Following eight years of the most gigantic propaganda campaign in human history, devoted to the alleged "death of Communism", the world bourgeoisie responded to the 80th anniversary of the October Revolution 1917 with a carefully prepared, internationally coordinated display of indifference. In most countries, including Russia itself, this question was only dealt with as the second or third item of the main evening TV news broadcasts. The commentaries in the bourgeois press the next morning declared that the question of the Russian Revolution, having lost all relevance for the world of today, remains of interest only for the historian. Commenting on workers' protests taking place at about the same moment (such as the 150,000 demonstration in Prague against the savage anti-proletarian attacks by the Klaus government which emerged from the Czech "velvet revolution" of 1989) the German media noted with demonstrative satisfaction that the class struggle itself had now been "freed from ideological clutter and the pursuit of dangerously utopian final goals".
In reality, this pretended dismissal of the proletarian revolution into the dispassionate hands of bourgeois "historical science" represents a new, qualitatively superior stage of the capitalist attack against Red October. Under the cover of reviewing the results of the research of its historians, the ruling class has organised a world-wide public debate about the "crimes of Communism". This "debate" not only blames the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism for the crimes of the Stalinist counter-revolution, but also, at least indirectly, for the crimes of Nazism, since "the degree and the techniques of mass violence were inaugurated by the communists and (...) the Nazis inspired themselves from this ..." (Stephane Courtois in Le Monde 09110.11. 97). For the bourgeois historians, the fundamental crime of the Russian Revolution was the replacement of "democracy" by a totalitarian ideology leading to the systematic extermination of the "class enemy". Nazism, we are told, appeared only in reaction to this undemocratic tradition of the Russian Revolution, replacing the "class war" of the former with the "race war" of the latter. The bourgeois lesson drawn from the barbarism of its own decadent system is that bourgeois democracy, precisely because it is not a "perfect system", but allows "room for individual freedom" is best suited to human nature, and that any attempt to challenge it can only end in Auschwitz and the Gulag.
Since 1989, the bourgeois attack against Communism and the Russian Revolution was mainly carried by the momentum of the impact of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the east, and the sheer scale of the propaganda making this the collapse of Communism. At that time, the bourgeoisie did not even have to pretend to advance any historical arguments in defence of these lies. But since then, the impact of these campaigns has been eroded by the failure of "western" style capitalism and bourgeois democracy to halt economic decline and mass pauperisation either in the east or in the west. Although the combativity, and above all the consciousness of the proletariat were hit badly by the events and propaganda which followed the- fall of the Berlin Wall, the working class remains undefeated. Its combativity is slowly recovering. Within politicised minorities of the class there is the beginning of a new interest in the history of the working class in general, and in the Russian Revolution and the Marxist struggle against its degeneration in particular. Although the bourgeoisie has the immediate social situation comfortably under control, its extreme anxiety in face of it's progressively collapsing economy and the still intact potential of its class enemy obliges it to constantly intensify its ideological attacks against tile proletariat. This is why the bourgeoisie for instance organises movements such as the French Autumn of 1995 or the UPS strike in the United States in1997 specifically to strengthen the authority of its trade union control apparatus.
""class" genocide joins up with "race" genocide: the death through famine of the child of a Ukrainian Kulak deliberately left to starve by the Stalinist regime is "equal" to the death of a Jewish child left to starve in the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazi Regime". Some of his collaborators, on the other hand, but also the French Prime minister J ospin, consider that Courtois is going" too far" by putting in question the "uniqueness" of the crimes of Nazism. In parliament, Jospin "defended" the "honour of Communism" (which he identified with the honour of his ministerial colleagues from the Stalinist PCF) by arguing that although "Communism" had killed more people than Fascism, it was less evil since motivated by "good intentions". The international controversies provoked by this book - from the question whether its authors exaggerated the number of victims to have a "round figure" of 100 million, to the difficult ethical question whether or not Lenin was "as evil" as Hitler, all serve to discredit Red October, the most important milestone on the road to the liberation of the proletariat and humanity. The protests, across Europe, of the Stalinist veterans of the Resistance opposed to Germany in World War IT against being compared to the Fascists serve no other purpose today, than to consolidate the lie that the Russian Revolution is responsible for the crimes of its mortal Stalinist enemy. Both the "radical" Courtois and the "reasonable" Jospin, like the entire bourgeoisie, share the same capitalist lies at the heart of the whole "Black Book". These include the lie, constantly affirmed without the slightest proof, that Lenin was responsible for the Stalinist terror, and the lie that bourgeois democracy is the only "safeguard" against barbarism. In reality, this whole display of democratic pluralism of opinion and humanitarian indignation only serves to hide the historic truth that all the great crimes of this century share the same bourgeois class nature - not only those of fascism and Stalinism, but also those of democracy, from Hiroshima and Dresden to the starvation inflicted on a quarter of humanity by "liberal" decadent capitalism. In reality, the whole moralistic debate on which of these crimes of capitalism is more condemnable is itself as barbarous as it is hypocritical. In reality, all the participants in this fake bourgeois debate are out to demonstrate the same thing: that any attempt to abolish capitalism, to challenge bourgeois democracy, no matter how "idealistic" and "well intentioned" it may originally be, is bound to end up in bloody terror.
In fact, the roots of the "largest and longest reign of terror" in history, and the "paradoxical tragedy" of Communism lie, according to Jospin and the chancellor-historian Doktor Helmut Kohl, in the utopian vision of World Revolution of the Bolshevism of the original October Revolution period. The reviews of the French "Black Book" in the German bourgeois press defended the responsible anti-fascism of Stalinism against the "mad Marxist utopia" of October and the World Revolution. This madness consisted in surmounting the capitalist contradiction between internationally associated labour on a single world market and the deadly competition of the bourgeois nation states over the product of that labour, now identified as the "original sin" of Marxism, violating the "human nature" about which the bourgeoisie cares so much.
The bourgeoisie regurgitates the old Kautskyist lies
Whereas during the Cold War many western historians used to deny the continuity of Stalinism with the October Revolution, in order to prevent their eastern imperialist rival profiting from the prestige of that great event, today the target of their hatred is no longer Stalinism but Bolshevism. Whereas the threat of the imperialist rivalry of the USSR has disappeared, the threat of the proletarian revolution has not. It is against this threat that bourgeois historians are today warming up all the old lies produced by the panic-stricken bourgeoisie during the revolution itself, that the Bolsheviks were paid German agents, and October a Bolshevik Putsch etc. These lies, produced at the time by the likes of Kautsky[1] and used by the German bourgeoisie to justify the murder of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and thousands of revolutionary Communists, could exploit the bourgeois media black-out on what was really happening in Russia. Today, with more documentary evidence at their disposal than ever, the paid whores of the bourgeoisie pour out the same white-terror garbage.
These lies are reproduced today, not only by the open enemies of the Russian Revolution, but also by its alleged defenders. In the fifth Annual on Communism produced by the Stalinist historian Herman Weber, and devoted to the October Revolution (Jahrbuch fur Historische Kommunismusforschung 1997) the old Menshevik idea that the Revolution was premature is revamped by Moshe Lewin, who has discovered that Russia in 1917 was not ripe for socialism or even for bourgeois democracy due to the backwardness of Russian capitalism. This explanation for the alleged backwardness and barbarism of Bolshevism is also dished up in the new book, A People's Tragedy by the "historian" Orlando Figes, which has created a furore in Britain. He not only affirms that October was basically the work of one wicked man: a dictatorial act of a Bolshevik Party itself under the personal dictatorship of the "bully" Lenin and his henchman Trotsky ("The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insurrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began", p.481). He above "discovers" that the social basis of this "coup d'état" was not the working class but the lump en proletariat. After preliminary remarks about the poor level of education of the Bolshevik soviet delegates (whose knowledge about revolution had admittedly not been acquired at Oxford or Cambridge), Figes concludes. "It was more the result of the degeneration of the urban revolution, and in particular of the workers' movement, as an organised and constructive force, with vandalism, crime, generalised violence and drunken looting as the main expressions of this social break-down. (...) The participants in this destructive violence were not the organised 'working class' but the victims of the breakdown of that class and of the devastation of the war years: the growing army of urban unemployed; the refugees from the occupied regions, soldiers and sailors, who congregated in the cities; bandits and criminals released from the jails; and the unskilled labourers from the countryside who had always been the most prone to outbursts of anarchic violence in the cities. These were the semi-peasant types whom Gorky had blamed for the urban violence in the spring and to whose support he had ascribed the rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks." (p495). This is how the bourgeoisie today "rehabilitates" the working class from the charge of having a revolutionary history. In its cold blooded ignoring of the overwhelming facts proving that October was the work of millions of revolutionary workers organised in workers councils, the famous soviets, it is the class struggle of today and tomorrow which the bourgeoisie is targeting.
More than ever before, the leaders of the October Revolution have become the object of the hatred of 'the ruling class denigrations. Most of the books and articles appearing recently are above all indictments of Lenin and Trotsky. The German historian Helmut Altrichter, for instance, begins his new book "Ruland 1917" with the following words: "At the beginning was not Lenin". His whole book, while pretending to show that the masses, not the leaders made history, poses as a "passionate defence" of the autonomous initiative of the Russian workers: until, alas, they fell for the "suggestive" slogans of Lenin and Trotsky, who tossed democracy onto what they scandalously called the "rubbish dump of history".
Thousands of pages have been filled to "prove" that Lenin, although the last great struggle of his life was directed against Stalin and the social layer of state bureaucrats supporting him, calling for his removal in his famous "testimony", designated Stalin as his "successor". Particularly striking is the insistence of the "anti-democratic" attitude of against Trotsky. Whereas the Trotskyist movement joined the bourgeois ranks during World War Il, the historical figure of Trotsky is particularly dangerous for the bourgeoisie. Trotsky symbolises at once the greatest "scandal" in human history - that an exploited class toppled it's rulers (October), attempted to extend its rule across the globe (foundation of the Communist International), and organised the military defence of that rule (The Red Army in the Civil War) - as well as the Marxist struggle against the bourgeois, Stalinist counter-revolution. These are the two facts which the exploiters curse most of all, which they at all costs must eradicate from the collective memory of the working class: the fact that the proletariat toppled the bourgeoisie and became the ruling class in October 1917, and the fact that Marxism was the spearhead of the proletarian fight against the Stalinist counter-revolution supported by the world bourgeoisie. It was through the combined efforts of the western and the Stalinist counter-revolutionaries that the British General Strike 1926, the Chinese working class 1926/27, the Spanish working class during the Civil War of the 30s were defeated, that-the German revolution was finally defeated 1923 and it's proletariat crushed in 1933 through the combined efforts of the western and Stalinist counter-revolutionaries. The world bourgeoisie supported the Stalinist destruction of the vestiges of proletarian rule in Russia, in its destruction of the Communist International. Today the bourgeoisie hides the fact that the 100 million victims of Stalinism, the horrific toll compiled in capitalist book keeping manner in its "Black Book of Communism" are crimes of the bourgeoisie, and that the real, internationalist Communists were its first victims.
The bourgeois democratic intellectuals who have now put themselves at the head of the attack against Red October, apart from advancing their careers and boosting their earnings, have a specific interest of their own in imposing an historical tabula rasa. It is their interest in hiding the contemptible grovelling of the bourgeois intelligence at the feet of Stalin from the 1930s on. Not only Stalinist writers like Gorky, Feuchtwanger, Brecht[2] but the whole wretched rabble of bourgeois democratic historians and moralists from the Webbs to the "pacifist" Romain Rolland deified Stalin, defended the Moscow show trials tooth and nail, and supported the witch-hunt against Trotsky[3].
The attack on the aims of an undefeated proletariat
The attack against the revolutionary history of the working class is in reality an attack against the contemporary class struggle. By attempting to demolish the historic goal of the class movement, the bourgeoisie declares war against that class movement itself. Already Bernstein's separation of goal and movement at the turn of the century was a first full scale attempt to liquidate the revolutionary character of the proletarian class struggle "... since the socialist final goal is the only decisive moment distinguishing the social democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and bourgeois radicalism, transforming the whole workers' movement from a futile repair work towards the salvation of capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, to abolish this order ..." (Rosa Luxemburg: Social Reform or Revolution).
In the history of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat, periods of the upsurge of class struggle and development of class consciousness within the proletariat have always been periods of a difficult, uneven, heterogeneous, but real clarification concerning the final goal of the movement. Periods of defeat have always seen the abandonment of that goal by the broad masses. Although the working class displayed considerable combativity in the years before 1914, for instance, it was the replacement of the socialist revolutionary goal by reformist illusions, nourished by decades of economic expansion, in the heads of the majority of workers which made their mobilisation for World War possible. During the 1930s this is particularly clear: despite the combativity of the French, Spanish, Belgian, American proletariat, the acceptance by the masses of the bourgeois goals of defence of democracy or of Stalinist Russia against "fascism" was at the centre of their mobilisation for imperialist war. Similarly, the almost insurrectional movements of the Eastern European workers during the 1950s (East Germany 1953, Poland and Hungary 1956), taking place in the midst of the longest counter-revolution in history, failed to develop any long term perspective beyond bourgeois nationalism and democracy.
As opposed to this, periods of the massive development both of struggles and class consciousness, such as the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 opened up by the Russian Revolution, and the present epoch beginning in 1968, were characterised from the onset by the appearance of debates about the final goal of the proletarian struggle. The international wave of struggles opened up by May-June 1968 in France was characterised precisely by the confrontation of an undefeated generation of workers both with the left apparatus of capital (unions and "left" parties), and with the bourgeois definition of socialism given by this apparatus. This ending of 50 years of Stalinist counter-revolution was thus necessarily, inevitably marked by the appearance of a new generation of revolutionary minorities.
These historic examples of the extremely complicated, but inseparable link between the historic course of the class struggle (towards world war or towards decisive class confrontations) and the goal of communism, remind that the present bourgeois campaign against communism, against the October Revolution, far from being an academic question, is a central issue of the class struggle today. An issue requiring in particular the most determined response of revolutionary minorities, of Left Communism throughout the world. But this issue is all the more important today in view of the present period of capitalist decomposition. This period of decomposition is determined above all by the fact that since 1968, neither of the decisive classes of modern society has been able to take a decisive step towards its historic goal: the bourgeoisie towards world war, the proletariat towards revolution. The most important single result of this historic stalemate, opening a phase of horrific rotting of the capitalist system, has been the internal collapse of the Stalinist ruled eastern imperialist bloc. This event has in turn delivered the bourgeoisie unexpected ammunition with which to attack the communist revolution, slanderously identified with Stalinism. In 1980, in the context of an international development of combativity and consciousness spearheaded by the western proletariat, the mass strikes in Poland opened the perspective of the proletariat itself confronting and eventually defeating Stalinism, and thus removing this obstacle blurring the class perspective of communist revolution. Instead of this, the fall of the Stalinist regimes through decomposition has had the opposite effect: blurring the historic memory and perspective of the class, undermining its self-confidence, weakening its capacity to organise its own struggle towards real confrontations with the left control organs of capital, lessening the immediate impact of revolutionary intervention towards the struggles. Given the decisive importance of self-confidence for the first exploited revolutionary class in history, given the key role of the self-organised class confrontation with the bourgeois state and of the intervention of revolutionaries in demonstrating that the proletariat is a class capable of founding society anew, this set-back has made the road to revolution even longer and more difficult than it already was.
But this road towards revolution remains open. The bourgeoisie has not been able to mobilise its class enemy behind capitalist class goals as in the 1930s. The very fact that after eight years of celebrating the "death of communism" the bourgeoisie is obliged to intensify its ideological campaign, to more directly attack Red October, itself proves this. The flood of publications on the Russian Revolution, if they are first and foremost a mystification against the workers, is also intended as a warning of the bourgeois ideologists to their own class: a warning never again to underestimate the proletarian class enemy. One of the central messages of all these publications is that in moments of great social crisis, such as 1917 in Russia, a tiny minority of audacious, disciplined, consistent revolutionaries can "suddenly" win a majority and apparently fuse with the interests and aspirations of the mass workers organisations - can "easily mislead the masses" as the bourgeoisie prefers to put it. Indeed a timely warning, even if there is never anything "sudden" or easy about such processes, which can take decades to mature before reaching fruition. Capitalism is inexorably approaching the greatest economic and social crisis in its history - in the history of humanity in fact - and the working class remains undefeated. No wonder the learned bourgeois publications of today on the Russian Revolution are full of warnings! Never again must a "monster" like Lenin be allowed to travel to his meeting with revolutionary history! Never again should revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Trotsky be allowed to walk about freely (how this problem can be dealt with is shown by the fate of Liebknecht, Luxemburg and of Trotsky himself)! Never again must the working class be allowed to fall prey to dangerous "revolutionary utopias"!
The Perspective of October is still alive
The ideological blow being struck against the proletarian revolution is not decisive. After decades of a campaign of silence, the bourgeoisie is today obliged to attack the history of the Marxist movement, and thus to admit the existence of this history. Today it attacks not only Red October, not only Lenin and Trotsky, but also Bordiga, one of the founders of Left Communism. It is obliged to attack the internationalists who defended Lenin's revolutionary defeatism during World War II. Its accusation that these internationalists must have been apologists for fascism is a lie equally as monstrous as the ones produced against the Russian Revolution. The present day awakening of militant interest in Left Communism concerns only a tiny minority of the class. But was not Bolshevism itself, this spectre of Communism still haunting Europe and the world, for many years but a tiny minority of the class? The proletariat is an historical class, its consciousness is an historical consciousness. Its revolutionary character is not a passing whim, as that of the once revolutionary bourgeoisie, but flows from its decisive place in the capitalist mode of production.
