The ICC has just held its 10th Congress. Our organization carried out an evaluation of its activity, its positions, and its analyses, during the last two years, and set out its perspectives for the years to come. The Congress' focal point was a recognition of the turning point reached in the class struggle. The massive struggles of the Italian proletariat during the autumn of 1992 are a sign that the period of reflux begun in 1989 with the collapse of stalinism and the Russian bloc, is coming to an end. This reflux affected the readiness which the workers had shown until then to fight back against the austerity measures imposed by the ruling class; it also had a significant effect on the development of its revolutionary consciousness. With this perspective of a recovery in the struggle, the Congress adopted the orientation of intervention in the struggles which are beginning so that the ICC should be ready to play its part, as a political organization of the proletariat, in this period of struggles, which will be decisive for the proletariat, and for humanity as a whole.

Obviously, if we are to set out such perspectives, then it is vital to know whether the analyses and positions that the organization has defended since the last Congress have in fact corresponded to the development of those events which have dominated the international scene. The Congress acquitted itself of this task, evaluating the development of chaos and military conflicts, the crisis, imperialist tensions, and of course the class struggle. In the same way, it conducted an evaluation of the organization's activities in order to adapt them to the new period.

In general, we can say that this 10th Congress has strengthened the organization, and given us more and better weapons to face the end of the century, with a historic course still set towards a confrontation between capital and labor, where the intervention of the proletarian vanguard will play a decisive part. In this sense, our evaluation of the 10th ICC Congress is a positive one. Let us briefly explain, for the working class and the proletarian political milieu, why we consider this to be the case.

The growth of chaos

The ICC's 9th Congress, held during the summer of 1991, showed how the phase of capitalist decomposition which began during the 1980s, lay at the foundations of the fall of the Eastern imperialist bloc, the break-up of the USSR, and the death of stalinism.

The 10th Congress noted that our analyses of the phase of decomposition and its consequences have been entirely correct. Not only has the explosion of the old Eastern bloc continued, the entire Western bloc has followed its example, breaking down the old "harmony" between its members, including the world's most industrialized countries. This break-up of the system of blocs that had existed since 1945 has unleashed a chaos which, far from diminishing, is spreading like gangrene all over the planet.

One element that has accelerated the development of chaos has been the sharpening imperialist antagonisms between the great powers. These make the most of every conflict between the bourgeoisies of different countries, or within the same country, to try to lay hold of strategic positions against their rivals, ravaging the rickety economies of the countries involved in the conflict, which once again highlights the irrationality of war in the period of decadence. In this sense, there is no conflict, big or small, armed or not, which is not entangled in the struggle between the most powerful imperialist gangsters.

The other element is the tendency towards the formation of a new system of imperialist blocs, and the USA's struggle to remain the sole "world policeman". Germany's strategic advance in the Balkan's war, through its open support for the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, has positioned it as the one power capable of leading a bloc to rival the United States. However, the road to the formation of this new German bloc is becoming more and more difficult: on the one hand, is the determined opposition to German strategy from Great Britain and Holland, the USA's main allies in Europe; on the other, France and Germany's own specific imperialist appetites limit the reinforcement of the alliance between them, in which French military power would compensate German weakness in this domain.

Nor does the US have its hands free for military action. The rival powers' military and diplomatic activity in Yugoslavia has demonstrated the limitations of the 1991 "Desert Storm" operation, which was aimed at reasserting US leadership. Thanks to this, and to the opposition at home to the idea of a new Vietnam, the US has not had the same freedom of movement in Yugoslavia. However, the US has been anything but a passive spectator of events: its offensive, begun with the "humanitarian" intervention in Somalia and the "aid" to the muslim populations of Bosnia-Herzegovina being hunted down by the Serbian militia, has intensified with the enforcement of the no-fly zone over Bosnian territory.

This whole situation only confirms the constant tendency towards the development of military conflict.

The crisis hits the heart of capitalism

At the economic level, the Congress observed that the crisis, expressed through the current economic recession, has become a major preoccupation for the bourgeoisie of the central capitalist countries. Since 1990 it has become clear that all the bourgeoisie's palliative to the crisis is wearing thin. The USA is not the only country to be hit by the recession (now in its third year in the US): "the open recession ... quote from int sit" (Point 9 of the Resolution on the international situation, published in this issue. World capital is suffering from a crisis which has reached a qualitatively higher degree than any experienced before.

Since the "neo-liberal" policies of the 1980s have proven incapable of providing the slightest solution, the bourgeoisie in the central countries has undertaken a strategic redirection, towards a still greater involvement by the state in the economy. This has been a constant feature of decadent capitalism, even under Reagan, since the only way out could survive was by constantly cheating with its own economic laws. With Clinton's election, the world's greatest power has concretized this strategy. Nonetheless, "int sit quote".

But the sharpening crisis is not only expressed in the economic recession. The disappearance of the imperialist blocs has also sharpened the crisis and economic chaos.

The accentuation of the crisis in the central countries has been immediately translated into a deterioration in the proletariat's living conditions. But the proletariat is not inclined to accept passively the decline into unemployment and poverty. In 1992, the Italian proletariat reminded us again that the crisis remains the ally of the working class.

The recovery in the workers' combativity

This was a focal point of the 10th Congress. After three years of reflux, the massive struggles of the Italian proletariat in the autumn of 1992 (see International Review no. 73), the huge demonstrations by miners and other workers in Britain against mine closures, and the mobilization of the workers in Germany this winter, along with other signs of workers' combativity in Europe and the rest of the world, have confirmed the ICC's position that the historic course is towards massive confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

But the most significant aspect of this recovery in the proletarian struggle in the central countries, is that they mark the start of an overcoming of the reflux in consciousness begun in 1989. Nonetheless, it would be naive of us to imagine that this recovery in the struggle will be linear and devoid of difficulty: the negative effects of 1989 - confusion, doubts as to the class' revolutionary capacities - are still far from being completely overcome.

These factors are joined by the damaging effects of capitalism's decomposition on the working class: atomization, the ideology of "look after number one", which undermines proletarian solidarity; the loss of perspective in the face of the reigning chaos; massive and long-term unemployment, which tends to separate the unemployed from the rest of the class, and to plunge many - especially the young - into delinquency; xenophobic and anti-racist campaigns, which tend to divide the workers; the rot in the ruling class and its political apparatus, which encourages all sorts of propaganda around "the struggle against corruption"; "humanitarian" campaigns over the barbarism unleashed on the "Third World", which the bourgeoisie uses to make the workers feel guilty, and to justify the decline in their living conditions. All these factors, like the wars where the participation of and confrontation between the great powers are not obvious (eg Yugoslavia), make the process of developing the proletariat's consciousness and renewing its combativity more difficult.

However, the gravity of the crisis, the brutality of the bourgeoisie's attacks, the inevitable development of wars where the central countries are openly involved, will all open the workers' eyes to the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. The perspective before us is thus a massive development in workers' struggles. This recovery in proletarian activity demands that revolutionaries intervene, that they take an active part in the combat in order to fulfill their potential, and to defend determinedly the communist perspective.

The ICC's activities

To live up to the challenge of the recovery in workers' struggles, the 10th Congress had to make an objective evaluation of the organization's activities since the previous Congress, verify that its orientations had been carried out, consider the difficulties that had appeared, in order to prepare as well as possible for the period to come. The Congress evaluated the organization's activities positively:

"The organization has proved itself capable of resisting the disorientation that has come in the wake of the bourgeoisie's renewed ideological campaigns "on the end of marxism and the class struggle". It has set out perspectives, which have consistently proved correct, on the acceleration of inter-imperialist tensions and of the crisis, and on the recovery of workers' combativity which would inevitably follow the avalanche of attacks launched against the working class; it has done so, while taking into account the specificities of the present historic phase of decomposition, and developing its activity with regard to present conditions and the state of its own militant strength" (Point 2 of the Resolution on Activities).

Theoretical and political strengthening of the organization

One positive aspect of our activities has been the theoretical and political deepening that the organization has carried out in the face of the need to confront the bourgeoisie's campaigns on the death of communism. This demanded that we explain clearly and carefully the counter-revolutionary nature of stalinism; however, one factor (the other being the acceleration of history to which we must always respond rapidly) made this task still more important: the development of revolutionary elements in contact with the ICC. These contacts, going against the surrounding social atmosphere, are the expression of a subterranean maturation in class consciousness expressed through this minority.

Moreover, these new events have shown us that it is not enough to master a general analytical framework. We must know how to "speak marxism", to apply it to the analysis of particular events and situations, and this is impossible without constant theoretical and political work.

"The continuation of our theoretical and political efforts, a vigilant attention to the evolution of the international and different national situations will determine the organization's ability to play an active part within the working class as it draws out a general perspective for the struggle, and in the end a communist perspective" (Point 3 of the Resolution on Activities).

Centralization

Right from the birth of the groups which formed the ICC, and of the ICC, the organization has always considered itself as an international one. But our ability to make this internationalist conception live is coming up against still greater difficulties today. The weight of decomposition on the whole of society increases the pressure of individualism, the spirit of "every man for himself", and localism, on today's revolutionary organizations still more than did the weight of post-68 petty-bourgeois ideology on the organizations of the 1970s. The 10th Congress debated the need to strengthen the ICC's political and organizational life with a determination to confront and overcome these new difficulties:

"In every aspect of our activities, at every moment, in our functioning and our political deepening, from day to day and in every task of the local sections, our tasks are 'international tasks', our discussions are 'international discussions', our contacts are 'international contacts'. Strengthening our international framework is the precondition for strengthening all our local activity" (point 4 of the Resolution on Activities).

The ICC's international centralization is a fundamental precondition for it to play its part as a proletarian political vanguard:

"Our conception of the organization is not one where the central organ dictates orientations which then need only be applied, but of a living tissue where all the components act constantly as parts of the whole (...) The substitution of a central organ for the life of the organization is completely foreign to our functioning. The organization's discipline is fundamentally based on a conviction in a constant, living international mode of functioning and it implies a common responsibility at every level in working out our positions and in the organization's activity as a whole" (Point 4 of the Resolution on Activities).

Intervention

"The international situation today opens perspectives for intervention in the struggle such as we have not seen in recent years" (Point 6 of the Resolution on Activities).

It is through our principal tool of intervention, the press that we must adapt to dynamic of the new period. We will have to intervene simultaneously at every level: decomposition, economic crisis, imperialism, class struggle.

"In this context, good reflexes and rapid action, rigor in following events, a profound assimilation of our orientations, will all be more decisive than ever (...) Firstly, the press must react to events, and to the first signs of recovery in the workers' struggle, with determination, while at the same time still dealing with the exacerbation of imperialist tensions, the questions of war and decomposition, responding constantly and correctly to what is going on under our eyes, taking account of the situation's full complexity, and denouncing untiringly the lies and maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and showing the proletariat's perspectives (...) we must take part in the development within the working class of the consciousness that it alone is the revolutionary class which bears within it the only alternative to decomposing capitalism - a dimension of its consciousness which has been especially hard hit by the ideological campaigns which accompanied the historical bankruptcy of stalinism"  (Point 6 of the Resolution on Activities).

Our intervention towards sympathizers in contact with the ICC

The ICC has seen an important increase, in its different sections, in the number of contacts, which is a product of a minority within the working class approaching revolutionary positions. We have recognized that the number of contacts will increase with our intervention in the struggle. The organization's intervention towards them must be extremely determined, to permit their real incorporation into the proletarian revolutionary movement. The ICC, through its intervention towards these contacts must assert itself as the main pole of regroupment of revolutionary forces at the present time.

Intervention in the struggle

"The most important change for our intervention in the coming period is the perspective of a recovery in the workers' struggle" (idem). Our intervention in the struggle was a central element in the Congress' discussions. After three years of reflux in the class struggle, we insisted that the ICC must react rapidly, and be prepared to intervene without hesitating in the new situation:

"We will carry out our function as a revolutionary organization first and foremost in our ability to be active participants in the struggle, in our concern to try whenever possible to influence the course of the struggle and to make concrete proposals for action" (idem).

One of the main aspects of intervention in the workers' struggles is to avoid leaving the field free for the leftists and unions to act, especially through the rank-and-file unionists. As the struggles in Italy have shown us, these will play a major role, in trying to derail and control the struggle, by preventing them from developing on a class terrain, and by trying to confuse and demoralize the workers. Our intervention must aim to strengthen the greatest possible unity within the class:

"The organization must always intervene by putting forward, in every experience of working class struggle, what really defends the immediate interests of the class, the common interests of the whole class, what makes possible the extension and unity of the struggle, and its control by the workers themselves" (idem).

In the same way, "In the context of the working class' weakness on the level of consciousness, our intervention in the workers' struggles must, even more than in the past, highlight the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist system, its international and definitive crisis, the ineluctable plunge into misery, barbarism and wars if the bourgeoisie's rule continues, along with the perspective of communism" (idem).

Our intervention in the proletarian political movement

The tendency towards a reawakening of the struggle at levels unknown since the historic recovery at the end of the 1960s demands the strengthening, not just of the ICC but of the whole proletarian movement. This is why the 10th Congress paid special attention to our intervention within it. Although the response of the proletarian milieu to the Appeal of our 9th Congress has been very limited, we must not let this discourage us. We must improve our understanding of the different groups' positions, our mobilization, and our intervention in this respect.

A central element in strengthening our intervention in the political milieu, of which we are a part, is to reaffirm that it is itself an expression of the class' life, of the process of development of the class' consciousness. Strengthening our intervention towards the political milieu demands that debate within it be open, rigorous and fraternal, that its groups break with sectarianism and with the warped vision of some groups which consider that "any questioning, any debate, any disagreement is not a sign of a process of reflection within the working class but a 'betrayal of invariant principles'" (Point 2, Resolution on the proletarian political milieu).

These debates will in turn through a clearer light on new events, both for the ICC and for the rest of the milieu, which has experienced some confusion in understanding them.

"This was particularly true with the events in the East and the Gulf War. Even when these groups managed a minimum of clarity, it was accompanied by major confusions and came late in relation to the ICC. This observation is not to reassure us, or to let us sleep on our laurels, but to bring home the extent of our responsibilities towards the milieu as a whole. It should encourage in us a greater attention, mobilization, and rigour in following the proletarian political milieu, and intervening in it" (Point 4, idem).

The question of the defense of the proletarian political milieu taken as a whole required of the Congress a greater political clarity on the groups of the parasitic milieu which revolves around, and poisons the proletarian movement.

"Whatever their platform (which may formally be perfectly valid) the groups of the parasitic milieu do not express in the least any effort to developing consciousness within the class. In this sense, they are not part of the proletarian milieu, even if they should not be considered as belonging to the bourgeois camp (which is fundamentally determined by a bourgeois program: defense of the USSR, of democracy, etc). Fundamentally, what they express, and what determines their evolution (whether this be conscious or unconscious on the part of their members) is not the defense of revolutionary principles within the class, nor the clarification of political positions, but the spirit of the sect, or the 'group of friends', the affirmation of their own individuality against the organizations that they live off, all this being based on personal grievances, resentments, frustrations, and other wretched concerns derived from petty-bourgeois ideology" (Point 5, idem).

