvement of labour conditions (...) I repeat: the anarchists muct join the workers' unions. First of all to conduct anarchist propaganda, and secondly because it is the only way, when the time comes, for us to have at our disposal groups capable of directing the productive process".[23] [75]

The anarchists' return to the trades unions, and so the development of what came to be called anarcho-syndicalism, was contemporaneous with a growing dissatisfaction in the workers' ranks at the parliamentary opportunism of the socialist parties, and the latter's inability to work effectively for the unification of the union organisations in the class struggle. There thus appeared within the ranks of the of the FNS itself, up to then largely under the wing of Guesde's POF, a desire to create a real unitary organisation which could act independently of any party tutelage: so the CGT was founded at the congress of Limoges in 1895. Over the years, the influence of anarcho-syndicalism grew: by 1901, Victor Griffuelhes[24] [76] became secretary of the CGT, while Emile Pouget was press secretary in charge of the CGT's new weekly, La voix du peuple. The CGT's other two main papers were La Vie ouvrière, started by Monatte in 1909, and La Bataille syndicaliste, launched with much greater difficulty and much less success by Griffuelhes in 1911. We can thus say that the influence of anarcho-syndicalism was preponderant in the leading bodies of the CGT.

Let us now take a look at anarcho-syndicalist theory and practice at work in the CGT.

How did anarcho-syndicalism appear in the CGT?

The anarcho-syndicalists in the CGT considered themselves as the partisans of action, as opposed to academic theorising. Here is Emile Pouget in Le parti du travail: "What distinguishes syndicalism from the various schools of socialism - and this is its superiority - is its doctrinal sobriety. There is little philosophising in the unions. We do better. We act! On the neutral economic terrain, elements come together, soaked in the teachings of this or that philosophical, religious, or political school, and by rubbing together they lose their rough edges, retaining only the principals which are common to all: the will for improvements in their lot, and complete emancipation". Pierre Monatte intervened in much the same terms at the Amsterdam anarchist congress: "My aim is not so much to give you a theoretical explanation of revolutionary syndicalism, as to show it you at work, and so to let the facts speak for themselves. Revolutionary syndicalism, unlike the socialism and anarchism which preceded it, has asserted itself less in theory than in action, and it is in action rather than in books that we should look for it".[25] [77]

In his pamphlet on Revolutionary syndicalism, Victor Griffuelhes sums up thus his vision of union action: "syndicalism procalims the duty of the worker to act by himself, to struggle by himself, to fight by himself, these being the only conditions whereby the worker can achieve his complete liberation. Just as the peasant only reaps the fruit of his labour at the cost of his personal efforts (...) Syndicalism, we repeat, is the movement, the action of the working class; it is not the working class itself. That is to say that the producer, by organising together with other producers like himself for the struggle against a common enemy - the boss - by fighting for the union and in the union for the conquest of improvements, creates the action and the form of the workers' movement (...)

[For the Socialist Party] the union is the organ which can only stammer the workers' aspirations, whereas it is the Party which formulates, translates and defends them. For the Party, economic life is concentrated in parliament; everything must converge towards and start from parliament (...)

Since syndicalism is the movement of the working class (...) in other words the groupings that emerge from it can only be made up of wage earners (...) as a result, these groupings exclude those whose economic condition is different from that of the worker".

In his intervention at the Amsterdam congress, Pierre Monatte suggests that the union eradicates political disagreements within the working class: "In the union, differences of opinion which are often so subtle and artificial, fade into the background; as a result, it is possible to reach an understanding. In practical life, interests are more important than ideas: and all the quarrels between different schools and sects cannot prevent the workers from having identical interests, just as they are all equally subject to the same laws of wage labour. And this is the secret of the understanding that has been established between them, this is what gives syndicalism its strength, and which allowed it, at last year's Amiens Congress [in 1906] to assert proudly its self-sufficiency".[26] [78] It should be noted here that Monatte lumps the anarchists together with the socialists.

What can we draw from these quotations? There are four key ideas that we want to emphasise here.

There are no political tendencies in the union, it is politically "neutral". This comes up constantly in anarcho-syndicalist texts from the CGT: the idea that politics is nothing but "the squabbles of rival schools and sects", and that union work, the association of workers in the union struggle, was oblivious to the struggles between tendencies - in other words, "politics". In fact, this idea is far removed from reality. There is nothing automatic in the workers' movement, which is necessarily made of decisions, and of action on the basis of these decisions: these decisions are political acts. And this is even more true for the workers' struggle than for the struggles of all history's previous revolutionary classes. Since the proletarian revolution must be the conscious act of the great mass of the working class, taking decisions must constantly call on the working class' capacity for reflexion and debate every bit as much as on its capacity for action: the two are indissociable. The history of the CGT itself witnessed incessant struggles between different tendencies. First, there was the struggle against the socialists who wanted to tie the CGT more closely to the SFIO, which ended with the defeat of the socialists at the Amiens Congress. Moreover, in order to ensure the union's independence from the party, the anarcho-syndicalists did not hesitate to make an alliance with the reformists, who insisted not only on the federation's independence from the party, but also on the independence of each union within the national federation in order to maintain their own reformist policies within the unions that they dominated. Then there were the struggles between the reformists and the revolutionaries over the succession to Griffuelhes, who had resigned in 1909 and been replaced by the refomist Niel, himself replaced a few months later by the revolutionary candidate Jouhaux who was to bear such a heavy responsibility for the betrayal in 1914.

Politics means parliamentary politics. This idea, for which the incurable parliamentary cretinism (to use Lenin's phrase) of the French socialists was in great part responsible, has absolutely nothing to do with marxism. In 1872, Marx and Engels had already drawn this lesson from the Paris Commune, “where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months”: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”.[27] [79] In the Second International, the beginning of the 20th century was marked by a political struggle within the socialist parties and unions, between the reformists on the one hand, who wanted to integrate the workers' movement into capitalist society, and the left on the other, who defended the movement's revolutionary goal, on the basis of the lessons drawn from the experience of the mass strikes in Holland in 1903, and in Russia in 1905.

Non-workers should be banned from the struggle. This idea was also put forward by Pouget in Le Parti du travail: "This work of social reorganisation can only be elaborated and carried out in a milieu untouched by any bourgeois contamination (...) [the Party of Labour is] the only organism which, by its very constitution, eliminates all the social dross from within itself". This idea is pure nonsense: history is full of examples both of workers who betrayed their class (starting with several anarcho-syndicalist leaders of the CGT), and of those who, though not workers themselves, remained fatihful to the proletariat, and paid for their loyalty with their lives (the lawyer Karl Liebknecht and the intellectual Rosa Luxemburg to name but two).

The essence of the struggle lies in action not "philosophy". We should say first of all that the marxists did not wait for the anarchists to declare that "Philosophers have so far only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it".[28] [80] What is specific about anarcho-syndicalism is not the fact that it "acts", but the idea that action has no need to be based on theoretical reflection; that it is enough, so to say, to eliminate all "foreign" elements from the workers organisations for the "right" action to emerge spontaneously. This ideology is summed up in one of revolutionary syndicalism's most typical slogans: "direct action".

Direct action or the political mass strike?

This is how Pouget describes "The methods of union action" in Le Parti du travail: "[they] are not the expression of majority agreement expressed by the empirical procedure of universal suffrage: they are inspired by the means whereby live is expressed and develops in nature, in its numerous forms and aspects. Just as life began with a point, a cell, so in time it has always been the cell that is the element of fermentation; similarly, in the union milieu, things are always started by the conscious minorities which, through their example and their elan (and not through authoritarian orders) bring under their influence and plus into action the more frigid masses" (op.cit., p227).

We can see here the old anarchist refrain: revolutionary activity happens thanks to the example of the "conscious minority", the mass of the working class being relegated to the status of sheep. This is even clearer in Pouget's book on the CGT: "were the democratic mechanism to be applied by the workers' organisations, the non-will of the unconscious, non-unionised majority would paralyse all action. But the is not disposed to give up its demands and its aspirations before the inertia of the mass not yet animated and vitalised by the spirit of revolt. Consequently, the conscious minority has the obligation to act, without taking account of the refractory (CHECK translation) mass, if it is not to be forced into the spineless condition of the unconscious mass" (op.cit.,p165). It is of course that the working class does not develop the same consciousness all at once: there are always some elements of the class who see further than their comrades. And this is why the communists insist on the need to organise and regroup the vanguard minority into a political organisation capable of intervening in the struggle, of taking part in the development of consciousness throughout the class, and so to create the conditions for the whole class to act consciously and unitedly, in short, to create the conditions whereby "the emancipation of the working class" should really be "conquered by the working classes themselves". But this ability to "see further" does not come from an individual "spirit of revolt" which appears out of the blue for no apparent reason; it is part of the very nature of the historic and international working class, the only class in capitalist society which is obliged to raise itself to an understanding of capitalism and of its own nature as the gravedigger of the old society. A profound reflection on the action of the working class in order to learn the lessons of its victories and - far more often - of its defeats, is obviously a part of this understanding, but it is not its only component: the class which is to undertake the most radical revolution that humanity has ever known, the destruction of class rule and its replacement by the first world wide classless society, needs a consciousness of itself and of its historic mission which goes far beyond mere immediate experience.

This vision is light-years away from the anarchist Pouget's contempt for the "refractory mass": "Who could incriminate the disinterested initiative of the minority? Not the unconscious, whom the militants have barely considered as human zeroes, who have only the numerical value of a zero added to a number, when it is placed to its right" (op.cit.,p166). The anarchist "theory" of direct action thus descends directly from Bakunin's view of the masses as an elemental, but above all as an unconscious force, which consequently needs a "secret general staff" to direct its "revolt".

Other militants insisted on the independent action of the workers themselves: Griffuelhes thus writes that "the wage worker, master of his action at every hour and every minute, exercising his action whenever it seems good to him, never giving up to anyone the right to decide instead of him, preserving as an inestimable possession the possibility and the ability to utter the word which opens or closes an action, takes his inspiration from that ancient and decried conception called direct action; this direct action is nothing other than syndicalism's specific means of fighting and acting". Elsewhere, Griffuelhes compares direct action to a "tool" that workers must learn to use. This vision of workers' action is not marked by Pouget's haughty disdain for the "human zeroes"; nonetheless, it is far from satisfactory. First of all, Griffuelhes expresses a clear individualist tendency, which sees the action of a class as simply the sum of the individual actions of each worker. Consequently, and logically, he has no understanding that the there exists a balance of forces not between individuals, but between social classes. The possibility of successfully undertaking a large-scale action - still more a revolution - depends not on the mere apprenticeship of a "tool", but on the global balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Griffuelhes, and revolutionary syndicalism in general, failed utterly to see that the beginning of the 20th century was a watershed period, where the historical context of the workers' struggle was being completely changed. At the apogee of capitalism, between 1870 and 1900, it was still possible for workers to win lasting victories trade by trade, or even factory by factory, on the one hand because capitalism's unprecedented expansion made it possible, and on the other because of the ruling class itself had not yet taken the form of state capitalism.[29] [81] The militants of the CGT gained their experience during this period, which had made possible an ever greater development of union organisations on the basis of economic struggles. Revolutionary syndicalism, strongly influenced by anarchism in the case of the CGT, was the theorisation of the conditions and experience of a period which had already come to an end. It was inappropriate to the new period that was opening, in which the proletariat would find itself confronted by the choice between war and revolution, and would have to struggle on a terrain that went far beyond that of the economic struggle.

In this new period of capitalism's decadence, reality changed. First of all, the proletariat is not in a position to decide whether or not to struggle for this or that improvement, quite the contrary: 99 times out of 100, the workers enter into struggle in order to defend themselves against an attack (redundancies, wage cuts, factory closures, attacks on the social wage). Moreover, the proletariat is not confronted with a raw material that it can work as if with a tool. On the contrary, the enemy class will as far as possible take the initiative itself, and do all it can to fight on its own terrain, with its own weapons: provocation, violence, deception, untruthful promises, etc. Direct action provides no magic antidote to immunise the proletariat against such methods. What is vital, however, for success in the class struggle, is a political understanding of the whole environment that determines the conditions of the class struggle: what is the situation of capitalism, and of the class struggle world wide, how will the changes in the context within with the proletariat develops its struggle determine the changes in its methods of struggle. Developing this understanding is the task that falls specifically to the class' revolutionary minority, and it was all the more necessary in the period which was to see not a more or less linear rise in the development of the trades unions, but on the contrary a bourgeois offensive which would stop at nothing to crush the proletariat, corrupt its organisations, and drag the class into the imperialist war. And anarcho-syndicalism in the CGT proved absolutely incapable of carrying out this task.

The fundamental reason for this inability was that despite the importance that the anarcho-syndicalists that we have quoted attributed to the workers' experience, the theory of direct action limits this experience to the immediate lessons that each worker or group of workers can draw from his own experience. They thus proved absolutely incapable of drawing the lessons from what was undoubtedly the most important experience of struggle in this period: the Russian revolution of 1905. This is not the place for us to deal with the way that the marxists examined this enormous experience in order to draw from it the maximum number of lessons for the workers' movement. What we can say, however, is that the CGT paid it almost no attention, and on the rare occasions that the anarcho-syndicalists took notice of it, they completely failed to understand it. To take one example, Pouget and Pataud[30] [82] in their novel Comment nous ferons la revolution only refer to 1905 in terms of the bosses unions: "whenever the bourgeoisie (...) has encouraged the emergence of workers groupings, in the hope of holding them on a leash and using them as instruments, it has come a cropper. The most typical example was the formation, in Russia, under the influence of the police and the leadership of the priest Gapone, of scab unions which quickly evolved from conservatism to the class struggle. It was these unions which, in January 1905, took the initiative of a demonstration before the Winter Palace in St Petersburg - which was the starting point for the revolution, which although it failed to overthrow Tsarism nonetheless succeeded in diluting the autocracy". To read these lines, one would think that the strike was launched thanks to the scab unions. In reality, the demonstration led by the priest Gapone came humbly to ask the "little father of the peoples", the Tsar, for an improvement in their living conditions: it was brutal response by the Tsar's troops which provoked the outbreak of a spontaneous uprising in which the major role in the dynamic and the organisation of the workers' action was played, not by the unions but by a new organism, the soviet (the workers' council).

Towards the general strike?

As we have already seen, the notion of the general strike did not come from the anarcho-syndicalists as such, since it had already existed since the beginning of the workers' movement[31] [83] and had been put forward by the Guesdist FNS even before the creation of the CGT. In itself, the general strike might seem to be a natural extrapolation from a situation where the struggles were developing little by little (what could be more logical than to suppose that the workers would become more and more conscious?), the strikes would become larger, to end in the general strike of the whole working class. And this is indeed the vision of the CGT as it is expressed by Griffuelhes: "The general strike (...) is the logical conclusion of the constant action of the proletariat in need of emancipation; it is the multiplication of the struggles undertaken against the bosses. It implies, in the final act, a highly developed sense of the struggle, and a higher practice of action. It is a stage in an evolution both marked and precipitated by sudden upheavals, which (...) will be the general strikes at the level of a trade.

These latter are the necessary gymnastics [of the general strike], just as military manoeuvres are the gymnastics of war".[32] [84]

Another logical conclusion to the reasoning of the revolutionary syndicalists, is that once the strike becomes a general strike, it cannot be anything other than a revolutionary movement. Griffuelhes quotes La Voix du Peuple of 8th May 1904: "the general strike cannot be anything other than the Revolution itself, since otherwise it would be nothing but a new confidence trick. General strikes by trade or by region will precede and prepare it" (ibid.).

Of course, not everything that the revolutionary syndicalists had to say about the rise in struggles towards revolutionary action was false.[33] [85] But the fact is that the syndicalist perspective of an almost linear development in workers' struggles towards a seizure of power by the active minority grouped in the unions, does not correspond to reality. Nor is this any accident. Even if we leave to one side the fact that - in reality - the unions passed over to the ruling class and revealed themselves to be the worst enemies of the working class in its attempts at revolution (Russia 1917 and Germany 1919), there is a fundamental contradiction between the unions and revolutionary power. The unions exist within capitalist society and are inevitably marked by the struggle within capitalism, whereas the revolution stands against capitalist society. The trades unions in particular were organised by trade or by industry, and in the anarcho-syndicalist view, each union jealously guards its own prerogatives and its right to organise as it sees fit to defend the specific interests of the trade. There is thus an obvious incoherence in the idea that the union allows all the workers to unite irrespective of their political affiliation and that therefore the union makes it possible to unite the whole working class, while at the same time the unions maintain the workers' division by trade or by industry.

The revolution by contrast, is not only the work of the most advanced minorities, it rouses to action the whole working class, including those fractions whose consciousness has up to then been most backward. It must allow workers to see and act beyond the divisions imposed on them by the organisation of the capitalist economy; it must discover the organisational means which allow all sectors of the class, from the most advanced to the most backward, to express themselves, to decide, to act. The revolutionary workers' power is thus something very different from the union organisation. Trotsky, elected president of the Petrograd soviet in 1905, expressed it thus: “The soviet organised the masses, directed the political strikes and the demonstrations, and armed the workers…

But other revolutionary organisations had already done this before, did as much at the same time, and continued to do so after the dissolution of the soviets. The difference is that the soviet was, or aspired to be, an organ of power (…)

If the soviet led various strikes to victory, if it successfully settled conflicts between the workers and the bosses, this was absolutely not it existed for this purpose – on the contrary wherever there was a powerful union it often proved better able than the soviet to lead the union struggle. The intervention of the soviet had weight because of the universal authority that it enjoyed. And this authority was due to the fact that it accomplished its fundamental tasks, the tasks of the revolution, which went far beyond the limits of each trade and each town and gave the proletariat as a class a place in the front ranks of the fighters”.[34] [86]

These lines were written at a time when the unions could still be considered as the organs of the working class: but the lessons that they draw from the workers' experience are still valid to this day. If we examine the most important movement that the working class has known since the end of the counter-revolution in 1968 - the mass strike in Poland 1980 - then we can see immediately that the workers, far from using the "scab union" (the unions in Poland were entirely subordinated to the Stalinist state), adopted a quite different organisational form, which prefigured the revolutionary soviets: the assembly of elected and revocable delegates.[35] [87]

1906: the general strike is put to the test

The theory of the general strike according to the anarcho-syndicalists of the CGT was put to the test when the Confederation decided to launch a major campaign for the reduction of the working day, using the general strike.[36] [88] The CGT called on the workers, starting on 1st May 1906, to impose a new working day by stopping work after eight hours.[37] [89] The membership of the CGT was still a small minority of the working class: out of a total potential membership of 13 million workers in 1912,[38] [90] only 108,000 belonged to the CGT in 1902, rising to 331,000 in 1910.[39] [91] The movement would thus be a real test for the anarcho-syndicalist viewpoint: the minority would give the example and so draw the whole working class into a generalised confrontation with the bourgeoisie thanks to the apparently simple method (a “tool” as Griffuelhes would put it) at stopping work at a time decided by the worker and not by the employer. In 1905, the CGT set up a special propaganda commission, which published leaflets, pamphlets, and newspapers, and organised propaganda meetings (over 250 meetings in Paris alone!).

All this preparation was upset by an unexpected event: the terrible disaster of Courrières (10th March 1906), when more than 1,200 miners were killed in an enormous explosion underground. The workers’ anger boiled over and by 16th March 40,000 miners had walked out in a strike that had been neither planned nor desired either by the reformist “old union” led by Emile Basly, or by the revolutionary “young union” led by Benoît Broutchoux.[40] [92] The social situation was explosive: as the miners returned to work after a bitter struggle marked by violent confrontations with the army, other sectors entered the fight and by April 200,000 workers were on strike. In an atmosphere of virtual civil war, Interior Minister Clémenceau prepared the 1st May with a mixture of provocation and repression, including the arrest of Griffuelhes and Lévy, the CGT’s treasurer. The strike met with little support in the provinces, and the 250,000 Parisian strikers found themselves isolated and forced to return to work after two weeks, without having reached their goal. The history of the strikes gives the clear impression that the CGT was in fact ill-prepared to conduct a strike where neither government nor workers acted as expected. In the end, the 1906 strike demonstrated in the negative what the 1905 strike demonstrated in the positive: “If, therefore, the Russian Revolution teaches us anything, it teaches above all that the mass strike is not artificially "made," not "decided" at random, not "propagated," but that it is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability. It is not, therefore, by abstract speculations on the possibility or impossibility, the utility or the injuriousness of the mass strike, but only by an examination of those factors and social conditions out of which the mass strike grows in the present phase of the class struggle–in other words, it is not by subjective criticism of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is desirable, but only by objective investigation of the sources of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is historically inevitable, that the problem can be grasped or even discussed”.[41] [93]

It is the height of irony that when the CGT, which was supposed to allow workers to learn from their experience and to ignore politics, held its Amiens Congress in 1906, far from discussing the experience of the previous months, it spent the greater part of its time dealing with the eminently political question of the relationship between the Confederation and the SFIO!

The CGT and war: a hesitant internationalism

We have already said that nobody was surprised by the outbreak of war in 1914: neither the bourgeoisie of the great imperialist powers, which had been preparing for war in a frantic arms race, nor the workers’ organisations. Like the Second International at its Basel and Stuttgart congresses, the CGT adopted several resolutions against war, notably at the Marseille Congress in 1908, which “declares it necessary, from the international standpoint, to educate the workers so that in the case of war between the powers, the workers will answer the declaration of war by declaring the revolutionary general strike”.[42] [94] And yet, when war broke out, Griffuelhes’ Bataille syndicaliste evoked Bakunin to call workers to arms to “Save France from fifty years of slavery (…) in adopting patriotism, we will save universal freedom”, while Jouhaux, the once “revolutionary” secretary of the CGT, declared at Jaurès’ funeral that “it is not hatred of the German people that will send us to battle, but hatred of German imperialism!”.[43] [95] The treachery of the anarcho-syndicalist CGT was thus every bit as abject as that of the socialists it had once attacked so violently, and the one-time anarchist Jouhuax could even say of the socialist leader Jaurès that “he was our living doctrine”. [44] [96]

How could this happen to the CGT? In reality, and despite its appeals to internationalism, the CGT was more anti-militarist than internationalist, in other words it saw the problem more from the standpoint of the workers’ immediate experience faced with an army that the French bourgeoisie did not hesitate to use for strike-breaking: its way of posing the problem remained French and national, and war was considered as “a distraction to counter the rising demands of the proletariat”.[45] [97] Despite its revolutionary appearance, the CGT’s anti-militarism was in fact closer to pacifism, as we can see in this declaration by the Amiens Congress in 1906: “The intention is to oblige the people to march to war, on the pretext of national honour, of a war that is inevitable because it is defensive (…) the working class wants peace at any price”.[46] [98] This creates an amalgam – typical of anarchism – between the working class and the “people”, and in seeking “peace at any price”, the CGT prepared to throw itself into the arms of a government that maintained the pretence of seeking peace in all good faith: it is just in this way that pacifists become the worst warmongers, when the time comes to call for defence against the militarism… of the enemy.[47] [99]

The book by Pouget and Pataud, which we have already quoted (Comment nous ferons la revolution), is very instructive in this respect, since the revolution that it describes is in fact purely national. The two anarcho-syndicalist authors did not wait for Stalin to envisage the construction of “anarchism in a single country”: once the revolution has been successful in France, a whole chapter of the book is devoted to describing the system of foreign trade, which is to continue commercial operations abroad while production is organised on communist principles within French borders. For marxists, the assertion that “the workers have no country” is not a moral principle, but an expression of the proletariat’s very being as long as capitalism has not been destroyed world wide. For anarchists, it is nothing but a pious hope. This national vision of the revolution is strongly linked to French history and to a tendency common among French anarchists, and even socialists, to consider themselves as the heirs of the bourgeois revolution of 1789: it is therefore hardly surprising that Pouget and Pataud draw their inspiration, not from the Russian experience of 1905, but above all from the French experience of 1789, from the revolutionary armies of 1792, and from the struggle of the French “people” against the reactionary German invader. In this novel of the future, there is a striking contrast between the imagined strategy of a victorious revolutionary France, and the real strategy adopted by the Bolsheviks after the seizure of power in 1917. For the Bolsheviks, the essential tasks were propaganda abroad (for example, in the first days of the revolution, the publication by radio of the secret treaties signed by Russian diplomacy), and winning as much time as possible for fraternisation at the front between Russian and German troops. The new trade-union power in France, on the contrary, has little concern for what is going on abroad, and prepares to repel the invasion by capitalist armies, not by fraternisation and propaganda, but by threats followed by the use of the equivalent (for early 20th century science fiction) of nuclear and bacteriological weapons.

This lack of interest for anything happening outside France can be seen, not just in a future-fiction novel, but also in the CGT’s lack of enthusiasm for building international links. The CGT joined the international secretariat of trades unions, but hardly took it seriously: when Griffuelhes was sent as a delegate to the 1902 union congress in Stuttgart, he was incapable of following the debates, held for the most part in German, or even of finding out whether his motion had been translated. In 1905, the CGT proposed to the German unions the organisation of demonstrations against the danger of war as a result of the Moroccan crisis. But the Germans insisted that any action should be undertaken jointly with the French and German socialist parties; since this went against syndicalist doctrine, the CGT abandoned its initiative. Shortly before the war, an attempt was made to form a revolutionary syndicalist international, but the CGT failed even to send a delegate.

The failure of anarcho-syndicalism

The bankruptcy of the CGT, its betrayal of its own principles and of the working class, and its participation in National Unity in 1914, were no less abject than those of the German or British unions, and we will not recount them here. French anarcho-syndicalism proved no more capable of keeping faith with its principles and resisting the war which all had seen looming, than the German unions tied to the socialist party, or than the British unions, which had just created a political party under their own control.[48] [100] Within the CGT, nonetheless, there emerged – with immense difficulty in the face of state repression – a tiny internationalist minority, one of whose principal members was Pierre Monatte. What is significant, however, is that when Monatte resigned from the Confederation Committee in December 1914[49] [101] in protest at the CGT’s attitude towards the war, he cites among the reasons for his resignation the CGT’s refusal to respond to the appeal by neutral countries’ socialist parties for a peace conference in Copenhagen. He called on the CGT to follow the example of Keir Hardie[50] [102] in Britain, and Karl Liebknecht in Germany.[51] [103] In other words, Monatte found no internationalist revolutionary syndicalist reference point on which to take his stand. At the onset of war, he could only associate himself with for the most part centrist socialists.

Faced with its first great test, anarcho-syndicalism failed doubly: the union as a whole foundered in the patriotic fervour of national unity. For the first time, but not the last, the anarchist anti-militarists of yesteryear pushed the working class into the butchery of the trenches. As for the internationalist minority, it found no support in the international anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist movement. At first, it could only turn towards the centrist socialists of the “neutral” countries; later, it would ally itself with the revolutionary internationalism expressed in the left of the socialist parties, which was to emerge in the conferences of Zimmerwald and then, more strongly, Kienthal, to work towards the creation of the Communist International.

 

Jens, 30/09/2004

 

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As we have already pointed out several times in our press,[1] [165] we are at a turning-point in the evolution of the balance of class forces in the proletariat’s favour, after a long ebb in the class’ consciousness and militancy as a result of the huge ideological campaigns that accompanied the collapse of the so-called “socialist” regimes at the end of the 1980s. One sign of this new situation is “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”.[2] [166] This phenomenon is obviously of vital importance, since it is one of the preconditions for the formation of the future world wide revolutionary party. It is thus the duty of the organisations of the Communist Left to pay the greatest attention to this emergence of new forces, in order to bring them to fruition, to allow them to profit from their experience, and to integrate them into organised militant activity. This is a very difficult and delicate task, which has already been the subject of much reflection and debate in the workers’ movement. Marx and Engels were among the first to devote their efforts to the question, notably within the working class’ first international organisation: the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). Nearer to our own time, one of the great merits of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, on the basis of the RSDLP’s 1903 congress,[3] [167] that they took this issue to heart and developed the response which was to allow the Bolsheviks to live up to their responsibilities in the revolution of October 1917. It is a responsibility that the ICC has always taken very seriously, drawing our inspiration from our illustrious predecessors and the organisations where they were militants. This is one reason why, given the tendency towards the emergence of new revolutionary forces, we are returning to this question with a series of articles in the International Review. More particularly, we consider it necessary to illustrate once again, and in the light of recent experience, the difference between “Marxism and opportunism in the construction of the revolutionary organisation [168]” (as we put it in the title of an article published in International Review n°103/105). The first article in the series will therefore be devoted to our latest experience, where the marxist and opportunist visions met face to face once again: the appearance in Argentina of a small group of revolutionaries who formed the “Nucleo Comunista Internacional” (NCI).

 

The NCI[4] [169] has been one of the main targets of a furious offensive unleashed by the “Triple Alliance” of opportunism (the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party – IBRP), the parasites (the so-called “Internal Fraction” of the ICC – IFICC), and a strange megalomaniac adventurer who is at one and the same time the founder, supreme leader, and sole member of a “Circle of Communist Internationalists” in Argentina, and who has arrogated to himself the “continuity” of the NCI, which he claims to have destroyed for good.[5] [170]

In this article, we will investigate how the NCI appeared, how it made contact with the ICC, the evolution of its relations with our organisation, and what lessons we can learn from this experience; we will also consider what are the perspectives for our future work, now that we have unmasked the grotesque impostor whose manoeuvres won the support of the IBRP, which tried to use the latter to attack the ICC even if this meant destroying the NCI in the process.

This analysis has a dual aim: on the one hand, to stand up for the struggle of a handful of militants who are an expression of the Argentine proletariat’s contribution to the general struggle of the world proletariat; on the other, to draw out some lessons from this search for an internationalist communist coherence, and to highlight both the obstacles and difficulties along the road, and the strengths on which we can rely.

Birth of the NCI: first contacts with the ICC

In a letter (12th November 2003) explaining the group’s political trajectory and that of its members, the NCI presents itself as “a small group of comrades from various political backgrounds, different activities in the mass movement, and different political responsibilities. But we all share the same political roots: the Argentine Communist Party (…) During the 1990s, some of us then joined the Partido Obrero and the Partido de Trabajadores por el Socialismo [two Trotskyist organisations, ed. note], while others took refuge in trade union activity. The first nucleus really appeared in a split with a small fraction of the PTS, the LOI; after several discussions during 2000 and early 2001 (January-February), we decided not to merge with this Trotskyist current as a result of differences of principle”. There then began a difficult process which led the comrades to evolve “thanks to the Internet, towards a knowledge of your positions and those of other currents belonging to the milieu known as the Communist Left. We distributed and each of us read the documents, mostly of the ICC and the IBRP, towards the end of 2002”.

During 2003, this study of the positions of the different Left Communist currents led the comrades towards the positions of the ICC: “What brought us closest to the ICC was not just your programmatic foundations but also, among all the documents which we consulted on your web site, the debates with the Russian comrades, the question of the historic course, the theory of the decadence of capitalism, the positions concerning the party and its relations with the class, the analysis of the situation in Argentina, and the debate with the IBRP on the question of the party”.

This assimilation led the group to adopt programmatic positions very close to the ICC’s Platform, to create a publication (Revolucion Comunista, four issues of which appeared between October 2003 and March 2004), and to make contact with the ICC in October 2003.

The NCI’s appeal to the proletarian political milieu

A dual process then began: on the one hand, more or less systematic discussions of the ICC’s positions, and on the other an intervention in the proletariat in Argentina, focused on the burning questions of the day: in particular, understanding whether the events of December 2001 in Argentina were a step forward for the proletarian struggle, or a revolt without any perspective to offer. An article written on the second anniversary of these events, in Revolucion Comunista n°2, states clearly that “the main aim of this note is to lay bare the errors that the various currents have spread in their press, their leaflets, pamphlets, etc, describing the events in Argentina two years ago being something that they were not, namely a proletarian struggle”.

We undertook a discussion over the Internet on the union question, which made it possible for the NCI to clarify and go beyond the remnants of a leftist vision of “working in the unions to oppose the rank and file to the leadership”. The discussion was fraternal and sincere, and at no time were our criticisms seen as “persecution” or “anathemas”.[6] [171]

In December 2003, the NCI launched an appeal to the political milieu for the holding of international conferences, “with the precise aim of creating a pole of liaison and information where the various organisations could debate their political divergences on a programmatic level, and which could make it possible to undertake common action against the enemies of the working class, against the bourgeoisie, whether by the publication of joint documents, or by organising public meetings for the most advanced elements of the proletariat, highlighting both what unites and what divides us, and any other initiatives that might be proposed”.

It was obvious for the ICC that this Appeal would have to confront the prevailing sectarianism and irresponsibility of the majority of groups of the Communist Left. We nonetheless supported this initiative inasmuch as it was based on an openness to discussion and the confrontation of positions, and asserted a readiness to undertake common action against the capitalist enemy: “We welcome your proposal to hold a new Conference of groups of the Communist Left (a ‘new Zimmerwald’, as you put it). The ICC has always defended this perspective and participated enthusiastically in the three conferences held at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. unfortunately, as you are certainly aware, the other groups of the Communist Left consider that such conferences are not on the agenda given the depth of disagreement among the various groups of the Communist Left. We are not of this opinion, but as the proverb says ‘You only need one to divorce, but it takes two to marry’. It is clear that in the present period, there is no question of ‘marriage’ (i.e. regrouping within a single organisation) between the different currents of the Communist Left”.

In this general framework, we put forward an orientation to guide the work of the small groups appearing in several countries on the basis of class positions, or in the process of moving towards them: “This does not mean that ‘marriages’ are impossible in the present period. In reality, if two organisations come to a programmatic agreement on the basis of the same platform, then not only is it possible for them to regroup, it is a necessity: the sectarianism affecting many groups of the Communist Left (and which, for example, has led to the dispersal of the Bordigist groups into a multitude of schools whose programmatic differences are difficult to understand) is the price that the Communist Left is still paying for the terrible counter-revolution which hit the working class during the 1920s” (our letter of 25th November 2003).

First meeting with the NCI

Apart from the ICC, the only other replies to the Appeal[7] [172] came from the International Communist Party (Il Partito, known as the “Florence PCI”), and the IBRP. Both were clearly negative.

The IBRP’s reply declared peremptorily: “Above all, we are surprised that 23 years after the end of the cycle of International Conferences of the Communist Left (originally called by the PCInt of Italy), which were to demonstrate what we will explain more fully below, you should put forward such a proposal with an identical disingenuousness, when the situation is completely different”.

How could these newcomers dare to propose what has already been settled by the IBRP 23 years ago?[8] [173] The IBRP’s overbearing contempt (the same that Marx detected in Proudhon[9] [174]) for these first efforts by elements of the class is really discouraging![10] [175] Just as well that this came from the “only valid pole of regroupment”, to use the endlessly repeated expression of their adorers the IFICC!

As for Il Partito, it simply put forward every disagreement imaginable (to a group which had only just come into existence!), beginning with the question of the party, with an argumentation so feeble as to border on the ridiculous: “What is perhaps the most obvious point is the conception of the party; our party considers that we are the continuation of the historic party created by Marx and Engels, and which has never ceased to exist since then despite the difficult epochs it has gone through, and that the torch of marxist doctrine has always been kept alight thanks to organisations like the Italian Communist Left or the Russian Bolshevik party”. Keeping marxist doctrine alive is precisely at the heart of the NCI’s existence. But any reason is enough to avoid any political confrontation!

As we can see from these two replies, the perspectives for newly emerging groups would be dark indeed if all that existed in the camp of the Communist Left were the organisations that wrote these replies. They consider new groups from the lofty heights of their sectarian ramparts, and offer no perspective other than an integration as a group into the “international regroupment” of the IBRP or individual integration into the PCInt. These positions are light-years removed from those adopted by Marx, Engels, Lenin, the Third International, or the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left.[11] [176]

After the failure of their Appeal, it is thus hardly surprising that the comrades of the ICC decided to move closer to the ICC. This led us to send a delegation to Buenos Aires in April 2004, which undertook many discussions with the members of the NCI on subjects such as the union question, the decadence of capitalism, the functioning of revolutionary organisations, the role of their statutes, and the unity of the three components of the proletariat’s political programme: political positions, functioning, and behaviour. We proposed that a general meeting should be held, and the latter decided to undertake regular discussions on the decadence and decomposition of capitalism, the statutes, and our texts on organisation and functioning, etc., with a view to joining the ICC: “Following the internationalist visit of the ICC, the members of the nucleus consider unanimously that this visit far surpassed our expectations, not only in terms of the level of agreement that we have reached but also by the important steps forward that this visit allowed us to make (…) Thus, while our aim was already our integration into the ICC, this visit better allowed us to understand concretely not only this international current and its programme, but also its internationalist conduct” (Resolution by the NCI, 23rd April, 2004).

The danger of gurus

Following our delegation’s visit, the group agreed to participate in the ICC’s press by writing articles on the situation in Argentina. These contributions were very positive, in particular an article denouncing the piquetero movement which has proven very useful in laying bare the pseudo-revolutionary myths put about by the leftists and the “anti-globalisation” groups.[12] [177]

Amongst the subjects debated with the NCI, we should emphasise the debate on the behaviour which ought to exist within a proletarian organisation, and which must be inspired by the nature of the future society for which it struggles. Does the end justify the means? Can we achieve communism, a society of the free community of all human beings, while practising slander, informing, manipulation, theft – practices which destroy all trace of sociality at the roots? Should the communist militant generously contribute the best of himself to the cause of human emancipation, or can he on the contrary contribute to the cause while also seeking personal benefit, or personal power, using others as pawns to serve his own particular objectives?

These discussions provoked a debate in depth in the NCI on the question of the behaviour of the IFICC, which led the group to adopt a resolution on the 22nd May 2004 which condemned this gang of scoundrels and, “after reading the publications of both the ICC and the Internal Fraction of the ICC, considered that the latter has adopted a behaviour which is foreign to the working class and to the Communist Left”.[13] [178]

Despite these steps forward, a problem nonetheless began to emerge. In a letter written after our visit, to evaluate its results, we pointed out that “a communist organisation cannot exist without a collective and unitary functioning. Regular meetings, brought to a conclusion with rigour and modesty, without extravagant objectives but held with tenacity and intellectual rigour, are the foundations of this collective life based on unity and solidarity. Obviously, the collective is not opposed to the development of individual initiative and contributions. The bourgeois vision of the ‘collective’ is precisely that of a sum of clones where any spirit of individual initiative is systematically crushed. The symmetrical and complementary opposites of this false view has been developed by Stalinism on the one hand, and by liberal democrats and libertarians on the other. The marxist vision is that of a collective framework, which encourages and develops individual initiative, responsibility and contribution. Each should bring the best of himself, in accordance with the famous phrase of Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, ‘from each according to his abilities’”.

The practice of one member of the Nucleo, who we shall call B., had a practice which was in complete opposition to this orientation. To begin with, he completely monopolised access to computers and the Internet, and correspondence outside the group; he also profited from the confidence which the other members of the group accorded him to draw up most of their texts. Moreover, and contrary to the orientations which had been decided during the April visit, he developed an organisational practice which consisted of avoiding, as far as possible, holding general meetings of the group where all the militants could express themselves, and collectively take decisions and decide on their activity. Instead of such meetings, he would meet separately, at most with one or two comrades, which allowed him to control all their activity. This practice is typical of bourgeois groups where the “leader”, the “political commissar” meets with all the members separately in order to keep them divided and unaware of what is going on. This led to a situation, as the comrades of the NCI confirmed to us afterwards, where they themselves did not really know who was a member of the group and which tasks had been given by Senor B to people that they did not even know themselves.[14] [179]

Another element of this individual’s tactics, was to avoid the development of any serious discussion during the rare more or less general meetings. The comrades have explained the unease they felt at Senor B’s interventions, interrupting discussions under the pretext that it was time to move on to “something else”. In order to empty the meetings as far as possible of any content, B encouraged the greatest informality: meetings were reduced to meals where family members and friends, who did not belong to the group, also took part.

This organisational practice has nothing to do with the proletariat and is typical of bourgeois groups. It has two objectives: on the one hand, it keeps most of the comrades in a state of political under-development by systematically depriving them of the means which would have allowed them to develop their own judgment; on the other, and along with what we have just described, it transforms them into a mass of troops for the policy of the “great leader”. In reality, Senor B intended to use his “comrades”[15] [180] as a springboard, in order to become a “personality” within the proletarian political milieu.

The fight to defend the organisation

This individual’s plans were thwarted by two factors that he had not, in his arrogance and presumption, foreseen: on the one hand the ICC’s organisational coherence and firmness, and on the other the fact that the other comrades, despite the limited means at their disposal, and despite Senor B’s obscure manoeuvres, were undertaking a real effort of reflection which led them to political independence.

At the end of July 2004, Senor B tried an audacious manoeuvre: he demanded immediate membership of the ICC, and forced through this demand despite the resistance of the other comrades who, although they also aimed to join the ICC, felt that they first needed to go through a profound process of assimilation and clarification of new ideas: communist militant activity can only be built on solid foundations.

This put Senor B in a delicate situation: his “comrades” were on the way to becoming class-conscious elements, rather than pawns in his ambitious plan to become an international “leader”. When an ICC delegation visited Argentina at the end of August, he insisted that it should immediately announce the NCI’s integration into the ICC. The ICC rejected this demand. We will have nothing to do with hasty and immature integrations, which can only run the risk of destroying militant energies. In drawing up the balance-sheet of our visit, we wrote: “During our visit, you posed the question of your integration. Of course, our reaction was the natural enthusiasm of fighters for the proletarian cause when other comrades want to join their struggle (…) However, we have to be clear that we do not pose the question of integrating new militants, or of forming new sections, in the same terms as a commercial enterprise aiming at all costs to gain a footing in a new market, or as a leftist group seeking new adepts for its politics within state capitalism, [but as] a general problem of the international proletariat which must be dealt with on the basis of historical and global criteria (…) Our delegation’s central orientation was to discuss with you in depth the implications of communist militant activity, and what it means to build a unified and centralised communist organisation. [This] is not a technical question; it demands a tenacious collective perseverance. It can never bear fruit if it is based only on the impulse of the moment (…) for ourselves, our aim is to train militants of independent judgment, whatever their personal or intellectual capacities, who are capable of taking part collectively in the construction and defence of the international organisation”.

This did not fit in with the plans of Senor B. “Moreover, it is highly likely that he had already made contact, in secret, with the IFICC, while at the same time continuing to deceive us as to his desire to hasten the NCI's integration into the ICC” (see the Presentation of the NCI’s declaration[16] [181]). This individual reversed his attitude overnight, without so much as having the honesty to express his “disagreements”. The reason is simple: his aim was not clarification, but simply his own personal success as an “international leader”. Having discovered that he was not going to be able to satisfy his ambition in the ICC, he decided to look for more congenial company.

Nor did he hesitate to resort to intrigue and duplicity to create a “sensation”. Overnight, he brought into being a “Circle of International Communists”, of which he himself was the sole and unique member, even having the cheek to “integrate” into it the members of the NCI – who were unaware of its very existence – and his “very close contacts”. This “Circle” proposed to use the same method adopted by Stalin to ensure the disappearance of the NCI: it presented itself as the only true continuity with the NCI.[17] [182]

These manoeuvres, encouraged as we have said by the disgusting alliance between the opportunism of the IBRP and the parasites of the IFICC,[18] [183] were uncovered and defused by our own efforts, joined by the NCI. The comrades of the NCI had been isolated by Senor B’s manoeuvres; we re-established contact with them despite the difficulties that this represented. “By telephoning the other comrades of the NCI (an approach which, in the words of Senor B, supposedly reveals the ‘sickening methods of the ICC’), we learned that they were completely unaware of the existence of this ‘Circulo’ of which they were supposedly members! They were completely unaware of the existence of the ‘Circulo's’ disgusting ‘Declarations’ against the ICC which were supposedly adopted – to use the words of these ‘Declarations’ – ‘collectively’, ‘unanimously’, and ‘after consulting all the members’ of the NCI! All of which is perfectly untrue” (“Presentation of the NCI’s Declaration”).

Once contact was re-established, we immediately organised a visit to discuss with the comrades of the NCI and to work out perspectives for the future. We received a warm and fraternal welcome from the comrades. During our stay, the comrades decided to send, by post, their 27th October Declaration to all the sections of the IBRP and to the other groups of the Communist Left in order to establish the truth: contrary to the false information peddled by the IBRP (notably in its Italian press), the NCI has not broken with the ICC!

On several occasions, the members of the NCI phoned Senor B to ask him to come to explain his attitude to the NCI and to the ICC’s delegation. The gentleman refused any such encounter. Caught red-handed in the act, this cowardly individual preferred to go to ground like a rabbit.

Despite the shock of discovering the lies and manoeuvres perpetrated in their name by this sinister individual, the comrades of the NCI expressed the desire to continue with their political activity as far as they are able. Thanks to the NCI’s fraternal welcome and political commitment, the ICC was able to hold a second public forum in Buenos Aires (5th November), on a theme chosen by the comrades of the NCI.

Despite the terrible material difficulties that they confront in their daily lives, the comrades firmly declared to our delegation their intention to continue their militant activity, and in particular to continue the discussion with the ICC. Those comrades who are unemployed intend to find work, not just to feed themselves and their children, but also to escape from the political under-development in which they were kept by Senor B (and in particular have expressed their desire to contribute to the purchase of a PC). In breaking with Senor B and his bourgeois methods, the comrades of the NCI have behaved as true militants of the working class.

Perspectives

The experience of the NCI is rich in lessons. First and foremost, in adopting programmatic positions very close to those of the ICC, it has demonstrated the unity of the world proletariat and of its vanguard. The working class defends the same positions in every country, no matter what their level of political development, their imperialist position, or their political regime. Within this unified framework, the comrades have been able to make contributions of general interest to the whole proletariat (nature of the piquetero movement, nature of the social revolts in Argentina and Bolivia, etc.), and have taken part in an international struggle for the defence of proletarian principles: their clear denunciation of the bunch of scoundrels that call themselves the IFICC, the Declaration in defence of the NCI and proletarian principles of behaviour, etc.

Secondly, this experience has highlighted the danger that “gurus” can represent for the evolution of groups and comrades in search of class positions. This phenomenon is far from being specific to Argentina [19] [184], it is an international phenomenon that we have met with often in the past: individuals, often brilliant themselves, who consider a group as their “personal property” and who, whether because they mistrust the real abilities of the working class or simply because of their own thirst for personal recognition, try to subject the other comrades to their personal control, blocking their evolution and condemning them to political under-development. Such elements often start by playing a dynamic role in moving towards revolutionary positions, if only by putting themselves at the head of an approach and a reflection on the part of other comrades. But generally, unless they thoroughly call into question their own past approach, such elements fail to follow through their approach to its conclusion, because this would means losing their own status as “guru”. Another consequence is the rapid loss of members from the group, as a result of the climate created in the group by the demands of the guru for submission to his own subjectivity; this leads to demoralisation amongst the others, who often give up all political activity under the bitter impression that political positions may be all very well but that the organisational practice, human relations, and personal behaviour, have not in the least broken with the oppressive universe of the left and leftist groups.

Thirdly, this experience has shown something much more important: it is possible to fight this danger, and it can be beaten. Today, and not without difficulty, the comrades have begun a process of clarification, of developing their own self-confidence, and their collective capacities, with the aim of integrating into the ICC in the future. Whatever the final outcome of this struggle, the NCI has demonstrated that despite all the guru’s efforts to reduce their political development, the comrades can organise and struggle for the proletarian cause.

Finally – and this is not the least important – thanks to the comrades’ active efforts, a milieu for proletarian debate around the political positions of the ICC is developing in Argentina. It will be of the greatest value for the clarification and militant involvement of proletarian elements who appear in this country, and in other countries of Latin America.

 

C.Mir (3rd December, 2004)

 

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One hundred years ago, the proletariat in Russia embarked on the first revolutionary movement of the 20th century, known today as the Russian revolution of 1905. As it was not brought to a victorious conclusion, unlike the October revolution twelve years later, this movement has fallen into almost total obscurity today. This is largely why it has not become the focus of campaigns to denigrate and slander it, as has the Russian revolution of 1917, particularly in the autumn of 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. Nevertheless, the revolution of 1905 brought with it a whole series of lessons, clarifications and answers to questions presented to the workers movement at the time, without which the revolution of 1917 certainly would not have succeeded. Moreover, although these events took place a century ago, 1905 is much closer to us politically than might be supposed and the generation of revolutionaries of today and tomorrow need to re-appropriate the basic lessons of this first Russian revolution.

The events of 1905 took place as the period of capitalism's decline dawned. This decline was already making its mark, even if only a tiny minority of revolutionaries at the time were able to glimpse its significance in terms of the profound change that was taking place in society and in the conditions of the proletarian struggle. In the course of these events, the working class developed massive movements beyond the factories, across sectors and categories. There were no common demands, nor was there a clear distinction between the economic and the political as had been the case previously with the union struggle on the one hand and the parliamentary struggle on the other. There were no clear directives from the political parties or the unions. For the first time, the movement's dynamic gave rise to the creation of organs, the soviets (or workers' councils), which were to become the form through which the revolutionary proletariat would organise itself and wield power, in Russia in October 1917, and throughout the revolutionary wave that shook Europe in the wake of October.

In 1905 the workers' movement thought that the bourgeois revolution was still on the agenda in Russia because the Russian bourgeoisie did not hold political power but remained subjugated under the feudal yoke of tsarism. However, the leading role taken by the working class in these events was to knock this idea on the head. The reactionary orientation that the parliamentary and union struggle was beginning to adopt, due to the change in period that was taking place, was far from clear and would not become so for some time. But the secondary or completely non-existent role that the unions and parliament played in the movement in Russia that was a first indication of this. The capacity of the working class to take charge of its own future and to organise itself cast doubt on the vision of German Social-Democracy and the international workers' movement as to the tasks of the party, its function of organisation and direction of the working class, and threw new light on the responsibilities of the political vanguard of the working class. Many elements that would later constitute decisive positions of the workers' movement in the phase of capitalist decadence were already present in 1905.

The 1905 revolution was the subject of many writings within the workers' movement at the time and the issues that it raised were hotly debated. Within the context of a short series of three articles, we will concentrate on certain lessons that seem to us to be central for the workers' movement today and still entirely relevant: the revolutionary nature of the working class and its intrinsic ability historically to oppose capitalism and give society a new perspective; the nature of the soviets, "the form, finally discovered, of the dictatorship of the proletariat", as Lenin said; the capacity of the working class to learn from experience, to draw the lessons of its defeats, the continuity of its historic combat and the maturation of the conditions for revolution. In order to do so we will return very briefly to the events of 1905, referring to those who were the witnesses and the protagonists at the time, such as Trotsky, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and who were able, in their writings, not only to draw the broad political lessons but also to convey the intense emotion aroused by the struggle in those months.[1] [211]

The Russian revolution of 1905 is a particularly clear illustration of what marxism means when it talks of the fundamentally revolutionary nature of the working class. It shows the capacity of the Russian proletariat to go from a situation in which it was ideologically dominated by the values of capitalist society, to a position in which it developed its self-confidence through a massive movement of struggle, developed its solidarity and discovered its historic strength to the point of creating the organs that enabled it to take control of its future. This is a living example of the material force that the class consciousness of the proletariat becomes when it begins to move. In the years before 1968 the Western bourgeoisie told us that the proletariat had been "bourgeoisified", that nothing could be expected of it anymore. The events of 1968 in France and the whole international wave of struggles that followed them, scathingly gave this the lie. They ended the longest period of counter-revolution in history that had been opened up by the defeat of the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23. Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bourgeoisie has never stopped declaring that communism is dead and that the working class has disappeared - and the difficulties experienced by the latter seem to prove them right. The bourgeoisie always has an interest in burying its own historic grave-digger. But the working class still exists - there is no capitalism without the working class and what took place in 1905 in Russia shows us how it can go from a situation of submission and ideological confusion under the capitalist yoke to a situation in which it becomes the subject of history, in which all hope resides, because it contains the future of humanity in its very being.

Brief history of the early steps of the revolution

Before going into the dynamic of the Russian revolution of 1905, we must briefly recall the international and historic context which was the starting point for the revolution. The last decades of the 19th century were characterised by a particularly pronounced economic development throughout Europe. These were the years in which capitalism developed the most dynamically. The countries that were advanced in capitalist terms were trying to expand into the backward regions, both in order to find cheap labour and raw materials and also to create new markets for their goods. It was in this context that tsarist Russia, a country whose economy was still very backward, became the ideal place for the export of a large amount of capital to set up industries of medium and large-scale industry. Within a few decades, the economy was profoundly transformed: "the railways acted as a powerful lever for the country's industrialisation”.[2] [212]. The data on the industrialisation of Russia cited by Trotsky, compared to those of other countries with a more solid industrial structure, such as Germany and Belgium at the time, shows that, although the number of workers was still relatively modest in relation to its huge population (1.9 million compared to 1.56 in Germany and 600,000 in tiny Belgium), nevertheless Russia had a modern industrial structure on a par with the other world powers. Created out of nothing, thanks to mainly foreign capital, capitalist industry in Russia was not created by an internal dynamic but by technology and capital from abroad. Trotsky's data show how the work-force in Russia was much more concentrated than in other countries because it was mostly divided between large and medium enterprises (38.5% in enterprises with over 1000 workers and 49.5% in enterprises between 51 and 1000 workers, whereas in Germany the figures were respectively 10% and 46%). This data on the structure of the economy explains the revolutionary vitality of a proletariat that in other respects was submerged in a profoundly backward country still dominated by a peasant economy.

Moreover, the events of 1905 did not grow out of nothing but were the product of successive experiences that shook Russia from the end of the 19th century onwards. As Rosa Luxemburg shows "the January mass strike was without doubt carried through under the immediate influence of the gigantic general strike, which in December 1904 broke out in the Caucasus, in Baku, and for a long time kept the whole of Russia in suspense. The events of December in Baku were for their part only the last and powerful ramification of those tremendous mass strikes which, like a periodic earthquake, shook the whole of south Russia in 1903 and 1904, and whose prologue was the mass strike in Batum in the Caucasus in March 1902. This first mass strike movement in the continuous series of present revolutionary eruptions is finally separated by five or six years from the great general strike of the textile workers in St. Petersburg in 1896 and 1897".[3] [213]

January 9th, 2005[4] [214] is the anniversary of what is called "Bloody Sunday", which was the beginning of a series of events in old Tsarist Russia that unfolded throughout 1905 and ended in the bloody repression of the Moscow insurrection in December. The activity of the class was practically ceaseless throughout the year although the forms of struggle were not always the same and the struggles were not always of the same intensity. There were three significant moments during this revolutionary year: January, October and December.

January

In January 1905 two workers were sacked from the Putilov factory in St. Petersburg. A strike movement in solidarity began: a petition for political freedom, the right to education and the 8-hour day, against taxation, etc was drafted, that was to be presented to the Tsar by a massive demonstration. It was the repression of this demonstration that was to become the starting point for the year-long revolutionary conflagration. In fact the revolutionary process in Russia took off in a singular way. "Thousands of workers - not Social-Democrats, but loyal God-fearing subjects - led by the priest Gapon, streamed from all parts of the capital to its centre, to the square in front of the Winter Palace, to submit a petition to the Tsar. The workers carried icons. In a letter to the Tsar, their then leader, Gapon, had guaranteed his personal safety and asked him to appear before the people".[5] [215] In April 1904 Father Gapon had been the inspiration behind an "Assembly of Russian factory and office workers in the city of St. Petersburg", authorised by the government and in collusion with the police officer Zubatov.[6] [216] As Lenin said, the role of this organisation was to contain and control the workers' movement at the time, just as today the same aim is accomplished by different means. But the pressure that had built up within the proletariat had already reached a critical point. "And now the Zubatov movement is outgrowing its bounds. Initiated by the police in the interests of the police, in the interests of supporting the autocracy and demoralising the political consciousness of the workers, this movement is turning against the autocracy and is becoming an outbreak of the proletarian, class struggle". [7] [217] It all took shape when the workers arrived at the Winter Palace to hand their demands to the Tsar and were charged by the troops who "attacked the crowd with drawn swords, fired on the unarmed workers, who on their bended knees implored the Cossacks to allow them to go to the Tsar. Over one thousand were killed and over two thousand wounded on that day, according to police reports. The indignation of the workers was indescribable".[8] [218] The Petersburg workers had appealed to the Tsar, whom they called "Little Father", and they were enraged when he replied to their petition by force of arms. It was this profound indignation on their part that unleashed the revolutionary struggles of January. The working class that began by following Father Gapon and religious icons and addressed their petition to the "Little Father of the people", showed an unforeseen strength with the momentum of the revolution. A very rapid change took place in the state of mind of the proletariat in this period; it is the typical expression of the revolutionary process in which, whatever their beliefs and fears, the proletarians discover and become aware that their unity makes them strong. "A tremendous wave of strikes swept the country from end to end, convulsing the entire body of the nation. According to approximate calculations, the strike spread to 122 towns and localities, several mines in the Donetz basin and to railways. The proletarian masses were stirred to the very core of their being. The strike involved something like a million men and women. For almost two months, without any plan, in many cases without advancing any claims, stopping and starting, obedient only to the instinct of solidarity, the strike ruled the land".[9] [219] Embarking on strike action out of solidarity, without a specific demand to put forward, because "the proletarian mass, counted by millions, quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable was that social and economic existence",[10] [220] was both an expression of and an active factor in the maturation within the Russian proletariat at the time, of its consciousness that it is a class and that it must confront its class enemy as such.