The decades of struggle and proletarian reflection lying ahead, precisely because they will be so difficult, will be years of the torturous but real development of the political culture of the proletariat. If it is to advance in its fight against unheard of material attacks, growing layers of an undefeated class will eventually be obliged to confront the legacy of its own history, to consult the treasure chest of Marxist theory. Under the present historical conditions, it will be impossible for the future struggles to regain a scale and momentum comparable to France 1968 or Poland 1980 without the development of a political culture, without the re-acquisition of past lessons and traditions at least among the most advanced workers, at a superior scale to anything witnessed between 1968-1989. The bourgeois onslaught against Communist October makes this process longer and more difficult. But at the same time it makes this work of re-acquisition all the more important in fact obligatory for the advanced sectors of the class in the defence of its immediate material interests.
The glorious perspective opened in October 1917, that of the world proletarian revolution, is anything but dead. It is the recognition of this fact which motivates the present bourgeois campaign.
ICC
[1] The main arguments of Lenin ("Renegade Kautsky") and Trotsky ("Terrorism and Communism") against Kautsky are today, in face of the present bourgeois campaign, more timely and valid than ever.
[2] Brecht, who secretly sympathised with Trotsky at the time, wrote his Galileo Galilei in order to justify his own cowardice in not opposing Stalin. The martyrdom of Giordano Bruno, who as opposed to Galileo refused to retract in face of the inquisition, symbolises for Brecht the alleged futility of the resistance of Trotsky.
[3] The shamefulness of the bourgeois democratic intelligence is not removed, but made all the more wretched, by the lonely example of the American philosopher Dewey who presided over the tribunal to judge the case of Trotsky. By supporting the duty of a revolutionary to publicly defend his reputation, Dewey showed a greater respect and understanding for proletarian behaviour than the hysterical petty bourgeoisie today campaigning against the ICC's defence of this same principle of a "'jury of honour. Indeed, with its present "anti-Leninist" prostration at the feet of the present anti-communism of the "triumphant" western bourgeoisie today, the disgrace of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia has reached new depths.
In no.13 of Prometeo (June, 1997), the Partito Comunista Internazionahsta - Battaglia Comunista (PClnt) - has published the documents prepared from its 6th Congress.
This awareness of a "new phase" in the political life of the PCInt and the ommunist left has led the PCInt to replace its original, specific platform with an adhesion to the common platform of the IBRP. This in itself is a substantial advance: whereas previously the IBRP's two constituent organisations (PCInt and CWO) each maintained their own platform, as well as that of the IBRP, the IBRP platform alone now serves as a single political foundation. We welcome this as a contribution to the clarity and political cohesion of the revolutionary movement as a whole.
In a revised version of its platform published in 1994, the IBRP had already been led to modify certain elements and criteria for regroupment[1]. These changes already, at the time, represented a clarification for the whole revolutionary milieu. However, the fact that they are now adopted unambiguously by both the IBRP and its member groups, gives their publication in 1997 an added importance. This is why we consider that this Congress has reinforced the whole of the communist left in its struggle for its defence and its development.
Obviously, the fact that we welcome and support these positive aspects of the Congress does not mean that we intend to sweep under the carpet our disagreements with and criticisms of the Congress documents, where these exist. In this article, we will mention some of these disagreements, but our main aim is to set out what we consider to be a contribution to whole communist vanguard, and a strengthening of the common positions of the communist left. Only from this framework can we then go on to develop our divergences and criticisms.
Denunciation of the democratic mystification
The history of the workers' movement in the 20th century has shown clearly that so-called "democracy" is the bourgeoisie's main weapon against the proletariat. The democratic charade allows the capitalist state to deceive and divide the workers, to turn them away from their class terrain, and once this is done to organise an implacable repression which generally is no less brutal than the crudest forms of capitalist dictatorship (Stalinism or Nazism).
In the present situation, because of the disorientation of the working class (as a result of the collapse of the supposedly "communist" regimes and the anti-communist campaign organised by the world bourgeoisie), the democratic mystification is enjoying a revival. This is why the state is laying down a barrage of propaganda to derail workers onto the rotten ground of the defence of "democracy".
From this point of view, as far as the denunciation of the democratic mystification is concerned, the old IBRP platform of 1984[2] contains some ambiguities and omissions. The IBRP remained silent about the questions of elections and parliamentarism. Moreover, it declared that "the democratic revolution is no longer practicable. It should be considered (and this has been the case for a long time) as definitively closed in the imperialist citadels, and impossible to repeat elsewhere in the period of decadence". We agree entirely with that, but although the "democratic revolution" was denounced as "impossible" , the PClnt did not take position clearly on the possibility or otherwise of conducting a "tactical" struggle for "democracy"[3], since elsewhere it spoke of "the possibility of taking up demands for certain elementary freedoms in revolutionary political agitation" .
The new version of the platform contains an important clarification:
- on the one hand, the IBRP does not just denounce" democratic revolutions"; it attacks "the struggle for democracy": "The era of democratic struggles ended a long time ago and they cannot be repeated in the present imperialist epoch".
- Moreover, the IBRP has added a sentence which explicitly rejects elections: "communist party tactics aim for the overthrow of the state and the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Communists have no illusions that workers' freedom can be won through electing a majority in parliament".
- More concretely, the IBRP has added a paragraph where it declares that: "Parliamentary democracy is only the fig leaf to disguise the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The real organs of power in democratic capitalist society lie outside Parliament".
The IBRP has taken up the "Theses on Democracy" from the First Congress of the Communist International, and has gone over its analyses and perspectives in depth. In our opinion, however, there is still missing an explicit condemnation of the use of elections. For example, the IBRP does not denounce the CI's theory of revolutionary parliamentarism. This theory recognised that parliament is a fig leaf for bourgeois rule, and that it is not possible to take power by the electoral, parliamentary road. However, it was in favour of the "revolutionary" use of parliament as an agitational tribune and a means of denunciation. This position was clearly wrong at the time, and today is counter-revolutionary, being used by the Trotskyists to bring the workers back into the electoral game.
Moreover, the IBRP has retained the paragraph which refers to the "demand for certain elementary freedoms [as a part of] revolutionary agitation". To what is the IBRP referring? Does it support the idea - as the FOR[4] used to - that there are certain "elementary freedoms" of assembly, association, etc, that the working class should try to conquer legally as a first step in its struggle? Does it believe, as some radical Trotskyist groups claim to do, that these "minimal freedoms" are a tool for agitation, which even if they cannot be won under capitalism nonetheless serve to "advance consciousness". It would be good if the IBRP could clarify its position on this question.
The union question
The PCInt already defended a fairly clear position on the union question, in rejecting the traditional bourgeois position which sees the unions as somehow "neutral" organs whose orientation towards either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat depends on their leaders. This position was clearly condemned in the 1984 platform: "It is impossible to conquer or to change the unions: the proletarian revolution must necessarily pass over their corpse".
The positions adopted in 1997 contain modifications which might appear minimal at first sight. The IBRP has removed a paragraph which contradicted in practice the clarity in theory: "In the framework of these principles [ie the affirmation cited above rejecting any possibility of conquering or changing the unions], the possibility of different concrete actions as far as communist work in the unions is concerned, is a question for the tactical elaboration of the party" . It seems to us quite correct to have removed this paragraph, since its effect was to relegate the declarations of principle against the unions to the realm of "strategy", to leave the IBRP's hands free for the elastic "tactical" imperatives of "work in the unions".
In the same sense, the IBRP has modified the paragraph in the 1984 platform, which stated that "the union is not and cannot be the organ of the mass of the working class in struggle" by removing the term "in struggle", which suggested without saying so openly that the unions could be organs of the mass of the working class when it was not in struggle. This correction is strengthened in the document adopted by the 1997 congress entitled "The unions today and communist action", which states "It is impossible for the workers really to defend even their immediate interests other than outside and against the union line" (Thesis 7, in Prometeo no. 13). By including this precision, tile IBRP closes the door to the Trotskyist lie as to the "dual nature" of the unions, supposedly favourable to the workers during periods of social calm, and reactionary during moments of struggle and the rise of the revolution. This is a sophistry to justify the return to the union prison, of a kind used by the Bordigist current. We think that the removal of the term "in struggle" means that the IBRP condemns such a position, even if it might have been said more clearly.
In the same way, the IBRP in the same text makes a clear demarcation between itself and rank and file unionism, the radicalised variation on trades unionism which specialises in making virulent attacks on the union leadership and bureaucracy, the better to defend the supposedly "working class" nature of the union. In Thesis 8, the IBRP states that "the various attempts to build new trades unions have all come to grief in a motley array of rank and file unionist acronyms, many of which are now trying to get legal recognition as contractual partners, allowing in the footsteps of the official unions".
We also welcome the fact that the IBRP has replaced the paragraph stating that "the trades union is the organ for the mediation between capital and labour" with the much clearer: "Unions arose as negotiators of the terms of sale of workers' labour power". The old formulation was dangerous for two reasons:
- On the one hand, it ascribed to the unions a timeless character as organs of mediation between capital and labour, both in the ascendant and the decadent periods of capitalism, whereas now the platform states that they "arose as negotiators ... of labour power", which differentiates the IBRP's position from the typical Bordigist view of the unions as something unchanging.
On the other, the very idea of an "organ for the mediation between capital and labour" is erroneous, since it opens the door to a vision of the unions as organs situated between the two opposing social classes. In the ascendant period of capitalism, the unions were not organs of mediation between the classes but instruments of proletarian combat, created by the workers' struggle and violently persecuted by the bourgeoisie. It is thus clearer to speak of organs born as "negotiators of the terms of sale of workers' labour power", since this was one of their functions during this period of history, derived from the possibility of winning lasting reforms and improvements in workers' conditions. However, the IBRP forgets another dimension of the unions, emphasised by Marx, Engels and other revolutionaries: their role as "schools of communism", of instruments of organisation, and to an extent also of clarification, for large layers of the working class.
Finally, the IBRP has significantly altered the point on the intervention of communists in the class struggle, in the form of the "communist factory groups". The 1984 platform said that "the possibility of encouraging the development of struggles on the immediate level at which they are born to the broader level of the anti-capitalist political struggle, depends on the operational presence of communist factory groups", while the 1997 version states that "The possibility of the favourable development of struggles away from the immediate level from which they spring onto the wider arena of a political struggle against capital depends on the active presence of communists inside the workplaces" (the Italian version includes the phrase "to provide a stimulant to the workers, and to indicate the perspective to follow"). We fully share the IBRP's preoccupation with the development of means of revolutionary intervention within the concrete process of tile struggle and the politicisation of the struggle. But while the concern is correct, tile response seems to us to be limited.
On the one hand, the IBRP has rightly eliminated the notion that the politicisation of the workers' immediate struggle depends on the "operational presence of communist factory groups"[5], but on the other it continues to maintain that the anti-capitalist politicisation of the workers' struggle is "conditioned by the operational presence of communists within the workplace". Revolutionaries must develop a political presence in the struggles of the working crass through an intervention via their press, leaflets, speaking in meetings in strikes, demonstrations, and assemblies, in short wherever such intervention is possible, and not only in workplaces where a revolutionary presence exists already as the IBRP's formulation seems to imply.
According to the text "The unions today and communist action", communists should form around them "organisms for intervention in the class", which could be ''factory based" or "territorial".
Here again, the form seems to us somewhat vague. Different organisms can appear within the proletariat, depending on the different moments in the balance of forces between the classes:
- in moments when the struggle is developing, what we call struggle committees appear, which are organisms that regroup combative elements whose aim is to contribute to the extension of the struggle, and their control by the workers through mass meetings, and elected and revocable committees of delegates; rather than being factory based, they tend to regroup workers from different sectors;
- in less crucial moments, or during an ebb following a period of intense struggle, small minorities create workers' groups or discussion circles, tied more to the need to draw the lessons of the struggle, and oriented towards the more general problems of the working class.
Faced with these tendencies within the class, the revolutionary position rejects any "spontaneism" which "waits for the class to create them by itself, and in an isolated manner". Revolutionaries intervene in these organisms and do not hesitate to propose and encourage their creation if the conditions are ripe. However, that does not make these "organisms for the intervention of communists", they are organisations of the class and in the class, whose intervention is distinct from that of the communist political organisation. This is why we think that the IBRP's formulation remains ambiguous, and leaves the door open to the conception of intermediary organisations between the working class and communist organisations.
The role of the party and the struggle to build it
The world communist party is a vital tool of the proletariat. As the experience of October 1917 has shown, the proletariat cannot achieve victory in the revolutionary process, and seize power, without forming a party which intervenes, and gives a political leadership and impulse to the revolutionary action of the class.
With the defeat of the worldwide revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the degeneration of the communist parties, the groups of the communist left tried to draw the concrete lessons of this experience, on the question of the party:
- Firstly, they concentrated on the programmatic question: the criticism of, and the going beyond the weak points in the programme of the Communist International which contributed to its degeneration, particularly on the union, parliamentary, and so-called "national liberation" questions.
- Then, they turned to a critique of the conception of the mass party linked to the proletariat's tasks in the ascendant period of capitalism (organisation and education of the class, given its origins in the peasant and artisan classes; participation in parliament, given the possibility of the struggle for reforms and improvements in the workers' condition).
This old conception led to a vision of the party representing, organising the class, and taking power in its name - an incorrect vision which was revealed as dangerous and damaging in the revolutionary period of1917-23. For the most advanced groups of the communist left, their critique led to the conclusion that the party is vital to the class, not as a mass organisation, but as a minority force with the job of concentrating on developing its consciousness and political determination[6]; not as an organ to exercise power on behalf of the class, but as the most dynamic and advanced factor which contributes, through its intervention and its clarity, to the class ability to exercise power collectively and massively through the workers' councils.
The position adopted by the IBRP in its 1984 platform, while it certainly demonstrates a clarification on the programmatic questions (which as we have seen above, has been further developed in the 1997 congress), also expressed an ambiguous position, full of general and vague affirmations, on the crucial question of the party, its relations with me class, its form of organisation and the process of its construction. By contrast the documents of the recent Congress are more precise on these questions, and reveal a much clearer conception of the process of the party's construction, and the concrete steps that must be taken by communist organisations in the present period.
In the 1984 platform, the IBRP said: "The class party is the specific and irreplaceable organ of the revolutionary struggle for it is the political organ of the class". We agree with the idea that the party is a specific organ (it cannot be confused with or dissolved into the class as a whole), and that it is indeed irreplaceable[7]. However, the formulation "it is the political organ of the class" can imply, without saying so openly as the Bordigists do, that the party is the organ which takes power in the name of the class.
The 1997 version provides an important precision, which moves towards the most coherent definitions of the communist left: "The class party - or the political organisations which precede it - comprises the most conscious part of the proletariat who are organised to defend the programme for the emancipation of the entire working class". On the one hand, even if this passage says so indirectly and implicitly[8], the IBRP rejects the Bordigist vision of a party self-proclaimed by a minority, independently of the historic situation and the balance of class forces, becoming the party for ever. Moreover, the IBRP has eliminated the formulation "the political organ of the class", to replace it with the much clearer "most conscious part of the proletariat which organises to defend the revolutionary programme".
Obviously, abandoning the 1984 formulation does not mean denying the political nature of the party. The proletarian party's role cannot be the same as that of bourgeois parties, whose function is to exercise political power in the name of those they represent. As an exploited class, deprived of all economic power, the proletariat cannot delegate to a minority, however faithful, the exercise of its political power.
On the other hand, the IBRP has introduced into its programmatic corpus the lessons of the Russian Revolution, which were completely missing in the 1984 version: "The lesson of the last revolutionary wave is not that the working class can do without organised leadership, or that the party is the class (a metaphysical abstraction of latter-day Bordigists) Rather, that leadership and its organisational form (the party) is the most important weapon that the revolutionary working class has. Its task will be to fight for a communist perspective in the mass organs of proletarian power (soviets). The party, however, will remain a minority of the working class and is not a substitute for the class in general. The task of establishing socialism is one for the working class as a whole. It is a task which cannot be delegated, not even to the class conscious vanguard".
The IBRP has introduced explicitly this essential lesson of the Russian Revolution (which in itself was no more than a confirmation of that motto of the Ist International, "The emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves"). At the same time, it has gone on to reflect on the development of the relationship between revolutionaries and the class, the role of the party, and its links with the class.
In the 1997 platform we find the following: "the experience of the counter-revolution in Russia obliges revolutionaries to deepen their understanding of the relationship between the state, the party and the class. The role played by what started out as the revolutionary party has led many potential revolutionaries to reject the whole idea of the class party en bloc". Instead of avoiding the problem with declamatory phrases on the 'importance" of the party, the IBRP poses the question in historical terms: "During the revolution, the party will tend to conquer the political leadership of the movement by distributing and upholding its programme within the mass organs of the working class. Just as it is impossible to imagine a process of growing consciousness in the absence of a revolutionary party, it is equally impossible to imagine that the most conscious part of the proletariat could control events independently of the soviets. The soviets are the instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and their decline and side lining from the Russian political scene contributed to the collapse of the soviet state and the victory of the counter-revolution. The Bolshevik Commissars, isolated from an exhausted and starving working class, found themselves forced to manage power within a capitalist state, and behaved like those that govern a capitalist state".
