Twenty years ago one of the most important events of the second half of the twentieth century occurred: the collapse of the imperialist bloc of the East and of the European Stalinist regimes, including the principal one: the USSR.
This event was used by the ruling class to unleash one of the most pernicious and massive ideological campaigns against the working class. By once again fraudulently identifying Stalinism with communism, by making the economic bankruptcy and barbarity of the Stalinist regimes the inevitable consequence of the proletarian revolution, the bourgeoisie aimed to turn the working class away from any revolutionary perspective and deal a decisive blow to the struggles of the working class.
At the same time, the bourgeoisie tried to profit from a second big lie: with the disappearance of Stalinism, capitalism was going to enter a period of peace and prosperity and would finally really blossom out. The future, the promise went, would be radiant.
March 6, 1991, George Bush Senior, President of the United States of America, buoyed up from his recent victory over the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein, announced the arrival of a "New World Order" and the advent of a "world of united nations, freed from the impasse of the Cold War, about to realise the historic vision of their founders: a world in which liberty and the rights of man are respected by all nations."
Twenty years later, you could almost laugh, if the world disorder and the proliferation of conflicts to the four corners of the globe hadn't spread so much death and misery. And in this respect, the balance sheet gets heavier year after year.
As to prosperity, forget it! In fact, since the summer 2007 and above all 2008, "All of a sudden, words and phrases like ‘prosperity', ‘growth', ‘triumph of liberalism' were discretely dropped. At the grand banqueting table of the capitalist economy there now sat a guest that they thought they had banished forever: the crisis, the spectre of a new great depression comparable to the one in the 1930s."[1] Yesterday, the collapse of Stalinism signified the triumph of liberal capitalism. Today it's the same liberalism that is accused of all evils by all the politicians and specialists, even among its most desperate defenders, such as President Sarkozy and Prime Minister Gordon Brown!
One obviously can't choose anniversary dates and the least that one can say is that this one falls badly for the bourgeoisie. If, on this occasion, it is deliberately avoiding its campaign on "the death of communism" and "the end of the class struggle", it is not that it lacks the desire to do so but that the calamitous situation of capitalism being what it is, such a campaign would run the risk of revealing the true nature of these ideological themes more completely. That is why the bourgeoisie is sparing us from big celebrations of the collapse of the "last world tyranny" and of the great victory of "freedom". Instead of that, apart from some perfunctory historic references, there's neither euphoria nor exaltation.
If history has settled the reality of the peace and prosperity that capitalism was supposed to offer us, this doesn't mean that the poverty and barbarity we are seeing today is appearing clearly in the eyes of the exploited as ineluctable consequences of the insurmountable contradictions of capitalism. In fact, the propaganda of the bourgeoisie today is oriented towards the necessity to "humanise" and to "reform" capitalism, and this has the objective of putting off for as long as possible the development of consciousness of this reality by the exploited. So, since reality only reveals part of the lie, the other part, the identification of Stalinism with communism, still continues today to weigh on the minds of the living, even if it is evidently in a less massive and brutal fashion that during the 90s. Faced with this, it's necessary to recall some historical elements.
"All the countries under Stalinist regimes are in the same dead-end. Their economies have been particularly brutally hit by the world capitalist crisis, not only because of their backwardness, but because they are totally incapable of adapting to an exacerbation of inter-capitalist competition. The attempts to improve their competitiveness by introducing some of the ‘classical' norms of capitalist management have only succeeded in provoking a still greater shambles, as can be seen from the utter failure of ‘Perestroika' in the USSR. (...) What's in store for the Stalinist regimes though is not a ‘peaceful', still less an economic ‘recovery'. With the deepening of the worldwide crisis of capitalism, these countries have entered a period of convulsions to an extent unheard of in the past which is nonetheless rich in violent upheavals."[2]
This catastrophic situation of the eastern countries didn't prevent the bourgeoisie presenting them as new, immense markets to be exploited once they had been completely liberated from the yoke of "communism". To achieve this it was necessary for them to develop a modern economy, which would have the added virtue of filling the order books of western businesses for decades to come. Reality was somewhere else: there was certainly much to construct, but no one to pay for it.
The expected boom came to nothing. Quite the contrary, the economic difficulties that appeared in the west were, without the slightest scruple, put down to the cost of assimilating the backward countries of the east. It was the same thing with the inflation that was becoming a difficult problem for Europe. From 1993, the situation wasn't long in turning into an open recession on the Old Continent.[3] Thus, the new configuration of the world market, with the complete integration of these countries, changed absolutely nothing about the fundamental laws that govern capitalism. In particular, debt continued to occupy an even more important place in financing the economy, rendering it increasingly vulnerable even to minor cases of destabilisation. The bourgeoisie's illusions disappeared in front of the hard economic reality of its system. Then in December 1994, Mexico cracked, a result of an influx of speculators fleeing the crisis in Europe: the Peso collapsed and risked bringing a good part of the economies of the American continent down with it. The threat was real and well understood. The United States mobilised 50 billion dollars in order to underwrite the Mexican currency. At the time it seemed a fantastic amount of money... Twenty years later, the United States has used forty times that amount for its economy alone!
From 1997, crisis in Asia: this time it's the currencies of South East Asia that brutally collapse. These famous Dragons and Tigers, model countries for economic development, show-case of the ‘new world order' where even the smallest countries have access to prosperity, also submitted to the severity of capitalism's laws.
The allure of these economies had attracted a speculative bubble, which burst at the beginning of 1997. In less than a year, every country of the region was hit. Twenty-four million people were made unemployed within a year. Revolts and lootings multiplied, causing the deaths of 1,200 people. The number of suicides exploded. In the year following, the risk of international contagion was constant, with the appearance of serious difficulties in Russia.
The Asian model, the famous "third way", was dead and buried alongside the model of "communism". It was necessary to find something else in order to prove that capitalism was the sole creator of wealth on the Earth. This something else was the economic miracle of the Internet. Since everything in the real world was collapsing, then let's invest in the virtual world! Since lending to the rich was no longer sufficient, let's lend to those that promise us they will become rich! Capitalism has a horror of the void, above all in its wallet, and when the world economy seems incapable of the greater profits corresponding to the insatiable needs of capital, when nothing more profitable exists, they invent a new market out of thin air. The system worked for a while, stocks rose on share dealings that bore no reasonable link to reality. Companies lost billions of dollars on the market. The bubble had been inflated, and then it burst. The madness gripped a bourgeoisie totally deluded about the everlasting life of the "new economy", to the point of dragging down the old one. The traditional sectors of the economy were also involved here, hoping to find the profitability lost in their traditional forms of activity. The "new economy" overran the old,[4] and then took it down the pan.
The fall was hard. The collapse of such a contrivance, based on nothing other than mutual confidence between actors hoping that no one would flinch, could only be brutal. The bursting of the bubble provoked losses of 148 billion dollars in the companies of the sector. Bankruptcies multiplied, the survivors' assets depreciating at a stroke by hundreds of billions of dollars. At least half a million jobs were lost in the telecommunications sector. The "new economy" was shown to be no more fruitful than the old and the funds that got out of the mire in time had to find another sector in which to invest.
And it went into bricks and mortar. Finally, after lending to countries living beyond their means, after lending to companies built up on thin air, who was there left to lend to? The bourgeoisie has no limit to its thirst for profits. Henceforth, the old adage "you can only lend to the rich" would be definitely ditched, since there are not enough rich people to go round. The bourgeoisie thus went on to attack a new market... the poor. Beyond the evident cynicism of this approach, there is also the total contempt for the lives of people who became the prey of these vultures. The loans arranged were underwritten by the value of the property. But when these properties rose in value with the rise of the market, it provided the opportunity for families to increase their debt even more, placing them in a potentially disastrous situation. Because when the model collapsed, which it did in 2008, the bourgeoisie cried for its own dead, the merchant banks and other financial houses, but it forgot the millions of families who had everything that they possessed - although that was hardly worth very much at all - taken from them, and who were then thrown out onto the street or into improvised shanty-towns.
What followed is sufficiently well known for us not to return to it here in detail, but it can be summed up perfectly in a few words: an open world recession, the most serious since the Second World War, throwing millions of workers onto the street in every country, a considerable increase in poverty.
The global imperialist configuration was evidently overturned by the collapse of the eastern bloc. Before this event, the world was divided into two rival blocs constituted around their leading powers. The whole period after World War II, up to the collapse of the eastern bloc, was marked by very strong tensions between the blocs, taking the form of open conflicts through their pawns in the Third World. To cite just some of them: war in Korea at the beginning of the 1950s, the Vietnam War throughout the 60s and into the middle of the 70s, war in Afghanistan from1979, etc. The collapse of the Stalinist edifice in 1989 was in fact the product of its economic and military inferiority faced with the opposing bloc.
Through western propaganda, the "Evil Empire" of the Russian bloc had always been presented as the "aggressor", the warlike bloc against the "peaceful" west. So, with the collapse of the Russian bloc, shouldn't that mean the end to aggression and war? This, however, was the analysis of the ICC defended in January 1990: "The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and the resulting effects on the American gendarme vis-à-vis its main ‘partners' of yesterday, opens the door to unleashing a whole series of more local rivalries. These rivalries and confrontations cannot, at this present time, degenerate into a world conflict (...) On the other hand, from the fact of the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the presence of the blocs, these conflicts risk becoming more violent and more numerous, particularly in the zones where the proletariat is weakest."[5] It wasn't long before world events confirmed this analysis, notably with the first Gulf War in January 1991 and the war in ex-Yugoslavia from the autumn of the same year. Since then bloody and barbaric confrontations have not ceased. There's too many to enumerate here but we can underline some in particular: the pursuit of the war in ex-Yugoslavia, which saw the direct engagement, under the aegis of NATO, of the United States and the principal European powers in 1999; the two wars in Chechnya; the numerous wars ravaging the African continent (Rwanda, Somalia, Congo, Sudan, etc); the military operations of Israel against Lebanon and, quite recently, against the Gaza Strip; the war in Afghanistan of 2001 which is still going on today; the war in Iraq of 2003 whose consequences continue to weigh dramatically on this country, but also on the initiator of this war, American imperialism.
The following quote, analysing and denouncing Stalinism, was part of a supplement to our intervention which was widely distributed in January 1990 (the supplement in question is published as a whole in the article ‘1989-1999 - the world proletariat faced with the collapse of the eastern bloc and the bankruptcy of Stalinism' in International Review n° 99). Considering that, 20 years afterwards, this position remains perfectly valid, we are reproducing it here without any changes:
"This is how the regime of Stalinist terror was set up, on the ruins of the 1917 October revolution. Thanks to this negation of communism - ‘socialism in one country' - the USSR became once again a wholly capitalist state where the proletariat was subjected at gunpoint to the interests of the national capital, in the name of the defence of the ‘socialist fatherland'.
"Thanks to the power of the workers' councils, proletarian October brought World War I to a halt. The Stalinist counter-revolution, by destroying all revolutionary thought, by muzzling every attempt at class struggle, by subjecting the whole of social life to terror and militarisation, heralded the second world slaughter.
"Each step in Stalinism's development on the international scene during the 1930s was in fact marked by imperialist bargaining with the major capitalist powers, which were preparing to subject Europe once again to blood and destruction. Having used his alliance with German imperialism to thwart the latter's expansion towards the East, Stalin turned his coat in the mid-30s to ally with the ‘democratic' bloc (in 1934, Russia joined the ‘den of thieves' as Lenin had described the League of Nations). 1935 saw the Stalin-Laval pact between the USSR and France.
"The CPs took part in the ‘Popular Fronts' and in the Spanish Civil War, in the course of which the Stalinists did not hesitate to massacre any workers or revolutionaries who questioned their policies. On the eve of war, Stalin turned his coat yet again and sold the USSR's neutrality to Hitler, in exchange for several territories, before finally joining the ‘Allied' camp in the imperialist massacre of World War II, where the Stalinist state was to sacrifice the lives of more than 20 million of its own citizens. This was the result of all Stalinism's sordid dealings with the different imperialist sharks of Western Europe. Over heaps of corpses, Stalinism built its empire, and imposed its will on all the states that the treaty of Yalta brought under its exclusive domination.
"But although Stalin was a ‘gift from heaven' for world capitalism in suppressing Bolshevism, one individual alone, however paranoid, was not the architect of this terrible counter-revolution. The Stalinist state was controlled by the same ruling class as everywhere else: the national bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie was reconstituted as the revolution degenerated from within, not from the old Tsarist ruling class which the revolution had eliminated in 1917, but on the basis of the parasitic bureaucracy of the state apparatus which under Stalin's leadership was increasingly identified with the Bolshevik Party.
"At the end of the 1920s, this Party-state bureaucracy wiped out all those sectors capable of forming a private bourgeoisie, and with which it had been allied (speculators and NEP landowners). In doing so, it took control of the economy. These conditions explain why, contrary to what happened in other countries, state capitalism in Russia took on this totalitarian and caricatural form. State capitalism is capitalism's universal mode of domination in its period of decadence, when capitalism has to keep its grip on the whole of social life.
"It gives rise to parasitic sectors everywhere. But in other capitalist countries, state control over the whole of society is not hostile to the existence of private, competitive sectors, preventing the complete domination of the economy by its parasitic sectors. The particular form of state capitalism in the USSR was characterised by an extreme development of the parasitic sector, which sprang from the state bureaucracy. Their only concern was not to make capital productive by taking account of market laws, but to fill their own pockets, even to the detriment of the national economy. From the viewpoint of the functioning of capitalism, this form of state capitalism was an aberration which could not but collapse as the world economic crisis accelerated. The collapse of the state capitalism which emerged from the Russian counter-revolution has signalled the irredeemable bankruptcy of the whole brutal ideology which, for more than half a century, had held the Stalinist regime together and held sway over millions of human beings.
"This is how Stalinism was born; this is why it died. It appeared on the historical stage covered in the filth and blood of the counter-revolution. And covered in filth and blood, it is now leaving it, as we can see yet again in the horrible events in Romania which do no more than announce the imminence of still worse massacres at the heart of Stalinism: in the USSR itself.
"Whatever the bourgeoisie and its venal media may say, this monstrous hydra has nothing whatever in common with the October revolution, either in form or content. The proletariat must become fully aware of this radical break, this total antagonism between Stalinism and the October revolution, if it is not to fall victim to another form of bourgeois dictatorship: that of the ‘democratic' state."
The world more and more resembles a desert with billions of human beings just about surviving. Each day, close to 20,000 children die of hunger in the world, several thousand jobs are lost, leaving whole families in distress; wages are cut for those who still have a job.
Here's the "new world order" promised nearly twenty years ago by George Bush Senior. It's closer to absolute chaos! This terrifying spectacle totally invalidates any idea that the collapse of the eastern bloc marked the "end of history" (with the sub-plot that it was the beginning of the eternal history of capitalism) as the "philosopher" Francis Fukuyama claimed at the time. It was rather an important stage in the decadence of capitalism: as the system more and more came up against its historic limits, its most fragile parts definitively collapsed. There is nothing healthy for the system of capitalism in the collapse of the eastern bloc. The limits are still there and they still threaten the very heart of capitalism. Each new crisis is more serious than the last.
That's why the sole lesson concerning the last twenty years is this: there can be no hope of peace and prosperity within capitalism. The stakes are, and will remain, the destruction of capitalism or the destruction of humanity.
If the campaigns on the "death of communism" dealt a severe blow to the consciousness of the working class, the latter is far from beaten, and it can still regain lost ground and renew the development of class struggle at the international level. And indeed, since the beginning of the 2000s, with the campaign of the death of communism and the end of class struggle getting used up, and in the face of growing attacks on its conditions of life, the working class has rediscovered the road to the class struggle. This recovery of class struggle, which here and now is expressing itself in the development of politicised minorities on an international scale, is preparing the ground for massive struggles which, in the future, will once again pose the real perspective for the proletariat and humanity: the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism.
GDS, 1/11/09.
[1]. Resolution on the International Situation of the 18th Congress of the ICC published in International Review n° 138.
[2]. "Capitalist convulsions and workers' struggles", International Review n° 59.
[3]. See for example "La récession de 1993 réexaminée", Persée, journal of the OECD, 1994, volume 49, n° 1.
[4]. They even bought up parts of it: the acquisition of Time Warner by the Internet company AOL, remains a symbol of the irrationality that gripped the bourgeoisie at this time.
[5]. "After the collapse of the eastern bloc, destabilisation and chaos", International Review n° 61.
In the first part of this series on the question of the environment, published in International Review n° 135, we looked at the current state of affairs and tried to show the nature of the threat facing the whole of humanity with the development on a planetary scale of phenomena such as:
We continue this series with a second article in which we will try to show that the problems of the environment are not the fault of a few individuals or enterprises which don't respect the law - even though, of course, particular individuals and enterprises do bear a level of responsibility - but that it is capitalism, with its logic of maximum profit, which is really responsible.
We will thus try to show, through a series of examples, how it is the specific mechanisms of capitalism which generate the most decisive ecological problems, independent of the will of this or that capitalist. Furthermore, the widely held idea that scientific developments will shield us from natural catastrophes and help us avoid environmental problems will be firmly opposed. In this article, we will show, by quoting at length from Bordiga, how modern capitalist technology is not really synonymous with safety and how the development of the sciences and of scientific research is not motivated by the satisfaction of human need but are subordinated to the capitalist imperative of realising the maximum profit; that they are subjected to the demands of capital and competition on the market and, when necessary, in the field of war. In a third and final article we will analyse the responses given by the different "Green" movements in order to demonstrate their total ineffectiveness, despite the good intentions of many of those who are active inside these movements, and to show that the only possible solution is the world communist revolution.