The general strike in January was followed by a period of continuous struggles for economic demands, that arose and disappeared throughout the country. This period was less spectacular but just as important. "The various undercurrents of the social process of the revolution cross one another, check one another, and increase the internal contradictions (…) not only the January lightning of the first general strike, but also the spring and summer thunderstorms that followed it, played an indispensable part". Although there was "no sensational news from the Russian theatre of war", "the great underground work of the revolution was in reality being carried on without cessation, day-by-day and hour-by-hour, in the very heart of the empire" (ibid). Bloody confrontations took place in Warsaw. Barricades went up in Lodz. The sailors of the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea mutinied. This whole period prepared the second, stronger period of the revolution.

October

"This second great action of the proletariat already bears a character essentially different from that of the first one in January. The element of political consciousness already plays a much bigger role. Here also, to be sure, the immediate occasion for the outbreak of the mass strike was a subordinate and apparently accidental thing: the conflict of the railwaymen with the management over the pension fund. But the general rising of the industrial proletariat which followed upon it was conducted in accordance with clear political ideas. The prologue of the January strike was a procession to the Tsar to ask for political freedom: the watchword of the October strike ran away with the constitutional comedy of czarism!

And thanks to the immediate success of the general strike, to the Tsar’s manifesto of October 30, the movement does not flow back on itself, as in January but rushes over outwardly in the eager activity of newly acquired political freedom. Demonstrations, meetings, a young press, public discussions and bloody massacres as the end of the story, and thereupon new mass strikes and demonstrations" (ibid.)

A qualitative change took place in the month of October, expressed by the formation of a soviet in Petersburg, which was to become a landmark in the history of the international workers' movement. With the extension of the print workers' strike to the railway and telegraph sectors, the workers made the decision in a general assembly to form the soviet that would become the central nervous system of the revolution: "The Soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organisation which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organisational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self control".[11] [221] Soviets were then formed in many other cities.

The formation of the first soviets went unnoticed by a large part of the international movement. Rosa Luxemburg who, on the basis of the 1905 revolution, had analysed so masterfully the new characteristics of the proletariat's struggle at the dawn of the new historic period - the mass strike - still considered the unions to be organisational forms of the class.[12] [222] It was the Bolsheviks (though not immediately) and Trotsky who understood the step forward that the formation of these organs represented for the workers' movement, that they were in fact organs for the seizure of power. We will not develop this point here because we plan to deal with it in another article.[13] [223] We will just point out that it is precisely because capitalism was entering its period of decline that the working class was confronted, from that moment on, with the immediate task of overthrowing capitalism. So ten months of struggle, of socialist agitation, of the maturation of consciousness, of the transformation of the balance of forces between the classes, led "naturally" to the creation of organs to wield power.

"On the whole the soviets were quite simply strike committees along the lines of those that have always been formed during wildcat strikes. As the strikes in Russia broke out in the large factories and spread very quickly to the towns and provinces, the workers had to stay in contact permanently. They met and discussed in the workplace, (…) they sent delegates to other factories (…) But these tasks in fact were much broader than in the current strikes. The workers in fact had to free themselves from the weighty oppression of tsarism and were aware that the very foundations of Russian society were being transformed because of their action. It was not just a question of wages but also of all the problems related to society globally. They had to discover for themselves a steady path in various areas and deal with political questions. When the strike was intensified and spread throughout the whole country, which stopped industry and transport short and paralysed the authorities, the soviets were confronted with new problems. They had to organise social life, pay attention to the maintenance of order as well as the efficient functioning of vital public services, in brief, fulfil functions that usually fall to the government. The workers carried out the decisions they made"[14] [224]

December

"The fermentation after the brief constitutional period and the gruesome awakening finally leads in December to the outbreak of the third general mass strike throughout the empire. This time its course and its outcome are altogether different from those in the two earlier cases. Political action does not change into economic action as in January, but it no longer achieves a rapid victory as in October. The attempts of the czarist camarilla with real political freedom are no longer made, and revolutionary action therewith, for the first time, and along its whole length, knocked against the strong wall of the physical violence of absolutism".[15] [225] Terrified by the movement of the proletariat, the capitalist bourgeoisie lined up behind the Tsar. The government failed to pass the liberal laws that it had promised. The leaders of the Petrograd soviet were arrested. But the struggle continued in Moscow: "The climax of the 1905 Revolution came in the December uprising in Moscow. For nine days a small number of rebels, of organised and armed workers - there were not more than eight thousand - fought against the Tsar's government, which dared not trust the Moscow garrison. In fact, it had to keep it locked up, and was able to quell the rebellion only by bringing in the Semenovsky Regiment from St. Petersburg".[16] [226]

The proletarian character of the 1905 revolution and the dynamic of the mass strike

The main historic elements have been outlined, and we just want to emphasise one point here: the 1905 revolution had just one main protagonist, the Russian proletariat, and its whole dynamic strictly followed the logic of this class. The whole international class movement was expecting a bourgeois revolution in Russia and believed that the central task of the working class was to participate in the overthrow of the feudal state and push for the establishment of bourgeois freedom, as had been the case with the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. However, not only was it the mass strike of the working class that animated the whole of 1905 but its dynamic led to the creation of organs for the power of the working class. Lenin himself was clear enough on this when he said that apart from its "bourgeois democratic" character, due to its "social content", "the Russian revolution was also a proletarian revolution, not only in the sense that the proletariat was the leading force, the vanguard of the movement, but also in the sense that a specifically proletarian weapon of struggle - the strike - was the principal means of bringing the masses into motion and the most characteristic phenomenon in the wave-like rise of decisive events" (ibid). But when Lenin talks of the strike, we mustn't see this as the 4-, 8- or 24-hour actions proposed by the unions today in every country in the world. In fact, what developed in 1905 is what was later called the mass strike, this "ocean of phenomena" - as Rosa Luxemburg characterised it - the spontaneous extension and self-organisation of the proletariat's struggle, would characterise all the great movements of struggle in the 20th century. "The right-wing of the Second International, the majority, surprised by the violence of events, failed to understand anything of what was taking place, but showed its resounding disapproval of and disgust for the development of the class struggle - thus foreshadowing the process which was to lead them into the camp of the class enemy".[17] [227] The left wing, that included the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg and Pannekoek, was to see the confirmation of its positions (against Bernstein's revisionism[18] [228] and parliamentary cretinism) but it had to undertake a profound theoretical work to fully understand the changed conditions in the life of capitalism - the phase of imperialism and decadence - which determined the change in the aims and the means of the class struggle. But Luxemburg had already outlined the premises: "The mass strike is thus shown to be not a specifically Russian product, springing from absolutism but a universal form of the proletarian class struggle resulting from the present stage of capitalist development and class relations (…), the present Russian Revolution stands at a point of the historical path which is already over the summit, which is on the other side of the culminating point of capitalist society"[19] [229]

The mass strike is not just a movement of the masses, a sort of popular revolt encompassing "all the oppressed" and which would as such be positive if we were to take the word of the leftist and anarchist ideologists. In 1905 Pannekoek wrote: "If you conceive of the masses in a completely general way, the whole people, it seems that, in as far as the different conceptions and desires neutralise one another, what is left is no more than a mass without will, odd, committed to disorder, versatile, passive, oscillating between different impulses, between uncontrolled movements and apathetic indifference - in short, the picture that liberal writers willingly paint of the people (…) They know nothing of classes. On the contrary, the strength of the socialist doctrine is that it has brought order and a framework of interpretation to the infinite variety of human individuality by introducing the principle of the division of society into classes (…). The different classes are identified within historic mass movements and a clear picture of class struggle emerges from the impenetrable fog, with its successive phases of attack, retreat, defence, victory and defeat".[20] [230]

Whereas the bourgeoisie and the opportunists of the workers' movement with it, turned away in disgust from the "incomprehensible" 1905 movement in Russia, the revolutionary left would go on to draw the lessons of the new situation: "…mass actions are a natural consequence of the development of modern capitalism into imperialism, they are increasingly the form of combat that is imposed". "In previous epochs, popular insurrections either had to win a complete victory, or, if they had not the strength to do so, they would fail completely. Our mass actions [of the proletariat] cannot fail; even if we do not get the result that we set ourselves, these actions are not in vain because even temporary retreats contribute to the future victory".[21] [231]

The mass strike is not a ready made recipe as is the "general strike" proposed by the anarchists,[22] [232] it is rather the self-expression of the working class, a way of regrouping its forces in order to develop its revolutionary struggle. "In a word, the mass strike, as shown to us in the Russian Revolution, is not a crafty method discovered by subtle reasoning for the purpose of making the proletarian struggle more effective, but the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution". [23] [233] Today we have no direct and concrete of idea what the mass strike is, with the exception, for those who are not too young, of the struggle of the Polish workers in 1980.[24] [234] So we turn once more to Luxemburg, who gives a solid and lucid framework: "the mass strike from that first great wage struggle of the Petersburg textile workers in 1896-97 to the last great mass strike in December 1905, passed imperceptibly from the economic field to the political, so that it is almost impossible to draw a dividing line between them. Again, every one of the great mass strikes repeats, so to speak, on a small scale, the entire history of the Russian mass strike, and begins with a pure economic, or at all events, a partial trade-union conflict, and runs through all the stages to the political demonstration (…) The January mass strike of 1905 developed from an internal conflict in the Putilov works, the October strike from the struggle of the railway workers for a pension fund, and finally the December strike from the struggle of the postal and telegraph employees for the right of combination. The progress of the movement on the whole is not expressed in the fact that the economic initial stage is omitted, but much more in the rapidity with which all the stages to the political demonstration are run through and in the extremity of the point to which the mass strike moves forward (…) the economic and the political factor in the period of the mass strike, far from being completely separated or even mutually exclusive (…) form the two interlacing sides of the proletarian class struggle in Russia".[25] [235] Here Rosa Luxemburg takes up a central aspect of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat: the inseparable unity between the economic struggle and the political struggle. In contrast to those at the time who said that the political struggle transcends, is the noble aspect (so to speak) of the proletariat's confrontation with the bourgeoisie, Luxemburg explains clearly on the contrary how the economic struggle develops from the economic terrain to the political, then to return with a vengeance to the terrain of the economic struggle. This is all particularly clear when you re-read the texts on the 1905 revolution and on the period of spring and summer. In fact we see how the proletariat began on bloody Sunday with a political demonstration humbly requesting democratic rights and then, not only did it not retreat after the heavy repression but rather came out of it with renewed energy and strength, to mount an assault for the defence of its living and working conditions. This is why in the following months there was an increase in the struggles, "here was the eight-hour day fought for, there piece-work was resisted, here were brutal foremen 'driven off' in a sack on a handcar, at another place infamous systems of fines were fought against, everywhere better wages were striven for and here and there the abolition of homework" (ibid). This period was also of great importance because, as Rosa Luxemburg stresses, it gave the proletariat the possibility of internalising, a posteriori, all the lessons of the prologue to January and of clarifying its ideas for the future. In fact, "the worker, suddenly aroused to activity by the electric shock of political action, immediately seizes the weapon lying nearest his hand for the fight against his condition of economic slavery: the stormy gesture of the political struggle causes him to feel with unexpected intensity the weight and the pressure of his economic chains" (ibid).

The spontaneous nature of the revolution and confidence in the working class

A particularly important aspect of the revolutionary process in Russia 1905 was its markedly spontaneous character. The struggles arose, developed and strengthened. They gave rise to new instruments of struggle such as the mass strike and the soviets without the revolutionary parties of the period managing to keep up with events or even at first, to understand completely the implications of what was happening. The proletariat's strength within the movement in defence of its own interests, is formidable and contains within it an extraordinary creativity. Lenin recognised this in the assessment that he made of the 1905 revolution a year later: "From a strike and demonstrations to isolated barricades. From isolated barricades to the mass erection of barricades and street fighting against the troops. Over the heads of the organisations, the mass proletarian struggle developed from a strike to an uprising. This is the greatest historic gain the Russian revolution achieved in December 1905; and like all preceding gains it was purchased at the price of enormous sacrifices. The movement was raised from a general political strike to a higher stage. It compelled the reaction to go to the limit in its resistance, and so brought vastly nearer the moment when the revolution will also go to the limit in applying the means of attack. The reaction cannot go further than the shelling of barricades, buildings and crowds. But the revolution can go very much further than the Moscow volunteer fighting units, it can go very, very much further in breadth and depth (…) The proletariat sensed sooner than its leaders the change in the objective conditions of the struggle and the need for a transition from the strike to an uprising. As is always the case, practice marched ahead of theory". [26] [236]

This passage of Lenin's is particularly important today given that many of the doubts experienced by politicised elements and, up to a certain point within proletarian organisations, are linked to the idea that the proletariat will never manage to emerge from the apathy in which it sometimes seems to have fallen. What happened in 1905 gives the lie to this idea in a very striking way and the amazement that we feel, when we see that the class struggle was spontaneous, simply expresses an under-estimation of the profound process that takes place within the class, the subterranean maturation of consciousness, which Marx was talking about when he spoke of the "old mole". Confidence in the working class, in its capacity to give a political response to the problems that afflict society, is a primordial question in the present period. After the collapse of the Berlin wall and the bourgeois campaign that followed it around the failure of communism, wrongly assimilated to the infamous Stalinist regime, the working class is experiencing difficulty recognising itself as a class and consequently in identifying itself with an aim, a perspective, an ideal for which to fight. This lack of perspective automatically produces a drop in combativity, it weakens the conviction that it is necessary to fight because you do not fight for nothing but only if you have an objective to attain. This is why today the working class' absence of clarity on its perspective and its lack of confidence in itself are tightly linked together. But it is essentially in practice that such a situation can be overcome, through the direct experience on the part of the working class of its capacities and the need to struggle for a perspective. This is exactly what happened in Russia in 1905, when "within a few months, however, the picture changed completely. The hundreds of revolutionary Social-Democrats ‘suddenly’ grew into thousands; the thousands became the leaders of between two and three million proletarians. The proletarian struggle produced widespread ferment, often revolutionary movements among the peasant masses, fifty to a hundred million strong; the peasant movement had its reverberations in the army and led to soldiers' revolts, to armed clashes between one section of the army and another".[27] [237] This was necessary not only for the proletariat in Russia but also for the world proletariat, including the most developed, the German proletariat:

"In the revolution when the masses themselves appear upon the political battlefield this class-consciousness becomes practical and active. A year of revolution has therefore given the Russian parliament that ‘training’ which thirty years of parliamentary and trade-union struggle cannot artificially give to the German proletariat. (…) And just as surely, on the other hand, will the living revolutionary class feeling, capable of action, affect the widest and deepest layers of the proletariat in Germany in a period of strong political engagement, and that the more rapidly and more deeply, more energetically the educational work of social democracy is carried on amongst them".[28] [238] We can also say, paraphrasing Rosa Luxemburg, that today too in this period of deep economic crisis internationally and in the face of the obvious incapacity of the bourgeoisie to confront the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, an active and lively revolutionary feeling will grip the most mature sectors of the proletariat and that it will do so especially in the more advanced capitalist countries, where the experience of the class has been the richest and the most deeply rooted and where the revolutionary forces, although still weak, are more present. This confidence that we express today in the working class, is not an act of faith, nor is it a blind, mystical confidence, it is based precisely on the history of the class and on its sometimes surprising capacity to re-emerge from its apparent torpor. As we have tried to show, although its true that the processes of the dynamic through which its consciousness matures are often obscure and difficult to understand, it is certain that this class is obliged historically, because of its position in society as both an exploited and revolutionary class, to confront the class which oppresses it, the bourgeoisie. In the experience of this combat, it will re-discover the self-confidence that it lacks today:

"We seem to have an impotent, docile mass, as inert as corpses in the face of the dominant force which is itself well organised and knows what it wants, which manipulates the mass to its liking and then all of a sudden this mass is transformed into organised humanity, able to determine its own fate by exercising its conscious will, able to valiantly confront the old dominant power. It was passive; it has become an active mass, an organism endowed with its own life, cemented and structured of itself, endowed with its own consciousness, its own organs".[29] [239]

Together with the development of the working class' self confidence there is another crucial element of the proletarian struggle: solidarity within its ranks. The working class is the only class which has a real sense of solidarity because within it there is no divergent economic interest - unlike the bourgeoisie, a competitive class, for whom the highest expression of solidarity is expressed only within the national framework or against its historical enemy, the proletariat. Competition within the proletariat is imposed on it by capitalism but the society which it bears within its loins and within its being is a society which ends all divisions, a real human community. Proletarian solidarity is a fundamental arm in the proletarian struggle; it was at the inception of the huge upheavals of 1905 in Russia: "the spark that started the fire was an ordinary conflict between capital and labour: a factory strike. It is interesting to note however that that the strike of 12,000 workers at Putilov, which broke out on Monday 3rd January, was a strike called in the name of proletarian solidarity at the beginning. It was caused by the sacking of 4 workers. 'When the request to reintegrate them was rejected - wrote a Petersburg comrade on 7th January - the factory came to a halt immediately and with complete unanimity'".[30] [240]

It is no accident that today the bourgeoisie tries to distort the notion of solidarity by presenting it under a "humanitarian" form or else with a dressing of "economic solidarity", one of the gimmicks of the new "alternative" "anti-globalisation movement", which is trying to counteract the gradual awareness that is developing in the depths of society about the dead-end that capitalism represents for humanity. Even if the working class as a whole is not yet aware of the power of its solidarity, the bourgeoisie itself has not forgotten the lessons that the proletariat has etched into history.

1905 was a great workers' movement that arose from the depths of the revolutionary soul of the proletariat and showed the creative power of the revolutionary class. Today, in spite of all the blows that the bourgeoisie in its death agony has dealt it, the proletariat retains its capacities intact. It is up to revolutionaries to enable their class to re-appropriate the great experiences of its past history and to tirelessly prepare the theoretical and political terrain for the development of the struggle and the consciousness of the class today and tomorrow.

"In the tempest of the revolution, the proletarian, the prudent father anxious to ensure that he has money coming in, turns into a 'romantic revolutionary', for whom the supreme good - life itself - let alone his material well-being, have but little value in comparison with the ideal of the struggle. So although it is true that in the revolutionary period the direction of the strike tends towards initiating their outbreak and taking them in hand, it is no less true that in other ways the leadership in the strikes falls to the Social-Democracy and its directing organisms. (…) In a revolutionary period Social-Democracy is called upon to give political leadership. The most important 'leadership' task in the period of the mass strike resides in giving slogans for the struggle, in orienting and regulating the tactic of the political struggle in such a way that in each phase and each moment of the combat, the entire force of the proletariat, that is already engaged in battle, is realised and set in motion".[31] [241] During 1905 revolutionaries (called social-democrats at the time) were often surprised, overtaken by the impetuosity of the movement, its newness, and its creative imagination, and they were not always able to supply the slogans, as Luxemburg says, "to each phase, to each moment" and they even made serious mistakes. However, the basic revolutionary work that they carried out before and during the movement, the socialist agitation, the active participation in the struggle of their class, were indispensable factors in the 1905 revolution. Their ability to draw the lessons of these events afterwards prepared the terrain for the victory in 1917.

Ezechiele (5-12-04)

World capitalism in a dead-end

With slaughter continuing in Iraq and elsewhere across the planet, two elections took place in the spotlight of the world’s media, one in the United States and one in the Ukraine, the former remaining in the news for many weeks. As is the case with all elections, neither of these will provide any solution to the poverty and growing barbarism into which capitalism is plunging the proletariat and the exploited masses. But each, in its own way, demonstrates the impasse in which world capitalism finds itself. doesn’t Far from proving the good health of the world’s number one power and cold-war victor, the re-election of Bush has highlighted the difficulties of American imperialism, as reflected inside the US bourgeoisie. Fifteen years after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the elections in the Ukraine are a moment in the struggle between the different imperialist powers for control over the region that opens up the prospect of growing chaos across the former USSR.

THE UNITED STATES ELECTION

The war in Iraq: the main issue in the electoral campaign

The closer that election day came, the more the majority of media commentators, who in both the US and in a lot of other countries had made the case for a Kerry victory, forecast a very close result. Right up to the tense last moment the hopes of the world were seen by the media to be resting on the defeat of Bush who personified the unpopular war in Iraq. Nevertheless this was not based on anything tangible, since Bush and Kerry had identical programmes for prosecuting the war. Besides it is clear that the latter was spouting the same hysterical, ultra-patriotic rallying cries as his opponent: “For us, that flag is the most powerful symbol of who we are and what we believe in. Our strength. Our diversity. Our love of country. All that makes America both great and good. That flag doesn't belong to any president. It doesn't belong to any ideology and it doesn't belong to any political party. It belongs to all the American people” (Kerry’s address to the Democratic Convention in July).

In fact, the obvious disagreement between the two men was on issues like abortion, homosexuality, the environment or bio-ethics, which led to one being branded “conservative” and the other being labelled “progressive”. But that’s no problem, since it always benefits the bourgeoisie to highlight its differences in order to keep the exploited under the spell of elections. However, the anti-Bush clamour in the world’s media serves in actual fact to hide not simply different but indeed antagonistic interests between the different national factions of the world bourgeoisie.

For countries like France or Germany, who from the outset were especially hostile to an American intervention in Iraq since it would clearly obstruct their own imperialist interests, taking an anti-Bush line in these elections allowed them to continue their anti-American campaign to the outside world. By presenting the US president as personally responsible for aggravating world disorder, campaigns like these hide the responsibility of a system in crisis for spreading war and barbarism, and cover up the clearly imperialist nature of these bourgeoisies themselves. The desire of the latter to see the defeat of Bush in this election was nothing but pure hypocrisy; in effect he is their “best enemy”. Indeed, more than anything, he is the embodiment of all the false reasons that bourgeois propaganda uses for explaining the invasion of Iraq by the United States:

-         his family links to the Texan oil industry enabling him to profit from this war (sic!);

-         his family ties with the arms industry;

-         his attachment to the hawkish wing of the Republican party;

-         his religious fundamentalism;

-         his incompetence.

In other words, there is no one better than Bush as president for demonising the United States. That’s why, in spite of the anti-Bush rhetoric, the re-election of Bush has been a godsend to the United States’ main imperialist rivals.

It is for the same reasons that, after a long period of indecision, the main sectors of American bourgeoisie decided to support Kerry. Despite his numerous weaknesses, in particular his adoption of contradictory positions on the Iraq war, the dominant view inside the American bourgeoisie finally came out in his favour. This is because it was thought that he would be the best placed to restore American credibility in the world arena and to find a way out of the impasse in Iraq.  In addition, Kerry was considered best placed to convince the American population to accept new military incursions into other war zones.

For all these reasons, he had won the backing of retired high-ranking generals and admirals, whereas Bush was himself being abandoned by important individuals in his own party, who criticised him precisely for his management of the Iraqi crisis, and this only five weeks before election day. Kerry had equally benefited from the support he received in the media, particularly through coverage of the TV debates of him and Bush, where he was judged on each occasion to have bettered his opponent. Finally, the media brought out into the open a number of issues and concerns that compromised Bush’s image still further, notably leaks coming from members of the Administration itself that brought to light the errors and misdeeds of the Bush Administration, especially with regard to the Iraq war. It was divulged that the Administration made attempts to make secret modifications to the code of military justice, thus contravening the arrangements of the Geneva Convention. An anonymous source inside the CIA reported strong opposition within the Intelligence Agency to this violation of democratic principles. Another “regrettable” story concerned the disappearance of 380 tons of explosives in Iraq that American troops had failed to make secure and which probably fell into the wrong hands, so that they could be used against American forces. Just one week ahead of the election, sources in the FBI released details of a criminal inquiry into the preferential treatment received by Halliburton (where Vice President Cheney was the Chief Executive before the 2000 elections) in winning lucrative contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq, reached by mutual agreement. The media also presented in a sympathetic light the action of 19 American soldiers who refused to go on what they saw as suicide missions, driving oil tankers unescorted and vulnerable to attack across Iraq. Rather than depicting them as mutineers and cowards, these soldiers were presented in the media as brave and honourable but without the necessary supplies and weapons; and that corresponds exactly to how the Kerry campaign had been describing the situation for some weeks.

This is why Kerry’s defeat, despite the first class support given him, and even though the aspirations of some dominant sectors of the American bourgeoisie were with him, is significant of the difficulties of the ruling class at the domestic level. These in turn partly reflect the impasse faced by American imperialism in the world.

The American bourgeoisie’s difficulties

As we have often argued in our press, the crisis of world leadership obliges the American bourgeoisie to maintain a permanent offensive at the military level. This is the only way it can contain the impulses of its direct rivals to challenge its leadership. But in return, as the Iraqi quagmire shows, such a policy will only feed hostility toward the world’s first power everywhere and lead to its growing isolation.  Not being able to backtrack in Iraq, which would risk a considerable weakening of its global power, it is caught up in contradictions that are hard to handle. In addition to being a financial black hole, Iraq is the permanent target for the criticisms of its main imperialist rivals and a source of growing discontent for the American population. Today we are seeing the exhaustion of all the ideological benefits, both at the national and the international level, gained from the 9/11 attacks (which were allowed to take place by the top echelons of the American state apparatus,[1] [275] so providing the pretext for intervening in Afghanistan and Iraq). The hesitation and dissension inside the American bourgeoisie in choosing the most suitable candidate are not an attempt to find another less aggressive imperialist alternative, but show the difficulty in carrying out the only strategy possible. The delay in the emergence of a pro-Kerry orientation from the American bourgeoisie has weakened its ability to manipulate the election result in this respect. And this is particularly the case in a country where right-wing Christian fundamentalism has a strong presence; by its nature this current is little influenced by the ideological campaigns against Bush. Indeed, these fundamentalists, shepherded by the local clergy, first appeared during the Reagan years as the basis of support for the Republicans and are characterised by their socially anachronistic conservatism.  They predominate in many of the least populated regions and in the rural States and they decide their voting on issues like homosexual marriage and abortion. Thus, an incredulous CNN commentator noted on the night of the election that despite the fact that an industrial state such as Ohio, which undoubtedly has many backward areas too, has lost 250,000 jobs; despite the fact that there is a disastrous war in Iraq and that Kerry won three face-to-face TV confrontations with Bush, social conservatism in Ohio won the election for the incumbent president.

This flight into religious fanaticism, in the US as elsewhere in the world, which constitutes a response to the development of chaos and social decomposition and a loss of hope in the future, is something that poses serious problems for the ruling class because it reduces its ability to control its own electoral game. It is all the more problematic, as the re-election of Bush tends to legitimise some practices inside the Executive apparatus which could harm the functioning and the standing of the democratic state, since some members of the presidential team, beginning with Vice-President Cheney, are accused of mixing up their own specific interests with those of the state. Cheney, who had been criticised at the beginning of 2001 for taking orders directly from Enron, was again in the hot seat for his links with Halliburton, where he had resigned as CEO to become Vice-President.

Indeed, he has continued since then to be handsomely remunerated for his various roles in this company, that makes military equipment and has been awarded reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and which has enjoyed highly favourable treatment when it comes to orders for supplies directly linked to the Iraq war. To make matters worse, Cheney has usually answered queries about this business in a very arrogant and peremptory way. It is evidently not the collusion between members of the Bush Administration and the armaments industry or the oil industry which explain the reason for the war in the Gulf, any more than the arms merchants, Krupp and Schneider, were the cause of the First World War. It is the left factions of the bourgeoisie that are generally responsible for this kind of mystification, which they used during the American election to discredit the Bush administration. Although the impact has not been sufficient to lead to the defeat of Bush, this episode demonstrates nevertheless the strong reaction that is aroused by factions of the bourgeoisie whose behaviour is prejudicial to the interests of the national capital as a whole. This was brought out, albeit in a different degree and in a different context, by the Watergate Scandal that led to Nixon being driven from power. Then his foreign policy also tended to displease more and more of the bourgeoisie since, in failing to bring the Vietnam war to a rapid end, he was holding back the establishment of the new alliance with China against the eastern bloc, for which he himself had already established the foundations. But above all, the governing clique used the state agencies (the FBI and CIA) to guarantee itself a decisive advantage over the other factions of the ruling class; that was considered intolerable by the latter, who felt themselves directly threatened by it.[1] [276]

If we don’t know how the American bourgeoisie will solve the problems it is facing, one thing is certain: no matter whether a government is elected from the left or the right, it will in no way be able to bring about a peaceful world.

ELECTIONS IN THE UKRAINE

Great power manoeuvres in Eastern Europe

After the “Revolution of the Roses” in Georgia last year, where the “will of the people” democratically put an end to the corrupt regime of Shevarnadze, under Moscow’s control, it is the turn of the government in the Ukraine, equally corrupt and also under Moscow’s influence, to be faced with a similar fate as a result of another “popular rising”, this time dubbed the “Orange Revolution”. This event has also been another opportunity for the media to grind down the working class in every country by presenting the clamours for democracy in the best light possible:

“The people are not afraid”; “We are able to speak freely”; “People who thought they were untouchable, are not anymore”. However, we have come a long way since the dirty campaigns around the death of communism that marked the different stages in the collapse of Stalinism.[2] [277]  And for a very good reason: it is not in the name of so-called communism that some dictators have again defended the national capital at the helm of the state; and when such dictators have been replaced by more democratic teams, as in Georgia, the situation of the population has not changed; if anything, like everywhere else, it has continued to worsen.

Moreover, the imperialist stakes are so explicitly present that it is difficult for the media not to take them into account; all the more so because from one country to another, a different tone is adopted and the key concern is to use the language of truth about one’s rivals: “Human rights have always been a movable feast: they are talked about with regard to Kiev or in Georgia, much less when it comes to Uzbekistan or Saudi Arabia. This doesn’t mean that there was no issue of electoral fraud or that there is no democratic concern being expressed by the Ukrainians. The problem with Russia is precisely that it relies on unpopular, corrupt and authoritarian regimes. And that the USA is making a good job of defending democracy there… but with strategic ulterior motives. We saw this in 2003 with the Rose Revolution in Georgia. A very pro-American government was installed and I am not sure that the corruption has diminished much” (George Challand, French expert in geopolitics, in an interview entitled “An American strategy to push back Russia”, reproduced in Libération 6th December). In order to maintain its grip on neighbouring countries, Russia only has the means commensurate with its status: which means it has to sponsor teams who can only impose themselves through electoral fraud and crime (the attempt to poison Viktor Yushenko); whereas its rivals, and first and foremost the USA, while they may have no qualms about using the same methods, do so more discreetly, and have the means to sponsor and support more democratic teams. Russia hardly contests this reality as regards Ukraine even though it tries to present itself in a more favourable light: “This election has indeed shown the popularity of Russia: 40% of Ukrainians still voted for a twice-condemned oligarch, whose only quality was to have been the ‘Russian’ candidate” (Sergei Markov, one of the main advisers in Russian communications who supported the campaign of Viktor Yankovitch, in Libération 8th December).

What is being played out in the Ukraine at the moment is part of the dynamic that opened up with the collapse of the Eastern bloc. From the beginning of 1990, the different Baltic countries declared for independence. Even more serious for the Soviet empire was that on 16th July 1990, Ukraine, the second republic of the USSR, which had been linked to Russia for centuries, proclaimed its sovereignty. It was followed by Belarus, then by all the republics of Caucasia and central Asia. Gorbachev then tried to save something from the wreckage by proposing the adoption of a Union treaty which would preserve a minimum of political unity between the different components of the USSR., The failure of an attempted coup in defence of the old USSR on 21st December, was followed by the formation of the Community of Independent States, with a very vague structure, regrouping a certain number of the former components of the USSR; four days later it was dissolved. Since then Russia has continued to lose influence among the countries of the former Soviet bloc: in Central and Eastern Europe, all the members of the Warsaw pact have joined NATO, as have the Baltic states. In the Caucasus and central Asia, Russia is also losing influence. Worse still, its own internal cohesion is under threat. To avoid losing part of its territory to the moves towards independence among its Caucasian republics, Russia has had no choice but to respond with the savage war in Chechnya.

Today, the imperialist alignment of Ukraine is a major strategic, political and economic issue. This is a nuclear power with 48 million inhabitants, with nearly 1600 km of shared border with Russia. Moreover, “without close economic cooperation with Ukraine, Russia would lose 2 or 3 keys to its growth. Ukraine contains the ports though which our goods pass, the gas-lines through which we run our gas, and many hi-tech projects (…) it is the country with the main Russian naval base on the Black Sea, at Sebastopol” (Sergei Markov, ibid). With the loss of its influence over such a neighbour, Russia’s position in the region will be considerably weakened, all the more because this will also reinforce the positions of rivals like the USA.

The retreat of Russian influence has up till now mainly benefited the US because a pro-American government is in power in Georgia; here US troops have been stationed with the aim of strengthening the US presence in Khirgiztan and Uzbekistan, north of Afghanistan. Even if there are other powers seeking to place their pawns in Ukraine and the region, it is nevertheless the USA today which is once again the best placed to take the lion’s share, in particular through its collaboration with Poland, one of its best allies in Eastern Europe, which has a historic influence in Ukraine. Putin made precisely this point when, in a speech delivered in New Delhi on 5th December, he accused the USA of wanting to “remodel the diversity of civilisation, following the principles of a unipolar world not unlike a barracks”, and of wanting to impose “a dictatorship in international affairs underneath a fine sounding but pseudo-democratic phraseology”. And he was quick to remind the Iraqi foreign minister in Moscow on 7th December that the US was badly placed to give lessons on democracy, saying about the coming elections in Iraq that he couldn’t imagine “how you can organise elections in conditions of a total occupation by foreign troops”.

Anyone apart from Russia who wants to play a role in Ukraine has no choice but to surf on the “Orange wave” of the reformist team led by Yushenko, which has very close ties to Poland and the USA. This is why today the main rivals in the Iraq war, the USA on the one hand and France and Germany on the other, all support the reformists; at the same time, the allies of yesterday, Russia on the one hand and France and Germany on the other, defend opposing camps in the elections.

The American political offensive in Ukraine is part of the general offensive which this country has to wage on all fronts, military, political and diplomatic, if it is to defend its world leadership; in this context it has very definite objectives. In the first place, it is part of a strategy of encircling Europe, aimed mainly at blocking the expansionist ambitions of Germany, for whom the east of Europe is the “natural” axis of its imperialist expansion, as two world wars have shown. In the second place, it is aimed specifically at Russia in order to punish it for its attitude over the Gulf war, since it radically opposed American interests in company with Germany and France. It is certain that without Russia and its determined stance, France and Germany would have been much less open in their opposition to US policy. In order to prevent such a misadventure repeating itself, or at least to minimise its effects, the USA needs to deprive Russia - which nevertheless remains a potential ally on many questions (didn’t Putin support the Bush candidacy?) - of the last cards that would allow it to play at the table of the great and to restrict its status to that of a regional nuclear power, like India for example.

Towards an acceleration of chaos in eastern Europe and central Asia

The game being played out in the territory of the former USSR today cannot be understood as the simple transfer of influence over a country from one power to another. Nobody knows how far Russia is prepared to go in order to resist and to keep its domination, even if it is only over part of Ukraine. Can it abandon the Crimea and Sebastopol without this having major repercussions on the political stability of its regime? Would not a major reverse like this give the green light to all the demands for independence coming from the republics within Russia itself? Moreover, there are not just two vultures in dispute for this sphere of influence, but three, because it is obviously not in Germany’s plans to stay quietly in America’s shadow. We also know that the development of instability on the territories of the ex-USSR can only arouse the imperialist appetites of the regional powers, in this case Turkey and Iran, who see an opportunity to cash in on the situation. There is no clear scenario that allows us to answer these questions; there are several possible scenarios, all of which have in common the fact that, since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the result of tensions between the great powers is always more and more chaos.

Similarly, whatever the ideological themes put forward by the bourgeoisie in order to assert its imperialist claims, they are never more than a pretext. The only explanation for the aggravation of tensions and the multiplication of conflicts is the fact that capitalism is sinking irreversibly into endless crisis. This is why the solution to this problem is not the installation of democracy, nor the search for national independence, nor the USA abandoning its desire for hegemony, nor any kind of reform of capitalism, but the destruction of this system world wide.

LC 20.12.04 

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In the first article in this series, published in International Review n118, we saw how the theory of decadence is at the very heart of historical materialism, of Marx and Engels’ analysis of the evolution of modes of production. Equally, we find the same notion at the centre of the programmatic texts of the organisations of the working class. Furthermore, not resting at merely adopting this foundation-stone of marxism, some of these organisations have developed the analysis and/or its political implications. It’s from this dual point of view that we aim here to briefly review the main political expressions of the workers’ movement. In this first part we will begin with the movement in the days of Marx, the Second International, the marxist lefts which came out of it, and the Communist International at the time it was formed. In the second part, which will appear in a future issue, we will examine more closely the analytical framework for the political positions developed by the Third International and then by the left fractions which emerged from it as it began to degenerate, and from which we draw our political and organisational origins.

The workers’ movement at the time of Marx

Marx and Engels always clearly expressed the view that the perspective of the communist revolution depended on the material, historical, and global evolution of capitalism. The conception that a mode of production could not expire before the relations of production on which it was based had become a barrier to the development of the productive forces was the basis of the whole political activity of Marx and Engels and of the elaboration of any proletarian political programme. Although there were two moments when Marx and Engels thought that they had discerned the beginning of the decadence of capitalism,[1] [284] they rapidly corrected these appreciations and recognised that capitalism was still a progressive system. Their view - already outlined in the Communist Manifesto and deepened by all their writings from this period - that if the proletariat came to power in this period its principal task would be to develop capitalism in the most progressive manner possible, and not simply to destroy it, was an expression of this analysis. This is why the practice of marxists in the First International was quite rightly based on the analysis that as long as capitalism had a progressive role to play, it was necessary for the workers’ movement to support bourgeois movements which were helping to prepare the historic ground for socialism. As the Manifesto put it:

“We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.[…] The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social-Democrats against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution. In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois. In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846. In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie… Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries”. [2] [285]

In parallel with this, it was necessary for the workers to continue fighting for reforms as long as the development of capitalism made them possible, and in this struggle “the Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class”(Manifesto). These materialist positions were defended against the a-historical calls of the anarchists for the immediate abolition of capitalism, and their complete opposition to reforms.[3] [286]

The Second International: heir to Marx and Engels

The Second International made this adaptation of the policy of the workers’ movement to the historical period even more explicit, by adopting a minimum programme of immediate reforms (recognition of the unions, diminution of the working day, etc) alongside a maximum programme, socialism, to be put into effect when the inevitable historical crisis of capitalism arrived. This appears very clearly in the Erfurt Programme which concretised the victory of marxism within social democracy: “So private property in the means of production has changed from what it originally was into its opposite, not only for the small producer, but for society as a whole. From a motive power of progress it has become a cause of social degradation and bankruptcy…Today there is no longer any question as to whether the system of private ownership in the means of production shall be maintained. Its downfall is certain. The only question to be answered is: Shall the system of private ownership in the means of production be allowed to pull society with itself down into the abyss; or shall society shake off that burden and then, free and strong, resume the path of progress which the evolutionary law prescribes to it? The productive forces that have been generated in capitalist society have become irreconcilable with the very system of property upon which it is built. The endeavour to uphold this system of property renders impossible all further social development, condemns society to stagnation and decay – a decay that is accompanied by the most painful convulsions…The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time. Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalist production. The substitution of a new social order for the existing one is no longer simply desirable, it has become inevitable...As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism…the history of mankind is determined, not by ideas, but by an economic development which progresses irresistibly, obedient to certain underlying laws and not to anyone’s wishes or whims”.[4] [287]

But for the majority of the main official leaders of the Second International, the minimum programme would more and more become the only real programme of Social Democracy: “The final goal is nothing. The movement is everything”, as Bernstein put it. Socialism and the proletarian revolution were reduced to platitudes and sermons reserved for First of May parades, while the energy of the official movement was more and more focussed on obtaining for Social Democracy a place inside the capitalist system, at whatever cost. Inevitably, the opportunist wing of Social Democracy began to reject the very idea of the necessity for the destruction of capitalism and the social revolution, and to defend the idea of a slow, gradual transformation of capitalism into socialism.

The marxist left within the Second International

In response to the development of opportunism in the Second International, left fractions emerged in a number of countries. The latter would be the basis of the formation of the communist parties that would be born in the wake of the betrayal of proletarian internationalism by Social Democracy when the First World War broke out. These fractions were loud and clear in taking up the torch of marxism and the heritage of the Second International; at the same time they were obliged to develop this legacy faced with the new challenge posed by the opening of a new period of capitalism – the period of decadence.

These currents appeared at a moment when capitalism was going through the last phase of its ascent, when imperialist expansion made it possible to see the prospect of confrontation between the great powers on the world arena, and when the class struggle was more and more raising its head (the development of general political strikes and above all of the mass strike in several countries). Against the opportunism of Bernstein and Co., the left wing of Social Democracy – the Bolsheviks, the Dutch Tribunists, Rosa Luxemburg and other revolutionaries - would defend all the implications of the marxist analysis: understanding the dynamic of the end of the ascendant phase of capitalism and the inevitable bankruptcy of the system,[5] [288] the reasons for the opportunist deviation[6] [289] and the reaffirmation of the necessity for the violent and definitive destruction of capitalism.[7] [290] Unfortunately, all this theoretical work by the left fractions was not carried out on an international scale; they worked in isolation and with different degrees of understanding of the formidable social convulsions of the first part of the 20th century, represented by the outbreak of the First World War and the development of insurrectionary movements on an international scale. We will not presume here either to present or analyse in detail all the contributions of the left fractions on these questions: we will limit ourselves to a few key position statements of the two organisations which would constitute the two vertebral columns of the new International – the Bolsheviks and the German Communist Party – through its two most eminent representatives: Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.

While Lenin didn’t use the terms “ascendance” and “decadence”, but expressions like “the epoch of progressive capitalism”. “once a factor of progress”, “the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie” to characterise the ascendant period of capitalism, and “the epoch of the reactionary bourgeoisie” “capitalism has become reactionary”, “moribund capitalism”, “the epoch of a capitalism which has reached its maturity” to characterise the period of the decadence of capitalism, he nevertheless made full use of the concept and its essential implications, notably in his analysis of the nature of the First World War. Thus, against the social-traitors who, by making use of the analyses developed by Marx during the ascendant phase of capitalism, continued to call for support for certain bourgeois factions and their national liberation struggles, Lenin was able to see the First World War as the expression of a system that had exhausted its historical mission, posing the necessity to overcome it through a world wide revolution. Hence his characterisation of the imperialist war as being totally reactionary and the need to oppose it with proletarian internationalism and revolution: “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” (Socialism and War, 2, “The principles of socialism and the war of 1914-15”).

“The epoch of capitalist imperialism is one of ripe and rotten-ripe capitalism, which is about to collapse, and which is mature enough to make way for socialism. The period between 1789 and 1871 was one of progressive capitalism when the overthrow of feudalism and absolutism, and liberation from the foreign yoke were on history’s agenda” (“Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International”).

“From all that has been said in this book on the economic essence of imperialism, it follows that we must define it as capitalism in transition, or, more precisely, as moribund capitalism…It is precisely the parasitism and decay of capitalism, characteristic of its highest historical stage of development, i.e., imperialism.

Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide scale” (Imperialism, Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1920 introduction to French and German editions).

The positions taken up in the face of war and revolution have always been the clear line of demarcation within the workers’ movement. Lenin’s ability to discern the historical dynamic of capitalism, to recognise the end of the “epoch of progressive capitalism”, to see that “capitalism has become reactionary” not only enabled him to clearly characterise the First World War but also to grasp the nature and significance of the revolution in Russia. When the revolutionary situation was maturing in this country, the Bolshevik’s understanding of the tasks imposed by the new period allowed them to fight against the mechanistic and nationalist conceptions of the Mensheviks. When the latter tried to minimise the importance of the revolutionary wave under the pretext that Russia was far too underdeveloped for socialism, the Bolsheviks insisted that the world wide nature of the imperialist war revealed that world capitalism had arrived at the point of maturity where the socialist revolution had become a necessity. They thus fought for the seizure of power by the working class in Russia, which they saw as the prelude to the world proletarian revolution.

Among the first and clearest expressions of this defence of marxism was the pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution, written by Rosa Luxemburg in 1899. Here, while recognising that capitalism was still expanding through “brusque expansionist thrusts” (i.e. imperialism), Luxemburg insisted on the fact that capitalism was moving ineluctably towards its “crisis of senility”, which would necessitate the revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat. Moreover, with a great deal of political perspicacity, Luxemburg was able to grasp the new demands posed by the change in historical period to the struggles and political positions of the proletariat, in particular as regards the union question, the parliamentary tactic, the national question and the new methods of struggle highlighted by the mass strike.[8] [291]

On the trade unions: “Once industrial development has attained its highest possible point, and capitalism has entered its descending phase on the world market, the trade union struggle will become doubly difficult …Such is the general trend of things in our society. The counterpart of this tendency is the development of the political and social class struggle” (Social Reform or Revolution, 3, “The introduction of socialism through social reforms”)

On parliamentarism: “National assembly or all power to the workers and soldiers’ councils; abandoning socialism or the most resolute class struggle of the armed proletariat against the bourgeoisie – that is the dilemma. Realising socialism through the parliamentary road, through a simple majority decision now appears as an idyllic project…Parliamentarism, it is true, was an arena of the class struggle of the proletariat during the tranquil phase of the life of bourgeois society. It was then a high tribune from which we could rally the masses around the flag of socialism and educate them for the struggle. But today we are at the very heart of the proletarian revolution and it’s a question of chopping down the very tree of capitalist exploitation. Bourgeois parliamentarism, like the class domination which was its basic reason for existence, has lost its legitimacy. Today when the class struggle has openly erupted, Capital and Labour no longer have anything to say to each other. It’s a matter of hand to hand combat and settling this life and death struggle once and for all” (Luxemburg, “National Assembly or Government of Councils”, 17 December 1918)

On the national question: “The world war serves neither the national defence nor the economic or political interests of the masses of the people whatever they may be. It is but a product of the imperialist rivalries between the capitalist classes of the different countries for world hegemony and for the monopoly in the exploitation and oppression of areas still not under the heel of capital. In the era of the unleashing of this imperialism, national wars are no longer possible. National interests serve only as the pretext for putting the labouring masses of the people under the domination of their mortal enemy, imperialism” (“Theses on the tasks of international social democracy”, appendix to The Crisis of Social Democracy).

The decadence of capitalism at the centre of the Communist International’s analysis

Brought into being by the revolutionary movements which put an end to the First World War, the Communist International was founded on the basis of recognising that the bourgeoisie had completed its progressive role, as the left wing of the Second International had predicted. The CI, and the groups which composed it, confronted with the task of understanding the turning point marked by the outbreak of the world war and of insurrectionary movements on an international scale, would - to a greater or lesser degree – see decadence as key to their understanding of the new period. Thus in the platform of the new International it says “A new epoch is born. The epoch of the disintegration of capitalism, of its inner collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”, and this framework of analysis would be found to a greater or lesser extent in all the CI’s position statements,[9] [292] as in the “Theses on Parliamentarism” adopted at its Second Congress: “Theoretically clear communism, on the other hand, will correctly estimate the character of the present epoch: highest stage of capitalism; imperialist self-negation and self-destruction”.

This analytical framework would appear with even greater clarity in the “Report on the International Situation” written by Trotsky and adopted the Third Congress: “Cyclical oscillations, we said in refutation in our report and resolution at the Third World Congress, accompany capitalist society in its youth, in its maturity and its decay, just as the beatings of a heart accompany a man even on his deathbed” Trotsky, “Flood-tide”, 1921) It was also attested by the discussions around this report: “We saw yesterday in detail how comrade Trotsky – and all those who are here, I think, agree with him – shows on the one hand the relationship between short crises and short periods of momentary cyclical rises, and,on the other hand, the problem of the rise and decline of capitalism seen on the scale of great historical periods. We are all agreed that the grand rising curve will now irresistibly go in the opposite direction, and that within this grand curve there will be further oscillations up and down” (Authier D, Dauve G, Ni parlement ni syndicats..les conseils ouviers! Edition ‘Les nuits rouges, 2003 [10] [293]). Finally, even more explicitly, this framework would be reaffirmed by the “Resolution on the Tactics of the CI” at its 4th Congress:

“II. The period of the decline of capitalism. On the basis of its assessment of the world economic situation the Third Congress was able to declare with complete certainty that capitalism had fulfilled its mission of developing the productive forces and had reached a stage of irreconcilable contradiction with the requirements not only of modern historical development, but also of the most elementary conditions of human existence. This fundamental contradiction was reflected in the recent imperialist war, and further sharpened by the great damage the war inflicted on the conditions of production and distribution. Obsolete capitalism has reached the stage where the destruction that results from its unbridled power is crippling and ruining the economic achievements that have been built up by the proletariat, despite the fetters of capitalist slavery…What capitalism is passing through today is nothing other than its death throes”.

The analysis of the political significance of the First World War

The explosion of the imperialist war in 1914 marked a decisive turning point in the history both of capitalism and of the workers’ movement. The problem of the system’s “crisis of senility” was no longer a theoretical debate between different fractions of the workers’ movement. The understanding that the war had opened up a new period for capitalism as a historic system demanded a change in political practice which became a class frontier: on the one hand the opportunists who had clearly showed themselves to be agents of capitalism by “adjourning” the revolution in favour of national defence in an imperialist war; and, on the other hand, the revolutionary left, the Bolsheviks around Lenin, the Internationale group, the Bremen left radicals, the Dutch Tribunists etc who gathered at Zimmerwald and Kienthal and affirmed that the war marked the opening of the era of “wars and revolutions”, and that the only alterative to capitalist barbarism was the revolutionary uprising of the proletariat against the imperialist war. Of all the revolutionaries who took part in these conferences, the clearest on the question of the war were the Bolsheviks, and this clarity derived directly from the conception that capitalism had entered its phase of decadence since the “epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie” had given way to “the epoch of the reactionary bourgeoisie” as affirmed without ambiguity in the following passage from Lenin: “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…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 Marx’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 substitutes the bourgeois for the socialist point of view”.

This political analysis of the historic significance of the outbreak of the First World War determined the positions taken up by the whole revolutionary movement, from the marxist fractions inside the Second International[11] [294] to the groups of the communist left via the Communist International. This is also what Engels had predicted at the end of the 19th century. "Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism’. What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales". (Luxemburg, The Crisis of Social Democracy, 1915).

It was also this understanding that had animated the revolutionary forces that took part in the foundation of the Communist International. Thus, in its statutes, it is very clearly stated that “The Third (Communist) International was formed at a moment when the imperialist slaughter of 1914-1918, in which the imperialist bourgeoisie of the various countries sacrificed twenty million men, had come to an end. Remember the imperialist war! This is the first appeal of the Communist International to every toiler wherever he may live and whatever language he may speak. Remember that owing to the existence of the capitalist system a small group of imperialists had the opportunity during four long years of compelling the workers of various countries to cut each other’s throats. Remember that this imperialist war had reduced Europe and the whole world to a state of extreme destitution and starvation. Remember that unless the capitalist system is overthrown a repetition of this criminal war is not only possible but is inevitable…. The Communist International considers the dictatorship of the proletariat an essential means for the liberation of humanity from the horrors of capitalism”.

Yes, more than ever, we must “remember” the analyses drawn up by our illustrious predecessors and we must reaffirm this all the more forcefully when parasitic grouplets try to dismiss it as “bourgeois moralism and humanism” by turning imperialist war and genocides into banalities. Under the pretext of a critique of the theory of decadence, such groups are actually attacking the most fundamental acquisitions of the workers’ movement: “For example, to demonstrate that the capitalist mode of production is in decadence, Sander affirms that its characteristic is genocide and that more than three quarters of deaths through war in the last 500 years have happened in the 20th century. This type of argument is also present in millenarian thinking. For the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the First World War was a turning point in history because of its grandeur and intensity. To follow them, the number of deaths during the First World War was ‘seven times greater than all the 901 preceding wars in the 2,400 years before 1914’. According to the polemicist Ruth Leger Sivard, in a work published in 1996, the century left around 110 million deaths in 250 wars. If we extrapolate this result to complete the century we will obtain around 120 million deaths, six times more than the 19th century. If we adjust the figure to take account of population increase, the relative number falls to 2 times…Even then, the effects of wars remains inferior to those of fleas and mosquitoes…It’s not by rallying to concepts that belong to modern bourgeois law (such as genocide), fashioned by democratic ideology and the rights of man in the aftermath of the Second World War that we will take materialism forward; still less will we increase our understanding of the history of the capitalist mode of production” (Robin Goodfellow, “Comrade, one more effort to no longer be revolutionary”).

Comparing the ravages of the imperialist war to something that is “inferior to the effects of fleas and mosquitoes” is a way of spitting on the millions of proletarians who were massacred on the battlefields and on the thousands of revolutionaries who sacrificed their lives to stay the murderous arm of the bourgeoisie and hasten the outbreak of revolutionary movements. It is a scandalous insult to the generations of communists who fought with all their might to denounce imperialist wars. Comparing the analyses bequeathed by Marx, Engels and all our predecessors of the Communist International and the communist left to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and to bourgeois moralism really is insane. In the face of such slander we fully concur with Rosa Luxemburg who argued that the indignation of the proletariat is a revolutionary force!

For these parasitic elements, the whole Third International, the Lenins, Trotskys, Bordigas, fell into a lamentable misunderstanding and stupidly mixed up the First World War, which the CI platform called “the greatest of all crimes” with something whose effects were “inferior to those of fleas and mosquitoes”. All the revolutionaries who thought that the imperialist war was the most gigantic catastrophe for the proletariat - “The catastrophe of the imperialist war has swept away all the conquests of the trade union and parliamentary battles” (Manifesto of the CI) - had committed the greatest of blunders: they had theorised the First World War as having opened up the period of the decline of capitalism. They had foolishly thought that “capitalism had fulfilled its mission of developing the productive forces and had reached a stage of irreconcilable contradiction with the requirements not only of modern historical development, but also of the most elementary conditions of human existence. This fundamental contradiction was reflected in the recent imperialist war, and further sharpened by the great damage the war inflicted on the conditions of production and distribution” (“Theses on the Tactics of the Comintern”, op cit).

The haughty disdain of these parasites for the acquisitions of the workers’ movement, which have been inscribed in letters of blood by our class brothers, is only equalled by the disdain which the bourgeoisie shows towards the misery of the workers and the disembodied cynicism that this class displays when it uses its brutal statistics to show the merits of capitalism. To paraphrase the famous phrase which Marx used about Proudhon: “these parasites see in statistics only statistics and not their revolutionary social and political significance”.[12] [295] All the revolutionaries of that period had grasped the qualitative difference, the whole social and political significance of this “mass slaughter of the elite of the international proletariat”..…

“None the less, the imperialist bestiality raging in Europe's fields has one effect about which the ‘civilized world’ (and today’s parasites) is not horrified and for which it has no breaking heart: that is the mass destruction of the European proletariat. Never before on this scale has a war exterminated whole strata of the population… The best, most intelligent, most educated forces of international socialism, the bearers of the holiest traditions and the boldest heroes of the modern workers' movement, the vanguard of the entire world proletariat, the workers of England, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia - these are the ones now being hamstrung and led to the slaughter Here capitalism lays bare its death's head; here it betrays the fact that its historical rationale is used up; its continued domination is no longer reconcilable to the progress of humanity” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of Social Democracy).[13] [296]

C Mcl

The 60th anniversary of the liberation from the concentration camps, of the bombing of Dresden, of Hiroshima, of the capitulation of Germany

 

2005 abounds in gruesome anniversaries. The bourgeoisie has just celebrated one of them - the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in January 1945 - with an ostentation that outdid the 50th anniversary of the same event. This comes as no surprise. For the last sixty years, parading the monstrous crimes of the side defeated in World War II has proved the surest means of absolving the Allies from the crimes that they too committed against humanity during and after the war. It has served moreover to present democratic values as the guarantee of civilisation against barbarity. Similarly, we can expect that the anniversary of the capitulation of Germany in May 1945 will also be greeted with a special fanfare. The Second World War, like the first, was an imperialist war fought by imperialist brigands and the slaughter it generated (50 million dead), was a dramatic confirmation of the bankruptcy of capitalism. Nowadays the bourgeoisie is obliged to accord great importance to the commemoration of the Second World War, precisely because the mystifications wreathed around it are beginning to wear thin. An increasing amount of evidence, that has long been denied and dissimulated, is beginning to emerge. One example is the fact that the Allies knew of the existence of the extermination camps and did nothing to put them out of action. Such evidence raises the question of the degree of Allied responsibility for the Holocaust. It is up to revolutionaries, who are always the first to denounce the barbarity of both camps, to wage a battle against bourgeois mystifications that try to keep the crimes of the allies out of sight or at least to play them down. It is also their task to expose the inconsistencies in the bourgeoisie's attempts to "excuse" the barbaric acts committed by the "democratic" camp.

Why such a hubbub about the liberation from the concentration camps?

The commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the allied landings in June 1944 has already been vested with an importance even greater than its 50th.[1] [314] Aware that the memory of such an event must be permanently maintained if it is to remain vivid in the minds of the living, the bourgeoisie has not skimped on the means used to revive the image of all those young recruits, who offered themselves up in their tens of thousands to be massacred on the beaches, believing that they were fighting "for the freedom of their fellow men". For the bourgeoisie it is of the utmost importance that the mystification that made the mobilisation of their elders possible remains in the minds of the new generations; that the illusion remains that to fight in the democratic camp against fascism[2] [315] was to defend human dignity and civilisation against barbarism. That is why it is not enough for the ruling class to have used the American, English, German,[3] [316] Russian or French working class as canon fodder: they are directing their sick propaganda specifically against the present generation of proletarians. Today the working class is not prepared to sacrifice itself for the economic and imperialist interests of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless it is still vulnerable to the mystification that it is not capitalism that produces the barbarity in the world, but that the latter is the responsibility of certain totalitarian powers that are the sworn enemies of democracy. The idea that the Jewish genocide is "unique" (and therefore not to be compared with other instances of genocide) plays a central role in the persistence of this democratic mystification today. In fact it is because of its victory over the totalitarian regime that tortured the Jewish people, that the Allied camp and its democratic ideology could consolidate the lie that it was the guardian against the utmost barbarity.

