The period 1918-20, the "heroic" phase of the international revolutionary wave inaugurated by the October insurrection in Russia, was also the period in which the communist parties of the day formulated their programme for the overthrow of capitalism and the transition towards communism.

In IR 93 we examined the programme of the newly formed KPD - the Communist Party of Germany. We saw that it consisted essentially of a series of practical measures designed to guide the proletarian struggle in Germany from the stage of spontaneous revolt to the conscious conquest of political power. In IR 94 we published the Platform of the Communist International - drawn up at its founding congress as a basis for the international regroupment of communist forces and as an outline of the revolutionary tasks facing the workers in all countries.

At almost exactly the same moment, the Communist Party of Russia - the Bolshevik party - published its new programme. The programme was closely linked to the CI platform and indeed had the same author - Nikolai Bukharin. Even so, to a certain extent, this separation between the CI platform and the programmes of its national parties - and between the latter programmes themselves - reflected the persistence of federalist conceptions inherited from the period of social democracy; and, as Bordiga was later to point out, the inability of the "world party" to subject its national sections to the priorities of the international revolution was to have very serious consequences in the face of the retreat of the revolutionary wave and the isolation and degeneration of the revolution in Russia. We will have occasion to return to this particular problem. And yet it is instructive to make a specific study of the RCP programme and to compare it with the ones previously mentioned. The KPD programme was the product of a party faced with the task of leading the masses towards the seizure of power; the CI platform was seen more as a general point of reference for those aiming to regroup with the International than as a detailed programme of action. Indeed, it is one of history's little ironies that the CI did not adopt a formal and unified programme until its 6th Congress in 1928. Here again Bukharin was the author, but this time the programme was also the International's suicide note, since it adopted the infamous theory of socialism in one country and thus ceased to exist as an organ of the internationalist proletariat.

The RCP programme, for its part, was drawn up after the toppling of the bourgeois regime in Russia and was thus first and foremost a precise and detailed statement of the aims and methods of the new soviet power. In short, it was a programme for the dictatorship of the proletariat and thus stands as an invaluable indication of the level of programmatic clarity attained by the contemporary communist movement. Not only that: although we shall not hesitate to point to those parts of the programme which practical experience was to put into question or definitively refute, we shall also be showing that in most of its essentials this document remains a profoundly relevant reference point for the proletarian revolution of the future.

The RCP programme was adopted at the 8th Party Congress in March 1919. The need for a fundamental revision of the old 1908 programme had been apparent at least since 1917 when the Bolsheviks had abandoned the perspective of the "democratic dictatorship" in favour of the proletarian conquest of power and the world socialist revolution. At the time of the 8th Congress there were numerous disagreements within the party about the way forward for the soviet power (we shall return to this in a subsequent article) and so in some senses the programme expressed a certain compromise between different currents in the party; but since, like the CI platform, the document was very much a product of the bright hopes and radical practices of the early phase of the revolution, it was able to satisfy the majority of the party, including many of those who had begun to feel that the revolutionary process in Russia was not advancing with sufficient rapidity or even that certain basic principles were being put into question.

The programme was shortly to be accompanied by a considerable work of explanation and popularisation - The ABC of Communism, penned by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky. This book was constructed around the points of the programme but is more than a mere commentary on it; rather it became a classic in its own right, a synthesis of marxist theory and its development from the Communist Manifesto to the Russian Revolution, written in a lively and accessible style that made it a manual of political education both for the party membership and for the broad mass of workers who supported and sustained the revolution. If this article focuses on the RCP programme rather than The ABC of Communism, it is because a detailed examination of the latter is outside the scope of a single article; it is by no means intended to lessen the importance of the book, which still repays reading today.

The same point can be made even more emphatically with regard to the numerous decrees issued by the soviet power in the initial phases of the revolution, and to the 1918 constitution which defined the structure and functioning of the new power. These documents also need to be examined as part of the "programme of the proletarian dictatorship", not least because, as Trotsky wrote in his autobiography, "during that first period the decrees were really more propaganda than actual administrative measures. Lenin was in a hurry to tell the people what the new power was, what it was after, and how it intended to accomplish its aims" (My Life, Penguin edition, p 356). These decrees covered not only burning political and economic issues - such as the structure of the state and the army, the struggle against the counter-revolution, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and workers' control of industry, the conclusion of a separate peace with Germany etc - but also numerous social issues such as marriage and divorce, education, religion, and so on. Again in Trotsky's words, these decrees "will be preserved forever in history as the proclamations of a new world. Not only sociologists and historians, but future legislators as well, will draw repeatedly from this source" (ibid, p 358). But precisely because of their immense scope, their analysis lies beyond the ambitions of this essay, which will focus on the 1919 Bolshevik programme for the very reason that it provides us with the most synthetic and concise statement of the general goals of the new power and the party whose aims it had adopted.

The epoch of proletarian revolution

The programme begins, like the platform of the CI, by situating itself in the new "era of the world-wide proletarian communist revolution", characterised on the one hand by the development of imperialism, the ferocious struggle for world dominion by the great capitalist powers, and thus by the outbreak of imperialist world war - the concrete expression of the collapse of capitalism; and, on the other hand, by the international revolt of the working class against the horrors of capitalism in decay, a revolt which had taken tangible form in the October insurrection in Russia and the development of the revolution in all the central capitalist countries, particularly Germany and Austria-Hungary. The programme itself does not elaborate on the economic contradictions of capitalism which had led to this collapse; these are examined in The ABC of Communism, although even the latter does not really formulate a definite and coherent theory of the origins of capitalist decadence. By the same token - and in surprising contrast to the CI platform - the programme does not utilise the concept of state capitalism to describe the internal organisation of the bourgeois regime in the new era; again however, this concept is elaborated in The ABC of Communism and in other theoretical contributions by Bukharin which we will come to in another article. Finally, like the CI platform, the RCP programme is absolutely firm in its insistence that it is impossible for the working class to make the revolution "without making it a matter of principle to break off relations with and wage a pitiless struggle against that bourgeois perversion of socialism which is dominant in the leading official social democratic and socialist parties ".

Having affirmed its membership of the new Communist International, the programme then moves on to the practical tasks of the proletarian dictatorship "as applied in Russia, a land whose most notable peculiarity is the numerical predominance of the petty bourgeois stratum of the population". The subheadings that follow in this article correspond to the order and titles of the sections of the RCP programme.

General politics

The first task of any proletarian revolution - the revolution of a class which has no economic base in the old society - must be to consolidate its political power; and in line with the Platform of the Communist International and the accompanying Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and Proletarian Dictatorship, the RCP programme's "practical" sections begin by affirming the superiority of the soviet system to bourgeois democracy. Against the misleading all-inclusiveness of the latter, the former, based primarily on workplace rather than territorial base units, openly proclaims its class character; in contrast to bourgeois parliaments, the soviets, with their principle of permanent mobilisation through base assemblies and of the immediate revocability of all delegates, also provide the means for the immense majority of the exploited and the oppressed population to exert a real control over the organs of state power, to participate directly in social and economic transformation, and this regardless of race, religion or gender. At the same time, since the immense majority of the Russian population was made up of the peasantry - and since marxism recognises only one revolutionary class in capitalist society - the programme also registers the leading role of the "industrial urban proletariat" and points out that "our Soviet Constitution reflects this, by assigning certain preferential rights to the industrial proletariat, as opposed to the comparatively disunited petty bourgeois masses in the villages" (specifically, as Victor Serge explains in his book Year One of the Russian Revolution, "The All-Russian Congress of Soviets consists of representatives of local soviets, the towns being represented by one deputy for every 25, 000 inhabitants and the country areas by one deputy for every 125, 000. This article formalises the dominance of the proletariat over the peasantry" (Chicago 1972 edition, p271).