The IBRP draws a conclusion which we agree with: "In the future world revolution, the revolutionary party will have to try to lead the revolutionary movement solely through the mass organs of the class, which will give an impetus to its emergence. There is no recipe which guarantees victory, neither the party nor the soviets in themselves represent a certain defence against the counter-revolution, the only guarantee of victory is a living class consciousness within the working masses".
Debate and regroupment among revolutionaries
Continuing with this clarification, the IBRP has added a series of precisions, which were absent from the 1984 texts, concerning the relationship between today's revolutionary groups and the concrete manner of contributing in the present period to the process that will lead to the formation of the revolutionary party.
Confronted with the bourgeoisie's present campaign against the communist left - expressed, for example, in the "anti-negationist" campaign - revolutionaries must establish a common line of defence. On the other hand, the development in the four comers of the earth of little minorities of the class looking for contact with revolutionary positions demands that the communist groups abandon sectarianism and isolation, and on the contrary offer these elements a coherent framework for them to come to grips with both the common heritage of die communist left, and the divergences within it.
Rightly responding to these concerns, the IBRP has added a complement to the criteria for participating in the International Conferences (which are to be found in the 1984 platform), which states: "We consider the Bureau to be a force situated within the proletarian political camp, which includes those who struggle for the independence of the proletariat against capital, who have nothing to do with nationalism in any form whatever, who see nothing socialist in Stalinism or the ex-USSR, and who at the same time recognise October 1917 as the point of departure for a vaster European revolution".
The PClnt recognises that "among the organisations which belong to the said camp, there are still important political differences, among which is the nature and function of the revolutionary organisation", and that it is necessary to undertake a discussion on these differences. This is the right method, and undoubtedly represents an important change of attitude relative to the IBRP's position during the Third International Conference of the Communist Left, a position which was maintained in the texts of 1984. Let us recall that during the Conference's final session, with the support of the CWO, the PCInt proposed to introduce an additional criterion for participation, on the role of the party as a "political leadership". As we said afterwards[9], this criterion seemed to us to have no other purpose than to exclude the ICC from the International Conferences, since the PCInt refused to discuss the counter-proposal of the ICC. This counter-proposal put forward the party's role as a political leadership, but within the framework of the exercise of power by the workers' councils. It is this question which the IBRP has returned to with clarity in its 1997 platform. Moreover, and above all, at the Third Conference the PCInt rejected a draft resolution calling for an in-depth and enlarged discussion on the conception of the party, its function, its nature, and its relations with the class as a whole. With this complement, the IBRP is today proposing a systematic discussion of the question, which seems to us an unequivocal opening to programmatic clarification within the communist left. In the framework of this article, we cannot respond in depth to all the points put forward by the IBRP. However, we do want to emphasise particularly Point 2 (which we agree with wholeheartedly, like the Point 6 which we have just examined): "The IBRP tends towards the formation of the World Communist Party from the moment when there will exist sufficient strength and a political programme for its constitution. The Bureau is for the Party, but does not claim to be its sole originating nucleus. The future party will not be the fruit of the growth of just one organisation".
From this correct vision, the IBRP leads on to Point 3, which is also correct: "before the revolutionary party is formed, all the details of its political programme must be clarified through discussions and debates between its constituent parts to be"[10].
This declaration reveals the IBRP's commitment to a rigorous discussion among the revolutionary groups, with a view to clarification throughout the communist left, and the new generation of elements secreted by the class, and attracted by the former's positions. We welcome this commitment, we urge the IBRP to concretise it, and to develop it by concrete attitudes and forward steps. For our part, we will contribute to its development with all our strength.
Adalen. 16th November 1997
[1] IBRP: International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, composed of the PClnt and the Communist Workers' Organisation (UK). Note that the quotations from the 1984 IBRP platform are translated from the French version published in the first issue of the IBRP's Revue Communiste (no longer published in French, but still available in English), while quotations from the 1997 platform have been taken from the English version available on the Internet. In some cases (in particular on the trades union question, where the Internet version still contains the formulation "Trades unions are organs of mediation between labour and capital", which no longer appears in Italian), there appear to be differences between the English Internet and the Italian version. In this case, we have stuck to the Italian original published in Prometeo no.13.
[2] A delegation from the CWO also took part in this Congress.
[3] Such precision is all the more necessary in that the left of capital and especially the Trotskyists and other leftists recognise that the "struggle for democracy" is not" revolutionary", but consider it "vital" for "tactical" reasons, or as a first "step towards socialism".
[4] Fomento Obrero Revolucionario, a group of the proletarian political milieu, today sadly defunct, led by G. Munis, and whose origins lay in a break with Trotskyism in 1948.
[5] This position is similar to that of the KAPD in the 1920s which worked for the formation of "Unionen" - organisms which were half-way between the general organisation of the class and the political organisation, with platforms that included both political positions and contingent elements. In reality, the Unionen turned out to be a handicap for the class by their concessions to trades unionism.
[6] In his polemic in 1903 and throughout the Bolsheviks' struggle right up to 1917, Lenin defended the need for a clear break with the conception of the mass party, although he did not develop this idea in all its implications.
[7] See amongst other articles, "The function of the revolutionary organisation" in International Review no.29. "The party and its relations with the class" in International Review no. 35.
[8] The IBRP is much more precise in the explanation that it has added to the criteria for the International Conferences: "the proclamation of the revolutionary party, or its initial nucleus, solely on the base of the existence of little groups of activists, does nor represent much of a step forward for the revolutionary movement".
[9] See our position in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference, available from our address, and also our evaluation of the Conferences and the attitude of Battaglia Comunista, in the International Review no.22.
[10] Of course, this globally correct view should not lead 10 a schematic interpretation according to which the party cannot be formed until "all the details are clarified". For example, in March 1919 it was urgent to found the Third International (which was already late), and the founding Congress followed the advice of Lenin, rather than that of the German delegate who wanted to delay it on the (real) grounds that points remained to be clarified.
What was the nature of the system that existed in our country during the "soviet" period?
This is certainly one of the most important questions for history, and to an extent for the other social sciences. And it is not at all an academic question - it is very closely tied to the present epoch, for it is impossible to understand the reality of today without understanding that of yesterday.
And yet this question can be summed up as follows: what was the nature of the central actor of the "soviet" system, which determined the country's development, ie the ruling bureaucracy? What were its relations with other social groups? What motives and needs determined its activity?
It is impossible to study these problems seriously without knowing the works of Leon Trotsky, one of the first writers to try to understand and analyse the nature of the "soviet" system and its ruling strata. Trotsky devoted several works to this problem, but his most general and concentrated view of the bureaucracy is set out in his book The Revolution Betrayed, published 60 years ago[1].
Principal characteristics of the bureaucracy
Let us recall the main characteristics of the bureaucracy that Trotsky gives in his book:
1) The upper levels of the social pyramid of the USSR are occupied by "a ruling caste in the proper sense of the word" (p 117), and this caste "does not do any directly productive work, but directs, orders, commands, pardons and punishes". According to Trotsky, this stratum comprises between 5 and 6 million people.
2) This stratum which rules everything is removed from any control by the masses who produce social commodities. The bureaucracy reigns, the toiling masses "obey and are silent".
3) This stratum maintains relations of material inequality in society: "Limousines for the "activists", fine perfumes for "our women", margarine for the workers, stores "de luxe" for the gentry, a look at delicacies through the store windows for the plebs" (P120). In general, the living conditions of the ruling class are analogous to those of the bourgeoisie: "the ruling stratum comprises all gradations, from the petty bourgeoisie of the backwoods to the big bourgeoisie of the capitals" (P 140).
4) This stratum rules not only objectively, but subjectively, for it considers itself sole master of society: according to Trotsky it "possesses the specific consciousness of a ruling class" (p135).
5) The domination of this stratum is based on repression, and its prosperity on "the masked appropriation of the fruits of other's labour". "The privileged minority", notes Trotsky, "lives at the expense of the non-privileged majority".
6) There is a latent social struggle between this ruling caste and the oppressed majority of workers.
Trotsky in fact is describing the following picture: there exists a fairly numerous social stratum which controls production, and therefore its produce, in a monopolistic manner, and which appropriates a large part of production (in other words, exercises a function of exploitation), which is united around an
understanding of its common material interests, and is opposed to the producing class.
What do marxists call a social stratum that displays all these characteristics? There is only one answer: this is the ruling social class in every sense of the term.
Trotsky leads his reader to the same conclusion. But he does not come to it himself, even though he notes that in the USSR the bureaucracy "is something more than a bureaucracy" (P249). Something more ... but what? Trotsky does not say. Moreover, he devotes a whole chapter to refuting the notion of the bureaucracy's bourgeois class nature. Trotsky starts with "a", but after describing the exploiting ruling class, Trotsky hesitates at the last moment, and refuses to go on to "b".
Stalinism and capitalism
Trotsky demonstrates the same reticence when he compares the Stalinist bureaucratic system with the capitalist system.
"Mutatitis mutandis, the Soviet government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the same position as the capitalist does in relation to the single enterprise" (p43), says Trotsky in Chapter 2 of Revolution Betrayed. In Chapter 9, he says:
"The transfer of the factories to the state changed the situation of the worker only juridically [my emphasis - AG]. In reality he is compelled to live in want and work a definite number of hours for a definite wage (...) The workers lost all influence whatever in the management of the factory. With piecework payment, hard conditions of material existence, lack of free movement, with terrible police repression penetrating the life of every factory, it is hard indeed for the worker to feel himself a "free workman". In the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state the employer" (p241/2).
In the same chapter, Trotsky notes that the nationalisation of property does not liquidate the social difference between the ruling and subject strata: the former enjoy every possible luxury, while the latter live in poverty as before and sell their labour power. He says the same thing in Chapter 4: "state ownership of the means of production does not turn manure into gold, and does not surround with a halo of sanctity the sweat-shop system" (p82).
These theses seem to observe very clearly phenomena that are elementary from a marxist viewpoint. For Marx always emphasised that the principal characteristic of a social system was not its laws and "forms of property", whose analysis as things in themselves leads to a useless metaphysics[2]. The decisive
factor is the real social relations, and principally the position of social groups in relation to society's social product.
A mode of production can be based on different forms of property. The example of feudalism shows this well. During the Middle Ages, it was based on private feudal ownership of the land in the west, and on state feudal ownership in the east. Nonetheless, social relations were feudal in both cases, since they relied on the feudal exploitation of the class of peasant producers.
In Volume III of Capital, Marx defines the principal characteristic of any society as "the specific economic form in which free labour is directly extracted from the producers themselves". Consequently, what is decisive is the relationship between those who control the process and the fruits of production, and those who carry it out. The attitude of the owners of the means of production towards the producers themselves: "This is where we discover the most profound mystery, the hidden foundation, of every society"[3].
We have already shown how Trotsky described the relationship between the ruling stratum and the producers. On the one hand, the real "owners of the means of production" embodied in the state (ie the organised bureaucracy), on the other the de jure owners, in fact the workers deprived of any rights, the wage workers, from whom "free labour is extracted". We can only draw one logical conclusion: there is no fundamental difference in nature between the Stalinist bureaucratic system and "classical" capitalism.
Here again, Trotsky starts with "a" by demonstrating the essential identity between the two systems, but does not go on to "b". On the contrary, he sets himself firmly against any identification of Stalinist society with state capitalism, and puts forward the notion of the existence in the .USSR of a specific form of "workers' state", where the proletariat remains the ruling class from the economic viewpoint, and is not subjected to exploitation despite being "politically expropriated" .
Trotsky supports this thesis by referring to the nationalisation of the land, the means of production and exchange, and transport, and the monopoly of foreign trade. In other words, he uses the same "juridical" argumentation which he has already convincingly refuted (see the quotations above). On page 82 of Revolution Betrayed, he denies that state property can "turn manure into gold", while on page 248 on the contrary, he declares that the sole fact of nationalisation is enough to make the oppressed workers into the ruling class.
The schema that replaces reality
How is this to be explained? Why does Trotsky the publicist, the merciless critic of Stalinism who cites the facts proving that the bureaucracy is a ruling class and a collective exploiter, contradict Trotsky the theoretician when he tries to analyse these facts?
Obviously, we can name two major factors which prevented Trotsky from overcoming this contradiction, one theoretical and one political.
In Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky tries to refute theoretically the thesis of the bureaucracy's bourgeois class nature with arguments as weak as the fact that it "has neither stocks nor bonds" (p249). But why should the ruling class necessarily possess them? For it is obvious that the possession of stocks and bonds is of no importance in itself: the important thing is whether this or that appropriates to itself a surplus product of the direct producers. If yes, then the function of exploitation exists whether the distribution of the appropriated product is done via dividends on shares, or through a salary and privileges attached to a job. The author of Revolution Betrayed is just as unconvincing when he says that the representatives of the leading stratum cannot bequeath their privileged status (P249). It is highly unlikely that Trotsky thought that children of the elite could become workers or peasants.
In our opinion, it is not worth considering superficial explanations like this to determine a serious reason for Trotsky's refusal to consider the bureaucracy as a social ruling class. Instead, it is to be found in his firm conviction that the bureaucracy could not become the central element of a stable system, that it was only capable of "expressing" the interests of other classes, but by distorting them.
During the 1920s, this conviction had already become the basis for Trotsky's schema of the social antagonisms of "soviet" society. For him, the framework for all these antagonisms was reduced to the strict dichotomy between the proletariat and private capital. There was no place in this schema for a "third force". The rise of the bureaucracy was seen as the result of the pressure of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie on the Party and the state. The bureaucracy was seen as balancing between the interests of the workers and those of the "new owners", unable to serve one or the other. Such a regime dominated by an unstable group "between the classes" could only fall, and the group itself split, at the first serious threat to its stability. This is what Trotsky predicted at the end of the 1920s[4].
And yet in reality, events developed quite differently. After the most violent conflict with the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy had neither fallen nor split. After easily obtaining the capitulation of an insignificant internal "right", it set about liquidating the NEP and "the kulaks as a class", and establishing a regime of forced collectivisation and industrialisation. All this came as a complete surprise to Trotsky and his supporters, convinced as they were that the "centrist" apparachiks would by nature are incapable of it! It is not surprising that the bankruptcy of the Trotskyist opposition's political calculations should be followed by its catastrophic capitulation in Russia, and its political bankruptcy at the international level[5].
Trying in vain to find a way out, Trotsky sent letters and articles from exile where he proved that the bureaucracy had only one option, and that it would "inevitably collapse long before achieving any serious results"[6]. Even when the leader of the opposition saw the practical incoherence of his idea of a role dependent on the "centrist" bureaucracy, he obstinately stuck to his bankrupt schema. At the time of the "great turn", his theoretical reflection is striking for its remoteness from reality. For example, at the end of 1928, he writes: "Centrism is an official line of the apparatus. The bearer of this centrism is the party functionary. The functionaries do not form a class. So what class line is represented by centrism?". Since Trotsky denied the possibility of the bureaucracy having its own line, he arrived at the following conclusion: "The rising owners of property find their expression, though a cowardly one, in the right fraction. The proletarian line is represented by the Opposition. What is left for centrism? When we remove the above social strata, all that is left is ... the middle peasant"[7]. And he writes all this at the same time as the Stalinist apparatus is conducting a violent campaign against the middle peasantry, and preparing its liquidation as an economic formation!
As time went on, Trotsky continued to expect an imminent split in the bureaucracy between the proletarian and bourgeois elements, and those "who would be left to one side". He predicted the "centrists ", fall from power, first after the failure of a "complete collectivisation", then as the result of an economic crisis at the end of the first Five Year Plan. In his Draft Platform for the International Left Opposition on the Russian Question written in 1931, he even envisaged the possibility of a civil war when the elements of the state and party apparatus would be divided "on the two sides of the barricades"[8].
Despite all these predictions, the Stalinist regime survived, the bureaucracy not only remained muted but even strengthened its totalitarian power. Trotsky nonetheless continued to consider the bureaucratic system in the USSR as extremely precarious. And during the 1930s, he thought that the bureaucracy’s power could collapse at any moment. In other words, it should not be considered as a class. Trotsky expressed this idea most clearly in his article The USSR at War (September 1939): "Would we not be mistaken to describe the Bonapartist oligarchy as a new ruling class a few years or even months before its shameful fall?"[9].
All Trotsky's predictions of the "Soviet" bureaucracy's imminent fall have been refuted, one after the other, by events themselves, Despite everything, he did not want to change his ideas. For him the attachment to a theoretical schema was worth more than anything else. But this is not the only reason, since Trotsky was more a politician than a theoretician, and generally preferred the "concrete political" approach to a problem than that of "abstract sociology". We will look here at another important reason for his obstinate refusal to call things by their real names.
Terminology and Politics
If we examine the history of the Trotskyist Opposition during the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s, we can see that his entire political strategy was based on the imminent disintegration of the USSR's governing apparatus. Trotsky thought that an alliance between a hypothetical "left tendency" and the Opposition would be necessary for the reform of the party and the state. At the end of 1928, he wrote: "A bloc with the centrists [ie the Stalinist apparatus] is admissible and possible in principle. Moreover, only such a regroupment in the party can save the revolution"[10]. Because they counted on such a bloc, the leaders of the Opposition tried not to put off the "progressive" bureaucrats. This tactic explains the highly equivocal attitude of the Opposition leaders towards workers' class struggle against the state, their refusal to create their own party, etc.