In the aftermath of World War II, and even in the subsequent two decades, it was only a small minority, mainly limited to the internationalist revolutionary milieu,[4] [317] who placed the barbarity of the Allies side by side with that of the Nazi camp. That was to change gradually following the return of the proletariat to the international scene in 1968. Questions began to be asked about a whole series of mystifications and lies that had been produced and maintained during nearly half a century of counter-revolution (in the first place, the lie about the socialist character of the Eastern bloc countries). The process has been encouraged by the endless stream of military conflicts since the Second World War, in which the great democratic countries have supplied material for critical reflection by showing themselves to be champions of barbarism (the United States in Vietnam, France in Algeria…).[5] [318] The flight towards barbarism and chaos since the 1990s comes across as the coronation of the most barbaric century in history, despite the renewal of the democratic mystification engendered by the campaigns on the collapse of Stalinism.[6] [319] Over the last 15 years the great powers, often the "democratic" ones, have had an obvious responsibility for the outbreak of conflicts. We can cite the United States’ leadership of the anti-Saddam coalition in the first Iraq war that caused, directly and indirectly, up to 500,000 deaths; the great Western powers in Yugoslavia (twice) with their "ethnic cleansing", including that of Srebrenica in 1993, carried out by Serbia and covertly backed by France and Great Britain. Then there is the Rwanda genocide orchestrated by France, which produced almost a million victims;[7] [320] Russia's continuing war in Chechnya, which also involves ethnic cleansing, and the barbaric Anglo-American intervention in Iraq. In some of these conflicts we even see reproduced the scenario of the Second World War: a dictator (Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Milosevic in Yugoslavia) is spotlighted to take the blame for the hostilities and deaths. No matter that this dictator had previously been a respectable person in the eyes of these democrats, with whom they had maintained cordial relations before they found him more useful as a scapegoat.

In this situation, it is not surprising that the pill of the "uniqueness" of the Jewish genocide is increasingly difficult to swallow for those who have not been bludgeoned by such ideological brainwashing for a whole lifetime. To see the Holocaust as a particularly abject and shameful moment in an ocean of barbarity, rather than as a specificity, requires the power of criticism. It requires a refusal to succumb to the really revolting guilt and intimidation campaigns of the bourgeoisie, who label those who reject and condemn the Allied camp as well as that of the fascists, as indifferentists, negationists (those who deny the reality of the Holocaust), as anti-Semites, neo-nazis. This is why the new generations are more inclined to distance themselves from the lies that have poisoned the consciousness of their elders. This is recognised in comments from schoolteachers, who have to give courses on the Shoah. "It is difficult to get them [the students] to accept that it is any different from other acts of genocide" (Le Monde, 26th January, "L' attitude réfractaire de certains élèves oblige les enseignants à repenser leurs cours sur le Shoah").

The bourgeoisie plays hard on the feelings that the description of the suffering of the millions lost in the concentration camps is bound to evoke. It does so in order to hamper a tendency towards a growing awareness of the real character of the second international butchery, and of democracy. They then divert the real responsibility for these horrors and for those of all wars, onto one dictator, one regime, one country in order to cover the back of the system itself, of capitalism. To make the scenario all the more effective, they have to go on hiding and distorting the crimes of the big democracies during the Second World War.

Behind the terror and barbarism of the Allies and of Nazism lie the same motivations of the state

The experience of two world wars shows us what the common characteristics are that explain the heights of barbarity now reached, which are the responsibility of all the camps involved:

• The most sophisticated technology is reserved for the military, which drains society's strength and resources, as does any form of war effort. The technological development between the First and Second World War, particularly in aviation, means that military confrontations are no longer limited to the battle field, where the opposing armies are face to face. Rather the whole of society becomes the theatre of operations.

• An iron corset encircles the whole of society in order to bend it to the extreme demands of militarism and war production. The way that this was done in Germany is a caricature. As military difficulties increased, there was an intense need for manpower. In order to satisfy it, during 1942 the concentration camps became an immense reservoir of cheap human material, that was inexhaustibly renewable and able to be exploited at will. At least a third of workers employed by the big companies, such as Krupp, Heinkel, Messerschmitt or IG Farben were deportees.[8] [321]

• The most extreme means are used to impose oneself militarily: mustard gas during the First World War, which, up until its first use, was said to be the ultimate weapon, that would never be used; the atomic bomb, the supreme weapon against Japan in 1945. Less well known but still more murderous, was the bombing of towns and civil populations during the Second World War, in order to terrorise and decimate them. Germany was the first to use this strategy when it bombed London, Coventry and Rotterdam. The technique was perfected and made systematic by Britain, whose bombers unleashed real fire balls at the heart of the towns, raising the temperature to over a thousand degrees in what became a gigantic inferno,

"The crimes of Germany or Russia should not make us forget that the Allies themselves were possessed of the spirit of evil and outdid Germany in some ways, specifically with terror bombing. When he decided to order the first raids on Berlin on 25th August 1940, in response to an accidental attack on London, Churchill assumed the devastating responsibility for a terrible moral regression. For almost five years, the British Prime Minister, the commanders of Bomber Command, Harris especially, attacked German towns relentlessly (…)

This horror reached its zenith on 11th September 1944 at Darmstadt. In the course of a remarkably concerted attack, the entire historic centre disappeared in an ocean of flames. In 51 minutes, the town was hit by a volume of bombs greater than those dropped on London throughout the whole war. 14 000 people died. As for the industrial zone, situated on the outskirts and which represented only 0.5% of the Reich's economic potential, it was hardly touched." (Une guerre totale 1939-1945, stratégies, moyens, controverses by Philippe Masson).[9] [322] The British bombardments of German towns killed nearly 1 million people.

Far from moderating the offensive against the enemy and so reducing the financial cost, the rout of Germany and Japan in 1945 had quite the opposite effect. The intensity and cruelty of the air raids was redoubled. This was because what was really at stake was no longer victory over these countries; this had already been won. The purpose was in fact to prevent parts of the German working class from rising up against capitalism in response to the suffering caused by the war, as had happened at the time of the First World War.[10] [323] So the British and American air raids were intended to annihilate those workers who had not already perished on the military fronts and to throw the proletariat into impotence and disarray.

There was another consideration as well. It had become clear to the Anglo-Americans that the future division of the world would place the main victors of World War II in opposition to one another. On one side there would be the United States (with Britain at its side, a country that had been bled dry by the war). On the other side would be the Soviet Union, which was in a position to strengthen itself considerably through conquest and military occupation, that would follow its victory over Germany. Churchill expressed his awareness of this new threat in the following unequivocal words. "Soviet Russia had become a mortal danger for the free world, [so] it was necessary to create a new front, without delay, to arrest its advance and this front had to be as far East as possible in Europe".[11] [324] So a concern of the western Allies was to set limits to Stalin's imperialist appetites in Europe and Asia by means of a dissuasive show of force. This was the other purpose behind the British bombardment of Germany in 1945 and it was the sole reason for using atomic weapons against Japan.[12] [325]

The fact that military and economic establishments were targeted less and less, as these had become secondary, demonstrates the new stakes in the bombings, as in the case of Dresden:

"Up to 1943, in spite of the suffering inflicted on the population, the raids still had a military or economic justification, aimed as they were at the large ports in the north of Germany, the Ruhr complex, the main industrial centres or even the capital of the Reich. But from the autumn of 1944, this was no longer the case. With a perfectly practised technique, Bomber Command, which had 1,600 planes at its disposal and which was striking at a German defence that was increasingly weak, undertook the attack and systematic destruction of middle sized towns or even small urban centres that were of no military or economic interest.

History has excused the atrocious destruction of Dresden in February 1945 under the strategic pretext that it neutralised an important rail centre, behind the Wehrmacht's lines as it engaged the Red Army. In fact, the disruption to rail traffic did not last more that 48 hours. However there is no justification for the destruction of Ulm, Bonn, Wurtzburg, Hidelsheim; these medieval cities, these artistic marvels that were part of the patrimony of Europe, disappeared in fire storms, in which the temperature reached 1,000-2,000°C and which cause the death and dreadful suffering of tens of thousands of people" (P. Masson).

When barbarism itself becomes the main driving force towards barbarism

There is another characteristic shared by the two world conflicts: just as the bourgeoisie is unable to maintain control of the productive forces under capitalism, so too the destructive forces that it sets in motion during all-out war tend to escape its control. Equally, the worst impulses that have been unchained by the war take on a life and dynamic of their own, giving rise to gratuitous acts of barbarity that no longer even have anything to do with the aims of the war, however despicable the latter may be.

In the course of the war, the Nazi concentration camps became a huge machine for killing all those suspected of resistance within Germany or in the countries it had occupied or that were its vassals. The transfer of detainees to Germany became a way of using terror to impose order in zones occupied by Germany.[13] [326] But the increasingly hurried and radical nature of the means used to get rid of the population in the camps, the Jews in particular, shows that the need to impose terror or for forced labour was less and less a consideration. It was a flight into barbarism in which the only motive was barbarism itself.[14] [327] At the same time as these mass murders were taking place, the Nazi torturers and doctors carried out "experiments" on the prisoners, in which sadism vied with scientific interest. These individuals would later be offered immunity and a new identity in exchange for collaborating with projects in the United States that were classed as "military defence secrets" (the operation was known as "Project Paperclip").

The march of Russian imperialism across Eastern Europe towards Berlin was accompanied by atrocities that betrayed the same logic:

"Columns of refugees were crushed under tanks or systematically strafed from the air. The entire population of urban centres was massacred with refined cruelty. Naked women were crucified on barn doors. Children were decapitated, had their heads beaten to pulp with sticks, or were thrown alive into pig troughs. All those in the Baltic ports who did not manage to get away or who could not be evacuated by the German navy, were simply exterminated. The number of victims can be estimated at 3 or 3.5 million (…)

“This murderous madness was visited unabated on all the German minorities in Southeast Europe, in Yugoslavia, Rumania and Czechoslovakia, and on thousands of Sudeten Germans. The German population in Prague, which had been established in the city since the Middle Ages, was massacred with a degree of sadism rarely witnessed. Women were raped and then their Achilles tendon cut, condemning them to bleed to death on the ground in terrible agony. Children were machine gunned at school entrances, thrown into the road from the top floors of buildings or drowned in basins or fountains. Some were walled up alive in cellars. In all there were more than 30,000 victims.

“The violence did not spare the young signals auxiliaries of the Luftwaffe, who were thrown alive into burning haystacks. For weeks the Vltava (Moldau) carried thousands of corpses, sometimes of whole families nailed to rafts. To the horror of the witnesses, a whole sector of the Czech population displayed a savagery that belongs to another age.

“In fact these massacres were the product of a political will, of an intention to eliminate, with the help of a stirring of the most bestial impulses. Given Churchill's concern at Yalta at seeing new minorities arise within the framework of the future frontiers of the USSR or Poland, Stalin could not help declaring sarcastically that there could no longer be a lot of Germans in these regions…" (P. Masson).

The "ethnic cleansing" of the German provinces in the East, was not the responsibility of Stalin's army alone but was done with the co-operation of the British and American armed forces. Although, even at this time, the lines for future tension were already drawn between the USSR and the United States, these countries and Britain still co-operated without reservations in the task of removing the proletarian danger, by the mass murder of the population.[15] [328] Moreover, they all had an interest in ensuring that the yoke of the future occupation of Germany could be exercised over a population, that had been made passive by all the suffering it had gone through and that included the least number of refugees possible. This aim in itself incarnates barbarism but it was to become the departure point for an uncontrolled escalation of brutality at the service of mass murder.

Those refugees who escaped Stalin's tanks, were massacred by the British and American bombardments, which employed considerable means to simply exterminate them. The cruelty of the bombardments over Germany, whether they were British, and ordered by Churchill in person, or American, were intended to kill as many as possible with the maximum savagery:

"This will to systematically destroy, which was close to genocide, went on until April 1945, in spite of the growing objections of Air Marshal Portal, the commander-in-chief of the RAF, who wanted to direct the bombings against the oil industry or transport. In the end even Churchill, as a good politician, became concerned, when there were reactions of indignation in the press of the neutral countries and even from a sector of British public opinion" (P.Masson).

On the German front, the American raid of 12 March 1945 on the harbour town of Swinemunde in Pomerania probably caused more than 20,000 victims, according to estimates. It targeted the refugees who were fleeing from Stalin's advancing troops and who were gathered together in the town or already aboard the boats.
"A large belt of parks bordered the beach. It was here that the bulk of the refugees were concentrated. The 8th American army knew this perfectly well, this is why it had loaded its planes with 'tree breakers'; bombs with detonators which explode as soon as they come into contact with branches.

“A witness relates having seen the refugees in the park 'throw themselves to the ground, so exposing the whole of their bodies to the action of the tree breakers’. The bombers had traced the boundaries of the park precisely with tracer lights. So the carpet bombs fell in a particularly restricted zone, meaning that there was no means of escape (…)

Among the large merchant ships, which sailed - the Jasmund, Hilde, Ravensburg, Heiligenhafen, Tolina, Cordillera - it was the Andros which sustained the heaviest losses. It set sail from Pillau, on the coast of Samland, the 5th March, on its way to Denmark with two thousand passengers aboard" (Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945 by Jörg Friedrich).

"At the same time and in addition to these massive attacks, there were repeated raids by tactical air command fighter-bombers. These raids (by the Americans as well as the British) targeted trains, roads, villages, isolated farms, as well as farmers in their fields. Farm work was limited in Germany to the hours of dawn or dusk. There were machine gun attacks at school entrances and the children had to learn how to protect themselves from aerial attacks. During the bombardment of Dresden, the allied fighters attacked the ambulances and fire engines that converged on the town from nearby cities." (P.Masson).

On the Far Eastern front, American imperialism acted with the same brutality: "To return to the summer of 1945. Sixty-six of the largest towns in Japan had already been destroyed by fire following napalm bombardments. A million civilians in Tokyo were homeless and 100,000 people had died. To repeat the words of Curtis Lemay, the general of the division responsible for the firebombing, they were 'grilled, boiled and cooked to death'. President Franklin Roosevelt's son, who was also his confidant, said that the bombings had to continue 'until we had destroyed about half of the civilian population of Japan'. On 18th July, the Emperor of Japan sent a telegraph to President Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt, asking once more to make peace. His message was ignored. (…) A few days before the bombing of Hiroshima, vice admiral Arthur Radford boasted: 'Japan will end up as a country without towns - a population of nomads'." ("From Hiroshima to the Twin Towers", Le Monde Diplomatique of September 2002).

Ideological fog and lies to cover up the cynical crimes of the bourgeoisie

There is yet another characteristic of the bourgeoisie's behaviour, which is particularly present in war, and even more so in all-out war. Those of its crimes that it does not decide to erase from history (as the Stalinist historians had already begun to do in the 1930s), are dressed up as their opposite; as courageous, virtuous acts that enabled them to save more human lives than they destroyed.

The British bombardment of Germany

With the Allied victory, a whole segment of the history of the Second World War has disappeared from the records:[16] [329] "the terror bombings have fallen into almost total oblivion, as have the massacres carried out by the Red Army or the terrible settling of scores in Eastern Europe." (P.Masson). Of course, these acts are not included in the commemoration ceremonies for these "gruesome" anniversaries. They are banished from them. There remain just a few historical testimonies, that are too deeply rooted to be openly eradicated and so are given a "media make-over" in order to render them inoffensive. This is the case with the bombing of Dresden in particular: "…the most beautiful terror raid of the whole war was the work of the victorious allies. An absolute record was made on 13th and 14th February 1945: 253,000 dead, refugees, civilians, prisoners of war, labour deportees. No military objective." (Jacques de Launay, Introduction to the French 1987 edition of David Irving's book The destruction of Dresden.[17] [330]

Nowadays it is customary for the media, when covering the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, to give the number of victims as 35,000. When the number of 250,000 is mentioned, it is promptly attributed to either Nazi or Stalinist propaganda. The latter "interpretation" is not very consistent with the great concern of the East German authorities, for whom at the time, "there was no question of spreading the correct information that the town had been overrun by hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing from the Red Army." (Jacques de Launay). In fact at the time that the bombardments occurred, Dresden counted about 1 million inhabitants, of which 400,000 were refugees. In view of how the town was devasted,[18] [331] it is hard to imagine that only 3.5% of the population perished!

The bourgeoisie's campaign to render innocuous the horror of Dresden by minimising the number of victims is complemented by another one, aiming to present the legitimate indignation that this barbaric act excites, as an expression of neo-Nazism. All the publicity given to the demonstrations in Germany, mobilising the nostalgic degenerates of the 3rd Reich to commemorate the event, can only serve to discourage any criticism casting doubt upon the Allies, for fear of being taken for a Nazi.

The atomic bombardment of Japan

Unlike the British bombardment of Germany, where great pains are taken to hide its enormity, the use of the atomic weapon for the first and only time in history, by the world's most powerful democracy, has never been hidden or minimised. On the contrary, everything possible has been done to publicise it and to make clear the destructive power of this new weapon. Every provision had been taken to do this even before the bombing of Hiroshima on 6th August 1945. "Four cities were marked out [to be bombed]: Hiroshima (major port, industrial city and military base), Kokura (main arsenal), Nigata (port, steelworks and oil refinery) and Kyoto (industries) (…) From that moment on, none of the cities mentioned above were touched by bombs. They had to be damaged as little as possible in order to put the destructive power of the atomic bomb beyond discussion." (Article "The bomb dropped over Hiroshima" on www.momes.net/dictionnaire/h/hiroshima.html [332]). As for the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki,[19] [333] it expressed the intention of the United States to show that it could use nuclear weapons whenever necessary (which was not true in fact because the other bombs that they were building were not yet ready.)

According to the ideological justification for this massacre of the Japanese population, it was the only way to ensure the capitulation of Japan and save the life of a million American soldiers. This is a gross lie which is still propagated today: Japan had been bled dry and the United States (having intercepted and decoded the communiqués of the Japanese diplomatic corps and headquarters) knew that they were ready to capitulate. But they also knew that for Japan there was a limiting condition to their capitulation; the Emperor Hirohito was not to be removed. So, as they had the means to prevent Japan from accepting total capitulation, the United States made use of it by drafting ultimatums in such a way as to imply that the removal of the Emperor would be required. It must also be stressed that the American administration never explicitly threatened Japan with a nuclear attack, from the time of the first successful attempt at a nuclear explosion at Alamogordo, in order of course to leave it no opportunity to accept America's conditions. Having dropped two atomic bombs to demonstrate the superiority of this new weapon over all conventional arms, the United States achieved its ends, Japan capitulated and …the Emperor remained. The complete futility of using the atomic bomb against Japan in order to force it to capitulate has since been confirmed by the statements of the military, some of them high ranking, who were themselves staggered by such cynicism and barbarity.[20] [334]

The Allies complicity in responsibility for the Holocaust

"The silence of the Allies complemented that of the Europeans. Although completely aware of the fate of the Jews from 1942 onwards, neither the British nor the Americans were particularly concerned about it and they refused to include the struggle against genocide in their war aims. The press reported deportations and massacres but this information was relegated to the twelfth or fifteenth page. This was particularly clear in the United States where there had been a virulent anti-Semitism since 1919" (P Masson, op. cit.)

When the camps were liberated, the Allies pretended to be surprised at their existence and at the massive exterminations carried out inside them. Up until recently they have been denounced only by a few honest historians and by revolutionary minorities. But over the last twelve years this deception has been uncovered by those in an official position or by the official media. For example, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on 23rd April 1998 at the "March of the Survivors" in Auschwitz: "It would not have been difficult to stop it. It would have been enough to bomb the railway lines. They [the Allies] knew about it. They did not bomb them because at the time the Jews had no state, no military and political force to defend themselves". Likewise the French magazine Science et Vie Junior writes: "In the spring of 1944, the Allies took detailed photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau and bombed the factories in the vicinity four times. No bomb was ever dropped on the gas chambers, the railway lines or the crematorium furnaces of the death camp. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were informed as early as 1942 by the representative of International Jewish Congress in Geneva and later by the Polish resistance of what was going on in the camps. The Jewish resistance asked them to bomb the gas chambers and the crematorium furnaces at Auschwitz. They did not do so or, in the case of Churchill, their orders were not executed." (No. 38, October 1999, supplement to the series: the Second World War). The procedure is as old as the world itself: cast blame on the underlings in order to save face! Even the most honest reply to this situation defends the respectability of the allied camp: "Why, given that the Allied air force had bombed a rubber factory 4 kilometres away? The answer is terrible: the military had other priorities. For them the main thing was to win the war as quickly as possible and nothing was to delay this primary objective" (ibid). Every effort is made to avoid raising the real issue: Allied complicity in the Holocaust.2 [335]1 They had refused all the proposals of the Germans to exchange the Jews for lorries, or even for nothing. They did not on any account want to be lumbered with a population that they did not know what to do with, not even if it meant saving these lives.

The bourgeoisie: a class of gangsters

How can we explain the fact that secrets, that had been so well kept over the years, end up being bandied about publicly? In the article that quotes Netanyahu's speech of 23rd April 1998 at Auschwitz (see above), there are elements of a reply. "Obviously the pressure exerted on Netanyahu by the European countries and the United States in particular, before his departure for Poland, regarding the negotiations with Yasser Arafat, explains why he resorted to the subject of the victims of the Shoah" ("The debate on the written history in Israel about the Shoah: the case for Jewish leadership" by Raya Cohen, University of Tel-Aviv). Essentially it was in order to ease the pressure that the United States was exerting on Israel in the negotiations with the Palestinians, that Netanyahu put a spanner in the works, intending to sully the reputation of Uncle Sam. By making it explicit that it wanted to be more independent of the United States so that it could play its own card, Israel did no more than situate itself within the same dynamic traced by all the vassals of the United States within the old Western bloc, after its disappearance in 1990. Other countries, such as France or Germany, have pushed this dynamic further by contesting American leadership openly. This is why the new rivals, and old allies, of the United States are more and more in favour of asking publicly the question: "why did the Allies, who knew about the Holocaust while it was going on, not bomb the camps?" They do so in order to encourage anti-American sentiment, which is developing as antagonisms with the major international power intensify. The United States, and also Britain, must expect to be confronted in the future with the need to answer more explicit criticisms about their own responsibility for the Holocaust.[22] [336]

Germany, in particular, has an interest in breaking the ideological consensus in favour of the victor, which has existed since 1945. At the same time it wants to relinquish its status as a military dwarf, which is a result of its defeat. Since its reunification at the beginning of the 1990s, Germany has availed itself of the means to assume military responsibility internationally in so-called "peace-keeping" operations, in Yugoslavia particularly, and more recently in Afghanistan. German policy to assert its status as main challenger to American leadership (even if it is still far from being able to rival the latter) corresponds to a desire on Germany's part to return to a leading role on the imperialist chessboard. One of the preconditions for it to play the part is that it put an end to the shame of its ingrained Nazi past and "rehabilitate" itself by showing that, during World War II, the barbarism was on both sides. This is not very difficult, given the evidence. It is quite appropriate that the ideological offensive of Germany is undertaken by those who declare that their battle is subordinate to their defence of democracy and who do not spare their denunciation of Nazi crimes. As is shown in an article that appeared in a special issue of Der Spiegel in 2003 and entitled "Jörg Friedrich's book Der Brand, the polemic around the strategic bombardments reopened", this ideological offensive has produced a lively media exchange between Germany and Britain. Der Spiegel writes: "As soon as extracts from this exhaustive work on the bombardments carried out during the war by the Allies against Germany in the period 1940-45, was published in Bild-Zeitung, British journalists attacked the Berlin historian. They ended up by constantly asking the same question: 'How can you depict Winston Churchill as a war criminal?' Friedrich explained repeatedly that in his book he avoided making any judgement of Churchill. 'What's more, he cannot be a war criminal in the legal sense of the term', Friedrich replied, 'as prosecutions are never made against the victors, even when they have committed war crimes'."

Der Spiegel continues: "It is not surprising that the conservative Daily Telegraph should sound the alarm and condemn Friedrich's book 'as an unprecedented attack against the Allies' conduct of the war'. In the Daily Mail the historian Corelli Barnett fumes that the German fraternity has joined the 'heap of dangerous revisionists' and 'is trying to make 'Churchill's support for the carpet bombings morally equivalent to the unspeakable crimes of the Nazis', 'an infamous and dangerous nonsense'. (…)

“Churchill - a real man of war - was also an ambivalent politician. It was this charismatic Prime Minister who pushed for the 'annihilation' attacks against German cities. But when he later saw the films of the cities in flames, he asked:’Are we animals? Are we going too far?'.

“At the same time, it was he himself, who - just like Hitler and Stalin - took upon himself all the important military decisions and he, at the very least, approved the constant escalation of the bombardments."

Moreover, Germany is also developing a diplomatic offensive. The primary aim of the latter is to win moral reparation for the detriment accrued through the loss of its historic influence in a number of Eastern European countries, due to its defeat in the Second World War. In fact, "about 15 million Germans had to flee from Eastern Europe after the defeat. Nazis or non-Nazis, collaborators or resistance fighters, they were chased out of regions, in which they had been settled for centuries: the Sudetens in Bohemia and Moravia, the Silesians, the eastern Prussians and the Pomeranians" ("La 'nouvelle Allemagne' brise ses anciens tabous", Le Temps – a Swiss periodical - of 14th June 2002). In fact, under the pretext of working for humanitarian ends, at Germany's initiative, a "European network against the displacement of populations" has been created. It is motivated by "the idea that the displacement of the German population was an 'injustice' carried out for ethnic reasons, that were hidden by the Potsdam Agreement'" ("Informationen zur Deutschen Außen-politik" of 2nd February 2005; https://www.germanforeignpolicy.com [337]).[23] [338] In a speech supporting this "network" made in November 2004 before a commission of the European Council, Markus Meckel, SPD deputy with special responsibility for international questions, said: "Certainly there are dictators, such as Hitler, Stalin and, recently, Milosevic who have given orders for such displacement of populations. But democrats, such as Churchill and Roosevelt accepted ethnic homogenisation as a means of political stabilisation". The document quoted (Informationen zur…) summarises the speech: "Meckel aggravates the provocation by adding that the whole world would now agree in describing the forced migration of the German populations, as an attack on human rights. 'The international community now condemns', he explains, 'the behaviour of the victors in the war. It seems to think that they acted no differently from the racist dictatorship of National Socialism’."

Obviously we cannot expect that any fraction of the bourgeoisie brings to light the crimes committed by other fractions of the bourgeoisie, for any other reason than the defence of its own imperialist interests. Indeed the bourgeois propaganda using revelations about the crimes of the Allies during the Second World War is to be fought with the same determination, with which we fight against the allied and democratic propaganda, using the crimes of Nazism in order to re-construct their political virginity. All the tears shed for the victims of the Second World War, by whatever fraction of the bourgeoisie, are no more than nauseating hypocrisy.

The most important lesson to draw from the six years of slaughter of the second world slaughter, is that the two camps that fought it out, and the countries that followed them, were all the rightful creation of the vile beast that is decadent capitalism, no matter what ideology they used; Stalinist, democratic or Nazi.

The only denunciation of barbarism that can serve the interests of humanity is that which goes to the root of this barbarity and uses it as a lever for the denunciation of capitalism as a whole. And which does so with a view to overthrowing it, before it buries the whole of humanity under a heap of ruins.

LC-S (16th April 05)

 

 

Tsunami, imperialist rivalries in Iraq, Lebanon, Ukraine, Palestine, Kyrghyzstan

If we were to identify a vice that is characteristic of each epoch of human history, it would certainly be the hypocrisy of the ruling class that would fit the bill in the case of capitalism. The great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan, amassed piles of skulls when he conquered towns that had not submitted to him. But he never claimed to do it for the good of their inhabitants. It took bourgeois capitalist democracy to teach us that war is "humanitarian" and that it is necessary to bomb civilian populations in order to bring… peace and freedom to these very populations.

The tsunami in December 2004 hit the coasts of the Indian Ocean when the last issue of this Review was already going to press. This meant that it was not possible for us to include a position statement on such an important event for the world today,[1] [366] so we will do it in this issue. As early as 1902, a little more than 100 years ago, the great revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg denounced the hypocrisy of the great powers. She pointed out that, although they offered their "humanitarian aid" to the populations that were victims of the volcanic disaster on Martinique, they had never hesitated for a moment to massacre the same populations in order to spread their domination throughout the world.[2] [367] Today, when we see the reaction of the great powers to the disaster that occurred in South East Asia at the end of 2004, we have to conclude that things have not changed much since then. If anything, they have worsened.

We now know that the number of deaths directly caused by the tsunami is more than 300 000, on the whole people from the poorest populations, while hundreds of thousands have been left homeless. This hecatomb was by no means an "act of god". Obviously we cannot accuse capitalism of causing the quake that led to the huge tidal wave. On the other hand, we can lay at its door the utter negligence and irresponsibility of the governments in this area of the world and of their Western counter-parts, that led to this enormous human catastrophe.[3] [368]

They all knew that this part of the globe is particularly prone to seismic quakes: "However local experts knew that a drama was about to take place. In December, Indonesian seismologists raised the question with a French expert, outside the official meeting of physicists in Jakarta. They were well aware of the danger of tsunamis because there are repeated quakes in the region" (Libération, 31/12/04).

Not only were the experts aware of the danger but the ex-director of the international centre for information on tsunamis in Hawaii, George Pararas-Carayannis, had even stated that a major quake had taken place two days before the disaster of 26th December.

"The Indian Ocean has basic infrastructures to measure and communicate seismic activity. No one should have been surprised, because a quake of the magnitude of 8.1 occurred on 24th December. The authorities should have been warned. But there is a lack, firstly of any political will on the part of the countries concerned, and also of any international co-ordination on the scale of that which exists in the Pacific" (Libération of 28/12/04).

No one should have been surprised, yet the disaster happened. It happened even though there was enough information available about the catastrophe beforehand to have made it possible to take action to prevent this carnage.

This is not negligence, this is a criminal attitude and it reveals the profound contempt that the ruling class has for the population and the proletariat, who are the main victims of the policies of the local bourgeois governments.

In fact, it is now clearly acknowledged officially that the warning was not given out of fear… that it would harm the tourist industry! In other words, tens of thousands of human beings were sacrificed in order to defend sordid economic and financial interests.

Such irresponsibility on the part of governments is a further illustration of the attitude of this class of sharks, that runs the life and productive activity of society. Bourgeois states are ready to sacrifice as many human lives as is necessary to preserve capitalist exploitation and profits.

The profound cynicism of the capitalist class, the disaster that the survival of this system of exploitation and death represents for humanity, is even clearer if we compare the cost of a system to detect tsunamis with the fabulous sums spent on armaments. The countries bordering on the Indian Ocean are considered to be "developing countries". Yet the sum of $20-30 million, considered necessary to set up a system of warning beacons in the area, is the equivalent of just one of the 16 Hawk-309 planes ordered from Britain by the Indonesian government in the 1990s. If we look at the defence budgets for India ($19 billion), Indonesia ($1.3 billion) and Sri Lanka ($540 million - this is the smallest and poorest of the three countries), the reality of the capitalist system becomes glaringly obvious. It is a system that does not hesitate to spend money in order to reap death but that is stingy in the extreme when it is a matter of protecting the life of the population.

Other victims are to be expected now that new quakes in the region have affected the Indonesian island of Nias. The large number of dead and injured is due to the material used for housing: concrete blocks that are much less resistant to earthquakes than wood, which is the traditional building material in the region. But concrete is cheap. Wood, however, is costly, all the more so in that exporting it to the developed countries is an important source of revenue for the capitalists, for organised crime and for the military in Indonesia. With this new disaster, the return of the Western media to the region, showing us all the good work done by the NGOs that are still there, also shows us the consequences of the grandiose declarations of governmental solidarity following the December 2004 quake.

Firstly, as far as the financial donations promised by the Western governments are concerned, the contrast between arms expenditure and the money devoted to aid operations, is still more glaring than in the case of the countries bordering on the Indian Ocean. At first, the United States promised $35 million in aid ("the amount we spend in Iraq each morning before breakfast", as the American senator, Patrick Leahy, said). Yet their proposed military budget for 2005 -2006 is $500 billion, excluding the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And even though the sum promised in aid is pitiful, we have already had occasion to predict that the bourgeoisie will be rich in promises but mean in practice: "We should remember that the ‘international community’ of imperialist gangsters promised $100 million after the earthquake in Iran (December 2003), of which only $17 million has been paid. The same thing happened in Liberia: $1 billion promised, $70 million paid.”[4] [369] The Asian Development Bank today announced that $4 billion of the money promised has not yet been transferred and, according to the BBC, "The Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, has [said] that his country has not yet received any of the money promised by governments". On Banda Aceh there is still no clean water for the population (ironically, the only ones to benefit from the efforts of the NGOs, which are largely inadequate, are the refugees in their camps…). In Sri Lanka, the refugees from the area around Trincomalee (to take just one example) are still living in tents and suffer from diarrhoea and chicken pox; 65% of their fishing fleet (on which a large part of the island's population depends) was destroyed by the tsunami and still has not been replaced.

The media, under orders of course, explain to us at great length the inevitable difficulties of a large-scale aid operation. It is very instructive to compare these "difficulties" assisting the poverty-stricken population (which brings no profit to capital), with the impressive logistic capacity of the American army during Desert Storm. During the six month build-up for the attack on Iraq, according to an article published by the Army Magazine,[5] [370] the "22nd Support Command received more than 12,447 tracked vehicles, 102,697 wheeled vehicles, 1 billion gallons [3,7 billion litres] of fuel and 24 short [metric] tons of mail during this brief period. Innovations over previous wars included state-of-the-art roll-on-roll-off shipping, modern containerisation, an efficient single-fuel system and automated information management". So when they talk about the "logistic difficulties" of humanitarian operations, let's bear in mind what capitalism is capable of doing when it is a question of defending its imperialist interests.

Moreover, even the sums and the pitiful resources sent there, were not given free of charge: the bourgeoisie does not spend money unless it gets something in return. If the Western powers dispatched their helicopters, their aircraft carriers and their amphibious vehicles to the area, it is because they intended to benefit in terms of their imperialist influence there. As Condoleeza Rice said to the American Senate, when she was confirmed as Secretary of State:[6] [371] "I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the US government, but the heart of the American people, and I think it has paid great dividends for us".[7] [372] Equally, the Indian government's decision to refuse any Western aid was entirely motivated by its desire to "play in the big boys' playground" and to affirm itself as a regional imperialist power.

Democracy hides barbarism

The indecent discrepancy between what the bourgeoisie spends on disseminating death and the increasingly wretched living conditions of the vast majority of the world's population is telling. However if we remain at this level, we will not get any further than all those of good conscience who defend democracy, that is, the various NGOs.

All the great powers are themselves ardent defenders of democracy and the information they broadcast on TV does not hesitate to expound all the reasons why we can expect a better world, thanks to the irresistible spread of democracy. Following the elections in Afghanistan, the population voted for the first time in Iraq, and Bush Junior was able to welcome the admirable courage of these people, who braved a real risk of death in order to go to the polling stations and say "no" to terrorism. In the Ukraine, the "orange revolution" has followed the example of Georgia and has replaced a corrupt government, a Russian leftover, with the heroic Yushenko. In the Lebanon, young people mobilise to demand that light be thrown on the assassination of opposition leader Rafik Hariri and that Syrian troops leave the country. In Palestine, the elections gave a clear mandate to Mahmud Abbas to end terrorism and conclude a just peace with Israel. Finally, in Kirghizstan a "tulip revolution" has swept away the old president Akayev. So we are supposed to be in the midst of a real democratic unfolding of "people power", the bearer of the "new world order", promised us when the Berlin wall came down in 1989.

But once we scratch the surface, the perspective immediately becomes less rosy.

To start with, the elections in Iraq have only punctuated a power struggle between the different factions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie, which continued unabated with the subsequent negotiations between Shiites and Kurds over the division of power and the degree of autonomy to be given to the Kurdish party. For the moment they have managed to reach an agreement about certain government positions. But this is only by postponing the thorny question of Kirkuk, a rich oil town in northern Iraq, which is coveted both by the Sunnis and by the Kurds. Moreover it continues to be the scene of violent confrontations with the "resistance". We may well ask to what extent the Kurdish leaders take the Iraqi elections seriously given that, on the very same day, they organised an "opinion poll", the results of which showed that 95% of Kurds want an independent Kurdistan. "Self-determination is the natural right of our people and they have the right to express what they wish" according to Kurdish leader Barzani, and "when the moment comes, it will become a reality".[8] [373] The Kurdish situation is pregnant with threats to the stability of the region because any attempt on their part to affirm their independence would be seen as an immediate danger by two neighbouring countries, in which there exist significant Kurdish minorities: Turkey and Iran.

The Iraqi elections have proved to be a media coup in favour of the United States that has, politically, considerably weakened the resistance of its powerful rivals in the region, France in particular. On the other hand, the Bush government is by no means pleased at the prospect of an Iraqi state dominated by the Shiites, allied to Iran and so indirectly to Syria and its Lebanese henchmen, the Hezbollah. The assassination of Rafik Hariri, a powerful Lebanese leader and businessman, must be seen in this context.

All of the Western press - in America and France above all - point the finger at Syria. However all commentators are agreed on two points. Firstly Hariri was by no means an opposition force (he had been prime minister under Syrian tutelage for ten years). Secondly, Syria is the last to benefit from the crime, as it has been obliged to announce the complete withdrawal of its troops for the 30th April.[9] [374] By contrast, those who actually profit from the situation are, on the one hand Israel, as it weakens the influence of Hezbollah and, on the other hand the United States, which leapt at the chance to bring the Syrian regime into line. Does this mean that the "democratic revolution", that brought about this retreat, has, by some stretch of the imagination, won over a new zone to peace and prosperity? We beg leave to doubt this when we note that today's "opposition forces" (such as the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt) are in fact none other than the warlords, the protagonists of the conflict that bathed the country in blood from 1975 to 1990. Several bombings have already been directed against the Christian areas of the Lebanon, while the Hezbollah (with 20,000 men in arms) holds massive demonstrations.

In the same way, the forced resignation of the president of Kirghizstan, Akayev, is no more than a prelude to more misery and instability. This country, one of the poorest in Central Asia, already hosts Russian and American military bases, and is coveted increasingly by China. Moreover, it is one of the main drug routes from Afghanistan to Europe. Given these conditions, the recent "democratic" outcome is no more than a moment in the proxy settling of scores between the great powers.

During the 20th century, imperialist rivalries have twice covered the planet in blood with the appalling butchery of the two world wars. Moreover, there were incessant wars after 1945 involving the two large imperialist blocs that emerged victorious from the Second World War up until the fall of the Russian bloc in 1989. At the end of each orgy of killing, the ruling class swears that this time really is the last; the 14-18 war was "the war to end war", the 1939-45 war was to open up a new period of reconstruction and freedom, guaranteed by the United Nations. The end of the Cold War in 1989 was to herald a "new world order" of peace and prosperity. In case the working class today begins questioning the benefits of this "new order" (of war and misery), 2004 and 2005 have, and will, see sumptuous celebrations of the triumphs of democracy (Normandy landings in June 1944). This also includes moving ceremonies commemorating the horrors of Nazism (liberation of the concentration camps). We suspect that the democratic and hypocritical bourgeoisie will make less palaver about the 20 million deaths in the Russian gulags, as it was itself allied with the USSR against Hitler. Likewise it will be more reticent about the 340,000 deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the greatest democracy in the world used the weapon of Armageddon, the atomic bomb, for the only time in history, against a country that had already been defeated.[10] [375]

This shows how little confidence we can have that this bourgeois class will give us the peace and prosperity they promise us with hand on heart. On the contrary: "Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth - there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretence to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law - but the ravening beast, the witches' sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form."[11] [376] Against this macabre sabbath, only the proletariat can impose a real opposition able to end war, because it will put an end to war-mongering capitalism.

Only the working class can offer a solution

At the end of the Vietnam war, the American army was no longer fit for combat, The soldiers - mainly conscripts - refused repeatedly to go to the front and assassinated those officers who were "zealously inclined". This demoralisation was not the result of a military defeat but was due to the fact that, unlike in the 39-45 war, the American bourgeoisie had not managed to get the working class to join it in its imperialist aims.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon's pro-war factions were convinced that the "Vietnam syndrome" had been overcome. Nevertheless, there is growing refusal on the part of American workers in uniform to give their lives for the military adventures of their bourgeoisie. Since the beginning of the Iraq war, some 5,500 soldiers have deserted, while there is a shortfall of 5,000 men recruited for the National Guard (who make up half the troops). This total of 10,500 men represents nearly 8% of the force of 135,000 present in Iraq.

This kind of passive resistance does not in itself represent a perspective for the future. But the old mole of workers' consciousness goes on digging away. The slow awakening of proletarian resistance to the decline in its living conditions bears with it not only resistance to this old, putrefying world but eventually its destruction to do away for ever with its wars, its misery and its hypocrisy.

 

Jens, 9 April 2005-05-08

 

The last recession (2000-2001) dealt a serious blow to all the theoretical flights of fancy that had developed around the supposed "third industrial revolution" based on the micro-processor and new information technologies, just as the collapse on the stock exchange demolished all the blather about a new "ownership capitalism" where wage labourers were to become participating shareholders – the umpteenth version of the worn-out myth of "popular capitalism", whereby each worker is supposed to become a "proprietor" through the ownership of a few shares in "his" company.

Since then, the US has succeeded in limiting the extent of the recession, while Europe has got stuck in near stagnation. And so we are told, over and over again, that the secret of the American recovery lies in a greater openness to the "new economy", and in its more deregulated and flexible labour market. By contrast, the lethargy of the recovery in Europe is supposedly explained by its backwardness in both domains. To overcome this, the European Union has adopted the objectives laid down in the so-called "Lisbon strategy", which aims to create, by 2010, "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in the world". In the "employment guidelines" laid down by the European commission, and referred to by the new constitution, we can thus read the member states must reform "overly restrictive employment legislation which affects the dynamic of the labour market" and promote "diversity in terms of Labour contracts, notably as far as working time is concerned". In short, the ruling class is trying to turn the page on the last recession and stock market collapse and to present these as if they were no more than minor details on the road towards growth and competitiveness. They are playing us the old tune of a better future... if only the workers will consent to a few extra sacrifices before they finally reach the earthly paradise. But the reality is very different, as this article aims to show through a marxist analysis of the bourgeoisie's own official statistics. The final part of this article is devoted to refuting the analytical method for understanding the crisis, developed by another revolutionary organisation: Battaglia Comunista.

A systemic crisis

The last recession is far from being a mere unfortunate accident: it is the sixth to strike the capitalist economy since the end of the 1960s (see graph n°1).

In 1967,1970-71,1974-75,1988-82,1991-93 and 2001-02 each recession tended to be both longer and deeper than the previous one, within the context of the constant decline in the average growth rate of the world economy decade on decade. They were not merely setbacks on the way towards "the most competitive and dynamic economy in the world", they were so many stages in the slow but inexorable descent into the abyss which is leading the capitalist mode of production to bankruptcy. Despite all the triumphal speeches about the "new economy", the liberalisation of markets, the enlargement of Europe, the technological revolution, globalisation, not to mention all the repeated puffing of the performance of supposedly emerging countries, at the opening of markets in the Eastern bloc, the development of Southeast Asia and China... the growth rate of world GDP per person has continued to decline decade on decade.[1] [396] Certainly, if we look at indicators such as unemployment, the rate of growth, the rate of profit or international trade, then the present crisis is far from the collapse experienced by the capitalist economy worldwide during the 1930s, and its rhythm is much slower. Since then, and especially since World War II, national economies have increasingly come under an ever more omnipresent direct and indirect control by the state. To this should be added the establishment of economic control at the level of each imperialist bloc (through the creation of organisations such as the IMF for the Western bloc and COMECON for the Eastern bloc).[2] [397] With the disappearance of the blocs the same international institutions have either disappeared or lost their influence on the political level, although in some cases they continue to play a certain role on the economic level. This "organisation" of capitalist production for decades to kept control of the system's own contradictions to a much greater extent than was possible during the 1930s, and explains the slow development of the crisis today. But alleviating the effects of these contradictions is not the same thing as resolving them.

Ever more feeble recoveries

The evolution of the economy today is not like a yo-yo, whose ups and downs are a vital part of its movement. It is part of an overall tendency towards decline, which although it is slow and gradual thanks to the regulatory intervention of the state and international institutions, is nonetheless irreversible.

This is the case with the much vaunted American recovery, so often set up as an example: the United States may have succeeded in limiting the extent of the recession but only at the cost of creating new imbalances which will make the next recession even deeper and its effects still more dramatic for the working class and all the exploited of the earth. If all we did was to note the existence of economic recoveries after each recession, then this would be a pure empiricism, which would not advance us one iota in understanding why the rate of growth of the world economy has declined continuously since the end of the 1960s. The evolution of the economic situation since then reveals the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, and consists of a series of recessions and recoveries, the latter being each time based on more fragile foundations. As far as the recovery of the US economy after the recession of 2000-2001 is concerned, we can see that it is essentially based on three high-risk factors: 1) a rapid and massive increase in the budget deficit; 2) a recovery in consumer spending based on growing debt, the disappearance of national savings, and external financing; 3) the spectacular fall in interest rates that herald increased instability on international money markets.

 

1) A record growth in the budget deficit

Since the end of the 1960s, we can see clearly (graph n°2) that the recessions in 1967,1970, 1974-75 and 1980-82 were increasingly deep (the dotted line tracks the growth rate of American GDP), whereas those of 1991 and 2001 appear to have been less extensive and separated by longer periods of recovery (1983-1990 and 1992-1999). Are we to suppose that these are the effects of the emergence of this new economy that we are so often told about? Do we see here a reversal of the tendency begun in the world's most advanced economy and which asks no more than to spread throughout the world if only others will copy America's recipes? This is what we will now examine.

To say that economic recoveries exist, even if they are less vigorous than before, does not take us much further unless we examine what drives them. To do so, we have matched the evolution of the United States budget deficit (solid line in graph n°2) with growth in GDP: this demonstrates clearly not only that each phase of recovery is preceded by a major increase in the budget deficit, but also that on each such occasion the latter is greater in either size or duration than on the previous one. Consequently, both the longer phases of recovery during the 1980s and 1990s and the relatively moderate nature of the recessions are explained above all by the size of the US budget deficit. The recovery after the recession of 2000-2001 is no exception to the rule. Without a historically unprecedented budget deficit, both in terms of its size and of the rapidity with which it developed, American "growth" would look more like deflation. From a surplus of 2.4% in 2000, the budget deficit has now reached 3.5% as a result of the decrease in taxation (essentially for higher incomes) and increased military spending. Moreover, and contrary to the promises of the presidential campaign, the priorities defined for 2005 should lead to an increase in the deficit, given the increases in military and security spending and substantial tax handouts for the rich.[3] [398] The few measures planned to limit this deficit will lead to still greater austerity for the exploited, since it is planned to reduce spending that benefits the poor.[4] [399]

Moreover, we also need to put paid to the myth of a turnaround begun in the United States, since when we look at growth rates by decade following the decline which set in at the end of the 1960s, these remain stationary at around 3%, in other words at a lower level than during previous decades... and the two hundredths of a percentage point (!) increase for the period 1990-1999 over 1980-1989 can certainly not be considered as a change in tendency (graph n°3).

It is clear that the idea of a new phase of growth led by the United States is nothing but a myth maintained by bourgeois propaganda, refuted by the relative decline in European performance which, up until the 1980s, was catching up with the US.[5] [400] The better health of the American economy comes not so much from its greater efficiency as a result of investment in the so-called "new economy", but from a thoroughly traditional and gigantic level of debt throughout the economy, which moreover has to be financed by the rest of the world. This is true both of the increase in the budget deficit and for the other fundamentals of the American economic recovery which we will examine below.

2) Debt fuels a recovery in consumer spending

One of the reasons for relatively higher growth in the United States is sustained consumer spending thanks to the following measures:

• The spectacular decline in taxation which has maintained the spending of the rich, at the cost of further damage to the federal budget;

• the decline both in interest rates, which have fallen from 6.5% at the beginning of 2001 to 1% in mid-2004, and in savings (graph n°4), which has had the effect of raising household debt to record levels (graph n°5) and unleashing a speculative bubble in the housing market (graph n°6).

Such dynamic consumer spending poses three problems: the growth in debt threatened by a crash in the housing market; a growing trade deficit (rising from 4.8% of US GDP in 2003 to 5.7% in 2004: more than 1% of world GDP) and an increasing inequality in incomes.[6] [401] As graph n°4 shows, at the beginning of the 1980s household savings stood at between 8 and 9% of income after tax. Since then, this rate has declined to about 2%. And consumer spending is at the root of the United States' growing trade deficit. The US imports ever more goods and services than it sells abroad. Such a situation, where the United States increasingly lives on credit from the rest of the world, is only possible because the countries which receive an excess of dollars as a result of their trade surplus with the US are prepared to invest them on the American money markets rather than demand their conversion into other currencies. This mechanism has swollen gross US debt towards the rest of the world from 20% of GDP in 1980 to 90% in 2003, beating a 110 year-old record.[7] [402] This debt relative to the rest of the world inevitably weakens the income of American capital which has to finance the interest. This raises the question of how long the American economy can go on sustaining such a level of debt.

Moreover, American household debt is only part of an overall tendency within the American economy, whose indebtedness has risen to an enormous 300% of GDP in 2002 (graph n°7), which in reality stands at 360% if we add in gross federal debt. Concretely this means that in order to repay its total debt the American economy would have to work for nothing for three years. This demonstrates what we said previously, that the shorter recessions and longer recoveries since the beginning of the 1980s, which are supposedly the proof of a new tendency to growth based on a "third industrial revolution", are in fact meaningless because they are based not on a "healthy", but on an increasingly artificial growth.

 

Graph 4: The rate of saving is the relationship between households’ total spending on goods and services (including housing) and their income after tax. This graph shows clearly that if United States growth rates were higher than those in Europe during the 1980s, this is not to do with the onset of the new phase of growth based on the so-called third industrial revolution tied to the “new economy”, but amongst other things to a constant fall in the rate of savings. The United States is spending its own savings and investments from the rest of the world.

Graph 5: Household debt has reached historically unprecedented levels. The growth in this debt has accelerated since the end of the 1960s, each percentage point of economic growth was based on a much faster increase in household debt. About three-quarters of this debt consists of mortgages: households borrow large sums on the basis of property values all the more readily in that interest rates on these loans are currently very low ("house values" here represents the share of mortgages in the total debt). Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Flow of funds accounts of the US, 6 June 2002

Graph 6: With the notable exceptions of Japan (still digesting its housing crash), and of Germany, the inflation in property prices is affecting the whole OECD. "L'état de l'économie 2005", in Alternatives Economiques n°64

Graph 7: Total US debt increases slowly from 1952 until the early 1980s, then doubles in the space of 20 years. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Flow of funds accounts of the US, 6 June 2002

 

 

 

3) Falling interest rates allow a competitive devaluation of the dollar

Finally, the third factor in the American recovery is the progressive fall in interest rates from 6.5% at the beginning of 2001 to 1% in mid-2004, which has made it possible to support the domestic market and to maintain a policy of competitive devaluation of the dollar on international markets.

These low interest rates have made possible a growing level of debt (notably through cheaper mortgages) and have allowed consumer spending and the housing market to sustain economic activity despite the decline in employment during the recession. That is, the share of household spending in GDP which was around 62% from the 1950s to the 1980s, has increased to over 70% at the beginning of the 21st century.

Furthermore, the response to the US trade deficit has been a considerable decline in the dollar (about 40%) in relation to non-aligned currencies, essentially the euro (and in part the yen). In effect the US economy is growing on credit and at the expense of the rest of the world, since it is financed by foreign capital thanks to the dominant position of the United States. Any other country placed in such a situation would be obliged to raise its interest rates enough to attract foreign capital.

Economic dynamics since the end of the 1960s

As we have seen, the recovery that followed the 2001 recession is even more fragile than its predecessors. It is one in a series of recessions which themselves concretise the tendency to a constant decline in rates of growth, decade on decade, since the end of the 1960s. If we are to understand this tendency towards declining growth rates, and especially its irreversible nature, then we must return to its underlying causes.

The exhaustion of the economic impetus after World War II, as the rebuilt European and Japanese economies began to flood the world with surplus products (relative to the solvent market), was followed by a slowdown in the growth of labour productivity, from the mid-1960s for the United States and the beginning of the 1970s for Europe (graph n°8).

Since the increase in productivity is the main endogenous factor that counters the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a slowdown in the growth of productivity puts pressure on the rate of profit and therefore also on other fundamental variables of the capitalist economy: notably the rate of accumulation[8] [403] and economic growth.[9] [404] Graph n°9 shows clearly this fall in the rate of profit, beginning in the mid-1960s for the United States and the early 1970s for Europe, and continuing until 1981-82.

As this graph clearly shows, the fall in the rate of profit was reversed at the beginning of the 1980s and has remained firmly positive since then. The fundamental question is therefore to determine the cause of this reversal, since the rate of profit is a synthetic variable which is determined by numerous parameters that we can summarise under the following three headings: the rate of surplus value, the organic composition of capital, and labour productivity.[10] [405] Essentially, capitalism can escape from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall either "upwards", by increasing labour productivity, or "downwards" through austerity at the expense of wage earners. The data presented in this article demonstrate clearly that the upturn in the rate of profit is not the result of new gains in productivity engendering a decrease or a slowdown in the growth of the organic composition of capital following a "third industrial revolution based on the microprocessor" (the so-called "new economy") but is due to direct and indirect wage austerity and the rise in unemployment (graph n°10,11,12).

Fundamental to the present situation is the fact that neither accumulation (graph n°12), nor productivity (graph n°8), nor growth (graph n°1) have kept up with the 25-year upturn in company profitability: on the contrary, all these fundamental variables have remained depressed. And yet historically, a rise in the rate of profit tends to draw with it the rate of accumulation and therefore of productivity and growth. We therefore need to pose the following fundamental question: why, despite the renewed health and upward orientation of the rate of profit, have capital accumulation and economic growth not followed?

The answer is given by Marx in his critique of political economy and especially in Capital where he puts forward his central thesis of the independence of production and the market: "the mere admission that the market must expand with production, is, on the other hand, again an admission of the possibility of over-production, for the market is limited externally in the geographical sense, the internal market is limited as compared with a market that is both internal and external, the latter in turn is limited as compared with the world market, which however is, in turn, limited at each moment of time, [though] in itself capable of expansion. The admission that the market must expand if there is to be no over-production, is therefore also an admission that there can be over-production. For it is then possible – since market and production are two independent factors – that the expansion of one does not correspond with the expansion of the other";[11] [406] "The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realising it, are not identical. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically. The first are only limited by the productive power of society, the latter by the proportional relation of the various branches of production and the consumer power of society".[12] [407] This means that production does not create its own market (inversely, by contrast, the saturation of the market necessarily has an impact on production, which is then voluntarily limited by the capitalists in an attempt to avoid total ruin). In other words, the fundamental reason behind capitalism's situation where company profitability has been re-established, but without productivity, investment, the rate of accumulation and therefore of growth, following, is to be sought in the inadequacy of solvent outlets.

This inadequacy of solvent outlets is also at the root of the so-called tendency towards the "financiarisation of the economy". If today's abundant profits are not reinvested this is not because of the low profitability of invested capital (if we were to follow the logic of those who explain the crisis solely through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), but because of the lack of sufficient outlets. This is illustrated clearly by graph n°12 which shows that, despite the upturn in profits (the marginal rate measures the relationship of profit to added value) as a result of the increase in austerity, the rate of investment has continued to decline (and so therefore has economic growth) which explains the rise in unemployment and in non-reinvested profit which is then distributed in the form of financial revenue.[13] [408] In the United States, financial revenue (interest and dividends, excluding capital gains) represented on average 10% of total household income between 1952 in 1979 but rose progressively between 1980 and 2003 to reach 17%.

 

Capitalism has only been able to control the effects of its contradictions by putting off the day of reckoning. It is not resolved them, it has only made them more explosive. The present crisis, as it demonstrates the impotence of the economic organisation and policies established since the 1930s and World War II, threatens to be both more serious and more indicative of the level reached by the contradictions of the system than all its predecessors.

 

Graph 8: Labour productivity in the United States and Europe (Average for Germany, France and Great Britain). Labour productivity as calculated here concerns all companies. The United States is shown as a solid line and Europe as a thin line. Labour productivity is the quotient of production, corrected for inflation (constant 1990 dollars), by the number of hours worked: it is thus expressed in dollars per hour. The logarithmic scale allows us to visualise growth rates by the greater or lesser steepness of the curtain (the increasing shallowness of the curve thus indicates a diminution in the rate of growth of labour productivity). We can readily identify the break point in the mid-1960s for the United States and in the first half of the 1970s for Europe. Thus in Europe, labour productivity rose from seven dollars per hour in 1961 to 14 dollars per hour in 1975, whereas the rise from 14 to 28 dollars per hour in 1998 took 23 years.* The small fluctuations in the curve are the effects of upturns and downturns in activity. Because the graph uses purchasing power parity indexes, the absolute levels are comparable (whereas European labour productivity was half that of the United States in 1960, we can see that Europe has since then caught up). * during the 1950-60s the growth rates for labour productivity in the G6 (United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy) were in the region of 6%. Since the 1980s they have turned around 2.5%, in other words they have fallen by more than half.

