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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