Who is responsible for the various environmental problems? The answer to this question is of the greatest importance, not only from the ethical or moral point of view, but also and above all because the correct or erroneous identification of the origin of the problem will lead either to the correct solution of the problem or into an impasse. We are first going to comment on a series of commonplaces, false responses or partial truths, none of which really succeed in identifying the origin of and responsibility for the growing degradation of the environment that we are facing every day, with the aim of showing how this process is the consequence, neither conscious nor willed, but objective, of the capitalist system.
"The problem is not as serious as they would have us believe"
Today as each government tries to be greener than the next, this idea, which was the prevailing one for many decades, is no longer the most common one to come from the mouths of the politicians. It nevertheless remains a classic position in the world of business, which, faced with the threat to workers, the population, or the environment posed by a particular form of economic activity, tends to minimise the gravity of the problem, quite simply because ensuring the safety of labour means spending more and extracting less profit from the workers. We see this every day with the hundreds of deaths at work, something that employers generally see as the result of Fate, when in fact it is a real product of the capitalist exploitation of labour power
"The problem exists but its origins are controversial"
For some, the huge quantity of waste produced by today's society is the fruit of "our" frenzy to consume. But the real issue here is an economic policy which, in order to make commodities more competitive, has for decades tried to minimise costs by using non-biodegradable packaging (see the previous article in this series).
Again, for some, the pollution of the planet is the result of a lack of civic responsibility, so the answer is to promote campaigns for cleaning up beaches, parks, etc, and for educating the population. In the same vein, governments are criticised for their inability to ensure that the laws of marine transport and so on are properly enforced. Or the problem is the mafia and its dangerous traffic in waste, as though it was the mafia which produced the waste and not the world of industry which, in order to reduce the costs of production, uses the mafia to do its dirty work. But then we are told: the responsibility may lie with industrialists, but only with the bad ones....
When, finally, we are faced with an episode like the fire at Thyssen Krupp in December 2007 in Turin, which cost the lives of 7 workers because of the total neglect of the norms of fire safety rules, there was a considerable wave of solidarity, but the dominant idea that arose was that if there are disasters, it's simply because there are unscrupulous businesses which try to enrich themselves at others' expense. But is this really the case? Are there, on the one side, nasty capitalists and on the other side those who are responsible capitalists who manage their enterprises well?
All the societies based on exploitation, which came before capitalism, have made their contribution to the pollution of the planet, generally in relation to the process of production. Certain societies have exploited the resources at their disposal so excessively that they disappeared when the point of exhaustion was reached, as is probably the case with Easter Island (see the first article in this series). However, the damage cause by these societies could never put the very survival of life on the planet into question, as is the case today with capitalism. One reason for this is that having conquered the entire planet, the damage inflicted by capitalism now affects the entire globe. But this isn't an explanation in itself because the development of the productive forces does not necessarily mean that they have to escape human control. The key question here is how these productive forces are used and managed by society. Now, capitalism appears as the culmination of the historic development of the commodity, to the point where it constitutes a system of universal commodity production where everything is for sale. If society is plunged into chaos by the domination of commodity relations, which involves not just the phenomenon of pollution but also the accelerating impoverishment of the planet's resources, a growing vulnerability to "natural" disasters etc, then it's for a whole number of reasons which can be briefly summarised here:
It is this necessity which, irrespective of the greater or lesser moral rectitude of this or that capitalist, forces them to adapt their enterprises to the logic of the maximum exploitation of the working class.
This leads to a vast waste and spoliation of human labour power and of the planet's resources, as Marx already showed in Capital Volume 1, chapter 15, section 10: "Modern Industry and Agriculture":
"In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman's individual vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of the rural labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer."
The irrationality and absurdity of production under capitalism is shown by the fact that you can often find enterprises which make highly polluting chemical products and systems for purifying the soil and water of these same pollutants; others who make cigarettes and products that help you give up smoking; and others who control armaments sectors while at the same time turning out pharmaceuticals and medicines.
These are peaks which were not reached by previous societies, where goods were essentially produced for their use value - useful either for the producers, the exploited, or for enhancing the splendour of the ruling class.
The real nature of commodity production prevents the capitalists from being interested in the usefulness, the type or the composition of the goods produced. The only real interest is how to make money from them. This mechanism explains why so many commodities only have a limited usefulness, when they are not altogether useless.
Capitalist society is essentially based on competition; even when capitalists come to circumstantial agreements, they remain fundamentally and ferociously in competition with each other. The logic of the market implies that the good fortune of one means the bad fortune of another. This means that each capitalist produces for himself, that each one is the rival to all the rest and that there cannot be a real planning by all the capitalists locally or internationally, but only a permanent competition with winners and losers. And in this war, one of the losers is precisely nature.
In fact, in the choice of a site for a new industrial installation, or land for agricultural production, the enterprise only take its immediate interests into account and no place is reserved for ecological considerations. There is no organ centralised at the international level with the authority to give an orientation or impose limits and criteria to be respected. Under capitalism, decisions are taken solely with a view to realising the maximum profit, so that a particular capitalist can produce and sell in the most profitable manner or in the greatest quantities, or so that the state can impose norms which correspond to the interests of the national capital and thus of the totality of national capitalists.
Of course at the level of each country there is legislation which imposes certain constraints. When they become too restrictive, it is not uncommon for businesses to export part of its production to countries where the rules are less severe and where it can make a bigger profit. Thus, Union Carbide, an American multinational chemical firm, implanted one of its enterprises in Bhopal in India, without equipping itself with a refrigerating system. In 1984, this factory allowed a cloud of toxic chemicals of 40 tons of pesticides which either immediately or in the years that followed killed 16,000 people and caused irreversible damage to a million others (see previous article). As for regions and seas in the third world, they often constitute a cheap dumping ground, legal or not, for established companies in the more advanced countries, who use them to get rid of their dangerous or toxic waste, because it would cost them much more to dispose of the waste in their own countries.
As long as there is no industrial and agricultural planning, coordinated and centralised on an international scale, able to harmonise the needs of today with safeguarding the environment of tomorrow, then the mechanisms of capitalism will continue to destroy nature with all the dramatic consequences we have seen.
It is widely held that the responsibility for this state of affairs lies with the multinationals or a particular sector of industry, or it is simply attributed to the anonymous mechanisms of the free market.
But could the state put an end to this madness by being more interventionist? No, because the state can do no more than "regulate" this anarchy. By defending national interests, the state serves to strengthen competition. Contrary to the demands of the NGOs or the "anti-capitalist" movement, increased intervention by the state - something which in any case has never really let up despite appearances in the hey-day of "neo-liberalism", and which is now being shown by all the state interventionism we've seen in response to the current acceleration of the economic crisis - is not capable of overcoming the problem of capitalist anarchy.
The only concern of the capitalists is, as we have seen, to sell at a maximum profit. But the issue here is not the egoism of this or that capitalist but a law of the system from which no enterprise, large or small, can withdraw. The growing weight of the cost of industrial equipment means that the huge investments involved can only be made profitable by very widespread sales.
For example, Airbus, which makes planes, has to sell at least 600 of its gigantic A380 models before making a profit. Similarly, the car industry has to sell hundreds of thousands of cars to make up for the amount spent on the equipment needed to build them. In short, each capitalist has to sell as much as possible and is constantly on the hunt for new markets. But to make use of them he has to outdo his rivals on a glutted market, which means spending huge amounts on advertising, an enormous waste of human labour and of natural resources, for example the number of trees used to make millions of tons of sales brochures and leaflets.
These laws of the economy (which, by enforcing the reduction of costs, imply a diminution of the quality of products) mean that the capitalist is not at all concerned about the composition of his products and whether or not they may be dangerous. So although the risk of fossil fuels to health (as a cause of cancer for example) have been known for a long time, industry takes no real measures to palliate them. The risks associated with asbestos have also been known about for a long time. But only the illness and deaths of thousands of workers finally compelled the industry to react. Many foods are stuffed full of sugar, salt and monosodium glutamate in order to increase sales, with considerable consequences for health. An incredible quantity of additives have been put in food without any real understanding of the risk for consumers, even though many cancers can be attributed to diet.
One of the most irrational elements of the present system of production is the fact that commodities travel all round the planet before arriving on the market as a finished product. This is not linked to the nature of the commodities or a demand of production, but simply to the fact that it's cheaper to apply certain processes in particular countries. A well-known example is that of yoghurt: the milk is transported across the Alps, from Germany to Italy, where it is transformed into yoghurt and then transported back from Italy to Germany. Another example is the car, where very often each separate component comes from a different country in the world before it is actually assembled. Prior to being put on the market, its components have often travelled for thousands of miles by various means. In the same way, electronic goods or domestic appliances are made in China because the wages there are very low and because there is hardly any environmental protection, even when, from a technological point of view, it would have been easy to have made them in the countries where they are being sold. Often, the production process begins in the countries where they are going to be consumed before being relocated to other countries where the costs of production, above all wages, are lower.
We also have the example of wines that are produced in Chile, Australia or California and sold on European markets while grapes grown in Europe rot on the vine as a result of overproduction; or again there is the example of apples imported from Africa when European cultivators don't know what to do with their excess apple crop.
Thus, as a result of the logic of maximum profit to the detriment of rationality and the minimum expenditure of human energy and natural resources, commodities are made somewhere on the planet and then transported to another part in order to be sold. So there's nothing surprising about the fact that commodities with the same technological efficiency, like cars, are made in Europe to then be exported to Japan and the USA, while others cars are being made in Japan or Korea to be sold on the European market. This network of transporting commodities which are very often very similar to each other and which go from one country to another simply to obey the logic of profit, of competition and the laws of the market, is a total aberration and has disastrous consequences for the environment.
A rational planning of production and distribution would be able to make these goods available without going through these irrational journeys, expressions of the folly of capitalist production.
The destruction of the environment resulting from the pollution caused by the hypertrophy of transport is not a merely contingent phenomenon because it has its deepest roots in the antagonism between town and country. Originally, the division of labour within nations separated industry and commerce from agricultural labour. From this was born the opposition between town and country with the resulting conflicts of interests. Under capitalism this opposition has reached a paroxysm[1].
In the period of the agricultural exploitations of the Middle Ages, devoted to subsistence production, there was little necessity to transport commodities over long distances. At the beginning of the 19th century, when workers often lived close to the factory or mine, it was possible to go there on foot. Since then, however, the distance between your workplace and your home has increased. Furthermore, the concentration of capital in certain localities (as in the case of enterprises implanted in certain industrial zones or other inhabited areas, in order to take advantage of financial exemptions or low land prices), as well as deindustrialisation and the explosion of unemployment linked to the suppression of many kinds of jobs, have profoundly altered the whole physiognomy of transport.
Now, every day, hundreds of millions of workers have to travel long distances to get to work. Many of them have to use a car because public transport can't get them there.
But it's worse than that: the concentration of a vast mass of individuals in the same place has a series of consequences for public health and for the environment. Concentrations of 10-20 million people presuppose an accumulation of waste (faecal matter, household waste, emissions from vehicles, from industry and from heating) in a space which, however wide it is, is till going to be too small to really digest all this.
With the development of capitalism, agriculture has been through the most profound changes in its 10,000 year history. This has come about because, under capitalism, contrary to previous modes of production where agriculture responded directly to needs, now agricultural producers have to submit to the laws of the world market, which means producing at a lower cost. The necessity to increase profitability has catastrophic consequences for the quality of the soil.
These consequences, which are inseparably linked to the appearance of a strong antagonism between town and country, were already being denounced by the workers' movement in the 19th century. We can see in the quote that follows how Marx pointed to the direct link between the exploitation of the working class and the pillaging of the soil:
"On the other hand, large landed property reduces the agricultural population to a constantly falling minimum, and confronts it with a constantly growing industrial population crowded together in large cities. It thereby creates conditions which cause an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life. As a result, the vitality of the soil is squandered, and this prodigality is carried by commerce far beyond the borders of a particular state."[2]
Agriculture has had to constantly increase the use of chemical products in order to intensify the exploitation of the soil and to extend the area under cultivation. Thus, in most parts of the planet, peasants practice ways of cultivating which would be impossible without the import of large quantities of pesticides and fertilisers, or without irrigation, whereas in the past they could do without them or at least have less need for them. Planting medicinal herbs in California, citrus fruit in Israel, cotton around the Aral Sea in the former USSR, wheat in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, i.e. planting crops in regions which don't offer the natural conditions for growing them, leads to a huge waste of water. The list of examples is truly endless since today around 40% of agricultural products depend on irrigation, with the result that 75% of the world's drinkable water is used for agriculture.
For example, Saudi Arabia has spent a fortune on pumping water from an underground spring in order to make a million hectares of the desert capable of growing what. For each ton of what grown, the government supplies 3,000 cubic meters of water, more than three times what is actually necessary to grow this cereal. And the water comes from sources which are not fed by the rain. A third of all irrigation works on the planet use the water from underground springs. And even though these non-renewable sources are often drying up, the cultivators of the region of Gujarat, in India, for example, deprived of rainwater, persist in the raising of milk cows, which requires 2,000 litres of water to produce just one litre of milk! In certain regions of the Earth, the production of one kilo of rice requires up to 3,000 litres of water. The consequences of irrigation and the generalised use of chemical products are disastrous: the land is inundated with salt, or overdosed with fertilisers; desertification, soil erosion, major falls in the water levels in springs and consequent reduction in reserves of drinking water.
Waste, urbanisation, drought and pollution are sharpening the worldwide water crisis. Millions and millions of litres of water are evaporating by being transported in open irrigation canals. The zones around the mega-cities, above all, but also whole regions of the planet, are seeing their water reserves falling rapidly and irreversibly.
In the past, China was the country of hydrology. Its economy and civilisation developed thanks to its capacity to irrigate arid lands and to build barrages that could protect flood regions. But in today's China, the waters of the mighty Yellow River, the great artery of the North, don't reach the sea for several months of the year. 400-600 cities in China are short of water. A third of China's wells have run dry. In India, 30% of cultivable land is threatened with turning into salt. In the whole world, around 25% of agricultural land faces the same threat.
But the cultivation of agricultural products in regions which are not adapted to it because of their climate or the dryness of their soil is not the only absurdity of today's agriculture. In particular, because of the shortage of water, the control of rivers and dykes has become a basic strategic question, leading national states to intervene heavy-handedly with no regard for the impact on nature.
More than 80 countries have already expressed their concerns about water shortages. According to a UN forecast, the number of people facing water shortages will reach 5.4 billion in the next 25 years. Despite the availability of agricultural land, the really cultivatable areas are constantly diminishing as a result of salinity and other factors. In earlier societies, nomadic tribes had to move on when water became scarce. Under capitalism, the most basic foodstuffs are in short supply at the same time as we have overproduction. Thus, as a result of the enormous damage done by modern agriculture, food shortages are inevitable. After 1984, for example, the worldwide production of cereals did not keep up with the growth of the world population. In the space of 20 years, this production has fallen further from 343 kg per person per year to 303.
Thus the spectre that has always accompanied humanity since its origins, the nightmare of hunger, seems to be returning in force, not through lack of cultivable land or lack of tools and methods at the service of agriculture, but because of the totally irrational use of the planet's resources.
While it's true that the development of science and technology puts at humanity's disposal instruments which were unimaginable in the past and which make it possible to foresee natural disasters and prevent accidents, it's also true that the use of these technologies is expensive and is only put into effect when here is an economic benefit. We want to stress once again that it's not the wanton egoism of this or that enterprise which is the issue here, but a necessity imposed on any enterprise or country to reduce the cost of producing goods and services to a minimum in order to cope with global competition.
In our press, we have often raised this problem, showing how so-called natural disasters are not due to chance or Fate, but are the logical result of the reduction of preventative and safety measures in order to make cost savings. This is what we wrote for example about the catastrophe brought about by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005:
"The argument that this disaster was unanticipated is equally nonsense. For nearly 100 years, scientists, engineers and politicians have debated how to cope with New Orleans' vulnerability to hurricanes and flooding. In the mid-1990s, several rival plans were developed by different groups of scientists and engineers, which finally led to a 1998 proposal (during the Clinton administration) called Coast 2050. This plan called for strengthening and reengineering the existing levees, constructing a system of floodgates, and the digging of new channels that bring sediment-bearing water to restore the depleted wetland buffer zones in the delta, and had a price tag of $14 billion dollars to be invested over a ten year period. It failed to win approval in Washington, on Clinton's watch, not Bush's. Last year, the Army Corps requested $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans, but the government approved only $42 million. Yet at the same time, Congress approved $231 million for the construction of a bridge to a small, uninhabited island in Alaska."[3]
We also denounced the cynicism and responsibility of the bourgeoisie in the case of the 160,000 deaths that followed the tsunami on 26 December 2004.
In fact, it is clearly and officially recognised today that the tsunami alert was not sent out for fear of ...damaging the tourist industry! In other words: tens of thousand of human lives were sacrificed to defend sordid economic and financial interests.
The irresponsibility of governments in these situations is a new illustration of the mode of life of this class of sharks which runs the productive activity of society. Bourgeois states are ready to sacrifice as many human lives as is necessary to preserve capitalist exploitation and profit.
It is always capitalist interests which dictate the policy of the ruling class, and under capitalism prevention is not a profitable activity, as the media now recognise: "Countries in the region have so far turned a deaf ear to installing a warning system given the enormous financial cost. According to the experts, a warning system would cost millions of dollars, but it would make it possible to save thousands of human lives."[4]
We could also take the example of the oil that is spilled into the sea every year (both intentionally and accidentally); we are talking about 3 to 4 million tons of oil a year. According to a report by Legambiente: "In analysing the causes of these incidents, it is possible to estimate that 64% of these cases can be put down to human error, 16% to mechanical breakdown and 10% to the problem of the structure of boats, while 10% cannot be put down to a definite cause."[5]
We can easily understand that when human error is cited - as for example in the case of railway accidents attributed to train drivers - they are talking about errors made by an operative because he is working in conditions of exhaustion and stress. Furthermore, the oil companies have the habit of using old and decrepit tankers to carry oil because, if they sink, they will only incur the cost of a penalty, whereas acquiring a new boat would cost a lot more. This is why the spectacle of tankers which break up very near coastlines and spill their whole cargo has become a regular occurrence. We can say, taking all this into account, that at least 90% of "black seas" are the result of a total lack if vigilance by the oil companies, and that this, once again, is the result of their interest in keeping costs to the minimum and profits to the maximum.