Graph 9: The rate of profit is calculated here for the whole private economy, as the ratio between a broad measure of profit (production less the total labour cost) and the stock of fixed capital (net of amortization). Taxes (on profits), interest payments, and dividends, for profits. G Dumesnil and D Lévy, published in La finance mondialisée, editor F Chesnais, ed. La Découverte, 2004, pp71-98

Graph 10: Every year, society produces a certain added value in the form of a given volume of goods and services: the gross domestic product (GDP). For companies, this added value is divided between profit and wages (wages paid directly to the workers, and indirect wages in the form of social security payments). The graph shows the evolution of wages as a percentage of GDP. We can see clearly that the rate has fallen over the last 20 years. M Husson, Les casseurs de l'Etat social, ed. La Découverte, 2003

Graph 11: Multiplied by 1.7 between the end of the war and 1970, weekly industrial wages (in 1990 dollars) have fallen to the level of the late 1950s. G Dumesnil and D Lévy, Crise et sortie de crise

Graph 12: Following the application of austerity programmes, the decline in labour costs has increased the competitivityof production costs, which however have not been wholly reflected in a fall in prices, thus increasing company profit margins. The recovery in profits has not, however, led to an increase in investment, which has continued to decline. It it this phenomenon which explains the so-called "financiarisation of the economy": instead of being reinvested, the increased profit is distributed in the form of finance revenue. But if the stagnation of wage costs has fed finance revenue rather than investment, this is not because "bad finance capital" is a parasite on "good productive capital", as the leftists and anti-globalists would have us believe, but because the intrinsic nature of capitalist social relations limits the development of solvent demand. The source of the crisis lies in the very foundations of the capitalist system, not in a "bad" capitalism chasing out the "good" and which needs to be disciplined by more regulations and "democratic control". M Husson, op. cit.

 

Another analysis of the crisis by Battaglia Comunista

We have seen above that the bourgeoisie's explanations are not worth a penny and are nothing other than a pure mystification to hide its system's historic bankruptcy. Unfortunately, some revolutionary political groups have also adopted these conceptions - voluntarily or not - either in their official or in their leftist and anti-globalist versions. We will look here more particularly at the analyses produced by Battaglia Comunista.[14] [409]

We should start by pointing out that everything we have seen above constitutes a clear refutation of the foundations of the "analysis" of the crisis in terms of a "third industrial revolution" and of the "parasitic financiarisation" of capitalism and the "recomposition of the working-class" which Battaglia seems to have taken directly from the bourgeoisie’s propaganda manuals for the former, and from the leftists and anti-globalists for the latter.[15] [410] Battaglia Comunista is utterly convinced that capitalism is in the midst of a "third industrial revolution marked by the microprocessor" and is undergoing a "restructuring of its productive apparatus" and a "resulting demolition of the previous composition of the class", thus making possible "a long resistance to the crisis of the cycle of accumulation".[16] [411] At this point we should make a number of comments:

1) First of all, if capitalism really were in the midst of a "industrial revolution" as Battaglia Comunista claims, then we should at least - by definition - be seeing an upturn in labour productivity. And indeed this is what Battaglia thinks is happening, since they declare forthrightly and without any empirical verification that "the profound restructuring of the productive apparatus has brought with it a dizzying increase in productivity", an analysis repeated in the latest issue of their theoretical review: "... an industrial revolution, in other words of the processes of production, has always had the effect of increasing labour productivity...".[17] [412] But, as we have seen above, the reality in terms of labour productivity is the opposite to the bluff maintained by bourgeois propaganda and swallowed whole by Battaglia Comunista. This organisation seems to be unaware that the growth in labour productivity began to decline more than 35 years ago and that it has more or less stagnated since the 1980s (graph n°8)![18] [413]

2) We have seen that, for Battaglia, "the third industrial revolution based on the microprocessor" is so powerful that it has "generated dizzying gains in productivity" making it possible to "reduce the increase in the growth of organic composition". But even a cursory examination of the real dynamic of the rate of profit demonstrates that the recession of 2000-2001 in the United States was preceded in 1997 by a temporary downturn[19] [414] (graph n°9), notably because the famous "new economy" led to an increase in capital, in other words to a rise in organic composition and not to a decline as Battaglia pretends.[20] [415] The new technologies have certainly made possible some gains in productivity[21] [416] but these have been insufficient to compensate for the cost of investment despite the decline in their relative price, which has in the end weighed on the organic composition of capital and has since 1997 led to a downturn in US profit rates. This point is important since it demolishes any illusions in capitalism's ability to free itself from its fundamental laws. The new technologies are not a magic wand which would make it possible to accumulate capital for free.

3) Moreover, if labour productivity really were undergoing a "dizzying increase" then, for anyone who knows Marx, the rate of profit would be rising. Indeed this is what Battaglia Comunista suggests, though without saying so explicitly, when they declare that "... unlike previous industrial revolutions (...) the one based on the microprocessor (...) has also reduced the cost of innovation, in reality the cost of constant capital, thus diminishing the increase in the organic composition of capital".[22] [417] As we can see, Battaglia does not deduce from this that there has been an increase in the rate of profit. Have they forgotten that "if productivity rises faster than the composition of capital, then the rate of profit does not decline, on the contrary it will rise", as its fraternal organisation, the CWO, wrote some time ago (in Revolutionary Perspectives n°16 old series, "Wars and accumulation", pp 15-17)? Battaglia prefers to talk discreetly of "the diminution in the increase of the growth of organic composition" as a result of "the dizzying growth in productivity following the industrial revolution based on the microprocessor" rather than of a rise in the rate of profit. Why such contortions, why try to hide economic reality from their readers? Quite simply because to recognise such an implication of their own observation (whether right or wrong) of the evolution of labour productivity would contradict their eternal dogma as to the unique source of the crisis: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Battaglia Comunista, which never misses an occasion to reassert its eternal credo that the rate of profit is always pointed downwards, is so preoccupied with "understanding the world" outside the supposedly abstract schemas of the ICC that they seem not to have realised that the rate of profit has been resolutely pointed upwards for a quarter-century (graph n°9) and not downwards as they continue to claim! This 28-year blindness has only one explanation: how else could they continue to talk about the crisis of capitalism without calling into question their dogma explaining crises solely by the tendency of the rate of profit fall, when in fact the latter has been oriented upwards since the beginning of the 1980s?

4) Capitalism survives not by rising, thanks to "an industrial revolution" and "dizzying new gains in productivity" as Battaglia Comunista claims, but by decline, through a drastic reduction in the mass of wages dragging the world into poverty and, at the same time, reducing in part its own outlets. Anyone who analyses attentively the driving forces behind this quarter-century rise in the rate of profit will see that it springs not from "dizzying rises in productivity" and "the diminution in the increase in organic composition" but in an unprecedented austerity at the expense of the working-class as we have seen above (graphs n°10 to 12).

Capitalism's present configuration thus utterly refutes all those who make the mechanism of the "tendency of the rate of profit fall" the sole explanation of the economic crisis, given that for 25 years the rate of profit has been rising. If the crisis continues today despite renewed company profitability, it is because companies no longer expand production as they once did, given the limitation and therefore the inadequacy of their outlets. This reveals itself in anaemic investment and therefore weak growth. Battaglia Comunista is incapable of understanding this because they have not understood Marx's fundamental thesis as to the independence between production and the market (see above), and have traded it in for an absurd idea which makes the development or the limitation of the market depend entirely on the sole dynamic upwards or downwards of the rate of profit.[23] [418]

Given these repeated blunders, which reveal their incomprehension of the most elementary notions, we can only repeat our advice to Battaglia Comunista: revise your ABC of marxist economic concepts before trying to play teacher and excommunicators with the ICC. In fact, Battaglia's recent decision to refuse any reply to our organisation has come just in time to hide their increasingly obvious inability to confront our arguments politically.[24] [419]

Contrary to the "abstract schemas" of the ICC, which are supposedly "outside historical materialism", Battaglia tells us that they have "... studied the administration of the crisis by the West both in all its financial aspects and on the terrain of the restructuring engendered by the wave of the microprocessor revolution".[25] [420] However, we have seen that Battaglia's "study" is nothing other than an insipid copy of leftist and anti-globalist theories about the "parasitism of financial rent".[26] [421] Their copy is not only insipid it is moreover totally incoherent and contradictory since they have failed to master the marxist economic concepts that they claim to work with. And while they do not understand these concepts, they do not hesitate to transform them as they please, as with the marxist thesis on the independence of production and the market which, in the secret world of Battaglia's dialectic, is transformed into a law of the strict dependence between "... the economic cycle and the process of valorisation which make the market 'solvent' or 'insolvent'" (op cit). We expect something better than a string of nonsense from critical contributions that claim to re-establish marxism against the so-called idealist vision of the ICC.

Conclusion

On all major questions of economic analysis Battaglia Comunista fall systematically into the trap of appearances in themselves, instead of trying to understand the essence of things from the standpoint of a marxist analytical framework. We have seen that Battaglia Comunista has swallowed all the bourgeoisie's talk about the existence of a third industrial revolution merely on the basis of the empirical appearance of a few technological novelties in the microelectronics and information technology sectors, however spectacular these may be,[27] [422] and as a result have arrived at the purely speculative deduction that there are "dizzying gains in productivity" and "a reduction in the cost of constant capital thus diminishing the increase in organic composition". On the contrary, a rigorous marxist analysis of the fundamental variables that determine the dynamic of the capitalist economy (the market, the rate of profit, the rate of surplus value, the organic composition of capital, labour productivity, etc.) allow us to understand not only that this is in large part of media bluff, but in valorisation the reality is the opposite of the bourgeoisie's claims, echoed by Battaglia Comunista.

Understanding the crisis is not an academic exercise but essentially a militant activity. As Engels said "The task of economic science is rather to show that the social abuses which have recently been developing are necessary consequences of the existing mode of production, but at the same time also indications of its approaching dissolution, and to reveal within the already dissolving economic form of motion, the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses." And this becomes possible with real clarity "Only when the mode of production in question has already described a good part of its descending curve, when it has half outlived its day, when the conditions of its existence have to a large extent disappeared, and its successor is already knocking at the door".[28] [423] This is the meaning and the aim of revolutionary work at the level of economic analysis. It allows us to understand the context for the evolution of the balance of class forces and certain of its determining factors, since capitalism's entry into its decadent phase provides the material and potentially the subjective conditions for the proletariat to undertake the insurrection. This is what the ICC has always tried to demonstrate in its analyses. Battaglia Comunista, by abandoning the concept of decadence[29] [424] and by adopting an academic and mono-causal vision of the crisis has begun to forget how to do this. Their "economic science" no longer service to demonstrate the " social abuses" of capitalism or the " indications of its approaching dissolution" as the founders of marxism urged us to do, but rather to fob us off with leftist and anti-globalist prose about "capitalism's capacity for survival" through the "financiarisation of the system", the "recomposition of the proletariat", and to cap it all "the fundamental transformation of capitalism" thanks to the so-called "third industrial revolution based on the microprocessor", new technologies, etc.

Today finds Battaglia Comunista completely disorientated and no longer really knowing what to defend in front of the working-class: is the capitalist mode of production in decadence or not?[30] [425] Is it the capitalist mode of production or the capitalist social formation which is in decadence?[31] [426] Has capitalism been "in crisis for more than 30 years"[32] [427] or is it going through "a third industrial revolution based on the microprocessor" leading to "a dizzying increase in productivity"?[33] [428] Is the rate of profit rising as the statistical data demonstrates or is it still falling as Battaglia invariably repeats, to the point where capitalism is obliged to proliferate war around the world in order to avoid bankruptcy?[34] [429] Is capitalism today in a dead-end or does it still have before it "a long capacity for resistance" thanks to "a third industrial revolution",[35] [430] or does it even have its own "solution" to the crisis thanks to war: "In the imperialist era global war is capital's way of 'controlling', of temporarily resolving, its contradictions" (IBRP platform)? These questions are fundamental if we are to orientate ourselves in the present situation. On these questions Battaglia Comunista can do no more than go around in circles: they are incapable of offering a clear response to the proletariat.

CC

---

 

In the previous article in this series (“Nucleo Comunista Internacional in Argentina: an episode in the proletariat’s striving for consciousness”, International Review n°120) we retraced the trajectory of a small nucleus of revolutionary elements in Argentina in the Nucleo Comunista Internacional (NCI).

We brought to light the problems encountered by this small group, particularly the fact that one of its elements, Citizen B, had profited from his possession of computer equipment (and especially Internet access) to isolate the other comrades by monopolising correspondence with groups of the proletarian political milieu. He imposed his decisions on them when he was not going behind their backs; he deliberately hid his actions from them and developed a politics which they did not approve since it called in question, overnight, their whole previous orientation. In particular, after expressing the will to be rapidly integrated into the ICC,[1] [471] affirming complete agreement with its political positions and analyses, rejecting the positions of the IBRP and denouncing the thuggish and informer-like behaviour of the so-called “Internal Fraction of the ICC” (IFICC), Citizen B abruptly turned his coat in the summer of 2004.

While a delegation of the ICC was present and was holding a whole series of discussions with the NCI, he made contact with the IFICC and the IBRP to announce his intention to develop work with these two groups, adopting another name, the “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas” (without saying a word to our delegation nor to the other members of the NCI). In fact “Senor B’s sudden passion for the IBRP and its positions, and for the IFICC, only began when this petty adventurer realised that his manoeuvres would meet short shrift with the ICC. This conversion, more sudden even than that of St Paul on the road to Damascus, gave the IBRP not the slightest pause for thought: the latter hastened to act as Senor B’s spokesman. The IBRP should ask itself one day how it is, and not just once, that elements who have demonstrated their inability to integrate into the communist left should turn towards the IBRP after failing in their 'approach' to the ICC” (ibid).

As far as we know, the IBRP has never asked itself such a question (at least no such question has ever appeared in its press).

One of the aims of this article is to set out some elements of an answer, which may be of some use to the IBRP, but will also be helpful for those coming towards the positions of the communist left and who might perhaps be impressed by the IBRP’s presentation of itself as the “only organisation with the heritage of the Italian communist left”. More generally, it will try to understand why the IBRP has experienced a series of failures in its policy of regroupment of revolutionary forces at the international level.

The IBRP's siren song's irresistible attractiveness for confused elements

The attitude of Citizen B, discovering at one and the same time a profound convergence with the positions of the IBRP and with the (totally slanderous) allegations put forward by the IFICC about the ICC, is really nothing but a caricature of an attitude which we have seen numerous times from elements who, having engaged in a discussion with our organisation, find that they have been mistaken, whether because they are not really in agreement with our positions, or because the demands of militancy in the ICC appear too constraining for them, or even because they have found out that they cannot carry out their personal policy within our organisation. These elements have then very often turned to the IBRP, in which they see an organisation more apt to satisfy their expectations. We have already taken up this type of evolution several times in our publications. That said, it would be worth while returning to these examples to show that this is not a fortuitous or exceptional event, but is a recurrent reality that ought to pose questions for the militants of the IBRP.

Even before the birth of the IBRP…

In the prehistory of the IBRP (and of the ICC) we see a first manifestation of what was be repeated many times thereafter. We are in the years 1973-4. Following an appeal launched in November 1972 by the American group Internationalism (which was to become the ICC section in the United States) for an international correspondence network, a series of meetings was organised between several groups which based themselves on the tradition of the communist left. The most regular participants of these meetings were Revolution Internationale from France and three groups based in Britain, World Revolution (WR), Revolutionary Perspectives (RP) and Workers’ Voice (WV) (from the names of their respective publications). WR and RP came from splits in Solidarity, which was based on anarcho-councilist positions. WV was a small group of workers from Liverpool who had broken with Trotskyism a short while before. Following these discussions, the three British groups came to positions close to those of Révolution Internationale and Internationalism (around which the ICC was constituted the following year). However, the process of unification of these three groups ended in failure. On the one hand the elements of Workers’ Voice decided to break with World Revolution because they felt they had been swindled by WR. The latter had retained semi-councilist positions on the 1917 revolution in Russia: it considered that it was a proletarian revolution but that the Bolshevik Party was bourgeois, a position of which it had convinced the comrades of WV. When WR, at the time of the meeting in January 1974, rejected these last remnants of councilism and rallied to the position of Révolution Internationale, these comrades felt “betrayed” and developed a great hostility to those in WR (who they accused of “capitulating to RI”). This led them to publish a “precision” in November 1974 that defined the groups who were going to form the ICC shortly after as “counter-revolutionaries”.[2] [472] On the other hand, RP asked to be integrated into the ICC as a “tendency” with its own platform (inasmuch as there were still differences between it and the ICC). We responded that our approach was not to integrate “tendencies” as such, each with its own platform, even if we consider that there can be differences on secondary aspects of the programmatic documents within the organisation. We did not shut the door on discussion with RP but this group began to distance itself from the ICC. It attempted to constitute an “alternative” international regroupment to the ICC, with WV, the French group Pour une Intervention Communiste (PIC) and the Revolutionary Workers’ Group (RWG) of Chicago. This “unprincipled bloc” (following Lenin’s term) didn’t last long. It could hardly be otherwise since the only question which brought these four groups together was their growing hostility to the ICC. Finally, however, there was the regroupment between RP and WV in Britain (September 1975) to constitute the Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO). RP had to pay a price for this unification: its militants had to accept the position of WV that the ICC was “counter-revolutionary”. It was a position they maintained for some time, even after the departure from the CWO, one year later, of the old members of WV who particularly reproached those of RP for their … intolerance of other groups![3] [473] This CWO “analysis”, considering the ICC as “counter-revolutionary” was based on “decisive arguments”:

“a) They regard state capitalist Russia after 1921 and the Bolsheviks as defensible.

b) They maintain that a state capitalist gang, such as was the Trotskyist Left Opposition, was a proletarian group” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°4).

It was only much later, when the CWO had started to discuss with the Partito Comunista Internazionalista of Italy (Battaglia Comunista) that it renounced the view that the ICC is “counter-revolutionary” (if it had maintained its previous criteria it would also have had to consider BC an organisation of the bourgeoisie!).

So, the point of departure for the trajectory of the CWO was marked by the fact that the ICC did not accept RP's integration into our organisation with its own platform. This trajectory finally led to the formation of the IBRP in 1984: the CWO could at last participate in an international regroupment after its previous failures.

Disappointment with the SUCM

The process which led to the formation of the IBRP was thus itself marked by the sort of approach where those “disappointed with the ICC” turned towards the IBRP. We will not go into the three conferences of the groups of the communist left which were held between 1977 and 1980 following an appeal from BC in April 1976.[4] [474] In particular our press has often stressed that BC and the CWO deliberately scuttled this effort in a totally irresponsible way, solely for petty sectarian reasons, by hastily calling for a vote at the end of the 3rd conference on the question of the role and function of the party as a supplementary criterion. This was specifically aimed at the exclusion of the ICC from future conferences.[5] [475] On the other hand, BC and the CWO decided that it was worth calling the 1982 “conference”, which was presented as the continuation of the three conferences between 77 and 80. This “conference” brought together, apart from BC and the CWO, the “Supporters of the Unity of Communist Militants” (SUCM) a group of Iranian students mainly based in Britain that the ICC knew well: it had discussed with them before and concluded that, despite their declarations of agreement with the communist left, it was a leftist group coming from Maoism. The SUCM then turned to the CWO, which did not take account of the warnings against this group from our comrades in the section in Britain. It was thanks to this first-rate new “recruit” that the CWO and BC were able to avoid having a simple tête-à-tête at this glorious 4th Conference of the Communist Left which, now that the ICC was no longer present to pollute it with its “councilism”, could at last pose the real problems of the construction of the future world party of the revolution.[6 [476]] In fact, all the other “forces” that the CWO-BC tandem had “selected” for invitation (according to the term used by BC) with “seriousness” and “clarity” deserted: whether because they could not come, as was the case for Kommunistische Politik from Austria or L’Eveil Internationaliste, or because they had disappeared by the time of the “Conference” as was the case for two American groups, Marxist Worker and Wildcat. Bizarrely, the latter, despite its councilism, was considered as an entrant according to the “criteria” decreed by BC and the CWO.[7] [477]

We should say that the flirtation with the SUCM was not pursued for long, not due to the lucidity of the comrades of BC and the CWO but simply because this leftist group, which could not hide its real nature for ever, ended up integrating itself into the Communist Party of Iran, a Stalinist organisation.

As for the conferences of the communist left, BC and the CWO did not call any others, preferring to avoid the ridicule of a new fiasco.[8] [478]

Two individual trajectories

The attraction of the IBRP for those “disappointed with the ICC” was shown in the same period by an element we will call L, who was their sole representative in France for a time. This element, who had previously attended the classes of a Trotskyist organisation, came close enough to the ICC at the beginning of the 80s to pose his candidature. Evidently we conducted serious discussions with him but we asked him to be patient because we observed that, despite his assertion of complete agreement with our positions, he still maintained traces of his experience of leftism in his political attitude, particularly a marked immediatism. Because of this he had very little patience. When he found that the discussions were lasting too long for his taste, he broke them off unilaterally and turned to the groups who were going to form the IBRP. Overnight his positions suddenly evolved to agreement with the IBRP which, for its part, did not demand the same patience before integrating him. This element then left the IBRP, proving that his convictions were not very solid, to wander among the groups of the Bordigist current, before coming back… to the IBRP, in the mid 1990s. At this point we warned the IBRP against his lack of political reliability, but they did not heed our warning and reintegrated him. However, as one might

have expected, this element did not remain very long in the IBRP: at the beginning of this century he “discovered” that the positions he had adopted for a second time did not really convince him and he came to several of our public meetings to cover the IBRP in mud: the ICC found it necessary to reject his slanders and defend the IBRP.

The series of flirtations of those disappointed in the ICC with the IBRP are not limited to the examples we have already given.

Another element, who also came from leftism, who we shall call E, had a similar trajectory. With him the process of integration went further than with L since he became a member of our organisation after long discussions. However, it is one thing to affirm agreement with the political positions, and another to integrate oneself into a communist organisation. Even though the ICC had explained at length what it means to be a militant in a communist organisation and even though he had approved of our attitude, the practical experience of militancy, which presupposes a particular and constant effort to overcome individualism, fairly rapidly led him to realise that he had no place in our organisation, and he started to develop a hostile attitude towards it. Finally he left the ICC without putting forward the slightest disagreement with our platform (despite our demand that he have a serious discussion about his “reproaches”). That did not prevent him from discovering a profound agreement with the positions of the IBRP shortly after, to the point where they published a polemic against the ICC that he had written.

Coming back to groups which have followed this sort of approach, the list is not exhausted by the examples we have already given above. We should recall the Communist Bulletin Group (CBG) in Britain, Kamunist Kranti in India, Comunismo in Mexico, Los Angeles Workers’ Voice and Internationalist Notes in Canada.

The doomed love between the CBG and the CWO

Our press has carried several articles about the CBG.[9] [479] We will not return to the analysis that we made of this tiny parasitic group, made up of former members of the ICC who left in 1981 with the theft of material and money from our organisation, and whose sole reason for existence was to throw mud at our organisation. At the end of 1983 this group had responded favourably to an “Address to proletarian political groups” adopted by the 5th ICC Congress with the aim of “of establishing a conscious co-operation between all organisations”:[10] [480] “We want to express our solidarity with the approach and concerns expressed in the Address…” However, it made not the slightest critique of its thuggish behaviour. We also wrote “Until the fundamental question of the defence of the political organisations of the proletariat is understood, we are obliged to consider the CBG’s letter as null and void. They got the wrong Address.”

Probably disappointed that the ICC had repulsed their advances, and visibly suffering from isolation, the CBG turned towards the CWO, the British part of the IBRP. A meeting was held in Edinburgh in December 1992 following a “practical collaboration between members of the CWO and the CBG”. “A large number of misunderstandings have been clarified on both sides. It has therefore been decided to make the practical co-operation more formal. An agreement has been written that the CWO as a whole should ratify in January (after which a complete report will be published) and which includes the following points…” There follows a list of different agreements for collaboration and especially: “The two groups will discuss a proposed ‘popular platform’ prepared by a comrade of the CWO as a tool for intervention” (Workers’ Voice 64, January-February 1996).

Apparently this flirtation was not continued for we have never heard any more on the collaboration of the CBG and the CWO. Nor have we ever read anything explaining why this collaboration came to nothing.

Setbacks for the IBRP in India

Another unfortunate adventure with those “disenchanted with the ICC” was with the group publishing Kamunist Kranti in India. This small nucleus emerged from a group of elements that the ICC had discussed with during the 1980s and some of whom had approached the ICC, becoming very close sympathisers or even joining our ranks. However, one of these elements, who we will call S, and who played an important role in the first discussions with the ICC, did not take that path. Probably afraid of losing his individuality in the event of being integrated into the ICC, he started his own group with the publication Kamunist Kranti.

For its part the IBRP has experienced setbacks in India. For this organisation conditions in the countries of the periphery “make mass communist organisations possible” (Communist Review n°3), which obviously supposes that it is easier to create them there than in the central countries of capitalism. The IBRP found that its theses were not concretised in the form of groups rallying to its platform. Their disappointment was all the greater because, already at this time, despite its analyses being misrepresented as “Eurocentrist”, the ICC had a section in Venezuela, one of the peripheral countries. Obviously the abortive flirtation with the SUCM had only aggravated the IBRP’s bitterness. So, when the IBRP engaged in discussions with the Lal Pataka group in India they thought that they had at last hit the jackpot. Lal Pataka was a group of Maoist extraction which, like the SUCM, had not really broken from its origins despite the sympathies that it expressed for the positions of the communist left. Faced with the warnings of the ICC against this group (which ultimately was reduced to just one element), the IBRP responded “Some cynical spirits [meaning the spirits of the ICC] think that we have accepted this comrade into the IBRP too quickly”. For some time Lal Pataka was presented as the constituent part of the IBRP in India, but, in 1991, this name disappeared from the pages of the press of the IBRP to be replaced by that of Kamunist Kranti. The IBRP seemed to place a lot of weight on these “disenchanted with the ICC”: “We hope that in the future productive relations will be established between the International Bureau and Kamunist Kranti” but these hopes were soon dashed because, two years later, you could read in Communist Review n°11: “It is a tragedy that, despite the existence of promising elements, there doesn’t yet exist a solid nucleus of Indian communists”. And indeed, Kamunist Kranti has since disappeared from circulation. There still exists a small communist nucleus in India, that publishes Communist Internationalist, but it is part of the ICC and the IBRP “forgets” to make any reference to it.

Mexican disappointments

 

During the time that the elements in India were approaching the positions of the communist left, the ICC was also engaged in discussions with a small group in Mexico, the “Colectivo Comunista Alptraum” (CCA) which started publishing Comunismo in 1986.[11] [481] Shortly thereafter, the “Grupo Proletario Internacionalista” (GPI) was constituted. It started publishing Revolucion Mundial at the beginning of 1987. The ICC undertook discussions with this group also.[12] [482] From this time the CCA began to distance itself from the ICC: on the one hand it adopted an increasingly academic method in its political positions and, on the other hand, it began approaching the IBRP. Quite clearly, this small nucleus took the establishment of relations between the ICC and the GPI badly.

Knowing the approach of the ICC, which insists on the need for groups of the communist left in the same country to develop close links, the CCA, which had a tenth of the membership of the GPI, probably thought that its “individuality” was being threatened by developing relations with this organisation. Relations between the IBRP and the CCA were maintained for a period, but when the GPI became the section of the ICC in Mexico, the CCA disappeared from circulation.

A stormy “American dream”

 

With the “Los Angeles Workers’ Voice” adventure we come almost to the end of this long list. This group was made up of elements who had taken classes in Maoism (of the pro-Albanian variety). We had discussions with these elements for a long period but we noted their inability to overcome the confusions that they had inherited from their membership of a bourgeois organisation. So when, in the mid-1990s, this small group approached the IBRP we warned the latter against the confusions of the LAWV. The IBRP took this warning very badly, thinking that we didn’t want it to develop a political presence in North America. For several years the LAWV was a sympathising group of the IBRP in the United States, and in April 2000 it participated in Montreal, Canada, in a conference intended to strengthen the political presence of the IBRP in North America. However, a short time afterwards, the Los Angeles elements began to express their disagreements on a whole series of questions, adopting a more and more anarchist vision (rejection of centralisation, depiction of the Bolsheviks as a bourgeois party, etc). But above all it began pouring out sordid slanders against the IBRP and particularly against another American sympathiser of this organisation, AS, who lived in another state. Our press in the US denounced the behaviour of the LAWV elements and expressed its solidarity with the slandered militants.[13] [483] This is why we thought it useful at the time to recall the warnings that we had made to the IBRP at the beginning of its idyll with the LAWV.

The other North American participant in the April 2000 conference, Internationalist Notes, which is today a “sympathising group” of the IBRP, was another of those “disenchanted with the ICC”. The discussion between the ICC and the comrades in Montreal began in the late 1990s. This was a small nucleus whose most experienced element, who we will call W, had had a long experience in unionism and leftism. The discussions had always been very fraternal, particularly with the various visits of ICC militants to Montreal, and we hoped that the comrades would be as frank with us as we were with them. In particular we had always been clear on the fact that we considered that the long period of W’s militancy in a leftist organisation was a handicap for a full comprehension of the positions and the method of the communist left. That is why we asked comrade W on several occasions to draw up a balance sheet of his political trajectory, but clearly this comrade had difficulties in making this balance sheet. Despite his promise to produce one, we never received it.

While the discussions with Internationalist Notes continued, and without the comrades informing us of their eventual rapprochement with the positions of the IBRP, we came across a declaration announcing that IN had become an IBRP sympathising group in Canada. The ICC had encouraged the Montreal comrades to get acquainted with the positions of the IBRP and to contact that organisation. In effect our approach has never been that of “keeping contacts to ourselves”. On the contrary we think that militants who approach the positions of the ICC should be fully aware of the positions of the other groups of the communist left. If they adhere to our organisation, it must be in a fully conscious way.[14] [484] That elements approaching the communist left find themselves in agreement with the positions of the IBRP doesn’t pose a problem in itself. What is surprising is when this rapprochement happens “in secret”. Obviously the IBRP did not make the same demands as the ICC on W breaking with his leftist past. And we are convinced that this is one of the reasons that led him to turn towards the IBRP without informing us of the evolution of his positions.

The IBRP’s speciality: political abortion

One can only be fascinated by the repetition of the phenomenon where elements who are “disenchanted with the ICC” later turn towards the IBRP. Obviously one could consider that this is a normal development: after having understood that the positions of the ICC are erroneous, these elements turn to the correctness and clarity of the IBRP. This is perhaps what the militants of this organisation tell themselves on each such occasion. The problem is that of all the groups which have taken this path, the only one that is still present today in the ranks of the communist left is the last mentioned, Internationalist Notes. ALL the other groups have disappeared or returned to the ranks of bourgeois organisations like the SUCM. The IBRP must ask itself why, and it would be interesting if it could produce a balance sheet of its experiences for the working class. The few reflections that follow might perhaps help its militants to make such a balance sheet.

Quite obviously, what animates the approach of these groups is not the search for a clarity that they have failed to find in the ICC, seeing that they ended up abandoning communist militancy. The facts have amply demonstrated that their distancing from the ICC, as we have said every time, corresponds fundamentally to a distancing from the programmatic clarity and the method of the communist left, most often ending in a refusal of the demands of militancy within this current. In reality their ephemeral flirtation with the IBRP is only one step before their abandonment of combat in the ranks of the proletariat. The question then posed is, why has the IBRP been drawn into such a trajectory?

To this question there is a fundamental answer: the IBRP defends an opportunist method for regrouping revolutionaries.

It is this opportunism on the IBRP's part that allows elements who refuse to make a complete break with their leftist past to find a temporary “refuge”, allowing them to think, or to say, that they are still engaged in the communist left. The IBRP, particularly since the 3rd Conference of the Groups of the Communist Left, has not stopped insisting on the necessity for a “rigorous selection” in the proletarian milieu. But, in reality, this selection is one-way: it says that the ICC is no longer “a valid force in the perspective for the future world party of the proletariat” and that it “can’t be considered by us [the IBRP] as a valid partner in defining any kind of unity of action” (response to our appeal of the 11th February 2003 addressed to groups of the Communist Left for a common intervention on the war and published in International Review n°113). Consequently it is out of the question for the IBRP to establish the least cooperation with the ICC, even for a common declaration of the internationalist camp in the face of imperialist war.[15] [485] However, this great rigour is not exercised in other directions, and notably towards groups that have nothing to do with the communist left, when they are not leftist groups. As we wrote in International Review n°103:

“In order to weigh the full measure of the IBRP’s opportunism in relation to its refusal of our appeal in relation to the war, it’s instructive to re-read an article that appeared in the November 1995 issue of Battaglia Comunista ‘Misunderstandings on the Balkan war’. BC relates that it has received a letter/invitation from the OCI (Organizazione Comunista Internazionalista) to a national assembly against the war to be held in Milan. BC considered that ‘the content of the letter is interesting and a welcome corrective to the position adopted by the OCI on the Gulf War, when it supported the ‘Iraqi people under attack from imperialism’ and was very polemical in relation to our so-called indifferentism.’” BC’s article continued thus: “‘It lacks reference to the crisis in the accumulation cycle (…) and the essential examination of its consequences on the Yugoslav Federation (…). But this doesn’t seem to preclude the possibility of a joint initiative on the part of those who oppose war on a class basis’ [our emphasis]. As we can see, only four years ago, in a situation less serious than that at the time of the war in Kosovo, BC would have been ready to promote a joint initiative with a group that was already clearly counter-revolutionary just to satisfy its activist bent, whereas it had the courage to say no to the ICC because… it has positions that are too different. That certainly is opportunism.”

The IBRP’s one-way selectivity was shown once again during 2003 when it refused the ICC’s proposition for a common position in the face of the war in Iraq. As we wrote in International Review n°116:

“We might expect that an organisation which is such a stickler for detail when it comes to examining its divergences with the ICC would have a similar attitude towards other groups. This is not the case. We refer here to the attitude of the IBRP via its sympathising and political representative, the Internationalist Workers Group (IWG) which publishes Internationalist Notes. This group intervened alongside anarchists and held a joint public meeting with Red and Black Notes, some councilists and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCP), which seems to be a typically leftist and activist group.” (“The proletarian political milieu faced with the war: the scourge of sectarianism in the internationalist camp”)

As can be seen, the opportunism of the IBRP shows itself in its refusal to take a clear position towards groups that are clearly a long way from the communist left, which have made an incomplete break with leftism (therefore with the camp of the bourgeoisie) or who are definitively leftist. This is the attitude it demonstrated toward the SUCM and Lal Pataka. With such an attitude it is not surprising that elements that have not made a clear balance sheet of their experience in leftism feel more comfortable with the IBRP than the ICC.

That said, it seems that with the attitude of the group in Canada we are faced with another variant of the opportunism of the IBRP: the fact that each of its component parts is “free to have its own politics”. What is absolutely impossible to envisage for European groups is completely normal for an American group (since we have read no criticism of the attitude of the comrades in Canada in the columns of Battaglia Comunista or Revolutionary Perspectives). This is federalism, a federalism that the IBRP rejects in its programme, but which it adopts in practice. This federalism is shamefaced but real and encourages certain elements, who find the centralism of the ICC too constraining, to turn towards the IBRP.

The fact that the IBRP recruits elements marked by their passage through leftism, or who can’t put up with centralism and who are allowed to have their own politics in their own corner, is the best way to undermine the basis of an organisation that is to be viable at the international level.

Another aspect of the opportunism of the IBRP is the indulgence that it shows towards elements hostile to our organisation. As we saw at the beginning of this article, one of the bases for the constitution of the CWO in Britain was not only the desire to maintain its own “individuality” (RP’s demand to be integrated into the ICC as a “tendency” with its own platform) but as a means of opposing the ICC (considered at one time as “counter-revolutionary”). More precisely, the attitude of the Workers Voice elements in the CWO - consisting, as we have seen above, in “using RP as a shield against the ICC” - is found with a lot of other elements and groups where the principle motivation is hostility towards the ICC. This was particularly the case with the element, L, who, whatever group he belonged to (and there were a lot of them) always distinguished himself as the most hysterically opposed to the ICC. Similarly, the element E, who we have mentioned above, began to show a violent hostility towards the ICC before moving towards the positions of the IBRP. This is so much the case that, to our knowledge, the only text of his that the IBRP has published was a violent attack on the ICC.

Not forgetting the CBG, with whom the CWO engaged in a short-lived flirtation: the level of their sordid denigrations of the ICC has not been rivalled until recently.

It’s in the recent period that this approach of opening towards the IBRP on the basis of hatred of the ICC has taken the most extreme forms with two illustrations: the advances made to the IBRP by the so-called “Internal Fraction of the ICC” (IFICC) and by citizen B founder, leader and sole member of the “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas” of Argentina.

We’re not going to recall in detail here the whole range of the IFICC’s behaviour, revealing their obsessional hatred against our organisation.[16] [486] We’ll just cite, very briefly, some of the things in its service record:

• repugnant slanders against the ICC and certain militants (of whom it suggests, having circulated the same behind the scenes in the ICC, that one was working for the police and that another had adopted Stalin's policy of “eliminating” the “founding members of the organisation”);

• theft of money and political material from the ICC (particularly the subscription address list of its publication in France);

• informing - by giving the organs of bourgeois state repression the opportunity to monitor the conference of our section in Mexico which was held in December 2002, and revealing the true identity of one of our militants (who was presented by the IFICC as the “leader of the ICC”).

In the case of citizen B it was particularly illustrated by the production of several despicable communiqués devoted to “the nauseating methodology of the ICC” which is compared to the methods of Stalinism and based on a tissue of gross lies.

If this sinister personage has been able to show such arrogance it is because, for a whole period, the IBRP, that he had flattered in writing texts representing positions close to that organisation (notably on the role of the proletariat in the countries of the periphery) gave him a semblance of credibility. Not only did the IBRP translate and publish on its website the positions and “analyses” of this element, not only did it salute the constitution of the “Circulo” as “an important and sure step forward realised today in Argentina in the aggregation of forces towards the international party of the proletariat” (“Anche in Argentina qualcosa si muove”, Battaglia Comunista October 2004); it also published in three languages on its website its communiqué of 12 October 2004 which is a pack of sordid slanders against our organisation.

The IBRP's love affair with this exotic adventurer sprang a leak when we demonstrated irrefutably that his accusations against the ICC were pure lies and that his “Circulo” was only a sinister imposture.[17] [487] It was in a very discreet fashion that the IBRP began to take the most compromising texts from this personage off its website, but without, however, ever condemning his methods, even after we had sent an open letter to its militants (letter of 7 December 2004, published on our website) asking for such a position to be taken. The only reaction that we have had from this organisation is a communiqué on its website “Last response to the accusations of the ICC” which affirms that the IBRP is “the object of violent and vulgar attacks from the ICC which is angry because it has been hit by a profound and irreversible internal crisis” and that “as of today we will not respond nor follow any of their vulgar attacks”.

As for the love affair with the “Circulo”, events have brought it to an end. Since the ICC unmasked the impostor citizen B, its website, which had been extremely agitated for a monthpreviously , has flatlined.

The IBRP has shown the same sort of indulgence towards the IFICC. Instead of examining with prudence this petty group's infamous accusations against the ICC, the IBRP has preferred to support them by meeting the IFICC on several occasions. The ICC, after the first meeting between the IFICC and IBRP in spring 2002, asked to meet this organisation to give its own version of the facts. But the IBRP refused this request, pretending that it didn’t want to take sides between two protagonists. This was a pure lie because the IFICC’s account of the discussions with the IBRP (and never refuted by them) made clear the latter’s agreement with the accusations against the ICC. But this was only the beginning of the unspeakable behaviour of the IBRP. It has since gone much further. On the one hand, by modestly closing its eyes to the IFICC’s thuggish behaviour, behaviour that could be easily verified through simply looking at its website, the IBRP doesn’t even have the excuse that its didn’t have the proof that the ICC has given on the deviations of the IFICC. Later the IBRP went even further by justifying, purely and simply, the theft by the members of the IFICC of political material from the ICC when the advertisement for an IBRP public meeting on 2 October was sent to subscribers of Révolution Internationale, using the address list stolen by a member of the IFICC.[18] [488] In the same way that the IBRP tried to draw the “Circulo” of Argentina into its orbit by publishing the insanities of citizen B on its website, it didn’t hesitate to get entangled with a gang of thugs and thieves in the hope of extending its political presence in France and establishing an outpost in Mexico (it didn’t hide the fact that it hoped to bring the elements of the IFICC into its ranks).

Unlike the “Circulo” the IFICC still lives and continues to publish bulletins largely devoted to slandering the ICC. The IBRP for its part affirms that “the links with the IFICC exist and persist”. Perhaps it will succeed in integrating the members of the IFICC when they tire of pretending, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that they are the “real continuators of the ICC”. But by doing so the IBRP will be reaching the culmination of its opportunist approach, an opportunism which is already throwing discredit on the memory of the communist left that it continues to lay claim to. And even if the IBRP manages to integrate the elements of the IFICC, it must not rejoice too soon: its own history will show it that you can can’t do much from the remnants that are found in the ICC’s dustbins.

Lies, complicity with informing, slander and theft, betrayal of the principles of honesty and organisational rigour which were a point of honour with the Italian Communist Left: that’s where opportunism leads. And the saddest thing for the IBRP is that it can’t see how this relates to its practice. It still does not understand that with an opportunist method (that is to say a method which holds “immediate success” above a long term perspective, not seeing the need to be based on principles) you’re building on sand; and as a result the only area where the IBRP has shown a certain effectiveness is in its abortions. It is because of this, after more than half a century of existence, the current that it represents is reduced to the state of a small sect, with far fewer political forces than it had at its creation.

In a future article, we will return to what is the basis of the opportunist method of the IBRP which has led it to the sad contortions which we have witnessed in the recent period.

Fabienne

For weeks, the European proletariat has been subjected to a frenzied media onslaught over a series of elections. With its usual cynicism, the bourgeoisie, which controls the media, leaped on the opportunity to push the horrors of its system into the background. News from Iraq, as it descends into ever bloodier savagery, or from Niger, where a third of the population is threatened with famine, from so many other disasters around the world, all gave way to the display of endless talk about the coming elections.

All the forces of the bourgeoisie, the left, the right, the far right and the extreme left, not to mention the trades unions, all came together in the grand electoral orchestra, whether in France and Holland for the referendums on the European constitution, for the parliamentary elections in Britain, or the Länder elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany's most heavily-populated region).

By dramatising what was at stake in the constitution referendums (in particular by pretending that Europe's future would be determined by the "people's vote"), by calling for a vote for or against the Schröder government's austerity programme, or for or against the government of Tony Blair, who had "lied" about the aims of the war in Iraq, the ruling class offered the workers an outlet for social anxiety.

Thanks to these campaigns of electoral mystification, the ruling class has been able to hide the bankruptcy of its mode of production. The working class today is anxious about the future, afraid of unemployment, fed up with austerity and precarious jobs. Confronted with this situation, the ruling class uses its electoral circus to divert workers' thinking about these issues into dead-ends, by using their still vigorous illusions in democracy and the electoral process.

It is not surprising that it is far from obvious to workers that they would do better to refuse to take part in the electoral circus: this mystification is intimately linked to the illusion of democracy, which lies at the heart of bourgeois ideology. All of social life under capitalism is organised by the ruling class around the myth of the "democratic" state.[1] [507] This myth is based on the deception according to which all citizens are equally free to "choose", through the ballot-box, the political representatives that they want, and that parliament is the reflection of the "popular will".[2] [508] This ideological swindle is difficult for the working class to see through, because the electoral mystification is based on certain historical facts which make it hard to pose the question as to whether the vote is useful or not. For example, the bourgeoisie uses the history of the workers' movement itself to remind us of its heroic struggles to win the right to vote, and the right to develop its own propaganda. And in doing so, it does not hesitate to lie and to falsify events. The left wing parties and the unions never stop reminding us of past workers' struggles to win universal suffrage. The Trotskyists, while they relativise the importance of elections for the proletariat, never miss an opportunity to take part in them, justifying this by the Communist International's "tactic" of "revolutionary parliamentarism", or by the use of parliament as a tribune supposedly to make the workers' voice heard and to defend a left wing and so-called "anti-capitalist" policy. As for the anarchists, some take part while others call for abstention. Confronted with all this ideological rubbish, especially when it claims to be based on the experience and traditions of the working class, it is necessary to return to the real positions on the electoral question, as they were defended by the workers' movement and its revolutionary organisations. Positions which were defended not in and of themselves, but according to the different periods in the evolution of capitalism and the demands of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle.

The electoral question during capitalism's ascendant period in the 19th century

The 19th century was the period of capitalism's development, during which the bourgeoisie used the struggle for universal suffrage and action in parliament to struggle against both the aristocracy and its own backward fractions. As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, in her 1904 article "Social Democracy and parliamentarism": "Parliamentarism is far from being an absolute product of democratic development, of the progress of the human species, and of such nice things. It is, rather, the historically determined form of the class rule of the bourgeoisie and - what is only the reverse of this rule - of its struggle against feudalism. Bourgeois parliamentarism will stay alive only so long as the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the feudalism lasts".[3] [509] As the capitalist mode of production developed, the bourgeoisie abolished serfdom and extended wage labour to satisfy the demands of its own economy. Parliament was the arena for the struggle between different parties, cliques, and representatives of the bourgeoisie, to decide on the composition and direction of the government. The workers often had neither free speech, nor the right to organise. Thanks to the impetus given by the First, and then by the Second International, the workers undertook large scale struggles, often at the cost of their lives, to win improvements in their living conditions (working day reduced from 12 or 14 to 10 hours, banning of child labour, or of dangerous work for women). Inasmuch as capitalism was still a vigorously expanding system, its revolutionary overthrow was not yet on the agenda. This is why the struggle for economic demands through the trades unions, or the struggle of the political parties in parliament, made it possible for the workers to win reforms to their advantage, within the system. "Participation in parliament allowed the class to use it to press for reforms, to use electoral campaigns as a means for propaganda and agitation for the proletarian programme, and to use parliament as a tribune for denouncing the ignominy of bourgeois politics. This is why the struggle for universal suffrage was throughout the nineteenth century in many countries one of the most important issues around which the proletariat organised".[4] [510] These were the positions that Marx and Engels defended throughout capitalism's ascendant period to explain their support for the proletariat's participation in elections.

The anarchist current opposed this policy, based on a historical vision and a materialist conception of history. Anarchism developed during the second half of the 19th century as a product of the resistance of petty bourgeois strata (artisans, shopkeepers, small farmers) to the process of proletarianisation which was depriving them of their previous social "independence". The anarchist vision of "revolt" against capitalism remained purely idealist and abstract. It is thus no accident that many anarchists, including this current's legendary figure Bakunin, did not consider the proletariat as revolutionary, but tended to replace it with the bourgeois notion of "the people", encompassing all those who suffer irrespective of their role in the relations of production, and no matter what their ability to organise and to become aware of themselves as a social force. According to this logic, for anarchism the revolution is possible at any moment, and consequently any struggle for reforms can fundamentally be nothing but a barrier to the revolutionary perspective. For marxism, this superficial radicalism cannot stand up, inasmuch as it expresses "the anarchists' inability to grasp that proletarian revolution, the direct struggle for communism, was not yet on the agenda because the capitalist system had not yet exhausted its progressive mission, and that the proletariat was faced with the necessity to consolidate itself as a class, to wrest whatever reforms it could from the bourgeoisie in order, above all, to strengthen itself for the future revolutionary struggle. In a period in which parliament was a real arena of struggle between fractions of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat could afford to enter this arena without subordinating itself to the ruling class; this strategy only became impossible once capitalism had entered its decadent, totalitarian phase".[5] [511]

The electoral question during capitalism's decadent phase, since 1914

At the dawn of the 20th century, capitalism had conquered the world and come up against the limit to its geographical expansion. In doing so, it also came up against the objective limit to the expansion of the market, and of outlets for its own production. Capitalist production relations were transformed into a barrier to the development of the productive forces. Capitalism as a whole entered a period of world crises and world wars.[6] [512]

This unprecedented upheaval in the life of capitalist society led to a profound modification in the political life of the bourgeoisie, the functioning of its state apparatus and the conditions and means of the proletarian struggle. The state takes on a dominant role because it alone can maintain the "order" and cohesion of a capitalist society torn apart by its own contradictions. It becomes increasingly obvious that the bourgeois parties are instruments of the capitalist state, whose role is to make its policies acceptable. The imperatives of World War I and the national interest made democratic debate in Parliament impossible, and imposed a rigid discipline on all the fractions of the national bourgeoisie. This state of affairs became permanent and more pronounced after the war ended. Political power thus tended to shift from the legislative to the executive branch, and the bourgeois parliament became an empty shell bereft of any powers of decision. This reality was clearly described by the Communist International in 1920 at its 2nd Congress: “The attitude of the Communist International towards parliamentarism is determined, not by a new doctrine, but by the change in the role of parliament itself. In the previous epoch parliament performed to a certain degree a historically progressive task as a tool of developing capitalism. Under the present conditions of unbridled imperialism, however, parliament has been transformed into a tool for lies, deception, violence and ennervating chatter…At present parliament, for communists, can in no way become the arena for the struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the position of the working class, as was the case at certain times in the previous period. The centre of gravity of political life has at present been removed finally and completely beyond the bounds of parliament.”[7] [513]

Since then, it has been impossible for the bourgeoisie to accord real and lasting reforms to the working class in any domain whatever, whether it be political or economic. On the contrary, the proletariat is subjected to ever greater sacrifices, poverty, exploitation and barbarism. Revolutionaries recognised at this point that capitalism had reached its historical limits, and that it had entered into its period of decline and decadence, as was demonstrated by the outbreak of World War I. Henceforth, there is only one alternative: socialism or barbarism. The era of reforms has been definitively closed, and the workers no longer have anything to gain on the electoral terrain.

Nonetheless, a crucial debate was to develop within the Communist International during the 1920s, over the possibility of using the "tactic" of "revolutionary parliamentarism"; this was the line defended by Lenin and the Bolshevik party. The experience of the past continued to weigh on the working class and its organisations as they confronted the plethora of questions raised by capitalism's entry into its decadent period.

The imperialist war, the proletarian revolution in Russia, then the reflux of the wave of proletarian struggle world wide in the 1920s, all led Lenin and his comrades to the idea that it would be possible to destroy parliament from within, or use parliament as a revolutionary tribune, as Karl Liebknecht had used the tribune of the German Reichstag to denounce the imperialist First World War. In fact, this "tactic" was to lead the Third International further and further into compromises with ruling class ideology. Moreover, the isolation of the Russian revolution, the impossibility of spreading the revolution to the rest of Europe after the crushing of the German workers, were to lead the Bolsheviks and the International, then the other Communist parties, towards an unbridled opportunism. This in turn led the Communist parties to abandon the revolutionary positions of the first two congresses of the International, to plunge into the degeneration of the congresses that followed and to end up in betrayal and the emergence of Stalinism, the spearhead of the triumphant counter-revolution.[8] [514]

The most left-wing fractions in the Communist parties reacted against this process of degeneration. First among them was the Italian Left led by Bordiga, which was already arguing against participation in elections in 1918. Known at first as the "abstentionist communist fraction", it was formally constituted after the Bologna Congress of October 1919, and, in a letter sent to Moscow from Naples, declared that a true party aiming at membership of the Communist International could only be formed on an anti-parliamentarian basis.[9] [515] The German and Dutch lefts were in turn to develop their own critique of parliamentarism and render it more systematic. Anton Pannekoek clearly rejected any possibility of making revolutionary use of parliament, since doing so could only lead revolutionaries into compromises and concessions to the dominant ideology. It could only breathe a semblance of life into these already moribund institutions, and encourage the passivity of the workers, when the revolution demands on the contrary the active and conscious participation of the whole proletariat in the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a communist society.

During the 1930s, the Italian Left in its review Bilan was to show concretely how the struggles of the French and Spanish workers had been derailed onto the electoral terrain. Bilan declared, rightly, that the "tactic" of the Popular Front in 1936 had made it possible to enrol the proletariat as cannon-fodder in World War II. At the end of this awful holocaust, it was the French Communist Left, which published the review Internationalisme (and from which the ICC is descended), which was to denounce most clearly the "tactic" of revolutionary parliamentarism": "The policy of revolutionary parliamentarism played a large part in corrupting the parties of the 3rd International, and the parliamentary fractions served as bastions of opportunism, as much in the 3rd International as previously in the 2nd. The truth is that the proletariat, in its struggle for freedom, cannot use a 'means of political struggle' which is specific to the ruling class and destined to its own enslavement (...) As a real activity, revolutionary parliamentarism has never existed, for the simple reason that when the proletariat undertakes revolutionary action, this presupposes its mobilisation as a class outside capitalism, not the taking of positions within capitalist society".[10] [516] Henceforth, anti-parliamentarism, the non-participation in elections, has become a class frontier separating proletarian from bourgeois organisations. In these conditions, for more than 80 years, elections have been used all over the world and whatever the government's political colour, to mislead the workers' discontent onto a sterile terrain and to lend credibility to the myth of "democracy". It is no accident that, unlike the 19th century, the "democratic" states undertake widespread campaigns against electoral abstention and the disgust with political parties, since the workers' participation in elections is vital if the democratic illusion is to be upheld. The recent elections in Europe are a concrete example of this.

Elections are nothing but mystification and "social Europe" is a lie

Contrary to the indigestible propaganda which presents the victory of the "no" vote to the European Constitution in France and Holland as a "victory for the people" through the ballot-box, we say that elections are a pure masquerade. Certainly, there may be disagreements among the different fractions within the bourgeois state on how best to defend the interests of the national capital, but fundamentally the bourgeoisie organises and controls the electoral carnival to ensure a result that suits its needs as a ruling class. This is why the capitalist state plans, manipulates and organises, thanks especially to its hired media. Nonetheless, accidents can happen, and indeed often do happen, especially in France (today with the result of the referendum, in 2002 when the fascist National Front came second in the presidential elections, in 1997 when the left won the early parliamentary elections, or in 1981 when Mitterrand became president); these of course have nothing to do with even the most minimal calling into question of the capitalist order. The difficulty that the French bourgeoisie finds in making the ballot-box give the answer they want, reveals the historical weakness and archaism of its political apparatus,[11] [517] which is quite unlike the situation in Britain and Germany.[12] [518]

But there is no way that the proletariat can take advantage of this weakness to impose an alternative to the policies of the bourgeoisie. As any worker can tell from his own experience in the electoral charade, since the end of the 1920s, whatever the result of the elections, whether they are won by the left or the right, it is always the same anti-working class policy that is imposed by the victorious government.

In other words, the "democratic" state always defends the interests of the ruling class and the national capital, irrespective of the results of increasingly frequent elections.[13] [519]

The campaign orchestrated by the whole European bourgeoisie over the constitutional referendums has succeeded in attracting the workers' attention, and in persuading them that "building Europe" is important for their future and for that of their children. Nothing could be more false! What was at stake in the new Constitution was the attempt by each of Europe's founding members to keep as much influence within the European institutions after the Union's enlargement to 25 members (which of course diluted the influence of each of them), as they had before.

The working class has no interest in taking part in the struggles for influence between different fractions of the ruling class. In fact, the Constitution is doing no more than making official the policies that are already being put into operation today, and which are foreign to the interests of the working class. The working class will be just as exploited with the "No" as it would have been with the "Yes".

Above all, the working class should reject the illusion that it is possible to use the national parliament in its struggle against capitalist exploitation, or that it could do the same thanks to the European parliament.[14] [520]

In this concert of hypocrisy and rascality, the prize goes on the one hand to the forces of the "left" who came together to carry the "No" vote, and who claim that it is possible to build another more "social" Europe, and on the other to the populists who exploit the fear, the despair, and the uncertainty about the future that exists in the population in general and in a part of the working class. As in France and Germany, for example, Holland has just seen a rise in unemployment from 2% in 2003 to 8% today, and attacks on its system of social security.

These attacks have even provoked the beginning of a widespread mobilisation in Holland. The proletariat's return to the social stage[15] [521] inevitably implies that it is developing a reflection in depth on the significance of mass unemployment, the repeated attacks on its living conditions, and the dismantling of the social security and pensions systems. In the end, the bourgeoisie's anti-proletarian policies and the response that these provoke cannot but lead to a growing awareness within the working class of capitalism's historic bankruptcy. And it is precisely to sabotage this growing awareness that the promoters of a "social Europe" are running around in all directions, demanding that the capitalist state should arbitrate the conflicts between social classes, and encouraging the workers to mobilise to reject "liberalism" the better to subject them to the mystification of the "social" state, a new swindle dreamt up in the comfortable drawing-rooms of the specialists of "anti-globalisation".[16] [522] The sole purpose of all this propaganda is to gather up the growing social discontent and dump it into the ballot-box. The referendums have thus been presented as a way to refuse the government's policies, to express one's disgust, and so to provide an outlet for all the social discontent that has been accumulating for years. And indeed, the forces of the "anti-capitalist" left are all crying victory, and urging the workers to remain mobilised for the next elections, in order to "consolidate the victory of the 'No' vote at the referendum, in the next elections". This is the same policy of derailing social discontent that we have already seen at work in Germany, where the workers were called upon to punish the Schroder coalition in the recent regional elections in North-Rhine Westphalia.

During the decadent phases of previous modes of production, the ruling classes would deliberately give the exploited masses the opportunity to let off steam in days of carnival, where nothing is forbidden, or in sporting competitions or gladiatorial combats in the arena.

The bourgeoisie has the same aim in mind when it makes systematic use of brain-numbing sporting events, and brings out the electoral circus as an outlet for workers' anger. Not only does the bourgeoisie plunge the proletariat into absolute pauperisation, it humiliates us by offering "games and electoral circuses". The proletariat has no business forging its own chains, it is up to us to break them!