We can make no concessions to this parasitic milieu, which is a confusing and above all destructive factor in the proletarian political movement. Still less so today, when it is vital to defend and strengthen the proletarian political movement if it is to face up to the challenge of the new period, and confront all the attacks that it will have to undergo.

The ICC held its 10th Congress at a crucial moment in history: the proletariat is returning to the road of struggle against capital; the massive struggles of the Italian workers are an indication. Already the bourgeoisie's gigantic campaign on "the death of communism" is beginning to give way to the harsh reality of military barbarism and merciless attacks on the living conditions of the proletariat in the central countries, as a result of the increasing acceleration of the crisis of over-production.

Our 10th Congress has armed the ICC better to confront the challenge of the new period; the organization is united on the turning point reached in the situation, with the international recovery in the class struggle. Moreover, the Congress consolidated our analysis of inter-imperialist tensions and the crisis, whose acceleration is plunging decomposing capitalism into still greater chaos.

The Congress also insisted that this recovery in the struggle would not be easy, and that the collapse of stalinism and the Eastern bloc would continue to weigh on the development of proletarian consciousness, and would not be easily overcome. Moreover, the bourgeoisie will do everything in its power to prevent the proletariat raising its struggles to higher levels of combativity and consciousness. This is why the Congress adopted its perspectives to strengthen the ICC's international centralization, and to arm it better for intervention in the class struggle, but also in all the other expressions of class consciousness, such as the new contacts and the proletarian political movement.

With this 10th Congress, the ICC intends to live up to the demands of this historic period, and to take on its role as a vanguard of the proletariat. And in this way, we will help to overcome the reflux in the development of class consciousness, so that the class may reassert itself, and defend the only alternative to capitalist barbarism: communism.

Mercilessly, events are giving the lie to bourgeois propaganda. Never, perhaps, has reality laid bare so fast the massive doses of lies doled out by the hypertrophied media of the ruling classes. The "new era of peace and prosperity" lauded so extravagantly by political leaders throughout the world has shown itself to be a hollow dream, only a few months later. This new period has turned out to be, on the contrary, one of growing chaos, of a plunge into the worst economic crisis that capitalism has ever known, of a proliferation of conflicts where military barbarism has scaled heights rarely equaled, from the Gulf War to ex-Yugoslavia.

This abrupt increase in tension on the international scene is an expression of the catastrophic, and explosive, crisis that is undermining every level of capitalism's existence. Obviously, the ruling class cannot admit this since to do so would mean admitting its own impotence, and thus the bankruptcy of the system that it represents. All the reassuring declarations, all the determined pretence to control the situation, are inevitably contradicted by the unfolding of events themselves. More and more, all the ruling class' talk appears openly for what it is: lies. Whether they be conscious lies or merely the product of its own illusions makes no difference: never has there been so crying a contradiction between reality and the bourgeoisie's propaganda.

A few years ago, the Western bourgeois delighted in the almost total discredit of the stalinist ruling class in the Eastern bloc, since this discredit made them look better by contrast. Today, they are caught in the same dynamic of declining credibility. More and more, it is becoming evident that they use the same weapons: first, the lie; then when that is no longer enough, repression.

Bosnia: the lie of a peaceful and humanitarian capitalism

For the Western powers, the war in Bosnia has been an opportunity to wallow in a media orgy of defending "plucky little Bosnia" against the Serbian ogre. Politicians of every complexion have no words too harsh and no images to shocking, to denounce the barbarity of Serbian expansionism: the prison camps compared to the Nazi extermination camps, ethnic cleansing, the mass rape of Muslim women, the awful suffering of the hostage civilian population. They have shown a fine facade of unanimity, where humanitarian efforts are mingled with repeated threats of military intervention.

But behind the unity portrayed by the media, the reality is one of division. The contradictory interests of the great powers have not so much left them impotent to put an end to the conflict, but have rather been the essential factor which caused it. Through the intermediary of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, France, Britain, Germany and the United States have moved their imperialist pawns on the Balkan chessboard, while their crocodile tears served to hide their active role in the continuing war.

The recent Washington agreement, signed by the US, Britain, France, Spain and Russia has sanctioned the hypocrisy of the ideological campaigns which have succeeded each other during the last two years of war and massacre. It recognizes the Serbian territorial gains. Farewell to the oft-declared dogma of "the inviolability of internationally recognized frontiers". And now the press goes on and on about the impotence of post-Maastricht Europe, and of Clinton's USA, to make the Serbs give in, and to impose their demands for "peace" on the new Hitler Milosevic, who has replaced Saddam Hussein in the media chamber of horrors. Yet another lie, designed to perpetuate the idea that the great powers are peaceful, that they really want to put an end to the bloody conflicts ravaging the planet, and that the warmongers are only the petty despots of third-rate local powers.

Capitalism is war. This truth is written in letters of blood all through its history. Since World War II, not a day has passed without a war somewhere or other adding to the pile of horrific misery and massacre. And in every one, the great powers have been involved to a greater or lesser extent, fanning the flames in the name of the defense of the global strategic interests: the innumerable colonial wars in Indochina, Angola, Kenya, Malaysia; the Korean war, the Algerian war, the Vietnam war; the Arab-Israeli wars; the "civil" war in Cambodia, the Iran-Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan; and on, and on. In every one of these wars, bourgeois propaganda has wept over the martyred populations and the atrocities committed by one side or another, the better to justify its support for the opposing camp. And not one of these wars could have been fought without the weapons supplied in abundance by the great powers that make them. Every one of these conflicts has been concluded with hypocritical declarations of a return to eternal peace, while the ministries and military headquarters prepare their secret plans for the next war.

With the collapse of the Eastern bloc, Western propaganda has been pretending that the disappearance of the antagonism between East and West has removed the world's main source of conflict, and that we were on the verge of a "new era of peace" as a result. This lie has already been used after Germany's defeat brought World War II to a close, and it only lasted until the erstwhile allies - the Stalinist USSR and the Western democracies - were once again ready to rip each other apart for a new division of the world. On this level, the present situation is not fundamentally different. Even if the USSR has not been defeated militarily, its collapse has given free rein to the rivalries between yesterday's allies in a new world share-out. The Gulf War demonstrated how the great powers intend to keep the peace: with war. The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians was not aimed at overthrowing the local tyrant Saddam Hussein[1]. With the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the Western bloc likewise had lost its main factor of cohesion, and the Gulf War was the result of the USA's determination to warn its one-time allies of the risks they ran in trying to play their own hand.

The break-up of Yugoslavia is the result of Germany's desire to profit from the Yugoslav crisis to recover one of its old spheres of influence, and through Croatia to gain access to the Mediterranean. Germany's "good friends" had no intention of allowing it free access to the Croatian ports, and encouraged Serbia to attack Croatia. The USA then encouraged Bosnia to declare its independence in the hope of gaining a faithful ally in the region: the various European powers, for various contradictory reasons, has no desire to see this happen, and this was expressed in a two-faced attitude which on this occasion plumbed new depths of duplicity. While they all proclaimed their desire to protect Bosnia in public, in reality they encouraged the Serbian and Croatian advances and sabotaged the possibility of an American intervention. This complex reality was expressed in the propaganda. All the powers hypocritically agreed that little Bosnia should be protected from aggression; they all competed in "pacifist" and "humanitarian" declarations, but as soon as it came to concrete proposals, complete pandemonium reigned supreme. The USA on the one hand pushed for a tough intervention, while the French and the British, with delaying tactics and diplomatic ruses, did everything they could to prevent it.

Today's alliances may well change tomorrow, in which case Serbia will be presented as an acceptable ally. In the end, all these ardent humanitarian declarations appear for what they are: pure propaganda designed to hide the reality of deepening imperialist tensions between the great Western powers which once were allied against the USSR, but which since its collapse have engaged in a complex reorganization of their alliances. Germany aspires once again to play the role of bloc leader, which it lost with its defeat in World War II. Since there is no longer, or not yet, any bloc discipline, every country is "looking after number one" and playing its own imperialist card.

The situation in Bosnia is thus not the result of the great powers' impotence to restore peace, but on the contrary of the dynamic which is pushing yesterday's allies into confrontation on the imperialist terrain, even if for the moment it is still only indirectly.

If there is one power which has suffered a setback, and an avowal of impotence, in Bosnia, it is the USA. The US had used the Serbo-Croat conflict to show up the impotence and divisions of Europe. With the ceasefire signed between Serbia and Croatia, the US played the Bosnian card. Its inability to protect the latter has reduced its pretentions to the level of a third-rate actor's tirades. More than any other, the USA has upped the ante on the conflict, criticizing the timidity of the Vance-Owen agreement and the share it gives to the Serbs, and constantly menacing the latter with a massive military intervention. But they have not been able to carry this intervention out. The USA's inability to carry out its threats has dealt a sharp blow to their international credibility. What the US gained from the Gulf War has largely been lost by their setback in Bosnia. As a result, the centrifugal tendencies that encourage their ex-allies to escape from American tutelage and play their own imperialist card, have been reinforced and accelerated. As for those bourgeois factions which counted on US protection, they are now likely to think twice before doing so again: the fate of Bosnia is there to give them pause.

The Americans cannot ignore this situation. They are forced to react. The recent bombardments in Somalia and the dispatch of US troops to Macedonia herald a new sharpening of imperialist tensions.

Yesterday's allies still practice the same ideological faith which kept them together against the USSR. But behind the unity of propaganda, is a hotbed of mutual rivalry; after Bosnia, they herald new wars and new massacres. All the fine words, all the crocodile tears have only one aim: to hide the imperialist reality of the Yugoslav conflict, and to justify the war.

The economic crisis: the fake recovery

War is not an expression of the bourgeoisie's impotence, but of capitalism's inherently warlike nature. By contrast, the economic crisis is the clear expression of the ruling class' inability to overcome the contradictions of the capitalist economy itself. The pacifist proclamations of the ruling class are a pure lie: it has never been pacifist; war has always been a means for one bourgeois fraction to defend its own interests against the others, and one that it never hesitated to use. By contrast, all the fractions of the bourgeoisie dream sincerely of a capitalism without crises, without recessions, a capitalism of eternal prosperity producing ever more juicy profits. The ruling class cannot imagine that there is no solution to the crisis, since to do so would be to recognize its own historic limits. As a dominant exploiting class, it can neither accept nor even imagine its own negation in this way.

Between the dream of a capitalism without crises, and today's reality of a world economy incapable of escaping from recession, lies a gulf which grows wider every day, to the increasing disquiet of the ruling class. And yet it is not so long ago that the "liberal" Western bourgeoisie saw in the economic collapse of the USSR a proof of its own unshakeable health, and its ability to surmount every obstacle. At the time, the media indulged in an orgy of self-satisfaction, where capitalism was promised an eternal and radiant future. History did not wait long to take a brutal revenge on all these illusions, and to strip bare these lies.

The USSR's collapse was still incomplete when the crisis returned to the heart of the world's greatest economic power: the USA. Since then, it has spread like an epidemic to the whole world economy. Japan and Germany have in their turn been laid low. The ink was scarcely dry on the Maastricht treaty, promising a European renewal and economic prosperity, when the whole edifice collapsed with the crisis in the European Monetary System, followed by the recession.

The brutal acceleration of the world crisis is giving the lie to every country's propaganda about the recovery. The bourgeoisie is nonetheless still singing the same song - "we have the solution" - and proposing new economic plans to pull capitalism out of the mire. But none of these measures have any effect. Hardly has the ruling class had time to welcome a brief favorable tremor in the economic statistics, than reality lays bare its illusions again. The latest important example is US growth: hardly had he arrived in the White House than Clinton proudly announced a growth rate of 4.7% for the US economy (4th quarter 1992), and predicted the end of the recession. But these high hopes were soon dashed. Growth for the first quarter 1993 was forecast to be 2.4%: in reality, it was a mere 0.9%. The worldwide recession is there, and nothing the ruling class does can shift it. Panic is growing in the ruling circles, and nobody knows what to do.

Since none of the classical measures to encourage recovery have done any good, the bourgeoisie only has one argument left: "you must accept sacrifices today, so that things will get better tomorrow". This argument is used constantly to justify the austerity programs against the working class. Since the return of the historic crisis at the end of the 1960's, this kind of argument has of course come up against the discontent of the workers who have had to foot the bill, but it has still retained a certain credibility inasmuch as the alternation between periods of recession and recovery seemed to lend it some validity. But the poverty which has gone on getting worse everywhere, from one austerity plan to another, only to lead to the present catastrophic situation, show that all the sacrifices in the past have been in vain.

Despite all the plans "against unemployment" set up by governments in every industrialized country, unemployment has continued to grow. Today, it is reaching new heights. Every day, more redundancies are announced. With taxes rising, wages falling - or at least rising more slowly than inflation - nobody any longer has the nerve to pretend that living standards are improving. In the towns of the developed world, the poor are more and more numerous, reduced to homelessness because they cannot afford to pay rent, and to beggary to survive. They bear a dramatic witness to the social decay at the heart of the richest capitalist countries.

The bourgeoisie has made the most of the political, economic, and social bankruptcy of the stalinist "model" of state capitalism, falsely identified with communism, to repeat ad nauseam that only "liberal" capitalism can bring prosperity. The crisis is forcing it to eat its words.

The truth of the class struggle against the lies of the bourgeoisie

As the crisis degenerates, the bourgeoisie sees before it the terrifying specter of a social crisis. And only a little while ago, the bourgeoisie's ideologues thought that the bankruptcy of stalinism proved the inanity of marxism and the absurdity of any idea of class struggle. In its wake, the very existence of the working class was denied, and the historic perspective of socialism was presented as a "nice idea" but one which it would be impossible to carry out. All this propaganda has created a profound sense of doubt within the working class as to the possibility and necessity of another system, another kind of relation between human beings, to put an end to the barbarity of capitalism.

The working class remains profoundly confused by the rapid succession of events and intense media campaigns. Nonetheless, it will be pushed by events to take up the struggle again, against the constant and worsening attacks on its living conditions.

Since the autumn of 1992, and the mass demonstrations of angry Italian workers against the government's new austerity plan, signs are appearing in many countries of a slow renewal in proletarian combativity: in Germany, Belgium, Britain, Spain, etc. In a situation where the constant deepening of the crisis implies ever more draconian austerity plans, this dynamic can only accelerate and spread. With growing anxiety, the ruling class sees the inevitable perspective advance of a development of the class struggle. Its room for maneuver is shrinking. Not only is it unable to delay its attacks for tactical purposes, its ideological cover is wearing thin.