We are indebted to Amadeo Bordiga[6], writing in the period following World War Two, for a systematic, incisive, profound and well-argued condemnation of the disasters caused by capitalism. In the preface to the book Drammi gialli e sinistri della moderna decadenza sociale, a collection of articles by Bordiga, we read: "as capitalism develops then rots on its feet, it more and more prostitutes techniques which could have a liberating role to its need for exploitation, domination and imperialist plunder, to the point where it transmits its own rottenness into them and turns them against the species. In all areas of daily life, in the ‘peaceful' phases between two imperialist massacres or in between two operations of repression, capitalism, ceaselessly spurred on by the search for a better rate of profit, crowds together, poisons, asphyxiates, mutilates and massacres human individuals through such prostituted technology...Neither is capitalism innocent of the so-called ‘natural' catastrophes. Without ignoring the existence of natural forces beyond human control, marxism shows that many disasters have been indirectly provoked or aggravated by social causes.... Not only does bourgeois civilisation directly provoke these catastrophes through its thirst for profit and the domination of business interests over the administrative machine...it also shows itself incapable of organising effective protection to the extent that prevention is not a profitable activity".[7]
Bordiga demystifies the legend that "contemporary capitalist society, with the joint development of sciences, technique and production will put the human species in an excellent position for struggling against the difficulties of the natural milieu."[8] In fact, as Bordiga adds "while it is true that the industrial and economic potential of the capitalist world is growing and not declining, it is also true that the greater its strength, the worse are the living conditions of masses of human beings in the face of natural and historical cataclysms"[9]. To demonstrate his argument, Bordiga analyses a whole series of disasters around the world, showing each time that they were not the result of chance or Fate, but of capitalism's intrinsic tendency to draw the maximum profit by investing as little as possible, as in the case of the sinking of the Flying Enterprise
"The brand new luxury boat made by Carlsen to shine like a mirror, and supposedly ultra-safe, had a flat keel...how was it that the very modern Flying Enterprise was constructed with a flat keel, like a lake-going barge? A newspaper put it succinctly: to reduce the costs of production...Here is the key to all modern applied science. Its studies, its research, its calculations, its innovations have one goal: to reduce costs and increase income. Hence the splendid salons with their mirrors and hangings to attract the better off customer, and the rotten stinginess of the mechanical structures in their weight and dimensions. This tendency characterises all modern engineering, from building to machinery, i.e. the key thing is to look rich, to ‘ape the bourgeois', using finishing touches and additions that any idiot can admire (given that he has a cheap culture acquired in the cinema or glossy magazines), while indecently skimping on the solidity of the basic structures which are invisible and incomprehensible to the profane".[10]
The fact that the disasters analysed by Bordiga did not have ecological consequences doesn't change anything. Through this example, and others referred to in the preface to his articles in Espèce humaine et croût terretre which we will come to, we can easily imagine the effects of the same capitalist logic when they operate in an area that has a direct impact on the environment, as for example in the maintenance of nuclear reactors:
"In the 1960s, several British Comet aircraft, the last word in sophisticated technology, exploded in mid-air, killing everyone on board: the long inquiry eventually revealed that the explosions were due to metal fatigue in the frame - the metal had been too thin because it was necessary to economise on metal, the effectiveness of reactors and production costs in general in order to increase profit. In 1974, the explosion of a DC10 over Ermenoville left more than 300 dead: it was known that the system for closing the baggage hold was defective but re-doing it would have cost money...but the most astonishing things was reported by the British journal The Economist (24.9.77): after the discovery of cracks in the metal of six Trident planes and the inexplicable explosion of a Boeing: according to the ‘new thinking' presiding over construction of transport planes, these were no longer taken in for a complete check-up after a certain number of flying hours but were marked ‘safe'...until the appearance of the first cracks resulting from metal fatigue. They could therefore be used to the maximum, whereas calling them in for a check-up would have meant the companies losing money."[11]
In the previous article in this series we have already referred to the case of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986. In essence, we're dealing with the same problem, and this also applies to the Three Mile Island disaster in the USA in 1979.
Understanding the role played by technology and science within capitalist society is of the greatest importance when it comes to answering whether they can constitute a starting point for preventing the advance of the ecological catastrophe we are facing and for struggling against some of the consequences that are already with us.
If, as we have seen, technology has been prostituted by the demands of the market, does the same go for science and scientific research? Is it possible for the latter to remain outside of any kind of partisan interest?
To reply to this question, we have to begin from the recognition that science is a productive force, that its development allows society as a whole to develop more rapidly, to increase its resources. The control of the development of the sciences is not and cannot be a matter of indifference to those who manage the economy, at the level both of the state and of business. This is why scientific research, and certain areas of it in particular, receives important financial backing. Science is not - and could never be in a class society like capitalism - a neutral terrain where there is freedom of research without interference by economic interests, for the simple reason that the ruling class has everything to gain from subjecting science to its own interests. We can really say that the development of science and of knowledge in the capitalist epoch did not come about as a result of an autonomous, independent dynamic but from the start has been subordinated to the objective of realising maximum profits.
This has very important consequences that only rarely emerge clearly. Let's take the development of modern medicine for example. The medical study and treatment of the human being has been fragmented into dozens of different specialisms, without any vision of the functioning of the human organism as a whole. Why have we come to this? Because the main goal of medicine in the capitalist world is not that each person lives well, but to repair the "human machine" when it breaks down and to fix it as quickly as possible so it can be sent back to work. In this framework, we can understand very well the massive resort to antibiotics and to diagnoses which always look for the causes of illnesses in specific factors rather than in the general conditions of life of the person being examined.
Another consequence of the dependence of scientific development on the logic of capital is that research is constantly pushed towards the production of new materials (more resistant, less expensive) whose impact from the toxicological point of view has never been seen as a big problem...for now, which means that little or nothing is spent on trying to eliminate or render harmless whatever is dangerous in these products. But then decades later the bill has to be paid, most often in damage to human beings.
The strongest link is the one between scientific research and the needs of the military sector and war. Here we can look at a few concrete examples of different scientific domains, in particular the one which might seem to be the "purest" scientifically speaking - mathematics
In the quotations that follow, we can see just how far scientific development has been subordinated to the control of the state and to military needs, to the point where, in the post-war period, we saw a whole blossoming of "commissions" of scientists who were working in secret for the military complex by giving a major part of their time to it, while other scientists knew nothing about the real aim of their research.
"The importance of mathematics for the offices of the war fleet and artillery required a specific education in mathematics; thus, from the 17th century on, the most important group that could claim a knowledge of mathematics, at least in its basics, was the army officers...In the Great War, many new weapons were created and perfected during the course of the war - planes, submarines, sonar equipment to combat the latter, chemical weapons. After some hesitation on the part of the military apparatuses, numerous scientists were employed to try to develop the military sphere, even if it was not to do research but to act as creative engineers at the highest level...In 1944, too late to be effective during the Second War, the Matematisches Forschunginstitut Oberwolfach was created in Germany. This was not set up for the pleasure of German mathematicians, but it was a very well thought-out structure, whose aim was to make the whole mathematics sector a ‘useful' one: the nucleus was made up of a small group of mathematicians who were completely up-to-date with the problems facing the military, and thus in a position to detect problems that could be solved mathematically. Around this nucleus, other mathematicians, very competent and very knowledgeable about the milieu of mathematics, had to translate these problems into mathematical ones and in this form pass them on to specialised mathematicians (who didn't need to understand the military problem behind it, or even to know about it). Afterwards, the result obtained, the solution would be passed back through the network.
"In the USA, a similar structure, even if it was somewhat improvised, was already operating around Marston Morse during the war. In the post-war period, an analogous structure, this time not improvised, was formed by the Wisconsin Army Mathematics Research Centre.
"The advantage of such structures is that they allow the military machine to exploit the abilities of many mathematicians without needing to ‘have them at home', with all that this implies: contracts, necessity for consensus and subordination, etc"[12]
In 1943, in the USA, research groups were set up, specifically focused on areas such as submarine warfare, the protection of naval convoys, the choice of air raid targets, or the tracking and intercepting of enemy aircraft. During the Second World War more than 700 mathematicians were employed in the UK, Canada and the US:
"Compared to British research, American research has from the beginning been characterised by a more sophisticated use of mathematics and, in particular, the calculation of probabilities and the more frequent recourse to modelling...operations research (which in the 1950s became an autonomous branch of applied mathematics) thus took its first steps through examining strategic difficulties and ways of optimising military resources. What are the best aerial combat tactics? What is the best way of deploying a certain number of soldiers at certain points of attack? How can we distribute rations to soldiers with the least possible waste?"[13]
"The Manhattan Project was the signal for a major turn-around, not only because it concentrated the work of thousands of scientists and technicians from numerous areas around a single project, directed and controlled by the military, but also because it represented an enormous leap for fundamental research, inaugurating what was thereafter known as Big Science...The enrolment of the scientific community for work on a precise project under the direct control of the military, had been an emergency measure, but couldn't last forever, for a number of reasons (the least of which was ‘freedom of research' claimed by the scientists). But the Pentagon could not afford to give up on this precious and indispensable cooperation of the scientific community, nor renounce a form of control over its activity: by the force of events, it was necessary to put forward a different strategy and change the terms of the problem...In 1959, on the initiative of a number of recognised scientists, consultants to the US government, a semi-permanent group of experts was created, a group which held regular study meetings. This group was given the name ‘The Jason Division', from the hero of Greek mythology who went with the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. This was an elite group of 50 eminent scientists, among them several Nobel Prize winners, who met every summer for several weeks to examine in complete liberty problems linked to security, defence and arms control. This was arranged by the Pentagon, the Department of Energy and other Federal agencies; they supplied detailed reports, to a large extent secret, which directly influenced national policy. The Jason Division played a key role, along with Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, during the Vietnam war, furnishing three particularly important reports which had an impact on US concepts and strategy: on the effectiveness of strategic bombing in cutting off Vietcong supply routes, on the construction of an electronic barrier across Vietnam, and on tactical nuclear weapons".[14]
These long quotations should help us understand that science today is one of the foundation stones for maintaining the status quo of the capitalist system. The important role it played during the Second World War, as we have just seen, has only grown with time, however much the bourgeoisie tries to hide it.
In conclusion, what we have tried to show is how ecological catastrophes, even if they can be unleashed by natural phenomena, are descending ferociously on the populations of the world, above all the most deprived ones; and that this comes from a conscious choice of the ruling class with regard to sharing out resources and using scientific research itself. The idea that modernisation, the development of science and technology are automatically associated with the degradation of the environment and the greater exploitation of man must therefore be categorically rejected. On the contrary, there is a huge potential for the development of human resources, not only at the level of producing goods but, and this is what counts, as regards the possibility of producing in another way, in harmony with the environment and the welfare of the ecosystem that man belongs to. The perspective is therefore not one of returning to the past by invoking a futile and impossible return to an original state where the environment was much less affected by human activity. On the contrary, it is one of going forward in a different way, of developing in a way that is really in harmony with the planet Earth.
Ezechiele 5 April 2009
[1]. The 20th century saw an explosion of mega-cities. At the beginning of the century, there were only six cities with more than a million inhabitants; in the middle of the century, there were only four cities with over five million inhabitants. Before the Second World War, the mega-cities were a phenomenon seen only in the industrialised countries. Today the majority of these mega-cities are concentrated in the peripheral countries. In some of them, the population has multiplied tenfold in a few decades. Today, half of the world's population lives in cities: in 2020, it will be two thirds. But none of these huge cities, which may have an influx of immigrants of more than 5,000 a day, is really capable of dealing with this increase in population, which means that the immigrants, who can't really be integrated into the social tissue of the city, end up swelling the slums on the outskirts, where there is a total lack of infrastructure and services.
[2]. Capital, Volume III, Chapter 47, Section V.
[3]. "Hurricane Katrina: Capitalism is responsible for the social disaster", International Review n° 123.
[4]. Les Échos, 30.12 - see "Raz-de-marée meutriers en Asie du Sud-est; la vrai catastrophe sociale, c'est le capitalisme!" Révolution Internationale n° 353.
[5]. www.legambientearcipelagotoscano.it/globalmente/petrolio/incident.htm [2].
[6]. Bordiga: leader of the left wing of the Communist Party of Italy, who contributed a great deal to its foundation in 1921 and who was expelled in 1930 after the process of Stalinisation. Participated actively in the foundation of the Internationalist Communist Party in 1945.
[7]. (Anonymous) Preface to Drammi gialli e sinistri dell moderna decadenza sociale by Amadeo Bordiga, Iskra editions, pp 6-9. In French in the preface to Espèce humaine et croûte terestre, Petite Bibliotehque Payot 1978, pp 7, 9 and 10. An English version of some of Bordiga's writings on disasters can be found in Murdering the Dead, Amadeo Bordiga on capitalism and other disasters, Antagonism Press 2001.
[8]. Battaglia Comunista n° 23, 1951 and also on p.19 of Drammi gialli.
[9]. Ibid.
[10]. Bordiga, "Politica e ‘construzione'", published in Prometeo series II, n° 304 and again in Drammi gialli, pp 62-63
[11]. Preface to Espèce humaine....
[12]. Jens Hoyrup, University of Roskilde, Denmark. "Mathematics and war", Palermo Conference 15 May 2003. Cahiers de la recherche en didactique, n°13, GRIM (Department of Mathematics, University of Palermo, Italy) math.unips.it/-grim/Horyup_mat_guerra_quad13.pdf.
[13]. Annaratone, www.scienzaesperienza.it/news.php?/id=0057 [3].
[14]. Angelo Baracca, "Fisica fondamentale, ricerca e realizzazione di nuove armi nucleari.".
The decade from 1914 to 1923 was one of the most intense periods in the history of mankind. This short lapse of time saw the terrible slaughter of the First World War, which ended thirty years of prosperity and uninterrupted progress for the capitalist economy and society as a whole. In the face of this hecatomb, the international proletariat rose up with, at its head, the Russian workers in 1917, and it was not until 1923 that echoes of this revolutionary wave began to fade, crushed by the bourgeois reaction. These ten years saw the world war, which opened up the period of capitalist decadence, the revolution in Russia and revolutionary attempts worldwide and, finally, the start of the barbarous bourgeois counter-revolution. Capitalist decadence, world war, revolution and counter-revolution marked the economic, social, cultural and psychological life of humanity for nearly a century, and they all took place within a single decade.
It is vital for the present generation to know and understand this decade, to think about what it represents and learn lessons from it. It is vital because there is a huge ignorance of its real meaning today, owing to the lies with which the dominant ideology has tried to obscure it, as well as the attitude it promotes, consciously or unconsciously, of living in the present moment and forgetting both the past and any perspective for the future.[1]
This fixation on the immediate and circumstantial, this "living in the here and now" without reflecting on or understanding its roots, without framing it in a future perspective, makes it very difficult to understand the real nature of these ten incredible years, and so by making a critical study of them we should be able to help clarify the current situation.
Today it's hard to imagine the huge shock that people must have experienced at the start of the First World War, with the qualitative leap into barbarism that it represented.[2] Today, after nearly a century of imperialist wars with their share of terror, destruction and above all the worst ideological and psychological brutality, it all seems to be "the most natural thing in the world", and it's as if we are not disturbed or angered by it or want to revolt against it. But this was not at all the attitude of people living through these events; they were profoundly shaken by the savagery of the war, which was unlike anything that had gone before.
It's even less understood that this terrible slaughter was brought to an abrupt end with the widespread revolt of the international proletariat, with its Russian brothers at the head.[3] Little is known of the enormous sympathy that the Russian revolution aroused among the exploited of the world.[4] There is a heavy blanket of silence and misinformation surrounding the many episodes of solidarity with the Russian workers, and the many attempts to follow their lead and extend the revolution internationally. The atrocities committed by the various democratic governments, particularly by the German government, in order to crush the revolutionary movement of the masses are again little known to most people. The worst deformation of all concerns the October revolution of 1917. This is commonly presented as a Russian phenomenon, totally isolated from the historic context we have set out above, and on this basis it has given free rein to the worst lies and most absurd speculation: that it was the work - brilliant according to the Stalinists, diabolical according to its detractors - of Lenin and the Bolsheviks; that it was a bourgeois revolution in response to tsarist backwardness; that in this country the socialist revolution was impossible, and only the Bolsheviks' fanatical determination led it in the direction where it could only end up as it did.
From this premise we are led to see in the international repercussions of the revolution of October 1917 a model to be exported to other countries; this is the deformation most commonly used by Stalinism. This notion of a "model" is doubly wrong and pernicious. On the one hand, the Russian revolution is seen as a national phenomenon and, on the other, it is conceived as a "social experiment" that can be carried out at will by any group that is sufficiently motivated and experienced.