The workers must respond to the attempt to strengthen the capitalist state, with the will to destroy it!

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the proletariat has no choice. Either it lets itself be drawn onto the electoral terrain, onto the terrain of the bourgeois state which organises its exploitation and oppression and where it can only find itself atomised and powerless to resist the attacks of capitalism in crisis. Or, it develops its struggles, in solidarity and unity, to defend its living conditions. This is the only way the proletariat will recover its strength as a revolutionary class: its unity and its ability to struggle outside and against bourgeois institutions (parliament and elections) in order to overthrow capitalism. Only then will it be able to build a new society freed of exploitation, poverty and wars.

The alternative today is the same as that discovered by the marxist lefts in the 1920s: either electoralism and the mystification of the working class, or the development of class consciousness and the extension of its struggles towards the revolution!

 

D. 26/6/05

The revolution of 1905 arose as capitalism began to enter its period of decline. The working class found itself confronted not with a struggle for reforms within capitalism but with a political struggle against capitalism and for its overthrow, in which the question of power rather than economic concessions was central. The proletariat responded to this challenge by creating the weapons of its political struggle: the mass strike and the soviets. In the first part of this article, in International Review n°120, we looked at how the revolution developed from an appeal to the Tsar in January 1905 to an open challenge to the power of the ruling class in December. We showed that it was a proletarian revolution that affirmed the revolutionary nature of the working class and that it was both an expression of and a catalyst in the development of the consciousness of the revolutionary class. We showed that the mass strike of 1905 had nothing in common with the confusions of the anarcho-syndicalist current that developed at around the same time (see the articles in International Review n°119 and n°120) and which saw the mass strike as a means of the immediate economic transformation of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg recognised that the mass strike unified the economic struggle of the working class and its political struggle and in doing so marked a qualitative development in the class struggle, even if at this point it was not possible to fully understand that this was a consequence of the historic change in the capitalist mode of production: “The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which the mass strikes are the most important weapon, is, by the working people and above all the proletariat, conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the struggle for the emancipation of the working class Marx and Engels first pointed out, and in opposition to anarchism fought for with all their might in the International. Thus has historical dialectics, the rock on which the whole teaching of Marxian socialism rests, brought it about that today anarchism, with which the idea of the mass strike is indissolubly associated, has itself come to be opposed to the mass strike in practice; while on the contrary the mass strike which, as the opposite of the political activity of the proletariat, was combated appears today as the most powerful weapon of the struggle for political rights”.[1] [550]

The soviets expressed an equally important qualitative change in the way the working class organised. And like the mass strike they were not a purely Russian phenomenon. Trotsky, like Luxemburg, underlined this qualitative change, even if, also like Luxemburg, he was not in a position to grasp its whole significance: “The Soviet organised the working masses, directed the political strikes and demonstrations, armed the workers, and protected the population against pogroms. Similar work was also done by other revolutionary organisations before the Soviet came into existence, concurrently with it, and after it. Yet this did not endow them with the influence that was concentrated in the hands of the Soviet. The secret of this influence lay in the fact that the Soviet grew as the natural organ of the proletariat in its immediate struggle for power as determined by the actual course of events. The name of ‘workers' government’ which the workers themselves on the one hand, and the reactionary press on the other, gave to the Soviet was an expression of the fact that the Soviet really was a workers' government in embryo. The Soviet represented power insofar as power was assured by the revolutionary strength of the working-class districts; it struggled for power insofar as power still remained in the hands of the military-political monarchy. Prior to the Soviet we find among the industrial workers a multitude of revolutionary organisations directed, in the main, by the social-democratic party. But these were organisations within the proletariat, and their immediate aim was to achieve influence over the masses. The Soviet was, from the start, the organisation of the proletariat, and its aim was the struggle for revolutionary power.

As it became the focus of all the country's revolutionary forces, the Soviet did not allow its class nature to be dissolved in revolutionary democracy: it was and remained the organised expression of the class will of the proletariat.”[2] [551]

The real significance of both the mass strike and the soviets can only be grasped by placing them in the correct historical context, by understanding how the change in the objective conditions of capitalism defined the tasks and means for both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

A turning point in history

In the last decade of the 19th century capitalism began to enter a period of historical change. While the dynamism that had enabled capitalism to spread around the globe was still very evident, with new countries, such as Japan and Russia, undergoing strong economic growth, there were growing signs in various parts of the world of increasing tensions and disequilibirum in capitalist society as a whole.

The fairly regular pattern of economic slump and boom analysed by Marx in the middle of the century had begun to change with the slumps deepening and lengthening.

After decades of relative peace, the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century saw growing tensions between the rival imperialisms as the struggle for markets and resources could increasingly only be waged by one power taking from another. This was exemplified in the “Scramble for Africa” where, in the space of 20 years, an entire continent was divided and subjected to some of the most brutal exploitation ever seen. The scramble led to frequent diplomatic confrontations and military stand-offs, such as the Fashoda Incident of 1898 when British imperialism forced its French rival to give way in the Upper Nile.

During this same period the working class launched itself into a greater number of strikes that were more widespread and intense than in the past. For example, in Germany the number of strikes rose from 483 in 1896 to 1,468 in 1900, falling back to 1,144 and 1,190 in 1903 and 1904 respectively.[3] [552] In Russia in 1898 and Belgium in 1902 mass strikes developed, prefiguring that of 1905. The development of revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism was partly a consequence of this rising militancy, but it took the form it did because of the growing opportunism in many parts of the workers’ movement, as we show in the series of articles we have started on this subject.[4] [553]

Thus for each of the two main classes the period was one of immense change in which new challenges required qualitatively new responses. For the bourgeoisie it marked the end of the period of colonial expansion and the start of growing imperialist rivalry that led to world war in 1914. For the working class it meant the end of the period when reforms could be won within the legal or semi-legal framework set by the ruling class, and the start of the period when its interests could only be defended by challenging the framework of the bourgeois state. This led ultimately to the struggle for power in 1917 and the worldwide revolutionary wave that followed. 1905 was the “dress rehearsal” for this confrontation, with many lessons evident both at the time and today for those who want to see them.

The situation in Russia

Russia was no exception to this historical trend, but the nature of the development of Russian society meant that the proletariat was confronted more rapidly and more sharply with some of the consequences of the emerging period. However, while we will consider these particular aspects shortly, it is necessary to begin first by stressing that the underlying cause of the revolution arose from the similarity of the conditions experienced by the working class as a whole, as Rosa Luxemburg stressed: “…there is a great deal of exaggeration in the notion that the proletarian in the Tsarist empire had the standard of life of a pauper before the revolution. The layer of the workers in the large towns who had been the most active and jealous in the economic as in the political struggle are, as regards the material conditions of life, on a scarcely lower plane than the corresponding layer of the German proletariat, and in some occupations as high wages are to be met with in Russia as in Germany, and here and there, even higher. And as regards the length of the working day, the difference in the large scale industries in the two countries is here and there insignificant. The notion of the presumed material and cultural helotry of the Russian working class is similarly without justification in fact. This notion is contradicted, as a little reflection will show, by the facts of the revolution itself and the prominent part that was played therein by the proletariat. With paupers no revolution of this political maturity and cleverness of thought can be made, and the industrial workers of St. Petersburg and Warsaw, Moscow and Odessa, who stand in the forefront of the struggle, are culturally and mentally much nearer to the west European type than is imagined by those who regard bourgeois parliamentarism and methodical trade-union practice as the indispensable, or even the only, school of culture for the proletariat.”[5] [554] It is true that the development of capitalism in Russia had been based on a brutal exploitation of the workers, with long days and poor working conditions reminiscent of the early nineteenth century in Britain; but the workers’ struggle developed rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These developments could be seen particularly in the Putilov Factory in St Petersburg, which manufactured weapons and built ships. The factory employed tens of thousands of workers and was able to manufacture on a scale that enabled it to compete with its more developed rivals. The workers there developed a tradition of militancy and were at the centre of the revolutionary struggles of the Russian proletariat in both 1905 and 1917. If the Putilov works stands out in terms of its scale, it was nonetheless part of an overall trend towards the development of larger factories that occurred throughout Russia. Between 1863 and 1891 the number of factories in European Russia rose from 11,810 to 16,770, an increase of about 42%, while the number of workers rose from 357,800 to 738,100, an increase of about 106%.[6] [555] In areas such as St Petersburg the number of factories actually fell while the number of workers rose, suggesting an even stronger trend towards the concentration of production and, hence, of the proletariat.[7] [556]

The situation of the railway workers in Russia supports Luxemburg’s argument about the position of the most advanced parts of the Russian working class. At the material level they had made some significant gains: between 1885 and 1895 real wages in the railways rose by an average of 18%, although this average hid wide variations between workers doing different jobs and between different parts of the country. At the cultural level there was a tradition of struggle that stretched back to the 1840s and 50s when serfs were first recruited to build the railways. By the last quarter of the century the railwaymen had become a central part of the urban proletariat with a significant experience of combat: between 1875 and 1884 there were 29 “incidents” and in the following decade 33. When wages and working conditions began to decline after 1895 the railwaymen rose to the challenge: “…between 1895 and 1904 the number of railroad strikes was three times that of the previous two decades combined (…) The strikes of the late 1890s grew more assertive and less defensive (…) After 1900 workers responded to the onset of economic crisis with increasingly militant resistance in which railroad metalworkers often acted in concert with craftsmen in private industry, and political agitators, mostly Social Democrats, made significant headway”.[8] [557] In the revolution of 1905 the railwaymen were to play a major role, putting their skill and experience at the service of the working class as a whole and pushing to extend the struggle and move from strikes to insurrection. This was not the struggle of paupers pushed into riot by hunger or of peasants in workers’ overalls, but of a vital and class conscious part of the international working class. It was against this background of common conditions and struggles that the particular features of the situation in Russia, the war with Japan abroad and political repression at home, took effect.

The question of war

The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 was a consequence of the imperialist rivalry that developed between these two new capitalist powers at the end of the 19th century. The confrontation arose during the 1890s over the question of influence in China and Korea. At the start of the decade work began on the Trans-Siberian railway, which would allow Russia access to Manchuria while Japan built up its economic interests in Korea. Tensions developed over the decade as Russia forced Japan to pull back from positions on the mainland; and they came to a head when Russia began to develop its own interests in Korea. Japan proposed that the two countries agree to respect each other’s spheres of influence. When Russia failed to reply Japan launched a surprise attack on Port Arthur in January 1904. The huge disparity between the military forces of the two antagonists made the outcome of the war seem inevitable at first, and its outbreak was initially greeted in Russia with an outburst of patriotic fervour, with denunciations of “insolent Mongols” and student demonstrations in support of the war. However, there was no quick victory. The Trans-Siberian railway was not finished so troops could not be brought to the front quickly; the Russian army was beaten back; in May the garrison was cut off and the Russian fleet sent to relieve it was destroyed; and on December 20th, after a siege of 156 days Port Arthur fell. At the military level the war was unprecedented. Millions of soldiers took to the field; 1,200,000 reservists were called up in Russia; industry was focused on the war, leading to slumps and the deepening of the economic crisis. At the battle of Mukden in March 1904 600,000 men fought for two weeks, leaving 160,000 dead. It was the biggest battle in history and a sign of what was to come in 1914. The fall of Port Arthur meant the loss of Russia’s Pacific Fleet and the humiliation of the autocracy. Lenin drew out the wider meaning of this: “But the military debacle which the autocracy has suffered has deeper implications; it signifies the collapse of our entire political system. The days when wars were fought by mercenaries or by representatives of a caste half-isolated from the people have gone forever…Wars today are fought by peoples; this now brings out more strikingly than ever a great attribute of war, namely that it opens the eyes of millions to the disparity between the people and the government, which heretofore was evident only to a small class-conscious minority. The criticism of the autocracy by all progressive Russians, by the Russian Social-Democrats, by the Russian proletariat, has now been confirmed in the criticism by Japanese arms, confirmed in such wise that the impossibility of living under the autocracy is felt more and more even by those who do not know, but yet would maintain it with all their soul. The incompatibility of the autocracy with the interests of social development, with the interests of the entire people (apart from a handful of bureaucrats and bigwigs), became evident as soon as the people actually had to pay for the autocracy with their lifeblood. Its foolish and criminal colonial adventure has landed the autocracy in an impasse, from which the people can extricate themselves only by their own efforts and only at the cost of destroying tsarism”.[9] [558]

In Poland the economic impact of the war was particularly devastating with 25 to 30% of workers in Warsaw thrown out of work and wages reduced by between a third and a half. In May 1904 there were clashes between workers and the police, with Cossacks reinforcing the latter. The war began to provoke increasingly strong opposition. During Bloody Sunday itself, when the troops began to slaughter the workers who had come to appeal to the Tsar, “the St Petersburg workers (…) cried out to the officers that they were more successful at fighting the Russian people than they were the Japanese”.[10] [559] Later some parts of the military rebelled against their situation and began to side with the workers: “The morale of the soldiers had been brought very low by the defeats in the East and their manifestly incapable leadership. Now discontent was increased by the government’s reluctance to carry out its promise of a speedy demobilisation. The result was mutinies in many regiments and occasional pitched battles. Reports of disorders of this kind came in from places as far apart as Grodno and Samara, Rostov and Kursk, from Rembertow near Warsaw, from Riga in Latvia and Vyborg in Finland, from Vladivostok and Irkutsk.

“By the autumn the revolutionary movement in the navy had also gained strength, with the result that a mutiny broke out at Kronstadt naval base in the Baltic in October which was put down only by the use of force. It was followed by yet another mutiny in the Black Sea fleet, at Savastopol, which at one point threatened to take control of the whole city”.[11] [560]

In their appeal to the working class in May 1905 the Bolsheviks drew the questions of war and revolution into one: “Comrades! We stand now in Russia on the eve of great events. We are engaged in the last desperate fight with the autocratic tsarist government, we must carry this fight on to its victorious end. See what calamities this government of brutes and tyrants, of venal courtiers and hangers-on of capital, has brought upon the entire Russian people! The Tsarist government has plunged the Russian people into an insane war against Japan. Hundreds of thousands of young lives have been torn away from the people to perish in the Far East. Words cannot describe all the calamities that this war brings upon us. And what is the war for? For Manchuria, which our predatory tsarist government has seized from China! Russian blood is being shed and our country ruined for the sake of foreign territory. Life is becoming harder and harder for the workers and peasants; the capitalists and officials keep tightening the noose round their necks, while the Tsarist government is sending the people out to plunder foreign territory. Bungling Tsarist generals and venal officials have led to the destruction of the Russian fleet, squandered hundreds and thousands of millions of the nation’s wealth, and lost entire armies, but the war still goes on, claiming further sacrifices. The people are being ruined, industry and trade are coming to a standstill, and famine and cholera are imminent; but the autocratic government in its blind madness follows the old path; it is ready to ruin Russia if only it can save a handful of brutes and tyrants; it is launching another war besides the one with Japan – war against the entire Russian people.”[12] [561]

State oppression

The war also served to divert the campaign that had been growing against the oppressive policies of the autocracy. In December 1903 Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, was reported to have said “In order to prevent revolution, we need a small victorious war”.[13] [562]

The power of the autocracy had been reinforced after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 by members of the People’s Will, a group committed to the use of terrorism against the autocracy.[14] [563] New “exceptional measures” were introduced to outlaw all political action, and far from being exceptional they became the norm: “It is true to say…that there was no time between the promulgation of the Statute of 14 August 1881 and the fall of the dynasty in March 1917 when the ‘exceptional measures’ were not in operation in some part of the land – often over large parts of it”.[15] [564] Under the “Reinforced Degree” the governors of the area covered could imprison people for three months without trial, prohibit all gatherings whether private or public, close down factories and shops and deport individuals from their home. The “Extraordinary Degree” effectively placed the area covered under military rule with arbitrary arrests, imprisonment and fines. The use of soldiers against strikes and workers’ protests became commonplace and many workers were shot down in the struggle. The numbers in the prisons and penal colonies throughout Russia increased, as did the number exiled to remote parts of the country.

During this period the proportion of those charged with crimes against the state who were workers steadily increased. In 1884-90 just one quarter of those charged were manual labourers; by 1901-03 this had grown to three fifths. This reflected the change in the revolutionary movement from one dominated by intellectuals to one composed of workers, as one prison warder was reported to have commented: “Why is it that more and more political peasants are brought in? It used to be gentlemen, students and young ladies, but now it is the grey peasant workers like us".[16] [565]

Alongside these formal, “legal” forms of oppression, the Russian state employed two complimentary forms. On the one hand the state encouraged the development of anti-Semitism, turning a blind eye to pogroms and massacres while ensuring that the organisations that did the work, such as the Union of the Russian People, which was better known as the Black Hundreds and was openly supported by the Tsar, received protection. Revolutionaries were denounced as being part of an orchestrated Jewish plot to take power. This strategy was to be used against the revolution of 1905 and to punish workers and peasants afterwards.

On the other hand, the state sought to appease the working class by creating a series of “police unions” led by Colonel Zubatov. These unions were designed to contain the revolutionary passions of the working class within the boundaries of immediate economic demands, but the workers in Russia first pushed at the boundaries and then, in 1905, overflowed them. Lenin argued that the political situation in Russia, where “conditions (…) ’impel’ the workers engaged in economic struggle to concern themselves with political questions”,[17] [566] meant that the working class could make use of these unions so long as the traps set for them by the ruling class were exposed by revolutionaries. “In this sense, we may, and should say to the Zubatovs and the Ozerovs: Keep at it, gentlemen, do your best! Whenever you place a trap in the path of the workers (…) we will see to it that you are exposed. But whenever you take a real step forward, though it be the most timid ‘zig-zag’, we will say: Please continue! And the only step that can be a real step forward is a real if small extension of the workers’ field of action. Every such extension will be to our advantage and will help to hasten the advent of legal societies of the kind in which it will not be agent provocateurs who are detecting socialists, but socialists who are gaining adherents”.[18] [567] In fact, when the revolution came, first in 1905, then in 1917, it was not the unions that were strengthened but a new organisation, adapted to the revolutionary task before the proletariat that was created: the soviets.

The armed confrontation with the state

While the factors we have considered above help to explain why the events of 1905 took place in Russia, the real significance of these events has nothing to do with Russia. Given this, what is it that is significant about 1905? What is that defines it?

One striking feature of 1905 was the development of armed struggle in December. Trotsky offers a powerful account of the struggle that took place in Moscow as the working class areas threw up barricades to defend themselves against the Tsarist troops while the Social-Democratic Fighting Organisation waged a guerrilla battle through the streets and houses: “Here is a typical example of a battle. Twenty-four men who make up one of the most recklessly courageous Georgian druzhina[19] [568], are marching along quite openly, in twos. The crowd warns them that sixteen dragoons with their officer are riding towards them. The druzhina stops, forms ranks, pulls out its Mausers, and prepares to fire. As soon as the mounted unit appears, the druzhina fires. The officer is wounded, the horses in the front rank, wounded, rear up, the dragoons are taken unawares and cannot fire back. This enables the druzhina to fire up to 100 rounds and the dragoons flee in disorder leaving behind several killed and wounded. ‘Now see that you get away,’ the crowd urges, ‘the artillery are coming.’ They are right; the artillery promptly appears on the scene, causing several dozen killed and wounded among the unarmed crowd, which never expected to be fired on. Meanwhile the Georgians have started another shooting match with the troops in another place. The druzhina is almost invulnerable because it is clad in the armour of popular sympathy.”[20] [569] However, it is not the armed struggle, no matter how courageous, that defines 1905. The armed struggle was indeed an expression of the struggle for power between the classes but it marked the last phase, arising when the proletariat was confronted with the success of the counter-attack of the ruling class. At first workers tried to win the troops over but clashes gradually developed and became bloodier. The armed struggle was an attempt to defend working class areas rather than to extend the revolution. Twelve years later, when the workers again confronted the military, it was their success in winning over significant parts of the army and navy that ensured the survival and advance of the revolution.

Further, armed clashes between the working class and the bourgeoisie have a very long history. The early years of the workers’ movement in Britain were marked by violent clashes. For example, in 1800 and 1801 there was a wave of food riots, some of which seem to have been planned in advance with printed handbills calling on the workers to assemble. A year later there were reports of workers drilling with pikes and of secret associations plotting revolution. Over the following decade the Luddite movement, or the Army of Redressers to use the movement’s own name, developed in response to the impoverishment of thousands of weavers. Some years later again the Physical Force Chartists made plans for insurrection. The Paris Commune of 1871 saw the violent confrontation between the classes burst into the open. In America the brutal exploitation that went with the rapid industrialisation of the country provoked violent opposition, as in the case of the Molly Maguires who specialised in killing company bosses, and turned strikes into armed conflicts.[21] [570] What singled out 1905 was not armed confrontation but the organisation of the proletariat on a class basis to attain its general goals. This resulted in a new type of organisation, the soviet, with new goals that necessarily superseded the trade unions.

The role of the soviets

In one of the first and most important studies of the soviets, Oskar Anweiler argues that “the more realistic view is that the soviets of 1905 and those of 1917 for a long time developed independently of the Bolshevik party and its ideology, and that their aim initially was not the seizure of state power”.[22] [571] This is an accurate assessment of the first stage of soviets, but it is no more true of the later stages than to suggest that the working class would have been content to continue marching behind Father Gapon and appealing to their “Little Father”. Between January and December 1905 something changed. Understanding what changed and how it changed is the key to understanding 1905.

In the first article we emphasised the spontaneous nature of the revolution. The strikes of January, October and December seemed to come from nowhere, being sparked off by seemingly insignificant events, such as the sacking of two workers in one factory. The actions overflowed even the most apparently radical of unions: “On September 30 ferment began in the workshops of the Moscow-Kursk and Moscow-Kazan railways. These two railways were prepared to open the campaign on October 1. They were held back by the railwaymen's union. Basing itself on the experience of the February, April, and July strikes of various individual lines, the union was preparing a general railway strike to coincide with the convening of the State Duma; for the present it was against partial action. But the ferment continued unabated. On September 20, an official conference of railwaymen's deputies had opened to discuss the question of pension funds. This conference spontaneously extended its terms of reference and, applauded by the railway world as a whole, transformed itself into an independent trade union and political congress. Greetings to the congress arrived from all sides. The ferment increased. The idea of an immediate general strike of the railways began to gain hold in the Moscow area.”[23] [572]

The soviets developed on a foundation that went beyond the scope of the trade union. The first body that can be classed as a soviet appeared in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in central Russia. On May 12th a strike broke out at one factory in the city, which was known as the Russian Manchester, and within a few days every factory was closed and over 32,000 workers were on strike. On the suggestion of a factory inspector delegates were elected to represent the workers in discussions. The Assembly of Delegates, composed of some 110 workers, met regularly in the following weeks. Its aims were to conduct the strike, prevent separate actions and negotiations, to assure the order and organised behaviour of the workers and to resume work only on its orders. The soviet put forwards a number of demands, both economic and political, including the eight hour day, increased minimum pay, sick pay, maternity pay, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. It then created a workers’ militia to protect the working class from attacks by the Black Hundreds, to prevent clashes between strikers and those still working and to keep in contact with workers in remote areas. The authorities initially yielded in the face of the organised strength of the working class but began to react towards the end of the month by banning the militia. A mass meeting in early June was attacked by Cossacks, killing some workers and arresting others. The situation deteriorated further towards the end of the month with rioting and further clashes with the Cossacks. A new strike was launched in July, involving 10,000 workers, but was defeated after three months, the only apparent gain being a reduction in the working day.

In this very first effort the fundamental nature of the soviets could be seen: a unification of the economic and political interests of the working class that, because it unified workers on a class basis rather than a trade one, inevitably tended to become more explicitly political as time went on, leading to a confrontation between the established power of the bourgeoisie and the nascent power of the proletariat. That the question of the workers’ militia was central in the life of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet was not due to the immediate military threat it posed but because it raised the question of class power.

This tendency towards the creation of rival powers runs throughout Trotsky’s account of 1905 and was posed explicitly after 1917 with the situation of dual power: “If the state is an organisation of class rule, and a revolution is the overthrow of the ruling class, then the transfer of power from one class to another must necessarily create self-contradictory state conditions, and first of all the form of the dual power. The relation of class forces is not a mathematical quantity permitting a priori computations. When the old regime is thrown out of equilibrium, a new correlation of forces can be established only as the result of a trial by battle. That is revolution”[24] [573] The situation of dual power was not reached in 1905, but the question was posed from the start: “From the hour it came into being until the hour it perished, the Soviet stood under the mighty, elemental pressure of the revolution (…) Every step of the workers’ representation was determined in advance. Its ‘tactics’ were obvious. The methods of struggle did not have to be discussed; there was hardly time to formulate them”.[25] [574] This is the essential quality of the soviet and is what distinguishes it from the unions. The unions are a weapon in the proletariat’s struggle within capitalism; the soviets are a weapon in its struggle against capitalism. At root, the two are not opposed, in that both arise from the objective conditions of the class struggle of their time and are in continuity in that they fight for the interests of the working class; but they become opposed when the union form continues after its class content – its role in organising the class and developing its consciousness – has passed into the soviets. In 1905 this opposition had not yet emerged; the soviets and unions could co-exist and to some extent reinforce each other, but it existed implicitly in the way that the soviets bypassed the unions.

The mass strikes that developed in October 1905 led to the creation of many more soviets, with the St Petersburg Soviet leading the way. In all some 40 to 50 soviets have been identified as well as a few peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets. Anweiler stresses their disparate origins: “Some were modelled on older organisations such as strike committees and deputies assemblies; others were formed directly, initiated by Social Democratic Party organisations, which then exercised considerable influence in the soviet. Frequently boundaries between a simple strike committee and a fully developed council of workers’ deputies were fluid, and only in the main revolutionary centres with considerable concentrations of workers – such as (apart from St. Petersburg) Moscow, Odessa, Novorossiysk, and the Donets Basin – were the councils thoroughly organised”.[26] [575] This may be objectively true but in no way lessens their significance as direct expressions of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. In their newness, they inevitably ebbed and flowed with the tide of revolution: “The strength of the soviets lay in this revolutionary mood of the masses, in the capital’s bellicose atmosphere, and in the regime’s insecurity. During the political euphoria of the ‘freedom days’ the working class readily responded to the appeal of its elected organ; as soon as the mood waned and gave way to exhaustion and disillusion, the soviets lost some of their influence and authority”.[27] [576]

The soviets and the mass strike arose from the objective conditions of the working class’ existence, just as the trade unions had before them: “The Soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organisation which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organisational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self control - and most important of all, which could be brought out from underground within twenty-four hours”.[28] [577] This is why in the century since 1905 the soviet form, as a tendency or a realisation, has emerged time and again when the working class takes the offensive: “The movement in Poland by its massive character, its rapidity, its extension beyond categories and regions, confirms not only the necessity but the possibility of the generalisation and the self-organisation of the struggle”;[29] [578] "…the authorities habitual use of propaganda based on a massive and systematic distortion of reality, as well as the state’s totalitarian control over every aspect of social life, pushed the Polish workers to develop a degree of self-organisation which represents an immense step forward in comparison to what has been achieved in any previous struggle”.[30] [579]

North, 14th June 2005

This article will be continued in the next issue of the International Review and is published in full on our web site. It will deal in particular with the following issues:

• The St Petersburg Soviet is the high point of the 1905 revolution; it is the most complete expression of the characteristics of the soviet as a weapon of revolutionary struggle: an expression of the struggle itself, with a view to developing it by regrouping the entire working class.

• The revolutionary practice of the working class clarified the union question well before it was understood theoretically. When unions were formed in 1905, they tended to overflow their original purpose since they were swept along in the revolutionary torrent. After 1905, they declined rapidly and in 1917, the working class was again organised in soviets for the struggle against capitalism.

• The idea that the 1905 revolution was the result of Russia’s backwardness, though wrong, continues to have a certain weight today. Against this idea, both Lenin and Trotsky insisted on the degree of development of Russian capitalism.

The ICC held its 16th Congress in the spring. As it says in our statutes, “the International Congress is the sovereign organ of the ICC”.[1] [612] This is why, as we always do after such meetings, we have a responsibility to the working class to give an account of it and draw out its main orientations.

In the article we published following our previous Congress, we wrote: “The 15th Congress held a particular importance for our organisation, for two main reasons. First, since the last Congress held in spring 2001, we have witnessed a major aggravation of the international situation, at the level of the economic crisis and above all at the level of imperialist tensions. More precisely, the Congress took place while war was raging in Iraq, and our organisation had the responsibility to make its analyses more precise in order to make the most appropriate intervention, given the situation and the stakes involved for the working class in this new plunge by capitalism into military barbarism. Secondly, this Congress took place after the ICC had been through the most dangerous crisis in its history. Even if this crisis has been overcome, it is vital for our organisation to draw the maximum number of lessons from the difficulties it has been through, to understand their origins and the way to confront them”.

The work of the 16th Congress had a very different tone: its main preoccupation was to examine the revival of class struggle and the responsibilities this imposes on our organisation, particularly as we are confronted with the development of a new generation of elements looking for a revolutionary political perspective.

Obviously, military barbarism is still being unleashed by a capitalist system that faces an insurmountable economic crisis. Specific reports on the crisis and imperialist conflicts were presented, discussed and adopted by the Congress. The essential elements of these reports are contained in the resolution on the international situation, which is being published in this issue of the International Review.

As this resolution reminds us, the ICC analyses the current historical period as being the final phase of the decadence of capitalism, the phase of decomposition, in which bourgeois society is rotting on its feet. As we have argued on numerous occasions, this decomposition derives from the fact that, faced with the irremediable historical collapse of the capitalist economy, neither of the two antagonistic classes in society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, has been able to impose their own response: world war for the first, the communist revolution for the second. These historical conditions determine the essential characteristics of the life of bourgeois society today. In particular, it’s only in the analytical framework of decomposition that we can really understand the permanence and aggravation of a whole series of calamities which are currently assailing humanity: in the first place, military barbarism, but also phenomena like the unceasing destruction of the environment or the terrible consequences of “natural disasters” like the tsunami last winter. The historical conditions linked to decomposition also weigh heavily on the proletariat as well as on its revolutionary organisations and are one of the major causes of the difficulties encountered by our class and by our organisation since the beginning of the 90s, as we have shown in previous articles.

“The different elements which constitute the strength of the working class directly confront the various facets of this ideological decomposition:

• solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;

• the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;

• the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;

• consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch” (“Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism”, International Review n62, reprinted in International Review n107).

In particular, the crisis of the ICC mentioned above can only be understood in the framework of this analysis of decomposition, which makes it possible to explain how the longstanding militants of our organisation who formed the so-called “Internal Fraction of the ICC” (IFICC) began to behave like hysterical fanatics looking for scapegoats, as thugs and finally as informers.[2] [613]

The revival of the class struggle

The 15th Congress recognised that the ICC had overcome the crisis it went through in 2001, in particular because it had understood this as a manifestation of the deleterious effects of decomposition in our own ranks. It also recognised the difficulties which the working class continued to experience in its struggles against the attacks of capital - above all, its lack of self-confidence.

However, since this Congress, held in the spring of 2003, and underlined by the plenary meeting of the ICC’s central organ in the autumn of that year, “the large-scale mobilisations of the spring of 2003 in France and Austria represent a turning point in the class struggles since 1989. They are a first significant step in the recovery of workers’ militancy after the longest period of reflux since 1968” (See International Review n°119).

Such a turning point was not a surprise for the ICC since its 15th Congress had already announced this perspective. In the article presenting this Congress, we wrote: “The ICC has on numerous occasions argued that the decomposition of capitalist society exerts a negative weight on the consciousness of the proletariat. Similarly, since the autumn of 1989, it has stressed that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes would provoke ‘new difficulties for the proletariat’ (title of an article from International Review n°60). Since then the evolution of the class struggle has only confirmed this prediction.

“Faced with this situation, the Congress reaffirmed that the working class still retains all the potential to assume its historic responsibilities. It is true that it is still experiencing a major retreat in its consciousness, following the bourgeois campaigns that equate marxism and communism with Stalinism, and that establish a direct link between Lenin and Stalin. Similarly, the present situation is characterised by a marked loss of confidence by the workers in their strength and in their ability to wage even defensive struggles against the attacks of their exploiters, a situation which can lead to a serious loss of class identity. And it should be noted that this tendency to lose confidence in the class is also expressed among revolutionary organisations, particularly in the form of sudden outbursts of euphoria in response to movements like the one in Argentina at the end of 2001 (which has been presented as a formidable proletarian uprising when it was actually stuck in inter-classism). But a long term, materialist, historical vision teaches us, in Marx’s words, that ‘it’s not a question of considering what this or that proletarian, or even the proletariat as a whole, takes to be true today, but of considering what the proletariat is and what it will be led to do historically, in conformity with its being’ (The Holy Family). Such an approach shows us that, faced with the blows of the capitalist crisis, which will give rise to more and more ferocious attacks on the working class, the latter will be forced to react and to develop its struggle”.

Thus, it was the marxist method which enabled our organisation to avoid falling into scepticism or demoralisation, when for over a decade, the militancy and consciousness of the world proletariat were being dealt heavy blows by the effects of the collapse of the regimes which all sectors of the bourgeoisie presented as being “socialist” or “working class”. It was with this same marxist method, which insists on the need to wait patiently for the opening of new situations, which enabled us to affirm that the long period of reflux in the working class that followed its ideological defeat in 1989 had reached its limits. This is what the resolution on the international situation adopted by the 16th Congress confirms:

“In spite of all its difficulties, the period of retreat has by no means seen the ‘end of the class struggle’. The 1990s was interspersed with a number of movements which showed that the proletariat still had untapped reserves of combativity (for example in 1992 and 1997). However, none of these movements represented a real shift at the level of consciousness. Hence the importance of the more recent movements which, though lacking the spectacular and overnight impact of a movement like that of 1968 in France, nevertheless constitute a turning point in the balance of class forces. The struggles of 2003-2005 have the following characteristics:

• they have involved significant sectors of the working class in countries at the heart of world capitalism (as in France 2003);

• they have been preoccupied with more explicitly political questions; in particular the question of pensions raised in the struggles in France and elsewhere poses the problem of the future that capitalist society holds in store for all of us;

• they have seen the re-emergence of Germany as a focal point for workers’ struggles, for the first time since the revolutionary wave;

• the question of class solidarity has been raised in a wider and more explicit way than at any time since the struggles of the 80s, most notably in the recent movements in Germany”.

This evolution of the proletarian struggle also makes it possible to grasp the full significance of the campaigns about “another world is possible” promoted by numerous sectors of the bourgeoisie since the beginning of the 21st century, campaigns which have taken their most concrete form in the European and global “social forums” which have been given such huge publicity. The capitalist class was aware that the retreat it had managed to impose on its mortal enemy, thanks to the campaigns about the “death of communism” and the “disappearance of the working class”, would not be definitive, and that it was necessary to develop other themes to deal with the inevitable danger of a revival of struggles and consciousness in the proletariat.

However, these bourgeois campaigns aren’t just aimed at the broad masses of the class. They also have the aim of derailing the progress of the most politicised elements, those who are moving towards the perspective of a new society free of the calamities engendered by capitalism. The resolution also notes that the different expressions of the turning point in the balance of class forces have been accompanied by “the emergence of a new generation of elements looking for political clarity. This new generation has manifested itself both in the new influx of overtly politicised elements and in the new layers of workers entering the struggle for the first time. As evidenced in certain important demonstrations, the basis is being forged for the unity between the new generation and the ‘generation of ‘68’ – both the political minority which rebuilt the communist movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s and the wider strata of workers who have been through the rich experience of class struggles between ‘68 and ‘89”.

The ICC’s responsibility faced with the emergence of new revolutionary forces

The other essential preoccupation of the 16th Congress was thus to make sure our organisation is capable of living up to its responsibilities faced with the emergence of these new elements moving towards the class positions of the communist left. This was expressed in particular by the activities resolution adopted by the Congress:

“The fight to win over the new generation to class positions and militantism is today at the heart of all of our activities. This applies not only to our intervention, but to our whole political reflection, our discussions and militant preoccupations.

“The work of regroupment of revolutionary forces today is first and foremost that of the political, geographical and numerical growth of the ICC. The continuation of the growth of sections already begun, the opening up towards this perspective of those sections which, over many years, have not been able to gain or integrate new members, the realisation of a real territorial section in India, the preparing of the foundations of a section in Argentina, are central to this perspective”.

This work of regrouping the new militant forces necessarily involves defending them against all the efforts to destroy them or lead them into a dead-end. This can only be done if the ICC knows how to defend itself against the attacks aimed at it. The previous Congress already recognised that our organisation had been capable of repelling the pernicious attacks of the IFICC, preventing it from attaining its declared goal – destroying the ICC or at least the greatest possible number of its sections. In October 2004 the IFICC waged a new offensive against our organisation by basing itself on the slanderous statements of a “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas” in Argentina, which presented itself as the continuator of the Nucleo Comunista Internacional, a group with whom the ICC had been developing discussions and contacts since the end of 2003. Lamentably, the IBRP made its own contribution to this shameful manoeuvre by publishing on its website, in several languages and for some months, one of the Circulo’s most hysterical and lying statements against our organisation. By reacting rapidly through documents published on our website, we repelled this assault, reducing our attackers to silence. The “Circulo” was unmasked for what it was: a fiction invented by citizen B, a small-time adventurer from the southern hemisphere, of mediocre intelligence but possessed of gigantic cheek and pretentiousness: his internet site showed signs of frenetic activity during the first three weeks of October 2004, but since the 23rd of that month its encephalogram has gone desperately flat. The IFICC, having tried for several months to make people believe in the reality of the Circulo, no longer says anything about the subject. As for the IBRP, it has withdrawn B’s communiqué from its internet site, but has done so in silence and has refused to publish the statement of the real NCI on the activities of B.

This combat against the offensive of the “Triple Alliance” of adventurism (B), parasitism (IFICC) and opportunism (IBRP) was also a combat for the defence of the NCI as the effort of a small nucleus of comrades to develop an understanding of the positions of the communist left in connection with the ICC.[3] [614]

“The defence of the NCI against the joint attacks by the Circulo, the “IFICC” and the IBRP shows the way forward for the whole ICC in the development of the organisation. This defence was based on

• a profound confidence in the new generation, embedded in an historical, long term vision;

• a method of regroupment based on a profound knowledge of the experience of regroupment of the ICC, made possible through an effective international centralisation;

• the capacity to pass on, with conviction and enthusiasm, our positions and our vision of militancy, and to develop proletarian solidarity as a mighty weapon of the unification of class forces…

• welcoming the new generation, not with scepticism and the ‘fear of success’, but with open arms, building on what is positive in order to help overcome the weaknesses;

• concretising the lessons learnt within the organisation, in order, with determination and careful reflection, to protect the searching elements from the dangers of the circle spirit, clanism, guruism and adventurism;

• applying to the maximum all the means at our disposal, according to the needs of the situation, as part of a global strategy, from correspondence, visits, the internet, to our press and public meetings; combining the rapidity of our reactions with a long term approach which remains undaunted by immediate failures”.

Faced with this work towards the searching elements, the ICC must keep up a determined intervention. But it must equally give all its attention to the depth of argumentation it puts forward in discussions and to the question of political behaviour:

“In the pursuit of this effort, we must aim in particular at:

• establishing or increasing the impact of the ICC in all the countries where we have sections, but also in areas such as Russia or Latin America, furthering debate (meetings, internet forums), polemics, correspondence, press reviews, favouring the establishment and promoting the work of discussion circles;

• …attracting the proletarian elements towards us through the depth of our arguments, but also through our capacity to make ourselves respected. It is the determination of the ICC in the defence of principles, and our capacity to counteract the manoeuvres aimed at sabotaging regroupment, which will win the confidence of the proletarian expressions, and scare off or inhibit sectarian and destructive elements;

• promoting proletarian methods of clarification, regroupment and comportment…intensify our offensive against parasitism, not only against the ‘IFICC’ but also against groups with an international impact such as the GCI”.

The emergence of new communist forces must be a real spur, stimulating the energies and capacities for reflection not only of our militants, but also of elements who were affected by the reflux in the class struggle after 1989:

“The effects of contemporary historic developments [are] ….destined to re-politicise part of the generation from 1968 originally diverted and embittered by leftism. It has already begun to reactivate former militants, not only of the ICC, but of other proletarian organisations. Each of these manifestations of this fermentation represent a precious potential in the re-appropriation of class identity, the experience of struggle, and the historic perspective of the proletariat. But these different potentials cannot be realised unless they are brought together by an organisation representing the historic consciousness, the marxist method and the organisational approach which, today, only the ICC can provide. This makes the constant, long term development of the theoretical capacity, the militant understanding and the centralisation of the organisation crucial to the historical perspective”

The Congress underlined the whole importance of theoretical work in the present situation: “The organisation can neither fulfil its responsibilities towards revolutionary minorities, nor those towards the class as a whole, unless it is capable of understanding the process preparing the future party in the broader context of the general evolution of the class struggle. The capacity of the ICC to analyse the evolving balance of class forces, and to intervene in the struggles and towards the political reflection in the class, is of long-term importance for the evolution of the class struggle. But already now, in the immediate term, it is crucial in the conquering of our leading role towards the new politicised generation ... The organisation must continue this theoretical reflection, drawing a maximum of concrete lessons from its intervention, overcoming schemata from the past”.

At the same time, this effort of reflection must become flesh in our propaganda, and to do this the organisation has to pay particular attention to the principal means of disseminating its positions, its press: the evolution of the world situation cannot but place new and higher demands on the quality of our press and its distribution. Via the internet, the organisation has opened up a quantitatively and qualitatively new dimension of its press intervention. During the recent struggle against the alliance of opportunism and parasitism, and thanks to this medium, the ICC has – for the first time since the times of a daily revolutionary press – developed an intervention where the capacity to immediately reply to events became decisive. Equally, the rapidity with which the organisation could publish, on its German website, its leaflets and analyses of the workers’ struggle at Mercedes and Opel, shows the way forward. The growing use of our press to organise and synthesise debates, to make propositions and launch initiatives towards the searching elements, underlines its growing importance as a privileged instrument of regroupment, of the political and numerical development of the organisation.

Finally, the Congress focused on the question summed up in the concluding paragraph of our platform: “Relations between the different parts of the organisation and the ties between militants necessarily bear the scars of capitalist society and therefore cannot constitute an island of communist relations within capitalism. Nevertheless, they cannot be in flagrant contradiction with the goal pursued by revolutionaries, and they must of necessity be based on that solidarity and mutual confidence which are the hallmarks of belonging to an organisation of the class which is the bearer of communism”.

Thus the activities resolution underlined that “fraternity, solidarity and sense of community belong to the most important instruments of the construction of the organisation, of the winning of new militants and the preservation of militant conviction”.

And such a requirement, like any other faced by a marxist organisation, demands theoretical reflection:

“Since questions of organisation and comportment are today at the heart of debates inside and outside the organisation, a central axis of our theoretical work in the coming two years will be the discussion of the different orientation texts and the contributions of the investigation commission, in particular the text on ethics. These issues bring us to the roots of the recent organisational crises, touch the very basis of our militant engagement, and are key issues of the revolution in the epoch of decomposition. They are thus destined to play a leading role in the renewal of militant conviction and in the recovery of the taste for theory and the marxist method of tackling each question with an historical and theoretical approach”.

In International Review n°111 and n°112 we published the essentials of an orientation text adopted by our organisation on “Confidence and solidarity in the proletarian struggle”, which gave rise to an in-depth discussion within the ICC. Today, especially following the adoption by the members of the IFICC of forms of behaviour totally at odds with the foundations of proletarian morality, we have decided to deepen this question around a new orientation text dealing with proletarian ethics, the final version of which we will eventually publish. It is this perspective that led the 16th Congress, as has been the case with most of the Congresses of the ICC, to devote a good deal of time to a general theoretical question by assessing its progress on this discussion on ethics.

Encouraging perspectives

The Congresses of the ICC are always enthusiastic moments for all the members. How could it be otherwise when militants from three continents and 13 countries, animated by the same convictions, come together to discuss all the perspectives of the historic movement of the proletariat? But the 16th Congress stimulated even more enthusiasm than most of the previous ones.

For nearly half its thirty years of existence, the ICC has worked in the context of a reflux in proletarian consciousness, an asphyxiation of its struggles and a delay in the emergence of new militant forces. For more than a decade, a central slogan for our organisation has been to “hold on”. This was a difficult test and a certain number of its “old” militants did not pass it (in particular those who formed the IFICC and those who gave up the struggle during the crises we have been through during this period).

Today, while the perspective is becoming brighter, we can say that the ICC, as a whole, has overcome this ordeal. And it has come out of it stronger. It has strengthened itself politically, as the readers of our press can judge (and we are receiving a growing number of letters of encouragement from them). But it is also a numerical strengthening, since there are already more new members than the defections that we experienced with the crisis of 2001. And what is remarkable is that a significant number of these new members are young elements who have not been through the whole deformation that results from being militants in leftist organisations. Young elements whose dynamism and enthusiasm is making up for the tired and exhausted “militant forces” who have left us.

The enthusiasm of the militants who took part in the Congress had no better mouthpiece than the comrades who made the opening and closing remarks for the Congress. They were two new comrades of the new generation who were not members of the ICC at the previous Congress. And the decision to confide this difficult task to them had nothing to do with any demagogic cult of youth – all the delegates saluted the quality and depth of their interventions.

The enthusiasm present at the 16th Congress was quite lucid. It had nothing in common with the illusory euphoria which has affected other Congresses of our organisation (a euphoria which was often especially marked among those who have since left us). After 30 years of existence, the ICC has learned,4 [615] sometimes painfully, that the road that leads to the revolution is not a highway, that it is tortuous and full of traps and ambushes laid by the ruling lass for its mortal enemy, the working class, in order to divert it from its historic goal. The members of our organisation know very well today that it is not an easy thing to be a militant: that it demands not only a very solid conviction, but also a great deal of abnegation, tenacity and patience. It demands, in fact, taking up the sense of what Marx wrote in a letter to J P Becker: “I have always noted that all those whose natures have been really tempered, once they have embarked upon the revolutionary path, are always able to draw new strength from defeat, and become more and more resolute as the tide of history carries them forwards”.

Understanding the difficulty of our task does not discourage us. On the contrary, it helps to make us more enthusiastic.

At this time there is a clear increase in the number of people taking part in our public meetings, as well as a growing number of letters from Greece, Russia, Moldavia, Brazil, Argentina and Algeria, in which contacts directly ask how to join the organisation, propose to begin a discussion or simply ask for publications – but always with a militant perspective. All these elements allow us to hope for the development of communist positions in countries where the ICC does not yet have a section, or the creation of new sections in these countries. We salute these comrades who are moving towards communist positions and towards our organisation. We say to them: “You have made a good choice, the only one possible if you aim to integrate yourselves into the struggle for the proletarian revolution. But this is not the easiest of choices: you will not have a lot of immediate success, you need patience and tenacity and to learn not to be put off when the results you obtain don’t quite live up to your hopes. But you will not be alone: the militants of the ICC are at your side and they are conscious of the responsibility that your approach confers on them. Their will, expressed at the 16th Congress, is to live up to these responsibilities”.

ICC

1. In 1916, in the opening chapter of the Junius pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg formulated the historical meaning of the First World War:

"Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’ What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilisation? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilisation. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilisation as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilisation and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales".

2. Almost 90 years later, the report from the laboratory of social history confirms the clarity and precision of Luxemburg's diagnosis. Rosa argued that the conflict that began in 1914 had opened up a "period of unlimited wars" which, if permitted to go on unchecked, would lead to the destruction of civilisation. Only 20 years after the hoped-for rebellion of the proletariat had halted the war, but failed to put an end to capitalism, a second imperialist world war had far surpassed the first in the depth and extent of its barbarism, which now featured not only the industrialised extermination of men on the battlefields, but first and foremost the genocide of whole peoples, the wholesale massacre of civilians, whether in the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka or the firestorms that liquidated Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The record of the period 1914-45 alone is enough to confirm that capitalist society had irreversibly entered its epoch of decline, that it had become a fundamental barrier to the needs of humanity.

3. Contrary to the propaganda of the ruling class, the 60 years since 1945 have in no way invalidated this conclusion - as if capitalism could be in historic decline in one decade and miraculously snap out of it the next. Even before the second imperialist slaughter had ended, new military blocs began to jockey for control of the globe. The US even deliberately postponed the end of the war against Japan, not to spare the lives of its troops, but to make a spectacular display of its awesome military might by obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki - a display aimed first and foremost not at defeated Japan but at the new Russian enemy. But within a short lapse of time, both of the new blocs had equipped themselves with weapons capable not only of destroying civilisation, but of annihilating all life on the planet. For the next five decades, humanity lived under the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction. In the world's “underdeveloped” regions, millions went hungry but the war machine of the great imperialist powers was fed with all the resources of human labour and ingenuity its insatiable maws demanded; millions more died in the “wars of national liberation” through which the superpowers conducted their murderous rivalries in Korea, Vietnam, the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Middle East.

4. MAD was the principal reason advanced by the bourgeoisie for the fact that the world was spared a third and probably final imperialist holocaust: thus, we should learn to love the bomb. In reality, a third world war was staved off:

• in an initial period, because it was necessary for the newly formed imperialist blocs to organise themselves and to introduce new ideological themes to mobilise the populations against a new enemy. Furthermore, the economic boom linked to the reconstruction of the countries destroyed by the second world war - a reconstruction financed by the Marshall Plan - allowed for a certain calming of imperialist tensions;

• in a second period, because when the boom brought about by the process of reconstruction came to an end in the late 1960s, capitalism no longer faced a defeated proletariat as it had done in the crisis of the 1930s, but a new generation of workers fully prepared to defend their own class interests against the demands of their exploiters. In the period of decadent capitalism, world war requires a total and active mobilisation of the proletariat: the international waves of workers' struggles that began with the general strike in France in May 1968 showed that the conditions for such a mobilisation were lacking throughout the 70s and 80s.

5. The final outcome of the long rivalry between the US and Russian blocs was thus not world war but the collapse of the latter. Unable to compete economically with the far more advanced US power, incapable of reforming its rigid political institutions, militarily encircled by its rival, and - as the mass strikes in Poland in 1980 demonstrated - unable to pull the proletariat behind its war-drive, the Russian imperialist bloc imploded in 1989. This Triumph of the West was immediately hailed as the dawn of a new period of world peace and prosperity; no less immediately, global imperialist conflicts merely took on a new form as the unity of the western bloc gave way to fierce rivalries between its former components, and a reunified Germany posed its candidature as a major world power to rival the US. In this new phase of imperialist conflicts, however, world war was even lower down the agenda of history because:

• the formation of new military blocs has been retarded by the internal divisions between the powers that would be the logical members of a new bloc facing the USA, in particular, between the most important European powers, Germany, France and Britain. Britain has not abandoned its traditional policy of working to ensure that no major power asserts its domination over Europe, while France has very strong historical reasons for putting limits on any possible subordination to Germany. With the break-down of the old two-bloc discipline, the prevailing trend in international relations is therefore towards “every man for himself”;

• the overwhelming military superiority of the USA, especially compared to Germany, makes it impossible for America's rivals to square up to it directly;

• the proletariat remains undefeated. Although the period that opened up with the collapse of the eastern bloc has thrown the proletariat into considerable disarray (in particular, the campaigns about the “death of communism” and the “end of the class struggle”), the working class of the major capitalist powers is still not ready to sacrifice itself for a new world carnage.

As a result, the principal military conflicts of the period since 1989 have largely taken the form of “deflected” wars. The dominant characteristic of these wars is that the leading world power has tried to stem the growing challenge to its global authority by engaging in spectacular displays of force against fourth-rate powers; this was the case with the first Gulf war in 1991, the bombing of Serbia in 1999, and the “wars against terrorism” in Afghanistan and Iraq which followed the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. At the same time, these wars have more and more revealed a precise global strategy on the part of the USA: to achieve total domination of the Middle East and Central Asia, and thus to militarily encircle all its major rivals (Europe and Russia), depriving them of naval outlets and making it possible to shut off their energy supplies.

Alongside this grand design - sometimes subordinated to it, sometimes obstructing it - the post-1989 world has also seen an explosion of local and regional conflicts which have spread death and destruction across whole continents. These conflicts have left millions dead, crippled and homeless in a whole series of African countries like the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, or Sierra Leone; and they now threaten to plunge a number of countries in the Middle East and Central Asia into a kind of permanent civil war. Within this process, the growing phenomenon of terrorism, often expressing the intrigues of bourgeois factions no longer controlled by any particular state regime, adds a further element of instability and has already brought these murderous conflicts back to the heartlands of capitalism (September 11, Madrid bombings…).

6. Thus, even if world war is not the concrete threat to mankind that it was for the greater part of the 20th century, the dilemma between socialism and barbarism remains just as urgent as ever. In some ways it is more urgent because while world war demands the active mobilisation of the working class, the latter now faces the danger that it will be progressively and insidiously swamped by a kind of creeping barbarism:

• the proliferation of local and regional wars could devastate entire areas of the planet, thus rendering the proletariat of those regions incapable of making any further contribution to the class war. This applies very clearly to the extremely dangerous rivalry between the two nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent; but is no less the case with the spiral of military adventures led by the USA. Despite their intention of creating a New World Order under the benevolent auspices of Uncle Sam, each one has added to an accumulating legacy of chaos and division, and the historic crisis of US leadership has only increased in depth and gravity. Iraq today provides clear proof of this, and yet without even making a show of rebuilding Iraq, the US is being driven towards new threats against Syria and Iran. This perspective is not invalidated by the recent attempts of US diplomacy to “build bridges” with Europe over Syria, Iran or Iraq. On the contrary, the current crisis in the Lebanon is clear evidence that the USA cannot delay in its efforts to attain complete mastery in the Middle East, an ambition which can only greatly accelerate imperialist tensions overall, since none of the USA’s major rivals can afford to allow the US free rein in this strategically vital zone. This perspective is also confirmed by the USA’s increasingly brazen intervention against Russian influence in the countries of the former USSR (Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgystan), and by the serious disagreements which have arisen over the question of arms to China. At the very time that China is underlining its growing imperialist ambitions by shaking a mailed fist at Taiwan stoking up tensions with Japan, France and Germany have been at the forefront of trying to revoke the embargo on arms sales to China introduced after the massacre of Tien An Man Square;

• the present period is marked by the philosophy of “every man for himself” not only at the level of imperialist rivalries, but also at the very heart of society. The acceleration of social atomisation and all the ideological filth that arrives with it (gangsterisation, the flight into suicide, irrationality and despair) bears with it the threat of permanently undermining the capacity of the working class to recapture its class identity and thus its unique class perspective of a different world, based not on social disintegration but on real community and solidarity;

• to the threat of imperialist war the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production so far past its sell-by date has uncovered a new menace, one equally capable of destroying the possibility of a new and human social formation: the increasing threat to the planetary environment. As successive scientific conferences warn of the mounting danger posed in particular by global warming, the bourgeoisie shows itself utterly incapable of taking even the minimum measures required to reduce greenhouse emissions. The south east Asian Tsunami exposed the unwillingness of the bourgeoisie to lift a finger to spare the human race from the devastating power of uncontrolled nature; the predicted consequences of global warming would be vastly more destructive and extensive. Furthermore, because the worst of these consequences still appear remote, it is extremely difficult for the majority of the proletariat to see them as a motive for struggling against the capitalist system today.

7. For all these reasons, marxists are justified not only in concluding that the perspective of socialism or barbarism is as valid today as it was in 1916, but also in saying that the spreading intensity of barbarism today could undermine the future bases of socialism. They are justified in concluding not only that capitalism has long been a historically obsolete social formation, but also that the period of decline that definitively began with the First World War has entered into its final phase, the phase of decomposition. This is not the decomposition of an organism that is already dead; capitalism is rotting, turning gangrenous on its feet. It is passing through a long and painful death agony, and in its dying convulsions it threatens to drag the whole of humanity down with it.

8. The capitalist class has no future to offer humanity. It has been condemned by history. And precisely for this reason it must strain all its resources to hide and deny this judgement, to pour scorn on the marxist prediction that capitalism, like previous modes of production, is doomed to become decadent and to disappear. It has thus secreted a succession of ideological antibodies, all aimed at refuting this fundamental conclusion of the historical materialist method:

• even before the epoch of decline had definitively opened up, the revisionist wing of social democracy began to contest Marx's “catastrophist” vision and argue that capitalism could continue indefinitely, and that as a result socialism would come about not through revolutionary violence but through a process of peaceful democratic change;

• in the 1920s, the staggering rates of industrial growth in the USA led a genius like Calvin Coolidge to proclaim the triumph of capitalism on the very eve of the great crash of ’29;

• during the reconstruction period after World War Two, bourgeois leaders like Macmillan told the workers that "you've never had it so good", sociologists theorised about the "consumer society" and the "embourgoisement" of the working class, while radicals like Marcuse looked for "new vanguards" to replace the apathetic proletarians;

• since 1989, we have had a real overproduction crisis of new theories aiming to explain how different it all is today and how everything Marx thought has been invalidated: the End of History, the Death of Communism, The Demise of the Working Class, Globalisation, the Microprocessor Revolution, the Internet Economy, the rise of new economic giants in the Far East, the latest being China and India. These ideas are so pervasive that they have deeply infected a whole new generation of those who are asking questions about the future capitalism has in store for the planet, and, even more alarmingly, have been picked up and wrapped in synthetic marxist theory by elements of the communist left itself.