The programme, it must be remembered is a party programme, and a true communist party can never be satisfied by any status quo until it has reached the ultimate goal of communism, at which point there will be no need for the party to exist as a separate political organ. That is why this section of the programme repeatedly insists on the need for the party to fight for the increasing participation of the masses in the life of the soviets, to raise their political and cultural level, to combat the national chauvinism and prejudices against women that still exist in the proletariat and other oppressed classes. It is noteworthy that there is within the programme no theorisation of the dictatorship of the party - this was to come later, even if the question of whether or not the party wields power had always been ambiguous for the Bolsheviks and indeed for the entire revolutionary movement at the time. Rather the opposite: there is a real awareness expressed in the programme that the difficult conditions facing the Russian bastion at the time - cultural backwardness, civil war - had already created a real danger of bureaucratisation in the soviet power, and it therefore outlines a series of measures to combat this danger:

"1. Every member of a soviet must undertake some definite work in the administrative service.

2. There must be a continuous rotation among those who engage in such duties, so that each member shall in turn gain experience in every branch of administration.

By degrees, the whole working population must be induced to take turns in the administrative service".

In fact, these measures were largely insufficient given that the programme underestimates the real difficulties posed by the imperialist encirclement and the civil war: the siege conditions, the famine, the grim reality of territorial warfare fought with the most extreme ferocity, the dispersal of the most advanced layers of the proletariat to the front, the plots of the counter-revolution and the corresponding Red Terror: all this sapped the lifeblood from the soviets and other organs of proletarian democracy, more and more subsuming them into a vastly atrophied bureaucratic apparatus. By the time the programme had been written, the involvement of even the most advanced workers in the tasks of state administration was having the effect of removing them from the life of the class and of turning them into bureaucrats. Instead of the tendency for the withering away of the state advocated in Lenin's State and Revolution, it was the soviets that began to wither away, isolating the party at the head of a state machine that had become increasingly divorced from the self-activity of the masses. In such circumstances, the party, far from acting as the most radical critic of the status quo, tended to merge with the state and so become an organ of social conservation (for more on the conditions facing the proletarian bastion at this time, see 'Isolation spells the death of the revolution' in IR 75)

This rapid and tragic negation of the radical vision that Lenin had stood for in 19 J 7 - a state of affairs which had already advanced to a considerable degree by the time the RCP programme was adopted - is frequently utilised by the enemies of revolution to prove that this vision was at best utopian, at worst a mere deception aimed at winning the support of the masses and propelling the Bolsheviks to power. For communists, however, it is proof only that if socialism in one country is impossible, this is no less true of that proletarian democracy which is the political precondition for the creation of socialism. And if there is an important weakness in this and other parts of the programme, it is in the passages that imply that merely applying the principles of the Commune, of proletarian democracy, in the case of Russia could lead to the disappearance of the state, without clearly and unambiguously stating that this could only be the result of a successful international revolution.

The problem of nationality

While on many questions, not least the problem of proletarian democracy, the RCP programme was faced above all with the practical difficulty of applying its measures in the conditions of the civil war, the section on the problem of nationality is flawed from the outset. Correct in its starting point - the "primary importance of ... the policy of uniting the proletarians and semi-proletarians of various nationalities in a joint revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie ", and in its recognition of the need to overcome feelings of suspicion engendered by long years of national oppression, the programme adopts the slogan that had been defended by Lenin since the days of the Second International: the "right of nations to self-determination" as the best way to allay these suspicions, and applicable even (and especially) under soviet power. On this point the author of the programme, Bukharin, took a significant step backwards from the position he, along with Piatakov and others, had put forward during the imperialist war: that the slogan of national self-determination was "first of all utopian (it cannot be realised within the limits of capitalism) and harmful as a slogan which disseminates illusions" (letter to the Bolshevik Central Committee, November 1915). And as Rosa Luxemburg showed in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks' policy of allowing "subject nations" to secede from the soviet power simply handed over the proletarians of these newly "self-determining" bourgeois nations to their own predatory ruling classes, and above all to the schemes and manoeuvres of the great imperialist powers. The same disastrous results were obtained in "colonial" countries like Turkey, Iran or China where the soviet power thought it could ally itself with the "revolutionary" bourgeoisie. In the 18th century Marx and Engels had certainly supported certain struggles for national independence, but only because in that period capitalism still had a progressive role to play vis-a-vis the old feudal or despotic remnants of a previous era. At no stage in history could "national self-determination" mean anything but self- determination for the bourgeoisie. In the epoch of the proletarian revolution, where the entire bourgeoisie stands as a reactionary obstacle to human progress, the adoption of this policy was indeed to prove extremely harmful to the needs of the proletarian revolution (see our pamphlet Nation or Class and the article on the national question in IR 67). The one and only way to struggle against the national enmities that existed within the working class was to work for the development of the international class struggle.

Military affairs

This is inevitably an important section of the programme given that it was written when the internal civil war was still raging. The programme affirms certain basics: the necessity for the destruction of the old bourgeois army and for the new Red Army to be an instrument for the defence of the proletarian dictatorship. Certain measures are put forward to ensure that the new army does indeed serve the needs of the proletariat: that it should be "exclusively composed of the proletariat and the kindred semi-proletarian strata of the peasantry"; that training and instruction in the army be "effected upon a basis of class solidarity and socialist enlightenment", to which end "there must be political commissars, appointed from among trusty and self-denying communists, to cooperate with the military staff", while a new category of officers composed of class conscious workers and peasants must be trained and prepared for leading roles in the army; in order to prevent the separation between the army and the proletariat, there must be "the closest possible association between the military units and the factories, workshops, trade unions and poor peasants' organisations", while the period of barrack life should be "reduced to the utmost". The use of military experts inherited from the old regime was accepted on condition that that such elements be strictly supervised by the organs of the working class. Prescriptions of this type express a more or less intuitive awareness that the Red Army was particularly vulnerable to escaping the political control of the working class; but given that this was the first Red Army and the first soviet state in history, this awareness was inevitably limited both at the theoretical and the practical level.

The last paragraph of the section already poses certain problems, where it says that "the demand for the election of officers, which had great importance as a matter of principle in relation to the bourgeois army whose commanders were especially trained as an apparatusfor the class subjugation of the common soldiers (and, through the instrumentality of the common soldiers, the subjugation of the toiling masses), ceases to have any significance as a mailer of principle in relation to the class army of workers and peasants. A possible combination of election with appointment from above may he expedient for the revolutionary class army on practical grounds".

While it is true that elections and collective decision-making have their limitations in a military context - particularly in the heat of the battle - the paragraph seems to underestimate the degree to which the new army was itself reflecting the bureaucratisation of the state by reviving many of the old norms of subordination. In fact, a "Military Opposition", linked to the Democratic Centralism group, had already arisen in the party, and at the 8th Congress it was particularly voiciferous in criticising the tendency to deviate from the "principles of the Commune" in the organisation of the army. These principles are important not merely on "practical" grounds but above all because they create the best conditions for the political life of the proletariat to infuse the army. But during the civil war period, the opposite was tending to happen: the imposition of "normal" military methods was helping to create a climate in favour of the militarisation of the entire soviet power. The leader of the Red Army, Trotsky, became more and more associated with such an approach in the period 1920-21.