This approach grossly distorts the reality of this historic period. The Russian revolution was not a laboratory experiment carried out within the four walls of its immense territory. It was an active and living part of a worldwide proletarian response provoked by capitalism's entry into the war and the terrible suffering that it caused. The Bolsheviks did not have the least intention of imposing a fanatical model, with the Russian people as the guinea pigs. A resolution adopted by the party in April 1917 stated that: "...‘the objective conditions of the socialist revolution, which were undoubtedly present before the war in the most advanced countries, have ripened further and continue to ripen further in consequence of the war with extreme rapidity'; that ‘the Russian revolution is only the first stage in the first of the proletarian revolutions inevitably resulting from the war'; and that common action by the workers of different countries was the only way to guarantee ‘the most regular development and the surest success of the world socialist revolution'."[5]
It is important to understand that bourgeois history underestimates - when it does not distort it completely - the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. And Stalinism equally joins in with this distortion. For example at the enlarged meeting of Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1925, that is to say at the beginning of Stalinisation, the German revolution was described as a "bourgeois revolution", throwing into the dustbin everything the Bolsheviks had defended from 1917 to 1923.[6]
This "opinion", which is broadcast widely today as much by historians as by politicians about this period, wasn't at all shared by their counterparts back then. Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, said in 1919: "The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent but also of anger and revolt amongst the workmen against conditions following the war. The existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other."[7]
The Russian revolution can only be understood as part of a world revolutionary attempt by the whole international proletariat, but this requires us to take into consideration the historical epoch that produced it, and recognise the deeper meaning of the outbreak of the First World War; that is to say, as the start of capitalism's historic decline, its decadent phase. Otherwise, the foundation of a real understanding is lost, and it has no meaning. And the world war and all subsequent events are meaningless since they appear either as exceptional events that have no consequences, or as the result of an unfortunate situation that is now past, so that events today have no connection with what happened then.
Our articles are written to debunk these conceptions. They are based on the historical and global perspective characteristic of marxism. We believe we can provide a coherent explanation of this historical period, an explanation that will provide a perspective and offer material to stimulate reflection about the current situation and point the way ahead for humanity to free itself from the yoke of capitalism. Otherwise, the situation both then and now is robbed of meaning and perspective, and the activities of all those who want to contribute to a world revolution are condemned to the most basic empiricism and to wearing themselves out by shooting in the dark.
The proposed theme of these articles, in continuity with the many contributions we have already made, is an attempt to reconstruct this period using the testimonies and the stories of the protagonists themselves.[8]
We have devoted many pages to the revolutions in Russia and in Germany.[9] Therefore, we are publishing this work on lesser-known experiences in various countries with the aim of giving a global perspective. Studying this period a little, one is astonished by the number of struggles that took place, by the magnitude of the echo from the revolution of 1917.[10] We consider the scope of this series of articles as open and therefore as an invitation to debate, and we welcome any contributions from comrades and from revolutionary groups.
ICC.
[1]. An historian who is reasonably serious and penetrating in many ways, Eric Hobsbawm, recognises in his history of the 20th Century that "The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late Twentieth Century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any relation to the public past of the times they live in" (The Age of Extremes, Abacus History Greats, page 3).
[2]. We find evidence of the way in which the world war upset its contemporaries in Sigmund Freud's article "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" in 1915, in which he points out the following: "In the confusion of wartime in which we are caught up, relying as we must on one-sided information, standing too close to the great changes that have already taken place or are beginning to, and without a glimmering of the future that is being shaped, we ourselves are at a loss as to the significance of the impressions which bear down upon us and as to the value of the judgements which we form. We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest. Science herself has lost her passionless impartiality; her deeply embittered servants seek for weapons from her with which to contribute towards the struggle with the enemy. Anthropologists feel driven to declare that enemy inferior and degenerate, psychiatrists issue a diagnosis of his disease of mind or spirit." (https://www.panarchy.org/freud/war.1915.html [7]).
[3]. The history books make a study of the military evolution of the war and, when they arrive at 1917 and 1918, suddenly insert the Russian revolution and the insurrectionary movement in Germany in 1918, as if these were events from another planet. We can see, for example, the article on the First World War from Wikipedia, which has the reputation as an alternative encyclopaedia.
[4]. Today the vast majority of anarchist ideologues denigrate the 1917 revolution and shower the Bolsheviks with the worst insults. However, this was not the case in 1917-21. In "The CNT faced with war and revolution" (International Review n° 129) we show how many Spanish anarchists - while maintaining their own criteria and with a critical spirit - supported the Russian revolution enthusiastically and, in an editorial in Solidaritad, the CNT paper, we read: "The Russians are showing us the way to go. The Russian people are winning: we are learning from their actions in order to win in our turn, in taking by force what they refuse to give us". Elsewhere Manuel Bonacasa, well renowned anarchist, says the following in his memoirs: "Who in Spain - as an anarchist - would scorn to call himself a Bolshevik?" Emma Goldman, an American anarchist, points out in her book Living my Life: "The American press, never able to see beneath the surface, denounced the October upheaval as German propaganda, and its protagonists, Lenin, Trotsky and their co-workers, as the Kaiser's hirelings. For months the scribes fabricated fantastic inventions about Bolshevik Russia. Their ignorance of the forces that led up to the October Revolution was as appalling as their puerile attempts to interpret the movement headed by Lenin. Hardly a single newspaper evidenced the least understanding of Bolshevism as a social conception entertained by men of brilliant minds, with the zeal and courage of martyrs. ... It was the more urgent for the anarchists and other real revolutionists to take up cudgels for the vilified men and their part in hastening events in Russia." (Living my life, Penguin Classics, page 362). [The French version of this article refers to "L'épopée d'une anarchiste" a translation/adaptation by Cathy Bernheim and Annette Levy-Willard who are very conscious of their treason when they write: "If she met us today, she would probably regard us with distrust for our ‘adaptation' ... Such would without doubt have been her appreciation of our work. But the only thing that Emma Goldman, fanatic for liberty, could not reproach us for is having made a free adaptation of her memoirs." Proof of this "free treason" is found in the fact that after the first sentence this passage only appears in a watered down version in the book by these ladies, and had to be translated from the original by our comrades.]
[5]. Quoted by E.H. Carr in The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-23: History of Soviet Russia, Norton edition, pages 83-4.
[6]. In The International Workers' Movement volume 4, published by Progress in Moscow, there is a note that: "at the start of the Second World War, as a result of broad discussions in Marxist historiography, it was decided that the revolutions of 1918-19 in countries of central Europe were completely bourgeois democratic (or national democratic) revolutions", (page 277 of the Spanish edition).
[7]. E.H Carr, op cit, volume 3, page 128.
[8]. In the preface to the book already quoted from, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, the author reflects on the correct method for analysing historical facts. Criticising the supposedly "neutral and objective" approach advocated by the French historian who asserts that "a historian must climb the ramparts of the threatened and, from there regard the besiegers as the besieged", Trotsky replies that: "The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a scientific conscientiousness which for its sympathies and antipathies - open and undisguised - seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the casual laws of their movement. That is the only possible historic objectivism, and moreover it is amply sufficient, for it is verified and attested not by the good intentions of the historian, for which only he himself can vouch, but by the natural laws revealed by him of the historic process itself."
[9]. For a knowledge of the Russian Revolution, there are two books that are classics in the workers' movement: Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and the famous book by John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World.
[10]. The book by E.H. Carr, mentioned above, quotes another statement by Lloyd George in 1919: "If military action was taken against the Bolsheviks, then England would become Bolshevik and there would be a soviet in London", and to this the author adds: "Lloyd George was speaking as usual to create a stir but his shrewd mind had correctly diagnosed the symptoms ".
The revolutionary attempt by the Hungarian proletariat had a strong international motivation. It was the result of two factors: the unbearable situation provoked by war and the example of the revolution of October 1917.
As we said in the introduction to this section, the First World War was an explosion of barbarism. In some ways, the "peace" was even worse; a peace signed in haste by the major capitalist powers in November 1918 when the revolution broke out in Germany.[1] It did not bring any relief to the suffering masses or a decrease in the chaos and disruption of social life that the war had caused. Winter 1918 and spring 1919 were a nightmare: there was famine, paralysis of the transport system, deranged conflicts between politicians, military occupation of the conquered countries, war against Soviet Russia, extreme disorder at all levels of society and the rapid spread of an epidemic called Spanish flu, that caused as many deaths as the war, if not more... In the eyes of the population, the "peace" was worse than the war.
The economic apparatus had been stretched to its extreme limit, which produced a strange phenomenon of under-production, as Béla Szantò outlines for Hungary:[2] "As a result of the effort put into war production, driven by the quest for super-profits, the means of production were left completely worn out and machines out of action. Their conversion would have required huge investments when there was absolutely no possibility of money being available. There were no raw materials. The factories were shut down. After demobilisation, with the factories closed, there was huge unemployment."[3]
The Times of London declared (19/07/19): "The spirit of disorder reigns over the whole world, from America in the west to China in the east, from the Black Sea to the Baltic; no society, no civilisation, as strong as it is, no constitution as democratic as it is, can escape this malign influence. Everywhere there are signs of the collapse of the most basic social bonds, caused by this prolonged tension."[4] In this context, the example set in Russia provoked a wave of enthusiasm and hope for the world's proletariat. The workers had an antidote to the deadly virus of a capitalism deep in chaos: the world revolutionary struggle, taking its lead from the example of October 1917.
The democratic republic of October 1918
Hungary, which was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and one of the losers in the war, suffered as the situation worsened, but the proletariat - heavily concentrated in Budapest with one seventh of the country's population and almost 80% of its industry there - proved itself to be highly combative.
A period of apathy had ensued after the uprisings of 1915 were crushed with the scandalous help of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), with some hesitant reactions in 1916 and 1917. But in January 1918, the social agitation led to what was probably the first international mass strike in history, which extended across many central European countries from its epicentres in Vienna and Budapest. It started in Budapest on January 14th; moved to Lower Austria and Styria by the 16th, to Vienna by the 17th and on the 23rd into the large armaments factories of Berlin, with numerous echoes in Slovenia, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Croatia.[5] The struggle was focused around three aims: against the war, against food shortages, and in solidarity with the Russian revolution. Two common slogans were raised in numerous languages: "Down with the war" and "Long live the Russian proletariat".
In Budapest, the strike erupted beyond the control of the Social Democrat leaders and the unions, and in numerous factories, enthused by the Russian example, resolutions were voted in favour of workers' councils... without any success in actually setting them up. The movement wasn't organised, which gave the unions the opportunity to take control and impose their own demands, particularly for universal suffrage, with disregard for the concerns of the masses. The government attempted to overpower the strike using troops armed with artillery and machine guns. The lack of success of this show of force and the growing doubts of the soldiers who did not want to fight at the Front and even less against the workers dissuaded the government which, in 24 hours, changed its mind and "conceded" to the demands - but only those of the unions and the Social Democrats - for universal suffrage.
Encouraged by this success, the unions went back into the factories to take control of the strike. They got a cool reception. However, fatigue, the lack of news from Austria and Germany and the gradual resumption of work in the most vulnerable sectors, dented the morale of the workers in the big metalworks who finally decided to return to work.
Strengthened by this victory, the Social Democrats "led a campaign of reprisals against all those committed to reviving revolutionary class struggle amongst the masses. In the Népszava - the main publication of the party - defamatory articles and even denunciations appeared that provided an abundance of ammunition for political persecutions by the reactionary government of Wkerle-Vaszonyi".[6]
The agitation continued despite the repression. In May, soldiers of the regiment at Ojvideck mutinied against being sent to the Front. They took control of the main telephone exchange and the railway station. The workers of the town supported them. The government sent two special regiments that bombarded the city for three days before taking back control. The repression was pitiless: one soldier in ten - whether part of the mutiny or not - was shot, and thousands were imprisoned.
In June, police fired on striking workers from a metalworks in the capital, leaving many dead and wounded. The workers quickly went to the neighbouring factories, which stopped work straight away and came out onto the streets. The whole of Budapest was paralysed in a few hours. The next day, the strike spread across the whole country. Impromptu assemblies, in a revolutionary atmosphere, decided on what measures to take The government arrested the delegates, sending the most implicated workers to the Front, and put the tramways back into operation using strike-breakers, each escorted by a squad of soldiers with bayonets at the ready. After eight days of struggle, the strike ended in defeat.
However, consciousness was developing inside the class: "Little by little, in numerous workers' circles there was a growing belief that the policy of the SDP and the stand taken by the Party leaders was not giving them support and was not in favour of revolution (...). The revolutionary forces had begun to come together; contacts were being established between workers in the big factories. The meetings and the secret deliberations were taking place on a semi-permanent basis and the outlines of independent proletarian political positions were being drawn up."[7] These workers' circles came to be known as the Revolutionary Group.
Mutinies by soldiers were becoming more and more frequent despite repression. Strikes were happening daily. The government - incapable of conducting a lost war, with its army more and more in retreat, disorganised, its economy paralysed and with a complete lack of provisions - collapsed. In such a dangerous power vacuum, the SDP, once again showing which side it was on, decided to bring the bourgeois parties together in a National Council.
On October 28th the Soldiers' Council co-ordinating with the Revolutionary Group organised a large demonstration in Budapest with the intention of marching on the Citadel to present a letter to the Royal representative. There was an enormous cordon of soldiers and police. The soldiers moved aside to let the crowd pass but the police opened fire, killing many people. "The anger at the police was indescribable. The following day workers in the armaments factory broke open the stores and armed themselves."[8]
The government attempted to send out of Budapest military units that had been in the avant-garde of the Soldiers' Councils, which caused a general uproar: thousands of workers and soldiers assembled in Rakóczi Street - the main artery of the city - to prevent their departure. One company of soldiers with orders to depart refused, and joined with the crowd outside the Astoria Hotel. Near midnight, the two main telephone exchanges were seized.
In the morning and during the following day, groups of armed soldiers and workers occupied the public buildings, barracks, central station and food shops. Massive detachments went to the prisons and freed political prisoners. The unions, posing as the mouthpiece of the movement, demanded power for the National Council. In the middle of the morning of October 31st, Count Hadik, head of government, handed power over to another Count, Károlyi, leader of the Independence Party and president of the National Council.
He found himself with total power without having lifted a finger. But his hold on power was still tenuous because of the threat from the as yet unorganised and unconscious working masses. This is why the government rejected all revolutionary endorsement and sought its legitimacy from the Hungarian monarchy, which was part of the fading "Austro-Hungarian Empire". In the absence of the king, members of the National Council, with the Social Democrats at their head, went to find the Emperor's representative, Archduke Joseph, who authorised the new government.
This news angered many workers. A rally was held at the Tisza Calman-Tér. Despite torrential rain, a large crowd gathered and decided to go to the HQ of the Social Democratic Party to demand the proclamation of a Republic.
During the 19th century the demand for a Republic became a slogan of the workers' movement, which considered that this form of government was more sympathetic to its interests than the constitutional monarchy. However, faced with this new situation, where the only alternative was bourgeois power or proletarian power, the Republic presented itself as the last resort of capital. Indeed, the Republic was born with the blessing of the monarchy and the high clergy, whose leader, the Archbishop of Hungary, received a visit from the entire National Council. The Social Democrat Kunfi made this famous speech: "I am, myself a convinced Social Democrat, charged with the overwhelming responsibility to say that we do not wish to act in line with the methods of class hatred or class struggle. And we are appealing to everyone to set aside class interests and partisan positions to help us deal with the burden of work before us."[9] The whole Hungarian bourgeoisie united behind its new saviour, the National Council, whose driving force was the SDP. On November 16th the new Republic was solemnly proclaimed.
The constitution of the Communist Party
The working class cannot launch a revolutionary offensive without creating the vital tool that is the communist party. But it's not enough for the party to defend internationalist programmatic positions; it must also put them into practice, with concrete proposals for the proletariat, through its capacity for careful analysis, with a broad vision of current events and the orientations to follow. To do this, the party must be international and not a simple sum of national parties, so that it can combat the confusing and suffocating weight of the immediate, local and national particularities and also promote solidarity, common debate and a global vision of the perspectives ahead.
The tragedy of the revolutionary attempts in Germany and Hungary was the absence of the International. It was constituted too late, in March 1919, when the Berlin insurrection had been crushed and after the revolutionary attempt in Hungary had already begun.[10]
The Hungarian Communist Party suffered cruelly from this difficulty. One of its founding organisations was the Revolutionary Group, formed by delegates and individual militant workers from the big factories in Budapest.[11] It was joined by elements coming from Russia in November 1918 who had founded the Communist Group, led by Béla Kun, by the anarchist Union of Revolutionary Socialists, and by the members of the Socialist Opposition, a nucleus formed inside the Hungarian SDP at the outbreak of the First World War.
Before Béla Kun and his comrades arrived, the members of the Revolutionary Group had considered the possibility of forming a communist party. The debate on this question led to an impasse because there were two tendencies that could not reach agreement: on one side were the supporters of the Internationalist Fraction inside the SDP and, on the other, those who considered that there was an urgent need to form a new party. The decision was finally taken to form a Union that took the name of Ervin Szabo,[12] which decided to continue the discussion. Militants arriving from Russia radically changed the situation. The prestige of the Russian Revolution and the persuasiveness of Béla Kun tipped the balance towards the immediate formation of the Communist Party, which was founded on 24th November. The programmatic document adopted included some very clear points:[13]
"while the SDP aimed to put the working class into service rebuilding capitalism, the new party's task is to show the workers how capitalism has already suffered a mortal blow and has reached a stage of development, both morally and economically, that is taking it to the brink of ruin";
"mass strike and armed insurrection: these are the means acknowledged by communists for taking power. They do not aspire to a bourgeois republic (...) but to the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the councils";
it gave itself the means of: "assisting the conscious development of the Hungarian proletariat, freeing it from its old ties to the dishonest, ignorant and corrupt ruling class (...) reawakening within it the spirit of international solidarity, systematically stifled until now", and linking the Hungarian proletariat to "the Russian dictatorship of the councils and with any other country where a similar revolution could break out".
A newspaper was founded - Vörös Ujsàg ("Red Gazette") and the party launched itself into feverish agitation that was moreover made necessary given the decisive nature of the events it faced.[14] However this agitation was not backed up by an in-depth programmatic debate, with a methodical, collective analysis of the events. The Party was in reality too young and inexperienced, and besides had little cohesion. This all led, as we will see in the next article, to it committing grave errors.