In short, marxism has had to wage a permanent battle against all those who seize on the slightest sign of life in the capitalist system to argue that it has a bright future in front of it. But time and time again, after maintaining a long-term and historical vision against these capitulations to immediate appearance, it has been aided in its battle by the sharp blows of the historical movement:

• the blithe “optimism” of the revisionists was shattered by the truly catastrophic events of 1914-1918, and by the revolutionary response of the working class that they provoked;

• Calvin Coolidge and Co. were rudely interrupted by the most profound economic crisis in capitalism's history, which resulted in the unmitigated disaster of the second imperialist world war;

• those who declared that economic crisis was a thing of the past were refuted by the reappearance of the crisis in the late 60s; and the international resurgence of workers’ struggles in response to this crisis made it difficult to maintain the fiction that the working class had fused with the bourgeoisie.

The current spate of theories about “New Capitalism”, “Post-Industrial Society” and the rest are similarly doomed. Already a number of key elements of this ideology have been exposed by the remorseless development of the crisis: the hopes put in the Tiger and Dragon economies were crushed by the sudden slide which hit these countries in 1997; the dot.com revolution proved to be a mirage almost as soon as it had been proclaimed; the “new industries” constructed around computing and communications have shown themselves to be no less vulnerable to recession than the “old industries” like steel and shipbuilding. And despite being pronounced dead on numerous occasions, the working class continues to raise its head, as for example in the movements in Austria and France in 2003, or the struggles in Spain, Britain and Germany in 2004.

9. It would nevertheless be a mistake to underestimate the power of these ideologies in the present period, because, like all mystifications, they are based on a series of partial truths, for example:

• faced with the crisis of overproduction and the ruthless demands of competition, capitalism in the main centres of its system has in the last few decades created huge industrial wastelands and pushed millions of workers either into permanent unemployment or into unproductive, low paid jobs in the “service” sectors; for the same reason it has relocated huge amounts of industrial jobs to the low-wage areas of the “third world”. Many traditional sectors of the industrial working class have been decimated through this process, which has aggravated the difficulties of the proletariat to maintain its class identity;

• the development of new technologies has made it possible to increase both rates of exploitation and the speed of circulation of capital and commodities on a world scale;

• the reflux in the class struggle over the last two decades has made it hard for a new generation to see the working class as the unique agent of social change;

• the capitalist class has shown a remarkable ability to “manage” the crisis of its system by manipulating and even deforming its own laws of operation.

Other examples could be given. But none of them put into question the fundamental senility of the capitalist system.

10. The decadence of capitalism has never meant a final and sudden collapse of the system, as certain elements of the German left argued in the 1920s, or a total halt in the productive forces, as Trotsky mistakenly thought in the 1930s. As Marx observed, the bourgeoisie becomes intelligent in times of crisis and it has learned from its mistakes. The 1920s were the last moment that the bourgeoisie really believed it could go back to the laissez-faire liberalism of the 19th century; this for the simple reason that the world war, while ultimately a product of the system's economic contradictions, had broken out before these contradictions could reach their full import at a “purely” economic level. The crisis of 1929 was thus the first global economic crisis of the decadent period. But having experienced it, the bourgeoisie recognised the need for fundamental change. Despite ideological pretensions to the contrary, no serious faction of the bourgeoisie would ever again question the necessity for the state to retain overall control over the economy; the need to abandon any notion of “balancing the books” in favour of deficit spending and financial trickery of all kinds; the necessity to maintain a huge arms sector at the centre of all economic activity. By the same token, capitalism has gone to considerable lengths to avoid the out and out economic autarky of the 1930s. Despite growing pressures towards commercial war and the break-down of international bodies inherited from the period of the blocs, the majority of these bodies have survived as the major capitalist powers have understood the necessity to put some limits on unrestrained economic competition between national capitals.

Thus capitalism has kept itself alive through the conscious intervention of the bourgeoisie, which can no longer afford to trust the invisible hand of the market. It is true that the solutions also become part of the problem - the recourse to debt clearly piles up enormous problems for the future, the bloating of the state and the arms sector generate tremendous inflationary pressures. These problems have since the 1970s given rise to different economic policies, to alternating emphases on “Keynsianism” or “neo-Liberalism”, but since neither policy can get to the real causes of the crisis, neither approach will ever achieve final victory. What is noteworthy is the bourgeoisie's determination to keep its economy going at all costs, its ability to hold off the inherent tendency towards collapse by maintaining a gigantic facade of economic activity fuelled by debt. Throughout the 1990s the US economy led the way in this regard; and now that even this artificial “growth” is beginning to falter, it is the turn of the Chinese bourgeoisie to surprise the world: considering the inability of the USSR and the Stalinist states of eastern Europe to politically adapt to the necessity for economic “reform”, the Chinese bureaucracy has pulled off an amazing feat merely by surviving, let alone by presiding over the current “boom”. Critics of the notion of capitalist decadence have even pointed to this phenomenon as proof that the system still has the capacity for real growth and development

In reality, the present Chinese “boom” in no way calls into question the overall decline in the world capitalist economy. In contrast to the ascendant period of capitalism:

• China’s current industrial growth is not part of a global process of expansion; on the contrary, it has as its direct corollary the de-industrialisation and stagnation of the most advanced economies who have re-located to China in search of cheap labour costs;

• the Chinese working class does not have the perspective of a steady rise in living standards, but is predicated upon increasingly savage attacks on living and working conditions and on the continued impoverishment of huge sectors of the proletariat and peasantry outside the main areas of growth;

• China’s frenzied growth will contribute not to a global expansion of the world market but to a deepening of the world crisis of overproduction: given the restricted consumption of the Chinese masses, the bulk of China’s products are geared towards export to the more developed capitalisms;

• the fundamental irrationality of China’s swelling economy is highlighted by the terrible levels of pollution which it has generated – a sure sign that the planetary environment can only be harmed by the pressure on each nation to exploit its natural resources to the absolute limit in order to compete on the world market;

• like the system as a whole, the entirety of China’s growth is founded on debts that can never be reabsorbed through a real expansion of the world market.

Indeed, the fragility of all such spurts of growth is recognised by the ruling class itself, which is increasingly alarmed by the Chinese bubble. This is not because it is worried about the terrifying levels of exploitation upon which it is based - far from it, these ferocious levels are precisely what makes China such an attractive proposition for investment - but because the global economy is becoming too dependent on the Chinese market and the consequences of a Chinese collapse are becoming too horrible to contemplate, not just for China, which would be plunged back into the violent anarchy of the 1930s, but for the world economy as a whole.

11. Far from refuting the reality of decadence, capitalism's economic growth today confirms it. This growth has nothing in common with the cycles of accumulation in the 19th century, based on a real expansion into outlying fields of production, on the conquest of new extra-capitalist markets. It is true that the onset of decadence occurred well before the total exhaustion of such markets, and that capitalism has continued to make the best possible use of such remaining economic areas as an outlet for its production: the growth of Russia during the 1930s and the integration of the remaining peasant economies in Europe during the period of post-war reconstruction are examples of this. But the dominant trend by far in the epoch of decadence is the use of an artificial market, based on debt. It is now openly admitted that the frenzied “consumerism” of the past two decades has been based entirely on household debt of staggering proportions: a trillion pounds in Britain, 25% of the GNP in America, while governments not only encourage such indebtedness but practice the same policy on an even vaster scale.

12. There is another sense in which capitalist economic growth today is what Marx called “growth in decay” (Grundrisse): it is the principal factor in the destruction of the global environment. The runaway levels of pollution in China, the vast contribution made by the USA to the sum total of greenhouse gases, the frenzied exploitation of the remaining rainforests...the more capitalism is committed to growth the more it must admit that it has no solution whatever to the ecological crisis, which can only be solved by placing global production on a new basis, "a plan for living for the human species" (Bordiga) in harmony with its natural environment.

13. Whether in boom or “recession” the underlying reality is the same: capitalism can no longer spontaneously regenerate itself. There is no longer a natural cycle of accumulation. In the first phase of decadence from 1914-1968, the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction replaced the old cycle of boom and bust; but the GCF were right in 1945 to argue that there was no automatic drive towards reconstruction after the ruin of the world war. In the final analysis, what convinced the US bourgeoisie to revive the European and Japanese economies with the Marshall Plan was the need to annex these zones to its imperialist sphere of influence and to prevent them falling into the hands of the rival bloc. Thus the greatest economic “boom” of the 20th century was fundamentally the result of inter-imperialist competition.

14. In decadence, economic contradictions drive capitalism towards war, but war does not resolve these contradictions. On the contrary, it deepens them. In any case the cycle of crisis war and reconstruction is over and the crisis today, unable to debauch on world war, is the prime factor in accelerating the decomposition of the system. It thus continues to push the system towards its own self-destruction.

15. The argument that capitalism is a decadent system has often been criticised on the grounds that it leads to fatalism - the idea of automatic collapse and spontaneous overthrow by the working class, thus removing any need for the intervention of a revolutionary party. In fact, the bourgeoisie has shown that it will not permit its system to collapse economically. Nevertheless, left to its own dynamic, capitalism will destroy itself through wars and other disasters. In this sense, it is indeed “fated” to disappear. But what is anything but fatal is the response of the proletariat. As Luxemburg put it in the same pages as the previously-cited passage on socialism or barbarism:

“Socialism is the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind. For this reason, Friedrich Engels designated the final victory of the socialist proletariat a leap of humanity from the animal world into the realm of freedom. This ‘leap’ is also an iron law of history bound to the thousands of seeds of a prior torment-filled and all-too-slow development. But this can never be realised until the development of complex material conditions strikes the incendiary spark of conscious will in the great masses. The victory of socialism will not descend from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of violent tests of strength between the old and the new powers. The international proletariat under the leadership of the Social Democrats will thereby learn to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history”.

Communism is thus the first society in which mankind will have conscious mastery of its own productive powers. And since in the proletarian struggle there can be no separation between ends and means, the movement towards communism can only be “the self-conscious movement of the immense majority” (Communist Manifesto): the deepening and extension of class consciousness is the indispensable measure of progress towards the revolution and the ultimate supercession of capitalism. This process is necessarily an extremely difficult, uneven and heterogeneous one because it is the emanation of an exploited class which has no economic power in the old society and is constantly subjected to the ideological domination and manipulation of the ruling class. In no sense can it be guaranteed in advance: on the contrary, there exists the real possibility that the proletariat, faced with the unprecedented immensity of the task, will fail to live up to its historic responsibility, with all the terrible consequences for humanity that would flow from it.

16. The highest point hitherto reached by class consciousness was the October insurrection in 1917. This has been strenuously denied by bourgeois historiography and all its pale reflections in anarchism and related ideologies, for whom October was merely a putsch by the power-hungry Bolsheviks; but October represented a fundamental recognition within the proletariat that there was no way forward for mankind as a whole but to make the revolution in all countries. Nevertheless, this understanding did not grip the proletariat in sufficient depth and extent; the revolutionary wave failed because the workers of the world, and principally of Europe, were unable to develop the overall political understanding that would have enabled them to respond adequately to the tasks of the new epoch of wars and revolutions that opened in 1914. The result of this, by the end of the 1920s, was the longest and deepest retreat by the working class in its history: not so much at the level of combativity, since the 1930s and 40s were punctuated with major outbreaks of class militancy, but above all at the level of consciousness, since politically speaking the working class rallied actively to the anti-fascist programmes of the bourgeoisie, as in Spain 1936-39 or France in 1936, or to the defence of democracy and the Stalinist “fatherland” during the Second World War. This profound reflux in consciousness was reflected in the near-disappearance of revolutionary political minorities by the 1950s.

17. The historic resurgence of struggles in 1968 once again posed the long-term perspective of the proletarian revolution, but this was only explicit and conscious in a small minority of the class, as reflected in the rebirth of the revolutionary movement internationally. The waves of struggle between 1968 and 1989 did see important advances at the level of consciousness, but they tended to be at the level of the immediate combat (questions of extension, organisation, etc). Their weakest point was their lack of political depth, partly the reflection of the hostility to politics that was a result of the Stalinist counter-revolution. On the political level, the bourgeoisie was largely able to impose its own agendas, first by offering the prospect of change through installing the left in power (1970s) and by giving the left in opposition the task of sabotaging struggles from the inside (1980s). Although they were capable of preventing the development of a course towards war, the inability of the waves of struggle from 1968 to 1989 to take on a historic, political dimension determined the passage to the phase of decomposition, The historic event marking this passage – the collapse of the eastern bloc – was both the result of decomposition and a factor in its aggravation. Thus the dramatic changes at the end of the 80s were at the same time a product of the proletariat’s political difficulties; and, as they gave rise to the propaganda barrage about the end of communism and the class struggle, a key element in bringing about a serious retreat in class consciousness - to the point where the proletariat even lost sight of its basic class identity. Thus the bourgeoisie has been able to declare a final victory over the working class and the working class has so far not been able to respond with sufficient strength to refute this claim.

18. In spite of all its difficulties, the period of retreat has by no means seen the “end of the class struggle”. The 1990s was interspersed with a number of movements which showed that the proletariat still had untapped reserves of combativity (for example in 1992 and 1997). However, none of these movements represented a real shift at the level of consciousness. Hence the importance of the more recent movements which, though lacking the spectacular and overnight impact of a movement like that of 1968 in France, nevertheless constitute a turning point in the balance of class forces. The struggles of 2003-2005 have the following characteristics:

• they have involved significant sectors of the working class in countries at the heart of world capitalism (as in France 2003);

• they have been preoccupied with more explicitly political questions; in particular the question of pensions raised in the struggles in France and elsewhere poses the problem of the future that capitalist society holds in store for all of us;

• they have seen the re-emergence of Germany as a focal point for workers’ struggles, for the first time since the revolutionary wave;

• the question of class solidarity has been raised in a wider and more explicit way than at any time since the struggles of the 80s, most notably in the recent movements in Germany;

• they have been accompanied by the emergence of a new generation of elements looking for political clarity. This new generation has manifested itself both in the new influx of overtly politicised elements and in the new layers of workers entering the struggle for the first time. As evidenced in certain important demonstrations, the basis is being forged for the unity between the new generation and the “generation of ‘68” – both the political minority which rebuilt the communist movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s and the wider strata of workers who have been through the rich experience of class struggles between ‘68 and ‘89.

19. The subterranean maturation of consciousness, denied by the empiricist distortion of marxism which sees only the surface of reality and not its deepest underlying tendencies, has not been obliterated by the general reflux in consciousness since ‘89. It is a characteristic of this process that it becomes manifest only in a minority, but the growth of this minority is the expression of the advance and development of a wider phenomenon within the class. Already after ‘89 we saw a small minority of politicised elements questioning the bourgeois campaigns about the “death of communism”. This minority has now been reinforced by a new generation preoccupied with the whole direction of bourgeois society. At the most general level this is the expression of the undefeated nature of the proletariat, of the maintenance of the historic course towards massive class confrontations which opened up in 1968. But at a more specific level the “turning point” of 2003 and the emergence of a new generation of searching elements are evidence that the proletariat is at the beginning of a second attempt to launch an assault on the capitalist system, following the failure of the attempt of 68-89. Although at the day-to-day level the proletariat is faced with the apparently basic task of reaffirming its class identity, behind this problem lies the prospect of a far closer intertwining of the immediate struggle with the political struggle. The questions posed by struggles in the phase of decomposition will more and more be around seemingly “abstract” but in fact more global issues like the necessity for class solidarity against the ambient atomisation, the attacks on the social wage, the omnipresence of war, the threat to the planetary environment – in short, the question of what future this society holds in store, and thus, the question of a different kind of society.

20. Within this process of politicisation, two elements, which up till now have tended to have an inhibiting effect on the class struggle, are destined to become increasingly important as stimuli to the movements of the future: the question of mass unemployment, and the question of war.

During the struggles of the 1980s when mass unemployment was becoming an increasingly obvious fact, neither the struggle of the employed workers against impending lay-offs, nor the resistance of the unemployed in the streets, reached significant levels. There was no movement of the unemployed on anything like the scale reached during the 1930s, even though the latter was a period of profound defeat for the working class. In the recessions of the 80s, the unemployed faced a terrible atomisation, especially the younger generation of proletarians who had never had any experience of collective labour and combat. Even when employed workers did launch wide-scale struggles against redundancies, as in the British mining industry, the negative outcome of these movements has been used by the ruling class to reinforce feelings of passivity and hopelessness, demonstrated recently by the response to the bankruptcy of Rover cars in Britain, where workers’ only “choice” is presented as being between one or other set of new bosses to keep the company running. Nevertheless, given the narrowing of the bourgeoisie’s margin of manoeuvre and its increasing inability to offer even the minimum of benefits to the unemployed, the question of unemployment is set to develop a far more subversive side, facilitating solidarity between employed and unemployed, and pushing the class as a whole to reflect more deeply and actively on the bankruptcy of the system.

The same dynamic can be observed with the question of war. In the early 90s, the first major wars of the phase of decomposition (Gulf, Balkans) tended to reinforce the feelings of powerlessness which had been induced by the campaigns around the collapse of the eastern bloc, while the pretext of “humanitarian intervention” in Africa and the Balkans could still have a semblance of credibility. Since 2001 and the “war on terrorism”, however, the mendacity and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie’s justification for war has become increasingly evident, even if the growth of huge pacifist movements has largely soaked up the political questioning this has provoked. Furthermore, the current wars are having a much more direct impact on the working class, even if this is still mainly limited to countries directly involved in these conflicts. In the USA, this has manifested itself through the number of families affected by death and injury to proletarians in uniform, but even more significantly by the awesome economic costs of military adventures, which have risen in direct proportion to cuts in the social wage. And as it becomes apparent that capitalism’s militarist tendencies are not only an ever-growing spiral, but one over which the ruling class has less and less control, the problem of war and its connection to the crisis is also going to lead to a far deeper and wider reflection about the stakes of history.

21. In a paradoxical sense, the immensity of these questions is one of the main reasons why the present revival of struggles seems so limited and unspectacular in comparison to the movements which marked the resurgence of the proletariat the end of the 1960s. Faced with vast problems like the world economic crisis, the destruction of the global environment, or the spiral of militarism, the daily defensive struggle can seem irrelevant and impotent. And in a sense this reflects a real understanding that there is no solution to the contradictions assailing capitalism today. But while in the 1970s the bourgeoisie had before it a whole panoply of mystifications about the possible ways of ensuring a better life, the present attempts of the bourgeoisie to pretend that we are living in an epoch of unprecedented growth and prosperity more and more resemble the desperate denials of a dying man unable to admit his impending demise. The decadence of capitalism is the epoch of social revolution because the struggles of the exploited can no longer lead to any real amelioration in their condition; and however difficult it may be to move from the defensive to the offensive levels of the struggle, the class will have no choice but to make this difficult and daunting leap. And like all such qualitative leaps, it is being preceded by all kinds of small preparatory steps, from strikes around bread and butter issues to the formation of tiny discussion groups all around the globe.

22. Faced with the perspective of the politicisation of the struggle, revolutionary political organisations have a unique and irreplaceable role. However, the conjunction of the growing effects of decomposition with long-standing theoretical and organisational weaknesses and opportunism in the majority of proletarian political organisations have exposed the incapacity of the majority of these groups to respond to the challenge posed by history. This is illustrated most clearly by the negative dynamic in which the IBRP has been caught up for some time: not only in its total inability to understand the significance of the new phase of decomposition, compounded by an abandonment of a key theoretical concept like that of the decadence of capitalism, but even more disastrously in its flouting of the basic norms of proletarian solidarity and behaviour, via its flirtation with parasitism and adventurism. This regression is all the more serious in that the premises are now being laid for the construction of the world communist party. At the same time, the fact that the groups of the proletarian milieu are more and more disqualifying themselves from the process which leads to the formation of the class party only highlights the crucial role which the ICC has been called upon to play within this process. It is increasingly clear that the party of the future will not be the result of the “democratic” addition of the different groups of the milieu, but that the ICC already constitutes the skeleton of the future party. But for the party to become flesh, the ICC must prove itself equal to the tasks imposed by the development of the class struggle and the emergence of the new generation of searching elements.

Twenty-five years ago, in May 1980, the cycle of international conferences of the communist left, initiated by the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt, Battaglia Comunista) some four years earlier, ended in disarray and confusion, following the adoption of a motion on the party tabled by Battaglia and the Communist Workers Organisation. This motion had been designed expressly to exclude the ICC because of its so-called “spontaneist” position on the question of organisation.

These conferences had been welcomed by the ICC as a positive step forward from the fragmentation and mutual misunderstanding which had plagued the international proletarian milieu. They still represent a valuable experience that holds many lessons for the new generation of revolutionaries emerging today, and it is important for this new generation to reacquaint itself with the debates that took place in and around the conferences. However, we cannot ignore the negative effects of the way in which they broke up. A brief glance at the sorry state of the proletarian political milieu today shows that we are still living with the consequences of this failure to create an organised framework for fraternal debate and political clarification among the groups of the left communist tradition.

Following the IBRP’s flirtation with the parasites of the “Internal Fraction” of the ICC and with the adventurer behind the “Circulo des Comunistas Internacionalistas” in Argentina, relations between this organisation and the ICC have never been so bad. The groups of the Bordigist tradition either remain in the self-satisfied tower of sectarian isolation in which they protected themselves from the conferences at the end of the 70s, or – as in the case of Le Prolétaire – have also shown themselves no less willing to lap up the flattery of the IFICC than the IBRP. In any case, the Bordigists have still not recovered from the traumatic crisis which hit them in 1981 and from which they have drawn very few lessons about their most important weaknesses. The last heirs of the Dutch/German left, meanwhile, have now gone the way of all flesh. And all this at a time when the new generation of searching elements is looking for inspiration and guidance from the organised communist movement, and when the stakes of history have never been so high.

When Battaglia took the decision to undermine the ICC’s participation in the conferences, it claimed that it had “assumed the responsibility that one has a right to expect of a serious leading force” (response to the ICC’s 1983 “Address to the proletarian milieu”). By going back over the history of these conferences, we aim to show, among other things, the real responsibility that this current bears for the disorganisation of the communist left.

We will not try to give an exhaustive account of the discussions in and around the three conferences. Readers can refer to a number of publications containing the texts and proceedings of these conferences, although these are now becoming quite rare and we would welcome offers to assist us in the task of creating an online archive of these publications. Our aim here will be to summarise the main themes that animated the meetings and above all to examine the principal reasons for their eventual failure.

Emerging from a long period of dispersal: background to the international conferences

The dispersal of the forces of the communist left was not a new phenomenon in 1976. The left communists have their origins in the left fractions of the Second International, which led the fight against opportunism from the end of the 19th century onwards. And this fight was itself carried out in dispersed order.

Thus, when Lenin initiated the struggle against Menshevik opportunism in the Russian party, Rosa Luxemburg’s first reaction was to side with the Mensheviks. And when Luxemburg began to perceive the real depth of Kautsky’s capitulation to the status quo, Lenin took a long a long time to realise that she had been right. All this was a product of the fact that the parties of the Second International had been formed on a national basis and carried out most of their activity on the national level; the International was more a federation of national parties than a single world party. And even though the Communist International pledged itself to overcoming these national particularities, the latter continued to exert a very heavy weight. There is no doubt that the left communist fractions which began to react against the degeneration of the CI in the early 20s were also affected by this; once again the left was responding in a largely fragmented way to the growth of opportunism in the proletarian International. The most obvious and damaging expression of this separation was the gulf that almost immediately divided the German left from the Italian left from 1920 onwards. Bordiga tended to identify the German left’s emphasis on the workers’ councils with Gramsci’s “factory councilism”, and the German left largely failed to see the “Leninist” Italian left as a possible ally against the degeneration of the CI.

The counter-revolution that had arrived in full force by the end of the ‘20s further scattered the forces of the left, although the Italian Fraction worked strenuously to combat this trend by seeking to lay the foundations for international discussion and co-operation on a principled basis. It thus opened its columns to debates with the Dutch internationalists, with the dissident groups of the left opposition, and so on. This open spirit displayed by Bilan was – along with many of the more general programmatic advances achieved by the Fraction in exile – one of the first victims of the opportunist formation of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy at the end of the war. Succumbing to a good dose of national narrow-mindedness, the majority of the Italian Fraction rushed to greet the foundation of a new party (in Italy alone!), dissolving the Fraction and joining the new party on an individual basis. This precipitous regroupment of some very heterogeneous forces did not cement the unity of the Italian left current but provoked new divisions. First, in 1945, with the French Fraction whose majority had opposed the dissolution of the Italian Fraction and criticised the opportunist basis of the new party. The French Fraction was summarily expelled from the ICP’s international organisation (the International Communist Left) and formed the Gauche Communiste de France. By 1952, the ICP itself had suffered a major split between the two main wings of the party – the “Damenists” around Battaglia Comunista and the “Bordigists” around Programma Comunista, with the latter in particular developing a theoretical justification for the most rigid sectarianism, considering themselves to be the one and only proletarian party on the planet (which didn’t prevent further splits and the co-existence of several “one and only” International Communist Parties by the 1970s). This sectarianism was certainly one of the costs of the counter-revolution. On the one hand it expressed an attempt to hang onto principles in a hostile environment by building a wall of unchanging formulae around hard-won political positions. On the other hand, the growing tendency for revolutionaries to be isolated from their class and to exist in a world of small groups reinforced the circle spirit and a sect-like divorce from the real needs of the movement.

However, after the barren years of the 1950s, which marked the nadir of the international revolutionary milieu, the social climate began to change. The proletariat returned to the stage of history with the strikes of May ‘68, a movement which had a profoundly political dimension, since it raised the question of a new society and gave birth to a plethora of groups whose search for a revolutionary coherence led them naturally to re-appropriating the traditions of the communist left. Among the first to recognise the new situation were the comrades of the old GCF, who had already recommenced political activity with some young elements they had encountered in Venezuela, forming the group Internacialismo in 1964. After the events of May ‘68, comrades of Internacialismo came to Europe to intervene in the new proletarian milieu which this massive movement had called into being. In particular, these comrades encouraged the old groups of the Italian left, which had the advantage of a press and structured organisational forms, to act as the focal point for debate and contact among the new searching elements by organising an international conference. They met with an icy response, because both wings of the Italian left saw little in May ‘68 (and even Italy’s “Hot Autumn” of 1969) except for an upsurge in student agitation. After several failed attempts to convince the Italian groups to carry out their role (see the ICC’s letter to Battaglia in the pamphlet Troisième Conference des Groupes de la Gauche Communiste, Mai 1980, Procès-verbal), the comrades of Internacialismo and the newly formed Révolution Internationale group concentrated on working towards the regroupment of the newer elements produced by the revival of the class movement. In ‘68, two French groups - Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils and the Organisation Conseilliste de Clermont-Ferrand got together with Révolution Internationale to form a “new series” RI, which now formed an international tendency with Internacialismo and Internationalism in the USA. In 1972 Internationalism put forward a proposal for an international correspondence network. Once again the Italian groups abstained from the process but it did bring some positive results, most notably a series of conferences in 1973-4, bringing together RI and some of the new groups in Britain, one of whom, World Revolution, joined the international tendency that formed the ICC in 1975 (then made up of six groups: RI, Internationalism, WR, Internacionalismo, plus Accion Proletaria in Spain, and Rivoluzione Internazionale in Italy).

First conference, Milan 1977

The cycle of international conferences of the communist left began in 1976 when Battaglia finally emerged from its isolation in Italy and sent out a proposal for an international meeting to a number of groups worldwide.

The list of groups invited was as follows:

• France: Révolution Internationale, Pour Une Intervention Communiste, Union Ouvrière, Combat Communiste.
• Britain: Communist Workers Organisation, World Revolution.
• Spain: Fomento Obrero Revolucionario.
• USA: Revolutionary Workers Group.
• Japan: Japan Revolutionary Communist League, “Revolutionary Marxist Faction” (Kakumaru-Ha).
• Sweden Forbundet Arbetarmakt: (Workers Power League).
• Portugal: Combate.

The introduction to the pamphlet Texts and Proceedings of the International Conference organised by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) notes that “a very rapid ‘natural selection’ process took place with the dissolution of Union Ouvrière and the RWG and the interruption of relations with Combat Communiste whose political positions showed themselves to be incompatible with the themes of the conference….Relations with the Portuguese group were interrupted following a meeting between their representative and a delegate of the PCInt in Lisbon, during which it became clear that this group had moved away from the fundamentals of the communist movement. The Japanese organisation did not reply, which could mean it never received the original ‘Address’”. The Swedish group expressed interest but was unable to attend.

This was an important step by Battaglia, a recognition of the fundamental importance, not of the need for “international links” (which every leftist group lays claim to), but of the internationalist duty of overcoming divisions in the world-wide revolutionary movement and working towards its centralisation and ultimate regroupment. The ICC warmly welcomed Battaglia’s initiative as an important blow against sectarianism and dispersal; moreover, its decision to participate in the initiative had a salutary effect on its own political life, since we were not entirely immune from the baleful tendency to see oneself as “the one and only” truly revolutionary group. Following questions being raised within the ICC about the proletarian character of the groups descended from the Italian left, a discussion ensued about the criteria for judging the class nature of political organisations and eventually gave rise to the resolution on proletarian political groups adopted at the ICC’s 1976 International Congress.

There were however a number of important weaknesses in Battaglia’s proposal and in the conference which it eventually engendered in Milan in April/May 1977.

First of all, Battaglia’s proposals lacked any clear criteria for participation. The initial reason given for calling the conference was something, which - as hindsight fully confirms – was the passing phenomenon of the adoption of “Eurocommunism” by some of the main Communist Parties of Western Europe. The implications of a discussion about what Battaglia called the “social democratisation” of the CPs were unclear, but more important, the proposal completely failed to define the essential class positions which would ensure that any international meeting would be a coming together of proletarian groups and would exclude the left wing of capital. Vagueness on this issue was nothing new for Battaglia, which in the past had issued appeals for an international meeting with the Trotskyists of Lutte Ouvrière. And this time the list of invitees also included radical leftists like the Japanese group and Combat Communiste. The ICC therefore insisted that the conference should adopt a minimum of basic principles which would exclude leftists, but also those who, even if they defended a certain number of class positions, were opposed to the idea of a class party. The aim of the conference was thus envisaged as being part of a long-term process towards the formation of a new world party.

At the same time the conferences immediately came up against the sectarianism which had come to dominate the movement. To begin with, Battaglia seemed to have decided that it would be the sole representative of the “Italian” left, and thus failed to invite any of the Bordigist groups to the conference. This approach was also reflected in the fact that the appeal was not addressed to the ICC as such (which already had a section in Italy), but only to certain territorial sections of the ICC. Secondly, we had the sudden decision of the group “Pour Une Intervention Communiste” not to participate, having initially agreed that it would. In a letter dated 24th April 1977, it wrote that the meeting would be “nothing but a dialogue of the deaf”. Thirdly, at the meeting itself, there was a small expression of what later became a major problem: the failure of the conferences to adopt any common positions whatsoever. At the end of the meeting, the ICC proposed a short document stating the points of agreement and disagreement that had emerged through the discussion. This was too much for Battaglia. Although they had given very grandiose objectives to the conference – “An outline of a platform of basic principles, so as to enable us to begin to work in common; an international co-ordination bureau” (Third Circular of the PCInt, February 1977) - well before the premises for such a step had been established, they got cold feet at the thought of signing anything together with the ICC, even so modest a proposal as a summary of agreements and disagreements.

As it happens, the only groups who were able to take part in the meeting in Milan were Battaglia and the ICC. The Communist Workers’ Organisation in Britain had agreed to come - which was a considerable step forward because it had hitherto broken off relations with the ICC, deeming it “counter-revolutionary” because of its analysis of the degeneration of the Russian revolution - but was unable to do so for practical reasons. Similarly for the group around Munis in Spain and France, the FOR. Nevertheless the discussion was wide-ranging and focused on a series of crucial issues, summarised in the ICC's proposed joint statement, which noted that there had been:

• an agreement that capitalist society was in its epoch of decadence, although there were different analyses of the causes: the ICC defended Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis that the fundamental contradiction which plunges capitalism into decadence is the problem of realisation, whereas for Battaglia this was secondary to the problem of the falling rate of profit;
• an agreement on the opening of a new phase of acute economic crisis;
• disagreement on the significance of the class movements of the late 60s and early 70s, which for the ICC signalled the end of the period of counter-revolution, while for Battaglia the counter-revolution still predominated;
• agreement on the counter-revolutionary role of the CPs and SPs, although the ICC criticised Battaglia's definition of these organisations as opportunist or reformist, since such epithets can only apply to proletarian organisations affected by bourgeois ideology;
• agreement that the trade unions were organisations of the bourgeoisie, but disagreement on how to intervene towards them. Battaglia still talked about working inside the unions, which could include standing for election in the union-based “factory commissions”. At the same time it talked about forming its own “factory groups”, which it called “communist factory groups” or “communist union groups”;
• this question of factory groups was also a major point of discussion, with Battaglia seeing them as transmission belts between party and class, and the ICC arguing that such transmission belts cannot exist in decadence since there could be no other mass permanent organs to take the place of the trade unions;
• this discussion was connected to major disagreements on the question of the party and class consciousness, with Battaglia defending Lenin’s thesis that consciousness must be brought to the workers “from the outside”, by the party. This question would be taken up at the next conference.

These issues have continued to be points of divergence between the ICC and Battaglia (and the IBRP) in the period since the conferences (with the addition of a major shift by the IBRP towards abandoning the very notion of decadence – see recent articles in the International Review). However, this was not by any means a dialogue of the deaf. Battaglia did evolve on the union question, at least in so far as dropping the term “union” from its factory groups. By the same token, some of the ICC's replies to Battaglia on class consciousness at the Milan meeting reveal a visceral “anti-Leninism “ which the ICC would confront within its own ranks in the ensuing years, particularly in the debate with what became the “External Fraction of the ICC” after 1984. In short, this was a discussion which could lead to mutual clarification, and was certainly of interest to the wider political milieu. And the conference did draw a positive conclusion from its work to the extent that it agreed to take the process further forward.

Second Conference: Paris November 1978

This conclusion was concretised in the fact that the second conference marked a considerable step forward in relation to the first. It was better organised, based on clear political criteria, and was attended by more organisations. A number of discussion documents were published as well as the proceedings (see volumes I and II of the pamphlet Second Conference of the Groups of the Communist Left, still available from us in English).

This time the conference began with a number of participants: Battaglia Comunista, the ICC, the CWO, the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista (Italy), Fur Kommunismen (Sweden) and the FOR. Three other groups declared themselves in favour of the conferences, though unable to attend: Arbetarmakt, Il Leninista from Italy and Organisation Communiste Révolutionnaire Internationalise d’Algérie.

The themes of the meeting continued the discussion at the first – the crisis and the economic foundations of capitalist decadence, the role of the party. There was also a discussion on the problem of national liberation struggles, which was a stumbling block for many of the groups from the Bordigist tradition. These debates were an important contribution to a more general process of clarification. For one thing, they enabled certain of the groups taking part in the conferences to see that they had enough in common to engage in a process of regroupment which did not put into question the overall framework of the conferences. This would be the case for the ICC and the Swedish group Fur Kommunismen. Secondly, they provided an invaluable reference point for the milieu as a whole – including those elements not attached to any particular group but looking for a revolutionary coherence.

However, this time the problem of sectarianism was to appear in a much sharper light.

For the second conference, the Bordigist groups were invited, but their response was a classic expression of their refusal to engage with the real movement, of a deeply sectarian attitude. The so-called “Florentine” PCI (which split from the main Bordigist group Programma in 1972 and publishes Il Partito Comunista) said it wanted nothing to do with any “missionaries of unification”. But as we pointed out in our response in “The second international conference” in International Review n°16, unification was certainly not the issue in any short-term sense: “The hour has not yet struck for the unification in one party of the different communist groups existing today”.

The same article also addressed the response of Programma:

“Only slightly different is the reply from the second PCI (Programma). What makes it especially distinguished is its grossness. The articles title, ‘the struggle between the fottenti and fottuti’ (literally, the struggle between the fuckers and the fucked) indicates already the stature that the Programma PCI gives itself – which really is hardly accessible to anyone else. Are we to believe that Programma is so saturated in Stalinist habits that they can only imagine the confrontation of positions among revolutionaries in terms of ‘rapists’ and ‘raped’? For Programma, no discussion is possible among groups who base themselves on the firm ground of communism: in fact, it’s especially impossible among such groups. One may, if it comes to the crunch, march alongside Trotskyists, Maoists and such like in a phantom soldiers’ committee, or sign leaflets with these and other leftists for ‘the defence of immigrant workers’, but never can one consider discussion with other communist groups, or even among the numerous Bordigist parties. Among these groups there can only be a rapport de force, and if they can’t be destroyed, their very existence must be ignored! Rape or impotence, such is the sole alternative which Programma wants to offer the communist movement, the sole model for relations between its groups. Not having any other conception, they see this vision everywhere and gladly attribute it to others. An international conference of communist groups cannot, in their eyes, have any other objective than splitting off a few members from another group. And if Programma didn’t come it’s certainly not for lack of desire to ‘rape’, but because they were afraid of being impotent... for Programma you can only discuss with yourself. For fear of being impotent in a confrontation of positions with other communist groups, Programma takes refuge in ‘solitary pleasure’. This is the virility of a sect – and its only means of satisfaction”.

The PCI also put forward another excuse: the ICC is “anti-party”. Others refused to participate because they were against the party – Spartacusbond (Holland) and the PIC, which as the article points out, much preferred the company of left wing social democrats to “Bordigo –Leninists”. And finally:

“The conference also had to witness a theatrical performance by the group FOR (Fomento Obrero Revolucionario, Spain and France). After giving its full support to the first conference in Milan, and agreeing to come to the second and contribute by a text and in the discussions, the FOR retracted its position at the beginning of the Conference, on the pretext that it disagreed with the first point on the agenda, i.e. the evolution of the crisis and its perspectives. The FOR defends the idea that capitalism is not in an economic crisis. The present crisis, they say, is simply a conjunctural crisis of the kind capitalism has known and overcome throughout its history. Because of this it doesn’t open up any new perspectives, above all it doesn’t pave the way to any resurgence of proletarian struggle. Rather the opposite is the case. On the one hand the FOR defends the thesis of a ‘crisis of civilisation’ totally independent of the economic situation. We can see in this thesis the vestiges of modernism and situationism. This isn’t the place to demonstrate that, for marxists, it’s absurd to talk about decadence and the collapse of an historical mode of production and simply base this on its superstructural and cultural manifestations, without any reference to the economic infrastructure, even going so far as to assert that this infrastructure, fundamental to any society, is flourishing and growing stronger than ever, this is an idea closer to the vagaries of Marcuse than to the thought of Marx. Thus the FOR bases its revolutionary activity not on objective economic determinism but on subjective voluntarism, a trait common to all the contestationist groups. But we must ask ourselves: were those aberrations the fundamental reason for the FOR’s withdrawal from the Conferences? Not at all. Its refusal to participate at the Conference, its withdrawal from the debate, is above all the expression of the spirit of the little chapel, the spirit of ‘everyone for themselves’ which still strongly impregnates the groups of the communist left”.1 [621]

Altogether, this was certainly enough evidence that sectarianism was a problem in itself. But the conference refused to support the ICC's proposal for a joint statement condemning this kind of attitude (although the Nucleo was in favour of it). The reasons given were that the attitude of the groups was not the problem - the problem was their political divergences. It's true that groups like Spartacus and the PIC, by rejecting the necessity for a class party, made it clear that they did not accept the criteria. But what is false is the idea that political activity consists simply of arguing for or against political positions. The attitude, trajectory, behaviour and organisational practice of political groups and their militants are of equal importance, and the sectarian approach certainly falls into this category.

We have had the same response from the IBRP in response to some of the crises in the ICC. According to the IBRP, the attempt to understand internal crises by talking about such problems as the circle spirit, clannish behaviour, or parasitism is simply a distraction from the “political” issues, even a deliberate obfuscation. In this view, the ICC’s organisational problems can all be explained by pointing to our erroneous view of the international situation or the historic period; the daily impact of bourgeois habits and ideology within proletarian organisations is simply of no interest. But the clearest proof that the IBRP is wilfully blind about such matters was provided by their lamentable conduct over the recent attacks on the ICC by the parasites of the IFICC and the adventurer behind the “Circulo” in Argentina. Unable to see the real motivation behind such groups, which has nothing to do with the clarification of political differences, the IBRP has been made a direct accomplice to their destructive activities.2 [622] Questions of behaviour are not irrelevant to proletarian political life. On the contrary, they are matters of principle, connected to a vital necessity for any form of working class organisation: the recognition of a common interest opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie. In short, the necessity for solidarity - and no proletarian organisation can ignore this elementary necessity without paying a very heavy price. The same applies to the problem of sectarianism, which is also a means of weakening the bonds of solidarity that should link organisations of the working class. By refusing to condemn sectarianism at the second conference, the conferences were striking a blow against the very basis on which they had been convened – the urge to go beyond the spirit of every man for himself and to work towards the real unity of the revolutionary movement. And by shying away from any kind of joint statement, they were falling even more surely into the sectarian pitfall.

According to Marx’s definition: “The sect sees its raison d'être and its point of honour not in what it has in COMMON with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from the movement." (Marx to Schweitzer, 13th October 1868. Selected Correspondence, p 201). This is an exact description of the behaviour of too many of the groups who participated in the international conferences.

Third Conference, Paris May 1980

Thus although we remained optimistic about the work of the second conference in that it marked a definite advance over the first, the danger signs were there. And they were to come to a head at the third conference.

The groups taking part were: the ICC, Battaglia, the CWO, L’Eveil Internationaliste, the Nuclei Leninisti Internazionalisti (formed from a regroupment between the Nucleo and Il Leninista), the Organisation Communiste Révolutionnaire Internationaliste d’Algérie (though not physically present) and the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, which attended as an “observer”.3 [623]

The main points on the agenda were once again the crisis and its perspectives, and the tasks of revolutionaries today. The ICC balance sheet of this meeting, “Quelques remarques generales sur les contributions pour le 3eme Conference Internationale…”, published in the Troisieme Conference pamphlet, drew out a number of important points of agreement underlying the conference:

• capitalism faces a deepening crisis which is leading the system towards a third world war;
• this war will be imperialist and revolutionaries must oppose both sides;
• communists must aim to contribute to the revolutionary action of their class, the only alternative to the march towards war;
• the working class needs to rid itself of the influence of the “workers’” parties and unions, and here again the activity of revolutionary minorities is vital.

At the same time, the text notes that there was considerable disagreement on the question of the historic course, with Battaglia in particular arguing that there can be a simultaneous course towards war and towards revolution, and that it is not the task of revolutionaries to decide which one has the upper hand. The ICC, on the other hand, basing itself on the method of the Italian Fraction in the 1930s, insisted that a course towards war can only be based on the weakening and defeat of the working class, and that by the same token a class moving towards a revolutionary confrontation with capitalism could not be marched off to war. Moreover, it was vital for revolutionaries to have as clear a position as possible about what was the dominant tendency, since the form and content of their activity had to be adapted to the conclusion they drew.

The question of factory groups was once again a bone of contention between the groups. Presented by Battaglia as a way of building up a real, concrete influence in the class, for the ICC this conception was based on nostalgia for the epoch of permanent large-scale organisations like the trade unions. The idea that the small revolutionary groups of today could create such an influential network, such “transmission belts between party and class”, revealed a certain megalomania about the real possibilities for revolutionary activity in this period. At the same time, however, the gap between this approach and an understanding of the real movement could result in a severe underestimation of the genuine work that revolutionaries could do, and in a failure to grasp the need to intervene towards the real forms of organisation which had begun to appear in the struggles of 78-80: not only general assemblies and strike committees (which were to make their most spectacular appearance in Poland, but had already manifested themselves, in the Rotterdam dock strike in particular) but also the groups and circles formed by combative minorities in or after the struggle. On this point, the ICC’s views were close to those put forward by the NLI in its criticisms of Battaglia’s “factory group” schema.

However, any possibility of developing the debate on these and other issues was to be cut short by the definitive victory of sectarianism over the conferences.

First, there was the rejection of the ICC's proposal to make a common declaration faced with the threat of war, which was certainly a major issue following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan:

“The ICC asked the Conference as a whole to take up a position on this question and proposed a resolution for discussion and amendment, if that proved necessary, which would affirm the position of revolutionaries faced with war.

“The PCInt refused to sign it, and the CWO and L’Eveil Internationaliste followed suit. The Conference remained silent. Given the criteria determining participation in the conferences, each of the groups present inevitably shared the same basic positions on what attitude the proletariat must have in the event of world conflict or the menace of war. But the partisans of silence told us: ‘Watch it. As for us, we’re not about to sign anything with just anyone. We’re not opportunists’. And we replied to them: ‘opportunism is the betrayal of principles at the first opportunity. What we are proposing isn’t the betrayal of a principle, but the affirmation of that self-same principle with all of our strength. The principle of internationalism is one of the highest and most important principles of the proletarian struggle. Whatever other divergences may separate the internationalist groups, few political organisations in the world defend it in a consistent way. Their conference should have spoken about war in the loudest possible way…’

“The content of this brilliant ‘non-opportunist’ logic is the following: ‘if revolutionary organisations can’t succeed in agreeing on all questions, then they must not mention those positions which they do agree on and have agreed on for a very long time’. The specificities of each group are made, on principle, more important than what is common to all of them. That is sectarianism. The silence of all three conferences is the clearest demonstration of how sectarianism leads to impotency” (International Review n°22 “Sectarianism, an inheritance from the counter-revolution that must be overcome”).

This problem has not gone away: it was highlighted in 1999 and 2003 by the response to the ICC’s more recent proposals to make a joint declaration against the wars in the Balkans and Iraq.

Secondly, the debate on the party was suddenly broken off at the end of the meeting by Battaglia and the CWO proposing a new criterion, designed to exclude the ICC because of its position clearly rejecting the idea that the party should take power in the revolution: the criterion reads “the proletarian party, an organism that is indispensable to the political leadership of the revolutionary class movement and of the revolutionary power itself”. This meant ending the debate before it had even begun. According to Battaglia, this marked a process of selection which had organically eliminated the “spontaneists” from the ranks of the conferences, leaving only those who were seriously interested in building the revolutionary party. In fact, all the groups attending the conference were by definition committed to building the party as a long-term aim. The discussion alone – linked to the real practise of revolutionaries – could resolve the most important disagreements about the structure and function of the party.

Indeed, the Battaglia/CWO criterion shows that these groups themselves had not come to a clear position on the role of the party. At the time of the conference, while often pouring out grand phrases about the party as the “captain” of the class, Battaglia normally rejected the more “frank” Bordigist view, which advocates the dictatorship of the party, stressing the need for the party to remain distinct from the state. And yet at the second conference the CWO had chosen to polemicise mainly against the ICC’s criticisms of the Bolsheviks’ “substitutionist” errors and had stated categorically that the party does take power, albeit “through” the soviets. So these two groups could hardly declare the debate “settled”. But the reason why Battaglia – which had begun the conferences without any criteria and now had become fanatics of especially “selective” criteria – put it forward was not out of any desire for clarification, but out of a sectarian urge to rid itself of the ICC, seen as a rival to be overcome, and to present itself as the sole international pole of regroupment. This was in fact to be more and more the practice and the theory of the IBRP in the 80s and 90s, to the point where it abandoned the very concept of the proletarian camp and declared itself to be the only force working for the party.

It’s important to understand, moreover, that the other side of sectarianism is always opportunism and the merchandising of principles. This was demonstrated in the method by which this new criterion was put forward – following private corridor negotiations with the CWO, and whipped out of the hat and put to the vote when the only other group likely to have opposed it – the NLI – had already left the meeting (this trick is known as “filibustering” in bourgeois parliaments and clearly has no place in a meeting of communist groups).

Against such methods, the ICC letter written to Battaglia after the conference (published in the Troisieme Conference) shows what would have been a responsible attitude:

“If you indeed thought that it was time to introduce a supplementary and much more selective criterion for the convocation of future conferences, the only serious and responsible attitude, the only one compatible with the concern for clarity and fraternal discussion that must animate revolutionary groups, would have been to have asked explicitly for this question to have been put on the agenda of the conference and for texts to have been prepared on this question. But at no point during the preparations for the third conference did you explicitly raise such a question. It was only after some corridor negotiations with the CWO that you hurled your little bomb at the end of the conference.

“How are we to understand your volte-face and your deliberate hiding of your real intentions? For our part, it is difficult to see anything less than a desire to avoid the basic discussion which would have been posed by the introduction of a supplementary criterion on the function of the party. It was indeed to carry out this basic debate - even though we considered that a ‘selection’ on this point would have been very much premature - that we proposed putting on the agenda of the next conference ‘The question of the party, its nature, its function, the relationship between party and class in the light of the history of the question in the workers’ movement and the historical verification of these conceptions’ (draft ICC resolution). It is this discussion which you wanted to avoid (did it embarrass you so much?), and this was clearly shown at the end of the conference when you refused to make explicit what you meant by the formula in your proposed criterion: ‘the proletarian party, an organism that is indispensable to the political leadership of the revolutionary class movement and of the revolutionary power itself’. For all the participants, it was clear that your sole concern was not to clarify the debate but ‘rid’ the conferences of elements you call ‘spontaneists’ and especially the ICC.

“What’s more this cavalier way of acting shows the greatest contempt towards all the groups taking part, those who were present but also and above all those who for material reasons were unable to come, and aside from these groups, for the whole of the revolutionary milieu for whom the conferences were a reference point. Such a way of acting seems to indicate that Battaglia Comunista saw the conferences as ‘ITS’ thing which it could make or unmake at will, according to its whim of the moment.

“No comrades! The conferences were not the property of Battaglia, or even of all the organising groups. These conferences belong to the proletariat, for whom they constitute a moment in the difficult and tortuous movement towards its coming to consciousness and towards the revolution. And no group can give itself the right of life and death over them through a simple brainstorm and through the frightened refusal to debate in depth the problems facing the class”.

The opportunism contained in the approach of Battaglia and the CWO was fully confirmed by the “4th conference” which they eventually held in London in 1982. Not only was this an organisational fiasco, with far less participants than the previous meetings, no publication of texts and proceedings and no follow up, but it also represented a dangerous blurring of principles, since the only other group to attend was the Supporters of the Unity of Communist Militants (SUCM) – a radical Stalinist group with direct connections to Kurdish nationalism and to what is now the Workers’ Communist Party of Iran (sometimes known as “Hekhmatists”). Thus sectarian “hardness” towards the ICC and the proletarian milieu was combined with a very soft attitude to the counter-revolution. This blatant opportunism has been repeated over and over again in the IBRP’s approach to regroupment, as we showed in the article “IBRP: an opportunist policy of regroupment that leads to nothing but ‘abortions’” in International Review n°121.

Years of Truth for revolutionaries

The 1970s had been years of growth for the revolutionary movement; which was still reaping the benefits of the first upsurge of workers’ struggles at the end of the 1960s. But from the beginning of the 1980s, the political environment began to grow much more sombre. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the aggressive response of the US, clearly marked a sharpening of inter-imperialist conflicts in which the menace of world war once again began to assume its terrifying shape. The bourgeoisie talked less and less about the bright future it had in store for us, and began to talk the brutal language of realism, typified by the style of the Iron Lady in Britain.

At the beginning of the decade the ICC said that the years of illusions were over and that the years of truth were about to start. Faced with the dramatic deepening of the crisis and the acceleration of preparations for war, we argued that the working class would be obliged to take its struggles onto a higher level, and that the ensuing decade could be decisive in determining the ultimate destiny of capitalist society. The proletariat, driven by harsh necessity, did indeed raise the stakes of the class struggle. In Poland, in August 1980, we saw the return of the classic mass strike, which demonstrated the capacity of the working class to organise itself at the level of an entire country. And although this movement was isolated and ultimately crushed by brutal repression, the wave of struggles which began in 1983 in Belgium showed that the workers of the key countries of Western Europe were ready to respond to the new attacks on their living standards imposed by the crisis. Revolutionaries would have many important opportunities for intervention in the movements that followed, but it was not an “easy” period for communist militancy. The seriousness of the situation proved too much for those who were not ready for the long haul which commitment to the communist cause necessarily entails, or had come into the movement with all sorts of petty bourgeois illusions inherited from the happy days of the 1960s. And at the same time, despite the importance of the workers’ struggles in this period, they did not attain a sufficient level of politicisation. The struggles of the British miners, of the Italian schoolworkers, the French railway workers, the Danish general strike…all these and many other movements certainly expressed the open defiance of an undefeated class and continued to obstruct the bourgeoisie’s drive towards world war; but they did not raise the perspective of a new society, they did not clearly establish the credentials of the proletariat as the revolutionary force of the future. And as a result, they did not produce a whole new generation of proletarian groups and militants.

The global result of this balance of forces between the classes would be what we term the phase of capitalist decomposition, where neither historic class would be able to clearly pose its alternative of war or revolution. And for the revolutionary milieu, the “years of truth” would mercilessly expose any weaknesses. The PCI (Programma) underwent a devastating crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, as vital lacunae in its programmatic armoury – above all on the question of national liberation – led to the penetration into its ranks of overtly nationalist and leftist elements. The ICC’s crisis of 1981 (culminating in the split by the “Chenier” tendency) was to a large extent the price paid for weaknesses in its grasp of organisational questions, while the rupture with the “External Fraction” in 1985 showed that the Current still had to settle scores with the councilist residues of its early years. In 1985, the IBRP was formed out of the marriage between Battaglia and the CWO. The ICC characterised it as an “opportunist bluff”; and its ensuing failure to build a really centralised international organisation proved that this term was only too accurate.

These problems would certainly have manifested themselves had the international conferences not been sabotaged at the start of the decade. But the absence of the conferences meant that once again the proletarian milieu would have to confront them in dispersed order. It is almost symbolic that the conferences collapsed on the very eve of the mass strikes in Poland, underlining the failure of the international milieu to be able to speak with one voice not only on the question of war, but also on such an overt and inspiring expression of the proletarian alternative.

In the same way, the difficulties facing the proletarian political milieu today are not all the product of the failure of the international conferences: as we have just seen, they have deeper and wider historical roots. But there is no doubt that the absence of an organised framework for political debate and co-operation has contributed to these difficulties.

Nevertheless, given the emergence of a new generation of proletarian groups and elements, the need for an organised framework will certainly present itself in the future. One of the first initiatives of the NCI in Argentina was to make a proposal in this sense, only to meet with a blank response from virtually all the groups of the proletarian milieu. But such proposals will be made again, even if the majority of the “established” groups are less and less able to make any positive contribution to the development of the movement. And when these proposals begin to bear fruit, they will certainly have to reacquaint themselves with the lessons of the 1976-80 conferences.

In its letter to Battaglia in the Troisieme Conference pamphlet, the ICC outlined the most important of these lessons:

• “Importance of these conferences for the revolutionary milieu and for the class as a whole;
• necessity for criteria;
• necessity to take position;
• rejection of any precipitation;
• necessity for the most thorough discussion on the crucial questions facing the proletariat”.

If these lessons are assimilated by the new generation, then the first cycle of conferences will not have entirely failed in its tasks.

Amos

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Appendix: brief notes on the groups mentioned

Some of the groups mentioned in this article have subsequently disappeared:

Spartacusbond

This group was one of the last remnants of the Dutch communist left, but by the 1970s it was a pale shadow of the council communism of the 1930s and of the post-war Spartacusbond that had declared the need for a proletarian party.

Forbundet Arbetarmakt

A Swedish group which exhibited a curious mixture of councilism and leftism. It defined the USSR as “the state-bureaucratic mode of production” and supported national liberation struggles and work inside the unions. However there were considerable differences within its ranks and some of its members left at the end of the 70s to join the ICC.

Pour Une Intervention Communiste

Split from the ICC in France in 1974, claiming that the ICC didn’t intervene enough (for the PIC this meant producing endless quantities of leaflets). The group evolved rather quickly towards semi-councilist positions and has since disappeared

Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista

This group split from the PCI (Programma) in Italy in the late 70s and initially developed a much more open attitude to the tradition of Bilan and to the existing proletarian milieu, an attitude which can be seen in many of its interventions at the conferences. By the time of the third conference, it had regrouped with Il Leninista to form the Nuclei Leninisti Internazionalisti. It subsequently formed the Organizzazione Comunista Internazionalista, which has effectively collapsed into leftism. The NCI’s original weaknesses on the national question have come home to roost, since the OCI came out in open support of Serbia in the 1999 war and Iraq in both Gulf wars

Fomento Obrero Revolucionario

Current founded by Grandizo Munis in the 1950s. Munis had split with Trotskyism on the defence of the USSR and evolved towards the positions of the communist left. The group’s confusions about the crisis, and the death of the highly charismatic Munis, dealt a fatal blow to this current, which had effectively disappeared by the mid-90s.

L’Eveil Internationaliste

This group had emerged in France at the end of the 70s following a split in Maoism. At the third conference, it lectured all the other groups on their insufficiencies in matters of theory and intervention, and vanished without trace soon afterwards.

Organisation Communiste Révolutionnaire Internationaliste d’Algérie

Sometimes known as the TIL from its paper Travailleurs Immigrés en Lutte. It gave its support to the conferences, but claimed that it could not participate physically for security reasons. In fact this was part of a more general problem – an avoidance of confrontation with the revolutionary milieu. It did not survive very long into the 80s.

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In this issue, we continue the article begun in International Review n°122, where we highlighted the change in period which formed the backdrop to the events of 1905 in Russia, as capitalism entered the watershed between its ascendant and decadent periods. We also described the conditions that had favoured the radicalisation of the struggle in Russia: the existence of a modern, concentrated and highly conscious working class confronted by the attacks of a capitalism whose situation had been worsened by the disastrous effects of the war with Japan. The working class was thus led into a direct confrontation with the state in order to defend its living conditions, and organised in soviets to undertake this new historic phase in its struggle. The first part of this article recounted how the first workers’ councils were formed, and what needs they answered. This second part analyses in more detail how the soviets were formed, how they were linked to the movement of the whole working class, and their relationship with the trades unions. In fact, the unions – which already in 1905 no longer corresponded to the organisational needs of the working class in the new period, only played a positive role inasmuch as they were pulled along by the movement’s dynamic, in the wake of the soviets and under their authority.