The basic problem we are dealing with here is the problem of the transitional state. The Red Army - like the special security force, the Cheka, which is not even mentioned in the programme - is a statist organ par excellence, and, while it can be used to safeguard the gains of the revolution, cannot be considered as a proletarian and communist organ. Even exclusively composed of proletarians (which could hardly be the case in Russia), it inevitably appears as an organ one step removed from the collective life of the class. It was thus particularly damaging that the Red Army, like other state institutions, was more and more escaping the overall political control of the workers' councils; while at the same time, the dissolution of the Red Guards, based in the factories, deprived the class of a means of direct self-defence against the danger of internal degeneration. But these were lessons that could only be learned through the often merciless school of revolutionary experience.

Proletarian Justice

This section of the programme complements the one on general politics. The destruction of the old bourgeois state also involves the replacement of the old bourgeois courts with a new apparatus of justice in which judges are elected from among the workers, and jurors drawn up from amongst the mas of the labouring population; the new court system was [Q be simplified and made more accessible to the population than the old labyrinth of higher and lower courts. Penal methods were [Q be freed of any attitude of revenge and become constructive and educational. The long term aim being that "the penal system shall ultimately be transformed into a system of measures of an educative character" in a society without classes or a state. The ABC of Communism, however, pointed out that the urgent demands of the civil war had required the new popular courts to be supplemented by revolutionary tribunals to deal not only with "ordinary" social crime but with the activities of the counter-revolution. The summary justice handed out by these tribunals was a product of bunting necessity, although abuses were committed, and certainly carried the danger that the introduction of more humane methods would be postponed indefinitely. Thus the death penalty, abolished by one of the first decrees of the new soviet power in 1917, was rapidly restored in the fight against the White Terror.

Education

Like the proposed penal reforms, the soviet power's efforts to overhaul the education system were very much subject to the demands of the civil war, Furthermore, given the extreme backwardness of social conditions in Russia, where illiteracy was widespread, many of the proposed changes themselves aimed no further than enabling the Russian population to reach a level of education already attained in some of the more advanced bourgeois democracies. Hence the call for free, compulsory co-educational schooling for all children up to the age of 17; for the provision of crèches and kindergartens to free women from domestic drudgery; for the removal of religious influence from the schools; the provision of extra-scholastic facilities such as adult education, libraries, cinemas etc etc.

Nevertheless, the longer term aim was "the transformation of the school so that from being an organ for maintaining the class dominion of the bourgeoisie, it shall become an organ for the complete abolition of the division of society into classes, an organ for the communist regeneration of society ".

To this end, the "unified labour school" was a key concept, elaborated more completely in The ABC of Communism. Its function was seen as that of beginning to overcome the division between elementary, middle and upper schools, between the sexes, between common schools and elite schools. Here again, it was recognised that such a school was the ideal of every advanced educationist, but as a unified labour school it was seen as a crucial factor in the communist abolition of the old division of labour. The hope was that from a very early stage in a child's life, there would no longer be any rigid separation between mental education and productive work, so that "in communist society, there will be no closed corporations, no stereotyped guilds, no petrified specialist groups. The most brilliant man of science must also be skilled in manual labour ... .A child's first activities take the form of play; play should gradually pass into work by an imperceptible transition, so that the child learns from the very outset to look upon labour, not as a disagreeable necessity or an a punishment, but as a natural and spontaneous expression of faculty. Labour should be a need, like the desire for food and drink; this need must be instilled and developed in the communist school".

These basic principles would surely remain valid in a future revolution. Contrary to certain strains of anarchist thought, school cannot be abolished overnight, but its aspect as an instrument for imposing bourgeois discipline and ideology would certainly have to be attacked straight away, not only in the content of what is taught (The ABC is very insistent on the need to instil the school with a proletarian outlook in all areas of education), but also in the way (hat teaching takes place (the principle of direct democracy, as far as possible, would have to replace the old hierarchies within the school). Similarly, the gulf between manual and mental labour, work and play would also have to be addressed from the start. In the Russian revolution, numerous experiments took place in these directions; although disrupted by the civil war, some of them continued well into the 1920s. Indeed, one of the signs that the counter-revolution had finally triumphed was that the schools once again became instruments for the imposition of bourgeois ideology and hierarchy, even if concealed in the garb of Stalinist "marxism".

Religion

The inclusion of a specific section on religion in the party programme was, at one level, an expression of the backwardness of Russian material and cultural conditions, compelling the new power to "complete" certain tasks unrealised by the old regime, in particular, the separation of church and state and the ending of state provision for religious institutions. However, this section also explains that the party cannot remain satisfied with the measures "which bourgeois democracy includes in its programmes but has nowhere carried out owing to the manifold associations that actually obtain between capital and religious propaganda". There were longer term aims guided by the recognition that "nothing but the fulfilment of purposiveness and full awareness in all the social and economic activities of the masses can lead to the complete disappearance of religious prejudices". In other words, religious alienation cannot be eliminated without the elimination of social alienation, and this is possible only in a fully communist society. This did not mean that the communists took a passive attitude to the existing religious illusions of the masses; they had to be actively fought on the basis of a scientific conception of the world. But this was above all a work of propaganda; it was completely foreign to the Bolsheviks to advocate the forcible suppression of religion - another hallmark of the Stalinist regime which could dare in its counter-revolutionary arrogance to have realised socialism and thus to have extirpated the social roots of religion. On the contrary, while carrying out a militant atheist propaganda, it was necessary for the communists and the new revolutionary power to "avoid anything that can wound the feelings of believers, for such a method can only lead to the strengthening of religious fanaticism". This is also far removed from the approach of anarchism, which favours the method of direct provocation and insult.

These basic prescriptions have not lost their relevance today. The hope, sometimes expressed in Marx's earlier writings, that religion was already dead for the proletariat, has not been fulfilled. Not only the persistence of social and economic backwardness in many parts of the world, but also the decadence and decomposition of bourgeois society, its tendency to regress to extremely reactionary forms of thought and belief, have ensured that religion and its various offshoots remain a powerful force of social control. Consequently communists are still faced with the necessity to fight against the "religious prejudices of the masses".

Economic Affairs

The proletarian revolution necessarily begins as a political revolution because, having no means of production or social property of its own, the working class needs the lever of political power in order to begin the social and economic transformation that will lead to a communist society. The Bolsheviks were fundamentally clear on the fact that this transformation could only be carried to its conclusion on a global scale; although as we have noted, the RCP programme, this section included, does contain a number of ambiguous formulations which talk about the establishment of complete communism as a kind of progressive development within the "soviet power", without making it clear whether this refers to the existing soviet power in Russia or to a world-wide republic of councils. In the main, however, the economic measures advocated in the programme are relatively modest and realistic. A revolutionary power could certainly not avoid posing the "economic" question from the start, since it is precisely the economic chaos provoked by the collapse of capitalism which compels the proletariat to intervene in order to ensure that it provide society with the minimum needed for survival. This was the case in Russia where the demand for "bread" was one of the main factors of revolutionary mobilisation. However, any idea that the working class, having assumed power, could set about calmly and peacefully reorganising economic life was immediately dismissed by the speed and brutality of the imperialist encirclement and the White counter-revolution which, coming in the wake of the World War, had "bequeathed an utterly chaotic situation" to the victorious proletariat. In these conditions, the primary aims of the soviet power in the economic sphere were defined as being:

* the completion of the expropriation of the ruling class, the seizure of the principal means of production by the soviet power;

* the centralisation of all economic activities in all the areas under soviet rule (including those in "other" countries), under a common plan; the aim of such planning was to secure "a universal increase in the productive forces of the country" - not for the sake of the "country" but in order to ensure "a rapid increase in the quantity of goods urgently needed by the population";

* the gradual integration of small-scale urban production (handicrafts etc) into the socialised sector via the development of cooperatives and other more collective forms;
* the maximum use of all available labour power by "the general mobilisation by the soviet power of all members of the population who are physically and mentally fit for work";

* the encouragement of a new labour discipline based on a collective sense of responsibility and solidarity;

* the maximation of the benefits of scientific research and technology, including the use of specialists inherited from the old regime.