The impotence of all the bourgeois parties to resolve the crisis, to give the appearance of being good managers, only serves to discredit them further. Under today's conditions, no ruling party hope to profit from its popularity: we need only look at how, after a few months of deepening crisis, the popularity in the opinion polls of Mitterrand in France, Major in Britain, or even the newly elected Clinton in the USA, has fallen sharply. he situation is the same everywhere. The managers of capital, whether from the right or from the left, have revealed their impotence, and so laid bare the lies they have peddled for so many years. Internationally, the participation of the socialist parties in the management of the state in Italy, France, or Spain has shown that they are no different from the right-wing parties, from which they want so much to distinguish themselves. The stalinist parties are discredited by the collapse of their Russian model, and this too rubs off on the socialists. The proliferation of "scandals" showing up the generalized corruption within the ruling class is creating a rejection of the political apparatus verging on disgust. The whole "democratic" model of capitalist management is being shaken to the foundations. Every day, the gulf between reality and what the bourgeoisie says grows deeper. Consequently, the gulf between the state and civil society cannot but grow deeper also. The result today is that it has become a cliché‚ to say that politicians lie: the whole exploited class is deeply convinced of the fact.

But to see through one lie does not mean that one is immune to new mystifications, or that one has seen the truth. The proletariat is in this situation today. That the world is plunging towards catastrophe, that all the reassuring speeches are pure propaganda: the vast mass of workers understands this more and more. But if this is not accompanied by the search for an alternative, and a reappropriation by the proletariat of its revolutionary traditions, by the reassertion through struggle of its central role in society, and of its existence as a revolutionary class bearing a future for humanity, then disillusion can just as well lead to confusion and apathy. The present dynamic, in the light of the deepening economic crisis, pushes the working class to think, to search for a solution which can only, in accordance with the class' own being, be the new society that it bears within it: communism. Faced with the disaster that the ruling class can no longer hide, more and more is it necessary to put forward the revolutionary perspective.

The ruling class is not remaining passive in this situation. Even if its system is falling into chaos, it is not just going to give up the fight. It will hang on to social power with all its strength; it will do everything it can to hinder the development of proletarian consciousness, which it knows means its own demise. As its mystifications wear thin, it invents new ones or reuses the old with greater insistence. It even uses the decomposition gangrening its system as a new means to confuse the proletariat. Poverty in the "Third World and the barbarity of war are used to encourage the idea that wherever the catastrophe has not reached such a point, there is no reason to complain or protest. When scandals and political corruption are dragged into the light of day, as in Italy, they are used to give credit to the idea of a renewal of the political apparatus, and of a "clean state". Even the workers' own misery is used to deceive them. Fear of unemployment is used to justify reductions in wages, in the name of "solidarity". In every country, "protecting jobs" is the pretext for chauvinist campaigns, while "immigrant" workers are the perfect scapegoats to spread division within the working class. The bourgeoisie no longer has any historic future. It can only survive by the lie. It is the class of the lie. And when the lie is no longer enough, it still has the force of repression which does not mystify, but reveals openly the true face of capitalist barbarism.

Socialism or barbarism. This is the alternative posed by revolutionaries at the beginning of the century. It is more immediate than ever. Either the working class lets itself be taken in by the bourgeoisie's mystifications, and the whole of humanity is doomed along with capitalism to a process of decomposition which would mean its death. Or, the proletariat develops its ability to struggle, to lay bare the lies of the bourgeoisie, and to advance towards its own revolutionary goal. This is what is at stake in the present period. The winds of history are pushing the proletariat to assert its revolutionary being, but the future is certain. The bourgeoisie's masks are falling, but it makes new ones all the time. It is up to the proletariat to strip them away for good.

JJ

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[1] Saddam, moreover, is still in power. For years, during the war with Iran, he was supported and armed to the teeth without any hesitation by the Western powers.

For ten years decomposition has spread its grip over the whole of society. Increasingly, world events can only be understood in this framework. However, the phase of decomposition belongs to capitalism's decadence and the tendencies proper to the whole of this period do not disappear, far from it. Thus in examining the world situation it is important to distinguish the phenomena which spring from the period of decadence in general, from those which specifically belong to its ultimate phase of decomposition, especially since their respective impacts on the working class are not identical and can even act in opposing senses. And this applies as much on the level of imperialist conflicts as on that of the economic crisis which both constitute the essential elements determining the development of working class struggles and its consciousness.

The evolution of imperialist rivalries

1) Rarely since the end of World War II has the world known such a proliferation and intensification of wars as we are seeing today. The Gulf War, at the beginning of 91, was supposed to install a "new world order" based on "Law". Since then the free for all which followed the end of the carving up of the world by the two imperialist colossi has not ceased to spread and worsen. Africa and South East Asia, traditional terrains for imperialist confrontation, have continued their plunge into convulsions and wars. Liberia, Rwanda, Angola, Somalia, Afghanistan, Cambodia: these countries are today synonymous with armed confrontations and desolation despite all the "peace accords" and the intervention of the "international community" directly or indirectly patronized by the UNO. To these "storm zones" can be added the Caucasus and Central Asia which are paying a heavy price in inter-ethnic massacres for the disappearance of the USSR. Lastly, the haven of stability which Europe has constituted since the end of World War II is now plunged into one of the most bloody and barbaric conflicts. These confrontations tragically express the characteristics of the capitalist world in decomposition. They largely result from the newly created situation which constitutes, up to now, the most important manifestation of this new phase of capitalist decadence: the collapse of the Stalinist regimes and of the Eastern bloc. But, at the same time, these conflicts are again aggravated by one of the general and fundamental characteristics of this decadence: the antagonism between the different imperialist powers. Thus, the pretended "humanitarian aid" in Somalia is only a pretext and an instrument of the confrontation of the two imperialist powers which today oppose each other in Africa: the United States and France. Behind the offensive of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia lies China. Behind the different cliques battling for power in Kabul, stand the interests of the regional powers of Pakistan, India, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, powers whose own interests and antagonisms are tied up with those of the "Great" powers, like the United States and Germany. Lastly, the convulsions which have put Yugoslavia to fire and sword, just some hundreds of miles away from "advanced" Europe, also reveal the principal antagonisms which today divide the planet.

2) Ex-Yugoslavia has become a major bone of contention in the rivalries between the world's main powers. If the confrontations and massacres which have unfolded here have found a favorable terrain with ancestral ethnic antagonisms smothered by the Stalinist regimes whose collapse has bought back to the surface, the sordid calculations of the major powers have constituted a factor of the first order in the exacerbation of these antagonisms. It is because Germany encouraged the secession of the northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia, so as to make an opening towards the Mediterranean that has opened the Pandora's Box of Yugoslavia. It is because the other European states, as well as the United States, were opposed to this German offensive that they have directly, or indirectly by their inactivity, encouraged Serbia and its militias to unleash "ethnic cleansing" in the name of the "defense of minorities". In fact, ex-Yugoslavia constitutes a sort of resume, a striking and tragic illustration of the whole of the world situation in the domain of imperialist conflicts.

3)  In the first place, the confrontations which today ravage this part of the world are a new confirmation of the total economic irrationality of imperialist war. For a long time, and following the "Gauche Communiste de France", the ICC has pointed out the fundamental difference opposing wars of the ascendant period of capitalism, which had a real rationality for the development of this system, and those of the period of decadence which can only express the total economic absurdity of a mode of production in agony. If the aggravation of imperialist antagonisms has as its ultimate cause the scramble of all the national bourgeoisies faced with the total dead end of the capitalist economy, the conflicts of war offer not the slightest "solution" to the crisis, for the world economy as a whole any more than for any country in particular. As "Internationalisme" already noted in 1945, war is no longer at the service of the economy, but rather the economy which is at the service of war and its preparation. And this phenomenon has only got worse since. In the case of Yugoslavia, none of the protagonists can hope for the least economic profit from their involvement in the conflict. This is evident for all the Republics who are making war at the present time: the massive destruction of the means of production and the forces of labor, the paralysis of transport and productive activity, the enormous waste that armaments represent to the detriment of the local economy will benefit none of the new states. Similarly, contrary to the idea which exists in the proletarian political milieu, this totally ravaged economy can in no way constitute a solvent market for the surplus production of the industrialized countries. It is not markets which the major powers are disputing on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia, but strategic positions destined to prepare for what has become the principal activity of decadent capitalism: imperialist war on a still larger scale.

4)  The situation in ex-Yugoslavia confirms another point that the ICC has underlined for a long time: the fragility of the European edifice. This, with its different institutions (European Organization of Economic Cooperation responsible for administering the Marshall Plan and which was ultimately transformed into the OECD, the Western European Union founded in 1949, the European Community of Coal and Steel which came into being in 1952, and which five years later became the European Economic Community) was essentially constituted as an instrument of the American bloc faced with the threat of a Russian bloc. The common interests of the different states of Western Europe faced with this threat (which did not prevent France's president de Gaulle from trying to limit US hegemony) constituted a powerful factor stimulating cooperation, notably economic, between these states. Such cooperation was unable to overcome the economic rivalries amongst them - a result which cannot be attained in capitalism - but it did permit a certain "solidarity" faced with the commercial competition of Japan and the United States. With the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the basis of the European edifice has been overturned. Henceforth, the European Union, that the Maastricht Treaty of 1991 wants to follow the EEC, will no longer be considered as an instrument of a Western bloc which itself has ceased to exist. On the contrary, this structure has become a battleground for imperialist antagonisms that the disappearance of the old configuration of the world has thrown up. This is what the confrontations in Yugoslavia have shown when we see the profound divisions displayed by the European states incapable of putting together the least common policy faced with a conflict developing on their own doorstep. Today, even if the "European Union" can still be used by all the participants as a bulwark against the commercial competition of Japan and the United States or as an instrument against immigration and against the combats of the working class, its diplomatic and military component is the object of a dispute which can only get worse between those (particularly France and Germany) who want to make it play a role as a structure capable of rivaling American power (preparing the formation of a future imperialist bloc) and the allies of the United States (essentially Britain and Holland) who see their presence there as a means of restraining such a tendency[1].

5)  The evolution of the conflict in the Balkans equally illustrates one of the other characteristics of the world situation: the fetters on the reconstitution of a new system of imperialist blocs. As the ICC has underlined from the end of 89, the tendency towards such a system has been on the agenda ever since the old one disappeared with the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The emergence of a candidate to the leadership of a new imperialist bloc, rivaling that which would be led by the United States, is rapidly confirmed with the advance of Germany's positions in central Europe and in the Balkans whereas its freedom of military and diplomatic maneuver is still limited by the constraints inherited from its defeat in the World War II. The ascension of Germany is largely based on its economic and financial power, but it has also benefited from the support of its old accomplice in the EEC, France (concerted action in relation to the European Community, creation of common army corps, etc). However, Yugoslavia has shown the contradictions which divide this tandem: whereas Germany gave solid support to Slovenia and Croatia, for a long period France maintained a pro-Serbian policy aligning it, in the first instance, with the position of Britain and the United States, which permitted the latter to drive in a wedge within the privileged alliance between the two main European countries. Even if these two countries have made great efforts to see that the bloody imbroglio in Yugoslavia does not compromise their cooperation (for example Bundesbank support for the French Franc against speculative attacks), it is more and more clear that they do not put the same hopes in their alliance. Because of its economic power and its geographic position, Germany aspires to the leadership of a "Greater Europe" which itself would be the central axis of a new imperialist bloc. If it agrees to play such a role in the European structure, the French bourgeoisie, who since 1870 know the power of their neighbor to the east, would not be content with the role of second fiddle that is offered them with this alliance. For that reason France is not interested in too great a development of German military power (access to the Mediterranean, acquisition of nuclear arms notably) which would devalue the trumps it holds in order to maintain a certain parity with its neighbor over the leadership of Europe and at the head of contestation of American hegemony. The Paris meeting of March 11 between Vance, Owen and Milosevic under the presidency of Mitterrand, once again illustrates this reality. Thus, one of the conditions for a new sharing out of the world between two imperialist blocs, the very significant growth of the military capacities of Germany, carries with it the threat of serious difficulties between the two European candidates for the leadership of a new bloc. The conflict in ex-Yugoslavia confirms that the tendency towards the constitution of a new bloc, put on the agenda with the disappearance of that of the East in 1989, is by no means assured of reaching its end: to the geopolitical situation specific to the two bourgeoisies who make up the principal protagonists can be added the general difficulties proper to the period of decomposition which exacerbate the "each for themselves" between all the states.

6) The conflict in ex-Yugoslavia finally confirms one of the other major characteristics of the world situation: the limits of the efficacy of the 1991 operation "Desert Storm" designed to assert US leadership over the world. As the ICC said at the time, this large-scale operation was not mainly aimed at Saddam Hussein or even at the other countries of the periphery who might have tried to imitate Iraq. For the United States it was a question first of asserting and reminding others of its role as "world policeman" faced with the convulsions coming from the collapse of the Russian bloc, and particularly to obtain obedience from the other Western powers who, with the end of the threat from the east, were spreading their wings. Hardly some months after the Gulf War, the beginning of the confrontations in Yugoslavia illustrated the fact that these same powers, and particularly Germany, were quite determined to make their imperialist interests prevail to the detriment of those of the United States. Since then, the USA, while it has succeeded in demonstrating the impotence of the European Union by the lack of harmony reigning in the ranks of the latter, including here between the best allies of France and Germany, it ha not really contained the advance of other imperialisms, particularly those of the latter country which has, on the whole, achieved its aims in ex-Yugoslavia. Such a setback is clearly serious for the first world power since it can only encourage the tendency of numerous countries, on every continent, to use the new world givens in order to loosen the grip that's been imposed on them by the United States for decades. It is for this reason that the activism of the United States has not ceased around Bosnia after it made a display of military force with its massive and spectacular "humanitarian" deployment in Somalia and the prohibition of air space in South Iraq.

7) This latest military operation also confirms a certain number of realities previously put forward by the ICC. It has illustrated the fact that the real target aimed at by the United States in this part of the world is not Iraq, since it has strengthened Saddam Hussein's regime both inside and outside Iraq, but rather its "allies" that it tried, with less success than in 1991, to get behind it once more (the third thief of "the coalition", France, was content this time to send reconnaissance aircraft). In particular it constituted a message to Iran whose growing military power is accompanied by a re-forging of links with certain European, notably France. This operation equally confirms, since Kuwait is no longer concerned, that the Gulf War was not fought over the price of oil or for the United State's preservation of its "oil revenue" as the leftists, and even at one point certain groups in the political milieu have affirmed. If the US is keen to conserve and strengthen its grip on the Middle East and its oil fields, it is not fundamentally for commercial or strictly economic reasons. Above all it wants the power, should the need is felt, to deprive its Japanese and European rivals of their supplies of an essential raw material for a developed economy and still more for any military undertaking (a raw material moreover which the main ally of the US, Britain, has in abundance).

8) Thus, recent events have confirmed that, faced with an exacerbation of world chaos and of "look after number one" and the strong growth of its new imperialist rivals, the first world power will increasingly have to make use of its military force in order to preserve its supremacy. Potential areas of confrontation are not lacking and can only multiply. The Indian sub-continent, dominated by the antagonism between Pakistan and India, will find itself more and more concerned, as we can see, for example, with the confrontations in this latter country between religious communities which, if they are a testimony to decomposition, are stirred up by this antagonism. Similarly, the Far East today is the theatre of large-scale imperialist maneuvers such as, in particular, the rapprochement between China and Japan (sealed by the visit to Peking, for the first time in history, of the Emperor of Japan). It is more than likely that this configuration of imperialist forces will be confirmed since:

- there is no contentious issue remaining between China and Japan;

- each of these two countries has a dispute with Russia (the Russo-Chinese frontier, the Kurile Islands question);

- rivalry is growing between the United States and Japan around South East Asia and the Pacific;

-  Russian is "condemned", even if that stirs up the "conservatives'" resistance to Yeltsin, to an American alliance from very fact of the importance of its atomic armaments (that the United States could not tolerate passing into the hands of another alliance).