The high point of the 1905 revolution: The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies

The tendencies seen in Ivanovo-Voznesensk were realised most fully in the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in St Petersburg.

The soviet emerged from the development of the workers’ struggles in St. Petersburg. Superficially it differed from Ivanovo-Voznesensk in that the initial meeting was called on the initiative of the Mensheviks rather than arising directly from a particular struggle. In reality it was rooted every bit as much in the workers’ struggles, but in the movement as a whole rather than just one part of it. This was an advance and the notion that it was less genuinely proletarian or was in some way the creature of the Social Democracy can only express the superficial formalism of those who argue the point. In fact, revolutionaries were driven along by the rush of events and by the spontaneous development of the struggle at a pace they did not always find comfortable.

From the outset the soviet revealed its political nature: “It was decided immediately to call upon the proletariat of the capital to proclaim a political general strike and to elect delegates. The proclamation drafted at the first meeting states: ‘The working class has resorted to the final, powerful weapon of the world workers' movement -- the general strike. . . Decisive events are going to occur in Russia within the next few days. They will determine the destiny of the working class for many years ahead; we must meet these events in full readiness, united by our common Soviet . . .’".[1] [632] The second meeting of the soviet already presumed to make demands of the ruling class: “A special deputation was instructed to submit the following demands to the city duma: 1) that measures be taken immediately to regulate the flow of food supplies to the workers; 2) that premises be set aside for meetings; 3) that all food supplies, allocations of premises and funds to the police, the gendarmerie, etc., be discontinued forthwith; 4) that funds be issued for the arming of the Petersburg proletariat in its fight for freedom”.[2] [633] Very rapidly the soviet became the rallying point for the struggle and the leader of the mass strike, with trade unions and individual strike committees adhering to its decisions. The constitutional manifesto, signed by the Tsar and published on 18th October, may not have been a particularly radical document in itself but in the political context of the period, it was an expression of the balance of class forces during the revolution, and as such was of real significance: “On October 17, the Tsarist government, covered in the blood and curses of centuries, capitulated before the revolutionary strike of the working masses. No efforts at restoration can rub out this fact from the history books. The sacred crown of the Tsar's absolutism bears forever the trace of the proletarian's boot”.[3] [634]

The next two and a half months saw a trial of strength between the revolutionary proletariat, led by the soviet it had created, and the bourgeoisie. On October 21st, faced with the loss of momentum of the strike, the soviet brought it to an end, showing its power by organising all workers to return at the same hour. In late October, plans for a demonstration to demand an amnesty for the prisoners taken by the state were called off in the face of preparations by part of the ruling class to provoke a clash. These actions were attempts to gain the advantage by the classes as they headed towards an inevitable clash: “That was the general trend of the Soviet's policy; it went towards the inevitable conflict with its eyes open. But it did not feel itself called upon to accelerate the conflict. The later, the better.”[4] [635] In late October a wave of pogroms was organised, using the Black Hundreds as well as the worst lumpen and criminal elements of society, that left some 3,500 to 4,000 killed and 10,000 injured; and even in St Petersburg preparations went ahead with isolated beatings and assaults. The working class responded by strengthening its militia, seizing arms and mounting patrols, prompting the government in turn to bring soldiers into the city.

In November a new strike developed, partly in response to the imposition of martial law in Poland and the court martial of the soldiers and sailors from Kronstadt who had rebelled. Again faced with a loss of momentum after forcing some concessions, the soviet called off the strike and the workers returned to work as a disciplined body. The success of the strike lay in the fact that it drew in new sectors of the working class and made contact with the soldiers and sailors: “With a single blow it stirred the consciousness of many circles within the army and, in a matter of a few days, gave rise to a number of political meetings in the barracks of the Petersburg garrison. Not only individual soldiers but also soldiers' delegates began to show up in the Executive Committee and even at meetings of the Soviet itself, making speeches, demanding support; revolutionary liaison among the troops was reinforced; proclamations were widely read”.[5] [636] Similarly, an attempt to enforce the 8 hour day could also not be sustained and the gains that had been made were quickly lost once the campaign was called off, but the impact on the consciousness of the working class was lasting: “Defending the resolution to drop the campaign in the Soviet, the rapporteur of the Executive Committee summed up the campaign in the following words: ‘We may not have won the eight hour day for the masses, but we have certainly won the masses for the eight-hour day. Henceforth the war-cry: Eight hours and a gun! shall live in the heart of every Petersburg worker’".[6] [637]

The strikes continued, particularly a new spontaneous movement amongst railway and telegraph workers, but the counter-revolution also gradually gathered strength. On November 26th the Chairman of the Soviet, Georgiy Nosar, was arrested. The soviet now recognised that the clash was inevitable and passed a resolution declaring that it would continue preparations for an armed insurrection. Workers, peasants and soldiers drew towards the soviet, affirmed its call to arms and made preparations. However, on December 6th the soviet was surrounded and its members arrested. The Moscow soviet now came to the fore, calling a general strike and attempting to transform it into an armed insurrection. But by this time the reaction was mobilising on a massive scale and the attempted insurrection became a rearguard, defensive action. By mid-December it had been defeated. In the reaction that followed 14,000 people were killed during the fighting, 1,000 executed, 20,000 wounded and 70,000 arrested and imprisoned or exiled.

The bourgeoisie finds itself perplexed by the events of 1905. Because the revolutionary nature of the working class is foreign to them, the development of the struggle into armed confrontation and the defeat of the proletariat seems like an act of madness: “Flushed with success, the Petersburg Soviet succumbed to hubris.[7] [638] Instead of consolidating its achievements, it became increasingly militant, and even reckless. Many of its leaders reasoned that if the autocracy could be so easily brought to its knees, would it not be possible to gain more and more concessions for the working class and press ahead with a socialist revolution? They chose to ignore the fact that the general strike had succeeded only because it had been a unified effort by various social groups; and they failed to understand that they could count on middle class sympathy only so long as the Soviet concentrated its fire against the autocracy”.[8] [639] For revolutionaries, the significance of 1905 does not lie in any immediate gains made but in the lessons it provides about the development of the conditions for revolution, the role of the proletariat and of the revolutionary organisation and, in particular, about the means the proletariat will use to wage its struggle: the soviets. These lessons were only gained because of the “hubris” and “recklessness” of the proletariat; qualities it will need in abundance if it is to succeed in overthrowing capitalism.

The Bolsheviks were uncertain when confronted with the soviets. In St. Petersburg, although they participated in the formation of the soviet, the Bolshevik organisation in the city passed a resolution calling on it to accept the social democratic programme. In Saratov they opposed the creation of a soviet as late as November 1905, while in Moscow, after some delays, they participated actively in the soviet. Lenin had a much clearer grasp of the potential of the soviets and in an unpublished letter to Pravda in early November, criticised those who opposed the party to the soviets: “…the decision must be: both the Soviet of Workers Deputies and the Party” and argued “it would be inadvisable for the Soviet to adhere wholly to any one party”.[9] [640] He went on to argue that the Soviet arose from the struggle and was the product of the whole of the proletariat and that its role was to regroup the proletariat and its revolutionary forces, although the inclusion of the peasantry and elements of the bourgeois intelligentsia blurred this significantly. “To my mind, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, as a revolutionary centre is not too broad an organisation but, on the contrary, a much too narrow one. The Soviet must proclaim itself the provisional revolutionary government, or form such a government, and must by all means enlist to this end the participation of the new deputies not only from the workers, but, first of all from the sailors and soldiers (…) secondly, from the revolutionary peasantry, and thirdly, from the revolutionary bourgeois intelligentsia (…) We are not afraid of so broad and mixed a composition – indeed, we want it, for unless the proletariat and the peasantry unite and unless the Social-Democrats and revolutionary democrats form a fighting alliance, the great Russian revolution cannot be fully successful”.

Lenin’s position at the time of the revolution and just afterwards was not always clear, not least because he linked the soviets to the bourgeois revolution and saw them as the basis for a provisional revolutionary government. However, he clearly grasped some of the most fundamental, defining features of the soviets: that they were a form that arose from the struggle itself, from the mass strike; that they regrouped the class; that they were a weapon of the revolutionary or insurrectionary struggle and that they ebbed and flowed with the struggle. “Soviets of Workers Deputies are organs of direct mass struggle. They originated as organs of the strike struggle. By force of circumstances they very quickly became the organs of the general revolutionary struggle against the government. The course of events and the transition from a strike to an uprising irresistibly transformed them into organs of an uprising. That this was precisely the role that quite a number of ‘soviets’ and ‘committees’ played in December, is an absolutely indisputable fact. Events have proved in the most striking and convincing manner that the strength and importance of such organs in the time of militant action depend entirely upon the strength and success of the uprising”.[10] [641] In 1917 this understanding helped Lenin to grasp the central role to be played by the soviets.

The trade unions and the soviets

One of the major lessons of 1905 concerned the function of the unions. We have already mentioned the fundamental point that the development of the soviets showed that the union form was being transcended by the development of history; however, it is important to consider this in more detail.

In Russia, the immediate context was one in which workers’ associations had been banned by the state for many years. This contrasted with the more advanced capitalist countries where the unions had won the right to exist and had grouped together hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers. The particular situation in Russia did not prevent the workers from struggling but meant that their disputes tended to be quite spontaneous and, in particular, that their organisations arose directly from the struggle as strike committees and disappeared with the strike itself. The only legal form allowed was the collection of relief funds.

In 1901 a Society for Mutual Aid for Workers in Mechanical Industries was founded in Moscow by Sergei Zubatov and was followed by the creation of similar organisations in other cities. The aim of these police unions, as we have already mentioned, was to separate the economic grievances of the working class from the political and to ameliorate the former in order to keep the latter in check. They failed to do this, on the one hand because the state was unwilling to make even the minimal concessions that would have been necessary for them to have any credibility and, on the other, because the working class and the revolutionaries sought to turn them to their own ends. “The Moscow Zubatovists found a following in the workshops of the Moscow-Kursk [railway] line, but contrary to the plans of these ‘police socialists’, the contacts developed in Zubatovist tea rooms and libraries also spurred the organisation of Social-Democratic groups…”.[11] [642] In the face of the strike wave of 1902-03 in which some 225,000 workers participated the Zubatov unions were liquidated.

In their place the state allowed the creation of starosti, or factory elders[12] [643] to negotiate with management. Such delegations had arisen in the past because of the absence of other forms of organisation; but under the new law, and in order to avoid the appearance of delegates who truly represented the workers’ interests, such individuals could only be nominated with their employers’ permission. They had no immunity and could be fired by the employers or removed by the state-appointed governor of the region.

When the revolution broke out trade unions were still illegal. Nonetheless numerous unions were formed as a result of the first wave of struggles. By the end of September 16 unions had been formed in St. Petersburg, 24 in Moscow and a few others in different parts of the country. By the end of the year this had increased to 57 in St. Petersburg and 67 in Moscow. The intelligentsia and professional classes also formed unions, including lawyers, medical personnel, engineers and technicians and in May 14 of these unions formed the Union of Unions.

What then was the relationship between the unions and the soviets? Quite simply, it was the soviets that led the struggle, the unions being drawn along and radicalised by their leadership. “As the October strike developed, so the Soviet naturally came more and more to the political forefront. Its importance grew literally hour by hour. The industrial proletariat was the first to rally around it. The railwaymen's union established close relations with it. The Union of Unions, which joined the strike from October 14, was obliged to place itself under the Soviet's authority almost from the start. Numerous strike committees - those of the engineers, lawyers, government officials - adapted their actions to the Soviet's decisions. By placing many disconnected organisations under its control, the Soviet united the revolution around itself”.[13] [644]

The example of the railway workers’ union is instructive as it shows both the fullest extent and the limitations of the unions’ role in a revolutionary period.

As we have already seen, the railway workers had gained a reputation for militancy before 1905 and revolutionaries, including the Bolsheviks, had a significant influence amongst them. In late January waves of strikes developed, first in Poland and St. Petersburg, then in Belorussia, the Ukraine and the lines centred on Moscow. The authorities first made a few concessions and then tried to impose martial law but neither tactic brought the strikers to heel. In April the All-Russian Union of Railroad Employees and Workers was founded in Moscow. At first the union seems to have been dominated by the professional, white-collar, workers and the blue-collar workers kept their distance; but this changed as the year progressed. In July a new wave of strikes arose from the rank and file workers and, significantly, it immediately took a more political form. In September, as already mentioned, the pensions conference transformed itself into the “First All- Russian Delegate Congress of Railroad Employees”. This rising tide of militancy began to push against the limits of the union with the outbreak of spontaneous strikes in September forcing the union to act, as one delegate to the pensions’ congress noted: “the employees struck spontaneously; recognising the inevitability of a strike on the Moscow-Kazan Railroad, the union found it necessary to support a strike on the remaining roads of the Moscow junction”.[14] [645]

These strikes were the spark that set off the mass strike of October: “On October 9, at an extraordinary meeting of the Petersburg delegates' congress of railway personnel, the slogans of the railway strike were formulated and immediately disseminated by telegraph to all lines. They were the following: eight-hour day, civil liberties, amnesty, Constituent Assembly. The strike began confidently to take over the country. It finally bade farewell to indecision. The self-confidence of its participants grew together with their number. Revolutionary class claims were advanced ahead of the economic claims of separate trades. Having broken out of its local and trade boundaries, the strike began to feel that it was a revolution -- and so acquired unprecedented daring. The strike rushed forward along the rails and stopped all movement in its wake. It announced its coming over the wires of the railway telegraph. ‘Strike!’ was the order of the day in every corner of the land”.[15] [646]

The rank and file workers came to the fore, overflowing the union with their revolutionary fervour: “Between October 9 and 18 there is no record of the Central Bureau issuing even a single instruction to union locals, and the memoirs of the leaders are noticeably silent concerning events of these days. In fact the upsurge of rank-and-file organising sparked by the strike tended to strengthen the influence both of local leadership factions and revolutionary parties at the expense of the nominally independent Central Bureau, especially as the strike came to involve new occupational categories”.[16] [647] Even the Tsarist police noted that “during the strike committees were formed by the strikers on each of the railroads to provide organisation and leadership”.[17] [648] One feature of the strike was the appearance of “delegate trains” used to spread the strike and maintain communication between the centres of struggle.

Between October and December large numbers of new unions were formed but, as a government report noted, these immediately took up the political struggle: “unions were formed initially to regulate the economic relations of the employees, but soon, under the influence of propaganda hostile to the state, they took on a political aspect and began to strive for the overthrow of the existing state and social order”.[18] [649] This was certainly an accurate description of the railway workers who remained at the forefront of the revolution, participating in the strike and armed insurrection of December in Moscow.

In the aftermath of the revolution the union rapidly declined. At its third congress in December 1906 while the number of workers represented was ostensibly double that of the year previously, activity had sharply declined. In February 1907 the Social Democrats withdrew from the union and in 1908 it collapsed.

In Britain in the 19th century the working class fought to create unions. Initially these only regrouped the most skilled workers and it required major struggles in the second half of the century for the unskilled workers to overcome their dispersal and weakness to form their own unions. In Russia in 1905 it was also the most skilled who first formed unions, but in contrast to Britain, the lack of participation of the unskilled, rank-and-file workers was not an expression of a lack of class consciousness and militancy but of their high level. The absence of unions had not prevented the growth of either, and in 1905 both rose to a new level, aspiring towards the mass strike and the soviet. The union form appeared, but its content tended towards the new form of struggle. In the revolutionary ferment the workers created new forms of the struggle but also filled older forms with the new content, overflowed them and joined the revolutionary flood. The revolutionary life of the working class clarified the situation in practice many years before it was understood in theory: in 1917 it was the soviets that the working class returned to when it stormed the gates of capital.

1905 heralds the end of union organisation

The revolution of 1917 thus confirmed that the soviet was the only organisational form adapted to the needs of the workers’ struggle in the "epoch of wars and revolutions" (as the Communist International described the period after World War I: see the article on the political implications of the decadence of capitalism in this issue).

The 1905 mass strike, and the attempted insurrection, demonstrated that the workers’ councils were capable of taking on all the essential functions assumed till then by the unions: providing places where the proletariat could unite and develop its class consciousness, thanks in particular to the influence of revolutionary intervention.[19] [650] But whereas during the previous period the working class was still in the process of formation, the unions often owed their existence to the intervention of revolutionaries who organised their class, the spontaneous creation of the soviet by the working masses in struggle corresponds to the evolution of the working class, to its maturity and the rising level of its consciousness, and to the new conditions of its struggle. Whereas union action was generally conceived on the basis of a struggle for reforms, often in close collaboration with the mass parliamentary parties, the workers’ council corresponds to the need for a struggle which is both economic and political, in head-on confrontation with the state power incapable of according the workers’ demands. In other words, a struggle which could no longer use the union form of organisation as it rallied and unified in action the growing and divers fractions of the working class, and provided the crucible for the general development of their consciousness.

The events of 1905 demonstrated in practice that the trade union, which the workers had fought for decades to build, was losing its usefulness for the working class. If the unions were still able to play a positive role in 1905, this was only thanks to the soviets, whose appendages they became. History’s was to be much sharper in the years that followed. In 1914, the first great slaughter began and the ruling class of the belligerent countries put the unions to serve the bourgeois state, controlling the working class for the benefit of the war effort.

Conclusion

The revolution of 1905 contains many lessons of vital importance for today on the necessity to understand the historical period in order to understand the tasks and form of the revolutionary struggle. The essential elements of the proletariat’s struggle in the period of capitalism’s decadence emerged during the struggle of 1905. The developing crisis of capitalism made the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism the goal of the struggle, while the consequences of the crisis in war, poverty and increased exploitation meant that any real struggle would have to take on a political form. These were the roots of the soviets. None of these were specific to Russia; they developed in different ways and at different paces in all of the main capitalist countries. In the next part of this series we will draw out the international significance of the revolution and the lessons that the workers’ movement drew from it.

North 14/06/05

The ICC held its 16th Congress in the 30th year of its existence. In this article we therefore intend, as we did on the 10th and 20th anniversaries of the ICC, to draw up a balance sheet of our organisation's experience. This is not a sign of narcissism: communist organisations do not exist by or for themselves; they are instruments of the working class, to which their experience belongs. This article thus aims, as one might say, to return our organisation's mandate for its 30 years of existence to the class. And as always in returning a mandate, we must determine whether our organisation has been able to live up to the responsibilities that it took on when it was formed. We will therefore begin by asking what were the responsibilities of revolutionaries in the situation of 30 years ago, and how they have changed since then, as the situation itself has changed.

The responsibilities of revolutionaries

During its first years the ICC's responsibilities were determined by the end of the profound counter-revolution which had crushed the world proletariat after the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. The immense strike of May 1968 in France, the “hot autumn” of 1969 in Italy, and the Baltic strikes in Poland during the winter of 1970-71, and many other movements, had shown that the proletariat had risen again after more than four decades of defeat. This historic recovery of the proletariat was not only expressed in a resurgence of workers' struggles, and in these struggles' ability to break the straitjacket in which the left parties and above all the trade unions had held them for decades (this was particularly the case during the wildcat strikes of Italy's “hot autumn” in 1969). One of the most significant signs of the working class’ emergence from the counter-revolution was the appearance of a whole generation of individuals and small groups in search of the proletariat's real revolutionary positions, thus calling into question the monopoly of the Stalinist parties, with their Trotskyist or Maoist appendages, of the very idea of communist revolution. The ICC was itself the fruit of this process, since it was formed by the regroupment of several groups which had appeared in France, the United States, Britain, Italy and Spain and which had moved towards the positions defended since 1964 by the Internacionalismo group in Venezuela, itself under the impetus of an old militant of the Communist Left, MC, who had been living there since 1952.

During this initial period the ICC's main preoccupations and activity were thus determined by three fundamental responsibilities:

• fully absorbing the positions, the analyses, and the lessons of the communist organisations of the past, since these had either disappeared or become completely sclerotic as a result of the counter-revolution;

• intervening in the international wave of workers' struggles opened by May 1968 in France;

• continuing the regroupment of new communist forces, of which the ICC’s formation was a first step.

The collapse of the Eastern bloc and of Europe's Stalinist regimes in 1989 created a new situation for the working class, subjected to the full blast of all the campaigns about the “triumph of democracy”, the “death of communism”, the “disappearance of the class struggle” or even of the working class itself. The situation was responsible for a profound ebb in both the militancy and the consciousness of the proletariat.

The ICC's 30 years of existence have thus been divided into two very different periods of 15 years each. During the first period, it was necessary to take part in the working class’ progressive steps forward in developing its struggles and its consciousness, in particular through an active intervention in these struggles. During the second period, one of our organisation's prime concerns was to hold fast against the current of disarray that swept over the world working class. This was a test for the ICC, as it was for all the communist organisations, since the latter are not immune to the general atmosphere breathed by the class as a whole: the demoralisation and the lack self-confidence that affected the class could not help having its effects within our own ranks. And this danger was all the greater in that the generation which had founded the ICC had entered politics after 1968 and at the beginning of the 1970s in the wake of large-scale workers’ struggles which encouraged the idea that the communist revolution was already knocking on history's door.

If we are to draw up a balance sheet of 30 years of the ICC's existence, we must therefore examine whether the organisation was able to confront these two periods in the life of society and in the struggle of the working class. In particular, we must see how, in the tests which it has had to confront, it has overcome the weaknesses inherent in the historical circumstances within which it was formed. In doing so, we must understand what are the ICC’s strengths that allow it to evaluate these 30 years of its existence positively.

A positive balance sheet

Before we continue, we must state straightaway that the ICC can draw a thoroughly positive balance sheet of these 30 years of its existence. It is true that our organisation's size and above all its impact remain extremely modest. As we put it in an article published on the ICC's 20th anniversary: “The comparison between the ICC and the organisations which have marked the history of the workers' movement, especially the Internationals, is disconcerting: whereas the latter organisations included or influenced millions, even tens of millions of workers, the ICC is only known, throughout the world, to a tiny minority of the working class” (International Review n°80). The situation remains fundamentally the same today and can be explained, as we have often said in our articles, by the particular circumstances in which the working class has once again set out on the long path towards the revolution:

• the slow rhythm of capitalism's economic collapse, whose first expressions at the end of the 1960s served as a detonator for the proletariat's historical resurgence;

• the length and depth of the counter-revolution that crushed the working class from the end of the 1920s onwards, and which cut off the new generations of proletarians from the experience of the generations which had undertaken the great struggles of the early 20th century and above all of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23;

• the extreme distrust of those workers who rejected the unions and the so-called “workers’”, “socialist” or “communist” parties towards any kind of proletarian political organisation;

• the even greater weight of the lack of self-confidence and demoralisation as a result of the collapse of the so-called “communist regimes”.

That said, we should also point out how far we have come: in 1968, our political tendency was nothing but a little nucleus in Venezuela, and a tiny group in a provincial French city, capable of publishing no more than a roneoed magazine two or three times a year; our organisation has today become a sort of reference point for all those who are coming towards revolutionary positions:

• a territorial press in twelve countries and seven languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish);

• more than a hundred pamphlets and other documents published in these languages, and also in Russian, Portuguese, Bengali, Hindi, Farsi, and Korean;

• more than 420 issues of our theoretical publication, the International Review, published every three months in English, Spanish, and French, as well as less regularly in German, Italian, Dutch and Swedish.

Since its formation, the ICC has produced a publication on average every five days; today, we publish roughly every four days. To this should now be added our website “internationalism.org” in thirteen languages. This site publishes the printed articles from the territorial press and the International Review, our pamphlets and leaflets, but it also includes an Internet publication ICConline which gives us the possibility of taking position rapidly on the most important events in the news.

As well as our publications, we should also mention the thousands of public and open meetings held in fifteen countries since our organisation’s foundation, where sympathisers and contacts can come to discuss our positions and analyses. Nor should we forget our oral interventions, sales of the press and distribution of still more numerous leaflets in public meetings, forums and gatherings of other organisations, in street demonstrations, in front of workplaces and in markets and railway stations – not forgetting of course in the workers’ struggles.

Once again, all this is little enough when we compare it, for example, with the activity of the sections of the Communist International in the 1920s, when revolutionary positions found expression in a daily press. But as we have seen, one can only compare what is comparable. A true measure of the ICC’s “success” can be seen from the difference between the ICC and the other organisations of the Communist Left, which already existed in 1968 when the ICC was no more than an embryo.

The groups of the Communist Left since 1968

In 1968, several organisations existed which considered themselves to be descendants of the Communist Left. On the one hand, there were the groups that belonged to the tradition of the Dutch Left, the “councilists” represented essentially in Holland by the Spartacusbond and Daad en Gedachte, in France by the “Groupe de Liaison pour l’Action des Travailleurs” (GLAT) and Informations et Correspondances ouvrières (ICO), and in Britain by Solidarity, whose origins lay above all in the experience of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, which sprang from a split in the Trotskyist 4th International just after World War II and had disappeared in 1964.

Apart from the councilist current, there also existed another group in France, descended from Socialisme ou Barbarie, Pouvoir Ouvrier, as well as a small group around Grandizo Munis (one-time leader of the Spanish section of the 4th International), the “Ferment Ouvrier Révolutionnaire” (FOR, in Spanish the “Fomento Obrero Revolucionario”) which published Alarme (Alarma in Spanish).

The other current of the Communist Left in 1968 had its roots in the Italian Left, and comprised the two branches that had emerged from the 1952 split in the Partito Comunista Internazionalista founded in Italy after the war in 1945. On one side was the “Bordigist” International Communist Party which published Programma Comunista in Italy, and Le Prolétaire and Programme Communiste in France; on the other was the majority at the time of the split which published Battaglia Comunista and Prometeo.

For a while, some of these groups enjoyed an undoubted success in terms of their audience. “Councilist” groups like ICO witnessed the arrival of a whole series of militants awoken to politics by May 1968, and in 1969 and 1970 was able to organise several encounters at the regional, national and even international level (Brussels 1969) which brought together a considerable number of individuals and groups (including our own). But at the beginning of the 1970s, ICO disappeared. The tendency reappeared in 1975 with the quarterly bulletin Echanges et Mouvements in which people from several countries took part but which was only published in French. As for the other groups, they either ceased to exist, in the case of the GLAT during the 1970s, Solidarity in 1988, or the Spartacusbond which did not outlive its main figure Stan Poppe (who died in 1991), or else ceased publication like Daad en Gedachte at the end of the 1990s.

Other groups that we have mentioned above have also disappeared, such as Pouvoir Ouvrier in the 1970s and the FOR during the 1990s.

As for the groups which descend from the Italian Left, one can hardly say that their fate has been much better. Since Bordiga’s death in 1970, the “Bordigist” movement has undergone several splits, including one which led to the creation of a new “International Communist Party” publishing Il Partito Comunista. At the end of the 1970s, the majority tendency that published Il Programma Comunista expanded rapidly in several countries, and for a time became the main organisation of the Communist Left tradition. But this progress was in large part made possible by a turn towards leftism and Third Worldism. In 1982, the International Communist Party exploded and the whole organisation collapsed like a house of cards, its members all pulling in different directions. The French section disappeared for several years, while in Italy only a few militants remained faithful to “orthodox” Bordigism and after a while reappeared with two publications: Il Programma Comunista and Il Comunista. While the Bordigist current still has a certain ability to publish in Italian with three more or less monthly papers, it is barely present internationally. The Il Comunista tendency is represented in France by Le Prolétaire which publishes every three months. The Programma Comunista tendency publishes Internationalist Papers in English every year or two, and Cahiers internationalistes still less often. The Il Partito Comunista tendency publishes an Italian “monthly” (that comes out seven times a year) and also produces Comunismo every six months and La Izquierda Comunista and Communist Left, in Spanish and English respectively, once or twice a year.

As for the current descended from the majority in the 1952 split, and which kept both the press and the name of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt), we have already, in our article “An opportunist policy of regroupment that leads to nothing but ‘abortions’” (International Review n°121), described its misadventures in its attempts to widen its international audience. In 1984, the PCInt came together with the Communist Workers Organisation (which publishes Revolutionary Perspectives) to form the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP). Fifteen years later, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the IBRP at last managed to spread beyond its first two participants to include a few small nuclei of which the most active is Internationalist Notes in Canada, which manages to publish once or twice a year, while Bilan et Perspectives in France publishes less than once a year and the “Circulo de América Latina” (a “sympathising group” of the IBRP) has no regular press and contents itself with publishing statements and translations on the IBRP’s Spanish language website. The IBRP was formed 20 years ago (and the Partito Comunista Internazionalista has existed for 60 years), and yet despite being the most internationally developed[1] [672] of all the groups that claim to descend from the PCInt of 1945 the IBRP today is still smaller than the ICC was when it was founded.

More generally, each year the ICC alone produces more regular publications in more languages than all the other organisations put together. In particular, none of the other organisations has a regular publication in German, which is clearly a weakness given the importance of the German proletariat in both the history and the future of the workers’ movement.

We do not make this comparison between the extent of our organisation and that of the other groups out of a spirit of competition. Contrary to what some of these groups have claimed, we have never tried to expand at the expense of others, far from it. When we discuss with our contacts, we always make them aware of the other groups’ existence and encourage them to acquaint themselves with the latter’s positions.[2] [673] Similarly, we have always invited the other organisations to our public meetings, both to speak and to present their own press (we have even proposed to lodge their militants in cities or countries where they themselves have no presence [3] [674]), as we have also on occasion placed other groups’ press in bookshops, when they were in agreement. Finally, it has never been our policy to “go fishing” after the militants of these organisations who have developed disagreements with the latter’s policies or positions. We have always encouraged them to stay in their organisations in order to debate and to clarify. [4] [675]

In fact, unlike the other groups which we have cited, each of which thinks itself to be the only one able to develop the future party of the communist revolution, we consider that there exists a Left Communist camp which defends proletarian positions within the working class, and that all the groups within it only stand to gain if this camp develops as a whole. Obviously, we criticise those positions that we believe to be incorrect whenever we consider it useful to do so. But these polemics are part of the necessary debate within the proletariat and we believe, with Marx and Engels, that together with its experience only the discussion and confrontation of positions will allow its consciousness to move forward.[5] [676]

In fact, this comparison of the ICC’s balance sheet with that of the other organisations of the Communist Left aims above all to highlight how weak is the impact of revolutionary positions within the class due to historical conditions and to the obstacles it encounters on its road to consciousness. This allows us to understand that the ICC’s lack of influence today is in no way a demonstration of failure either of its politics or of its orientations: given present historical conditions, what we have managed to do during the last thirty years can be considered as very positive, and emphasises the validity of our orientations throughout this period. We should therefore examine more precisely how and why these orientations have allowed us to confront successfully the different situations that we have had to face since our organisation was founded. And to start with, we need to recall (as we have already done in the articles published on the organisation’s 10th and 20th anniversaries) what are the fundamental principles on which the ICC is based.

The fundamental principles for the construction of the organisation

The first thing that we should emphasise strongly, is that these principles are not an invention of the ICC. They have been worked out over time by the whole workers’ movement. There is thus nothing platonic in the statement in the “Basic Positions” that appear on the back of all our publications, that “The positions and activity of revolutionary organisations are the product of the past experiences of the working class and of the lessons that its political organisations have drawn throughout its history. The ICC thus traces its origins to the successive contributions of the Communist League of Marx and Engels (1847-52), the three Internationals (the International Workingmen’s Association, 1864-72, the Socialist International, 1889-1914, the Communist International, 1919-28), the left fractions which detached themselves from the degenerating Third International in the years 1920-30, in particular the German, Dutch and Italian Lefts.”

While our heritage lies in the different left fractions of the Communist International, as far as the question of building the organisation is concerned we rely on the ideas of the left fractions of the Communist Party of Italy, in particular as these were expressed during the 1930s in the review Bilan. This group's great clarity played a decisive part in its ability not only to survive, but also to push forward a remarkable development in communist thinking.

We cannot, in the framework of this article, do justice to all the richness of the positions of the Italian Fraction. We will limit ourselves here to summarising a few essential aspects.

The first question where we have inherited from the Italian Fraction is their position on the course of history. Each of the fundamental classes in society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, has its own response to the mortal crisis of the capitalist economy: that of the former is imperialist war, of the latter world revolution. Which of these finally gains the upper hand depends on the balance of power between the classes. The bourgeoisie was only able to unleash World War I because it had defeated the proletariat politically beforehand, above all through the victory of opportunism within the main parties of the Second International. However, the barbarity of the imperialist war, by sweeping away any illusions in capitalism's ability to bring peace and prosperity to society and to improve the living conditions of the working class, led to a reawakening of the proletariat in 1917 in Russia and in 1918 in Germany: the workers rose against the war to launch themselves into the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism. The defeat of the revolution in Germany, in other words in the most decisive country, opened the door to the victory of the counter-revolution, which spread throughout the world especially in Europe with the victory of Stalinism in Russia, of fascism in Germany and Italy, and of “antifascist” ideology in the “democratic” countries. During the 1930s, one of the Fraction's merits was to have understood that, precisely because of this profound defeat of the working class, the acute crisis of capitalism, which began in 1929, could only lead to a new world war. On the basis of their analysis of the period, which considered that the course of history led not towards revolution and the radicalisation of workers' struggles but towards world war, the Fraction was able to understand what was happening in Spain in 1936 and to avoid falling into the fatal mistake of the Trotskyists who mistook this preparation for the second imperialist slaughter for the beginnings of the proletarian revolution.

The Fraction’s ability to identify the real balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was combined with a clear conception of the role of communist organisations in each period of history. On the basis of the experience of different left fractions which existed previously in the history of the workers movement, notably of the Bolshevik fraction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) but also of Marx and Engels after 1847, the Fraction in its publication Bilan established the difference between two forms of communist organisation: the party and the fraction. The working class gives rise to the party in periods of intense struggle, when the positions defended by revolutionaries have a real impact on the course of events. When the balance of forces turns against the proletariat, then the party either disappears as such or else tends to degenerate in an opportunist course which leads it towards betrayal in the service of the enemy class. It is the fraction, smaller in both its size and its impact, which must then take up the defence of revolutionary positions. The fraction's role is to struggle to correct the party's line so that it is able to play its part when the class struggle recovers. Should this task prove vain, then its role is to provide a programmatic and organisational bridge towards the new party, which can only be formed under two conditions:

• that the fraction has drawn all the lessons from past experience, and above all from past defeats;

• that the balance of class forces is once again in the proletariat's favour.

Another lesson passed on by the Italian Left and which flows naturally from what we have just said is the rejection of immediatism, in other words of an approach which loses sight of the long-term nature of the proletariat’s struggle and of the intervention of revolutionary organisations within it. Lenin used to say that patience was one of the Bolsheviks' main qualities. He was doing no more than continue the struggle of Marx and Engels against the scourge of immediatism.[6] [677] Because the working class is constantly penetrated by the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, that is to say of a social stratum which has no future, immediatism is a constant threat to the workers' movement.

The corollary of the struggle against immediatism is programmatic rigour in the work to regroup revolutionary forces. Unlike the Trotskyist current, which preferred hasty regroupment notably on the basis of agreements between “personalities”, the Fraction insisted on profound discussion on programmatic principle before merging with other currents.

That said, this rigorous adherence to principle in no way excluded discussion with other groups. Those who are firm in their convictions have no fear of confrontation with other currents. Sectarianism by contrast, which considers itself “alone in the world” and rejects any contact with other proletarian groups, is generally the mark of a lack of conviction in the validity of one's own positions. In particular, it was precisely because it stood solidly on the experience of the workers movement that the Fraction was able to criticise this experience with such daring, even when this meant calling into question positions which had come to be considered as dogma by other currents.[7] [678] Whereas the Dutch-German left reacted to the degeneration of the revolution in Russia and the counter-revolutionary role which was henceforth played by the Bolshevik party, by throwing out the baby with the bathwater and concluding that both the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks had been bourgeois, the Fraction always asserted loud and clear the proletarian nature of both. In doing so, it also combatted the “Councilist” position where the Dutch left ended up, by declaring that the party had a vital role to play in the victory of the communist revolution. And unlike the Trotskyists who base themselves on the totality of the first four congresses of the Communist International, the Fraction, like the Communist Party of Italy at the beginning of the 1920s, rejected the incorrect positions adopted by these congresses, especially the policy of the “United Front”. Indeed the Fraction went further still when it called into question the position of Lenin and the Second Congress on support for national liberation struggles, adopting instead the position defended by Rosa Luxemburg.

All these lessons were adopted and systematised by the French Communist Left (1945-52) and it was on this basis that the ICC was founded. This is what has allowed it to win through in the different ordeals that it has had to confront, notably those due to the weaknesses that weighed on the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities at the moment of its historic recovery in 1968.

History puts the Fraction's principles to the test

Faced with this resurgence of the working class, the first thing that had to be understood was the question of the historic course. This was little understood by the other groups who considered themselves the heirs of the Italian Left. Having formed the Party in 1945, when the class was still in the grip of the counter-revolution, and having failed since then to criticise this premature formation, these groups (who continued to call themselves “the party”) proved unable to distinguish between the counter-revolution and the end of the counter-revolution. They saw nothing of any importance for the working class either in the France of May 1968 or in the Italian hot autumn of 1969, and put these events down to mere student agitation. By contrast, our comrades of Internacionalismo (in particular MC, an old militant of the Fraction and the GCF), conscious of the change in the balance of class forces, understood the necessity of launching a process of discussion and regroupment with those groups that had emerged as a result of the change in the historic course. These comrades repeatedly asked the PCInt to appeal for the opening of discussion between the groups and to call an international conference inasmuch as the size and influence of the PCInt was far greater than that of our little nucleus in Venezuela. Each time, the PCInt rejected our proposal on the basis that nothing new was going on. Finally, a first cycle of conferences began in 1973 following an appeal launched by Internationalism, a group in the United States close to the positions of Internacionalismo and of Révolution Internationale which had been formed in France in 1968. It was largely thanks to these conferences, which allowed a serious decantation to take place among a whole series of groups and elements that had come towards politics after May 1968, that the ICC was formed in January 1975. It is obvious that the attitude, inherited from the Fraction, of systematically seeking to discuss with individuals, however confused, if they clearly demonstrated a revolutionary will was a determining element in this first step.

That said, while the young militants who had formed the ICC or joined it in its first years, were certainly enthusiastic, they nonetheless suffered from a certain number of very important weaknesses:

• the impact of the student movement soaked in petty bourgeois ideas, especially individualism and immediatism (“revolution now!” was one of the student slogans of 1968);

• suspicion towards any form of revolutionary organisation intervening in the class as a result of the counter-revolutionary role played by the Stalinist parties; in other words, the weight of councilism.

These weaknesses did not only affect the militants regrouped in the ICC. On the contrary they remained much greater amongst the groups and elements who had remained outside our organisation, which was to a large extent formed through the struggle against them. These weaknesses explain the ephemeral success after 1968 of the councilist current. Inevitably ephemeral since when one makes a theory out of one's uselessness for the class struggle, one has little chance of survival. They also explain the success and then the rout of Programma Comunista: after completely failing to understand the significance of what was happening in 1968, this current suddenly lost its head in the face of the international development of workers’ struggles and abandoned the caution and organisational rigour which had characterised it for some time previously. Its congenital sectarianism and its vaunted “monolithism” mutated into an “opening” in all directions (except towards our organisation which it continued to consider as “petty bourgeois”), notably towards a large number of elements who had barely and incompletely emerged from leftism, and especially from Third Worldism. Its catastrophic disintegration in 1982 was the logical result of its forgetting the main lessons of the Italian Left whose heir it nonetheless continually claimed to be.

These weaknesses soon also appeared in the ICC, despite our determination to avoid the hasty integration of new militants. In 1981 our organisation suffered an important crisis which swept away half of its section in Britain. This crisis was fed essentially by immediatism, which led a whole series of militants to overestimate the potential of the class struggle (at the time Britain was going through the most massive workers struggles of its history: with 29 million strike days lost in 1979, Britain took second place behind the France of 1968 in terms of the statistics of workers militancy). As a result some of them mistook the rank-and-file union organisations which the bourgeoisie had produced as the unions lost their grip, for proletarian groups. At the same time a still powerful individualism led to a rejection of the unitary and centralised nature of the organisation: each local section, or even each individual, could break the organisation's discipline if he considered that its orientations were incorrect. The immediatist danger is one of the main targets of the “Report on the function of the revolutionary organisation” (International Review n°29) adopted by the Extraordinary Conference held in January 1982 to put the ICC back on the rails

In the same way, the “Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation” (International Review n°33) was aimed at individualism in defence of a centralised and disciplined organisation (while insisting at the same time on the necessity for the most open and profound debates within it).

This victorious struggle against immediatism and individualism saved the organisation in 1981, but it did not eliminate the threats to it: in particular, the weight of councilism, in other words the underestimation of the role of the communist organisation, crystallised in 1984 with the formation of a “tendency” which raised the flag against “witchhunts” when we began to fight against the remains of councilist ideas in our own ranks. This “tendency” ended up by leaving the ICC at its Sixth Congress, in late 1985, to form the External Fraction of the ICC (EFICC) which proposed to defend our organisation's “real platform” against its supposed “Stalinist degeneration” (the same accusation that had been made by those elements who left the ICC in 1981).

Overall, these different struggles allowed our organisation to assume its responsibilities in the class struggles which took place during this period, such as the miners’ strike of 1984 in Britain, the general strike of 1985 in Denmark, the huge public sector strike of 1986 in Belgium, the strike on the railways and hospitals in 1986 and 1988 in France, and the teachers’ strike in Italy in 1987.[8] [679]

During this active intervention in the workers’ struggles of the 1980s, our organisation did not forget one of the main concerns of the Italian Fraction: to draw the lessons of past defeats. After following and analysing with great attention the workers’ struggles in Poland in 1980,[9] [680] in order to understand their defeat the ICC made an attentive examination of the specific characteristics of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe.[10] [681] It was this analysis which allowed our organisation to foresee the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, at a time when many groups were still analysing the events in the USSR and its glacis (“perestroika” and “glasnost”, Solidarnosc in Poland coming to power in the summer of 1989) as part of the policy to reinforce the same Bloc.[11] [682]

Similarly, the ability to face up with lucidity to the defeats of the class, which had been a strength of the Fraction and after it of the French Communist Left (GCF), made it possible for us, even before the events of autumn 1989, to predict that they would provoke a profound ebb in proletarian consciousness: “even in its death, Stalinism is doing capitalist rule one last service: its decomposing corpse continues to pollute the atmosphere that the proletariat breathes... we must expect to see a temporary retreat in the proletariat's consciousness (...) even if it does not call into question the historic course or the general perspective of class confrontations, the present retreat of the proletariat, given the historic importance of the events by which it is determined, is far more profound than that which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland.”[12] [683]

This analysis did not meet with universal agreement in the Left Communist camp, many of whom thought that because Stalinism had been the spearhead of the counter-revolution, its pitiful disintegration would open the way for the development of the consciousness and militancy of the proletariat. This was also the time when the IBRP could write as follows about the coup d'état which had overthrown the Ceausescu regime at the end of 1989: “Romania is the first country in the industrialised regions in which the world economic crisis has given birth to a real and authentic popular insurrection whose result has been the overthrow of the ruling government (...) in Romania, all the objective conditions and almost all the subjective conditions for the transformation of the insurrection into a real and authentic social revolution were present” (Battaglia Comunista, January 1990, “Ceausescu is dead, but capitalism still lives”).

Finally, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Stalinism, and the difficulties that these created for the struggle of the working class, were only fully understood by our own organisation because it had previously been able to identify the new phase in the decadence of capitalism, the phase of decomposition: “Up to now, the class combats which have developed in the four corners of the planet have been able to prevent decadent capitalism from providing its own answer to the dead-end of its economy: the ultimate form of its barbarity , a new world war. However, the working class is not yet capable of affirming its own perspective through its own revolutionary struggles, nor even of setting before the rest of society the future that it holds within itself. It is precisely this temporary stalemate, where for the moment neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian alternative can emerge openly, that lies at the origin of capitalism’s putrefaction, and which explains the extreme degree of decadent capitalism’s barbarity. And this rottenness will get still worse with the inexorable aggravation of the economic crisis" (The decomposition of capitalism”, International Review n°57).

"In reality, the present collapse of the Eastern bloc is another sign of the general decomposition of capitalist society, whose origins lie precisely in the bourgeoisie's own inability to give its own answer - imperialist war - to the open crisis of the world economy" (International Review n°60, "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and in the Eastern bloc", Point 20).

Here again, the ICC drew its inspiration from the method of the Italian Fraction, for whom “knowledge can tolerate no embargo and no ostracism”. The ICC was able to elaborate this analysis because, like the Fraction, it has a constant concern to fight against routine, against lazy thinking, against the idea that “there is nothing new under the sun” or that “the positions of the proletariat have been invariant since 1848” (as the Bordigists claim). Our organisation foresaw the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the disappearance of the Western Bloc which was to follow, just as it foresaw a serious retreat suffered by the working class from 1989 onwards, because it too has adopted this determination to be constantly alert to historical events even if this means calling into question comfortable and well-established certainties. In fact, this method of the Fraction which the ICC continues, is not specific to the former, however capable it was of putting it to work. This is the method of Marx and Engels, who never hesitated to call into question positions that they had adopted previously when reality demanded it. This is the method of Rosa Luxemburg who at the 1896 Congress of the Socialist International dared to call for the abandoning of one of the most symbolic positions of the workers’ movement: support for Polish independence and more generally for national liberation struggles. This was Lenin’s method when, to the astonishment and against the opposition of the Mensheviks and the “old Bolsheviks”, he declared that it was necessary to rewrite the programme adopted by the Party in 1903, with the words “Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.” [684] [685]

The ICC's determination to remain vigilant in the face of any new event does not only apply in the domain of the international situation. It also applies to the internal life of our organisation. Once again, this is no invention of ours. We learnt this approach from the Fraction which in turn took its inspiration from the example of the Bolsheviks, and before them from Marx and Engels, especially within the First International. The period that followed the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, which as we have seen represents almost half of the life of the ICC, was a new test for our organisation which had to confront new crises, as it had done during the 1980s. From 1993 onwards, it has had to engage in the struggle against the “circle spirit” as Lenin defined it during the 1903 Congress of the RSDLP, whose source lay in the origins of the ICC when it brought together small groups where affinity was mixed with political conviction. The survival of the circle spirit, combined with the growing pressure of decomposition, tended more and more to encourage clan behaviour within the ICC, threatening its unity and even its survival. And in the same way that the elements most marked by the circle spirit, including a number of founding members of the party like Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zassulich, Potressov and Martov, had opposed and separated from the Bolsheviks to form the Menshevik fraction after the 1903 Congress, a certain number of “eminent members” of the ICC (as Lenin called them) were unable to face up to the struggle and fled the organisation (1995-96). However, the struggle against the circle spirit and against clan behaviour were not taken to their conclusion and once again made themselves felt in 2000-2001. In 2001, the same ingredients were present as in the crisis of 1993, but for some militants they were combined with an exhaustion of communist conviction aggravated by the prolonged retreat of the working class and the increased weight of decomposition. This explains how long-standing members of the ICC could either abandon any concern with politics, or could be transformed into blackmailers, ruffians, and even volunteer stool pigeons.[13] [686] Shortly before his death in 1990, our comrade MC insisted that the working class was about to suffer a serious retreat, saying that we would now see who the real militants were, that is to say those who do not lose their convictions in the face of difficulty. Those elements who, in 2001, either resigned or formed the IFICC, demonstrated this alteration in their convictions. Once again, the ICC sought to defend the organisation with the same determination that it had shown on previous occasions. And we owe this determination to the example of the Italian Fraction. In the depths of the counter-revolution, the Fraction's slogan was “never betray”. Since the retreat of the working class did not mean the return of the counter-revolution, in the 1990s the ICC adopted as its watchword: “hold fast”. Some betrayed, but the organisation as a whole held fast, and even become stronger thanks to this determination to address organisational questions at the greatest possible theoretical depth, just as in their time Marx, Lenin and the Fraction had done. The two texts already published in our International Review (“The question of the functioning of the organisation in the ICC” in International Review n°109 and “Confidence and solidarity in the proletarian struggle” in n°111 and 112) are testimony to this theoretical effort on organisational questions.

In the same way, the ICC has responded firmly to those who claim that the numerous crises that our organisation has gone through are proof of its failure: “it is because the ICC does struggle against any penetration of opportunism that it seems to have such a troubled life, that it has gone through so many crises. It is because it defended its statutes and the proletarian spirit that animates them without any concessions, that it was met with such anger by a minority which had fallen deep into opportunism on the organisation question. At this level, the ICC was carrying on the combat of the workers’ movement which was waged by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in particular, whose many detractors castigated their frequent organisational struggles and crises. In the same period, the German Social-Democratic Party was much less agitated but the opportunist calm which reigned within it (challenged only by “trouble-makers” on the left like Rosa Luxemburg) actually prefigured its treason in 1914. By contrast, the crises of the Bolshevik party helped it to develop the strength to lead the revolution in 1917.” (“15th Congress of the ICC, today the stakes are high - strengthen the organisation to confront them”, International Review n°114).

We thus owe the ICC's ability to live up to its responsibilities during its 30 years of existence largely to the contributions of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. The secret of the positive balance sheets that we can draw of activity during this period lies in our fidelity to the teachings of the Fraction and, more generally, to the method and the spirit of Marxism which it had learnt so well.[14] [687]

The Fraction found itself disarmed when World War II broke out. This was because its majority had followed Vercesi in abandoning the principles which had been its strength beforehand, especially during the war in Spain. And on the contrary, it was on the basis of these principles that a small nucleus in Marseilles was able to re-form the Fraction during the war, and to continue an exemplary theoretical and political work. In its turn, the remainder of the Fraction abandoned its fundamental principles at the end of the war, when the majority decided to dissolve and to join as individuals the Partito Comunista Internazionalista founded in 1945. It was therefore left to the French Communist Left (GCF) to adopt the fundamental gains of the Fraction and to continue with their theoretical work of preparing the political framework which would make it possible for the ICC to form, to exist, and to progress. In this sense, we consider the summary of 30 years of our organisation as a homage to the extraordinary work carried out by the small group of exiled militants who kept alive the flame of communist thought in the darkest period of history. Their work which, while it is largely unknown today and largely ignored by those who claim to be the heirs of the Italian Left, will prove to be a determining element in the final victory of the proletariat.

A new generation of communist fighters

Thanks especially to the lessons left us by the Fraction and by the GCF, transmitted and elaborated untiringly by our comrade MC right up to his death, the ICC today is fit and ready to welcome into its ranks the new generation of revolutionaries coming towards our organisation, who will increase in both numbers and enthusiasm with the tendency towards the recovery in class struggle since 2003. The last International Congress noted that we are currently witnessing a significant increase in the number of our contacts and new members: “And what is remarkable is that a significant number of these new members are young elements who have not been through the whole deformation that results from being militants in leftist organisations. Young elements whose dynamism and enthusiasm is making up for the tired and exhausted ‘militant forces’ who have left us.” (“16th ICC Congress”, International Review n°122).

For human beings 30 years is the average age of a generation. Today the elements who are coming towards us or who have already joined us could be the children (and sometimes are the children) of the militants who founded the ICC.

What we said in the Report on the International Situation presented to the Eighth Congress of the ICC is becoming a concrete reality: “it was necessary that the generations who had been marked by the counter-revolution of the 1930-50s should give way to those who had not known it, for the world proletariat to find the strength to overcome it. Similarly (though bearing in mind that there was a historic break between the generation of 1968 and its predecessors whereas there is that continuity with the following generations), the generation which will make the revolution cannot be that which accomplished the historic task of opening to the world proletariat a new perspective after the most profound counter-revolution of its history.”

What is true for the working class is also true for its revolutionary minority. And yet, most of the “old militants” are still there, even if their hair is grey (when they have any left!). The generation which founded the ICC in 1975 is ready to transmit to the “youngsters” the lessons which it received from its predecessors, as well as those which it has learnt during the course of these 30 years, so that the ICC becomes more and more capable of making its contribution to the formation of the future party of the communist revolution.

The only future is communism

With this article, we are beginning a third volume of our series of communism, begun nearly 15 years ago. The second volume of the series (in International Review 111) ended with an end: the exhaustion of the international revolutionary wave which shook world capitalism to its foundations, and more specifically, with an audacious description of the communist culture of the future, outlined by Trotsky in his 1924 work, Literature and Revolution.

For the proletarian movement, the clarification of its overall goals has always been a constant element of its struggle. This series has try to play its own part in this struggle, not only by re-telling its history – although that is important enough, given the terrible distortion of the proletariat’s real history by the dominant ideology – but also by seeking to explore new or long-neglected areas, to develop a deeper understanding of the entire communist project. In forthcoming articles, therefore, we will continue with the chronological thread of the series up to now, in particular by studying the contributions to the problems of the period of transition made by the left communist fractions during the period of counter-revolution that followed this historical defeat of the working class. But rather than simply taking off from the workers’ movement’s new theoretical developments on the problems of communism and the period of transition in the light of the revolutionary proletariat’s first seizure of power, we think it both useful and necessary to clarify the aims and methodology of the series by returning once more to a beginning: on the one hand we will return to the beginning of the series, and to the beginning of marxism itself, while on the other we will recapitulate the main arguments developed in the first two volumes of this series, which give an account of the studies and clarification of the content of communist society that have accompanied the development of the proletariat’s historical experience. This will then provide a firmer starting point for looking at the questions that were posed to the revolutionaries of the 1930s and 40s, and indeed for going on to consider the problem of the proletarian revolution in our own times.

In this issue of the Review, we will therefore examine in detail a seminal text of the young Karl Marx: the letter to Arnold Ruge[1] [703] of September 1843, a text which has been quoted very often but rarely analysed in depth. There is more than one reason for going back to the letter to Ruge. With Marx and marxism it is not simply a question of struggling for a new form of economy to replace capitalism once it has reached its historical limits. It is not simply a question of fighting for the emancipation of the working class. As Engels said later on, it is a question of making it possible for the human species to move from “the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom”, from its “prehistory” to its real history; it is a question of liberating all the potential that mankind bears within itself and which has been held in check by hundreds of thousands of years of scarcity and in particular by thousands of years of class society. The letter to Ruge provides us with a way into this problematic, by insisting that we are on the verge of a general awakening of mankind. And we could go even further: as Marx was to argue in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the resurrection of man is at the same time the resurrection of nature; if man becomes conscious of itself through the proletariat, then nature becomes conscious of itself through man. Surely these are questions that take us to the very depths of human inquiry. The outlining of their solution is not the invention of the brilliant individual Marx, but the theoretical synthesis of the real possibilities unfolding in history.

The letter to Ruge is a very good illustration of the process through which Marx evolved from the milieu of philosophy to the communist movement. We have already dealt with this question in the second article of the series (‘How the proletariat won Marx to communism’ in International Review n°69), where we showed that Marx’s political trajectory was in itself an illustration of the position adopted in the Communist Manifesto: that the views of the communists were not the inventions of individual ideologues, but the theoretical expression of a living movement, the movement of the proletariat. We showed in particular how Marx’s involvement with the workers’ associations of Paris in 1844 played a decisive part in winning him over to a communist movement that predated Marx and arose independently of him. The study of Ruge’s letter and of other works by Marx prior to his arrival in Paris make it clear that this was no sudden ‘conversion’, but the culmination of a process that was already in development. But this does not alter the basic thesis. Marx was no aloof philosopher concocting the recipe books of the future from the safety of his kitchen/study. He moved towards communism under the magnetic pull of a revolutionary class which was then able to appropriate and integrate all of his undoubted talents as a thinker into the struggle for a new world. And the letter to Ruge, as we shall see, already begins to articulate this biographical reality into a coherent theoretical approach to the question of consciousness.

From the critique of alienation to historical materialism

In September 1843, Marx spent a ‘holiday’ of several months in Kreuznach, thanks in part to the actions of the elephantine Prussian censorship, which had deprived Marx of the responsibility of editing the Rheinische Zeitung. The newspaper had been closed down after publishing a number of ‘subversive’ pieces, including Marx’s article on the sufferings of the Moselle wine-growers. Marx took advantage of the freedom thus accorded him to reflect and to write. He was going through a crucial period of evolution, of transition from a radical democratic standpoint to the explicitly communist position he was to proclaim from Paris in the following year.

A great deal has been written about ‘the young Marx’, in particular the works he wrote in the years 1843-44. Some of the most important works of this period remained unknown until well after Marx’s death; in particular, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, (EPM), which he wrote in Paris in 1844, were not published at all until 1932.

As a result, much of Marx’s early work and ideas were unknown to marxists themselves during a very significant period in the development of the workers’ movement – including the entire period of the Second International and the period of the formation of the Third. Some of the most daring explorations contained in the EPM – key elements concerning both the concept of alienation and the content of human experience in a society in which alienation has been overcome – could not have been directly integrated into the evolution of marxist thought during this whole period.