These general guidelines remain fundamentally valid both as the first steps of a proletarian power seeking to produce the necessities for survival in a given area, and for the real begirmings of communist construction by the world-wide republic of councils. The main problem here was again the harsh conflict between overall aims and immediate conditions. The project of raising the consuming power of the masses was straight away thwarted by the demands of the civil war which turned Russia into a veritable caricature of a war economy. So great was the chaos brought about by the civil war that "the development of the productive powers of the country" remained a complete non-starter. Instead the vastly diminished productive powers of Russia, the result of the imperialist war, were still further diminished by the ravages of the civil war and by the necessity to feed and clothe the Red Army in its combat against the counter-revolution. The fact that this war economy was highly centralised, and, in conditions of financial chaos, virtually did away with monetary forms, led to its being dubbed "war communism"; but this altered nothing of the fact that military necessities more and more prevailed over the real aims and methods of the proletarian revolution. In order to maintain its collective political rule, the working class needs to have secured at least the basic material necessities of life and in particular to have the time and energy to engage in political life. But we have already seen that instead, during the civil war, the working class was reduced to absolute penury, its best elements dispersed to the front or swallowed up in the growing "soviet" bureaucracy, subject to a real process of "declassment" as others fled to the countryside or scrabbled to survive by petty trade and theft; those who remained in factories which still produced were forced to work longer hours than ever before, sometimes under the watchful eye of Red Army detachments. The Russian proletariat made these sacrifices willingly, but since they were not compensated by the extension of the revolution, they were to have profoundly damaging longer term effects, above all in undermining the proletariat's capacity to defend and maintain its dictatorship over society.

The RCP programme, as we have also seen, did recognise the danger of growing bureaucratisation during this period, and advocated a series of measures to combat it. But whereas the "political" section of the programme is still wedded to the defence of the soviets as the best means of maintaining proletarian democracy, the section on economic affairs emphasises the role of the trade unions, both in the management of the economy and in the defence of the workers from the excesses of bureaucracy: "The participation of the trade unions in the conduct of economic life, and the involvement by them of the broad masses of the people in this work, would appear at the same time to be our chief aid in the campaign against the bureaucratisation of the soviet power. This will also facilitate the establishment of an effective control over the results of production".

That the proletariat, as the politically dominant class, also needs to exercise to the maximum a direct control over the process of production, is axiomatic and - on the understanding that political tasks cannot be subordinated to economic tasks, above all in the period of the civil war - this remains true throughout all phases of the transition period. Workers who cannot "rule" in the factories are unlikely to be able to take political control over an entire society. But what is mistaken here is the idea that the trade unions could be the instrument for this task. On the contrary, by their very nature, the trade unions were much more susceptible to the virus of bureaucratisation; and it was no accident that the trade union apparatus became the organs of an increasingly bureaucratic state within the factories. by abolishing or absorbing the factory committees which had been a product of the revolutionary élan of 1917, and which were therefore a far more direct expression of the life of the class and a far better base for resisting bureaucracy and regenerating the soviet system as a whole. But the factory committees are not even mentioned in the programme. It is certainly true that these committees often suffered from localist and syndicalist misconceptions, in which each factory was seen as the private property of the workers who worked within them: during the desperate days of the civil war, such ideas reached their nadir in the practice of workers bartering "their own" products for food and fuel. But the answer to such errors was not to absorb the factory committees into the trade unions and the state; it was to ensure that they functioned as organs of proletarian centralisation by linking them much more closely to the workers' soviets - an obvious possibility given that the same factory assembly which elected delegates to the town's soviet also elected its factory committee. To these observations we should add: the difficulties that the Bolsheviks had in understanding that the trade unions were obsolete as organs of the class (a fact confirmed by the very emergence of the soviet form) was also to have very grave consequences in the International, especially after 1920, where the influence of the Russian communists was decisive in preventing the CI from adopted a clear and unambiguous position on the trade unions.

Agriculture

The basic approach to the peasant question in the programme had already been outlined by Engels in relation to Germany. Whereas large scale capitalist farms could be socialised fairly rapidly by the proletarian power, it would not be possible to compel the small farmers to join this sector. They would have to be won over gradually, primarily thanks to the capacity of the proletariat to prove in practice the superiority of socialist methods.

In a country like Russia, where pre-capitalist relations still held sway in much of the countryside, and where the expropriation of the great landed estates during the revolution had resulted in the peasants dividing up the land into innumerable smallholdings, this was all the more true. The policy of the party could thus only be to, on the one hand, encourage the class struggle between the semi-proletarian poor peasants and the rich peasants and rural capitalists, helping to create special organs for the poor peasants and rural proletarians who would be the main support for the extension and deepening of the revolution in the countryside; and, on the other hand, to establish a modus vivendi with the smallholding middle peasants, helping them materially with seed, manure, technology etc, so as to increase their yield, and at the same time fostering cooperatives and communes as transitional steps towards a real collectivisation. "The party aims at detaching them [the middle peasants] from the rich peasants, at bringing them over to the side of the working class by paying special attention to their needs. It attempts to overcome their backwardness in cultural matters by measures of an ideological character, carefully avoiding any coercive steps. On all occasions upon which their vital interests are touched, it endeavours to come to a practical agreement with them, making to them such concessions as will promote socialist construction". Given the terrible economic scarcity in Russia immediately after the insurrection, the proletariat was not in a position to offer these strata much in the way of material improvement, and indeed, under war communism, many abuses against the peasants were committed during the requisitioning of grain to feed the army and the starving cities. But this was till a far cry from the forced Stalinist collectivisation of the 1930s, which was based on the monstrous assumption that the violent expropriation of the petty bourgeoisie (and this for the requirements of a capitalist war economy) signified the achievement of socialism.

Distribution

"In the sphere of distribution, the task of the soviet power at the present time is unerringly to continue the replacement of trade by a purposive distribution of goods, by a system of distribution organised by the slate upon a national scale. The aim is to achieve the organisation of the whole population into an integral network of consumers' communes, which shall be able with the utmost speed, purposiveness, economy and a minimal expenditure of labour, to distribute all the necessary goods, while strictly centralising the whole distributive apparatus". The existing cooperative associations, defined as "petty bourgeois ", were to be as far as possible transformed into" consumer communes led by the proletarians and the semi-proletarians" . This passage conveys all the grandeur but also all the limitations of the Russian revolution. The communisation of distribution is an integral part of the revolutionary programme and this section shows how seriously it was taken by the Bolsheviks. But the real progress they had made towards it was greatly exaggerated during - and indeed because of the war communism period. War communism was in reality no more than the collectivisation of misery and was largely imposed by a state machine that was already slipping out of the workers' hands. The fragility of its basis was proved as soon as the internal civil war had ended, when there was a rapid and general return to private enterprise and trade (which had in any case flourished as a black market under war communism). It is certainly true that, just as the proletariat will have to collectivise large sectors of the productive apparatus after the insurrection in one region of the world, it will also have to do the same for many aspects of distribution. But while these measures may have some continuity with the constructive policies of a victorious world revolution, neither should the they be identified with the latter. The real communisation of distribution depends on the capacity of the new social order to "deliver the goods" more effectively than capitalism (even if the goods themselves differ substantially). Material scarcity and poverty are the soil of commodity relations; material abundance the only solid basis for the development of collectivised distribution and for society to "inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875).