Even after his exile from the USSR, Trotsky continued to place his hopes in a rapprochement with the “centrists". His hope to gain the support of a part of the ruling bureaucracy was so great that he was prepared to compromise (under certain conditions) with the Secretary General of the CP's Central Committee. The story of the slogan "Stalin resign!" is a striking example. In March 1932, Trotsky published an open letter to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR where he launched an appeal: "It is necessary at last to carry out Lenin's final, insistent advice: make Stalin resign"[11]. However, a few months later he had already gone back on this, explaining: "What matters is not Stalin as an individual, but his fraction... The slogan "Down with Stalin!" could be (and inevitably would be) understood as a call for the overthrow of the fraction which is today in power, and more widely of the regime. We do not want to overthrow the system, but to reform it"[12]. Trotsky made the question of his attitude towards the Stalinists completely explicit in an unpublished article-interview written in December 1932: "Today, as before, we are ready for co-operation in many forms with the present ruling fraction. Question: Are you as a result ready to co-operate with Stalin? Answer: Without any doubt"[13].
During this period, Trotsky linked a possible turn of a part of the Stalinist bureaucracy towards a "multiform cooperation" with the opposition, to an imminent "catastrophe" for the regime, which as we have said above, he considered inevitable because of the "precariousness" of the bureaucracy's social position[14]. As a result of this catastrophe, the leaders of the Opposition were ready to consider an alliance with Stalin in order to save the party, nationalisation, and the "planned economy", from the bourgeois counter-revolution.
And yet, the catastrophe did not happen. The bureaucracy was much stronger and more firmly consolidated than Trotsky thought. The Politburo did not respond to his appeals to ensure "an honest cooperation between the historic fractions" in the CP[15]. Finally, in the autumn of 1933 and after many hesitations, Trotsky abandoned any hope - which was utopian anyway - in a reform of the bureaucratic system with the participation of the Stalinists, and called for a "political revolution" in the USSR.
However, this change to the Trotskyists' principal slogan did not mean any radical revision of their view of the nature of the bureaucracy, the Party, and state, any more than it meant a definitive rejection of their hoped-for alliance with its "progressive" wing. When Trotsky wrote Revolution Betrayed, and afterwards he still considered the bureaucracy theoretically as a precarious formation devoured by growing antagonisms. In the IVth International's TransitionaL Programme (1938), he declared that the state apparatus in the USSR comprised all political tendencies, including a "truly Bolshevik" one. Trotsky thought of the latter as a minority within the bureaucracy, but nonetheless a significant one: he was not talking of a few apparachiks, but of a fraction within a social stratum of 5-6 million people. According to Trotsky, this “truly Bolshevik" fraction was a potential reserve for the left opposition. Moreover, the leader of the IVth International still thought it admissible to form a "united front" with the Stalinist part of the apparatus, in the case of a capitalist counter-revolution, which he considered "imminent" in 1938.[16]
It is this political orientation, first towards co-operation and the bloc with the "centrists" - ie the majority of the ruling" Soviet" bureaucracy - (in the late 20s and early 30s), then towards an alliance with the "truly Bolshevik" fraction and a "united front" with the ruling Stalinist fraction (after 1933), that we must bear in mind when we examine Trotsky's ideas on the nature of the bureaucratic oligarchy and social relations in the USSR, expressed in their most complete form in Revolution Betrayed.
Let us suppose that Trotsky had recognised in the totalitarian "Soviet" bureaucracy the exploiting ruling class and bitter enemy of tile proletariat. What would have been the political consequences? In the first place, he would have had to reject the idea of uniting with a part of this class - the very idea of the existence of a "truly Bolshevik fraction" within the exploiting bureaucratic class would have been as absurd as its existence within the bourgeoisie, for example. Secondly, a supposed alliance with the Stalinists to fight the "capitalist counter-revolution" would have become a “popular front", a policy categorically rejected by the Trotskyists because it would have amounted to a bloc of enemy classes instead of a "united front" within the same class, an idea well within the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition. In short, understanding the class essence of the bureaucracy would have dealt a heavy blow to the foundations of Trotsky's political strategy. Naturally, he did not want to accept this.
Thus the problem of determining the nature of the bureaucracy was much more important than a mere matter of theory or terminology.
The destiny of the bureaucracy
To do Trotsky justice, towards the end of his life he began to revise his vision of the Stalinist bureaucracy. We can see this in his book on Stalin, the most mature of his works, although incomplete. Examining the decisive events at the turn of the 20s and 30s, when the bureaucracy completely monopolised power and property, Trotsky already considered the state and Party apparatus as one of the main social forces in struggle to "control the nation's surplus product". In declaring all-out war on the "petty bourgeois elements" they were not driven by the "pressure" of the proletariat, nor were they "pushed by the opposition" (as Trotsky had once claimed)[17]. Consequently, the bureaucracy did not "express" anyone else's interests, and was not "balancing" between two poles, but appeared as a social group conscious of its own interests. After beating all its competitors, it had won in the battle for power and profits. It alone disposed of surplus product (ie, the function of a real owner of the means of production). Admitting this, Trotsky could no longer neglect the question of tile bureaucracy's class nature. Indeed, speaking of the 1920s, he writes: "The essence of the [Soviet] Thermidor ... has crystallised new privileged strata, and has led to the birth of a new substratum of the ruling class in the economic sense [my emphasis]. There were two pretenders to this role: the petty-bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy itself”[18]. Thus this substratum nourished two pretenders to the role of ruling class. It only remained to see who would win - and the winner was the bureaucracy. The conclusion is very clear: it is the bureaucracy that has become the new ruling social class. In reality, although he prepared for this conclusion, Trotsky did not in fact reach it, preferring not to complete his reflections politically. But he had taken a great step forward.
In his article The USSR at war, published in 1939, Trotsky took one more step in this direction: he thought it possible in theory that "the Stalinist regime may be the first stage of a new society of exploitation". Certainly, as always he emphasised that there was another viewpoint: the "Soviet" system, and its ruling bureaucracy, were only an "episode" in the process of transformation of bourgeois into a socialist society. Nonetheless, he declared his willingness to revise his opinions in certain circumstances, notably should the bureaucratic government in the USSR enter the world war which had already begun, and should this spread to other countries[19].
We know what happened thereafter. According to Trotsky, the bureaucracy had no historic mission, was situated "between the classes", had no autonomy, was precarious, and so constituted an "episodic event". In reality, the bureaucracy did nothing less than radically alter the social structure of the USSR by proletarianising millions of peasants and petty-bourgeois, carry out an industrialisation based on the super-exploitation of the workers, transform the country into a great military power then subject it to a terrible war, and export its form of domination to Central and Eastern Europe and South-East Asia. After all that, would Trotsky have changed his view of the bureaucracy? It is hard to say: he did not survive World War II, and never saw the formation of a "socialist camp". But for decades after the war, his political adepts continued to repeat word for word the theoretical dogmas contained in Revolution Betrayed.
The march of history has obviously refuted all the main points of the Trotskyist analysis of the social system in the USSR. To understand this, only one fact is necessary: none of the "successes" of the bureaucracy fall within Trotsky's theoretical schema. And yet even today, some savants (not to mention the representatives of the Trotskyist movement) continue to claim that his conception of the ruling "caste", and forecasts as to its destiny, have been confirmed by the collapse of the CPSU regime and the events which followed in the USSR and the "Soviet bloc". Here they are talking about Trotsky's prediction that the power of the bureaucracy would inevitably fall, either as a result of a "political revolution" by the working masses, or after a social coup d’état by the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie[20]. For example, V.Z. Rogovin[21], writes that the "counter-revolutionary variant" of Trotsky's predictions "has been carried out 50 years late, but with extreme precision"[22].
Where are we to find this precision, especially "extreme precision"?
The essence of the "counter-revolutionary variant" of Trotsky's forecasts lies above all in his predictions as to the bureaucracy's fall as a ruling stratum. "The bureaucracy is inseparably linked to the ruling class in the economic sense [he means the proletariat], is nourished by the same social roots, stands and falls with it [my emphasis)"[23]. Supposing that a social counter-revolution did take place in the countries of the ex-Soviet Union, and that the working class did lose its economic and social power, then according to Trotsky the ruling bureaucracy should have fallen with it.
In reality, did it fall, to give way to a bourgeoisie come from somewhere else? According to the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, more than 75 % of the Russian "political elite" and more than 61 % of the "business elite" have their origins in the Nomenklatura of the "Soviet" period[24]. Consequently, the same people are in the same ruling economic, social, and political positions in society. The origins of the other part of the elite can easily be explained. O. Krychtanovskaya writes: "Apart from direct privatisation ... whose principal beneficiaries were the technocratic part of the Nomenklatura (economists, professional bankers, etc.), we saw the quasi-spontaneous creation of commercial structures which appear to have no ties to the Nomenklatura. At the head of such structures are to be found young people, whose biographies reveal no links with the Nomenklatura. Their great financial success can only be explained in one way: although not part of the Nomenklatura, they were in its confidence, its "trusted agents", in other words its plenipotentiaries [emphasis in the original]"[25]. All this shows very clearly that it was not some "bourgeois party" (where could this have come from in the absence of a bourgeoisie under the totalitarian regime?) which took power and succeeded in using a few individuals from the previous ruling "caste" as its servants. It was the bureaucracy itself which organised the transformation of the economic and political forms of its rule, while remaining master of the system.
Thus, contrary to Trotsky's forecast, the bureaucracy did not fall. What about the other side of his predictions: the imminent split of the ruling social "stratum" between proletarian and bourgeois elements, and the formation within it of a "truly Bolshevik" fraction. Indeed, today the leaders of the "communist" parties formed from the debris of the CPSU claim to play the part of "true" Bolsheviks and to defend the interests of the working class. But it is unlikely that Trotsky would have recognised in a Zhuganov or an Ampilov[26] his "proletarian elements", since the aim of their "anti-capitalist" struggle is nothing other than the restoration of the old bureaucratic regime in its classic Stalinist, or "patriotic statist" form.
Finally, Trotsky saw the "counterrevolutionary" version of the bureaucracy's fall from power in almost apocalyptic terms: "In the unlikely event of capitalism being restored in Russia, this could only be done through a cruel counter-revolutionary coup d’état, which would claim ten times more victims than the October revolution and the civil war. Should the soviet regime fall, its place could only be taken by Russian fascism, compared to whose cruelty the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler would look like philanthropic institutions"[27]. This prediction should not be seen as a fortuitous exaggeration, for it springs inevitably from Trotsky's whole theoretical vision of the nature of the USSR, and above all from his firm conviction that the "soviet" bureaucratic system served the mass of the workers, in its own way, by guaranteeing their "social conquests". Such a vision naturally considered that a counter-revolutionary transition from Stalinism to capitalism would be accompanied by a rising of the proletarian masses to defend the "workers" state and their "own" nationalised property. And surely only a ferocious fascist regime could defeat and crush the workers' powerful resistance to a "capitalist restoration".
Obviously, Trotsky could not have known that in 1989-90 the working class would not only fail to defend nationalised property and the "communist" state apparatus, but would actively contribute to their abolition. Since the workers saw nothing in the old system to justify its defence, the transition to the market economy and the denationalisation of state property led to no bloody class struggle, and no fascist or semi-fascist regime proved necessary. Trotsky's predictions cannot be said to have been confirmed in this domain either.
If the "soviet" bureaucracy were not a ruling class, but as Trotsky put it only a "policeman" of the distribution process, the restoration of capitalism in the USSR would have required a primitive accumulation of capital. And indeed, contemporary Russian commentators often use the expression "initial capital accumulation". In doing so, they generally mean the enrichment of this or that person, the accumulation of money, the means of production, or other goods, in the hands of the "new Russians". However, this has nothing to do with scientific understanding of primitive capital accumulation uncovered by Marx in Capital. In analysing the genesis of capital, Marx emphasised that "so-called primitive accumulation is nothing but the historic process of separating the producer from the means of production"[28]. The formation of an army of wage workers by the confiscation of the producers' property is one of the main conditions for the formation of a ruling class. In the countries of the ex-USSR during the 1990s, did the "restorers of capitalism" need to form a class of wage workers by expropriating the producers? Obviously not: this class existed already, the producers had no control whatever over the means of production - there was nobody to expropriate. Consequently, the time for capital's initial accumulation had already passed.
Trotsky was doubtless right to link primitive accumulation with a cruel and bloody dictatorship. Marx also writes that "new-born capital sweats blood from every pore", and that in its first stages needs a "regime of blood"[29]. Trotsky's mistake was not in linking primitive accumulation to the counter-revolution, but in failing to see how that counter-revolution was taking place under his very eyes, with all its characteristics of massacres and monstrous political tyranny. The millions of despoiled peasants dying of poverty and hunger, the workers deprived of every right and forced to work beyond endurance, whose tombs were the foundations of the buildings constructed according to the Stalinist 5- Year Plans, the innumerable prisoners of the gulag: these are the real victims of primitive accumulation in the USSR. Today's property owners do not need to accumulate capital, they need only redistribute it amongst themselves by transforming state capital into private corporate capital[30]. But this operation did not mean a change in society, nor in the ruling classes, nor did it demand any great social cataclysm. If we do not understand this, then we will understand neither "soviet" history, nor Russia today.
To conclude. The conception of the bureaucracy contained in Trotsky's fundamental theoretical views and political perspectives is incapable of explaining the realities of Stalinism or its evolution. We can say the same of the other elements of the Trotskyist analysis of the social system in the USSR (the "workers" state, the "post-capitalist" nature of social relations, the "dual role" of Stalinism, etc.). Nonetheless, Trotsky did succeed in resolving one problem: this remarkable commentator directed a crushing critique against the claims of "socialist" construction in the USSR. And that was not too bad for his day.
AG
[1] All quotations from Revolution Betrayed are taken from the New Park edition of 1973.
[2] See Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Chap 2.
[3] Marx, Capital, Book III.
[4] See the article Towards the New Stage in the Russian Centre of Collections of Documents for New History (RCCDNH), drawer 325, list I, folder 369, p1-11.
[5] By about 1930, the Opposition had lost two thirds of its members, including almost all its "historical leadership" (ten out of the thirteen who had signed the Platform of the Bolshevik-Leninists).
[6] RCCDNH. drawer 325,1.1…folder 175, p4, 32-34.
[7] Bioulleten oppositsii (Bulletin of the Opposition), 1931, no.20, p.10.
[8] Bioulleten oppositsii (BO), 1931, no.20, p.10.
[9] ibid. 1939, no.79-89, p.6
[10] RCCDNH, drawer 325, 1.1, folder 499, p2.
[11] BO, 1932, no. 27, p.6.
[12] ibid., 1933, no.33, p9-10.
[13] See Broue, "Trotsky et Ie bloc des oppositions de 1932". Cahiers Leon Trotsky. 1980, no.5, p22.
[14] See Trotsky, Dnevniki i pisma, (Letters and Correspondence). Moscow. 1994. p54-55.
[15] ibid.
[16] BO, 1938, no.66-67. p.15
[17] Trotsky, Stalin, Vol. 2
[18] ibid.
[19] The USSR in the war, Trotsky, 1939.
[20] Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, p290.
[21] During the "soviet" epoch, Vadim Rogovin, professor at the Russian Institute of Sociology , was one of the main official propagandists and commentators on the social policy of the CPSU. During Perestroika, he converted himself into an "anti-Stalinist" and an unconditional admirer of Trotsky. He is the author of several apologetics for Trotsky and his ideas.
[22] Rogovin, Stalinski neonep, (The Stalinist NeoNEP), Moscow, 1994, p.344.
[23] BO, 1933. no.36-37, p.7
[24] O. Krychtanovskaya, "Finansovaya oligarkhia v Rossii", (The Financial Oligarchy ill Russia), Izvestia, 10101/96.
[25] ibid.
[26] Zhuganov is the leader of the "renovated" Communist Party and Yeltsin's main rival in the last presidential elections. Victor Ampilov is the main leader of the hard-line Stalinist movement in Russia, and the founder of the "Russian Communist Workers' Party". He calls for the restoration of the "classical" totalitarian regime of the 1930s.
[27] BO, 1935, no.41, p3.
[28] Marx, Capital, Book I, p663.
[29] ibid.
[30] Arriving at a similar conclusion after concrete sociological studies, O. Krychtanovskaya writes: "If we analyse carefully the situation in Russia in the 1990s, we see that the only "primitive accumulation” was the work of unlucky doctors turned stock-broker, or engineers buying a kiosk. This stage of accumulation almost always ended in the purchase of shares in MMM [a failed financial "pyramid"] (the result is well-known), and was rarely transformed into "secondary accumulation?" (Izvestia, 10/01/1996)
We are publishing here the report on the crisis adopted by the 12th Congress of the ICC. This report was written in January 1997, and its discussion throughout our organisation was the basis for the adoption, at the same Congress, of the Resolution on the International Situation published in no.90 of this Review. Since these two texts were written, the development of capitalism economic crisis has been dramatically illustrated by the financial upheavals that have hit, first the now ex-dragons - of Asia from the summer of 1997, then the entire world's money markets, from Latin America to Eastern Europe, from Brazil to Russia, all the way to the great industrial powers: the USA, but first and foremost Japan.