Trade unions or workers' councils?
During the historic period 1914-23, a very complex question was posed for the proletariat. The trade unions had behaved as recruiting sergeants for capital during the imperialist war and the subsequent workers' responses had gone beyond their control. Nevertheless, the heroic times when the workers' struggles had been organised through the unions were still very recent; they had cost a lot of economic effort, many hours in meetings, and had suffered a lot of repression too. The workers still considered them their own and hoped to be able to win them back.
At the same time, there was huge enthusiasm for the Russian example of the workers' councils that had taken power in 1917. In Hungary, in Austria and in Germany, struggles led to the formation of workers' councils. But whereas in Russia the workers had accumulated a lot of experience of what they were, how they worked, what their weaknesses were, and how the class enemy tried to sabotage them, in both Austria and Hungary this experience was very limited.
This combination of historical factors produced a hybrid situation that was cleverly exploited by the SDP and the unions, who on November 2nd formed the Budapest Workers' Council with a strange mixture of union chiefs, SDP leaders and elected delegates from a few large factories. In the following days all sorts of "councils" appeared that were only unions and professional organisations following the new fashion: councils of police (founded on November 2nd under Social Democrat control), councils of civil servants, councils of students. There was even a council of priests formed on November 8th! This proliferation of councils had the goal of short-circuiting their formation by the workers.
The economy was paralysed. The state's coffers were empty and with everyone asking it for help, its only response was to print more paper money, to pay for grants, the salaries of state employees and current expenses... In December 1918, the Minister of Finance met the unions to ask them to put an end to wage demands, to co-operate with the government in re-launching the economy and if necessary taking the reins, of the management of industry. The unions were very receptive.
But the workers were outraged. There were more massive assemblies. The newly formed Communist Party took the lead in the protests. It decided to participate in the unions and quickly achieved a majority in several organisations in the large factories. Its programme was to create workers' councils; but these were considered compatible with the trade unions.[15] This situation produced a continual to-ing and fro-ing. The Budapest Workers' Council, created by the Social Democrats as a diversionary tactic, had become a lifeless body. At this time, efforts at organising and developing consciousness were taking place on a terrain where the unions had less and less control, such as the massive assembly of the Metalworkers' Union which in response to the plans of the Minister after two days of debates adopted some very radical positions: "From the perspective of the working class, state control of production can have no effect given that the People's Republic is only a modified form of capitalist rule where the State continues to be what it was before: the collective organ of the class that has ownership of the means of production and oppresses the working class."[16]
The radicalisation of the workers' struggles
The disorganisation and paralysis of the economy pushed the workers and the majority of the population to the brink of starvation. In these circumstances, the Assembly decided that "In all the big firms there should be Councils of Factory Control which, as organs of workers' power, control factory production, the supply of raw materials and also the functioning and smooth running of business".[17] However, they did not consider themselves as in partnership with the state, or as organs of "self-management", but as levers and as supporters of the struggle for political power: "Workers' control is only a phase of transition to the system of workers' management in which first seizing political power is a necessary condition (...) Taking all this into consideration, the Assembly of delegates and members of the organisation condemn any suspension, even provisional, of the class struggle, any adherence to constitutional principles, and considers that the immediate task is the organisation of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Councils, as representatives of the dictatorship of the proletariat."[18]
On December 17th, the Workers' Council of Szeged - the second largest city - decided to disband the municipality and "take power". This was an isolated act, which illustrated the tension in the deteriorating situation. The government reacted cautiously and began negotiations that led to the reestablishment of the municipality with a "social democratic majority". At Christmas 1918, the workers of one factory in Budapest demanded a pay rise. In two days the whole of Budapest took up the same demand that began to spread to the provinces. The factory owners had no other choice than to give in.[19]
At the beginning of January, the miners of Salgótarján formed a workers' council that decided to take power and organise a militia. The central government was alarmed and immediately sent in elite troops, who occupied the district, killing eighteen people and wounding thirty. Two days later, workers from the region of Satoralja-Llihely took the same decision and received the same response from the government, provoking a new bloodbath. In Kiskunfélegyháza, when women staged a protest against food shortages and high prices, the police fired into the crowd, killing ten and wounding thirty. Two days later it was the turn of the workers of Poszony where the workers' council declared the dictatorship of the proletariat. The government, its forces stretched, asked the Czech government to militarily occupy the town, which was in a border area.[20]
The peasant problem intensified. Demobilised soldiers returned to their villages and spread the agitation. Meetings were held demanding that the land be divided up. The Budapest Workers' Council[21] showed great solidarity that led to a proposal for a meeting: "to impose a solution on the government to the agrarian problem". The first meeting did not reach any agreement and it was necessary to hold a second that ended with acceptance of the SDP proposal that made provision for the creation "of individual farms with compensation for the former owners." This temporarily calmed the situation, but only for a few weeks, as we shall see in the next article. Indeed, in Arad near Romania, in late January the peasants occupied the land and the government had to use a large contingent of troops to stop them, which led to a further slaughter.
February 1919: Repression against the communists
In February, the Union of Journalists formed itself into a council and demanded censure of all articles hostile to the revolution. The assemblies of printers and other related sectors were growing and gave this measure their support. The metalworkers participated in this activity that led to the workers taking control of most newspapers. From this point, the publication of news and written articles was submitted to the collective decision of the workers.
Budapest had been transformed into a gigantic debating chamber.[22] Every day, every hour, discussions were held on a variety of topics. Premises were occupied everywhere. Only generals and big bosses were denied the right of assembly, since when they tried they were dispersed by groups of metalworkers and soldiers, who eventually took control of their luxurious premises.
Alongside the development of workers' councils and in the context of the chaos and disruption of production, a second type of organisation developed in the factories, the factory councils, which took control of the production and supply of essential goods and services in order prevent shortages. At the end of January, the Budapest Workers' Council took a bold centralising initiative: taking control of gas production, armaments factories, major construction sites, the newspaper, Deli Hirlap, and the Hungaria Hotel.
This was a challenge to the government, and the socialist Garami responded by proposing a bill that reduced the factory councils to mere underlings of the bosses who were again put in charge of production and the management of their businesses. Massive protests against this measure grew. In the Budapest Workers' Council discussion was very animated. On February 20th, the SDP "dropped a bomb" during the third session on the bill; their delegates interrupting the meeting with sensational news: "the communists have launched an attack against the Népszava. The editorial offices have been stormed with machine gun fire! Several editors are already dead! The street is littered with corpses and the wounded!".[23]
This allowed the proposal against the factory councils to be passed by a narrow majority, but it also opened the door to a crucial stage: the attempt to crush the Communist Party by force.
The storming of the Népszava was soon found to have been a provocation staged by the SDP. The operation came at a particularly delicate time; the workers' councils were growing everywhere in the country and increasingly rising up against the government - and crowned a campaign against the Communist Party by the SDP that had been prepared months before.
Already, by December 1918, following an SDP proposal the government had forbidden the use of all kind of printing paper with the aim of preventing publication and distribution of Vörös Ujsàg. In February 1919, the government resorted to force: "One morning, a detachment of 160 policemen armed with grenades and machine guns, surrounded the Secretariat. Claiming to conduct an investigation, the police invaded the premises, smashing the furniture and equipment and taking everything away in eight big cars."[24]
Szanto tells us that "the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by the white counter-revolution in Germany was considered to be the signal for the fight against Bolshevism by the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries ".[25] A very influential bourgeois journalist, Ladislas Fényes, launched a persistent campaign against the communists. He said "they had to disarm".
The SDP continued to claim that Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg "had paid with their lives for challenging the unity of the workers' movement". Alexandre Garbai, who was later to become the chairman of the Hungarian worker's councils, stated that "communists should be lined up and shot because no one can divide the social democratic party without paying with his life".[26] Workers' unity, which is fundamental to the proletariat, was fraudulently used to support and expand the bourgeoisie's offensive.[27]
The question of "the threat to workers' unity" was brought before the Workers' Council by the SDP. The workers' councils which were just beginning to function found themselves confronted with a thorny question that eventually paralysed them: on several occasions the social democrats put forward motions demanding the exclusion of the communists from meetings for "having split the workers' movement". They were only replaying the ferocious campaign of their German acolytes who, after November 1918, had made unity the main basis for excluding the Spartacists, fostering a pogrom atmosphere against them.
The attack on the Népszava has to be seen in the same context. Seven policemen die there. In the course of this same night of February 20th there is a wave of arrests of communist militants. The police, revolted by the death of their colleagues, torture prisoners. On February 21st, the Népszava broadcasts a statement that brands communists "counter-revolutionary mercenaries in the pay of the capitalists" and calls for a general strike in protest. A demonstration outside parliament is called the same afternoon.
The demonstration is huge. Many workers go, outraged by the attack attributed to the communists, but it is the Social Democrats in particular who mobilise civil servants, petty bourgeois, army officers, tradesmen, etc, who demand harsh bourgeois justice for the communists.
On February 22nd, the press reports torture inflicted on prisoners. The Népszava defends the police: "We understand the resentment of the police and deeply sympathise with their grief for their fallen colleagues defending the workers' press. We can be grateful that the police have given their support to our party, that they are organised and that they have feelings of solidarity with the proletariat ".[28]
These repugnant words are the alpha and omega of a two-stage offensive against the proletariat led by the SDP: first, crush the communists as the revolutionary avant-garde, and then defeat the proletarian masses more and more forcefully.
On the very same 22nd, the motion to expel the communists from the Workers' Council is approved. Are the communists going to be completely decapitated? It looks like the counter-revolution is about to win.
In the next article, we will see how this offensive will be defeated by a strong response from the proletariat.
C Mir 3/3/09
Part 2 [9]
[1]. The general armistice was signed on November 11th 1918, just days after the emergence of the revolution in Kiel (northern Germany) and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm, the German Emperor. See the series of articles we have published on this subject, starting in International Review n° 133.
[2]. See the book by this author The Hungarian Republic of the Councils, page 40 of the Spanish edition.
[3]. Thus phenomenon of under-production caused by the total and complete mobilisation of all the resources into armaments and war is also noted by Gers Hardach in his book The First World War (page 86 of the Spanish edition) with regard to Germany which, from 1917, showed signs of its economy collapsing, causing disruption to supplies and chaos, which in turn ended up blocking war production.
[4]. Karl Radek, quoted in Szantò (page 10 of the Spanish edition).
[5]. In his book World Communism, the Austrian, Franz Borkenau, an old communist militant, says that: "..it was in more than one sense the biggest revolutionary movement of properly proletarian origin which the modern world has ever seen (...) The international co-ordination which the Comintern later so often tried to bring about was here produced automatically, within the borders of the Central Powers, out of the community of interests in all the countries concerned, and the common predominance of two main problems, bread and the Brest-Litovsk negotiations [peace negotiations between the Soviet government and the German Empire in January-March 1918]. The slogans everywhere demanded a peace with Russia without annexation or compensation, better rations, and full political democracy" (page 92).
[6]. Béla Szantò, The Hungarian Revolution of 1919, Spanish edition, page 21.
[7]. Szantò, op. cit, page 24.
[8]. Szantò, op. cit, page 28.
[9]. Quoted by Szantò, page 35.
[10]. See "Germany 1918: Formation of the Party, absence of the International" in International Review n° 135.
[11]. Very similar to the revolutionary delegates in Germany. Indeed, there is a significant coincidence in the constituents that lead to the formation of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, the KPD in Germany and the Hungarian CP: "It is no peculiarity of the situation in Germany that the three above mentioned forces within the working class played crucial roles in the drama of the formation of the class party. One of the characteristics of Bolshevism during the revolution in Russia was the way it united basically the same forces within the working class: the pre-war party representing the programme and the organisational experience; the advanced, class conscious workers in the factories and work places, who anchored the party in the class, played a decisive, positive role in resolving the different crises in the organisation; and revolutionary youth politicised by the struggle against war." (Op. cit., International Review n° 135).
[12]. A militant on the left of social democracy who left the party in 1910 and moved towards anarchist positions. He died in 1918 after having energetically opposed the war with an internationalist position.
[13]. We are quoting the summary of principles by Béla Szantó in the book referred to above.
[14]. The party showed considerable success in its agitation and recruitment of militants. In four months it grew from 4,000 to 70,000 militants.
[15]. This same position prevailed inside the Russian proletariat and among the Bolsheviks. But whereas the unions were very weak in Russia, in Hungary and other countries they were much stronger.
[16]. Szantò, op. cit., page 43.
[17]. Idem.
[18]. Idem.
[19]. In compensation, the SDP minister Garami proposed granting the factory owners 15 million kroner in credit. This meant the increases obtained by the workers would evaporate in a few days due to the inflation this lending would cause. The subsidy was approved even though the official bourgeois ministers of the cabinet were opposed to it.
[20]. This area would stay under Czech rule until the outbreak of the revolution in August 1919.
[21]. From January, it had returned to life with the to-ings and fro-ings that we have referred to above. The large factories sent delegates - a lot of them communists - who demanded the resumption of its meetings.
[22]. This was one of the remarkable characteristics of the Russian Revolution that was underlined, for example, by John Reed in his book, Ten days that shook the world.
[23]. Szantò, page 60.
[24]. Szantò, page 51.
[25]. Ibid.
[26]. Szantò, page 52.
[27]. We will see in a subsequent article how unity was the Trojan horse used by the Social Democrats to keep control of the workers' councils when the latter took power.
[28]. Szantò, page 63.
The Italian left communist Bordiga once described Marx's entire work as "the necrology of capital" - in other words, as a study of the inner contradictions from which bourgeois society could not escape and which would eventually lead to its demise.
Acknowledging the certainty of death is problematic for the human being in general - alone among the animal species, mankind is burdened with the consciousness of the inevitability of death, and the weight of this burden is demonstrated, among other things, by the ubiquity of mythologies about the afterlife in all epochs of history and in all social formations.
By the same token, ruling, exploiting classes and their individual representatives are apt to flee from death into consoling fantasies about the eternal foundations and destiny of their reign. The class regime of pharaohs and divine emperors is thus legitimised by the sacred stories from the primordial beginning to the unforeseeable future.
The bourgeoisie, despite priding itself on its rational and scientific outlook, is no less prone to mythological projections: as Marx observed, this can easily be discerned in its attitude to past history, into which it projects its "Robinsonades" about private property being at the very foundation of human existence. And it is not more inclined than the despots of ancient times to envisage the end of its system of exploitation. Even in its revolutionary heyday, even in the thought of the philosopher of dialectical movement par excellence, Hegel, we find the same tendency to proclaim that the rule of bourgeois society marks the "end of history": Marx remarked that, for Hegel, the restless advance of the World Spirit had finally achieved peace and repose in the shape of the bureaucratic Prussian state (which was still largely stuck in the feudal past anyway).
We thus take it as a basic axiom of the ideologically distorted world view of the bourgeoisie that it cannot tolerate any theory which points to the purely transitory nature of its class rule. Whereas marxism, which expresses the theoretical standpoint of the first exploited class in history to carry within it the seeds of a new social order, has no such blockages to its vision.
Thus the Communist Manifesto of 1848 opens with the famous passage about history being the history of class struggles, which had in all hitherto existing modes of production served to explode the social fabric from within, ending "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes...." Bourgeois society has simplified class contrasts to the point where they are to all intents and purposes reduced to two great social camps defending irreconcilably antagonistic interests - capitalist on the one hand, proletarian on the other. And the proletariat is destined to be the gravedigger of the bourgeois order.
But the Manifesto did not expect this decisive clash between the classes to arise merely as a result of capitalism's simplification of class differences or of the evident injustice of the bourgeoisie's monopoly of privilege and wealth. It was first necessary for the bourgeois system to be unable to function "normally", to have reached the point where "the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society". In sum, the overthrow of bourgeois society becomes a vital necessity for the very survival of the exploited class and of social life as a whole.
The Manifesto saw in the economic crises which periodically wracked capitalist society in that era as harbingers of this approaching point:
"In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented".
Several points need to be made about this oft-quoted passage.
It maintains that the economic crises are a result of the overproduction of commodities, as the enormous productive powers unleashed by capitalism come up against the limits of their capitalist appropriation and distribution. As Marx explained later, this was not overproduction in relation to need. On the contrary, it resulted from the fact that the needs of the vast majority were necessarily restricted by the existence of antagonistic relations of production. This was overproduction in relation to effective demand - demand backed by the ability to pay.
It considers that capitalist relations of production have already become a definitive fetter on the development of these productive forces, a straitjacket which is holding them in check
At the same time capitalism has at its disposal various mechanisms for overcoming these crises: on the one hand the destruction of capital, by which Marx principally meant not the physical destruction of unprofitable factories and machines but their destruction as value because the crisis forced them to stand idle. This, as Marx was to explain in later works, both uncluttered the market of dead-wood competitors and had a "beneficial" effect on the average rate of profit; on the other hand, "the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones", allowing a temporary escape from the engorgement of the market in those areas already conquered by capitalism.
These very mechanisms of escape actually only paved the way for increasingly destructive crises and tended to cancel themselves out as means of overcoming the crisis. In short, capitalism was necessarily heading towards a historical impasse.