Money and Banks

As with distribution, so with money, its "normal" vehicle under capitalism: given the impossibility of immediately installing integral communism, above all in the confines of a single country, the proletariat can only take a series of measures which tend in the direction of a moneyless society. However, the illusions of war communism - in which the collapse of the economy was confused with its communist reconstruction - lend an over-optimistic tone to this and other related sections. Equally over-optimistic is the notion that merely nationalising the banks and fusing them into a single state bank would constitute the first steps towards "the disappearance of banks and to their conversion into the central book-keeping establishment of communist society". It is doubtful that organs so central to the operation of capital can be taken over in this way, even if the physical seizure of the banks will certainly be necessary as one of the first revolutionary blows aimed at paralysing the hand of capital.

Finance

"During the epoch in which the socialisation of the means of production confiscated from the capitalists has begun, the state power ceases to be a parasitic apparatus nourished upon the productive process. There now begins its transformation into an organisation directly fulfilling the function of administering the economic life of the country. To this extent the state budget will be a budget of the whole of the national economy". Again, the intentions are laudable but bitter experience was to show that in the conditions of an isolated or stagnating revolution, even the new commune-state more and more becomes a parasitic apparatus feeding on the revolution and the working class; and even in the best conditions it can no longer be assumed that merely centralising finances in the hands of the state "naturally" leads an economy that once functioned on the basis of profit to become one functioning on the basis of need.

The housing question

This section of the programme is more rooted in immediate necessities and possibilities. A victorious proletarian power cannot avoid taking rapid steps to relieve homelessness and overcrowding, as did the soviet power after 1917, when it "completely expropriated all the houses belonging to capitalist landlords and handed them over to the urban soviets. It effected mass settlements of workers from the suburbs in the bourgeois dwellings. It handed over the best of these dwellings to the workers' organisations, arranging for the upkeep of the houses at the cost of the state; it undertook to provide the workers' families with furniture, etc". But here again, the programme's more constructive aims - the clearing of slums and the provision of decent housing for all - remained largely unrealised in a war-ravaged country. And while the Stalinist regime embarked upon massive housing schemes later on, the dreadful results of these schemes (the infamous workers' barracks of the ex-Eastern bloc) were certainly no solution to the "housing problem ".

Evidently, the longer term solution to the housing question lies in a total transformation of the urban and rural environment - in the abolition of the antithesis between town and country, the reduction of urban gigantism and the rational distribution of the world's population over the face of the earth. Clearly such grandiose transformations cannot be carried through until after the definitive defeat of the bourgeoisie.

Labour protection and social welfare work

The immediate measures put forward here, given the extreme conditions of exploitation prevailing in Russia, are merely the application of minimum demands long fought for in the workers' movement: the 8-hour day, disability and unemployment benefit, paid holiday and maternity leave, etc. And as the programme itself admits, even many of these gains had to suspended or modified due to the demands of the civil war. However, the document pledges the party to fight not only for these "immediate demands" but also for more radical ones - in particular, the reduction of the working day to six hours so that more time could be devoted to training, not only in work-related areas but also and above all in state administration. This was crucial because, as we have already noted, a working class weighed down by daily labour will not have the time or energy for political activity and the running of the state.

Public Hygiene

Here again it was a matter of struggling for "reforms" which were long overdue because of the terrible conditions of existence experienced by the Russian proletariat (diseases related to slum housing, unsupervised hygiene and safety standards at work), etc. Thus, "the Russian Communist Party regards the following as its immediate tasks:

1. the vigorous pursuance of extensive sanitary measures in the interests of the workers, such as:

(a) improvement of the sanitary condition of all places of public resort; the protection of earth, water and air;

(b) the organisation of communal kitchens and of the food supply generally upon a scientific and hygienic foundation;

(c) measures to prevent the spread of disease of a contagious character;

(d) sanitary legislation (. . .)

4. a campaign against social diseases (tuberculosis, venereal disease, alcoholism).
5. The free provision of medical advice and treatment for the whole population" .

Many of these apparent basics, however, have yet to be achieved in many regions of the globe. If anything, the scope of the problem has widened immeasurably. To begin with, the bourgeoisie, faced with the development of the crisis, is everywhere cutting back the medical provisions that had begun to be regarded as "normal" in the advanced capitalist countries. Secondly, the aggravation of capitalism's decadence has vastly amplified certain problems, above all through its "progressive" destruction of the natural environment. Whereas the RCP programme only briefly mentions the need for the "protection of earth, water and air", any programme of the future would have to recognise what an enormous task this represents after decades of systematic poisoning of "earth, water and air".

CDW

We have noted that the essential radicalism of the RCP programme was a product of the unity of aim and purpose in the Bolshevik party in 1919, and a reflection of the high revolutionary hopes of that moment. In the next article in this series we shall examine a further effort by the Bolshevik party to understand the nature and tasks of the transition period, this time posed in a more general and theoretical manner. Once again the author of the text in question - The Economics of the Transformation Period - was Nikolai Bukharin.

The full extent of the financial crisis which began just over a year ago in South-East Asia is beginning to emerge. It took a new plunge during the summer with the collapse of the Russian economy, and the unprecedented convulsions of the "emerging countries" of Latin America. But today, it is the developed countries of Europe and North America that are in the firing line, with a continuing slide on their stock exchanges and the constant downward adjustment oftheir forecast growth. We have come a long way from the bourgeoisie's euphoria of a few months back, expressed in the dizzying rise in western markets during the first half of 1998.

Today, the same "specialists" who had congratulated themselves on the "good health" of the Anglo-Saxon countries, and who forecast a recovery for all the European countries, are the first to talk of recession, or even "depression". And they right to be pessimistic. The clouds gathering over the most powerful economies are pregnant, not with some passing squall, but with a veritable temptest, an expression of the dead-end into which the capitalist economy has plunged.

The summer of 1998 devastating for the capitalist system's credibility: a deepening crisis in Asia, prey to a lasting recession which has evev hit the two major economies of China and Japan; a menacing situation looming over Latin America; the spectacular crash of the Rusian economy; close to record falls on world's stock market. In three weeks, the rouble lost 70% of it's value (since June 1991, Russia's GDP has fallen by between 50% and 80%). On 31st August - the famous "blue Monday", according to athe expression of a journalist who dared not call it "black" - Wall Street fell by 6.4%, while the Nsdaq (the exchange specialising in technology shares) fell by 8.5%. The nxt day, the European exchanges were hit in their turn. Frankfurt begn the morning with a 2% fall, Paris with 3.5%. During the day, Madrid lost 4.23%, Amsterdam 3.56% and Zurich 2.15%. In Asia, during 31st August Hong Kong fell by mre than 7%, while Tokyo fell sharply to reach its lowest position for 12 years. Since then, the stock markets have continued to fall, so that by 21st September (and the situation will probably be worse by the time this issue of the International Review goes to press) most of the indices had returned to the same level as the beginning of the year. New York was up to 0.32% and Frankfurt 5.09%, but London, Zurich, Amsterdam, and Stockholm were all down.

This accumulation of events is not due to chance. Nor it is the sign of some "passing crisis of confidence" in "emerging economies", or of a "salutary automatic correction of an over-valued market". It is on the contrary another episode in the decline of capitalism as a whole, a descent into hell caricatured by the disintegration of the Russian economy.