Antagonisms between the first world power and its ex-allies do not even spare the American continent where repeated coup attempts against Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela as well as the constitution of the NAFTA, quite apart from their economic and social causes and implications, are moves aimed at increasing the influence of certain European states. Thus, the world perspective on the level of imperialist tensions is characterized by an ineluctable increase of the latter with a growing use of military force by the United States, and the recent election of the Democrat, Clinton, will not reverse this tendency, on the contrary. Up to now, these tensions have essentially developed from the fall-out of the collapse of the Eastern bloc. But, more and more, they will be further aggravated by the catastrophic plunge of the capitalist economy into its mortal crisis.

The evolution of the economic crisis

9) The year 1992 was characterized by a considerable aggravation of the situation of the world economy. In particular, the open recession generalized reaching countries that had been spared the first time round, such as France, and among the most solid as Germany and even Japan. If Clinton's election represented the continuance, and the strengthening, of the policy of the first world power on the imperialist arena, it symbolizes the end of a whole period in the evolution of the crisis and of the bourgeoisie's policies in order to face up to it. It takes note of the definitive weakness of "Reaganomics" which had aroused the most insane hopes in the ranks of the dominant class and numerous illusions among the proletariat. Today, in bourgeois language, there no longer remains the least reference to the mythical virtues of "deregulation" and "less state". Even politicians belonging to the forces who were made the apostles of "Reaganomics", such as Major in Great Britain, admit, faced with the accumulation of difficulties in the economy, the necessity for "more state" in it.

10)  The "Reagan years", prolonged by the "Bush years", in no way represented an inversion of the historic tendency, specific to decadent capitalism, of the reinforcement of state capitalism. During this period, measures such as the massive increase of military spending, the rescue of the Savings and Loans by the Federal Reserve (which increased state spending by $1000 billion dollars) or the voluntary lowering of interest rates below the rate of inflation, have represented a significant growth in the intervention of the state in the economy of the first world power. In fact, whatever the ideological themes used, whatever the modalities, the bourgeoisie can never, in the period of decadence, renounce calling on the state to bring together something of an economy which is tending to break apart, in order to try to cheat its capitalist laws (and only the state can do this, notably by using the printing press. However, with:

-  the new aggravation of the world crisis;

-  the critical level reached by the dilapidation of certain crucial sectors of the American economy (health, education, infrastructure, equipment, research...) encouraged by the frantic "liberal" policy of Reagan and Co;

-  the surrealist explosion of speculation to the detriment of productive investments encouraged by "Reaganomics".

The Federal State cannot escape a much more open intervention, an uncovered face, in this economy. In this sense, the significance of the arrival of the Democrat Clinton to the head of the American executive must not be reduced to merely ideological imperatives. These imperatives are not negligible, notably with a view to encouraging a greater adherence by the whole population of the United States to its imperialist policy. But, much more fundamental, the Clinton "New Deal" signals the necessity of a significant reorientation of this bourgeoisie's policy, a reorientation that Bush, too closely linked to the preceding policy, was badly placed to open up.

11)  This political reorientation, contrary to the promises of Clinton the candidate, will not call into question the degradation of working class living conditions, that is qualified as "middle class" for the purposes of propaganda. Hundreds of billions of dollars of savings announced by Clinton at the end of February ‘93, represent a considerable growth of austerity designed to relieve the enormous Federal deficit and improve US competivity on the world market. However, this policy comes up against insuperable limits. The reduction of the budget deficit, if it is indeed carried out, will only accentuate the tendencies of the slowing down of the economy which has been doped by the same deficit for almost a decade. Such a slowing down, by reducing fiscal receipts (despite the increase seen in imports) will again lead to the aggravation of this deficit. Thus, whatever the measures applied, the American bourgeoisie will confront an impasse; instead of a recovery of the economy and a reduction of its debt (and particularly that of the state) it is condemned, to a deadline which cannot be deferred for long, to a new slowing down of the economy and to an irreversible increase in debt.

12) The impasse in which the American economy is placed only expresses that of the whole of the world economy. Every country is increasingly squeezed in a vice whose jaws are the fall of production and the explosion of debt (particularly that of the state). It's the striking manifestation of the irreversible crisis of overproduction into which the capitalist mode of production has sunk for more than two decades. Successively, the explosion of debt in the Third World, after the world recession of 73-74, then the explosion of American debt (as much internal as external), after that of 81-82, allowed the world economy to limit the direct expressions, and above all to mask the reality of this overproduction. Today, the draconian measures that the US proposes to apply, signal the definitive scrapping of the American "locomotive" which had pulled the world economy during the 1980's. The internal market of the United States is closing up more and more, and in an irreversible fashion. And if it is not thanks to a better competitivity of US-made goods, it will be through the unprecedented growth of protectionism, of which Clinton, since his arrival, has given a foretaste (increase in laws on agricultural products, steel, aircraft, closure of public markets...). Thus, the only perspective for the world market is that of an irreparable and growing contraction, all the more so as it is confronted with a catastrophic crisis of credit symbolized by ever more numerous bankruptcies in banking: constantly and deliriously abused by endebtment, the international financial system is near to explosion, an explosion which will lead to bringing about, in an apocalyptic fashion, the collapse of the markets and of production.

13)  Another factor aggravating the state of the world economy is the growing chaos developing in international relations. When the world lived under the two imperialist giants, the necessary discipline that the allies had to respect within each of the blocs was expressed not only on the military and diplomatic, but also on the economic level. In the case of the Western bloc, it is through structures such as the OECD, the IMF, the G7 that the allies, who were at the same time the main advanced countries, established, under the aegis of their US chief, a coordination of their economic policies and a modus-vivendi in order to contain their commercial rivalries. Today, the disappearance of the Western bloc, following the collapse of that in the East, has dealt a decisive blow to this coordination (even if the old structures still survive) and leaves the field clear for the exacerbation of "every man for himself" in economic relations. Concretely, commercial wars can only be unleashed still more, aggravating the difficulties and instability of the world economy. This can be seen in the present paralysis in the GATT negotiations. Officially these have the aim of limiting protectionism between the "partners" so as to encourage world trade and thus the production of different national economies. The fact that these negotiations have become a free-for-all, where imperialist antagonisms are superimposed on simple commercial rivalries, can only provoke the inverse effect: a still greater disorganization of these exchanges, growing difficulties for the national economies.

14)  Thus, coming into the last decade of the century, the gravity of the crisis has reached a qualitatively superior degree to anything capitalism has known up to now. The financial system moves closer to the edge of the precipice with the permanent and growing risk of being dashed against the rocks. The commercial war which will be unleashed will be at a level never seen. Capitalism cannot find any new "locomotive" to replace the American locomotive which is henceforth out of action. In particular, the colossal markets which the old countries run by the Stalinist regimes were supposed to represent only existed in the imagination of some sectors of the dominant class (and also in that of some groups of the proletarian milieu). The hopeless dilapidation of these economies, the bottomless pit that they represent for any investment, the political convulsions which excite the dominant class and which will even more deepen the economic catastrophe, all these elements indicate that they about to plunge into a situation like that of the Third World, that far from constituting a second wind for the economies of the most developed countries, they have become a growing millstone for them. Finally, if in the more developed economies, inflation has some chance of being contained, as is the case up to now, that does not at all mean any overcoming of the economic difficulties that underlie it. On the contrary, it is an expression of the dramatic reduction of the markets which exerts a powerful downward pressure on the price of goods. The perspective for the world economy is thus a growing fall of production with the wastage of a yet more important part of invested capital (bankruptcies, industrial desertification, etc) and a drastic reduction of variable capital, which signifies for the working class, outside of the growing attacks against wages, massive job losses, an unprecedented growth of unemployment.

The perspective of class combat

15)  The capitalist attacks of every order which are unleashed today, and which can only worsen, hit a proletariat which has been palpably weakened during the course of the last three years, a weakening which has affected its consciousness as much as its combativity.

It is the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of Europe and the dislocation of the whole of the Eastern bloc at the end of 89, which has constituted the essential factor in the reflux of the proletariat's consciousness. The identification, by all sectors of the bourgeoisie for half a century, of these regimes with "socialism", the fact that these regimes did not fall under the blows of the class struggle but following an implosion of their economy, has allowed the bourgeoisie to use massive campaigns on "the death of communism", on the "definitive victory of liberal and democratic capitalism", on the perspective of a "new world order" made of peace, prosperity and the respect for Law. Although the vast majority of the proletariat in the great industrial concentrations have for a long time ceased to have any illusions in the so-called "socialist paradises", the inglorious disappearance of the Stalinist regimes has nevertheless dealt a blow to the idea that there could ever be anything else than the capitalist system, that the action of the proletariat could lead to an alternative to this system. Such a blow to consciousness was still more aggravated by the explosion of the USSR, following the failed coup of 1991, hitting the country which had been the theatre of the proletarian revolution at the beginning of the century.

On the other hand, the Gulf crisis, from Summer 90, operation "Desert Storm" at the beginning of 91, engendered a profound sentiment of impotence among workers who felt themselves totally incapable of acting, or of weighing on events whose gravity they were conscious of, but which remained the exclusive province of "those on high". This feeling powerfully contributed to a weakening of workers' combativity in a context where this combativity had already been altered, although to a lesser extent, by events in the East the previous year. And this weakening of combativity was yet further aggravated by the explosion of the USSR two years after the collapse of its bloc and by the contemporary development of confrontations in ex-Yugoslavia.

16)  Events which rushed along after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, by raising a whole series of questions and contradictions to the bourgeoisie's campaigns of 1989, contributed to undermining a part of the mystifications in which the working class had been plunged. Thus, the crisis and the Gulf War began to deal some decisive blows to illusions on the installation of an "era of peace" that Bush had announced at the time of the collapse of the rival imperialism from the east. At the same time, the barbaric behavior of the "great democracy" of America and its acolytes, the massacres of Iraqi soldiers and the civilian population helped to unmask the lies on the "superiority" of democracy, on the victory of the "right of nations", and of the "rights of man". Lastly, the catastrophic aggravation of the crisis, the open recession, bankruptcies, losses registered by companies considered the most prosperous, massive job losses in every sector and particularly in these companies, the inexorable growth of unemployment, all these expressions of the capitalist economy's insurmountable contradictions are about to settle the hash of the lies about the "prosperity" of the capitalist system, its capacity to overcome the difficulties which had engulfed its so-called "socialist" rival. The working class has not yet digested all of the blows against its consciousness in the preceding period. In particular, the idea that there could be an alternative to capitalism does not automatically flow from the growing fact of the weakness of this system and can very well give rise to despair. But, within the class, conditions for a rejection of bourgeois lies, of a profound questioning, are about to develop.

17)  This reflection in the working class takes place at a time where the accumulation of capitalist attacks and their growing brutality obliges it to shake off the torpor that has overcome it for several years. In turn:

-  the explosion of workers' combativity in Italy during Autumn 92 (a combativity which has never been completely extinguished since);

-  to a lesser degree but significant, the massive demonstrations of workers in Britain during the same period, after the announcement of many mine closures;

-  the combativity expressed by the proletariat of Germany at the end of the winter following massive job cuts, notably in what constitutes one of the symbols of industrial capitalism, the Ruhr;

-  other signs of workers' combativity, on a smaller scale, but which are multiplying in several countries of Europe faced with more and more draconian austerity plans.

All this shows that the proletariat is about to unclamp itself from the vice that has been gripping it since the beginning of the 90s, that it is freeing itself from the paralysis which had forced it to submit to the attacks of the bourgeoisie from this time without reaction. Thus, the present situation is fundamentally different from that at the preceding ICC Congress, which stated that "... the apparatus of the left of the bourgeoisie has already tried for several months to launch movements of premature struggle so as to hold back this reflection (within the proletariat) and to spread additional confusion in workers' ranks". In particular, the ambiance of impotence which predominated among the majority of workers, and which helped the bourgeoisie's maneuvers aiming to provoke minority struggles destined to drown in isolation, tends to give way more and more to a will to cross swords with the bourgeoisie, to reply with determination to its attacks.

18) The proletariat of the main industrialized countries is about to raise its head, confirming what the ICC has never ceased to affirm: "the fact that the working class still holds the key to the future within its hands" (Resolution to the 9th ICC Congress), and which it announced with confidence: "...it is because the historic course has not been overturned, because the bourgeoisie has not succeeded with its multiple campaigns and maneuvers in inflicting a decisive defeat on the class of the advanced countries and rallying them behind the national banner, that the reflux submitted to by the class, as much at the level of its consciousness as of its combativity, will necessarily be overcome". (Resolution of 29.3.92, International Review 70). However, this recovery of class combat will be difficult. The first attempts made by the proletariat since Autumn 92 show that it still suffers from the weight of the reflux. Largely, the experience, the lessons acquired during the struggles of the 80s, have not yet been reappropriated by the great majority of workers. On the other hand the bourgeoisie, from now, shows that it has drawn the lessons of preceding combats:

- by organizing, for some time, a whole series of campaigns designed to make the workers lose their class identity, particularly the anti-fascist and anti-racist campaigns, as well as others aimed at brain-washing them with nationalism;

- by using the unions to take the lead in any expressions of combativity;

- by radicalizing the language of these organs flanking the working class;

- by straightaway giving, wherever it's necessary as in Italy, a leading role to rank-and-file unionism;

- in some countries, by organizing or preparing the departure of "socialist" parties from government, the better to play the card of the left in opposition;

- by avoiding, thanks to international planning of its attacks, a simultaneous development of workers struggles in different countries;

- by organizing a systematic black-out on struggles.

Moreover, the bourgeoisie has shown itself capable of using the reflux in class consciousness to introduce false demands and objectives into the struggle (union rights, work sharing, defense of the company, etc).