This has given rise to a number of ideological interpretations, gradations of which can generally found to lie between two poles. The one pole is personified by that spokesman of the most senile form of Stalinist intellectualism – Louis Althusser, for whom the early writings of Marx can be relegated to the category of sentimental humanism and youthful folly, later wisely discarded by a Scientific Marx who emphasised the central importance of the objective laws of the economy – which, if you can move from the sublime gobbledegook of Althusserian theory to its rather more comprehensible application in the world of politics, happily point not towards the end of alienation but towards the much more achievable state capitalist programme of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The other pole is the mirror image of Marx-the-hard-headed-Stalinist: this is the ideology embraced by a congregation of Catholics, existentialists and other philosophers, who also accept the continuity between Marx’s later work and the Five Year Plans in the USSR, but who whisper to us that there is a different Marx, a young, romantic and idealist Marx who offers an alternative to the spiritual impoverishment which plagues the Materialist West. In between these poles are all sorts of theorists – some of them more inclined to the Frankfurt school[2] [704] or the work of Lucio Colletti,[3] [705] others who are partly influenced by partial aspects of left communism (example: the publication Aufheben in Britain) – who have used the Second International’s reliance on Engels rather than on the early Marx in matters of philosophy to construct a huge gulf not so much between the two Marx’s, but between Marx and Engels or between Marx and the Second and Third Internationals. In either case, the villains of the piece are seen as proponents of a mechanical, positivist distortion of Marx’s thought.

These approaches certainly sprinkle elements of the truth into their recipes. It is true that the period of the Second International in particular saw the workers’ movement becoming increasingly vulnerable to the penetration of the dominant ideology, and this was no less the case at the level of general theory (e.g. philosophy, the problem of historical progress, the origins of class consciousness) than at the level of political practise (eg on the question of parliament, the minimum and maximum programmes. etc). It must also be the case that an ignorance of Marx’s early work accentuated this vulnerability, sometimes in regard to the most far-reaching problems. Engels for one never denied that Marx was the more profound thinker of the two, and there are moments in Engels’ theoretical work when a full assimilation of some of the questions posed most insistently in Marx’s earlier work would indeed have taken his contributions onto a deeper level. But what all the divisive approaches lack is the sense of the continuity of Marx’s thought, and of the continuity of the revolutionary current that, for all its weaknesses and deficiencies, adopted the marxist method to advance the cause of communism. In previous articles in this series, we have argued against the idea that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the Second International and authentic marxism, either before or after it (see International Review n°84, ‘Social Democracy advances the communist cause’); we have also responded to the attempt to oppose Marx to Engels on the philosophical level (see ‘The transformation of social relations’ in International Review n°85, which rejects the idea advanced by Schmidt - and Colletti - that there is no concept of the dialectics of nature in Marx). And we have insisted, with Bordiga, on the essential continuity between the Marx of 1844 and the EPM, and the mature Marx of Capital, who did not abandon his earlier visions but sought to give them a solid grounding and a more scientific basis, above all through the development of the theory of historical materialism and a more profound study of capitalist political economy (see International Review n°75, ‘Capital and the principles of communism’).

A glance at Marx in his immediately ‘pre-communist’ phase, the Marx of 1843, fully supports this way of approaching the problem. During the preceding period, Marx had been increasingly exposed to communist ideas. For example, while involved in editing the Rheinsiche Zeitung, he had attended the meetings of a discussion circle in the paper’s Cologne offices, animated by Moses Hess,[4] [706] who had already declared his support for communism. Certainly, Marx did not commit himself to any cause lightly. As he had thought long and hard about becoming a follower of Hegel, so again he refused any superficial adoption of communist theories, recognising that many of the existing forms of communism were crude and undeveloped – dogmatic abstractions, as he described them in his September 43 letter to Ruge. In a previous letter to Ruge (November 1842), he had insisted that “I find it inappropriate, indeed even immoral to smuggle communist and socialist doctrines, hence a new world outlook, into incidental theatre criticisms, etc, and that I demand a quite different and more thorough discussion of communism, if it should be discussed at all”.

Overcoming the separation between the individual and the community

But a cursory examination of the texts he was writing in this phase show that the transition to communism was already well underway. The main text he was working on during his stay at Kreuznach was his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. This is a long and incomplete text which is difficult to read but which shows Marx wrestling with Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel. Marx was particularly influenced by Feuerbach’s pertinent inversion of Hegel’s idealist speculations, which stressed that thought derives from being and not the other way round. This method informs the critique of the state, seen by Hegel as an incarnation of the Idea rather than the reflection of the more earthy realities of human life. The premises are therefore laid for a fundamental critique of the state as such. In the view of the 1843 Critique, the state – even the modern representative state - was already approached as an expression of the alienation of man’s social powers. And although Marx is still counting on the advent of universal suffrage and a democratic republic, he was from the very beginning looking beyond the ideal of a liberal political regime; for in the admittedly hybrid formulations of the Critique, Marx argues that universal suffrage, or rather radical democracy, heralded the transcendence both of the state and of civil (i.e. bourgeois) society. “Within the abstract political state the reform of voting is a dissolution of the state, but likewise the dissolution of civil society”.

Here in embryo is a goal that has animated the marxist movement throughout its history: the withering away of the state.

In his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, written towards the end of 1843, Marx is again looking beyond the fight to abolish feudal barriers – in this case, restrictions on civil rights for Jews, whose repeal he affirmed as a step forward, in opposition to the sophisms of Bruno Bauer. Marx shows the inherent limitations of the very notion of civil rights, which can only mean the rights of the atomised citizen in a society of competing egos. For Marx, political emancipation – in other words, the goals of the bourgeois revolution, yet to be achieved in backward Germany – should not be confused with a genuine social emancipation, in which mankind would not only be freed from the rule of alien political powers, but also from the tyranny of buying and selling. This involved overcoming the separation between the individual and the community. The word communism is not used, but the implications are already plain (see ‘Marx and the Jewish Question’, International Review n°114).

Finally, in the shorter but far more focused Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (written at the end of 1843 or the beginning of 1844), Marx’s achievements are enormous and it would take another article to do them justice. Summarised as briefly as possible, they are twofold: first, he puts forward his famous critique of religion which already surpasses the rationalist criticisms of the bourgeois Enlightenment, recognising that the power of religion derives from the existence of a social order which must deny human needs; and secondly, he for the first time identifies the proletariat as the agent of the social revolution, this “class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes…..a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from – and thereby emancipating – all the other spheres of society, which is in a word the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity”.

The emancipation of the proletariat is inseparable from general human emancipation: the working class cannot merely free itself from exploitation, cannot perpetuate itself as a ruling class, but must act as the standard bearer of all the oppressed; likewise, it cannot rid itself and humanity of capitalism alone, but must overcome the nightmare weight of all previously existing forms of exploitation and oppression.

The proletariat, agent of revolutionary change

We should also add that the last two texts, together with the collection of Marx’s letters to Ruge, were published in the one and only edition of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher in February 1844. This journal was the fruit of Marx’s collaboration with Ruge, Engels, and others.[5] [707] Marx had set great store by this enterprise, which he had hoped would both replace Ruge’s banned Deutsche Jahrbücher and take an important step forward by creating firm links between French and German revolutionary thought, although in the end none of his prospective French collaborators lived up to these hopes, and all the contributions were from the German side. It is of considerable interest to note that in August-September 1843 Marx wrote a short draft programme for the publication:

“The articles of our annals will be written by Germans or Frenchmen, and will deal with

1) Men and systems which have acquired a useful or dangerous influence, and political questions of the day, whether they concern constitutions, political economy, or public institutions and morals.
2) We shall provide a review of newspapers and journals which in some way will be a castigation and correction of the servility and baseness shown by some, and which will help to call attention to the worthy efforts on behalf of humanity and freedom shown by others.
3) We shall include a review of the literature and publications of the old regime of Germany which is decaying and destroying itself, and finally a review of the books of the two nations which mark the commencement and continuance of the new era that we are entering”.

From this document we can draw two things. First, that even at this stage, Marx’s preoccupation was a militant one: to draw up a draft programme for a publication, however brief and general, is to see that publication as the expression of organised action. This dimension of Marx’s life – the idea of committing his life to a cause and to the necessity to build an organisation of revolutionaries – remains a fundamental mark of the proletarian influence on Marx the “man and fighter”, to use the title of Nikolaevsky’s 1936 biography.

Secondly, when Marx talks about the “new era”, we must bear in mind that while in Germany and in much of Europe the new era meant the overthrow of feudalism and the victory of the democratic bourgeoisie, there was also a powerful tendency in Marx and Engels’ initial commitment to communism to conflate the bourgeois with the proletarian revolution, to see one following fairly rapidly after the other. This is clear from Marx’s identification of the proletariat as the agent of revolutionary change even in backward Germany, and it is even clearer in the approach taken by the Communist Manifesto and in his theory of permanent revolution, elaborated in the wake of the 1848 uprisings. Applied to Marx’s thinking in 1843 and 1844, we must deduce that in anticipating a “new era”, Marx’s gaze was fixed less on the purely transitional struggle for a bourgeois republic and far more on the ensuing battle for a truly human society free of capitalist egoism and exploitation. What animated Marx throughout his life was above all this sense of the possibility of such a society. He was later to recognise more lucidly that the direct struggle for such a world was not yet on the agenda of history; that mankind had yet to pass through the Calvary of capitalism in order for the material bases for the new society to be established; but this original inspiration never left him.

Marxism is not a closed system

It is therefore senseless to make a rigid distinction between the young Marx and the old. The texts of 1843-4 are all decisive steps towards his fully-formed communist world-outlook, even before he consciously or explicitly defined himself as a communist. Furthermore, the pace of Marx’s movement in this period is quite remarkable. Following the production of the texts mentioned above, Marx moved to Paris. During the summer of 1844, palpably influenced by his direct involvement with the communist workers’ associations of that city, Marx produced the EPM where he declares for communism; in late August he met Engels, who was able to contribute a much more direct understanding of the functioning of the capitalist system. Their collaboration had a further dynamising effect on Marx’s work, and by 1845, through his "Theses on Feuerbach" and The German Ideology, he was able to present the essentials of the materialist theory of history. And since marxism, contrary to its detractors, is not a closed system, this process of evolution and self-development was continue to the very end of Marx’s life (see for example the article from this series on the "late Marx" in International Review n°81, which recounts how Marx took on the task of teaching himself Russian in order to deal with the Russian question, producing answers that confounded some of his more rigid followers).

The September letter to Ruge, which we reprint in full below, must be approached in the light of the above. It was not accidental that the entire collection of letters was published in the DFJ; they were obviously seen even then as contributions to the elaboration of a new programme or at least of a new political method; and the final letter is the most ‘programmatic’ of them all. Through the course of these letters, we can chart Marx’s decision to quit Germany, where his prospects had become ever-more precarious owing to a combination of family disagreements and harassment by the authorities. In the September letter, Marx confesses that he was finding it increasingly difficult to breath in Germany, and had determined to head for France – the land of revolutions, where socialist and communist thought was developing luxuriously in a variety of directions. Ruge, the former editor of the suppressed Deutsche Jahrbuche, was a willing collaborator in the plan to establish the ‘German-French Annals’, although their ways were to part when Marx adopted an explicitly communist standpoint, and Ruge had already confessed to Marx his feelings of discouragement following his experiences with the German censors and with the philistine atmosphere prevailing in Germany. Thus Marx’s penultimate letter to Ruge (written from Cologne, May 1843) was devoted in part to lifting Ruge’s spirits, and gives us a good insight into Marx’s optimistic state of mind at the time: “For our part, we must expose the old world to the full light of day and shape the new one in a positive way. The longer the time that events allow to thinking humanity for taking stock of its position, and to suffering mankind for mobilising its forces, the more perfect on entering the world will be the product that the present time bears in its womb”.

The struggle against dogmatism

By the time Marx wrote the September letter, Ruge’s depression had lifted. Marx was keen to outline the political approach that should hold sway in their proposed enterprise. To begin with, he was anxious to avoid any dogmatic and sectarian approaches. It must be remembered that this was the hey-day of utopian socialism of all kinds, nearly all of them based on abstract speculations about how a new and more equitable society should be run, and with little or no connection to the real, down-to-earth struggles going on around them. In many cases, the utopians displayed a haughty disdain both for the demands of the democratic opposition to feudalism and for the immediate economic demands of the nascent working class; and they could rarely come up with a better scheme for instituting the new social order than handing out the begging bowl to rich bourgeois philanthropists. This is why Marx dismisses so many of the varieties of contemporary socialism as forms of dogmatism, confronting the world with ready made schemas and regarding practical political struggles as unworthy of their attention. At the same time, Marx makes it clear that he was well aware of different trends within the communist movement, and that some of these – he mentions Proudhon and Fourier[6] [708] – were more worthy of study than others. But the key is the conviction that a new world could not descend from the heavens but must be the result of struggles going on in the real world. Hence the famous passage: “Nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to”.

In essence, as Lukacs points out in his 1920 essay ‘Class Consciousness’, this is already a materialist analysis: it is not a question of bringing consciousness to unconscious matter – the essence of idealism – but of making conscious a process which is already moving in a certain direction; a process driven by a material necessity which also encompasses the necessity to become aware of itself.

It is certainly the case that Marx is still largely talking about the struggle for political emancipation - for the completion of the bourgeois revolution, and this above all in Germany. The emphasis on the critique of religion, on intervening in contemporary political questions such as the differences between the estates system and representative government, confirms this, as does the possibility that these activities will “win the interest of a large party” – i.e. influence the liberal bourgeoisie. But let us not forget that Marx was also on the verge of announcing the proletariat as the agent of social change, a conclusion that would soon be applied both to feudal Germany and to the more capitalistically developed countries. Hence the method can equally – and in fact most specifically – be applied to the proletarian struggle for immediate demands, whether economic or political. This is in fact a profound anticipation of the struggle against the sectarian approach to socialism, which in later years would be typified by Bakunin; but it is also linked to the formulations in the German Ideology, which define communism as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs”; which locates revolutionary consciousness in the existence of a revolutionary class, and which explicitly defines communist consciousness as an historic emanation of the exploited proletariat. The continuity with the "Theses on Feuerbach" - the understanding that the educators must also be educated - is equally evident. Together these works provide an early warning against all the latter-day saviours of the proletariat, all those who see socialist consciousness being brought to the lowly workers from some exalted place on high.

Communism in continuity with mankind’s history

The concluding paragraphs of the letter summarise Marx’s approach to political intervention, but they also take us into deeper waters.

“Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.

In short, therefore, we can formulate the trend of our journal as being: self-clarification (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires. This is a work for the world and for us. It can be only the work of united forces. It is a matter of a confession, and nothing more. In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are”.

In George Elliot’s great novel of mid-19th century social life in England, Middlemarch, there is a character called Casaubon, a dry and dusty scholar, a man of the church with independent means, who devotes his life to writing a monumental and would-be definitive work entitled The Key to All Mythologies. This work is never completed and this is a symbolic expression of the character’s divorce from real human life and passions. But we can also take this as a story about bourgeois scholarship in general. In its period of ascent, the bourgeoisie did develop a taste for universal questions and the search for universal answers, but this search was increasingly abandoned in its decadent phase, when any posing of such questions leads to the uncomfortable conclusion of its demise as a class. Casaubon’s failure thus anticipates the intellectual dead-ends of bourgeois thinking. Marx, by contrast, in just a few brief remarks, offers us the beginnings of an approach that really does offer us a key to all mythologies; for just as Marx says in the September letter that religion is the “register” or “table of contents of the theoretical struggles of mankind”, mythology is the register of mankind’s psychic life since its beginnings, both in its limits and in its aspirations, and the study of mythology provides us with an insight into the needs that give rise to these aspirations .

David McLellan, perhaps one of Marx’s best biographers since Mehring, comments that “the notion of salvation through a ‘reform of consciousness’ was, of course, very idealistic. But this was merely typical of German philosophy of this time” (Karl Marx, His Life and Thought, 1973, p 77). But this is surely to take a purely static view of Marx’s formulation. When we take into account the fact that Marx was already seeing this ‘reform of consciousness’ as being the product of real struggles, when we recall that Marx was already beginning to look to the proletariat as the bearer of this ‘reformed’ consciousness, then it is evident that Marx is already moving past the dogmas of contemporary German philosophy. As Lukacs later made clear in the essays contained in History and Class Consciousness, the proletariat, the first to be both a revolutionary and an exploited class, has no need for ideological mystifications. Its class consciousness is thus for the first time a clear and lucid consciousness which marks a fundamental break with all forms of ideology.[7] [709] The notion of a consciousness which is clear to itself is intimately linked to Marx’s movement towards the proletariat. And it was this same movement which was to enable Marx and Engels to elaborate the materialist theory of history, which recognised that communism was no longer just a "beautiful ideal" because capitalism had laid down the material premises for a society of abundance. The basics of this understanding would be put forward only two years later, in The German Ideology.

The charge could also be made that Marx’s formulations in the September letter are still caught up in the framework of humanism, of an ‘all-class’ vision of mankind. But as we have shown, since Marx was already tending towards the proletarian movement, it seems plain that any such humanitarian residues were no obstacle to his adoption of a class standpoint. Besides, it is not only permissible but necessary to speak of mankind, of the species, as a reality and not as an abstraction if we want to understand the true dimensions of the communist project. For while the proletariat is the communist class par excellence, still the proletariat “does not begin a new work”. The EPM, as we have seen, would make it clear that communism must be based on the recovering the entire wealth of the human past; by the same token it argued that “the entire movement of history, as simply communism’s actual act of genesis – the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming”. Communism is therefore the labour of history, and the communism of the proletariat is the clarification and synthesis of all previous struggles against misery and exploitation. This is why Marx, for one, named Spartacus as the historical figure he admired the most. Looking even further back, the communism of the future will rediscover on a higher level the unity of the tribal communities in which mankind lived for the greater part of its historical existence, prior to the advent of class divisions and the exploitation of man by man.

The proletariat sees itself as the defender of all that is human. While ferociously denouncing the inhumanity of exploitation, it does not preach an attitude of hatred even towards individual exploiters, nor does it regard with contempt or superiority other oppressed classes and social strata, past or present. The view that communism meant the obliteration of all culture because it had hitherto belonged to the exploiters was lambasted as “crude communism” in the EPM. This is a negative tradition that has plagued the workers’ movement ever since, for example in certain forms of anarchism which delight in the despoiling and destruction of the cultural symbols of the past; and the decadence of capitalism, especially when it is combined with the Stalinist counter-revolution, has spawned even more hideous caricatures such as the Maoist campaigns against “The Four Olds”[8] [710] during the so-called Cultural Revolution. But simplistic and destructive attitudes to the culture of the past did manifest themselves even during the heroic days of the Russian revolution, when in particular organs of repression such as the Cheka frequently displayed a harsh and vengeful attitude towards ‘non-proletarians’, sometimes almost seen as congenitally inferior to ‘pure’ proletarians. The marxist recognition of the historical role of the working class has nothing in common with this kind of ‘workerism’, the worship of the proletariat as it is at any given moment; nor with the philistinism that rejects the entire culture of the old world (see in particular the article in this series on Trotsky and proletarian culture, in International Review n°109).The communism of the future will integrate into itself all that is best in the cultural and moral endeavours of the human species.

Marx’s letter to Ruge, September 1843

I am glad that you have made up your mind and, ceasing to look back at the past, are turning your thoughts ahead to a new enterprise. And so — to Paris, to the old university of philosophy — absit omen! [May it not be an ill omen] — and the new capital of the new world! What is necessary comes to pass. I have no doubt, therefore, that it will be possible to overcome all obstacles, the gravity of which I do not fail to recognise.

But whether the enterprise comes into being or not, in any case I shall be in Paris by the end of this month, since the atmosphere here makes one a serf, and in Germany I see no scope at all for free activity.

In Germany, everything is forcibly suppressed; a real anarchy of the mind, the reign of stupidity itself, prevails there, and Zurich obeys orders from Berlin. It therefore becomes increasingly obvious that a new rallying point must be sought for truly thinking and independent minds. I am convinced that our plan would answer a real need, and after all it must be possible for real needs to be fulfilled in reality. Hence I have no doubt about the enterprise, if it is undertaken seriously.

The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles. For although no doubt exists on the question of “Whence,” all the greater confusion prevails on the question of “Whither.” Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be. On the other hand, it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one. Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it. Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

Therefore I am not in favour of raising any dogmatic banner. On the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions for themselves. Thus, communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism as taught by Cabet, Dézamy, Weitling, etc.[9] [711] This communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic principle, an expression which is still infected by its antithesis — the private system. Hence the abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical, and it is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other socialist doctrines — such as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc. — arising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle.

And the whole socialist principle in its turn is only one aspect that concerns the reality of the true human being. But we have to pay just as much attention to the other aspect, to the theoretical existence of man, and therefore to make religion, science, etc., the object of our criticism. In addition, we want to influence our contemporaries, particularly our German contemporaries. The question arises: how are we to set about it? There are two kinds of facts which are undeniable. In the first place religion, and next to it, politics, are the subjects which form the main interest of Germany today. We must take these, in whatever form they exist, as our point of departure, and not confront them with some ready-made system such as, for example, the Voyage en Icarie.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal. As far as real life is concerned, it is precisely the political state — in all its modern forms — which, even where it is not yet consciously imbued with socialist demands, contains the demands of reason. And the political state does not stop there. Everywhere it assumes that reason has been realised. But precisely because of that it everywhere becomes involved in the contradiction between its ideal function and its real prerequisites.

From this conflict of the political state with itself, therefore, it is possible everywhere to develop the social truth. just as religion is a register of the theoretical struggles of mankind, so the political state is a register of the practical struggles of mankind. Thus, the political state expresses, within the limits of its form sub specie rei publicae,[as a particular kind of state] all social struggles, needs and truths. Therefore, to take as the object of criticism a most specialised political question — such as the difference between a system based on social estate and one based on representation — is in no way below the hauteur des principes. [Level of principles] For this question only expresses in a political way the difference between rule by man and rule by private property. Therefore the critic not only can, but must deal with these political questions (which according to the extreme Socialists are altogether unworthy of attention). In analysing the superiority of the representative system over the social-estate system, the critic in a practical way wins the interest of a large party. By raising the representative system from its political form to the universal form and by bringing out the true significance underlying this system, the critic at the same time compels this party to go beyond its own confines, for its victory is at the same time its defeat.

Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be — as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion — to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.

Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.

In short, therefore, we can formulate the trend of our journal as being: self-clarification (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires. This is a work for the world and for us. It can be only the work of united forces. It is a matter of a confession, and nothing more. In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are.

In 1867 in the preface to the first edition of his famous work Capital Karl Marx observed that the economic conditions of England, the first industrialised country, were the model of future capitalist development in other lands. England was then the “locus classicus” of capitalist relations of production. From here ascendant capitalism would come to dominate the world.

In 1967 the devaluation of the pound sterling made England into another kind of prophetic symbol: this time for the decline of world capitalism and its growing bankruptcy.

The events over the summer of 2005 in London indicated that England is once again a sort of signpost for world capitalism. The London summer was prescient both at the level of imperialist conflict, that is the deadly military contest between national states on the world arena and at the level of the international class struggle, of the conflict between the two main economic classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The terrorist bombings of July 7th in London were claimed by Al Qaeda in retaliation for the participation of British troops in the occupation of Iraq. The explosions on that Thursday morning rush hour brutally reminded the working class that it must pay for capitalism not only in terms of drudgery and poverty but also in terms of blood and gore. The 4 bombs on the London underground and a London bus brought a hideous end to the lives of 52[1] [723] mostly young workers and left hundreds maimed and traumatised. But the outrage had a much wider impact. It meant for example that millions of workers would now have to go to and from work wondering whether their next journey, or that of their loved ones, would be the last. Life in the capital city suddenly became more precarious. The words of the Tony Blair government, of the left wing London mayor Ken Livingstone, and of the media and employers, couldn’t have been more sympathetic. But behind the slogans of “we will not give in to terrorists” and “London stands united” the bourgeoisie let it be known that business was to continue as normal. Workers would be expected to run the risk of further explosions on the transport system in order that they could continue to enjoy their “traditional way of life”.

Imperialism is coming home

This was the single bloodiest attack on London civilians since the Second World War. The comparison with the imperialist carnage of 1939-45 is entirely apt. The London bombings, after 9/11 in New York, March 2004 in Madrid, indicate that once again imperialism is “coming home” to the main metropoles of the world.

Its true that London itself has not had to wait 60 years for the return of military attacks on its citizens. The city was also the target of the bombs of the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army[2] [724] for over two decades after 1972. The population had already been given a taste of imperialist terror. But the July 7th atrocities in 2005 were not simply a repetition of this experience; they represented an increased threat indicative of the more deadly current phase of imperialist warfare.

Of course the terrorist bombs of the IRA anticipated the barbarism of the Al Qaeda attack. In a general sense they expressed the tendency in the latter half of the 20th century for terrorism against civilians to become more and more a favoured method of imperialist warfare. But nevertheless, during most of the period in which the IRA bombs were detonated, the world was still divided into two imperialist blocs, under the control of the USA and the USSR. These blocs more or less regulated the isolated secondary imperialist conflicts between states within each bloc, such as the one between Britain and Ireland in the US bloc, and the latter prevented them from weakening the main military front with the USSR and its satellites. This was particularly true of the dimensions of the IRA campaign to eject Britain from Northern Ireland. The scope of this project was, and still is, largely decided by how much financial support it receives from the United States. The IRA terrorist attacks on London were therefore relatively exceptional in the metropoles of the advanced countries at the time. The main theatres of imperialist war fought in proxy by the two blocs were on the periphery of the system: in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Middle East.

Although the IRA blew up defenceless civilians the targets of their bombs corresponded to a more classical imperialist logic. They chose military sites in London like the Chelsea Barracks in 1981, or Hyde Park in 1982 or targeted symbols of economic power like Bishopsgate in the City of London, or Canary Wharf in 1996.[3] [725]

In contrast the Al Qaeda bombs on crowded public transport in London are symptomatic of a more dangerous imperialist situation at the world level and therefore more typical of international trends than those of the IRA were over ten years ago. The imperialist blocs no longer exist to contain and to give some semblance of order to capitalist militarism. Each for himself has become the dominant imperialist motto, proclaimed most violently and bloodily by the United States in the ongoing attempt to maintain its hegemony on the world stage. The unilateral strategy of Washington shown in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and elsewhere has only exacerbated the growing military chaos. The development of the global reach of Al Qaeda and other imperialist warlords in the Middle East is a product of this imperialist free for all that the main imperialist powers, acting against each other, are unable to prevent.

On the contrary, the major powers including Britain have actively contributed to the development of the terrorist threat. They have used it and tried to manipulate it to their own advantage.

British imperialism was determined not to be left out in the US invasion of Iraq. It wanted to protect its own interests in the area and maintain its prestige as a significant military power. Fabricating a pretext for joining the US “coalition” with the famous dossier on imaginary Iraqi weapons of mass destruction British imperialism therefore played a full part in reducing Iraq to its present bloody chaos. The British state has helped to stoke up Al Qaeda’s terrorist campaign against western imperialism. This campaign certainly began before the invasion of Iraq. But the great powers had a hand in the very origins of this terrorist campaign. Britain as well as the United States helped to train and arm Bin Laden’s guerrilla struggle against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.

After July 7th Britain’s major “allies” (in reality, rivals) couldn’t help pointing out that the capital of the country should be known as “Londonistan” – that is, a refuge of various Islamic radical groups connected to terrorist organisations in the Middle East. The British state allowed the presence of these groups, or protected certain individuals in the hope of using them to advance its own status in the Middle East often at the expense of its “allies” amongst the great powers. Britain for example has resisted the demands of the French state for the extradition of Rachid Ramda, a suspect in the 1995 bomb attack on the Paris metro, for ten years! Returning the compliment the French Direction Centrale des Renseignements Generaux, (according to the International Herald Tribune 09.08.05) did not communicate to its British counterparts an intelligence report written in June predicting that a bomb attack would be carried out in Britain by Pakistani sympathisers of Al Qaeda.

Britain’s own imperialist policy, which follows the same “principles” as its rivals – “do unto others before they do it to you”, has helped bring about the terrorist attacks on its own soil.

In this period terrorism is no longer the exception in the war between states and proto-states but has become the method of choice. The growth of terrorism partly corresponds to an absence of stable alliances between the imperialist powers, and is characteristic of a period where each power is trying to undermine and sabotage its rivals.

In this context we shouldn’t underestimate the increasing role of “black operations” or “psy-ops” carried out, or in some way engineered, by the main imperialist powers on their own populations in order to discredit their rivals and provide a pretext for their own military initiatives. While these operations are of course never officially confirmed, there is strong evidence that the blowing up of the Twin Towers, or of the Moscow apartment buildings that led to major imperialist adventures by the United States and Russia respectively, was the secret work of these states themselves. British imperialism is no innocent in this respect either. Its undercover involvement in both sides of the terrorist conflict in Northern Ireland is well known, including the presence of several double-agents in the ranks of the Real IRA the terrorist organisation responsible for the Omagh bombing.[4] [726] More recently, in September 2005, two members of the SAS (British special forces) were arrested in Basra by the Iraqi police while they were, according to some journalists, on a terrorist bombing mission. These undercover operatives were subsequently freed by an armed assault by the British Army on the prison that was holding them. From events like this it is reasonable to assume that British imperialism is itself involved in the daily terrorist carnage in Iraq: probably in order to help justify its own “stabilising” presence as an occupying force. The underlying “principle” of divide and rule behind such terror tactics was first perfected by British imperialism as the oldest colonial power.

The deterioration of imperialist conflict in the direction of terrorism bears the imprint of the final period of capitalism’s decay, the period of social decomposition where the absence of long term perspectives and possibilities predominate at all levels of society.

Indeed the fact that the July 7th attacks were the work of suicide bombers born and brought up in England symbolised the general breakdown in the remaining rules of imperialist warfare. It also showed that the capitalist heartlands as well as the peripheries of the system can generate the sort of irrationality among the young that leads to the most violent and hateful self-destruction. Whether the British state itself was involved in the bombings is too early to say.

The arbitrary horror of imperialist war is thus returning to the heartlands of capitalism where the most concentrated sectors of the working class live. It is no longer confined to the third world but is increasingly hitting the industrial metropoles: New York, Washington, Madrid, London. No longer are the targets nominally economic or military: they are designed to maximise civilian casualties.

Ex-Yugoslavia expressed this tendency for imperialism to return to the capitalist centres in the 1990s. Today England does.

The terror of the bourgeois state

But terrorist bombs weren’t the only mortal threat to Londoners in July 2005. On July 22nd, a young Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was executed by 8 police bullets at Stockwell underground station on his way to work. The police supposedly mistook him for a suicide bomber. Britain, famous for the image of the integrity of Scotland Yard and of the friendly local “bobby” helping old ladies cross the road, has always tried to pretend that its police were the servants of the democratic community, the protectors of the citizens’ legal rights and keepers of the peace. Yet on this occasion the British police now appeared to be essentially no different from the police in any third world dictatorship that openly uses auxiliary “death squads” to carry out the needs of the state. According to the official line of the British police, echoed by the government and media, the execution of Jean Charles was a tragic mistake. However the armed detachments of the Metropolitan police had already been given the directive to “shoot to kill” any suspected suicide bomber after the events of July 7th. And even after the slaying of Jean Charles this policy was defended and maintained in force. Given the near impossibility of identifying or apprehending a suicide bomber before he could detonate his explosives, this directive effectively gave the police leave to shoot practically anyone without warning. At the very least the policy directed from the highest level allowed for such “tragic mistakes” as an inevitable by-product of the strengthening of the state.

We can thus assume that the killing was hardly accidental particularly when we consider that the function of the state and its repressive agencies is not what the former claims it to be: that is, a protector and servant of the population that often has to make difficult choices between defending the citizen and protecting his rights. In reality, the fundamental task of the state is quite different: to defend the established social order in the interests of the ruling class. This means above all that the state must preserve and display its own monopoly of armed force. This is particularly true in time of war where the display of force and the taking of reprisals is vital. In response to such terrorist attacks as July 7th the state’s main priority is not to protect the population – a task which is in any case impractical except for a small number of high functionaries - but to display its power; reassert the superior force of the state with the object of maintaining the obedience of its own population and commanding the respect of foreign powers. In these conditions the apprehension of the real criminals is secondary or irrelevant to the main objective.

Here another analogy with the IRA bombing campaign is useful. In response to the IRA pub bombings in Birmingham and Guildford,[5] [727] the British police arrested, extracted false confessions from and fabricated evidence against 10 Irish suspects and sentenced them to long prison terms. Only some 15 years later did the government admit a “tragic miscarriage of justice” had been made. Was not this rather a reprisal against the population of a foreign power?

Behind the democratic and humanitarian façade of the state, so elaborately constructed in Britain, July 22nd revealed the truth. The essential role of the state as a machine of violence is not to act for or on behalf of the majority of the population but against them.

This was confirmed by a whole series of “anti-terrorist” measures proposed by the Blair government in the wake of the bombings to strengthen the control of the state over the population in general, measures that cannot in any case stop Islamic terrorism. These measures include the introduction of ID cards; the introduction of an indefinite shoot to kill policy; control orders restricting the movements of citizens; the official recognition of the policy of phone tapping and web surveillance; the holding of suspects for up to 3 months without charge and the commissioning of special courts where evidence is given in secret and without juries.

Thus over the summer the state, as it has done before, used the pretext of terrorist outrages to strengthen its repressive apparatus in preparation to use against a much more dangerous foe: the resurgence proletariat.

The workers’ response

On July 21st after the failed bombings of that day only the Victoria and Metropolitan London underground lines were officially closed (on July 7th the entire network was shut down). But the Bakerloo and Northern lines were also closed on that day because of workers action. The underground drivers had refused to take out the trains given the absence of safety and security guarantees. In this action there was a glimpse of the long term solution to the intolerable situation: the workers taking the situation into their own hands. However the trade unions reacted to this spark of class independence as quickly as the emergency services had to the bombings. Under their guidance the drivers would return to work pending negotiations between unions and management while the unions would back any worker who nevertheless refused to drive i.e. leave him to his own devices.

It was in the first weeks of August that the resistance of the working class made a bigger impact. A wildcat strike at London Heathrow Airport was unleashed by workers employed by the catering firm Gate Gourmet that supplies in-flight meals to British Airways. This strike led immediately to “sympathy”, i.e. solidarity, action by airport baggage handlers employed by British Airways; some 1000 workers in all. British Airways flights were grounded for several days and the images of stranded passengers and mass pickets were broadcast around the world.

The British media furiously denounced the insolence of the workers in taking up the supposedly old-fashioned tactic of the sympathy strike. Apparently the workers should have realised that all the experts, lawyers and officials of industrial relations had consigned solidarity action to the history books and made it illegal for good measure.[6] [728] The media tried to denigrate the exemplary courage of the workers by pointing to the poor plight of the airline passengers that their action had caused.

The media also took a more conciliatory line, but one equally hostile to the workers’ cause. The strike was blamed on the uncivilised tactics of the American owners of Gate Gourmet who had announced the mass sackings to the workers by megaphone. Apparently the strike was a mistake: an unnecessary result of poor management, an exception to the normal civilised conduct of industrial relations between unions and management where solidarity action is unnecessary. But the root cause of the strike was not the arrogance of a small employer. In reality the brutal tactics of Gate Gourmet were not that exceptional. Tesco for example, the largest and most profitable supermarket chain in Britain, recently announced the effective end of sick pay for its workers. Nor are mass sackings typically a product of the absence of union involvement. According to the International Herald Tribune 19.08.2005, a spokeswoman for British Airways, Sophie Greenyer, ‘said the company had been successful in the past at cutting jobs and costs by working with the unions. BA had cut 13,000 jobs in the past three years, and £850 million in costs. “We’ve been able to work sensibly with the unions to achieve those savings,” she said.’

It was BA’s continuing determination to cut operational costs that led to the pressure on Gate Gourmet workers’ pay and conditions. In turn, the actions of Gate Gourmet were a deliberate provocation to enable the replacement of existing staff by Eastern European workers on even worse conditions and pay.

The relentless cost cutting by BA is hardly unusual whether in the airline industry or elsewhere. On the contrary intensified competition in increasingly saturated markets is the normal capitalist response to the intensification of the economic crisis.

Therefore the Heathrow strike was not an accident but an instance of workers being forced to defend themselves against increasingly savage attacks by the whole bourgeoisie. The workers appetite for the fight was not the only significant feature of the strike. Even greater importance should be attached to the illegal solidarity action by other airport workers.

These workers risked their own livelihoods to widen the struggle of workers in another company. This expression of class solidarity – albeit brief and embryonic – cleared the suffocating atmosphere of national obedience generated by the bourgeoisie following the terrorist attacks. It was a reminder that the London population was not invoking the “spirit of the Blitz” of the 1940s when Londoners passively endured nightly bombing by the Luftwaffe in the interests of the imperialist war effort.

On the contrary the Heathrow strike was in continuity with a series of struggles that have taken place around the world since 2003 such as the solidarity action of Opel workers in Germany and the sympathy action of Honda employees in India.[7] [729]

The international working class is slowly, almost imperceptibly emerging from a long period of disorientation after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. It is now groping towards a clearer class perspective.

However the difficulties of developing this perspective were made apparent by the swift sabotage of the Heathrow sympathy action by the unions. The Transport and General Workers Union quickly brought the strike of baggage handlers to an end and the sacked workers of Gate Gourmet were then left to await the fate of prolonged negotiations between unions and bosses.

Nevertheless the difficult resurgence of class struggle is particularly significant in Britain. The British working class, after reaching high points of its struggle in the massive public sector strikes of 1979 and the1984/5 miners strike, suffered particularly from the defeat of the latter, which the Thatcher government exploited to the maximum, including the outlawing of sympathy strikes. Therefore the reappearance of such strikes in Britain is all the more welcome.

England was not only the first capitalist country but also witnessed the birth of the first working class and its first political organisation, the Chartists, and provided the site for the International Working Men’s Association. England is no longer the axis of the world economy but it still plays a key role in the industrialised world. Heathrow Airport is the largest in the world. The English working class is still a significant weight on the scales of the world class struggle.

Over the summer England was the location where the stakes of the world situation were laid bare. On the one hand the tendency of capitalism to descend into chaotic barbarism where all social values have been destroyed in a bloody free for all. On the other, the strike at London Airport revealed again the existence of a quite different social principle based on the unlimited solidarity of the producers: the principle of communism.

Como

 

From Marx to the Third International, part III 

In the first article in this series, published in International Review n°118 [742], we showed how the theory of decadence is at the very heart of historical materialism in Marx’ and Engels’ analysis of the evolution of modes of production. It is central to the programmatic texts of the organisations of the workers’ movement. In the second article, which appeared in International Review n°121, we saw how the organisations of the workers’ movement from the time of Marx, through the Second International and its marxist left to the Communist International, made this analysis the foundation of their understanding of the evolution of capitalism in order to be able to determine the priorities for the period. In fact, Marx and Engels always stated very clearly that the perspective of the communist revolution depended on the objective, historical and global evolution of capitalism. The Third International, in particular, made this analysis the general framework for its understanding of the new period that opened with the outbreak of World War I. All of the political currents that formed the International, recognised that the first global war marked the beginning of capitalism’s decadent phase. We continue here our historical survey of the main expressions of the workers’ movement by examining more closely the particular political positions of the Communist International on the national, parliamentary and union questions, for which the system’s entry into its phase of decline had important implications.

The First Congress of the Communist International was held from 2nd to 6th March 1919, at the height of the international revolutionary wave sweeping the great workers’ concentrations of Europe. The young soviet power in Russia had been in existence for barely two years. A major insurrection took place in Bulgaria in September 1918. Germany was at the height of social agitation, workers’ councils were being formed everywhere, a great insurrection had taken place in Berlin between November 1918 and February 1919. A Socialist Republic of Workers’ Councils had even been formed in Bavaria; tragically, it was only to survive from November 1918 to April 1919. A victorious socialist revolution was to break out in Hungary after the congress and resist the assaults of counter-revolutionary forces for six months from March to August 1919. Important social movements, following the atrocities of the war and the difficulties that arose afterwards, were shaking all the other European countries.

At the same time, following the treason of Social-Democracy, which took the side of the ruling class at the outbreak of war in August 1914, the revolutionary forces were in the process of reorganisation. New formations, emerging from the difficult process of decantation sought to safeguard the principles and the greatest achievements of the old parties. The conferences of Zimmerwald (September 1915) and Kienthal (April 1916), by regrouping all the opponents of the imperialist war, had contributed forcefully to this decantation and enabled the foundations of a new International to be laid.

In the previous article we saw how, following the outbreak of the First World War, this new International made capitalism’s entry into the new historic period its framework for understanding the tasks of the hour. We are now going to examine how this framework was worked out, explicitly or implicitly, in the elaboration of programmatic positions; we will also show how the speed of events and the difficult conditions of the time did not allow revolutionaries to draw out all the political implications of capitalism’s entry into its decadent phase as regards the content and the forms of the struggle of the working class.

The union question

When the First Congress of the Third International was held in March 1919, the first questions to confront the nascent communist organisations were those concerning the form, the content and the perspectives of the revolutionary movement which was developing just about everywhere in Europe. To the extent that the tasks of the hour were no longer progressive conquests in the framework of the development of ascendant capitalism, but the conquest of power faced with a mode of production that had shown its historic bankruptcy at the turn of century with the outbreak of World War I,[1] [743] the form taken by the class struggle evolved to correspond with its new content and objective. If organisation in unions – essentially economic organs regrouping a minority of the working class – was adapted to the objectives of the movement in the ascendant phase of capitalism, they were not adapted to the seizure of power. That is why the working class, starting with the mass strikes in Russia in 1905,[2] [744] created the soviets – or workers’ councils – which are organs regrouping all the workers in struggle, whose content is both economic and political[3] [745] and whose fundamental objective is to prepare for the seizure of power: “All that is needed is to find the practical form to enable the proletariat to establish its rule. Such a form is the soviet system with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorship of the proletariat – until now these words were Latin to the masses. Thanks to the spread of the soviets throughout the world this Latin has been translated into all modern languages; a practical form of dictatorship has been found by the working people. The mass of workers now understands it thanks to Soviet power in Russia, thanks to the Spartacus League in Germany, and to similar organisations in other countries…” (“Opening remarks” to the First Congress of the Communist International, in Founding the Communist International, proceedings and documents of the First Congress: March 1919, Pathfinder, p.47).

Basing itself on the experience of the Russian revolution and the widespread appearance of workers’ councils in all the insurrections in Europe, the Communist International, at its First Congress, was strongly aware that large-scale working class struggles would no longer take place in the union framework but in that of the new unitary organs, the workers’ soviets: “Victory can be considered assured only when not only the urban workers, but also the rural proletarians are organised, and organised not as before – in trade unions and cooperative societies – but in soviets” (Lenin’s speech on the theses on bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat at the First Congress of the CI, ibid, p.163). Besides, the main lesson drawn by the First Congress of the Third International is that, in Lenin’s words, “spreading the soviet system is a most important task”: “But I think we should not present the problem in this way after nearly two years of revolution; we should rather adopt concrete decisions because for us, and particularly for the majority of the western European countries, spreading the soviet system is a most important task (…) I want to make the practical proposal that a resolution be adopted in which three points shall be specifically mentioned. First: One of the most important tasks confronting the western European comrades is to explain to the people the meaning, importance, and necessity of the soviet system (…) Third: We must say that winning a communist majority in the soviets is the principal task in all countries in which Soviet government is not yet victorious” (ibid p.160-163).

Not only did the working class create new organs of struggle – the workers’ councils – adapted to the new objectives and content of the struggle in the decadence of capitalism, but the First Congress also made it clear to revolutionaries that the proletariat must also confront the unions, which had passed, lock, stock and barrel, into the camp of the bourgeoisie, as is evident from the reports of the delegates from the different countries. Thus Albert, the delegate from Germany said in his report that: “What is significant for us is that these factory councils completely eclipsed the trade unions, which until then had been highly influential in Germany, but had been in league with the scab unions, had forbidden the workers to strike, consistently opposed their public actions, and stabbed them in the back at every opportunity. Since November 9 these trade unions have been completely bypassed. Since then, all struggles for better wages have been led without and even against the trade unions, which had not won a single one of the workers’ wage demands” (“Report on Germany”, ibid, p.56). It was the same with Platten’s report on Switzerland: “The Swiss trade union movement suffers the same diseases as the German (…) The Swiss workers recognised early on that they could better their material conditions only by proceeding directly into struggle, regardless of the union statutes, under the direction not of the old trade union federation but of leadership they elected themselves. A workers’ congress was held and a workers’ council formed (…) The workers’ congress was founded despite the opposition of the trade union federation…” (“Report on Switzerland”, p.60-61). This reality, of an often violent confrontation between the workers’ movement organised in councils and the unions, which had become the last rampart to safeguard capitalism, is an experience which runs through the reports of all the delegates to one degree or another.[4] [746]

The reality of the powerfully counter-revolutionary role of the unions was news to the Bolshevik Party: in his report on Russia, Zinoviev could still say that “The second form of worker’ organisation in Russia is the trade unions. They developed differently here than in Germany: they played an important revolutionary role in the years 1904-1905, and today are marching side by side with us in the struggle for socialism (…) A large majority of trade union members support our party’s positions, and all decisions of the unions are made in the spirit of those positions” (“Report on Russia”, ibid, p.64). Similarly, Bukharin, as writer and co-reporter on the platform which was to be voted, said “Comrades, it is my task to analyse the theses that we have proposed (…) If we were writing only for Russians, we would take up the role of the trade unions in the process of revolutionary reconstruction. However, judging by the experience of the German Communists, this is impossible, for the comrades there tell us that the position occupied by their trade unions is the complete opposite of the one taken by ours. In our country, the trade unions play a vital role in the organisation of useful work and are a pillar of Soviet power. In Germany, however, it is just the opposite” (ibid, p.121 and 128). This is hardly surprising when we understand that the unions did not really make their appearance in Russia until 1905 and that they were carried along in the wake of the soviets. When the movement ebbed after the failure of the revolution, the unions also tended to disappear; the relative weakness of the Tsarist state did not allow it to integrate them into itself, contrary to what occurred in the Western countries. At the time of the revolutionary wave in 1917, they were once again in the wake of the soviets.

This difference in the heritage of workers’ experience would, with the change in the dynamic of the revolutionary wave and the isolation of Russia (at this point no-one had yet said that the Bolshevik Party was the spearhead of the counter-revolution), weigh on the International’s ability to draw out and unify all the proletariat’s lessons and experiences internationally. The strength of the revolutionary movement, which was still considerable at the time of the First Congress, as well as the convergence of the experiences of all the delegates from the most developed capitalist countries on the union question, made this question one that remained open. Comrade Albert thus concluded on the union question for the praesidium as co-reporter on the platform of the CI as follows: “I come now to a very important question that the platform does not deal with, that of the trade union movement. We spent a lot of time on this question. We interviewed delegates from each country about their trade union movement, and concluded that since the proletariat’s situation in each country is completely different, it is impossible at this time to include in the platform an international position on this question (…) These are all conditions that vary from one country to the next, and we therefore believe it is impossible to offer the workers a clear international policy. For that reason we cannot resolve the question today. We must leave it up to each national organisation to develop a position on it” (ibid, p.144-145). In reply to the idea of revolutionising the unions, put forward by Reinstein, former member of the American Socialist Labor Party who was considered to be the delegate for the United States,[5] [747] Albert, delegate of the German Communist Party replied: “It would be easy to say they must be revolutionised, with revolutionary leaders replacing the Yellow ones. But that is not so easy to do, because all organisational structures in the unions are adapted to the old state apparatus and because a council system cannot be established on the basis of craft unions” (p. 144-145).

The end of the war, a certain “victory” euphoria in the victorious countries and the bourgeoisie’s ability, with the unshakable support of the Social-Democratic parties and the unions, to unleash a ferocious repression on social movements, at the same time as granting important economic and political concessions to the working class – such as universal suffrage and the eight hour day – made it possible, little by little, to stabilise the socio-economic situation in each country. This caused a progressive decline in the intensity of the revolutionary wave, which had emerged precisely in reaction to the atrocities of the war and its consequences. This exhaustion of revolutionary élan and the end of the deterioration of the economic situation, weighed very heavily on the revolutionary movement’s ability to draw the lessons of all the experience of struggle at the international level and to unify its understanding of all the implications of the change in the historic period for the form and content of the proletarian struggle. With the isolation of the Russian revolution, the Communist International was dominated by the positions of the Bolshevik Party which was increasingly forced, under the terrible pressure of events, to make concessions in order to try to gain time and to break out of the vice in which it was held. Three significant events in this regression took place between the First and the Second Congress of the Communist International (July 1920). Shortly before its Second Congress in 1920, the CI created a Red Trade Union International, in competition with the International of “yellow” trade unions in Amsterdam (linked to the treacherous Social-Democratic parties). In April 1920 the Executive Commission of the CI dissolved its Amsterdam Bureau for Western Europe, which polarised the radical positions of the parties in Western Europe against some of the orientations it defended, particularly on the union and parliamentary questions. And, lastly, Lenin wrote one of his worst works in April-May 1920, Left wing communism, an infantile disorder in which he incorrectly criticised those he called the “leftists”, and who were precisely those expressions of the left which expressed the experiences of the most concentrated and advanced bastions of the European proletariat.[6] [748] Instead of pursuing the discussion, the confrontation and unification of the different experiences of the proletarian struggle internationally, this turn in perspective and position opened the door to a withdrawal to the old positions of the radical Social-Democrats.[7] [749]

Despite the increasingly unfavourable course of events, the Communist International showed in its Theses on the union question, adopted at the Second Congress, that it was still capable of theoretical clarification. Thanks to the confrontation of experiences of struggle in all countries and the convergence of the lessons on the counter-revolutionary role of the unions, it gained the conviction that, despite the contrary experience in Russia, they had passed to the side of the bourgeoisie during World War I: “During the war most of the trade unions proved themselves to be part of the military apparatus of the bourgeoisie, assisting the exploitation of the working class and spilling the blood of the proletariat in the interests of capitalist profit. In the same way and for the same reasons international Social-Democracy showed itself, with few exceptions, to be an organisation serving the interests of the bourgeoisie and restraining the proletariat, rather than a weapon of the revolutionary proletarian struggle” (“The Trade Union Movement, Factory Committees and the Third International” in Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the first four Congresses of the Third International, Hessel, p.106). Similarly, and contrary to their experience in Russia, the Bolsheviks accepted that from now on the unions would play an essentially negative role, constituting a powerful brake on the development of the class struggle since they were contaminated by reformism in the same way as Social-Democracy.

However, the terrible pressure of events – the reversal in the revolutionary wave, the socio-economic stabilisation of capitalism and the isolation of the Russian revolution – led the CI, under the impetus of the Bolsheviks, to hold on to the old radical Social-Democratic positions rather than complete the political deepening necessary to understand the changes in the dynamic, content and form taken by the class struggle in the decadent phase of capitalism. Unsurprisingly, we can see a clear regression in the programmatic theses which were adopted at the CI’s Second Congress, despite the opposition of many communist organisations and not least of the representatives of the most advanced fractions of the Western European proletariat. So, without any argumentation and in complete contradiction to the general orientation developed at the First Congress and to the concrete reality of the struggle, the Bolsheviks defended the idea that “Though, during the war, the trade unions influenced the working masses in the interests of the bourgeoisie, they are now instruments for the destruction of capitalism” (ibid, p.107)! This assertion was immediately strongly qualified[8] [750] but the door was now open to all the tactical expedients of “re-conquering” the unions, putting their backs to the wall or developing a united front tactic, etc., all on the pretext that communists are still a minority, that the situation is more and more unfavourable, that it is necessary to “be with the masses”, etc.

The evolution of the position on the union question, which we have briefly outlined above, was similar in many details for the other political positions of the Communist International. Having made important advances and theoretical clarifications, it regressed with the retreat in the revolutionary wave internationally. It is not for us to set ourselves up as judges of history and award good and bad marks but to understand a process in which each took part with their strengths and weaknesses. Faced with growing isolation and under the pressure of the retreat in social movements, each party tried to adopt an attitude and positions determined by the specific experience of the working class in each country. The predominant influence of the Bolsheviks in the Communist International, the active factor in its constitution, was gradually transformed into a hindrance to clarification, crystallising its positions essentially on the experience of the Russian revolution alone.[9] [751]

The parliamentary question

The position on parliamentary politics, like that on the union question, developed from a tendency towards clarification, including the theses on parliamentarism adopted at the second congress of the CI to a second period marked by a tendency to withdraw from these theses.[10] [752] But even more than the union question, which we have concentrated on in this article, the parliamentary question was seen in the framework of the evolution of capitalism from its ascendant to its decadent phase. So, we can read in the theses of the Second Congress that: “The struggle for communism, however, must be based on a theoretical analysis of the character of the present epoch (the culminating point of capitalism, its imperialist self-negation and self-destruction, the uninterrupted spread of civil war etc.) …The attitude of the Third International to parliament is determined not by new theoretical ideas, but by the change in the role of parliament itself. In the preceding historical epoch parliament was an instrument of the developing capitalist system, and as such played a role that was in a certain sense progressive. In modern conditions of unbridled imperialism parliament has become a weapon of falsehood, deception and violence, a place of enervating chatter. In the face of the devastation, embezzlement, robbery and destruction committed by imperialism, parliamentary reforms which are wholly lacking in consistency, durability and order lose all practical significance for the working masses… At the present time parliament cannot be used by the Communists as the arena in which to struggle for reforms and improvements in working-class living standards as was the case at certain times during the past epoch. The focal point of political life has shifted fully and finally beyond the boundaries of parliament. … The comparative unimportance of this question [revolutionary parliamentarism] should always be kept in view. Since the focal point of the struggle for state power lies outside parliament the questions of proletarian dictatorship and mass struggle for its realisation are, obviously, immeasurably more important than the question of how to use the parliamentary system” (“The Communist Party and Parliament” in Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos p.97-99, our emphasis in bold). Unfortunately these theses were not coherent with their own theoretical underpinnings since, despite these clear statements, the Communist International did not draw out all the implications inasmuch as it required all the Communist Parties to make “revolutionary” propaganda in the parliamentary tribune and elections.

The national question

The Manifesto adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International was particularly clear-sighted on the national question, announcing that in the new period opened by the First World War: “The national state which gave a mighty impulsion to capitalist development has become too narrow for the further development of productive forces”. In consequence “This renders all the more precarious the position of small states, hemmed in by the major powers of Europe and scattered through other sections of the world”. To the extent that the little states were themselves constrained to develop their own imperialist policies: “These small states, which have arisen at different times as fragments chipped from bigger ones, as so much small change in payment for various services rendered and as strategic buffers, retain their own dynasties, their own ruling cliques, their own imperialist pretensions, their own diplomatic intrigues (…) the number of small states has increased; out of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, out of portions of the former Czarist empire, new states have been carved, which were no sooner born than they flung themselves at one another’s throats over the question of state boundaries”. Taking account of these weaknesses in the context of a system which had become too narrow for the expansion of the productive forces, national independence was described as “illusory”, leaving the small nations no choice but to play the game of the great powers and sell themselves to the highest bidder in the world inter-imperialist relations: “their phantom independence rested on the selfsame thing as the equilibrium of Europe: the uninterrupted antagonism between the two imperialist camps. The war has disrupted this equilibrium. By giving at first an enormous preponderance to Germany, the war compelled the small states to seek their salvation under the magnanimous wings of German militarism. After Germany was crushed, the bourgeoisie of the small states, together with their respective patriotic “Socialists,” turned their faces to the victorious Allied imperialism and began seeking guarantees for their continued independent existence in the hypocritical points of the Wilsonian program (…) The Allied imperialists are meanwhile preparing such combinations of small powers, both old and new, as would be bound to themselves through the hold of mutual hatreds and common impotence” (Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World [753]).

This clarity was unfortunately abandoned from the Second Congress onwards with the adoption of the Theses on the national and colonial questions since it was no longer considered that all nations, however small, were forced to conduct an imperialist policy and tie themselves to the strategy of the great powers. In fact nations were divided into two groups “…an equally clear distinction between the interests of the oppressed, dependent and subject nations and the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations…” (“Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions”, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos, p.77) implying that “Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International has the obligation (…) of supporting every liberation movement in the colonies not only in words but in deeds (…) Those Party members who fundamentally reject the conditions and Theses laid down by the Communist International are to be expelled from the Party” (“Theses on the Conditions of Admission to the Communist International”, p.94 and 97). Furthermore, and contrary to what was correctly stated in the Manifesto of the First Congress, the national state was no longer considered as “too narrow for the further development of productive forces” since “Foreign domination obstructs the free development of social forces; its overthrow is therefore the first step toward a revolution in the colonies” (“Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Questions”, in Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, p.220). At this level we can see that the abandonment of the deepening of the implications of the analysis of the entry of the capitalist system into decadence progressively leads the Communist International to the slippery slope of opportunism.

Conclusion

We have no wish to claim that the Communist International had a full and complete understanding of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production. As we will see in the next article, the Third International and all its component parties were, to one degree or another, certainly conscious that a new epoch had been born, that capitalism had served its time, that the task of the hour was no longer the winning of reforms but the conquest of power, that the capitalist system had become obsolete and that the class which represented it, the bourgeoisie, had become reactionary, at least in the central countries, etc. It was one of the weaknesses of the CI that it was not able to draw out all the lessons of the new period, which had opened with the First World War, on the form and the content of the proletarian struggle. Rather than the strength and weakness of the CI and its component parties, this weakness was above all the fruit of the general difficulties encountered by the movement as a whole: the profound division of revolutionary forces at the moment of the treason of Social-Democracy and the necessity for rebuilding them in the difficult conditions of the war and the immediate post-war period; the division between the victorious and defeated countries which did not provide favourable conditions for the generalisation of the revolutionary movement; the rapid regression of the movements and struggles as each country showed a greater or lesser ability to stabilise the economic and social situation after the war; etc. This weakness could only grow and it fell to the left fractions which detached themselves from the CI to continue the work that remained to be carried out.

C.McI