The crisis in Russia

The world ruling class and its "experts" had a serious fright a year ago, with the financial crisis in South-east Asia. For months afterwards, they consoled themselves with the thought that this crisis had not dragged the other "emerging economies" down with it. The media went on about the "specific" natue of the difficulties affecting Thailand, Indonesian, Korea, etc. Alarm-bells rang again when chaos gripped the Russian economy at the beginning of the summer1. The "international community", which had already paid heavily for South-east Asia, found itself forced to cough up an aid of $22.6 billion over 18 months - combined, as usual, with draconian conditions: a drastic reduction in state spending, an increase in taxes (especially taxes on wags, to compensate for the Russian state's inability to collect taxes from business), price rises and a rise in pension subscriptions. And all this, when the living conditions of Russian workers are already wretched, and most state and many private sector workers have notbeen paid for months. A dramatic expression of their poverty is the fall in life expectancy since June 1991; down from 69 to 58 years for men; the birth rate has also fallen substantially.

A month later, it was clear that these funds were merely good money thrown after bad. After a dreadful week, which saw the Moscow stock market plummet, and hundreds of banks teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, on 17th August the Yeltsin government was forced to abandon its last shred of credibility: the rouble and its parity wtih the dollar. Of the first tranche of IMF aid - $4.8 billion in July - $3.8 billion were swallowed up in a vain defence of the rouble. As for the remaning billion dollars, they were not used to restore the government's finances, still less to pay worker's back wages, for the simple reason that they had also melted away, to service the national debt (which already devours more than 35% of the country's income), in other words in interest payments fallen due during this period.not to mention the money that sticks to the fingers of this or that faction of a gangsterised bourgeoisie. The failure of this policy means not only a string of bank failures (more than 1,500 banks were affected), a plunge into recession, and an explosion of the state's dollar debt, but a return to galloping inflation which is already forecast to reach 200% or even 300% this year.

This disaster immediately provoked a political crisis in the upper echelons on the Russian state, which had still not been resolved at the end of September. The discomfiture of the ruling circles, which makes Russia look more and more like a vulgar banana republic, alarmed the Western bourgeoisies. But while the ruling class frets over the fate of Yeltsin and his henchmen, it is the Russian people and the working class who are paying the heavy price of thi situation and its consequences. The rouble's fall has already increased by 50% the price of imported food-stuffs, which amount for more than half of Russia's consumption. Production is barely 40% of its level prior to the fall of the Berlin wall.

Today, reality fully confirms what we said nine years agoin our "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern bloc", written in September 1989: "Faced with the total collapse of their economies, the only way out for these countries, not to any real competitiveness, but at least to keeping their heads above water, is to introduce mechanisms which make it possible to impose a real responsibility on their leaders. These mechanisms presuppose a "liberalisation" of the economy, the creation of a real internal market, a greater "autonomy" for enterprises and the development of a strong "private" sector (...) However, while this kind of programme has become more and more vital, its application runs up against virtually insurmountable obstacles" (International Review no. 60)

A few months later, we added: "(...) some fractions of the bourgeoisie answer that a new Marshall Plan is needed, to rebuild these countries' economic potential (...) today, a massive infection of capital in the East European countries aimed at developing their economic, and specially industrial potential, cannot be on the agenda. Even supposing that such an industrial potential were to be re-established, the goods it produced would only burden stiil further an already super-saturated world market. The countries emerging form Stanlinism today are in the same position as the unde- developed countries: for the latter, the policy of massive credit injections during the 1970s and 80s has simply lead to the catastrophic situation which is well known today (a debt of $1.400 billion, and economies in a still worse state than before). The fate of the East European countries (whose economies in many ways resembles those of the under-developed world) cannot be any different (...) The only thing we can expect is their provision of emergency credit or aid, to allow these coutries to avoid an open financial bankrsuptcy and famines, which would worsen the convulsions that shake them" ("After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, destabilisation and chaos", International Review no. 61)

Two years later, we wrote: "In order to loosen the financial strangulation of the ex-USSR, the G7 agreed to a year's delay in the repayment of interest on the Soviet debt, which now stands at $80 billion. But this will be like putting plaster on a wooden leg because in any case all the credits just disappear down a huge hole. Two years ago, there were all sorts of illusion floating around about the "new markets" that were being opened up by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. Today, when one of the expressions of the world economic crisis is a sharp crisis of liquidity, the banks are more and more reluctant to place their capital in this part of the world" (Editorial, International Review no.68)

Against all the interested illusions of the bourgeoisie and its flatterers, the reality of events has thus confirmed what Marxist theory has allowed revolutionaries to foresee. Today, complete disintegration and dreadful poverty are growing at the very gates of "fortress Europe".

The media's attempt to persuade us once the wave of panic at the stock markets has passed, the consequences will be minimal for the real economy internationally, have had little success. This is hardly surprising, since the capitalist's desire to reassure themselves, and above all to hide the gravity of the crisis from the working class, are confronted with the harsh reality of events. Firstly, Russia's creditors have been placed in a difficult situation. The Western banks lent almost $75 billion to Russia. They hold Treasury bonds whose value has fallen by 80%; repayments have been halted for those denominated in dollars. The Western bourgeoisie is also worried lest the other countries Eatern Europe slide into the same nightmare, and they have good reason: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic account between them for 18 times more investment than Russia. At the end of August, the Warsaw stock market fell by 9.5%, while Budapest lost 5.5% - a sign that a capital is already beginning to deset these new financial markets. Moreover, and even more immediately, Russia is drhe agging down with it the other countries of the CIS, whose economies are closely linked to its own. Even if Russia is only a "minor debtor" in the world economy, relative to other regions, its situation is particularly serious given its geopolitical position as a nuclear minefield in the heart of Europe, threatened with a plunge into chaos by its political and financial crisis.

The fact that the Russian debt is small relative to those of South East Asia, or other parts of the world, is poor consolation. Other dangers are looming, notably the threat of a financial crisis in Latin America, which in recent years has been the main recipient of direct foreign investment in "developing countries" (45% of the total in 1997, as opposed to 20% in 1980 and 38% in 1997). The threat of devaluation in Venezuela, the abrupt fall in raw materials prices since the Asian crisis, which has hit the Latin American countries even harder than Russia, a colossal national and foreign debt (Brazil, with the world's seventh highest GDP, has a national debt far greater than Russia's), all go to make Latin America a time bomb which threatens to add to the disaster in Russia and Asia. A time bomb set to go off at the very gates of the world's greatest power the USA.

However, the main threat does not come from the less developed countries, but from the hyper-developed second economic power on the planet: Japan.

The crisis in Japan

Even before disaster hit the Russian economy, in June 1998 n earthquake centered in Tokyo threatened to destabilise the whole world economic system.since 1992, despite seven "recovery plans" which have injected the equivalent of 2-3% ofGDP into the economy every year, and a 50% devaluation of yen in three years which should have upheld the competitiveness of Japanese products on the world market, the Japanese economy have continued to decline. The Japanese state has continuously delayed taking measures to "cure"its banking sector, for fear of confronting the social and economic consequences, in an already fragile situation. Unrecoverable debts now amount to some 15% of the GDP... enough to plunge the Japanese, and so the world economy into a recession without precedent since the great crisis in 1929. Given Japan's inability to get out of the recession, and the government's hesitation to take the necessary counter-measures, the yen has been thetarget of massive speculation, threatening all the currencies of the Far East with a series of devaluations which would trigger a nightmare scenario of deflation. On 17th june 1998, alarm bells rang on the financial markets: the US Federal Reserve gave massive support to a yeh which had begun to slide. However, this only puts the disaster off for later: with the help of the international community, japan was able to put off the day of reckoning, but only at the price of a dizzying rise in debt. The national debt alone is now equivalent to one year's production (100% of GNP)

It is interesting to note at this point, that the same "liberal" economists who once denounced the intervention of the state in the economy, and who have the greatest influence today in the world's great financial institutions and in Western governments, are now crying out for a new and massive injection of public money into the banking sector in order to save it from bankruptcy. Here is the proof that despite all their ideological chatter about "less state intervention", the bourgeoisie's "experts" know very well that the state is the last rampant against economic disaster. When they talk about the "less state", they essentially mean "less welfare state", in other words less social protection (sick pay, unemployment benefit, minimum wage) for the working class, and all their speeches simply mean more and worse attacks on the workers.