19)  More generally, it is still a long road that the proletariat must travel before it is capable of affirming its revolutionary perspective. It will have to spring all the usual traps that all the forces of the bourgeoisie will put under its feet. At the same time, it will confront all the poison of the decomposition of capitalism which penetrates the workers' ranks, and which the dominant class (whose political difficulties linked to decomposition do not affect its ability to maneuver against its mortal enemy) will cynically use:

- atomization, the "resourceful" individual, the "look after number one" spirit, which tends to undermine workers' solidarity and class identity and which, even in moments of combativity, will encourage corporatism;

- despair, the lack of perspective will continue to weigh, even if the bourgeoisie cannot again use an occasion like the collapse of Stalinism;

- the process of lumpenisation as a result of massive and long-term unemployment's tendency to cut many workers, especially the young, off from their class;

- the growth of xenophobia, including among important sectors, greatly facilitating, in exchange, the anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigns, which are aimed both at dividing the working class, and of drawing it into defense of the democratic state;

- urban riots, whether spontaneous or deliberately provoked (like those in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992), which the bourgeoisie will use to try to draw the proletariat off its class terrain;

- the different manifestations of the rotting of the dominant class, the corruption and gangsterism of its political apparatus, which if it undermines it credibility in the workers' eyes, at the same time favorizes campaigns of diversion in favor of a "clean" (or "green") state;

- the display of all the barbarity into which not only the Third World is plunging but also a part of Europe, like ex-Yugoslavia, which is a godsend for all the "humanitarian" campaigns aiming to make the workers feel guilty and accept the degradation of their own living conditions, but equally to justify the imperialist intrigues of the great powers.

20) This last aspect of the situation shows the complexity of the question of war as a factor in proletarian consciousness. This complexity has already been amply analyzed by communist organizations, and notably by the ICC, in the past. In the main, it consists of the fact that, while imperialist war constitutes one of the major manifestations of the decadence of capitalism, symbolizing in particular the absurdity of a system in agony and indicating the necessity of overthrowing it, its impact on the working class' consciousness depends strictly on the circumstances in which it breaks out. Thus the Gulf War, two years ago, brought to the workers of the advanced countries (which were all practically involved in this war, directly or indirectly) a serious contribution to overcoming the illusions spread by the bourgeoisie the year before, and thus helped to clarify consciousness. On the other hand, the war in ex-Yugoslavia has contributed not at all to the clarification of consciousness in the proletariat, which is confirmed by the fact that the bourgeoisie has not felt the need to organize pacifist demonstrations whereas several advanced countries (as France and Britain) already have thousands of men on the ground. And the same is true for the massive US police operation in Somalia. It seems that, when the sordid game of imperialism can conceal itself behind "humanitarian" screens, in other words it is able to present its military interventions as designed to relieve humanity from the calamities resulting from capitalist decomposition, it cannot, in the present period, be used by the great masses of workers in order to strengthen their consciousness and their class determination. However, the bourgeoisie will not always be able to hide the face of its imperialist war behind the mask of "fine sentiments". The ineluctable aggravation of the antagonisms between the great powers, by forcing them to make, even with the absence of the "humanitarian" pretext, more and more direct, massive and bloody interventions (which, in the final account, constitutes one of the major characteristics of the whole period of decadent capitalism) will tend to open the eyes of the workers to what is really at stake in our epoch. The same is true for war as for other expressions of the capitalist system's historic impasse: when they spring specifically from the decomposition of this system, they appear today as an obstacle to consciousness in the class; it is only as a general expression of the whole of decadence that they can constitute a positive element in this consciousness. And this potentiality will tend to become more and more of a reality inasmuch as the gravity of the crisis and the attacks of the bourgeoisie, as well as the development of workers' struggles, will permit the proletarian masses to identify the link between the economic impasse of capitalism and its plunge into barbaric warfare.

21) Thus, the evidence of the mortal crisis of the capitalist mode of production, the prime manifestation of its decadence, the terrible consequences that it will have for all sectors of the working class, the necessity for the latter to develop, against these consequences, the struggles in which it is once more engaging, will constitute a powerful factor in the development of consciousness. The aggravation of the crisis will more and more show that it is not the result of "bad management", that the "virtuous" bourgeoisie and the "clean" states are as incapable as the others of overcoming it, that they express the mortal impasse of the whole of capitalism. The massive deployment of workers' combats will constitute a powerful antidote against the noxious effects of decomposition, allowing the progressive surmounting, through the class solidarity that these combats imply, of atomization, "every man for himself" and all the divisions which weigh on the proletariat; between categories, branches of industry, between immigrants and indigenous workers, between the unemployed and workers with jobs. In particular, although the weight of decomposition has prevented the unemployed from entering the struggle (except in a punctual way) during the past decade, and contrary to the 30s, and while they will not be able to play a vanguard role comparable to that of the soldiers in Russia in 1917 as we had envisaged, the massive development of proletarian struggles will make it possible for them, notably in demonstrations on the street, to rejoin the general combat of their class, all the more so in that the numbers of unemployed who already have an experience of associated labor and of struggle at the workplace, can only grow. More generally, if unemployment is not a specific problem of those without work but rather a real question affecting and concerning all of the working class, notably as a clear and tragic expression of the historic weakness of capitalism, it is this same combat to come that will allow the proletariat to become fully conscious of it.

22) It is also, and fundamentally, through this combat against incessant attacks on its living conditions that the proletariat will have to overcome all the aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism, which has dealt such a blow to its perception of a perspective, its consciousness that there exists a revolutionary alternative to moribund capitalism. This combat "will give a new confidence to the working class, reminding it that it already constitutes a considerable force in society and will allow a growing mass of workers to turn once again towards the perspective of overthrowing capitalism" (Resolution of 29.3.92). And the more this perspective is present in workers' consciousness, the more the class will acquire the means to thwart the traps of the bourgeoisie, in order to develop its struggles fully, to take them effectively in hand, spread and generalize them. In order to develop this perspective, the class must not only recover from the disorientation it has suffered during the recent period, and reappropriate the lesson of the struggles fought during the 1980's; it must also rebuild the historic link with its communist traditions. The central importance of this development of consciousness can only emphasize the immense responsibility that rests on today's revolutionary minorities. It is the vital precondition for the definitive success of the class' combat.

 

---

 

[1] It seems that once again imperialist antagonisms do not automatically overlap with commercial rivalries, even if, with the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the world imperialist map today is closer than the preceding one to the map of these rivalries, which allows a country like the United States to utilize, notably in the GATT negotiations, its economic and commercial power as an instrument of blackmail against its ex-allies. Likewise, the EEC could be both an instrument of the imperialist bloc dominated by the American power while favorizing commercial competition against the latter, countries as Britain and Holland can very well base themselves on European Union in order to validate their commercial interests faced with this power while representing its imperialist interests in Europe.

Major workers' struggles do not leave many visible traces once they are over. When "order" returns, when "social peace" once again imposes its ruthless daily discipline, soon not much more than a memory is left. Some would say that a memory is very nice, but it does not count for much. In fact, it is a formidable force in the mind of the revolutionary class.

The ruling ideology always tries to destroy the images of those moments when the exploited raise their heads. It does this by falsifying history. It manipulates memory by emptying it of its revolutionary content. It generates distorted clichés, devoid of everything that these struggles contained by way of example, instruction and encouragement for the struggles to come.

When the USSR collapsed, the high priests of the established order leapt in joyfully with the filthy lie that identifies the revolution of October 1917 with Stalinism. They have been doing the same thing to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the events of May 68, albeit on a smaller scale.

These events, both because of the number of participants and their length, constituted the greatest workers' strike in history. But they are presented today as a bit of student rebellion, the product of the childish and utopian dreams of a university intelligentsia imbued with the Rolling Stones and the Stalinist heroes of the "Third World". What is left of all this today? Nothing, except one more proof that the idea of going beyond capitalism is an idle fantasy. And the media reinforce this by regaling us with images showing that the once "revolutionary" student leaders - actually the apprentice bureaucrats of the day - have now become conscientious and respectable managers of the capitalism they protested so much about. Cohn-Bendit, "Danny the Red", a member of parliament for Frankfurt; the others, special advisers to the president of the Republic, ministers, high-ranking officials, enterprise administrators, etc. As for the workers' strike, no one talks about it except to say that it never went beyond immediate demands. That it landed up with a wage rise which was wiped out by inflation within six months. In short, the whole thing was just a lot of hot air.

***

What really remains of May 68 in the memory of the working class?

Certainly there are the images of burning barricades where, at night and in a fog of tear gas grenades, students and young workers confronted the police; images of the streets of the Latin Quarter in Paris, denuded of their cobblestones; of the mornings after, debris and upturned cars everywhere. And in fact the media showed plenty of images like this.

But the power of media manipulation has its limits. The working class possesses a collective memory, even if it is often "underground" and only expresses itself openly when the class once again manages to unite massively in the struggle. Apart from this more spectacular side, there remains in the workers' memory a diffuse but profound feeling about the enormous strength the proletariat has when it unites.

At the beginning of the events in May 68 there certainly was a student agitation, as there was in all the western industrial countries, fuelled to a large extent by opposition to the Vietnam war and by a new disquiet about the future. But this agitation was restricted to a very small part of society. It could often be summed up by the demonstrations in which masses of students intoned the syllables of one of the most murderous of the Stalinists: "Ho-Ho, Ho-Chi-Minh!". At the origin of the first disturbances in the student milieu in 68 in France, we find, among other things, the students' demand for access to the bedrooms of the female students in the university dormitories.... Before 68, on the campuses, student "revolt" was often asserted under the banner of the theories of Marcuse, one of whose essential theses was that the working class was no longer a revolutionary social force and had become definitively "bourgeoisiefied".

In France, the stupidity of General De Gaulle's government, which responded to the student ferment by a blind and completely disproportionate repression, brought the protest to the paroxysm of the first barricades. But this still remained circumscribed essentially to the ghetto of student youth. What changed everything, what transformed the "events of May 68" into a major social explosion, was the entry onto the scene of the proletariat. Things only began to get serious when virtually the entire working class entered the battle, paralyzing nearly all the basic mechanisms of the economic apparatus. Sweeping aside the resistance of the union machinery, breaking through corporatist barriers, nearly 10 million workers all stopped work at the same time. And by this alone they opened up a new period in history.

The workers, who a few days before had been a mass of scattered individuals, ignorant of each other and submitting to the weight of exploitation and of the Stalinist police in the workplaces; the same workers who were supposed to have become utterly bourgeois, suddenly found themselves reunited, with a tremendous power at their fingertips. A power which they were the first to be surprised by and which they did not always know what to do with.

The halting of the factories and the offices, the absence of public transport, the paralysis of the wheels of production, showed very clearly how, in capitalism, everything depends in the final analysis on the will and consciousness of the exploited class. The word "revolution" was on everyone's lips and the question of what was possible, of where it was all leading, of what had happened in the great workers' struggles of the past, became the central subject of discussion. "Everyone was talking and everyone was listening". This is one of the things one remembers the most. For a month, the silence which isolates individuals and keeps them atomized, this invisible wall which normally seems so impenetrable, so inevitable, so disheartening, had vanished. There was discussion everywhere: in the streets, in the occupied factories, in the universities and the high schools, in the youth centers, in the workers' neighborhoods, which had been turned into political meeting places by the local "action committees". The language of the workers' movement, which calls things by their real names - bourgeoisie, proletariat, exploitation, class struggle, revolution, etc - developed everywhere because it was naturally the only one that could get hold of reality.

The paralysis of bourgeois political power, the hesitations of the ruling class faced with a situation that had got out of control, confirmed the power of the impact of the workers' struggle. An anecdote illustrates very well what was felt in the corridors of power. Michel Jobert, the head of the cabinet under Prime Minister Pompidou during the events, in a TV program in 1978, devoted to the tenth anniversary of May 68, told how one day, looking through the window of his office, he saw a red flag flying on the roof of one of the ministerial buildings. He quickly phoned up to get this object removed because its presence made the official institutions look ridiculous. But after several calls, he had not managed to find anyone ready or able to carry out the job. It was then that he understood that something really new was taking place.

The real victory of the workers' struggles of May 68 was not in the wage rises obtained in the Grenelle agreement, but in the very resurgence of the power of the working class. It was the return of the proletariat onto the stage of history after several decades of triumphant Stalinist counter-revolution.

Today, when the workers of the whole world are suffering the effects of the ideological campaigns about the "end of communism and of the class struggle", the memory of what the mass strike in France 68 really was is a living reminder of the strength that the working class carries within itself. When the whole ideological machine tries to trap the working class in an ocean of doubt about itself, to convince each worker that he is desperately alone and can expect nothing from the rest of his class, this reminder is an indispensable antidote.

****

But, they tell us, what does it matter if the memory lives on, when the thing itself will not appear again? What proof is there that in the future we are going to see new, massive and powerful affirmations of the fighting unity of the working class?

In a slightly different form, this question was being posed just after the struggle of spring 68: was this just a flash in the pan, something specifically French, or did it open up, on an international level, a new historic period of proletarian militancy?

The following article, published in 1969 in no. 2 of Revolution Internationale, set itself to answer these questions. Through a critique of the analyses of the Situationist International[1], it insisted on the need to understand the profound roots of this explosion and to seek them not, as the SI did, in "the most obvious manifestations of social alienation", but in the "sources which gave birth to them and nourished them". "It is in these (economic) roots that a radical theoretical critique must find the possibility of a revolutionary upheaval ... The real significance of May 68 is that it was one of the first and one of the most important reactions of the mass of workers to a deteriorating world economic situation".

On this basis it was possible to see ahead. By grasping the link between the explosion of May 68 and the degradation of the world economic situation, by understanding that this degradation expressed a historic turning point in the world economy, by seeing that the working class had begun to free itself from the grip of the Stalinist counter-revolution, it was easy to predict that new workers' explosions would rapidly follow that of May 68, with or without radical students.

This analysis was quickly confirmed. In autumn 1969 Italy went through its most important wave of strikes since the war; the same situation appeared in Poland in 1970, in Britain in 1972, in Portugal and Spain in 1974-5. Then at the end of the 70s, a new international wave of workers' struggles developed, culminating in the mass strike in Poland in 1980-81, the most important struggle since the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. Finally, between 1983 and 89, another series of class movements which, in the main industrial countries, showed on several occasions a tendency for workers to challenge the union straitjacket, to take the struggle into their own hands and to extend it.

May 68 in France was "just the beginning", the beginning of a new historic period. It was no longer "midnight in the century". The working class had thrown off the weight of the dark years that had lasted since the triumph of the social democratic and Stalinist counter-revolution in the 20s. By affirming its strength through massive movements that were capable of opposing the union machines and the "workers' parties", the working class had initiated course towards class confrontations that barred the way to a third World War and opened the way to the development of the international proletarian struggle.

The period we are in today is the one opened up by May 68. Twenty-five years after, the contradictions of capitalist society which led to the May explosion have not lessened - on the contrary. Compared to what the world economy is going through today, the difficulties of the late sixties seem insignificant: half a million unemployed in France in 68, more than three million today, to give but one example of the true economic disaster which has devastated the entire planet over the last quarter-century. As for the proletariat, through all the advances and refluxes in its militancy and its consciousness, it has never signed an armistice with capital. The struggles of autumn 92 in Italy, in response to the austerity plan imposed by a bourgeoisie confronted with the most violent economic crisis since the war, and where the union apparatus encountered an unprecedented challenge from the workers, has once again confirmed this.

What remains of May 68? The opening of a new phase of history. A period in which the conditions have been ripening for new working class explosions which will go much further than the groping steps of twenty five years ago.