The Manifesto was written on the very eve of the great wave of uprisings that swept across Europe in the year of 1848. But although these uprisings had very material roots - in particular, an outbreak of famine in a whole series of countries - and although they saw the first massive expressions of proletarian political autonomy (the Chartist movement in Britain, the July uprisings of the Parisian working class), these were essentially the last fires of the bourgeois revolution against feudal absolutism. In his efforts to understand the failure of these uprisings from the proletarian point of view - even the bourgeois goals of the revolution had rarely been achieved and the French bourgeoisie had not hesitated in crushing the insurgent Parisian workers - Marx began to recognise that the prediction of imminent proletarian revolution had been premature. Not only was the working class knocked backwards politically by the defeat of the 1848 uprisings, but capitalism was very far from having exhausted its historic mission as it spread imperiously around the globe, continuing to "create a world in its own image" as the Manifesto had put it. The dynamism of the bourgeoisie, as the Manifesto had itself acknowledged, was still very much a reality. Against the impatient activists of his own "party", who thought that mere will could stir the masses into action, he insisted that the working class probably faced decades of struggle before it could expect a decisive conflict with the class enemy. He also argued forcefully that "a new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis".[1]
It was this conviction that led Marx to devote himself to the study - or rather, the critique of - political economy, a profound and immensely detailed inquiry that was to find written form in the Grundrisse and the four volumes of Capital. In order to understand the material conditions for the proletarian revolution, it was necessary to understand in greater depth the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production, the fatal flaws that would eventually condemn it to death.
In these works, Marx acknowledged his debt to the bourgeois political economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo who had contributed a great deal to the understanding of the bourgeois economic system, not least because, in their polemics with the apologists of outmoded, semi-feudal forms of production, they had defended the view that the "value" of commodities was not some inherent quality of the soil or a figure determined by the vagaries of supply and demand, but was based on the real labour of human beings. But Marx also showed that these polemicists of the bourgeoisie were also apologists, to the extent that their writings:
What is fundamental to all the varieties of bourgeois political economy is the denial that the crises of capitalism are proof that there exist fundamental and ineradicable contradictions of the capitalist mode of production - ravens of doom whose harsh croak prophesies the Ragnarok[2] of bourgeois society.
"The apologetic phrases used to deny crises are important in so far as they always prove the opposite of what they are meant to prove. In order to deny crises, they assert unity where there is conflict and contradiction. They are therefore important in so far as one can say they prove that there would be no crises if the contradictions which they have erased in their imagination, did not exist in fact. But in reality crises exist because these contradictions exist. Every reason which they put forward against crisis is an exorcised contradiction, and, therefore, a real contradiction, which can cause crises. The desire to convince oneself of the non-existence of contradictions, is at the same time the expression of a pious wish that the contradictions, which are really present, should not exist."[3]
The apology for capital by the political economists is to a large extent rooted in the denial that the crises of overproduction, which began to make their appearance in the second or third decade of the 19th century, indicated the existence of any insurmountable barriers to the bourgeois mode of production.
Faced with the concrete reality of the crisis, the apologists' denials took various forms, most of which we have seen repeated by the economic experts of the past few decades. Marx points out, for example, that Ricardo sought to explain the first crises of the world market through various contingent factors, such as poor harvests, the devaluation of paper money, falling prices, or the difficulties of transition between peace and war and war and peace in the early years of the 19th century. Obviously these factors could play their role in exacerbating or even provoking the outbreak of crises, but they hardly penetrated to the heart of the problem. These evasions remind us of the more recent pronouncements by the economic "experts", locating the "cause" of the crisis in the rise in oil process in the 70s or the greed of the bankers today. When, towards the middle of the 19th century, the cycle of commercial crises became harder to ignore, the political economists were obliged to develop more sophisticated arguments, for example accepting the idea that there is too much capital while denying that this also means that there are too many unsale-able commodities.
Or, if the problem of overproduction was accepted, it was relativised. At root, for the apologists, "no man produces, but with a view to consume or sell, and he never sells, but with an intention to purchase some other commodity, which may be immediately useful to him, or which may contribute to future production".[4] In other words, there is a basic harmony between production and sale and, at least in the best of all possible worlds, every commodity should find a buyer. If there are crises, they are no more than possibilities contained in the metamorphosis of commodities into money, as John Stuart Mill argued, or are the result of a simple disproportionality between one sector of production and another.
Marx certainly does not deny that there can be disproportions between the different branches of production - indeed he insists that this always be a tendency in an unplanned economy where it is impossible to produce all commodities in relation to an immediate demand. What he objects to is the attempt to use the "disproportionality" problem as a pretext for wishing away the more fundamental contradictions involved in the capitalist social relationship:
"To say that there is no general over-production, but rather a disproportion within the various branches of production, is no more than to say that under capitalist production the proportionality of the individual branches of production springs as a continual process from disproportionality, because the cohesion of the aggregate production imposes itself as a blind law upon the agents of production, and not as a law which, being understood and hence controlled by their common mind, brings the productive process under their joint control."[5]
By the same token, Marx rejects the argument that there can be partial overproduction but no general overproduction:
"That is why Ricardo admits that a glut of certain commodities is possible. What is supposed to be impossible is only a simultaneous general glut of the market. The possibility of overproduction in any particular sphere of production is therefore not denied. It is the simultaneity of this phenomenon for all spheres of production which is said to be impossible and therefore makes impossible [general] over-production and thus a general glut of the market." [6]
What all these arguments had in common was that they denied the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism is the first economic form to have generalised commodity production, production for sale and profit, to the entire process of production and distribution; and its tendency towards overproduction was to be found in this distinction. Not, Marx is at pains to point out, overproduction in relation to need:
"The word over-production in itself leads to error. So long as the most urgent needs of a large part of society are not satisfied, or only the most immediate needs are satisfied, there can of course be absolutely no talk of an over-production of products- in the sense that the amount of products is excessive in relation to the need for them. On the contrary, it must be said that on the basis of capitalist production, there is constant under-production in this sense. The limits to production are set by the profit of the capitalist and in no way by the needs of the producers. But over-production of products and over-production of commodities are two entirely different things. If Ricardo thinks that the commodity form makes no difference to the product, and furthermore, that commodity circulation differs only formally from barter, that in this context the exchange-value is only a fleeting form of the exchange of things, and that money is therefore merely a formal means of circulation-then this in fact is in line with his presupposition that the bourgeois mode of production is the absolute mode of production, hence it is a mode of production without any definite specific characteristics, its distinctive traits are merely formal. He cannot therefore admit that the bourgeois mode of production contains within itself a barrier to the free development of the productive forces, a barrier which comes to the surface in crises and, in particular, in over-production-the basic phenomenon in crises."[7]
Marx then contrasts capitalist production with previous modes of production, which did not seek to accumulate wealth, but to consume it, and which were faced with a problem of underproduction rather than overproduction:
"...the ancients never thought of transforming the surplus-product into capital. Or at least only to a very limited extent. (The fact that the hoarding of treasure in the narrow sense was widespread among them shows how much surplus-product lay completely idle.) They used a large part of the surplus-product for unproductive expenditure on art, religious works and public works. Still less was their production directed to the release and development of the material productive forces-division of labour, machinery, the application of the powers of nature and science to private production. In fact, by and large, they never went beyond handicraft labour. The wealth which they produced for private consumption was therefore relatively small and only appears great because it was amassed in the hands of a few persons, who, incidentally, did not know what to do with it. Although, therefore, there was no over-production among the ancients, there was over-consumption by the rich, which in the final periods of Rome and Greece turned into mad extravagance. The few trading peoples among them lived partly at the expense of all these essentially poor nations. It is the unconditional development of the productive forces and therefore mass production on the basis of a mass of producers who are confined within the bounds of the necessary means of subsistence on the one hand and, on the other, the barrier set up by the capitalists' profit, which [forms] the basis of modern over-production."[8]
The problem with the political economists is that they think about capitalism as if it were already a harmonious social system - a kind of socialism in which production is fundamentally determined by need:
"All the objections which Ricardo and others raise against overproduction etc. rest on the fact that they regard bourgeois production either as a mode of production in which no distinction exists between purchase and sale-direct barter-or as social production, implying that society, as if according to a plan, distributes its means of production and productive forces in the degree and measure which is required for the fulfilment of the various social needs, so that each sphere of production receives the quota of social capital required to satisfy the corresponding need. This fiction arises entirely from the inability to grasp the specific form of bourgeois production and this inability in turn arises from the obsession that bourgeois production is production as such, just like a man who believes in a particular religion and sees it as the religion, and everything outside of it only as false religions."[9]
Against these distortions, Marx located the crises of overproduction in the very social relation that defined capital as a distinct mode of production: the wage labour relation.
"By reducing these relations simply to those of consumer and producer, one leaves out of account that the wage-labourer who produces and the capitalist who produces are two producers of a completely different kind, quite apart from the fact that some consumers do not produce at all. Once again, a contradiction is denied, by abstracting from a contradiction which really exists in production. The mere relationship of wage-labourer and capitalist implies:
1. that the majority of the producers (the workers) are non-consumers (non-buyers) of a very large part of their product, namely, of the means of production and the raw material;
2. that the majority of the producers, the workers, can consume an equivalent for their product only so long as they produce more than this equivalent, that is, so long as they produce surplus-value or surplus-product. They must always be over-producers, produce over and above their needs, in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs."[10]
Of course, capitalism does not start every phase of the accumulation process with an immediate problem of overproduction: it is born and it develops as a dynamic system in constant expansion into new areas of productive exchange, both within the domestic economy and on a world scale. But given the unavoidable nature of the contradiction that Marx has just described, this constant expansion is a necessity for capital in order to postpone or overcome the crisis of overproduction, and here again Marx had to assert this against the apologists who saw the expansion of the market more as a convenience than a life or death question, given their tendency to see capital as a self-contained and harmonious system:
"However, the mere admission that the market must expand with production, is, on the other hand, again an admission of the possibility of over-production, for the market is limited externally in the geographical sense, the internal market is limited as compared with a market that is both internal and external, the latter in turn is limited as compared with the world market, which however is, in turn, limited at each moment of time, [though] in itself capable of expansion. The admission that the market must expand if there is to be no over-production, is therefore also an admission that there can be over-production."[11]
In the same passage, Marx goes on to show that while the expansion of the world market allows capitalism to overcome its crises and to further expand the productive forces, the previous expansion of the market rapidly becomes inadequate for absorbing the new development of production. He did not consider that this was an eternal process: there are inherent limits to the capacity of capital to become a truly universal system, and once it has encountered these limits, they will push capitalism towards the abyss:
"But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognised as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension."[12]
And thus we come to the conclusion that the crisis of overproduction is the first raven of doom for capitalism, a concrete illustration, within capitalism, of Marx's basic formula explaining the rise and decline of all hitherto existing modes of production: yesterday's forms of development (in this case, the global expansion of commodity production) becomes today's fetter on the further development of mankind's productive powers:
"To approach the matter more closely: First of all, there is a limit, not inherent to production generally, but to production founded on capital. This limit is double, or rather the same regarded from two directions. It is enough here to demonstrate that capital contains a particular restriction of production - which contradicts its general tendency to drive beyond every barrier to production - in order to have uncovered the foundation of overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capital; in order to have uncovered, more generally, the fact that capital is not, as the economists believe, the absolute form for the development of the forces of production - not the absolute form for that, nor the form of wealth which absolutely coincides with the development of the forces of production. The stages of production which precede capital appear, regarded from its standpoint, as so many fetters upon the productive forces. It itself, however, correctly understood, appears as the condition of the development of the forces of production as long as they require an external spur, which appears at the same time as their bridle. It is a discipline over them, which becomes superfluous and burdensome at a certain level of their development, just like the guilds etc."[13]
A further critique that Marx makes of the political economists is their incoherence in denying the overproduction of commodities while admitting the overproduction of capital:
"To the best of his knowledge, Ricardo is always consistent. For him, therefore, the statement that no over-production (of commodities) is possible, is synonymous with the statement that no plethora or over-abundance of capital is possible...What then would Ricardo have said to the stupidity of his successors, who deny over-production in one form (as a general glut of commodities in the market) and who, not only admit its existence in another form, as over-production of capital, plethora of capital, over-abundance of capital, but actually turn it into an essential point in their doctrine?"[14]
However, Marx, especially in the third volume of Capital, shows that there is no comfort to be drawn from the assertion that there is a tendency for capital, above all in its form as means of production, to become "overabundant". This is because such overabundance merely brings forth another deadly contradiction, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, which Marx refers to as being "in every respect the most important law of modern political economy, and the most essential for understanding the most difficult relations."[15] This contradiction is no less inscribed in the basic social relation of capitalism: since only living labour can add new value and this is the "secret" of capitalist profit; and since at the same time the capitalists are driven by the whip of competition to constantly "revolutionise the means of production", i.e. increase the ratio between dead labour of machines and the living labour of human beings, it is faced with an inbuilt tendency for the proportion of new value contained in each commodity to shrink, and thus for the rate of profit to decline.
Again, bourgeois apologists fled in terror from the implications of all this, since the law of the falling rate of profit also points to the transitory nature of capital:
"On the other hand, the rate of self-expansion of the total capital, or the rate of profit, being the goad of capitalist production (just as self-expansion of capital is its only purpose), its fall checks the formation of new independent capitals and thus appears as a threat to the development of the capitalist production process. It breeds over-production, speculation, crises, and surplus-capital alongside surplus-population. Those economists, therefore, who, like Ricardo, regard the capitalist mode of production as absolute, feel at this point that it creates a barrier itself, and for this reason attribute the barrier to Nature (in the theory of rent), not to production. But the main thing about their horror of the falling rate of profit is the feeling that capitalist production meets in the development of its productive forces a barrier which has nothing to do with the production of wealth as such; and this peculiar barrier testifies to the limitations and to the merely historical, transitory character of the capitalist mode of production; testifies that for the production of wealth, it is not an absolute mode, moreover, that at a certain stage it rather conflicts with its further development".[16]
And here, in the Grundrisse, Marx's reflections on the falling rate of profit bring out perhaps his most explicit announcement of the perspective that capitalism, like previous forms of servitude, cannot avoid entering an era of obsolescence or senility, in which a growing tendency towards self-destruction will confront humanity with the necessity to advance towards a higher form of social life:
"...hence it is evident that the material productive power already present, already worked out, existing in the form of fixed capital, together with the population etc., in short all conditions of wealth, that the greatest conditions for the reproduction of wealth, i.e. the abundant development of the social individual-that the development of the productive forces brought about by the historical development of capital itself, when it reaches a certain point, suspends the self-realization of capital, instead of positing it. Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production becomes a barrier for capital; hence the capital relation a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour. When it has reached this point, capital, i.e. wage labour, enters into the same relation towards the development of social wealth and of the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom, slavery, and is necessarily stripped off as a fetter. The last form of servitude assumed by human activity, that of wage labour on one side, capital on the other, is thereby cast off like a skin, and this casting-off itself is the result of the mode of production corresponding to capital; the material and mental conditions of the negation of wage labour and of capital, themselves already the negation of earlier forms of unfree social production, are themselves results of its production process. The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms. The violent destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self- preservation, is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production."[17]
Certainly Marx was peering into the future in passages such as the above: he recognised that there are counter-tendencies which make the fall in the rate of the profit a long-term rather than an immediate barrier for capitalist production. These include: increasing the intensity of exploitation; depression of wages below the value of labour power; cheapening of elements of constant capital, and foreign trade. Marx's treatment of the latter in particular shows how the two contradictions at the heart of the system are closely linked. Foreign trade partly implies investing (as we see today in the phenomenon of "outsourcing") in cheaper sources of labour power and through selling home-produced goods "above their value even though cheaper than the competing countries."[18] But the same section also touches on the "the innate necessity of this mode of production, its need for an ever-expanding market."[19] This is also connected to the attempt to offset the fall in the rate of profit, since even if each commodity embodies less profit, as long as the capitalist can sell more commodities, then he is able to realise a greater mass of profit. But here again capitalism again comes up against its inherent limits:
"This same foreign trade develops the capitalist mode of production in the home country, which implies the decrease of variable capital in relation to constant, and, on the other hand, causes over-production in respect to foreign markets, so that in the long run it again has an opposite effect."[20]
Or again:
"Compensation of a fall in the rate of profit by a rise in the mass of profit applies only to the total social capital and to the big, firmly placed capitalists. The new additional capital operating independently does not enjoy any such compensating conditions. It must still win them, and so it is that a fall in the rate of profit calls forth a competitive struggle among capitalists, not vice versa. To be sure, the competitive struggle is accompanied by a temporary rise in wages and a resultant further temporary fall of the rate of profit. The same occurs when there is an over-production of commodities, when markets are overstocked. Since the aim of capital is not to minister to certain wants, but to produce profit, and since it accomplishes this purpose by methods which adapt the mass of production to the scale of production, not vice versa, a rift must continually ensue between the limited dimensions of consumption under capitalism and a production which forever tends to exceed this immanent barrier. Furthermore, capital consists of commodities, and therefore over-production of capital implies over-production of commodities."[21]
In seeking to escape from one contradiction, capitalism merely came up against the barriers imposed by another. Thus Marx saw the inevitability of "bitter contradictions, crises, spasms", "the more extensive and more destructive crises" which he had already talked about in the Manifesto. Marx's deep immersion in his studies of capitalist political economy had confirmed his view that capitalism would reach a point at which it had exhausted its progressive mission and begun to threaten the very capacity of human society to reproduce itself. Marx did not speculate about the exact form this downfall would take. He had not yet seen the emergence of world imperialist wars which, while seeking to "solve" the economic crisis for particular capitals, tend to become increasingly ruinous for capital as a whole and an increasing menace to the survival of humanity. By the same token, he had only glimpsed capitalism's propensity to destroy the natural environment upon which all social reproduction is ultimately based. He did, on the other hand, pose the question of capitalism reaching the end of its epoch of ascent in more concrete terms: as we have noted in a previous article in this series, already in 1858 Marx considered that the opening up of far-flung areas such as China, Australia and California indicated that capitalism's task of creating a world market and production based on that market was reaching completion; by 1881 he was talking about capitalism in the advanced countries being transformed into a "regressive" system, although in both cases he saw that capitalism still had some way to go (above all in the more peripheral regions) before it had ceased to be a globally ascendant system.