Finally, on 18th September, government and opposition signed a compromise to save the Japanese banking system. Instead of launching a recovery, however, these new measures were greeted with a new slide in the markets - an indication of world financiers' deep distrust in the planet's second economic power, presented for decades as the "model" to follow. Deutsche Bank's chief in Tokyo, Kenneth Courtis - a serious witness if ever there was one, did not mince his words:

"We must reverse the downward trend, which is more serious than at the beginning of the 1970s (plummeting investments and consumption.) We have now entered a phase where new bad debts are being created. Thre is much talk about the banks' bad debts, but none about those of households. With the fall in the value of housing and the rise in unemployment, we are likely to see a growing inability to repay loans guaranteed by mortgages on property held by individuals. These mortgages have reached the fabulous sum of $7,500 billion, while the properties have lost 60% of their value. There is a latent social and political problem (...) there should be no mistake: a large scale purge of the economy is underway... the companies that survive will be incredibly strong. The greatest threat to the world economy since the 1930s is likely to take shape in Japan..." (Le Monde, 23rd September).

Clearly, for the Japanese economy - and for the Japanese working class- the worst is still to come. Workers have already been hard ht by ten years of stadnation, and now recession, and will now have to suffer repeated austerity plans, massive redundancies, and increase exploitation in a context where financial crisis is combined with tha closure of some of the country's most important factories. However, since the working class has not yet digested the ideological defeat it suffered with the collapse of the Eastern bloc, this is not the capitalist's most pressing concern. Much more alarming is the destruction of their illusions and the growing realisation of the catastrophic perspectives for their economy.

Towards a new world recession

We have become used, during previous alerts to hearing comforting declarations from the "specialists", along the lines that "trade in South East Asia is not very important", "Russia's weight in the world economy is small", "the European economy is sustained by the perspective of the Euro", "the fundamentals of the US economy are good". Today, the tone has changed! The mini-crash at the end of August throughout the world's markets has been a reminder that, when a tree's weakest branches break first in the storm, it is because the trunk can no longer draw enough energy from its roots to nourish them. The heart of the problem lies in the central countries, and the stock market professionals have no doubt about it. When every reassuring declaration is immediately given the lie by events, it is no longer possible to hide the truth. More fundamentally, the bourgeoisie now has to prepare public opinion for the painful economic and social consequences of an increasingly inevitable recession: "a world recession has not been banished. The American authorities have judged it necessary to make it known that they are following events closely (...) the probability of a worldwide economic slowdown is not a negligeable one. A large part of Asia is in recession. In the USA, the fall in share is in encouraging households to save more, at the expense of consumption, provoking an economic slowdown" (Le Soir, 2nd September)

The crisis in eastern Asia has already led to massive devaluation of capital, throughthe closure of hundreds of production sites, the devaluation of shares, the bankruptcy of thousands of businesses, and the fall into profound poverty of tens of millions of people: "the most dramatic collapse of a country in the last 50 years" is how the World Bank describes the situation in Indonesia. Moreover, the decline in tha Asian stock markets was triggered by the official announcements of both Korea's and Malaysia's entry into recession in the second quarter of 1998. Together with Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Thailand, almost the whole of the much vaunted South East Asia region is going down, since even Singaporeis expected to enter recession by the end of the year. Only China and Taiwan are keeping their heads above the water - but for how long? Indeed, the issue in Asia is no longer recession but depression: "Depression is when the fall in production and trade accumulates to such a point that the social foundations of economic activity are undermined. At this point, it becomes impossible to foresee the tendency being reversed, and difficult, if not pointless to adopt the classic measures for recovery. Many of the Asian countries are in this situation today, to the point that the entire region is under threat" (Le Monde Diplomatique, September 1998). If we combine the economic difficulties in the central countries with the recession with the world's second economy - Japan - and througout South East Asia, adding on the deflationary effects of the crash in Russia on the countries of Easter Europe and Latin America (in particular the fall in raw material prices, notably oil), then we end up with an inevitable contraction of the world market which will be the basis for a new international recession. Indeed, the IMF has already included substantial deflationary effects in its own forecasts: the crisis will cut 2% off world growth rates compared to 1997 (4.7%), while the main blow will come in 1999. The third millennium, which was supposed to open on the definitive victory of capitalism and the new world order, seems likely to begin with zero gowth!

Continuity and limitations of palliative measures

For more than 30 years, the plunge into ever-increasing debt, and the diversion of the crisis' most devastating effects onto the periphery, has made it possible for the international bourgeoisie to put of the day of reckoning. This policy, which is still in extensive use today, is showing more and more signs of exhaustion. The new financial order which has progressively replaced the post-war Bretton Woods agreement "today appears extremely costly. The rich countries (USA, European Union, Japan) have benefited from it, while the small ones have been easily submerged by even a modest capital inflow" (John Llwellyn, global chief economist at Lehman Brothers, London). It is proving more and more difficult to contain the most devastating effects of the crisis on the margins of the international economic system. The economic decline and upheavals are so great that their repercussions will be inevitably be felt in the most powerful countries. After the bankruptcy of the Third World, the Eastern bloc, and South East Asia, the world's second largest economy - Japan - is swaying. This is no longer a matter of the periphery: one of the three poles at the very heart of the system is infected. Another unmistakable sign of the exhaustion of palliative measures is the growing inability of international institutions like theIMF and the World Bank - set up to avoid the repetition of events like 1929 - to extinguish the fires that burst out ever more frequently in the four corners of the world. This is expressed concretely in financial circles by uncertainty as to the IMF's status as "lender of last resort". The markets mumur that the IMF no longer has the resources to play the part of fireman: "Apart from anything else, the latest repercussions of the Russian crisis have shown that the IMF was no longer inclined - no according to some - to systemically play the fireman. The decision last week of the IMF and the G7 group of industrialised countries not to provide extra financial support for Russia can be considered fundamental for future policies of investment in the emerging countries (...) Translation: nothing says that the IMF will intervene financially to extinguish a potential crisis in Latin America or elsewhere. This is not going to reassure investors" (Agence France Presse, Le Soir, 25th August). Increasingly, like the drifting African economy, the bourgeoisie h s no choice but to abandon whole sectors of its world economy, in order to isolate the most gangrened parts and preserve a minimum of stability on a smaller foundation. This is one of the main reasons for the acceleration in the creation of regional economic groupings (European Community, NAFTA, etc). Just as, since 1995m the bourgeoisie in the developed countries has worked to renew the credibility of its trades unions to try to control the workers; struggles to come, so the Euro represents an effort t o resist the financial and monetary tremors to come, while working to stabilise whatever stiil works in the world economy. It is in this sense that the European bourgeoisie describes the Euro as a shield. A cynical calculation has begun to be worked out: international capitalism establishes a balance sheet comparing the cost of the measures needed to rescue a country or region, and the consequences of a bankruptcy if nothing were done. In the future, there is thus no guarantee that the IMF will function as "lender of last resort". This uncertainty is starving a so-called "emerging" countries of the capital on which they had built their "prosperity", thus rendering hypothetical any economic recovery.

The bankruptcy of capitalism

Not so long ago, the term "emerging countries' made the world's capitalists tremble with excitement, as they desperately searched the world market for new terrain for the accumulation of capital. They were the icing on the cake for the hired hacks who presented them as the proof of capitalism's youth, discovering a "second wind" in these regions. Today, the term immediately evokes stock exchange panic and the fear that some "far-off" region should infet the central countries with a new crisis.