Marxist theory against the lies and blindness of bourgeois economists
The point to which both texts were able both to forecast the open crisis in the Asian countries and above all to explain its underlying causes, is striking. However, we have no intention of bragging over the concretisation of our perspectives in so short a time. The fact that these forecasts were so quickly proved correct is not the most important thing. Had they been verified some time later, the validity of the analysis would not have been diminished by one iota. Similarly, we consider it a secondary matter that our forecasts were confirmed precisely in the Asian countries. In effect, these latter only express a general tendency, which appeared in Mexico in 1994-95, and which is appearing in Russia and Brazil as we write. What is important is the concretisation, sooner or later, of a tendency which only marxism is able to understand and to foresee. Whatever its pace or place, it confirms the validity, the seriousness, and the superiority of marxism over all the inept ideas, often incomprehensible, always incomplete and contradictory, never impartial, with which we are supplied by the economists, journalists, and politicians of the bourgeoisie.
Anyone who lifts their head for a while above the successive themes of media propaganda, designed either to hide the reality of the economic crisis or to give it a reassuring explanation, cannot but be staggered by the variety and contradictory nature of the explanations proposed by the bourgeoisie for the catastrophic development of the economy since the late 1960s and the end of the reconstruction period that followed World War II.
What is left of explanations that attributed the crisis to "excessive rigidity in the monetary system"[1], now that the anarchy of exchange rates has become a factor of world economic instability? What is left of all the talk of "oil shocks"[2] now that oil prices are drowning in overproduction? What is left of "liberalism" and the "miracles" of the "market economy"[3] now that economies are collapsing in a savage trade war for an ever more rapidly contracting world market? And what credibility can we give to today's explanations, based on the sudden discovery of the "dangers of debt" , but which ignore the fact that this suicidal level of debt has been the only way of prolonging the life of an economy in its death-throes[4]?
By comparison, marxism has continued to stand by the same explanation, developing it and improving its precision where necessary, through each new open expression of the crisis. This explanation is still there, in the report that follows. It has been taken up, defended, developed and made more precise many times in the revolutionary press, and in our publications in particular. A marxist understanding is historical; it has continuity and coherence.
"The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them". "In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production (...) And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets and by the more thorough exploitation of old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented"[5].
These characteristics and tendencies revealed by Marx and Engels have been verified throughout capitalism's history. They have become stronger still in the period of decadence, which marks the end of "new" markets and the exhaustion of the old. The tendency to massive destruction of productive forces has become a permanent and dominant one during the 20th century, in particular during the world wars. We have seen "crises appear as a result of the contradiction between the capacity for expansion, the tendency of production to increase, and the restricted consumption capacity" and that "credit is precisely the means of making this contradiction break out as often as possible". But credit also "paves the way for [the] more extensive and destructive crises" forecast by the Manifesto: "After having (as a factor of the process of production) provoked over-production, credit (as a mediator of the process of exchange) destroys, during the crisis, the very productive forces it itself created"[6]).
The fall in shares and currencies, along with the bankruptcy of the Asian countries, illustrates both the historical dead-end that capitalism finds itself in - expressed in the over-production mentioned in the Manifesto, and in the unlimited use of credit - and an endless fall into social and economic catastrophe into which the whole planet is being dragged. It confirms what we have said about the incompetence, not to say the utter vacuity, of the bourgeoisie's propagandists and economists. It confirms what we have said about the clear-sightedness and profound validity of the marxist method for analysing and understanding social reality, and, in the case which concerns us here, the irreversible and insoluble crisis of the capitalist mode of production. A brief reminder will suffice to illustrate our condemnation, without right of appeal, of capitalism's zealous defenders.
Thailand? "An Eldorado (...) a bubbling market"[7]. Malaysia? "an insolent success"[8], "a real locomotive [which] will soon be one of the world's top fifteen economic powers"[9]; the country plans to become, "like Singapore, a high-tech paradise"[10]; "explosive Malaysia, which sees big, really big (...) the most fortunate Asian financial market"[11]. "The Asian miracle is not over", insisted an expert consultant in February 1997 ... [12].
We could have gone on, and doubtless found other "pearls" of the same variety. They are endless, and their purpose is always the same: to deny or hide the irreversible reality of the crisis. We might have hoped that there would be no more George Bush coming to promise the "era of peace and prosperity" that the collapse of the Eastern bloc was supposed to bring; no more Jacques Chirac predicting the "end of the tunnel" . .. in 1976! But they are still there, more numerous than ever, assuring us that "the fundamentals are good" (Bill Clinton), and that "the correction [ie the fall on the world's stock markets] was a healthy one" (Alan Greenspan, president of the US Federal Reserve), or that "the recent disturbances on the financial markets could bring benefits in the long term for the American economy", and that "this does not mean the end of the boom and of growth in Asia " (Greenspan again)[13]. Nonetheless, the latter began to correct his over-optimistic words two weeks later, faced with the evidence of multiple collapses and bankruptcies affecting Japan and South Korea in particular: "the consequences of the Asia crisis will be non-negligible". Certainly, the words spoken at the high point of the crisis on the stock exchange were designed to reassure the latter, and to avoid a generalised panic; even so, they reveal both the blindness and the impotence of their authors.
What a slap in the face the Asian collapse has given to all those triumphant pronouncements about the wonders of the capitalist mode of production! How it has shown up all those pompous declarations about the exemplary success of these "emerging countries"! How it has given the lie to the speeches about the submission, discipline, sense of sacrifice in the service of the national economy, low wages and "flexibility" of the working class in these countries, as a source of success and prosperity for all!
The bankruptcy of Asia is a product of the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production
Since July, the Asian "tigers" and "dragons" have collapsed. By 27th October, in one week the stock exchange had lost 18 % of its value in Hong Kong, 12.9% in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), 11. 5 % in Singapore, 9.9 % in Manila (Philippines), 6 % in Bangkok (Thailand), 5.8% in Jakarta (Indonesia), 2.4% in Seoul (South Korea) and 0.6% in Tokyo. Over the last year, the same countries have recorded falls of respectively 22 %, 44%, 26.9%, 41.4%, 41 %, 23 %, 18.5%, and 12 %[14]. The fall has continued up to the time of writing this article.
In the wake of this collapse, and despite all the calming talk about its lack of effect on the world economy, Wall Street and the European stock markets have been hit by a serious crash. Only the intervention by governments and central banks, plus the regulations of the stock exchanges - which cut off trading automatically when prices fall too quickly - have halted the movement of panic. By contrast, in the Latin American countries stock markets and currencies have plunged. Most concern has been expressed over Brazil. Moreover, the same phenomenon is now appearing in the "emerging" countries of Eastern Europe: Budapest has fallen by 16%, Warsaw by 20%, Moscow by 40 %. The decline in the stock exchange has been accompanied by the depreciation of local currencies, as in Asia and Latin America.
"The experts fear that Eastern Europe will undergo a financial crisis similar to Asia's [which would be] one of the worst threats to the recovery of the economies of the European Union" (15). As if the recession had not been hitting the whole of capitalism for a decade: "If we leave aside the euphoria of globalisation, the situation in every region of the globe since 1987 can best be defined as stagnation".
As if the origins of capitalism's bankruptcy lay in the peripheral countries, and not in the capitalist mode of production itself. As if its epicentre did not lie at the centre of capitalism, in the industrialised countries. At the end of the post-war reconstruction period in the late 1960s, it was the world's great industrial centres that were hit by open crisis. The bourgeoisie in these countries used domestic and foreign debt to the hilt to create artificially the markets it lacked. Since the end of the 1970s, there has thus been an explosion of debt, which has led first to the bankruptcy of the Latin American countries, then to the collapse of the Stalinist state capitalisms in Eastern Europe. Now it is Asia's turn. At first, the central countries had succeeded in pushing bankruptcy and recession away onto the peripheral countries. Now they are returning with tenfold strength to the central countries, which have themselves used and abused the poisonous medicine of debt: the USA is heavily in debt, while none of the European countries is capable of meeting the criteria of the Maastricht agreement on the single currency.
Events have accelerated during this financial crisis. South Korea, the world's 11th economic power, is deeply affected. Its financial system is completely bankrupt. Bank and company closures are spreading, and tens of thousands of redundancies have already been announced. This is only the beginning. Japan, the world's second economic power, "has become the sick man of the world economy"[15]. Here too, company closures are announced and redundancies are growing. What a cruel end for all those triumphant and definitive declarations about the Korean and Japanese "models"!
And what a refutation also for the pitiful explanations given for the swathe of stock market falls since the summer! First of all, the bourgeoisie tried to explain the collapse in Thailand as a purely local phenomenon ... an explanation which was obviously refuted by the facts. Then it was supposed to be a crisis of growth in the Asian countries. Finally, it was supposed to be necessary cure for the speculative bubble, which would have no real effect on the real economy... a claim immediately refuted by the bankruptcy of hundreds of heavily indebted financial establishments, a wave of closures of equally indebted companies, and the announcement of drastic austerity plans that herald recession, redundancies by the thousand, and increased pauperisation for the local population.
Capitalism's generalised indebtedness
What are the mechanisms that underlie these events? The world economy, especially during the last two decades, has been running on debt, and even on "super-debt". In particular, the development of the so-called emerging economies of South-East Asia, like those of Latin America and Eastern Europe, has been built essentially on the investment of foreign capital. Korea, for example, has a debt of $160 billion, of which almost half must be repaid in the coming year - just as its currency has lost 20 % of its value. In other words, this gigantic debt will never be repaid. We do not have space here for an examination of the debt of other Asian states - colossal debts, like those of the world's other "emerging countries" , and whose size no longer has much meaning - whose currencies are all falling relative to the dollar. Most of these debts will never be repaid either. All these "bad debts" are lost to the industrialised countries, which will in turn aggravate their own level of debt[16].
What is the bourgeoisie's response to these enormous collapses, which threaten the entire world financial system with bankruptcy? More debt! The IMF, the World Bank, and the central banks of the richest countries have clubbed together to provide bail-outs of $57 billion to Korea, $17 billion to Thailand, and $23 billion to Indonesia. These new loans will be added to the old, and "the danger is already looming on the horizon of a collapse of the Japanese banking system, riddled with bad, and even irrecoverable debt, including $300 billion loaned to ten SE Asian countries, and to Hong Kong. And if Japan should fail, then the USA and Europe will find themselves in the heart of the storm"[17].
Japan is indeed at the centre of the financial crisis. Its bad debts are of roughly the same order of magnitude as its assets in US Treasury Bonds. At the same time, the increase in the government's budget deficit in recent years has added still further to its overall level of debt. It goes without saying that despite the 'Keynesian" policy of increasing the level of debt, there has been no recovery in the Japanese economy. By contrast, bankruptcies are proliferating amongst Japan's most heavily indebted financial institutions. In order to avoid a Korean-style collapse, the Japanese state is getting still further into deficit and debt. The possibility of Japan suffering a cash-flow crisis - which is what is happening - fills the world bourgeoisie with alarm: "Will the world's number one creditor, which for years has financed without counting the American balance of payments deficit, be able to go on playing the same role with a sick economy, eaten away by bad debt and a financial system drained of its resources? The worst case scenario would see Japan's financial institutions making massive withdrawals of their investments in US bonds"[18]. This would bring the financing of America's economy to an abrupt halt, in other words it would open up a brutal recession. The catastrophic consequences of the economic crisis exported to the capitalist periphery during the 1970s, by the massive use of credit, have returned to strike the central countries, and the worst of their effects are still to come.
It is difficult to say, today, whether these extra loans will succeed in calming the storm and putting off widespread bankruptcy for later, or whether the chips are finally down. As we write, it seems more and more unlikely that the $57 billion that the IMF has scraped together for Korea will be enough to stop the rout. There have been so many calls for help that the IMF's own funds, only recently increased by all the great powers, have already proved inadequate, so much so that the IMF is thinking of ... borrowing in its own right! But whatever the outcome of this particular financial crisis, the tendency is always the same, and can only get worse in the economic crisis. At best, the problem can only be put off till later, when its consequences will be still more profound and dramatic.
Capitalism's crisis is irreversible
This massive and growing use of debt illustrates the saturation of the market: when economic activity is based on debt, that means that the market has been created artificially. Today, the bubble of deception has burst. The saturation of the world market has prevented the "emerging countries" from selling as they need to. The present crisis will reduce sales further, and aggravate the trade war. We can already see an indication of this in the pressure the Americans are putting on Japan to maintain the value of the yen and open its domestic market, and in the conditions imposed by the IMF on Korea - and the other "assisted" countries. The Asian collapse, and their increased commercial aggressiveness, will affect all the developed countries, which are already calculating how much their growth rates will be reduced.
Once again, the bourgeoisie is at last forced to recognise the facts, and sometimes even to reveal a reality (in this case the saturation of the market) constantly affirmed by marxism:: "last August, the Wall Street Journal revealed that many industrial sectors were being confronted by a long-forgotten danger: too much productive capacity, and not enough customers", while "according to an article published on 1st October in the New York Times, over-production today threatens not just America, but the entire world. The global glut is even thought to be at the root of the Asian crisis"[19].
Recourse to credit to counter over-production and the saturation of the market only delays their effects, and in its turn becomes an aggravating factor in their development, as marxist theory has explained. Even if the IMF's new loans, which are out of all proportion to anything that has gone before (more than $100 billion to date), succeed in calming the situation, there is still a bill to be paid, to which these new loans must now be added. Capitalism is still in a dead-end. And the consequences are catastrophic for the whole of humanity. Even before this crisis, which will reduce millions more workers to misery and unemployment, and degrade the living conditions of billions of human beings, the International Labour Organisation revealed that "unemployment now affects almost a billion people throughout the world, almost a third of the working population"[20]. Before this crisis, UNICEF stated that 40,000 children die every day around the world from hunger. Every day, the economic, political, and social blockage of the capitalist mode of production imposes on billions of human beings a living hell of exploitation, hunger, poverty, wars and massacres, and generalised decomposition. And the most recent events will only accelerate this fall into barbarism on every continent and in every country, rich or poor.
These dramatic events herald a brutal decline in the living conditions of the whole world population. They mean a further deterioration of an already wretched situation for the working class, whether in work or unemployed, whether in the poorer countries of the periphery (Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia) or in the industrialised countries, including in the main bastions of the world proletariat in Japan, North America and Western Europe. The disaster taking place under our very eyes, and whose effects are beginning to appear in mass layoffs in Japan and Korea amongst others, demands a response from the proletariat. The world proletariat must throw back in the face of the ruling class and its states all the talk about the Japanese and Korean "models", cited as an example for more than a decade in order to justify attacks on workers' living and working conditions: sacrifices and submission do not bring prosperity, just more sacrifices and poverty. The capitalist world is plunging humanity into catastrophe. It is up to the proletariat to respond, with a massive and united struggle against sacrifices, and against the very existence of capitalism.
RL, 7th December 1997
[1] When Nixon decided to float the dollar in 1971.
[2] As a cause of the crisis in the 1970s.
[3] The fashionable theme during the 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher.
[4] International Review no.69, March 1992.
[5] Communist Manifesto, 1848 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1970).
[6] Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, in Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, Monthly Review Press, 1971.
[7] Investir, 3rd February 1997.
[8] Les Echos, 14th April 1997.
[9] Usine Nouvelle, 2nd May 1997.
[10] Far Eastern Economic Review, 24th October 1996.
[11] Wall Street Journal, 12th July 1996.
[12] From Jardine Fleming Investment Management (Option Finance no.437). Quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique of December 1997.
[13] International Herald Tribune, 30th October 1997.
[14] Figures taken from Courier International of 30th October 1997.
[15] Le Monde, 14th November 1997.
[16] On the level of debt in the industrialised countries, see International Review nos.76, 77, and 87.
[17] Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1997.
[18] Le Monde, 26th November 1997.
[19] Le Monde, 11th November 1997.
[20] Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1995.
Ever since 1989, the bourgeoisie's clamour about the end of marxism has been deafening. Not only have we been told over and over again about how the collapse of the "Communist" regimes showed the impossibility of creating a higher form of society than capitalism; we have also been asked to believe that marxism's predictions about the inevitable disintegration of the capitalist economy have not only been proved wrong, but have been proved right only about itself. After all, history has witnessed the collapse not of capitalism, but of socialism!
Marxists have the duty to fight these ideological campaigns, it is worth recalling that such refrains are by no means new. Almost 100 years ago, the "revisionists" in the Second International, dazzled by the achievements of a bourgeois society that had just reached its pinnacle, tried to argue that the marxist theory of crisis was obsolete, thus obviating the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
The left wing of social democracy, with Rosa Luxemburg in the forefront, were not afraid to stand by the "old" principles of marxism and reply to the revisionists by reasserting that capitalism could not escape disaster; and the events of the first three decades of the twentieth century proved them right in spectacular fashion. The 1914-18 war proved the falsity of theories about the possibility of capitalism peacefully evolving towards socialism; the reconstruction period that followed the war was short-lived and mainly confined to the USA, giving little time for the ruling class to congratulate itself on the success of its system; while the crash of '29 and the profound world-wide depression that followed gave even less basis for the bourgeoisie to argue that Marx's economic predictions were wrong, or better still, valid only for the 19th century.