RV, June 93

---

[1] The SI was a group which had a definite influence in May 68, particularly among the most radical sectors of the student milieu. It had its origins on the one hand in the "Lettrist" movement which, following in the tradition of the surrealists, aimed to make a revolutionary critique of art; and on the other hand in the milieu around the review Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded by the Greek former Trotskyist Castoriadis at the beginning of the 50s in France. The IS also laid claim to Marx but not to marxism. It took up some of the most advanced positions of the revolutionary workers' movement, particularly those of the German and Dutch lefts (the capitalist nature of the USSR, rejection of the union and parliamentary forms, necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat via the workers' councils), but it presented them as its own discoveries, mixed in with its analysis of the phenomenon of totalitarianism: the theory of the "society of the spectacle". The SI certainly embodied one of the highest points that could be attained by sectors of the radicalized student petty bourgeoisie: the rejection of their condition (the "end of the university") and the attempt to integrate into the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. But they never quite got away from the characteristics of their origins, as can be seen in particular by their ideological view of history, their inability to see the importance of the economy and thus the reality of the class struggle. The review of the SI disappeared not long after 68 and the group broke up in a convulsive series of reciprocal expulsions.

(Reprinted from Revolution Internationale no. 2, 1969)

The events of May 1968 have produced an extraordinary abundance of literary activity. Books, pamphlets, and anthologies of every description have been published pell-mell, and in impressive quantities. The publishers - always on the lookout for fashionable "gadgets" - have been falling over each other to exploit the immense interest aroused among the masses for anything to do with these events. And they have had no difficulty in finding any number of journalists, photographers, PR experts, professors, intellectuals, artists, and men of letters. As everyone knows, this country is crawling with them, and they are always ready to pick up a good commercial subject.

All this frantic recuperation makes you want to vomit.

But amongst the mass of May's combatants, the interest awoken during the struggle has not come to an end with the street fighting. On the contrary, it has grown stronger than ever. Research, confrontations, discussions all continue. The masses were not mere spectators, or one-off rebels. They found themselves suddenly engaged in a struggle of historic dimensions, and once they had recovered from their own astonishment, they could not help but search for the fundamental roots of this social explosion which was their own work, and for the perspectives which this explosion has opened up both in the short term, and in the more distant future. The masses are trying to understand, to become conscious of their own activity.

This is why it is only rarely that we find in the mass of books written about May any reflection of the disquiet and the questioning amongst the people. These are to be found rather in small publications, in often short-lived reviews, in the duplicated sheets put out by all kinds of groups, or of district and factory struggle committees which have survived May, in their meetings, and through discussions which inevitably are often confused. And yet despite this confusion, serious work is nonetheless going on to clarify the problems raised by May.

After several months of silence, probably devoted to elaborating its work, the "Situationist International" group has just intervened in this debate, through a book entitled Enrages[1] and Situationists in the Occupation Movement.

From a group which did indeed take an active part in the struggle, we had every right to expect a profound contribution to the analysis of May's significance, especially with several months hindsight. We had a right to make demands of this book; but it does not live up to its promises. Quite apart from their own special vocabulary ("society of the spectacle", consumerism, "critique of daily life", etc), we can only regret that the situationists have given in to the fashion of the day, and stuffed their book with photos, pictures and comic strips.

You can think what you like of comic strips as a means of revolutionary propaganda and agitation. And we are aware that the Situationists have a special taste for comics and speech-bubbles as a means of expression. They even claim to have discovered in the technique of "detournement"[2] the modern weapon of subversive propaganda, and see this as a sign of their superiority to other groups which have stuck to the "outdated" methods of the "traditional" revolutionary press, to "boring" articles, and to duplicated leaflets.

There is certainly some truth in the observation that the articles in the press of many little groups are often repetitive, long, and boring. However, this should not become an argument in favor of trying to amuse. Capitalism is constantly discovering all kinds of "cultural" activities, organized leisure, and especially sports for the young. Here it is not just a matter of content, but also of an appropriate method to the aim of turning young workers away from reflection.

The working class does not need to be amused. It needs above all to understand, and to think. Comics, witticisms, and puns are of little use, especially when in reality, there is one philosophical language (full of obscure, convoluted and esoteric terms) reserved for the "intellectual thinkers", while for the great infantile mass of workers, a few pictures with simple headlines will do.

When you denounce the "spectacular" everywhere, you have to take care not to fall into the spectacle" yourself. Unfortunately, this is just what this book on May tends to do. Another characteristic of this book is its tendency to describe events day by day, when what was needed is an analysis that places them in their historic context, and brings out their fundamental meaning. Moreover, what is described is in fact less the events themselves and more the action of the enrages and situationists, as we can see from the title. The absurd exaggeration of the role played by this or that "personality" among the enrages, the self-praise gives the impression that it was not so much the situationists who took part in the occupations movement, but rather that the May movement was solely designed to throw into relief the great revolutionary qualities of the situationists and the enrages. Anyone who has not lived through May would get a very strange idea of what happened from this book. To listen to them, you would think that the situationists had played a dominant part in events right from the beginning. This shows great imagination, and a real ability to "take one's desires for reality". In fact, the situationists share in events was probably less, and certainly not greater, than that of many other groups. Instead of subjecting to criticism the behavior, ideas, and positions of other groups - which would have been interesting, but which they don't do - they simply minimize (how disdainfully and superficially they "criticize" the other "councilist" groups) or ignore them. This is a pretty dubious means of blowing your own trumpet, and doesn't get us very far.

The book (or what's left of it, without the comic strips, photos, songs, grafitti and other reproductions) begins with an observation which is generally correct: May surprised almost everybody, and in particular the revolutionary or supposedly revolutionary groups. Everybody, that is, except of course the situationists who "knew about and demonstrated the possibility and imminence of a new start for the revolution". For the situationist group, "thanks to the revolutionary theory which returns to the practical movement its own theory, deduced from it and raised to the coherence which it is pursuing, certainly nothing was more predictable, and more predicted, than the new epoch of the class struggle...".

There is no law against pretentiousness - indeed it is a widespread mania within the revolutionary movement, especially since the triumph of "Leninism", and the Bordigist current is a striking example of it. So we won't argue with the situationists' pretentions. We will simply ask: where and when, and on what basis, did the situationists foresee the events of May? When they say that "for years they have very accurately predicted the present explosion and its consequences", they are obviously confusing a general statement with a precise analysis. The "prediction" that one day the revolutionary explosion would arrive has existed for 120 years, since the beginning of the workers' movement. For a group which claims not only to have a coherent theory, but better still to "return its revolutionary critique to the practical movement", this is hardly enough. If it is to be anything other than a rhetorical turn of phrase, then "returning its revolutionary critique to the practical movement" must mean analyzing the concrete situation, with all its potential and its limitations. The situationists never made this analysis before May, and to judge by this book they have not done so since: when they talk about a new period of renewed revolutionary struggles, they never refer to anything more than abstract generalities. And even when they do refer to recent struggles, they never do more than observe an empirical fact. In itself, this observation never goes beyond witnessing the continuity of the class struggle, and says nothing about its direction, nor about its ability to open out into a historic period of revolutionary struggles, above all at the international level, as a socialist revolution must necessarily be. Even such a formidable and important revolutionary explosion as the Paris Commune did not open a revolutionary period in history, since it was followed on the contrary by a long period where capitalism stabilized and flourished, and where as a result the workers' movement turned to reformism.

Unless we want to follow the anarchists, who think that everything is always possible where there is a will, we are forced to understand that the workers' movement does not follow a continuously rising curve, but that it is made up of periods of rising and falling struggle, and is objectively determined in the first place by the capitalist system's degree of development and its inherent contradictions.

The SI defines the present period as "the present return of the revolution". What is this definition based on? Here is the explanation:

1) "The critical theory elaborated and spread by the SI showed easily (...) that the proletariat had not been abolished" (how strange that the SI shows "easily" something that all workers and revolutionaries have always known, without having to wait for the SI).

2) "... capitalism has continued to develop its alienations" (who would have thought it?).

3) "... wherever this antagonism exists (as if this antagonism didn't exist throughout capitalism) the social question still remains posed after more than a century" (well, there's a discovery!).

4) "...the antagonism exists throughout the surface of the planet" (another discovery!).

5) "The SI explains the deepening and concentration of these alienations by the delay of the revolution" (it's obvious).

6) "This delay clearly springs from the international defeat of the proletariat since the Russian counter-revolution" (another truth which revolutionaries have been proclaiming for 40 years at least).

7) Amongst other things, "the SI knew very well (...) that the emancipation of the workers would always and everywhere come up against the bureaucratic organizations".

8) The situationists note that the constant lie necessary for the survival of these bureaucratic machines is the cornerstone in the generalized falsification within modern society.

9) They "had also recognized and worked to join with the new forms (?) of subversion whose first signs were already gathering".

10) And this is why "the situationists recognised and demonstrated the possibility and imminence of a new start to the revolution".

We have reprinted these long extracts in order to demonstrate as exactly as possible, and in their own words, what the situationists "knew".

As we can see, this "knowledge" can be reduced to generalities which have been known for years to thousands of revolutionaries, and while these generalities may be enough to affirm the revolutionary project, they contain nothing which might be considered as a demonstration of the "imminence of a new start for the revolution". The situationists "theory" can thus be reduced to a mere profession of faith, and nothing more.

The fact is that the Socialist Revolution and its imminence or otherwise cannot be deduced from a few verbal "discoveries" like the consumer society, the spectacle, or daily life, which are just new words to describe well-known notions of this capitalist society based on the exploitation of the working masses, with all that that implies in the way of human deformation and alienation in every aspect of social life.

Even supposing that we are faced with a new start to the revolution, how does the SI explain that we have had to wait just this amount of time since the victory of the Russian Revolution - let's say, 50 years. Why not 30 years, or 70? You can't have it both ways: either this recovery is fundamentally determined by objective conditions, and in this case it has to be explained which one - something the SI never does - or, it is solely the result of an accumulating subjective will, which shows itself one fine day, in which case it could not be predicted because there would be no criteria to determine its degree of maturation.

Under these conditions, the prediction that the SI is so proud of would be more the work of a soothsayer than the result of any theory. When Trotsky wrote in 1936 that "The revolution is beginning in France", he was certainly mistaken, but this assertion was based on an altogether more serious analysis than that of the SI, since it referred to an economic crisis which was shaking the entire world. The SI's "correct" prediction is more like Molotov's inauguration of the famous "third period" of the Communist International at the beginning of 1929, announcing the great news that the world had just entered the revolutionary period. The similarity lies in the gratuitous nature of both assertions. Molotov thought that the economic crisis, whose study is indeed a vital starting point for any analysis of a given period, was sufficient to determine the its revolutionary nature or otherwise; so, on the basis of the 1929 crisis he thought he could announce the imminence of the revolution. The SI by contrast thinks it enough to ignore anything that smacks of an objective condition, whence its deep aversion for anything to do with an economic analysis of modern capitalist society.

All the SI's attention is thus devoted to the most obvious expressions of social alienation, and it neglects to look at the springs that feed them. We insist, again, that such a critique which deals essentially with superficial expressions, no matter how radical, is bound to be hemmed in, limited, both in theory and practice.

Capitalism necessarily produces its own alienations, and it is not in the expression of these alienations that we should look for the motor of its downfall. As long as capitalism, at its roots, remains a viable economic system, it cannot be destroyed by will-power alone.

"A society never expires before developing all the productive forces that it is capable of containing" (Marx, Preface to a Critique of Political Economy).

A radical critical theory must look at the roots of capitalist society to uncover the possibility of its revolutionary overthrow.

"At a certain stage of their development, society's material productive forces enter into collision with the relations of production... So begins an era of social revolution" (Marx, idem).

This collision that Marx talks about is expressed in economic upheavals, such as crises, imperialist wars, and social convulsions. Every marxist thinker has insisted on the fact that before we can talk of a revolutionary period, "it is not enough that the workers do not want to go on as before, the capitalists must also be unable to continue as before" (Lenin). And here is the SI, which claims to be virtually the sole organized expression of revolutionary practice today, going in exactly the opposite direction. On the rare occasions when this book overcomes its own distaste so far as to deal with economic questions, it is to show that the new start to the revolution is not just independent of society's economic bases, but is taking place in an economically flourishing capitalism. "No tendency towards economic crisis could be observed... The revolutionary eruption did not come from the economic crisis... what was attacked head-on in May, was a capitalist economy working well" (emphasis in the text).

What this is trying to demonstrate is that the revolutionary crisis and society's economic state are two different things, which can evolve each in its own way, without being related. The SI thinks that facts support this "great discovery", and so cries triumphally: "No tendency could be observed towards economic crisis"!!

No tendency at all? Really?

By the end of 1967, the economic situation in France began to show signs of deteriorating. The threat of unemployment caused more and more concern. By the beginning of 1968, the number of unemployed rose above 500,000. The phenomenon was no longer restricted to local pockets, but had reached every region. In Paris, the number of unemployed rose, slowly but surely. The press was full of articles dealing with the fear of unemployment in various milieux. Part-time working had come to stay in many factories, and had provoked reactions from many workers. Sporadic strikes were directly provoked by the question of preserving jobs, or full employment. The young were hardest hit, and began to have difficulty in entering the productive process. The drop in employment was all the more unwelcome, since the labor market was having to absorb generation of the demographic explosion after the war. A fear for the future became permanent amongst the workers, and especially amongst the young. This fear was all the sharper in that it had been virtually unknown since the war.

As unemployment rose, wages and living conditions fell, partly as a result. Naturally, government and bosses tried to make the most of the situation to attack workers' living standards (eg, the decrees on the Social Security).

More and more, the feeling is growing in the masses that the period of prosperity has come to an end. The workers' indifference and "don't give a damn" attitude, which the bourgeois have so lamented during the last 10-15 years, are giving way to a deep and growing anxiety.

Certainly, it more difficult to discern this rising anxiety and discontent amongst the workers than spectacular actions in a university faculty. But you can't go on ignoring it after the May explosion, unless you believe that 10 million workers were suddenly touched, one fine day, by the Holy Spirit of the Anti-spectacle. Such a massive explosion is founded on a long accumulation of real discontent among the masses at their economic situation and working conditions, even if a superficial observer saw nothing of it. Nor can we attribute the economic demands of the strike solely to the scoundrels of the trades unions and the stalinists.

It is obvious that the unions and the PCF (French "Communist" Party) came to the government's rescue by using economic demands to the hilt as a means of preventing the strike breaking out onto a global, social terrain. But we are not talking here about the role of these state organisms; they did their job, and they can hardly be reproached for doing it to the utmost. But the fact that they were so easily able to keep the vast mass of striking workers to the purely economic terrain proves that the masses main preoccupation in taking up the struggle was the increasingly threatening economic situation. While the task of revolutionaries is to uncover the radical possibilities contained in the struggle of the masses, and to take an active part in bringing them to fruition, it is necessary above all not to ignore the immediate concerns that have pushed the masses into struggle in the first place.