Marx had initially conceived his studies of capital as part of a greater work which would encompass other key areas for research such as the state and the history of socialist thought. In the event, his life was too short even to complete the "economic" part, so that Capital remains an unfinished masterpiece. And besides, to pretend to elaborate a definitive and final theory of capitalist evolution would have been alien to the basic premises of Marx's method, which saw history as an unending movement, and the dialectical "Cunning of Reason" as necessarily full of surprises. Consequently, in the sphere of economics, Marx did not provide a definitive answer as to which of the two ravens of doom (the problem of the market or the problem of the falling rate of profit) would play the more decisive role in the onset of the crises that would ultimately drive the proletariat to revolt against the system. But one thing was certainly clear: both the overproduction of commodities and the overproduction of capital provide proof that humanity has at last reached a stage in which it has become possible to provide the necessities of life for all and thus to create the material basis for the elimination of all class divisions. Whether people starve while commodities go unsold in warehouses, or whether factories that produce life's necessities close because there is no profit to be made from producing them, the gap between the vast potential stored in the productive forces, and their constriction by the envelope of value, provides the foundations for the emergence of a communist consciousness among those who are most directly faced with the consequences of capitalism's absurdities.
Gerrard, 1/11/09.
[1]. The Class Struggles in France.
[2]. Ragnarok -in Norse mythology, the Downfall of the Gods, the final battle of the gods and giants.
[3]. Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, chapter XVII, 12, p 519.
[4]. Ricardo, quoted in Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, chapter XVII, 8 p 502.
[5]. Capital Vol. 3, chapter XV, III, p 257.
[6]. Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, chapter XVII, 14, p 529.
[7]. Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, chapter XVII, 14, p 527.
[8]. Ibid. p528.
[9]. Ibid. p 528-9.
[10]. Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, chapter XVII, 12, p519-520.
[11]. Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, chapter XVII, 13, p 524.
[12]. Grundrisse, Notebook IV, "Circulation Process of Capital", p 410 in the Penguin and Marxist.org version.
[13]. Ibid. p 415.
[14]. Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, chapter XVII, 7, p 496.
[15]. Grundrisse, Notebook VII, "Capital as Fructiferous. Transformation of Surplus Value into Profit", p748-9.
[16]. Capital Vol. 3, chapter XV, I, p 241-2.
[17]. Grundrisse, p749.
[18]. Capital volume 3, chapter XIV, V, p238.
[19]. Ibid, 237.
[20]. Ibid. p. 239.
[21]. Ibid. Chapter XV, III, p 256-257.
We are publishing two articles from Internationalisme, organ of the Gauche Communiste de France[1] dedicated to the question of Trotskyism and written in 1947. At this time, Trotskyism had already abandoned proletarian internationalism by participating in the Second World War, unlike the groups of the communist left[2] who, in the 1930s, had resisted the gathering wave of opportunism engendered by the defeat of the worldwide revolutionary upsurge of 1917-23. Among these groups, the Italian left around the review Bilan, founded in 1933, had correctly defined the tasks of the hour: faced with the march towards war, don't betray the elementary principles of internationalism; draw up the balance-sheet ("bilan" in French) of the failure of the revolutionary wave and of the Russian revolution in particular. The communist left fought against the opportunist positions adopted by the degenerating Third International, in particular the position defended by Trotsky on the United Front with the Socialist parties, which threw overboard all the clarity so dearly acquired regarding the transformation of the latter into parties of capital. On numerous occasions it had to confront its political approach with the very different one of the current formed around Trotsky's positions - which was still proletarian at that time - in particular in the attempts to reunify the various groups opposed to the policies of the Communist International and the Stalinised CPs.[3]
It was with the same method as Bilan that the Gauche Communise de France analysed the basic premises of Trotskyist politics, which were not so much "the defence of the USSR", even if this question most clearly showed how far it had strayed from the rails, but the attitude towards imperialist war. As the first article, "The function of Trotskyism" shows, Trotskyism's involvement in the war was not in the first instance determined by the defence of the USSR, as proved by the fact that certain of its tendencies, which rejected the theory of the degenerated workers' state, had also participated in the imperialist war. What was even more crucial was the idea of the "lesser evil", of joining the struggle against "foreign occupation" and for "antifascism". This characteristic of Trotskyism is exposed in particular in the second article, "Bravo Abd el-Krim or a little history of Trotskyism", which notes that "the whole history of Trotskyism revolves around the ‘defence' of something' in the name of the lesser evil, this something being anything except the interests of the proletariat". This trademark of Trotskyism has not at all altered with time, as witness the numerous expressions of contemporary Trotskyist activism, and its promptness in choosing one camp against another in the multiple conflicts that ravage the planet, including those that have come after the disappearance of the USSR.
At the roots of this tendency in Trotskyism we find, as the first article says, the attempt to attribute a progressive role "to certain factions of capitalism, to certain capitalist countries (and as the Transitional Programme expressly puts it, this applies to the majority of countries)". In this conception, as the article puts it, "the emancipation of the proletariat is the not the result of a struggle which places the proletariat as a class against the whole of capitalism, but is the result of a series of political struggles in the narrow sense of the term, and in which the working class, allied in succession to diverse political factions of the bourgeoisie, will eliminate certain other factions and by stages and degrees will succeed in gradually weakening the bourgeoisie, in triumphing over it by dividing it and beating it in separate bits". In all this there is nothing left of revolutionary marxism.
It is a major and very widespread error to consider that what distinguishes revolutionaries from Trotskyism is the question of the "defence of the USSR".
It goes without saying that revolutionary groups, which the Trotskyists contemptuously refer to as "ultra-left" (a pejorative term the Trotskyists use in much the same spirit as the term "Hitler-Trotskyites" which the Stalinists used against them) naturally reject any defence of the Russian capitalist state (or state capitalism). But the non-defence of the Russian state does not at all constitute the theoretical and programmatic foundation-stone of revolutionary groups - it is merely the political consequence of their general conceptions, of their revolutionary class platform. Inversely, the "defence of the USSR" is not something specific to Trotskyism.
While out of all the political positions that make up their programme, the "defence of the USSR" is the one which most clearly shows their blindness and loss of direction, we would make a serious error if we only looked at Trotskyism through the lens of this position. At most we can see this position as the most typical, complete expression of the basic fixation of Trotskyism. This fixation, this abscess is so monstrously evident that it is repelling more and more adherents of the Fourth International and it is quite probably one of the main reasons that a number of sympathisers have hesitated to join the ranks of this organisation. However, an abscess is not the same as the illness itself; it is simply its localised, external expression.
If we insist so much on this point, it is because so many of the people frightened by the external signs of the illness have too much of a tendency to rest easy as soon as the outward signs seem to have disappeared. They forget that an illness that has been covered up is not the same as an illness cured. People like this are just as dangerous, just as much capable of spreading the disease, perhaps even more so, as those who sincerely believe that the illness has been fully cured.
The "Workers Party" in the USA (a dissident Trotskyist organisation known by its leader Schachtman), the Munis tendency in Mexico,[4] the Gallien and Chaulieu minorities in France, all the minority tendencies in the "IVth International", because they reject the traditional position of defence of Russia, think they are cured of the "opportunism" (as they put it) of the Trotskyist movement. In reality the changes are largely cosmetic and underneath they are still totally trapped by this ideology.
This is so much the case that for proof you only have to take the most burning question, the one which offers the least possibilities of evasion, which poses the most irreducibly the proletarian class position against that of the bourgeoisie, the question of the attitude to take in the face of imperialist war. What do we see?
Both one and the other, majority and minority, with different slogans, all participate in the imperialist war.
We won't take the trouble to cite the verbal declarations of the Trotskyists against the war. We know them very well. What counts are not declarations but the real political practice which flow from theoretical positions and which was concretised here in ideological and practical support for the war effort. It matters little what arguments were used to justify this participation in the war. The defence of the USSR was certainly one of the most important threads that tied the proletariat to the imperialist war. However it is not the only one, The Trotskyist minorities who reject the defence of the USSR, like the left socialists and the anarchists, found other reasons, no less "valid", no less inspired by bourgeois ideology, to justify their participation in the imperialist war. For some it was the defence of "democracy", for others "the struggle against fascism" or "national liberation" or "the right of peoples to self-determination".
For all of them it was a question of the "lesser evil" which led them to participate in the war or in the resistance, fighting for one imperialist bloc against another.
The Party of Schachtman is quite right to reproach the official Trotskyists with supporting Russian imperialism which, for him, is no longer a "Workers' State"; but this doesn't make Schachtman a revolutionary because this reproach is not made on the basis of a proletarian class standpoint against imperialist war, but in virtue of the fact that Russia is a totalitarian country, that there is less democracy there than anywhere else, and that for this reason it was necessary to support Finland, which was less totalitarian and more democratic, against Russian aggression.[5]
To show the nature of its ideology, notably on the primordial question of imperialist war, Trotskyism has no need, as we have seen, for the position of the defence of the USSR. This defence of the USSR does enormously facilitate its position of participation in the war, enabling it to camouflage itself with a pseudo-revolutionary phraseology, but by itself it can obscure the real question and prevent us from clearly posing the problem of the nature of Trotskyist ideology.
For the sake of clarity, then, let's put to one side the existence of Russia or, if you prefer, all this sophistry about the socialist nature of the Russian state, through which the Trotskyists manage to obscure the central problem of imperialist war and the attitude of the proletariat towards it. Let's pose brutally the question of the attitude of the Trotskyists towards the war. The Trotskyists will obviously respond with a general declaration against the war.
But once they have correctly quoted from the litany about "revolutionary defeatism", they get onto the concrete issues, and start making distinctions, start with the ifs and buts which, in practice, leads them to join existing war fronts and to invite the workers to participate in the imperialist butchery.
Anyone who has had any relationship with the Trotskyist milieu in France during the years between 1939 and 1945 can bear witness that the dominant sentiments among them were not so much dictated by the position of defence of Russia as by the choice of the "lesser evil", the choice of the struggle against "foreign occupation" and for "antifascism".
This is what explains their participation in the "Resistance",[6] in the FFI[7] and the "Liberation". And when the PCI[8] in France was praised by sections in other countries for the part it played in what it calls the "Popular Uprising" of the Liberation, we leave them with the satisfaction of bluffing about the importance of the part a few dozen Trotskyists played in this "great" popular uprising. Let's stick to the political content of this praise.
Revolutionaries begin from the recognition that the world economy has reached its imperialist stage. Imperialism is not a national phenomenon (the violence of the capitalist contradiction between the level of the development of the productive forces - of the total social capital - and the development of the market determines the violence of the inter-imperialist contradiction). In this stage there can no longer be any national wars. The world imperialist structure determines the structure of every war: in this imperialist epoch there can no longer be any "progressive" wars. Progress can only take place through the social revolution. The historical alternative posed to humanity is social revolution or decadence and the descent into barbarism through the annihilation of the riches accumulated by humanity, the destruction of the productive forces and the continuous massacre of the proletariat in an interminable succession of localised and generalised wars. This is therefore a class criterion, related to the analysis by revolutionaries of the historic evolution of society.
Let's see how Trotskyism poses the question theoretically:
"But not all countries of the world are imperialist countries. On the contrary, the majority are victims of imperialism. Some of the colonial or semi colonial countries will undoubtedly attempt to utilise the war in order to cast off the yoke of slavery. Their war will be not imperialist but liberating. It will be the duty of the international proletariat to aid the oppressed countries in their war against oppressors".[9]
Thus the Trotskyist criterion is not connected to the historical period in which we live but is based on an abstract and false notion of imperialism. Only the bourgeoisie of a dominant country is seen as imperialist. Imperialism is not a politico-economic stage of world capitalism but strictly an expression of the capitalism of certain countries, whereas the "majority" of other capitalist countries are not imperialist. In fact, if you look at it in a purely formal manner, all the countries of the world are currently dominated economically by two countries: the USA and Russia. Are we to conclude that only the bourgeoisies of these two countries are imperialist and that the proletariat's hostility to war only applies within these two countries?
Even better: if we follow the Trotskyists, for whom Russia is by definition "not imperialist", we arrive at this monstrous absurdity which holds that there is only one imperialist country in the word, the USA. This leads us to the comforting conclusion that all the other countries of the world are "non-imperialist" and "oppressed" and that therefore the proletariat has the duty to come to their aid.
Let's look at the way this Trotskyist distinction works concretely, in practice.
In 1939, France is an imperialist country: revolutionary defeatism.
In 1940-45, France is occupied. From being an imperialist country it has now become an oppressed country; its war is "liberating"; "the duty of the proletariat is to support its struggle". Perfect. But suddenly in 1945 it's Germany that becomes an occupied, "oppressed" country: the duty of the proletariat should now be to support Germany's liberation from France. What is true for France and Germany is equally true for any other country: Japan, Italy, Belgium etc, not to mention the colonial and semi-colonial countries. Any country that, in the imperialist epoch, in the ferocious competition between imperialisms, doesn't have the luck or the strength to be the victor becomes in fact an "oppressed" country. Example: Germany and Japan and, in the opposite direction, China.
The proletariat's duty is therefore to spend its time going from one side of the imperialist scales to another, jumping to the commands of the Trotskyists, and to get itself massacred for what the Trotskyists call "giving aid in a just and progressive war" (see the Transitional Programme, same chapter).
It is the fundamental character of Trotskyism which, in all situations and in all its current positions, offers the proletariat an alternative: not by putting forward the class opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie, but by calling on it to choose between two equally "oppressed" capitalist formations.
Between the fascist bourgeoisie and the anti-fascist bourgeoisie; between "reaction" and "democracy"; between monarchy and republic; between imperialist war and "just and progressive wars".
It is starting from the eternal choice of the "lesser evil" that the Trotskyists participated in the imperialist war, and this was not all limited to the need to defend the USSR. Before defending the latter, they participated in the war in Spain (1936-8) for the defence of Republican Spain against Franco. It was then the defence of Chiang Kai Shek's China against Japan.
The defence of the USSR thus appears not as the starting point for these positions, but as their culmination, one expression among others of the Trotskyists' basic platform, a platform in which the proletariat does not have its own class position in an imperialist war but can and must make a distinction between the various national capitalist formations, momentarily antagonistic towards each other, and where the proletariat must proclaim which side is "progressive" and thus to be supported - as a general rule, the weakest, most backward formations, the "oppressed" bourgeoisie.
This position in a question as crucial as that of war immediately places Trotskyism as a political current outside the camp of the proletariat and in itself demands that any revolutionary proletarian element has to make a total break with it.
However, we have only drawn out one of the roots of Trotskyism. In a more general way, the Trotskyist conception is based on the idea that the emancipation of the proletariat is the not the result of a struggle which places the proletariat as a class against the whole of capitalism, but is the result of a series of political struggles in the narrow sense of the term, and in which the working class, allied in succession to diverse political factions of the bourgeoisie, will eliminate certain other factions and by stages and degrees will succeed in gradually weakening the bourgeoisie, in triumphing over it by dividing it and beating it in separate bits.
The fact that this is not simply a very subtle and insidious strategic conception, best formulated in the slogan "march separately but strike together", but is connected to one of the bases of the Trotskyist conception, is confirmed by the theory of the "permanent revolution" (New Look), which sees the revolution itself as a series of political events, in which the seizure of power by the proletariat is one event among many other intermediate events. In this view, the revolution is certainly not a process involving the economic and political liquidation of a class-divided society, a process in which the building of socialism can only get underway AFTER THE SEIZURE OF POWER BY THE PROLETARIAT.
It is true that this conception of revolution is in some sense "faithful" to the schema of Marx. But this is just faithfulness to the letter. Marx developed this schema in 1848, at a time when the bourgeoisie was still a historically revolutionary class, and it was in the heat of the bourgeois revolutions which unfolded across a whole series of European countries that Marx hoped that it would not end at the bourgeois stage but would be outflanked by the proletariat pushing forward towards the socialist revolution.
If reality invalidated Marx's hopes, this was at that time a daring revolutionary vision, in advance of what was historically possible. The Trotskyist view of permanent revolution is very different. Faithful to the letter but unfaithful to the spirit, a century after the end of the bourgeois revolutions, in the epoch of world imperialism, when the whole of capitalist society has entered its decadent phase, it attributes a progressive role to certain factions of capitalism, certain capitalist countries (and as the Transitional Programme expressly puts it, this applies to the majority of countries).
In 1848 Marx's aim was to put the proletariat forward at the head of society; the Trotskyists, in 1947, put the proletariat in the rear of the so-called "progressive" bourgeoisie. It would be hard to imagine a more grotesque caricature, a worse deformation of Marx's schema of permanent revolution.
When Trotsky took up the formula in 1905, the theory of the permanent revolution still retained a revolutionary significance. In 1905, at the beginning of the imperialist era, when capitalism still seemed to have wonderful years of prosperity ahead of it, in one of the most backward countries in Europe where a feudal political superstructure still survived, where the workers' movement was still taking its first steps - in this situation, in the face of all the Russian social democrats who were announcing the coming of the bourgeois revolution, in the face of Lenin who at that time didn't dare go further than assigning the future revolution the task of carrying out bourgeois reforms under a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants, Trotsky had the undeniable merit of proclaiming that the revolution would be socialist - the dictatorship of the proletariat - or it would not be.
Then the emphasis of the theory of the permanent revolution was on the role of the proletariat, from now on the only revolutionary class. This was an audacious revolutionary proclamation, entirely directed against the frightened and sceptical petty bourgeois socialist theoreticians, and against hesitant revolutionaries who lacked confidence in the proletariat.
Today, when the experience of the last 40 years has fully confirmed these theoretical givens, in a fully formed and already decadent capitalist world, the theory of the New Look permanent revolution is directed only against the revolutionary "illusions" of these ultra-left oddballs, the bête noire of Trotskyism.