It was rather different in the reconstruction period that followed the Second World War. The unprecedented rates of growth during this period gave rise to a whole industry churning out theories about the "bourgeoisification" of the working class, the consumer society, the arrival of a new, "organised" capitalism and the final end of the system's tendency towards crisis. Once again the obsolescence of marxism was proclaimed with the utmost assurance.
The crisis that opened up at the end of the 60s revealed, once again, the emptiness of all this propaganda. But it did not reveal it in a self-evident manner, in a way that could be grasped very quickly by large numbers of proletarians. Capitalism since the mid-1930s, but above all since 1945, had indeed been an "organised" capitalism in the sense that the state power had taken the responsibility for staving off its tendencies towards collapse; and the formation of "permanent" imperialist blocs made it possible to extend this "management" of the system onto the global arena. If state capitalist forms of organisation facilitated the post-war reconstruction boom, they also made it possible to slow down the crisis, so that instead of the spectacular dive of the 1930s, we have now been through almost thirty years of irregular, uneven descent, punctuated by numerous "recoveries" and "recessions" which have served to mask the underlying trend of the economy towards a total impasse.
Throughout this period, the bourgeoisie has taken full advantage of the slow pace of the crisis to develop all kinds of "explanations" about the difficulties of the economy. In the seventies, inflationary pressures were first put down to the rise in oil prices, and to the excessive demands of the working class. At the beginning of the 80s, the triumph of "monetarism" and Reaganomics put the blame on the excessive state spending of the left wing governments that had preceded them. Meanwhile, the left could point to the explosion of unemployment that accompanied the new economic policies and blame them on bad management by the likes of Thatcher, Reagan and Co. Both arguments were based on a certain reality: that the modem capitalist system, in so far as it is managed at all, is managed by the state apparatus. What they all obscure is the fact that this "management" is essentially crisis management. Nevertheless, the fact is that practically all the economic "debates" offered to us by the ruling class turn around this issue of how to manage the economy; in other words, the reality of state capitalism has been used to hide the reality of the crisis, since the uncontrollable nature of the crisis is never admitted. And this ideological use of state capitalism was given a further twist in l 989, when the collapse of the Stalinist model of state capitalism was, as we have already mentioned, held up as proof that the main crisis of present day society was not the crisis of capitalism, but the crisis of .... communism.
The collapse of Stalinism and the campaigns about the end of marxism also gave rise to the most extravagant promises about the new age of peace and prosperity that would inevitably follow. The seven years which followed have punctured large holes in these promises, above all the ones about "peace". But although, on the economic level, marxists can offer masses of evidence to show that these have been lean years rather than fat ones, they should not underestimate the capacity of the bourgeoisie to hide the truly catastrophic nature of the crisis from the exploited class, and thus to hinder the development, within the latter, of an understanding of the necessity to overthrow it.
Thus, at the XIth Congress of the ICC, our resolution on the international situation was obliged to begin its section on the economic crisis by refuting the bourgeoisie's claims that we were seeing the beginnings of a new economic recovery, particularly in the "Anglo-Saxon" countries. Two years later the bourgeoisie still talks about the recovery, even if it admits to numerous falterings and exceptions. Here, we will try therefore to avoid the mistake - often made by revolutionaries, out of an understandable enthusiasm to see the advent of the revolutionary crisis - of lapsing into an immediatist assessment of the prospects of world capitalism. But at the same time we will seek to use the most trenchant tools of marxist theory to reveal the shallowness of the bourgeoisie's claims and to underline the significant deepening of tile historic crisis of its system.
The hollow recovery
The resolution on the international situation at the XIth ICC Congress (April 95) analysed the reasons for the increased growth rates in certain important countries as follows:
"The official speeches on the "recovery " make a big thing out of the evolution of the indicators for industrial production, or the improvement in company profits. While we have indeed, in particular in the Anglo-Saxon countries, seen such a phenomenon recently, the foundation on which these rest must be pointed out:
- the recovery of profits is very often, especially for the big companies, the result of speculative windfalls; its counterpart is a new upsurge of public debts; it also flows from the elimination of "dead wood" by the big companies, in other words of their less productive sectors;
- the progress of industrial production results to a large extent from a very substantial increase in the productivity of labour based on the massive utilisation of automation and information technology.
It is for these reasons that one of the major characteristics of the present "recovery" is that it has not been able to create employment, to significantly reduce unemployment or temporary employment, which, on the contrary, can only increase, since capital constantly wants to keep a free hand in order to be able to its throw its superfluous workforce onto the streets at any moment" (International Review no.82).
The resolution goes on to emphasise that "the dramatic indebtedness of states has reached a new crescendo" and that "if they were to be subjected to the same laws as private companies, they would already have been declared officially bankrupt". This recourse to debt is a measure of the real bankruptcy of the capitalist economy, and can only presage catastrophic convulsions of the whole financial apparatus. One indication of this was the crisis of the Mexican peso. Mexico had been considered one of the models of third world "growth", but when the peso began to collapse, it needed a massive £50 billion dollar rescue operation to prevent a real disaster on the world's money markets. This episode revealed not only the fragility of the much-vaunted growth in some of the third world economies (with the Asian "tigers" being the most vaunted of all), but also the fragility of the entire global economy.
One year later, the resolution on the international situation from the 12th RI Congress reviewed the perspectives for the world economy drawn out at the XIth ICC Congress. The latter had predicted new financial convulsions and a new dive into recession. The resolution from the RI congress pointed to the factors which confirned this overall analysis: dramatic problems in the banking sector and a spectacular fall in the dollar at the financial level; and, at the level of the tendency towards recession, the increasing difficulties of those former models of economic growth, Germany and Japan. These indications of the real depth of the capitalist crisis have become even more significant over the past year.
Debt and capitalist irrationality
In December 96, Alan Greenspan, head of America's central bank, got up at a posh diner party and began talking about the "irrational exuberance" of the stock markets. Taking this to be warning of a financial crash, investors around the world were caught up in a selling panic and billions were wiped off share prices around the world - £25 billion in Britain alone, resulting in one of the steepest drops in share prices since 1987. The world's stock markets quickly recovered from this mini -crash, but the episode is a telling reminder of the fragility of the whole financial system. And indeed Greenspan was not at all wrong to talk about irrationality. The capitalists themselves have noted the absurdity of a situation in which Wall Street prices now tend to take a tumble when the rate of unemployment falls too low, since this revives fears of an "overheating" of the economy and new inflationary pressures. Bourgeois commentators can even see that there is an increasing divorce between the massive speculative investments carried out through the world's stock markets and not only real productive activity, but even "real" buying and selling. As we pointed out in our article "The Casino Economy" (IR 87), written just before the December mini-crash, the New York Stock Exchange had recently celebrated its 100th anniversary by announcing that the Dow Jones Index, with a 620% increase over the past 14 years, had beaten all previous records, including the "irrational exuberance" that had preceded the 1929 crash. And several capitalist experts met this announcement with profound misgivings: "Share prices of American companies no longer bear any relation to their real value" said Le Monde; "the longer this speculative madness lasts, the higher will be the price to pay later" said the analyst B M Biggs (both cited in IR 87). The same article in the Review also pointed out that while annual world trade is worth some $3,000 billion, international capital movements are estimated at $100,000 - 30 times more. In sum, there is a growing divorce between stock market prices and real value, the bourgeoisie is aware of this, and so deeply worried about it that a few hints from a leading US economics guru can trigger a huge crisis of confidence around the world's money markets.
What the capitalists can never understand, of course, is that "speculative madness" is merely a symptom of the impasse facing the capitalist mode of production. The underlying instability of the capitalist financial apparatus is based on the fact that a vast proportion of all economic activity today is not "really" being paid for, but is maintained by an ever-increasing mountain of debt. The wheels of industry, indeed of all branches of the economy, are being turned by debts that can never be repaid. The resort to credit has been a fundamental mechanism not only of the post-war reconstruction, but also of the "management" of the economic crisis since the 1960s. It is a drug that has kept the capitalist patient alive for decades; but as we have said many times, the drug is also killing the patient.
Indeed, in her answer to the revisionists in 1898, Rosa Luxemburg explained with great clarity why the resort to credit, while appearing to ameliorate things for capital in the short term, could only exacerbate the crisis of the system in the long term. It is worthwhile quoting her at length on this point since it sheds a great deal of light on the situation facing world capitalism today.
"Credit, through share-holding, combines in one magnitude of capital a large number of individual capitals. It makes available to each capitalist the use of other capitalists' money - in the form of industrial credit. As commercial credit it accelerates the exchange a/commodities and therefore the return of capital into production, and thus aids the entire cycle of the process of production. The manner in which the two principal functions of credit influence the formation of crises is quite obvious. If it is true that crises appear as a result of the contradiction existing between the capacity of extension, the capacity of production to increase, and the restricted consumption capacity of the market, credit is precisely, in view of what was stated above, the specific means that makes the contradiction break out as often as possible. To begin with, it increases disproportionately the capacity of the extension of production and thus constitutes an inner motive force that is constantly pushing production to exceed the limits of the market. But credit strikes from two sides. After having (as a factor of the process of production) provoked overproduction, credit (as a factor of exchange) destroys, during the crisis, the very productive force it itself created. At the first symptom of the crisis, credit melts away. It abandons exchange where it would still be found indispensable, and appearing instead ineffective and useless, there where exchange still continues, it reduces to a minimum the consumption capacity of the market.
Besides having these two principal results, credit also influences the formation of crises in the following ways. It constitutes the technical means of making available to an entrepreneur the capital of other owners. It stimulates at the same time the bold and unscrupulous utilisation of the property of others. That is, it leads to speculation. Credit not only aggravates the crisis in its capacity as a dissembled means of exchange, it also helps to bring and extend the crisis by transforming all exchange into an extremely complex and artificial mechanism that, having a minimum of metallic money as a real base, is easily disarranged at the slightest occasion.
We see that credit, instead of being an instrument for the suppression or the attenuation of crises, is on the contrary a particularly mighty instrument for the formation of crises. It cannot be anything else. Credit eliminates the remaining rigidity of capitalist relationships. It introduces everywhere the greatest elasticity possible. It renders all capitalist forces extensible, relative, and mutually sensitive to the highest degree. Doing this, it facilitates and aggravates crises, which are nothing more or less than the periodic collision of the contradictory forces of capitalist economy" (Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, Part One).
But now, in contrast to the days that Luxemburg was writing about, credit no longer disappeared in a crisis, eliminating the weakest capitals in good old Darwinian manner and adjusting prices downwards to reflect the fall in demand: on the contrary, credit became more and more the only mechanism for keeping capitalism afloat. So now we have the unprecedented situation whereby not only are the large capitals lending to the smaller capitals so that they can buy their goods from them: the world's main creditors have themselves been compelled to become debtors. TIle present situation of Japanese capital demonstrates this very succinctly. As we pointed out in "The Casino Economy", "with a foreign trade surplus, Japan has become the world's banker, with foreign assets greater than $1000 billion ", it is "the world's savings bank, providing 50% of the OECD countries financing needs" But the same article also points out that "Japan is certainly one of the most indebted countries on the planet. Today the accumulated debt of all non-financial agents (households, companies, the state), represents 260% of GNP; in a decade, it is expected to reach 400% ". Japan's budget deficit stood at 7.6% for 1995, compared to the USA's 2.8 %. As for the banking institutions themselves, "the Japanese economy is confronting a mountain of $460 billion of bad debts". All this has led to the specialists in risk analysis, Moody's, giving Japan a "D" classification, in other words, it is as big a financial risk as countries like China, Mexico and Brazil!
If Japan is the world's creditor, where does it get its credits from? Not even a Zen-trained Japanese businessman-samurai could unravel this koan. The same question could be asked about American capitalism, which is also simultaneously a global banker and a global debtor, even if its rulers have made a song and dance about tile reduction of the US deficit (in October 1996, government and opposition both rushed to claim credit for the fact that the US budget deficit was, at 1.9 percent of GDP, the lowest for 15 years).
The fact is that this absurd situation demonstrates that, for all the talk of sound economies and balancing the books that both governments and opposition like to indulge in, capitalism can no longer function according to its own rules. Against the bourgeois economists of his day, Marx went to great lengths to show that capitalism cannot create an unlimited market for its own commodities; the enlarged reproduction of capital depended on the capacity of the system to constantly extend the market beyond its own confines. Rosa Luxemburg demonstrated the concrete historical conditions in which this extension of the market would no longer be able to take place, thus plunging the system into irreversible decline. But capitalism in this epoch has learned to live with its own death agony, flouting its own rules in tile most shameful manner. No new markets you say? Then we'll create them even if it means that everyone, including the richest states on the planet, are, strictly speaking, bankrupt. In this manner, capitalism since the late sixties has avoided the kind of sudden deflationary crashes which it knew in the 19th century and which was still the form taken by tile crisis of 1929. In the current period, periodic recessions and financial splutterings have the function of letting off some of the steam that global debt is building up inside the capitalist pressure cooker. But they also presage the far more serious explosions that lie ahead. The collapse of the eastern bloc should serve as a warning to the bourgeoisie everywhere: you can only flout the law of value for so long. Sooner or later it will reassert itself, and the more you have flouted it, the more devastating will be its revenge. In this sense, as Rosa Luxemburg insisted, "credit is far from being a means of capitalist adaptation. It is on the contrary, a means of destruction of the most extreme revolutionary significance" (Social Reform or Revolution).
The limits to growth: the crisis in the US, Britain, Germany and Japan
It is all the more important to bear this in mind at the present juncture, where a number of apparently contradictory elements present themselves. The "recovery" centred in the "Anglo-Saxon" countries has faltered somewhat in the bourgeoisie's own terms, but most of the pundits are at least "quietly optimistic" about the prospects for growth. For example, The Sunday Times of 29/12/96 made a tour of the predictions US experts were making for the American economy in 1997, based on its performance in 96:
"Our tour of American prognosticators begins with the Business Week survey of the 50 top practitioners of that art. On average, those seers expect 1997 to be a repeat of 1996. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is forecast to grow steadily at a 2.1 % annual rate, and consumer prices to rise 3 %... The unemployment rate is expected to remain at a low 5.4 % and the interest rate on 30-year Treasuries to stay close to current levels at 6.43%". Indeed, the main debate among American economists at the moment seems to be whether continued growth will result in excessive inflation, a question we will come back to later on.
The British bourgeoisie, or at least its governing team (ie the Major government, when this report was written), has swapped styles with the Americans, and instead of being cautiously optimistic, is shooting its mouth off at every opportunity. According to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the British economy is "in its best shape for a generation". Speaking on 20.12.96, he quoted figures from the Office for National Statistics which "prove" that real disposable income has risen by 4.6% over the year; consumer expenditure was up by 3.2 %; overall economic growth was put at 2.4 %, while the trade deficit has also fallen. In the same month, official unemployment, in general descent since 1992, fell below 2 million for the first time in five years. In January, various forecasting institutes, such as Cambridge Econometrics and Oxford Economic Forecasting predicted that 1997 would bring more of the same, with growth rates of around 3.3%. In Britain too the most talked about concern of the experts is that the economy will "overheat" and provoke a new surge of inflation.
As we have seen, the ICC has already analysed the reasons for the relatively strong performance of the Anglo-Saxon countries in recent years. Apart from the factors cited by the resolution from our Xlth Congress, we have also pointed, in the case of the US, to "unprecedentedly brutal attacks against the workers (many of whom are forced to hold down two jobs to survive), and to using the advantages conferred by its special status as world superpower; financial, monetary, diplomatic and military pressure all put to the service of the trade war it is waging against its competitors" (resolution on the international situation, 12th Congress of RI, published in International Review no.86). In the case of Britain, the report to the 12th WR Congress (see World Revolution no.200) confirmed the degree to which the "recovery" has been based on debt, speculation, the elimination of dead wood and the massive utilisation of automation and information technology. It also points to the specific advantages Britain obtained by withdrawing from the ERM in 1992 and the resulting devaluation of sterling, which greatly increased its exports. But the report also details the real impoverishment of the working class that this "recovery" has been based upon (increasing rates of exploitation, decline in social services, growth of homelessness and so on), while exposing the bourgeoisie's lies about falling unemployment: since 1979, the British bourgeoisie has altered the criteria for its unemployment statistics 33 times. Current definitions, for example, ignore all those who have become "economically inactive", ie those who have finally given up looking for employment. This fraud was even owned up to by the Bank of England:
"Almost the entire net improvement in unemployment performance in the 1990s compared with the 1980s was accounted for by the rise in inactivity" (Financial Times, 12.9.96). So much for the "highest living standards for a generation" claimed by Mr Clarke.
But while marxists are always obliged to show the real costs of capitalist growth to the working class, merely pointing to the misery of the workers does not in itself prove that the economy is in bad shape. If this were the case, then capitalism would never have had an ascendant phase, since the exploitation of the workers in the 19th century was, as everyone knows, absolutely ruthless. To show that the bourgeoisie's optimistic forecasts are based on sand, we need to look at the deeper trends of the world economy. And here we must examine those countries whose economic difficulties provide the clearest indications of where things are going. As the resolution of the 12th Congress of Revolution Internationale points out, the most significant developments at this level in the last few years has been the decline of those two "powerhouse" economies, Germany and Japan.