Despite the proclaimed self-confidence of government circles, the business world is increasingly alarmed by the economic situation, as we have seen in the financial press at the beginning of the year. What worries them most is not so much the situation in France, whose position is still relatively privileged, but the fact that the economy is slowing down in a context of worldwide economic gloom, which cannot help but have repercussions in France. In all the industrial countries, in both Europe and the USA, unemployment is rising and the economic outlook is getting darker. Despite a whole series of measures, Britain was forced at the end of 1967 to devalue the pound, dragging other countries in its wake. The Wilson government has announced an exceptional austerity program: reduction in public spending, including armaments; withdrawal of British troops from Asia; wage freeze; reduction of domestic consumption and imports; support for exports. On January 1st 1968, the Johnson government (in the USA) sounded the alarm, and announced harsh measures necessary to keep the economy in balance. In March, came the dollar crisis. The economic press became more pessimistic by the day, and began to speak more and more of the specter of 1929 crisis; many feared that this time, the consequences would be still worse. Everywhere, the price of credit rose, the stock exchanges fell. In every country, the same cry: reduce spending and consumption, increase exports at all costs, and reduce imports to the strict minimum. At the same time, the same deterioration appeared in the Eastern bloc, which explains the tendency of countries like Czechoslovakia and Romania to detach themselves from the Soviet grip, and look for markets elsewhere.

This is the economic backdrop to the situation prior to May.

Of course, this is not yet an open economic crisis, first because we are only at the beginning, and second because in today's capitalism the state possesses a whole arsenal of means to slow down, and temporarily to attenuate the crisis' most striking expressions. Nonetheless, it is necessary to put forward the following points:

a) For 20 years since World War II, the capitalism has lived on the basis of rebuilding an economy ravaged by war, of the shameless plundering of the under-developed countries which, through the swindle of national liberation and aid to the construction of independent states have been exploited to the point where they are reduced to desperate poverty and famine, and of a growing production of armaments: the war economy.

b) These three sources of prosperity and full employment during the last 20 years are close to exhaustion. The productive apparatus is faced with a world market more saturated than ever, and the capitalist economy finds itself in exactly the same situation as in 1929, only worse.

c) There is a closer inter-relation between national economies than in in 1929, with the result that any difficulties in one national economy has more immediate and greater repercussions on the economy of other countries.

d) The 1929 crisis broke out after a series of heavy defeats for the international proletariat: the victory of the counter-revolution in Russia completed with the mystification of "socialism in one country", and the myth of the anti-fascist struggle. Thanks to these particular historic conditions, the 1929 crisis - which was not merely conjunctural, but a violent expression of the chronic crisis of decaying capitalism - could develop for years and finally lead to world war and generalized destruction. This is not the case today.

Capitalism disposes of fewer and fewer themes of mystification capable of mobilizing the masses and sending them to the slaughter. The Russian myth is collapsing; the false choice between bourgeois democracy and totalitarianism is wearing very thin. In these conditions, the crisis can be seen immediately for what it is. Its first symptoms will provoke increasingly violent reactions from the masses in every country. Because, today, the economic crisis cannot run its full course, but is immediately transformed into a social crisis, the latter may seem to some to be independent, suspended in mid-air without any relation to the economic situation which is nonetheless its foundation.

Obviously, if we are to grasp this reality fully, it is no good looking at it naively. Above all, it is useless to look for a narrow relationship of cause and effect, limited locally to particular countries or particular branches of industry. This reality's foundations, and the causes that determine its evolution in the final instance, are only to be found globally, on the scale of the world economy. Looked at in this way, the movement of student struggles in every town in the world reveals its fundamental meaning, but also its limitations. If the student struggles in May were able to serve as a detonator for the vast movement of factory occupations, it is because, with all their specificities, they were no more than the forerunners of a deteriorating situation at society's core: in production, and the relations of production.

The full significance of May 68 is that it was one of the most important reactions by the mass of workers to a deteriorating world economic situation.

Consequently, it is wrong to say, as the author of this book does, that "The revolutionary upheaval did not spring from the economic crisis; on the contrary, it helped to create a situation of crisis in the economy" and that "once this economy has been disturbed by the negative forces of its historic overcoming, it must function less well".

This certainly turns reality upside down: economic crises are no longer the inevitable product of the capitalist system's inherent contradictions, as Marx tells us; on the contrary, it is the workers and their struggle who create crises in a systems which "works well". This is precisely what the bosses and capitalist apologists never stop telling us. This was De Gaulle's theme in November, baling the crisis of the franc on the activities of the May enrages[3].

This boils down to replacing marxist economic theory with the political economy of the bourgeoisie. Not surprisingly, with such an outlook, the author explains the immense movement that was May 68 as the work of a small, determined minority which he exalts: "The agitation unleashed in January 1968 by the four or five revolutionaries who were to constitute the enrages group was to lead, in five months, to the virtual liquidation of the state". Later, he writes: "never has an agitation undertaken by so small a number led in so short a time to such consequences".

For the situationists, the problem of the revolution is posed in terms of "leading", if only by exemplary acts. For us, it is posed in terms of a spontaneous movement of the masses of the proletariat, forced to rise up against a decaying economic system, which can no longer offer anything but growing misery and destruction, as well as exploitation.

It is on this granite rock that we base the class' revolutionary perspective, and our conviction in its achievement.

MC

---

[1] Enrages: in French, literally means "the angry ones". Since this sounds a little strange in English, we have left the original French expression.

[2] "Detournement" is a term dear to the situationists which it is difficult to render into English. Briefly put, it referred to a popular situationist technique of taking products of the capitalist media (advertisements, comic strips, etc) and "turning them against" ("detourner") what they described as the "society of the spectacle".

[3] We refer those who want to blame the November crisis of the franc on speculation by a few "bad Frenchmen" to these lines by Marx:

"The crisis breaks out first of all in the domain of speculation, and only moves later to that of production. To a superficial observer, the cause of the crisis seems to lie, not in over-production, but in over-speculation, which in fact is merely a symptom of over-production. The disorganization of production that comes afterwards seems to be, not the result of its own previous exuberance, but a consequence of the collapse in speculation" (Marx, Review from May to October 1850, published by M. Rubel in Etudes de Marxologie, no. 7, August 1963).

 

In the first part of this article, we explained why the proletariat is the revolutionary class within capitalist society. We have seen why it is the only force capable of resolving the insoluble contradictions which undermine the world today, by setting up a new society rid of exploitation and able to satisfy fully human needs. This capacity of the proletariat, which was demonstrated during the previous century by marxist theory in particular, does not spring merely from the degree of misery and exploitation to which it is subjected every day. Still less is it based, as some bourgeois ideologues try to pretend that marxism says, on some kind of "divine inspiration" transforming the proletariat into a "messiah for modern times". It is founded on thoroughly material conditions: the proletariat's specific place within capitalist relations of production, its status as the collective producer of the great majority of social wealth, and as a class exploited by these same relations of production. This place within capitalism does not allow it, unlike other social classes (such as the small peasantry, for example), to hope for a return to the past. On the contrary, it is forced to turn towards the future, to the abolition of wage labor and the construction of a communist society.

None of these elements are new: they are all part of the classical heritage of marxism. However, one of bourgeois ideology's most perfidious methods whereby it tries to turn the proletariat away from its communist project is to convince it that it is disappearing, or even that it has already disappeared. For this ideology, the revolutionary perspective is supposed to have had a meaning only as long as the vast majority of wage-earners were industrial workers; now that this category of the workforce is diminishing, such a perspective is supposed to disappear of itself. And we are forced to admit, that this kind of talk affects not only the less conscious workers, but even certain groups which call themselves communist. This is a further reason to fight firmly against such chatter.

The so-called "disappearance" of the working class

Bourgeois "theories" about the disappearance of the proletariat already have a long history behind them. For decades, they have been based on a certain improvement in workers' living conditions. The fact that workers can now acquire consumer goods which were once reserved to the bourgeois or the petty-bourgeois is supposed to illustrate the disappearance of the working class. But even when they appeared, these "theories" did not bear examination: when, thanks to the increase in the productivity of labour, such commodities as cars, televisions, or refrigerators became relatively cheap, and moreover when they became indispensable thanks to the evolution of the framework of working-class life[1], the fact of possessing them does not at all mean that one is no longer a worker, nor even that one is less exploited. In reality, the degree of exploitation of the working class has never been determined by the quantity or the nature of the consumer goods that it can dispose of at a given moment. Marx and marxism have long since answered this question: the wage-earners' ability to consume depends on the cost of their labour power, in other words on the quantity of labor necessary to renew it. When the capitalist pays the worker a wage, his object is to allow the latter to continue his participation in the productive process under the best possible conditions for the profitability of capital. This means that the worker must not only be able to house, feed, and clothe himself, but must also be able to rest, and to acquire the qualification necessary to operate the constantly evolving means of production.

This is why the creation and increase of paid holidays during the 20th century in the developed countries has nothing to do with any kind of bourgeois "philanthropy". They have been made necessary by the enormous increase in the productivity, and therefore the intensity of labor during the same period, as indeed of urban life as a whole. Similarly, the (relative) disappearance of child labor and the increase in time spent at school, which are presented as further proofs of bourgeois solicitude, are essentially due to capital's requirement for a more highly qualified labor force adapted to the demands of an ever more technically complex productive apparatus (though this has also become, today, a means of hiding unemployment). Moreover, in the "increase" in wages of which the bourgeoisie makes so much, especially since World War II, we must take account of the fact that workers must support their children for much longer than in the past. When children went to work at the age of twelve or even less, they brought extra money into a working-class family for ten years or more, before starting their own family. When children stay at school until eighteen, this effectively disappears. In other words, the "increase" in wages is also in large part one of capital's means of preparing the next generation of workers for new technological conditions.

Even if capitalism in the most developed countries gave the appearance, for a while, of reducing the workers' level of exploitation, this was only an illusion. In reality, the rate of exploitation, in other words the relation between the amount of surplus value that a worker produces and the wages he receives[2], has never ceased to grow. This is why, even at the time, Marx spoke of the "relative" pauperization of the working class as a constant tendency under capitalism. During the years of relative prosperity that corresponded to the reconstruction following World War II, the exploitation of the working class increased continuously, even though their living conditions did not fall as a result. This being said, we are not dealing with merely relative pauperization today. "Improvements" in wages are no longer a prospect in today's conditions, and the absolute pauperization which the bourgeoisie's apologists told us had disappeared for good is returning in earnest to the "wealthy" countries. Now that the policy of every national fraction of the bourgeoisie for dealing with the crisis, is to attack workers' living conditions through drastic attacks on the "social wage" and even on money wages, all the chatter about the "consumer society" or even the "bourgeoisification" of the working class has disappeared of itself. This is why the talk about the "disappearance of the proletariat" has changed its arguments, which now rely increasingly on the changes that affect different fractions of the class, in particular the reduction in the industrial labour force and in the proportion of "manual" workers in the labor force as a whole.

Such talk is based on a gross falsification of marxism, which has never identified the proletariat solely with industrial or manual ("blue-collar") workers. It is true that in Marx's day, the working class' biggest battalions were formed by the so-called "manual" workers. But there has always existed within the proletariat sectors which worked with sophisticated technology, or required a high degree of intellectual knowledge. Some traditional crafts, for example, required a long apprenticeship. Similarly, trades like the proof-readers in the printing industry required a high degree of study, which made their members "intellectual workers". This did not prevent this sector of the working class from being in the vanguard of the class struggle. In fact, the opposition between "blue-collar" and "white-collar" workers corresponds to the kind of categorization beloved of sociologists and their bourgeois employers, and is used to divide the workers' ranks. This is why this opposition is not new, since the ruling class understood a long time ago the advantage to be gained from making many employees think that they were not part of the working class. In reality, belonging to the working class has nothing to do with sociological, still less with ideological criteria (ie the idea that a proletarian, or a group of proletarians, has of his own condition). Fundamentally, it is determined by economic criteria.

Who belongs to the working class?

Fundamentally, the proletariat is the class exploited specifically by capitalist relations of production. As we saw in the first part of the article, the result is that "In general terms (...) belonging to the working class is determined by the fact of being deprived of the means of production, and of thus being obliged to sell one's labor power to those who do possess them, and who profit from this exchange to allot the surplus value to themselves". However, given all the falsification that surrounds the question, we need to give these criteria greater precision.

To begin with, although it is necessary to be a wage earner to be part of the working class, this is not a sufficient condition: otherwise the police, priests, the managers of large companies (especially in the state sector), and even government ministers would be exploited, and potential comrades in struggle of those that they repress, deceive, or set to work for a revenue ten or a hundred times less[3]. It is thus vital to understand that an essential characteristic of the working class is the production of surplus-value. This means two things in particular:

- a worker's income never exceeds a certain level[4]; beyond this, an income can only be derived from surplus-value extorted from other workers;

- a proletarian is a real producer of surplus-value, and not a paid agent of capital whose job is to impose capitalist order on the producers.

Amongst the personnel of a company, there may thus be technicians, or even engineers, whose salary is close to that of a qualified worker, and who belong to the same class as the latter, while those whose income is closer to the bosses' (even if they are not directly involved in labor management) do not. Similarly, the same company may include low-level managers or "security officers" whose wage may even be less than that of a technician or a qualified worker, but whose role is that of a "screw" in the industrial gaol and who therefore cannot be considered as part of the proletariat.

On the other hand, belonging to the working class does not necessarily imply a direct and immediate participation in the production of surplus-value. The teacher educating the future proletarian, the nurse - even the salaried doctor whose income these days may be less than that of a qualified worker - who "repairs" the workers' labor power (even if they also look after policemen, priests and union officials, or even ministers) undoubtedly belong to the working class in just the same way as the cook in the factory canteen. Obviously, the same is not true for the university mandarin, or for the private doctor. We should however be clear that the fact that teachers (whose economic situation is not usually brilliant) inculcate bourgeois values - consciously or unconsciously, willingly or not - does not exclude them from the exploited and revolutionary class, any more than workers in the armaments industry are excluded from it[5]. It is moreover the case that throughout the history of the workers' movement, there have been many teachers among the revolutionary militants. Similarly, the workers at the Kronstadt arsenal were among the vanguard of the Russian revolution in 1917.

We also need to make it clear that the vast majority of office workers and state employees also belong to the working class. If we take the case of a state enterprise such as the Post Office, nobody is going to claim that the mechanics, who maintain the Post Office trucks, or the sorting-office workers, do not belong to the proletariat. Nor, from this point of departure, is it difficult to understand that their comrades who deliver letters, or who work behind the Post Office counter are in the same situation. This is why office workers in banks, insurance companies, social security or income tax offices are also part of the working class. Nor can we even argue that their working conditions are any better than those of industrial workers. It is no less tiring to spend the day behind a desk or in front of a computer screen than operating a lathe, though it may be cleaner. And one of the objective factors behind the proletariat's ability to struggle as a class, and to overthrow capitalism - the associated, collective nature of its work - is not called into question by modern conditions of production, quite the reverse.

In the same way, the increasing technological level of production involves a growing number of what sociological statistics call "managers" (technicians, or even engineers), most of whose social status, and even income, is close to that of a qualified worker. This certainly does not imply any "disappearance" of the working class or its replacement by the "middle classes", but on the contrary the proletarianization of the latter[6] This is why the talk about the "disappearance of the proletariat" which is supposedly the result of the increase in the number of white-collar workers and technicians relative to manual workers has no other foundation than to try to demoralize and mystify both. Whether its authors believe what they say or not is irrelevant: they may serve the bourgeoisie efficiently while still being too stupid even to ask themselves who made the pen (or the word-processor) that they use to write their idiocies.