Today, the emphasis is on the backward illusions of the workers, on the inevitability of intermediate stages, on the necessity for a realistic and positive policy, on workers' and peasants' governments, on just wars and progressive national revolutions.
This is the fate of the theory of permanent revolution in the hands of disciples who have only managed to retain and assimilate the weaknesses of the master and not his grandeur, strength and revolutionary worth.
Supporting the "progressive" factions and tendencies in the bourgeoisie and strengthening the revolutionary advance of the proletariat by exploiting inter-capitalist divisions and antagonisms, are the twin peaks of Trotskyist theory. We have seen what the first means, now let's look at the second.
Trotsky, who often allowed himself to get carried away by his own metaphors and images, to the point of losing sight of their real social content, insisted a great deal on the aspect of the divergence of economic interests between the various groups that make up the capitalist class. "It would be wrong to consider capitalism as a unified whole", he taught. "Music is also a whole, but it would be a poor musician who could not distinguish one note from another". And he applied this metaphor to social movements and struggles. No one denies or ignores the existence of clashes of interest within the capitalist class, and the struggles that result from them. The question is to know what place they occupy in society and in various struggles. It would be a very mediocre revolutionary marxist who put struggle between the classes, and struggles between groups inside the same class, on the same level.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the class struggle". This fundamental thesis of the Communist Manifesto obviously does not ignore the existence of secondary struggles between various groups and economic entities inside classes, and their relative importance. But the motor of history is not these secondary factors, but the struggle between dominant class and dominated class. When a new class in history is called upon to take the place of an older class that is no longer able to maintain the leadership of society, i.e. in a historic period of transformation and social revolution, the struggle between these two classes absolutely determines and dominates all social events and all secondary conflicts. In such historical periods, like ours, to insist on secondary conflicts in order to determine and condition the direction and breadth of the class struggle shows with startling clarity that you understand nothing of the essentials of marxist social analysis. All you have done is juggle with abstract phrases about musical notes, and in concrete terms, you have subordinated the historical social struggle of the proletariat to the contingencies of inter-capitalist political conflicts.
This whole kind of politics is fundamentally based on a singular lack of confidence in the proletariat's own forces. Certainly the last three decades of uninterrupted defeats have tragically illustrated the immaturity and weakness of the proletariat. But it would be wrong to seek the source of this weakness in the self-isolation of the proletariat, in the absence of a sufficiently supple line of approach towards anti-proletarian classes, strata and political formations. It's the other way round. Since the foundation of the Communist International, the infantile disease of "leftism" has been constantly decried, in favour of elaborating strategies for winning over the broad masses, conquering the unions, using parliament as a revolutionary tribune, the political united front with what Trotsky called "the devil and his grandmother", the participation in the workers' government in Saxony...
A disaster. Each time a new supple strategy was put forward, there followed a greater, deeper defeat for the workers. To make up for a weakness that is attributed to the proletariat, to "strengthen" the working class, we were going to rely not only on extra-proletarian political forces (social democracy) but also on ultra-reactionary social forces: "revolutionary" peasant parties, international peasants' conferences, international conferences of the colonial peoples. The more catastrophes rained on the proletariat's head, the more the rage for alliances triumphed in the CI. Of course the origins of this whole policy must be sought in the existence of the Russian state, which began to find its reason for existence in itself, having by nature nothing in common with the socialist revolution, since the state is alien to the proletariat and its finality as a class.
The state, in order to conserve and strengthen itself, has to look for and find allies in the "oppressed" bourgeoisies, in the "progressive" colonial peoples and countries, because these social categories are naturally called upon to build up a state themselves. It can speculate about divisions and conflicts between other states and capitalist groups, because it is of the same social and class nature as them
In these conflicts, the weakening of one of its antagonists can become the condition for the strengthening of the state. It's not the same for the proletariat and its revolution. It cannot count on any one of these allies; it cannot rely on any of these forces. It is alone and what's more is placed in a situation of irreducible opposition to all these forces and elements who for their part are indivisibly united against it.
To make the proletariat conscious of its position, of its historical mission, hiding nothing about the extreme difficulties of its struggle, but at the same time teaching that it has no choice, that it must fight and conquer despite these difficulties or else sacrifice its human and physical existence - this is the only way to arm the proletariat for victory.
But trying to get round the difficulty by trying to find possible allies, even temporary ones, portraying them as progressive elements of other classes which the working class can rely upon - this is to consoling it with deception, this is disarming and disorienting it.
This is effectively the function of the Trotskyist movement today.
Marc
Some people suffer from feelings of inferiority, others from feelings of guilt, still others from persecution mania. Trotskyism is afflicted with an illness, which for want of a better word we will call "defencism". The whole history of Trotskyism revolves around the "defence" of something or other. And when they sadly go through a week when there is nothing and nobody to defend, they really do fall ill. You can recognise them by their sad, defeated faces, haggard eyes, searching like a drug addict for his daily fix: a cause or a victim for them to take up the defence.
Thank God there is a Russia which once had a revolution. It will serve the Trotskyists' need for defence till the end of their days. Whatever happens to Russia, the Trotskyists will be unshakeable in their "defence of the USSR" because Russia is an inexhaustible source for satisfying their "defencist" vice.
But it's not the big defences that count. To fulfil a Trotskyist's life, he needs something more than the great, immortal, unconditional "defence of the USSR", even though it's the foundation and raison d'être of Trotskyism. He also needs lesser defences, day-to-day defences....
Capitalism, in its phase of decadence, unleashes such generalised destruction that as well as the proletariat, which is always a prime victim of the system, repression and massacre are also spreading within the capitalist class itself. Hitler massacres the bourgeois republicans, Churchill and Truman shoots and hangs Goering and Co, Stalin massacres left, right and centre. Widespread bloody chaos, the perfection of brutality and sadism on a scale never before seen, are the inevitable ransom for capitalism's inability to overcome its contradictions, and the absence of the conscious will of the proletariat to do away with it. But God be praised! What prospects all this offers for those seeking causes to defend! Our Trotskyists can rest easy. Every day there is a new opportunity for our latter day knights, allowing them to show off their great and generous nature in righting wrongs and obtaining vengeance for the maltreated.
In autumn 1935, Italy began a military campaign against Ethiopia. It was without doubt an imperialist war of colonial conquest between, on the one hand, an advanced capitalist country, Italy and, on the other, Ethiopia, a backward country, economically and politically semi-feudal. Italy had the regime of Mussolini, Ethiopia, the regime of the Negus, the "King of Kings". But the Italian-Ethiopian war was more than a classic colonial war. It was a preparation for and prelude to the imminent world war. But the Trotskyists had no need to look ahead that far. For them it was enough to know that Mussolini was the wicked aggressor against the poor kingdom of the Negus for them to immediately take up the unconditional defence of the national independence of Ethiopia. And how! They added their voices to the general choir (above all the choir of the "democratic" Anglo-Saxon bloc in formation) to demand international sanctions against "fascist aggression". Not needing lessons in defencism from anyone, they denounced the League of Nations for not defending Ethiopia enough, and called on the workers of the world to assume the defence of Ethiopia and the Negus. It's true that being defended by the Trotskyists didn't add much to the fortunes of the Negus, who, despite this defence, was defeated. But you can hardly blame them for this, because when it comes to defending, even defending a Negus, the Trotskyists have done their duty!
In 1936, the war broke out in Spain, in the form of an internal "civil war" that divided the Spanish bourgeoisie between a Francoist clan and a Republican clan. It used up the life and blood of the workers and was a general rehearsal for the imminent world war. The Republican/Stalinist/anarchist government was in a clearly inferior situation. The Trotskyists naturally ran to the aid of the Republic "in danger against fascism". A war obviously can't be fought with combatants and without materiel; otherwise it would come to a halt. Frightened by such a prospect, where there can no longer be any defence, the Trotskyists used all their strength to recruit combatants for the international brigades and poured their energies into the "guns for Spain" campaign. The Republican government, the Azanas and Negrins, had been the friends of Franco yesterday against the working class, and would be again tomorrow. But the Trotskyists didn't look too closely. Their help is not for sale. Either you are for or against Defence. We Trotskyists are neo-defenders, and that's that.
In 1938, war raged in the Far East. Japan attacked Chiang Kai Shek's China. Ah! No hesitation possible: "all as one for the defence of China!" Trotsky himself explained that this wasn't the moment to recall the bloody massacre of thousands and thousands of workers in Shanghai and Canton by the same Chiang Kai Shek in the 1927 revolution. The Chiang Kai Shek government may well be a capitalist government in hock to American imperialism and every bit the equal of the Japanese regime when it comes to the exploitation and repression of the workers. But this matters little next to the higher principle of national independence. The international proletariat mobilised for the independence of Chinese capitalism nevertheless remains dependent.... on Yankee imperialism, but Japan effectively lost China and was defeated. The Trotskyists can be happy. At least they had achieved one half of their goal! It's true however that this victory against the Japanese[10] cost the lives of tens of thousands of workers slaughtered over 7 years on all the fronts of the last world war.
1939: Hitler's Germany attacks Poland. Forward for the defence of Poland! But then the Russian "Workers" State" also attacks Poland, and what's more makes war on Finland and seizes territory by force from Romania. These actions befuddled Trotskyist minds a bit; like the Stalinists they didn't fully return to their senses until the opening of hostilities between Russia and Germany. Then it all became simple, too simple, tragically simple. For five years the Trotskyists called on the workers of all countries to massacre each other for the "defence of the USSR", and on the rebound everything that was allied to the USSR. They fought against the Vichy government, which wanted to place the French colonial empire at the service of Germany and thus threaten "its unity". They fought against Petain and the various Quislings.[11] In the USA, they called for the control of the army by the trade unions in order to better ensure the defence of the USA against the menace of German fascism. They were all maquis and fought in all the Resistances in all countries. This was the very zenith of "defence".
The war came to an end, but the deep need for "defence" among the Trotskyists has no end. The worldwide chaos that followed the official cessation of the war, the various movements of exasperated nationalism, the bourgeois nationalist uprisings in the colonies, all of them expressions of this worldwide chaos, everywhere used and fomented by the great powers for their imperialist interests, continued to supply ample matter for the Trotskyists to defend. It was above all the bourgeois nationalist movements in the colonies which, under the flag of "national liberation", and the "struggle against imperialism", continued to slaughter tens of thousands of workers, but which led the Trotskyists to the heights of their exaltation of defence.
In Greece, the Anglo-American and Russian blocs came into conflict over the control of the Balkans, draped in the local colours of a partisan war against the official government. The Trotskyists joined the dance: "hands off Greece" they cried, and announced the good news to the workers: the constitution of international brigades on Yugoslav territory under the "liberator" Tito.[12] The Trotskyists invited workers to join them for the liberation of Greece.
With no less enthusiasm they recounted their heroic tales of armed struggle in China in the ranks of the so-called Communist army - in reality this army was no more Communist than Stalin's Russian government of which it was an emanation. Indochina, where the massacre was equally well organised, was a chosen territory for the Trotskyist defence of the "national independence of Vietnam". With the same general enthusiasm the Trotskyists supported and defended the bourgeois national party of Destour in Tunisia and the bourgeois national party in Algeria (the PPA). They discovered the liberating virtues of the MDRM, a bourgeois nationalist movement in Madagascar. The arrest of its members, councillors of the Republic and deputies in Madagascar, by the French capitalist government, drove the indignation of the Trotskyists through the roof. Every week La Vérité was filled with appeals for the defence of the poor Madagascan deputies. "Free Ravohanguy, free Raharivelo, free Roseta!" The paper didn't have enough pages to cover all the "defences" supported by the Trotskyists. Defence of the Stalinist party under threat in the USA! Defence of the Pan-Arab movement against Jewish Zionist colonisation in Palestine, and defence of the chauvinist Jewish colonisers, the terrorist leaders of the Irgun, against Britain! Defence of the Young Socialists against the Directing Committee of the SFIO. Defence of the SFIO against the neo-Socialist Ramadier. Defence of the CGT against its leaders. Defence of "freedoms" against the "fascist" threats of De Gaulle. Defence of the Constitution against Reaction. Defence of the PC-PS-CGT government against the MRP. And, dominating it all, defence of poor Russia under Stalin, THREATENED BY US ENCIRCLEMENT!
Poor, poor Trotskyists, on whose narrow shoulders rests the heavy burden of so many "defences"!
On 31 May there was a rather sensational event: Abd el-Krim, the old leader of the Rif[13] exploited the politeness of the French government by escaping during his transfer to France. This escape was prepared and carried out with the complicity of King Faruk of Egypt, who gave him what you could call a royal asylum, and with the benevolent indifference of the USA. The French government and press were in consternation. France's position in its colonies is far from certain and it doesn't need new problems. But more than the real danger, the escape by Abd el-Krim is pouring a bit more ridicule on France, whose prestige in the world has already been shaken. We can thus understand very well the recriminations in all the press, complaining about Abd el-Krim's abuse of trust towards the democratic French government in escaping despite giving his word of honour to the contrary.
For our Trotskyists, this was indeed a formidable event which had them jumping with joy. La Vérité for 6 June, under the title "Bravo Abd el-Krim" told us all about this "leader of the heroic struggle of Moroccan people" and explained the revolutionary grandeur of his action. "If you deceived these gentlemen of the HQ and Ministry of the Colonies - you have done well. Lenin taught us that we have to learn how to deceive the bourgeoisie, lie to it and outwit it". So here we have Abd el-Krim transformed into a pupil of Lenin - perhaps he will soon be an honorary member of the Executive Committee of the 4th International!
The Trotskyists are keen to assure this "old Rif fighter, who as in the past aims for the independence of his country", that "as long as Abd el-Krim fights on, all the communists of the world will give him aid and assistance". And they conclude: "What the Stalinists said yesterday we Trotskyists repeat today".
We couldn't put it better ourselves. We won't reproach the Trotskyists for repeating today what the Stalinists said yesterday and for doing what the Stalinists have always done. Neither will we argue with them for "defending" whatever they want. That is their role after all.
But if we can express one single wish - for God's sake, let's hope that the Trotskyists' need to defend doesn't one day extend to the proletariat. Because with a defence like that, the proletariat will never recover. The experience of Stalinism is proof enough of that!
Marc
[1]. See our pamphlet (in French) La Gauche Communiste de France: https://fr.internationalism.org/brochure/gcf [14]
[2]. See our article "The communist left and the continuity of marxism", https://en.internationalism.org/the-communist-left [15]
[3]. See the first chapter of La Gauche Communise de France: "The aborted attempts to create a communist left in France".
[4]. Editorial note: A particular reference has to be made to Munis who did break with Trotskyism on the basis of the defence of proletarian internationalism. See our article on this point in International Review n°58, "Farewell to Munis, a revolutionary militant". (https://en.internationalism.org/node/3077 [16] ).
[5]. Editorial note: this is a reference to the Russian offensive in 1939 which as well as Finland also took in Poland (at the moment that Hitler was invading it) and Rumania
[6]. This is quite characteristic of the Johnson-Forest group which has just split from Schachtman's party and which sees itself as being very "left wing" because it rejects both the defence of the USSR and the anti-Russian position of Schachtman. This same group severely criticises the French Trotskyists which, it considers, didn't participate in the Resistance actively enough. This is a typical offshoot of Trotskyism.
[7]. Editorial note: Forces Français de L'Intérieur, the umbrella organisation of the military groups of the French Resistance in occupied France and in March 1944 placed under the command of General Koenig and under the political authority of General de Gaulle.
[8]. Editorial note: Parti Communiste Internationaliste: a result of the regroupment in 1944 between the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste and the Comité Communiste Internationaliste
[9]. The Transitional Programme: "The struggle against imperialism and war".
[10]. Read for example in La Véritė 20.6.47 in "The heroic struggle of the Chinese Trotskyists": "In the province of Chantoung our comrades became the best guerrilla fighters...in the province of Kung-Si...the Trotskyists were saluted by the Stalinists as the most loyal anti-Japanese fighters", etc
[11]. Editorial note: Vidkun Quisling was the leader of the Norwegian Nasjonal Samling (a Nazi party) and chief of the puppet government set up by the Germans after the invasion of Norway
[12]. Editorial note: Josip Tito was one of the leaders of the Yugoslav resistance and took power in Yugoslavia at the end of the war.
[13]. Editorial note: Abd el-Krim El-Khattabi (born around 1882 in Ajdir in Morocco, died 6 February 1963 in Cairo in Egypt) led a long campaign of resistance against the colonial occupation of the Rif - a mountainous region of Morocco - first by the Spanish, then by the French, and succeeded in setting up a ‘Confederate Republic of the Tribes of the Rif' in 1922. The war to crush this new republic was fought by an army of 450,000 men put together by the French and Spanish governments. Seeing his cause was lost, Abd el-Krim let himself be taken as a prisoner of war in order to spare the lives of civilians, which didn't prevent the French from bombing villages with mustard gas, resulting in 150,000 civilian deaths. Abd el-Krim was exiled to La Réunion in 1926 and lived there under house arrest, but received permission to return to live in France in 1947. When his boat docked in Egypt, he managed to trick his guards and escape, ending his life in Cairo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_el-Krim [17]
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/collapse-eastern-bloc
[2] http://www.legambientearcipelagotoscano.it/globalmente/petrolio/incident.htm
[3] http://www.scienzaesperienza.it/news.php?/id=0057
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1938/world-brink-environmental-disaster
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/global-warming
[7] https://www.panarchy.org/freud/war.1915.html
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/hungary-1919
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/144/1919-Hungarian-Revolution-02
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1822/ten-years-shook-world
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-hungarian-revolution
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/779/decadence-capitalism
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[14] https://fr.internationalism.org/brochure/gcf
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/the-communist-left
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200908/3077/farewell-munis-revolutionary-militant
[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_el-Krim
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/trotskyism
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/trotsky