The recent territorial conference of Welt Revolution identified a number of elements confirming this decline as regards Germany. These include:
- the shrinking of the internal market: for decades, the Germany economy provided a big market for the European and world economy. With the growing impoverishment of the working class, this is ceasing to be the case. In 1994, for example, expenditure on food shrank by 6 % to 20%. More generally internal investments will be 8 % lower this year; investment in buildings and equipment are some 30 % below the peak of 1992. Real turnover fell by 2 % in 1995. But the most significant figure in this respect is certainly the fact that unemployment now stands at well over 4 million: according to Germany's Labour Office, it could reach 4.5 million over the next few months. This is the clearest evidence for the pauperisation of the German working class and its decreasing ability to serve as a market for German and world capital.
- the growing burden of debt: in 1995 the state deficit (federal, Lander and municipalities) reached 1,446 billion DM. When another 529 billion DM of "hidden" debt is included, the total sum amounts to about 2,000 billion DM, corresponding to 57.6 % of the GNP. Over the past ten years, public debt has risen by 162 % .
- the increasing cost of maintaining the working class: tile growth of unemployment further increases the insolvency of the state, which is confronted with an undefeated working class and cannot simply allow the unemployed to starve. Despite all the famous austerity measures introduced by the Kohl government this past year, tile state still has a massive bill for maintaining the unemployed, the old age pensioners and the sick. Some 150 billion out of a federal budget of 448 billion DM are spent on social payments to the working class. The Federal Unemployment Office has a budget of 104.9 billion DM, and is already bankrupt.
- the failure of the German bourgeoisie to build up an "industrial landscape" in the east: despite the gigantic amounts of money spent in the east after reunification, the economy there has not taken off. Much of the money has gone into infrastructure, telecommunications and housing, but little into new industries. Instead all of the former, obsolete plants have gone bankrupt; and if new, modernised plants have been set up, they have absorbed less than 10 % of the old workforce. The army of the unemployed remains, but now has the "benefit" of sophisticated telecommunications and smart new roads!
All these factors are severely hampering German competitiveness on the world market and are compelling the bourgeoisie to make savage attacks on all aspects of working class living conditions: on wages, social benefits and jobs. The end of the German" social state" is the end of many capitalist myths: tile myth that hard work and social passivity give workers higher living standard, the myth of the necessary and profitable collaboration between bosses and workers, the myth of a German model of prosperity that can show other countries the way forward. But it is also the end of a reality for world capital: Germany's ability to act as a locomotive for the European and indeed the world economy. Instead, the very overt decline of German capital, and not the superficial "recovery" boasted by the US and British bourgeoisie, shows the real prospects of the system as a whole.
Equally significant is the wearing out of the Japanese economic "miracle". This had already became apparent in the early 90s, when growth rates - which had soared up to 10% in the 1960s - slumped to no more than 1 %. Japan was now "officially" in recession. A slight improvement in 1995 and 96 led some commentators to wax enthusiastic about the prospects for the year ahead. An article published in The Observer in January 1996 pointed to Japan's "unstoppable" export performance (a 10 % increase on 1994 meaning that Japan had now overtaken the US as the world's biggest exporter of manufactured goods). It confidently announced that "Japan is back in the global economic driving seat".
Our recent article "The Casino Economy" poured cold water on such hopes. We have already mentioned the mountain of debt weighing down the Japanese economy. The article goes on to insist that "this puts into proportion the recent Japanese announcement of a slight upward movement in growth figures, after four years of stagnation. The bourgeois media represent this as a piece of really encouraging news, whereas in reality it only illustrates the gravity of the crisis since the result was only achieved with difficulty after massive cash injections by five separate recovery plans. This expansion of the budget - in the purest Keynesian tradition - bore fruit at last ... but only at the cost of debts still more gigantic than those which lay behind the original recession. The "recovery" is thus extremely fragile, and in the end is doomed to collapse like an overcooked souffle".
The latest OECD report on Japan (2.1.97) fully confirms this analysis. Although the report predicts increased growth rates for 1997 (around 1.7%), it places all its emphasis on the need to tackle the debt problem. "The report concludes that, while the fiscal stimulus of the past year and a half was crucial in offsetting the impact of the recession, in the medium term Japan must control its budget deficit to reduce accumulated government debt. That debt is 90% of the economy's yearly output ... " (The Guardian, 3.1. 97). The OECD calls for increased sales taxes but above all largescale public spending cuts. Its concern about Japan's longer term economic health is openly announced. In short, this leading bourgeois think-tank makes no attempt to disguise the fragile nature of any "recovery" in Japan, and is clearly worried about the economy borrowing its way into even bigger problems in the future.
When it comes to countries like Germany and Japan, the bourgeoisie's worries are well founded. It was above all the reconstruction of these two war-shattered economies that provided the stimulus of the great boom of the 50s and 60s; it was the completion of that reconstruction in these two countries that provoked the return to the open crisis of overproduction at the end of the 60s. Today, the increasingly evident failure of these two economies constitutes a qualitative shrinking of the world market and is the sign that the global economy is tottering towards a new stage in its historic decline.
The wounded "dragons"
Disillusioned by Japan's difficulties, the bourgeoisie and its media tried to generate new false hopes by pointing to the performance of the east Asian "tigers", economies like Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea, whose staggering growth rates were heralded as the wave of the future. China too has been presented as being on the road to "economic superpower" status in place of Japan.
The fact is that, like previous third world "success stories" like Brazil and Mexico, the growth of the Asian tigers is a debt-fuelled bubble that could burst at any time. The big western investors, including the IMF, are already becoming aware of this:
"Among the reasons the richest industrial countries have been so anxious to double the IMP's emergency credit lines to 850 billion is that a new Mexico-style crisis is feared, this time in the Far East. The upsurge in the Pacific economies has stimulated enormous private sector capital flows, which have been substituted for domestic saving, lending to an unstable financial situation. The question has been which Asian tiger would be the first to fall.
Certainly the situation in Thailand is starting to look dicey. The finance minister, Bodi Chunnananda, has resigned amidst slumping investor confidence and shrinking demand in key sectors, including construction, property and finance - all symbols of a bubble economy. Similarly there has been a focus on recent uncertainty in Indonesia, as the stability and human rights record of the Suharto regime has become an issue" (Guardian, 16.10.96).
Most striking of all is the current social and economic situation in South Korea. The bourgeoisie here, learning from its European cohorts, has certainly drawn the workers into a large-scale manoeuvre: in December 96, tens of thousands of workers came out on strike against new labour laws which were presented above all as an attack on democracy and trade union rights, thus allowing the unions and opposition parties to take the workers off their own terrain. But behind the government's provocative attack is a real response to the crisis facing the South Korean economy: the central feature of the law is that it makes it far easier for businesses to lay-off workers and set working hours, and is clearly seen by the workers as a preparation for attacks on their living conditions.
As for China becoming the new powerhouse economy, this has never been more than a sinister farce. True, the capacity of the Stalinist regime there to adapt and survive when so many others have collapsed is remarkable in itself. But no amount of economic liberalisation, "opening up to the west", nor exploitation of tile new outlets that will be offered by the handing over of Hong Kong will transform the foundations of the Chinese economy, which remains desperately backward in industry, agriculture and transport, and, like all Stalinist regimes, chronically hampered by the weight of a bloated bureaucracy and military sector. As in the de-Stalinised regimes, liberalisation has indeed blessed China with western-style benefits... such as mass unemployment. On 14 October the state-run China Daily admitted that the number of unemployed could rise by more than half the present figure to 268 million in four years. With millions of rural migrants flooding the cities and bankrupt state enterprises desperate to shed "surplus" workers, tile Chinese bourgeoisie is deeply concerned about the danger of a social explosion. According to official figures, 43 % of state enterprises were losing money in 95, while in the first three months of 96, the entire state sector was running at a loss. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of state enterprise workers have been paid no wages for months (The Economist, 14-20 December 96). It is true that an increasing proportion of China's industrial output derives from private or mixed-ownership enterprises, but even if these sectors prove to be more dynamic, they could hardly compensate for the huge burden of bankruptcy in the directly state-owned sector.
Perspectives
1. A sharpening trade war
We have already pointed out that America's capacity to use its muscle internationally has been a big factor in the relative strength of the US economy in the past few years. But this also highlights another feature of the current situation: the growing intimacy between trade war and inter-imperialist competition.
Evidently, this intimacy is a product both of the general conditions of decadence, in which economic competition is increasingly subordinated to military and strategic rivalries, and of the specific conditions prevailing since the collapse of the old bloc system. The period of the blocs highlighted the subordination of economic rivalries to military ones, since the two main superpowers were not the main economic rivals. By contrast, the imperialist fissures that have opened up since 1989 correspond much more closely to direct economic rivalries. But this has not overthrown the domination of imperialist-strategic considerations; on the contrary, the trade war is more and more revealed as an instrument of the latter.
This is very clear with the Helms-Burton law passed by the US. This law makes unprecedented incursions into the "trading rights" of America's main economic and imperialist rivals, forbidding them to trade with Cuba on pain of sanctions. This is very clearly a provocative response by the US to the challenge to its global hegemony by the European powers, a challenge being mounted not only in "far away" regions like the Balkans and the Middle East, but also in America's "back yard", the Latin American countries, including Cuba itself.
The European powers have not remained passive in the face of this provocation. The European Union has taken the USA to the new World Trade Organisation court at Geneva, demanding the lifting of the Helms-Burton law. This confirms what we said in our article on globalisation - that the formation of regional trading conglomerations like the EU corresponds to "the necessity for groups of capitalist countries to create zones of protection from which to confront their most powerful rivals" (IR 86). The EU is thus an instrument of the global trade war, and the recent moves towards a single European currency have to be seen in this light. But it has more than purely "economic" functions: as we saw over the war in ex-Yugoslavia, it can also serve as a more direct instrument of inter-imperialist confrontation.
Of course, the EU is itself wracked by deep national-imperialist divisions, as illustrated recently by the disagreements between Germany and France on the one hand, and Britain on the other, over the single European currency. In the general context of "every man for himself", we can expect to see both trade and imperialist rivalries taking an increasingly chaotic form, aggravating the instability of the world economy; and, as each nation is forced to place barricades around its national capital, this will further accelerate the contraction of the global market.
2. Inflation and depression
Thus, whatever straws the bourgeoisie tries to cling to, world capitalism is inching towards the edge of vast economic convulsions, on a scale that will dwarf all those seen in the past thirty years. This is certain. What cannot be so clear to revolutionaries is not only the exact timescale of such convulsions (and we will not enter into the forecasting game here), but also tile precise form they will take.
After the experience of the 1970s, inflation has been presented by the bourgeoisie as the great dragon to be slain at all costs: the wholesale policies of deindustrialisation and cuts in public spending advocated by Thatcher, Reagan and the other monetarists were founded on the argument that inflation was the number one danger for the economy. By tile early 90s, inflation, at least in the main industrial countries, appeared to have been tamed to tile point that some economists began to talk about the historic conquest of inflation. One might ask whether we are not in fact seeing a partial return to the kind of deflationary crisis of the early 30s: a "classical" crisis of over-production in which prices tumbles with the sudden shrinking of demand.
Moreover, we should note that this tendency began to be reversed after 1936, when the state intervened -massively in the economy: the growth of the war economy, the boosting of demand by government spending- gave rise to inflationary pressures. This modification was even more apparent with the crisis that opened up in the late 60s. The first response of the bourgeoisie was to pursue the "Keynesian" policies of the previous decades. This had the effect of slowing down the pace of tile crisis but resulted in dangerous levels of inflation.
Monetarism presented itself as a radical alternative to Keynesianism; as a return to classical capitalist values of only spending money that had really been made, "living within our means" and so on. It claimed to be dismantling the bloated state apparatus and some revolutionaries were hoodwinked, talking about the "rolling back" of state capitalism. In reality, capitalism could not return to the forms and methods of its youth. Senile capitalism cannot keep going without the crutch of a hugely swollen state apparatus, and while the Thatcherites cut state spending in some sectors - especially those relating to tile social wage - they have hardly touched the war economy, the bureaucracy, or the machinery of repression. Furthermore, the trend towards deindustrialisation has increased the weight of unproductive sectors on the economy as a whole. In short, the "new" policies of the bourgeoisie could not remove the factors underlying the inflationary tendencies of decadent capitalism: the necessity to maintain a huge unproductive sector (see in this regard "Overproduction and inflation" in World Revolution no.2 and Revolution Internationale no.6, December 1973).
Another factor of the greatest importance in this equation is the system's growing dependence on credit, which we have already looked at. The huge extent of government borrowing shows how little the bourgeoisie has been able to break from the "Keynesian" policies of the past. In fact, it is the lack of solvent markets which makes it impossible for tile bourgeoisie, whatever the ideological varnish of its governing teams, to escape the necessity to create an artificial market. Today debt has become the principal artificial market for capitalism, but the original measures proposed by Keynes led straight in this direction.
If we want to find a model for the collapse of an economy which has turned the law of value inside out - the collapse, that is to say, of a state capitalist economy - we should look at what is happening in the former eastern bloc countries. What we are seeing here is not only a collapse of production on a far greater scale than in the crisis of 1929, but also a tendency towards uncontrollable inflation and the gangsterisation of the economy. Is this the shape of things to come in the west?
In no.28 of its review, dated May 1995, Internationalist Perspective (IP) offered us a panegyric on capitalism's strengths since the beginning of the century, and more particularly throughout the East Asian region. Not even the most ideological of World Bank reports has yet dared utter such paeans of praise: "capitalism has continued to develop the productive forces throughout the period of decadence - and moreover at an extremely rapid pace (...) the most prodigious rates of growth (sic!) in world industrial production have occurred since the end of the 1960s (...) the ICC also speaks of a geographically uneven development: according to its conception of decadence, no country newly arrived on the world market can industrialise and rival the old powers (...) And yet, since World War II Japan has become the world's second economic power; China is rapidly becoming a major economic power in its own right; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc have recently joined the ranks of the industrialised countries (...) In 1962, the Western Pacific only accounted for 9% of world GNP; in 1982 the figure was 15 %; and by the end of the century it will probably be 25 % - greater than Europe or North America. This capitalisation of the Far East, the entry into the ranks of the industrialised world of a region which before World War II was totally marginal from the industrial viewpoint, simply cannot be explained by the ICC's concept of decadence". While IP was lauding the radiant future of capitalism, our diagnostic forecast increasingly frequent and serious financial tremors, as a result of the growing recourse to debt as a means of putting off the effects of the crisis[1]. At the same time, we analysed historically and in depth the supposed prosperity of South-East Asia, and while we were at it put paid to all the bourgeoisie's tired old refrains on the subject[2], refrains which have been adopted, broadcast, and amplified by IP.
We have not had to wait more than two years for the facts to pronounce their verdict: South-East Asia is in intensive care, the IMF has had to act with utmost energy in order to impose the most drastic measures ever taken to try to "recover" a terrible economic situation. To accompany these measures, which are likely to lead to a major economic collapse, it has had to make available the biggest loan in its history. As for the other end of the planet, damage has been limited in the Western economies only by high level manipulation by governments and the major financial institutions.
IP is clearly more concerned to oppose the ICC than the bourgeoisie... This is where the worst kind of parasitism leads: objectively to play the game of the class enemy, to spread about the most inept drivel produced by the bourgeoisie's propaganda machine.
IP is going the same way on many other political questions, and it would be tedious to go through them all. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile nailing one more of its "theoretical exploits" of the last decade.
Just as the bourgeois campaigns after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes were at their most deafening to identify Lenin with Stalin, the Russian Revolution with the Gulag and Nazism, IP brought its own contribution to the edifice. In the editorial of IP no.20 (summer 1991), illustrated with a head of Lenin from which emerged little heads of Stalin, we could read the following: "Revolutionaries (...) must destroy their own icons, the statues of "glorious leaders" (...) [they] must get rid of the tendency to consider the Bolshevik revolution as a model". Here is IP's fundamental theoretical contribution to help spring the traps of a bourgeois ideological campaign whose prime objective is to eradicate from the consciousness of the working class its entire history and historic perspective (see the article in this issue). IP's persistence in adopting ludicrous positions, damaging to the development of proletarian consciousness, its constant desire to elaborate "theories", as absurd as they are incoherent and pedantic, is to be explained entirely by the group's origins and nature: as one of the most concentrated expressions of political parasitism.
C.Mcl
[1] Article on the financial situation in International Review no. 81, "Resolution on the International Situation" in International Review no. 82, "A casino economy" in International Review no. 87, "Resolution on the International Situation" in International Review no. 90.
[2] "The Asian dragons run out of steam" in International Review no.89.
[3] The reader may find our position on IP (or "External Fraction of the ICC" as it used to be called) in International Review nos.45, 64, and 70.
[4] Logically, IP should have abandoned the position of the communist left, which it still officially holds, on the impossibility of real national liberation struggles in decadence.
In the wake of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, there arose in Russia a committee for the study of the legacy of Leon Trotsky. This committee held a number of conferences on different aspects of the work of that great marxist revolutionary. In the course of the study of the contribution of Trotsky, it became clear not only that Trotsky himself had not been the only nor the most radical and resolute representative of the "Trotskyist" Left Opposition, but that there had been other oppositional currents inside and outside Russia, situated much further to the left. More particularly, it emerged that another, alternative tradition existed within the proletarian struggle against Stalinism, that of Left Communism representatives of which still exist today. On the initiative of Russian members of the committee, our organisation, the International Communist Current, was invited to the 1996 Conference in Moscow, devoted to an appraisal of Trotsky's book The Revolution Betrayed. On the proposition of the ICC, other groups of the Communist Left were also invited to participate, but either failed to come, as in the case of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, or refused out of a deep-seated sectarianism, as in the case of the "Bordigists". However, the intervention of the ICC was far from being the only expression of the life of the proletariat at that conference. The critique of Trotsky's refusal to recognise the state capitalist character of Stalinist Russia, which was presented to the conference by a Russian member of the organising committee, and which we are publishing in this issue of our International Review, is proof of that. A year later, moreover, the presence of groups of the Communist Left at the 1997 conference on Trotsky and the October Revolution was greatly reinforced by the participation, alongside the ICC, of another representative of the proletarian milieu: the Communist Workers Organisation, which alongside Battaglia Comunista forms the above mentioned International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (lBRP).