The so-called "crisis" of the working class

The bourgeoisie does not put all its eggs in one basket to demoralize the workers. So for those who are not taken in by the campaigns about the "disappearance of the working class", they reserve the idea that the latter is "in crisis". One of the supposedly decisive arguments in favor of this idea is the decline in union membership and influence during the last few decades. We will not, in this article, repeat our analysis of the bourgeois nature of trade unionism in all its forms. In fact, it is the working class' daily experience of the systematic sabotage of its struggle by the organizations which claim to "defend" it which is demonstrating this analysis, day after day[7]. And it is precisely this experience which is primarily responsible for the workers' rejection of the unions. In this sense, their rejection of the unions is not the sign of a "crisis" in their ranks, but on the contrary and above all a sign of a development in class consciousness. One illustration among many of this fact is the different attitude of workers in two great movements in France, thirty years apart. After the strikes of May-June 1936, right in the midst of the counter-revolution that followed the revolutionary wave after World War I, the unions enjoyed an unprecedented increase in membership. By contrast, after the general strike of May 1968, which marked the historic recovery of the class struggle and the end of the period of counter-revolution, union membership declined as workers tore up their union cards in disgust.

The argument that declining union membership proves the difficulties of the ruling class is a sure sign that anyone using it belongs to the ruling class. The same is true for the supposedly "socialist" nature of the stalinist regimes. History has shown, especially during World War II, the damage done to working-class consciousness by this lie peddled by every fraction of the bourgeoisie, whether right, left, or extreme left (stalinists and trotskyists). During the last few years, the lie of the "working class nature of the trades unions" has been used in much the same way: first, to enroll the workers behind the capitalist state; then, to confuse and demoralize them. However, the two lies have a different impact: because their collapse was not the result of the workers' struggle, the stalinist regimes' demise could be used effectively against the proletariat; by contrast, the discredit of the trades unions is essentially the result of this same workers' struggle, which considerably limits its impact as a factor of demoralization. This is why the bourgeoisie has encouraged the rise of "rank and file" unionism, to take the pressure off traditional unionism. And this is also why it is promoting more "radical" looking ideologues to put over the same message.

So we have seen the flourishing, and the promotion by the press[8], of analyses like those of Mr Alain Bihr, a doctor in sociology and the author, amongst other things, of a book titled: From the "great night"[9] to the "alternatives": the crisis of the European workers' movement. This gentleman's theses are not of much interest in themselves. However, the fact that he has recently been frequenting the milieux which claim to spring from the heritage of the communist left, some of which are ready to use his "analyses" themselves ("critically" of course) leads us to highlight the danger that they represent[10].

Mr Bihr presents himself as a "real" defender of working-class interests. This is why he does not claim that the working class is disappearing. On the contrary, he begins by asserting that: "... the frontiers of the proletariat extend today well beyond the traditional "world of the working class"". However, he only does so the better to put forward his central message: "During fifteen years of crisis, in France as in most other Western countries, we have seen a growing fragmentation of the proletariat which has called its unity into question and so has tended to paralyze it as a social force"[11].

Our author's main purpose is to demonstrate that the proletariat "is in crisis", and that it is the capitalist crisis itself which is responsible for this state of affairs, to which of course we have to add the sociological changes which affect the composition of the working class: "In fact, the current transformations of the wage relationship, with their overall effects of fragmentation and "reduction in mass" of the proletariat (...) tend to dissolve the two proletarian figures which made up the big battalions during the Fordist era: on the one hand, the skilled worker, whose condition is being profoundly modified by today's transformations which tend to replace the old skills with new categories of "professionals" linked to the new processes of automated labor; and on the other hand, the unskilled laborer, who was the spearhead of the proletarian offensive during the 60's and 70's, and is progressively being eliminated and replaced by part-time or fixed contract workers within the same automated production process"[12]. Apart from the pedantic language (which so delights the petty bourgeois who think themselves "marxist"), Bihr is just rehashing the same rubbish that generations of sociologists have already inflicted on us: automation is responsible for weakening the proletariat (since he thinks of himself as a "marxist" he doesn't talk about its "disappearance"), etc. He also follows them in maintaining that the decline in union membership is another sign of the "crisis of the working class" since: "All the studies that have been done on the development of unemployment and part-time working show that these tend to reactivate and reinforce the old divisions and inequalities within the proletariat (...). This dispersal into categories of such different status has had disastrous effects on the conditions of struggle. One sign of this is the failure of the various attempts, especially by the trades union movement, to organise part-time workers and the unemployed..."[13]. And so, behind all the radical talk and so-called "marxism", Bihr offers us the same old tripe served up by every sector of the ruling class: the trades unions are still "organizations of the workers' movement" (ibid).

This is the kind of "specialist" that inspires people like GS, and publications like Internationalist Perspective, which welcomes his writings with such sympathy. True, Bihr is no fool, and to smuggle his goods in he claims that the proletariat will be able, in spite of everything, to overcome its present difficulties by "recomposing" itself. But the way he says it tends to convince us of the reverse: "The transformations of the wage relationship have set a double challenge for the workers' movement: they force it simultaneously to adapt to a new social basis (a new "technical" and "political" composition of the class), and to make a synthesis between such apparently different categories as the "new professionals" and part-time workers, a synthesis which is much more difficult than that between the skilled and unskilled workers of the Fordist period"[14]. "The practical weakening of the proletariat and of the feeling of belonging to the working class can thus open the way to the recomposition of an imaginary collective identity on other bases"[15].

And so, after tons of - mostly specious - arguments designed to convince the reader that the working class is in serious trouble, and after having "demonstrated" that the cause of this "crisis" lies in the collapse of the capitalist economy and the rise of unemployment - neither of which will get anything but worse - the argument ends up simply asserting, without the slightest proof, that: "Things will get better... perhaps! But the challenge is a very difficult one". If you swallow Bihr's nonsense, and still believe that the proletariat and the class struggle have a future before them, you can only be a hopeless optimist. Well played Dr Bihr! Your rather obvious traps have caught the ignoramuses who publish IP and who present themselves as the true defenders of communist principles, which the ICC is supposed to have thrown to the winds.

It is true that the working class has encountered a number of difficulties in recent years, in the development of its struggles and its consciousness. For ourselves, and contrary to the reproaches directed at us by the professional sceptics (whether they be the EFICC - which is normal given their role as sowers of confusion - or Battaglia Comunista - which is less so, since this is an organization of the proletarian political milieu), we have never hesitated to point out these difficulties. But at the same time - and this is the least that one might expect of revolutionaries - we have analyzed the origins of these difficulties, and highlighted the conditions for overcoming them. And if we examine at all seriously the evolution of workers' struggles during the last decade, it is blindingly obvious that their present weakness has nothing to do with the falling numbers of "traditional" "blue-collar" workers. In most countries, for example, some of the most combative workers are to be found in the Post Office and the telecommunications industry. The same is true of health workers. In Italy in 1987, the biggest struggles were led by the school workers. And we could go on multiplying examples to show that neither the proletariat nor class combativity are limited to the "traditional" industrial workers. This is why our analyses are not obsessed with the kind of sociological criteria good only for academics or petty-bourgeois looking for an explanation not of the working class' problems, but of their own.

The real difficulties of the working class and how to overcome them

We do not have the space in this article to repeat all our analyses of the international situation during the last few years. The reader can find them in virtually every issue of the Review, and especially in the theses and resolutions adopted by our organization since 1989[16]. The proletariat's present difficulties, the reflux in its combativity and consciousness, on which basis some diagnose a "crisis" of the working class, have not gone unnoticed by the ICC. We have pointed out in particular that throughout the 1980's, the class has been confronted by the growing weight of capitalist society's generalized decomposition; by encouraging despair, atomization, the "look after number one" spirit, this has seriously damaged the general perspective of proletarian struggle and class solidarity, which - for example - has made it easier for the unions to shut the workers' struggles up in a corporatist framework. However - and this is an important sign of the class combat's vitality - the permanent weight of decomposition had not succeeded by 1989 in putting an end to the wave of struggles which had begun in 1983 with the strikes in the Belgian state sector. Quite the reverse: throughout this period we saw an increasing tendency for workers to go beyond the union framework, which obliged the unions to push a more radical rank-and-file unionism into the limelight, if they were to continue their work of sabotaging the struggle[17].

However, this wave of proletarian struggles was to be engulfed by the planetary upheaval which followed the second half of 1989. There were some - usually the same as those who had noticed nothing during the workers' struggles of the mid-80's - who thought that the collapse of the East European stalinist regimes in 1989 (the biggest expression to date of capitalist decomposition) would be favorable to the development of working class consciousness: we did not hesitate to assert that the opposite would be the case[18]. During 1990-91, with the Gulf crisis and War, then the Moscow putsch, we pointed out that these events would also affect the class struggle and the proletariat's ability to confront the increasing attacks of capital.

This is why the difficulties that the class has experienced these last few years have neither escaped our organization, nor surprised it. However, while we have analyzed their real causes (which have nothing to do with a mythical need for the working class to "recompose itself") we have also highlighted the reasons why the class has today the means to overcome its difficulties.

Here it is important to go back over one of Dr Bihr's arguments that there is a crisis in the working class: the economic crisis and unemployment have "fragmented the proletariat" by "reinforcing the old divisions and inequalities" within it. To show what he means, Bihr offers us a shopping list of all these "fragments": "workers with stable and guaranteed jobs", "those excluded from labor, or even from the labor market", "the floating mass of precarious workers". And he even takes delight in listing sub-categories of the latter: "workers for sub-contracting companies", "part-time workers", "temporary workers", "workers on training schemes", "workers in the black economy"[19]. In fact, what Dr Bihr presents as an argument is nothing other than a snapshot, which fits perfectly with his reformist vision[20]. It is true that at first the bourgeoisie's attacks on the working class were carried out selectively, in order to limit the extent of the latter's response. It is also true that unemployment, especially of young workers, has been used to blackmail some sectors of the proletariat, and so has reinforced their passivity by accentuating the influence of the general atmosphere of social decomposition and "every man for himself". However, the crisis itself, and its inexorable aggravation, will increasingly equalize, downwards, the living conditions of the working class' different sectors. In particular, the "high-tech" sectors (computers, telecommunications, etc) which had seemed to escape the effects of the crisis, are being hit head-on, throwing their workforce into the same situation as that faced by workers in the car or steel industries. Today, the biggest companies (such as IBM) are laying off en masse. At the same time, and contrary to the tendency of the previous decade, unemployment is rising faster among mature workers with existing work experience than amongst the young, which will tend to limit the atomization that unemployment created in the past.

Thus, even if decomposition is a handicap for the development of the class' struggle and consciousness, the increasingly obvious and brutal bankruptcy of the capitalist economy, with the string of attacks that this implies on working-class living conditions, is the determining element in the present situation for the recovery of the struggle, and the march of class consciousness. Obviously this is incomprehensible if one thinks, as reformist ideology (which cannot envisage the slightest revolutionary perspective) would have it, that the capitalist crisis provokes a "crisis in the working class". But once again, events themselves have taken care of the inane ramblings of the sociologists and demonstrated the validity of marxism: the Italian proletariat's formidable struggle in autumn 1992, against economic attacks of unprecedented violence, has once again shown that the proletariat has neither died nor disappeared, and that it has not given up the struggle, even if as one might expect it has not yet completely recovered from the blows it has suffered in the last few years. Nor will these struggles remain merely isolated events. Just like the workers' struggles of May 1968, they herald a general renewal of workers' combativity, a renewal of the proletariat's forward march towards the consciousness of the conditions and aims of its historic struggle for the abolition of capitalism. Whether those who lament, sincerely or otherwise, over the "crisis of the working class" and its "necessary recomposition" like it or not.

FM

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[1] The car is indispensable for getting to work, or for shopping, when public transport is inadequate or distances are too great. A refrigerator becomes vital when the only means to buy cheap food is to go to the supermarket, which can't be done every day. As for the television, which has been presented as the symbol of access to the "consumer society", quite apart from the fact that it provides the bourgeoisie with a formidable means of propaganda and stultification (it has proved an excellent replacement for religion as "opium of the people"), it can be found today in many "Third World" slum dwellings, which speaks volumes as to its devaluation.

[2] Marx described the rate of surplus-value, or the rate of exploitation, as the ratio S/V, where S is the surplus value or labor-value (the number of hours in the working day that the capitalist appropriates for himself) and V the variable capital, ie the wage (the number of hours in which the worker produces an equivalent to the value that he receives). This ratio allows us to determine the real intensity of exploitation in objective economic terms, not in subjective ones.

[3] Obviously, this assertion contradicts the lies of all the so-called "defenders of the working class" like the social-democrats or the stalinists, who have a long experience both in repressing and mystifying the workers, and in government. When a worker "leaves the ranks" to become a full-time union official, a councilor, a town mayor, a member of parliament or even a minister, he loses all links with his class.

[4] Of course, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to determine this level, which varies over time and from one country to another. What is important is that in each country (or group of countries which are similar from the standpoint of their economic development and the productivity of labor), there is a threshold which separates a qualified worker's wages from a manager's salary.

[5] For a fuller analysis of productive and non-productive labor, see our pamphlet on The decadence of capitalism.

[6] Although we should note at the same time that some managers see their income rise to the point where they are integrated into the ruling class.

[7] For a more developed analysis of the nature of the trades unions, see our pamphlet Unions against the working class. 

[8] For example, Le Monde Diplomatique, a French humanist monthly which specializes in the promotion of a capitalism "with a human face", often publishes articles by one Alain Bihr. In the March 91 edition, we find a text from this author entitled "Retreat of social rights, weakening of the trades unions, the proletariat is breaking up".

[9] In the French anarchist tradition, "le grand soir" designated the long-awaited general uprising which would overthrow the whole capitalist system.

[10] In no.22 of Internationalist Perspective, organ of the so-called "External Fraction of the ICC" we can read a contribution from GS (who is not a member of the EFICC, but who seems to have its agreement on all the essential points), entitled "The necessary recomposition of the proletariat", which quotes Bihr's book at length to support his assertions.

[11] Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1991.

[12] From the "great night"....

[13] Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1991.

[14] From the "great night"....

[15] Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1991.

[16] See the International Review nos. 60, 63, 67, 70 and this issue.

[17] Of course, if we follow Dr Bihr in considering the unions as working-class rather than bourgeois organizations, then the progress of the class struggle is converted into a retreat. But it is strange that people like the members of the EFICC, who officially recognize the bourgeois nature of the unions, follow him down this path.

[18] See the article on the difficulties confronting the proletariat in International Review no. 60.

[19] Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1991.

[20] One of Alain Bihr's favorite sayings is that "reformism is too serious to be left to the reformists". Just in case he takes himself for a revolutionary, let us undeceive him here and now.