The legacy of Trotsky and the tasks of the present period
The conferences on the legacy of Trotsky took place in response to events of world historic importance: the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, the Eastern Bloc (and thus the whole post-World War II world order of Yalta) and of the USSR itself. The fact that Stalinism was not toppled by the class struggle of the proletariat, but decomposed under the weight of the historic crisis of world capitalism, and of its own specific weaknesses as an economically and politically backward fraction of the bourgeoisie, allowed the ruling lass to present these events as the bankruptcy not of Stalinism, but of Communism and in particular of marxism. As a result, by presenting its own historical decomposition as that of marxism, Stalinism, the mortal enemy of the proletariat, was able even in its foundering to render yet another great service to world capitalism. For these events were used to attack the consciousness of the workers of the world on a most crucial question: that of the historic goal of their struggle - communism itself. But if the world historic events of 1989-1992 thus resulted in a massive retreat in the level of class consciousness within the proletariat as a whole, they did not signify an historic defeat of the working class, whose combativity and capacity for collective reflection remained intact. Thus, while causing a retreat in the consciousness of the mass of proletarians, these events also contained the perspective of a quantitative development, and of a qualitative maturation of small revolutionary minorities of the class. By brazenly equating Stalinism with communism, the bourgeoisie obliges those searching proletarian minorities who reject this equation to pose the following questions: which political currents in the history of the working class opposed the Stalinist counter-revolution in the name of communism and of the proletariat, and which part of this heritage can serve as the basis for revolutionary activity today? Now, it is a central thesis of marxism that the class consciousness of the proletariat is above all an historic consciousness, and that therefore revolutionary minorities can only fulfil their tasks by making the assimilation and critical synthesis of all the contributions of past generations of marxists the point of departure of their struggle. In particular, the marxist conception of the role of a fraction, which in a period of defeat of the proletariat has the irreplaceable responsibility of drawing all the lessons of that defeat and passing them on to future revolutionary generations (Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the defeat of the 1905 revolution in Russia; Luxemburg and the Spartakists after the defeat represented by the Social Democratic support for World War I in 1914; the Italian Fraction around the publication Bilan after the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 etc), is a central concretisation of this understanding. Of the many thousands of revolutionary elements who appeared internationally under the impulsion of the mass proletarian struggles of a new and undefeated generation of the class after 1968, impregnated as they were by impatience and a one-sided faith in the "spontaneity" of the class struggle to the detriment of long term theoretical and organisational work, most of them disappeared without trace, precisely because they failed to anchor themselves in the positions and traditions of the past workers' movement. Although the conditions for the development of revolutionary minorities in the phase after 1989 have in some ways become much more difficult, lacking in particular the immediate example of mass proletarian struggles which inspired the post-1968 generation, the fact that searching proletarian elements today feel obliged to seek and link themselves to past revolutionary traditions in order to withstand that bourgeois campaign about the "death of communism" opens the perspective of a broader and deeper rediscovery of the great marxist legacy of the Communist Left. In Russia itself, the very centre and the foremost victim of the Stalinist counter-revolution, it was only with the break -up of the rule and hegemony of Stalinism that a new generation of revolutionaries could begin to emerge - over 30 years after the same process began in the west: Moreover, the devastating world-wide effects of that half a century long counter-revolution - the destruction of the organic link to past revolutionary generations, the burial of the real history of that movement under mountains of corpses and lies - weighed particularly heavily in the country of the October Revolution. The emergence of questioning proletarian elements in Russia today confirms what the resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 60s, not only in the west, but also in Poland, Rumania, China, even Russia itself, already demonstrated: the end of the Stalinist counter-revolution. But if the conditions for re-discovering the true history of the proletarian movement are particularly difficult there, it was also inevitable that in a country in which there is hardly a working class family which did not lose at least one member in the Stalinist terror, uncovering the historical truth would constitute the point of departure. If, from the Perestroika on, the question of "rehabilitation" of the victims of Stalinism became the slogan of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois dissident opposition, for the representatives of the proletariat a very different task emerged: the restoration of the revolutionary tradition of the best of these victims, the sworn class enemies of Stalinism. It is therefore anything but a coincidence that the first faltering attempts of Russian revolutionaries to define and debate the interests of their class, and to establish contact with Left Communist organisations abroad, emerged in relation to the question of the heritage of the proletarian struggle against Stalinism in general, and the heritage of Trotsky in particular. Of all the leaders of the opposition against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Communist International, Trotsky was far and away the most famous. His role in the foundation of the Third International, in the October Revolution itself, and in the ensuing Civil War, was so gigantic (comparable to that of Lenin himself) that even in the USSR the Stalinist bourgeoisie was never able to completely eradicate his name from the history books, or from the collective memory of the Russian proletariat. But just as inevitably, the heritage of Trotsky became the focal point of a political, a class struggle. This is because Trotsky, the courageous defender of Marxism, was the founder of a political current which, after a whole process of opportunist degeneration, finally betrayed the working class by abandoning the proletarian internationalism of Lenin, participating' actively in the second imperialist world war. The Trotskyist current which emerged from this betrayal had become a fraction of the bourgeoisie, with a clearly defined (statist) programme for national capital, with a bourgeois foreign policy (generally in support of "Soviet" imperialism and the Eastern bloc) and a specific task of "radically" sabotaging workers' struggles and the marxist reflection of emerging revolutionary elements. Behind Trotsky, there is therefore not one heritage but two: the proletarian heritage of Trotsky himself, and the bourgeois, "critically" Stalinist heritage of Trotskyism.
The antagonisms within the conferences over Trotsky's heritage
During Perestroika, the Stalinist CP began to allow access to the historical archives of the country. This measure, part of Gorbachev's policy of mobilising public opinion against the resistance to his "reform" policy within the state bureaucracy, soon revealed itself to be one expression of the loss of control and general decomposition of the Stalinist Regime. Once the Yeltsin regime established itself in power, it quickly restored a more restricted access to state archives, in particular regarding Left Communism and the opposition to the left of Trotsky. Although it was Yeltsin's government which re-introduced private capitalist ownership alongside the already existing state capitalist ownership in Russia, it understood much better than Gorbachev that any historical putting in question of its predecessors, from Stalin to Brezhnev, and any rehabilitation of the proletarian struggle against the USSR state, could only undermine its own authority.
As opposed to this, parts of the present day Russian bourgeoisie are sympathetic to the idea of exploiting an iconised, bourgeois falsification of Trotsky, presented as the "critical supporter" of a slightly "democratised" Nomenclatura, to brush up their own historical image. This concern was reflected in the presence at the conference of Stalinist Party dissidents, including an ex-member of Zhuganov's Central Committee.
The 1996 conference on The Revolution Betrayed
Against the bourgeois canonisation of the mistakes of Trotsky, the ICC quoted his declaration at the beginning of The Revolution Betrayed: "We need no longer argue with the gentlemen bourgeois economists: Socialism has proven its right to victory, not in the pages of Capital, but in an economic arena covering a sixth of the globe, proved it not in the language of the dialectic, but in the language of iron, cement and electricity." If this were true, the disintegration of the Stalinist economies would oblige us to admit the superiority of capitalism over "socialism" - a conclusion the world bourgeoisie is now happy to draw. Indeed, towards the end of his life, desperately trapped by his own incorrect definition of the USSR, the "historic failure of socialism" was a hypothesis which Trotsky himself began to take into consideration.
It is no coincidence that an important part of the argumentation of The Revolution Betrayed is devoted to "disproving" that Stalin's Russia is state capitalist - this position was constantly advanced, not only within Left Communism, but within the Left Opposition itself, both in Russia and abroad. The contribution of comrade AG from Moscow published here represents a fundamental refutation of Trotsky's position on the USSR from the standpoint of revolutionary marxism. This contribution not only demonstrates the state capitalist nature of Stalinist Russia. It uncovers the fundamental weakness of Trotsky's understanding of the degeneration of Red October. Whereas Trotsky expected the counter-revolution, if it did not triumph through an invasion from abroad, to come from the peasantry, which is why he saw the Bukharinists and not the Stalinists as the main danger in the 20s, and initially saw Stalin's break with Bukharin as a move towards revolutionary politics, he was blind to the main instrument of counter-revolution from within: the" Soviet" state which had wiped out the soviets. In fact, already his debate with Lenin on the trade union question, where Lenin defended and Trotsky denied the right of the workers to strike against "their own" state, revealed Trotsky's weakness on this question. As opposed to Trotsky's uncritical belief in the "workers' state", Lenin already pointed out in 1921 that the state also represented other classes antagonistic to the proletariat, and was "bureaucratically deformed". To this can be added another important incomprehension of Trotsky - his belief in "economic acquisitions" and the possibility of at least beginning the transformation to socialism in one country - which helped prepare the way for the betrayal of Trotskyism through support for Soviet imperialism in World War II.
This debate was not academic. During the Conference the Trotskyists, by calling for the defence of the " still remaining socialist acquisitions" in a struggle against "private capitalism" which they judged "still unresolved", were in fact calling on the Russian workers to spill their blood in defence of the interests of that part of the Stalinist Nomenclatura which had lost out through the collapse of their regime. Moreover, by presenting the wars in ex-Yugoslavia as a means of "restoring capitalism" in that country, they denied the imperialist nature of this conflict, calling on workers to support the so-called "anti-capitalist" side (in general the pro-Russian Serb fraction, which is also supported by British and French imperialism). During the open forum at the end of the conference, the ICC intervened to denounce the imperialist character of the USSR, of the wars in Yugoslavia and Chechnya, and of the left of capital. But ours was not the only voice raised in defence of proletarian internationalism. One of the young Russian anarchists also intervened, firstly to denounce the manoeuvring policy of collaboration with other left, but also right wing tendencies, on the part of the Russian branch of the Militant tendency within Trotskyism. But above all, the comrade denounced the imperialist character of World War II, and of Russia's participation in it - probably the first, and thus an historic internationalist public declaration of this kind by a new generation of revolutionaries in Russia.
The 1997 conference on Trotsky and the Russian Revolution
This conference was mainly dominated by a much more direct confrontation between Trotskyism and Left Communism. The impact of the latter was greatly enhanced by the presence and the courageous interventions of the Communist Workers Organisation, but also by another contribution of Comrade G. This contribution recalled not only the existence of Left Communist currents in Russia such as the Communist Workers' Group of Gabriel Miasnikov, which opposed the Stalinist degeneration much earlier and more resolutely than Trotsky. He also demonstrated, on the basis of historically researched documents, the existence within the Left Opposition of a massive dissatisfaction and even open hostility towards Trotsky's half-hearted policies, calling instead for a social revolution to topple the Stalinist bourgeoisie.
The CWO and the ICC recalled that the Communist International had essentially been founded by the Bolsheviks and the Communist Left to spread the world revolution. The best known members of Dutch Left Communism, Pannekoek and Gorter, were put in charge of the Western European bureau of the International (in Amsterdam) by Lenin and Trotsky. The main Communist Parties there were founded by the Left Communists: the KPD by the Spartakists and the Bremen Left, and the Italian Party by the comrades around Bordiga. Moreover, the Comintern was founded in 1919 on the positions of the Communist Left. The Manifesto of the founding congress, written by Trotsky, is the clearest expression of this, showing that in the epoch of decadent state capitalism the trade union and parliamentary struggle, national liberation and the defence of bourgeois democracy are no longer possible, and that Social Democracy has become the left wing of the bourgeoisie. If, as opposed to Left Communism, Lenin and Trotsky did not remain loyal to these positions, then it was mainly because they became entangled in the defence of the interests of the Russian transitional state after 1917. This is why Left Communism is the true defender of the great revolutionary heritage of Lenin and Trotsky from 1905 and 1917. This is proven by the fact that the Communist Left remained loyal to the internationalist position of Lenin during World War Il, when Trotskyism betrayed.
The CWO and the ICC defended the gigantic contribution of Rosa Luxemburg to Marxism against the British neo-Trotskyist Hillel Tiktin, who in order to prevent Russian militants from studying her works, claimed that she had died because she had "no conception of the Party", in other words it was her own fault that she was murdered by the Social Democratic counter -revolution.
This conference revealed above all to the Russian comrades that Trotskyism cannot tolerate the voice of the proletariat. During the conference itself they repeatedly tried to prevent the presentations and interventions of the CWO and the ICC. After the Conference they attempted to exclude the "enemies of Trotskyism" from future meetings, and to remove from the organisational bureau of the committee those Russian members who defend the participation of non-Trotskyist political currents at the conferences. Beforehand they had already sabotaged the publication in Russian of the ICC contributions to the 1996 conferences on the pretext that they were of "no scientific interest".
Perspectives
We need hardly develop on the international and historic importance of the slow and difficult development of proletarian positions in the country of the October Revolution. It is evident that the development of such a process of clarification is faced with enormous obstacles and dangers. As a result in particular of over half a century of Stalinist counter-revolution centred precisely in that country, and the extreme manifestation of the capitalist crisis there, the searching proletarian elements in Russia are still isolated and inexperienced, continue to be cut off from much of the real history of the proletariat and the marxist movement, and face enormous material difficulties and the great danger of impatience and demoralisation. To this we must add the certain fact that the left of capital will continue to sabotage this process for all they are worth.
The real task of revolutionaries in Russia today, after decades of the most terrible counter-revolution in history, which has not only wiped out two generations of proletarian revolutionaries, but "stolen" the real history of our class, is that of political clarification of positions. The development of a revolutionary perspective for the working class today can only be an extremely long term, difficult task. The proletariat does not need revolutionaries who disappear after a short time, but organisations able to develop an historic work and perspective. This is why above all a maximum of clarity and firmness on proletarian positions, and a capacity to defend the real traditions of the working class is required of revolutionaries.
The ICC pledges itself to continue supporting all efforts in this direction. In particular we encourage the Russian comrades to study the contributions of Left Communism, which they themselves recognise as a genuine and important expression of the historic struggle of our class.
In our opinion the kind of conferences which have taken place to date have been an important moment of debate and confrontation, but have given rise to a proess of decantation as a result of which it is no longer possible to continue clarification in the presence of the kind of sabotage and falsifications we have seen from the Trotskyists. But the clarification process itself can and must go on, and this is only possible in an international framework.
Not only the Russian revolutionaries, but the international proletariat will benefit from this process. The text published below gives a clear indication how rich this contribution can be.
ERRATUM
Due to an oversight, the following footnotes were left out of the article 'Moscow conferences, 1997: A proletarian debate begins in Russia' in International Review 92. The second note is particularly important because it serves as an introduction to the text 'The unidentified class: Soviet bureaucracy as seen by Leon Trotsky' written by a comrade from the emerging milieu in Russia.
1. The Trotskyist (and Stalinist) lie that the German revolution of 1918-23 failed because of Rosa Luxemburg's alleged underestimation of the party and her negligence in founding it in time was not shared by Trotsky who gave a marxist explanation for the lateness and weakness of the political vanguard in Germany at the time: "History once again exhibited to the world one of its dialectical contradictions; precisely because the German working class had expended most of its energy in the previous epoch upon self-sufficient organisational construction, occupying the first place in the Second International both in party as well as trade union apparatus - precisely because of this, in a new epoch, at the moment of its transition to open revolutionary struggle for power the German working class proved to be extremely defenceless organisationally" ('A creeping revolution' in The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol 1, p45). In reality the fraction work undertaken by Luxemburg and the Spartacusbund within the Social Democratic Party against the treason of its leadership, and with the aim of preparing the future class party, is not only one of the most audacious and most resolute combats for the class party in history, but is located in the same excellent tradition of fraction work carried out by Lenin.
2. We are in general agreement with the analysis and the main arguments developed in this document. This said, we don't fully share all its formulations. Thus, the idea that "in 1989-90 the working class would not only fail to defend nationalised property and the 'Communist' state apparatus, but would actively contribute to their abolition" seems to us to be wrong. In no manner did the working class, as a class, appear as an actor in the convulsions which hit the so-called 'socialist' countries in this period. The fact that a majority of the workers, victims of democratic illusions, were pulled in behind the objectives of the "liberal" faction of the bourgeoisie against the Stalinist faction did not at all mean that it was the working class in action. The world imperialist wars mobilised tens of millions of workers, but this doesn't mean that the working class contributed actively to the massacres. When the working class did act as a class, for example in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918, it was to fight the war and put an end to it. But despite certain unfortunate formulations, this text seems to us to be excellent and we salute it.
[1] Thus, the French Trotskyist Krivine took a TV crew from the French-German Arte Channel to the conference, and only stayed for a few sessions to pose for the camera.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/stalinism
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/nazism
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/partito-comunista-internazionalista
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/contribution-discussion
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/leon-trotsky
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/parasitism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/internationalist-perspective
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/trotsky
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/russia