But the crisis does not come from this part of the world in particular. It is not a crisis of "youthful countries" but a crisis senility, of a system that entered its decadence more tha 80 years ago, and which has been confronting its insoluble contradictions ever since: the impossibility of finding ever more solvent markets for goods produced in order to ensure the continued accumulation of capital. Two world wars, and destructive open crisis like the present one, that has lasted for thirty years, have been the price. To keep going, the system has constantly cheated with its own laws. And the main "cheat" has been the plunge into ever more fantastic levels of debt.

The absurdity of the rusian situation, whre both banks and the state only survived at the cost of an exponential increase in debt, which forced them to go further into debt just to pay the interest on debts already contracted, is not a "Russian" madness. The entire world economy has survived for decades at the cost of the same absurd flight into debt, because this is the only answer it has to its contracdictions, the only answer it has to its contradictions, the only means of artificially creating new markets for capital and commodities. The whole world sytem is built on an enormous and increasingly fragile house of cards. The massive loans and investments in the "emerging" countries, themselves financed by other loans, have been no more than a means to push the system's explosive contradictions from the centre to the periphery. The repeated stock market crashes - 1987, 1989, 1997, 1998 - express the increasing extnt of capitalism's collapse. The question this raises is not why we are in such a brutal recession, but why it has not come much earlier. The only answer is: because the bourgeoisie worldwide has done everything to put off the day of reckoning by cheating with its own laws. And today, Marxism once again makes no distinction between the experts of "liberalism" and the advocates of "stricter financial and economic control". None of them can rescue an economic system whose contradictions are exploding despite all its cheating. Only Marxism has shown the bankruptcyof capitalism to be inevitable, making this understanding a weapon in the struggle of the exploited.

And when the bill has to be paid, when the fragile financial system cracks, t hen the fundamental contradictions are once again in control: we see the plunge into recession, the explosion of unemployment, strings of bankruptcies, of companies and whole industrial sectors. In a few months, in Thailand and Indonesia for example, the crisis plunged tens of millions deep in poverty. The bourgeoisie itself hs been forced to recognise this reality - which shows just how serious the situation is. Nor is this restricted to the so-called "emerging" countries. The recession is coming to all the central countries of capitalism. The highest levels of debt are owed, not by countries like Russia or Brazil, but by the very heart of capitalism: Japan and the USA. Following two quarters of negative growth, Japan is now officially in recession, and its GDP is expected to fall by 1.5% for 1998. Britain, presented not so long ago, alongside the US, as a model of economic "dynamism" has been forced by the threat of inflation to plan a "cooling" of the economy, and a "rapid rise in unemployment" (according to Liberation of 13th August). Redundancies are already proliferating in manufacturing (100,000 lay-offs out of 1.8 months).

Asia presents us with the perspective for the world capitalist economy. Despite all the "rescue" plans designed to return these countries to health and restore their vigour, we have seen the recession make itself at home, forming huge pockets of poverty and famine.

Capitalism has no solution to its crisis, which in return has no solution within this system. This is why the only solution to the barbarism and poverty that it imposes on humanity, is its overthrow by the working class. Thanks to its concentration and its historic experience, the proletariat at the very heart of capitalism, and in Europe notably, bears a decisive responsibility towards its class brothers in the rest of the world.

MPF

1 We should point out that the IMF's annual general meeting in October 1997 considered that the next major country "at risk" could well be Turkey. So much for the lucidity of the bourgeoisie's most qualified "experts"!

On numerous occasions in our press, we have denounced the massacres and crimes of the "great democracies" and shown that the "allies" shared responsibility for the holocaust with the Nazis (International Reviews 66 and 89). Contrary to the lying propaganda of the bourgeoisie, which repeats endlessly that the Second World War was a struggle between the democratic and humanist "forces of good" and the "absolute evil" of Nazi totalitarianism, this conflict was really a bloody conflict between rival imperialist interests, both as barbaric and as murderous as each other.

Once the war was finished and Germany defeated, the natural tendencies of decadent capitalism took their course and the new rivalries between former allies came to the surface. A regime of famine and terror was imposed on the European populations, especially in Germany. Here again, contrary to the propaganda of the Western bourgeoisies, this policy was by no means exclusive to Stalinism.

The episode of the Berlin airlift in 1948 marked a brutal acceleration of imperialist antagonisms between the blocs formed around Stalinist Russia and the USA. It was a turning point in the latter's policy towards Germany. Far from being an expression of their humanism, the Berlin airlift was an expression of their counter-offensive against Russia's imperialist ambitions. At the same time, it allowed them to hide their policy of terror, of organised famine, of mass deportation and imprisonment in labour camps which they had imposed on the German population right after the war.

It is not surprising that the democratic victor, of World War II - the French, British and American bourgeoisies - have taken the opportunity this year to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Berlin airlift that began on June 26 1948. According to their propaganda, this event proved, on the one hand, the humanitarianism of the Western democratic powers and their mercy towards a defeated nation; and on the other provided a beacon of resistance against the threats of Russian totalitarianism. For more than a year over 2.3 million tons of relief goods were flown on 277,728 flights by American and British planes to a West Berlin that had been blockaded by Russian imperialism. The passion for peace, freedom and human dignity revealed by this historical episode continues to live on today in the hearts of the western imperialists, according to their own media and politicians.

Nothing could be further from the truth, either of the history of the last 50 years in general or of the real meaning of the Berlin airlift in itself. In reality the airlift essentially marked a change of American imperialist policy. Germany was no longer to be de-industrialised and turned into farmland as put forward at the Potsdam Conference of 1945 but was now to be reconstructed as the bulwark of the newly created Western imperialist bloc against the Eastern bloc. This change on the part of Western imperialism was not motivated by compassion. Instead the reason for the reorientation was the threat of Russian hegemony spreading to Western Europe as a result of the latter's economic and political dislocation after the mass slaughter and destruction of World War II. Thus the Berlin airlift, while feeding pan of a starving population, was a well-devised propaganda stunt to hide the misery of the past few years, and to sell the new orientation to the West German and Western European populations who were, henceforth, to be held hostage to the emerging Cold War. Thanks to these "humanitarian" supply flights, three US bomber groups were sent to Europe, placing Soviet targets well within the range of their B-29s ...

Nevertheles the celebration of the airlift today, despite a special visit by US President Clinton to Berlin, has been relatively quiet. One probable explanation for the low intensity of this particular anniversary campaign is that a sustained celebration would raise uncomfortable questions about the real policy of the Allies towards the German proletariat during and immediately after World War II. It might reveal too much of the hypocrisy of the democracies, and their own crimes against humanity. It would also help vindicate the communist left which has consistently denounced all the barbaric manifestations of decadent capitalism, whether in the form of democracy, fascism, or Stalinism.

The ICC has often shown1, along with other political tendencies of the communist left, how the crimes of Allied imperialism during the Second World War were no less heinous than those of the fascist imperialisms. They were the product of capitalism at a particular stage of its historic decline. The fire bombings or nuclear erasure of major German and Japanese cities at the end of the war showed the spurious philanthropy of the Allies. The bombing of all the densely populated centres in Germany did not have the object of destroying military or even economic targets. The dislocation of the German economy at the end of the war was not achieved by these 'area bombings' but by the destruction of the transport system2. Instead the bombardment was designed specifically to decimate and terrorise the working class and prevent a revolutionary movement developing out of the chaos of defeat as it had after 1918.

But 1945, year zero, did not bring an end to the nightmare.

"The 1945 Potsdam Conference and the inter-Allied agreement of March 1946 formulated concrete decisions to ... reduce German industrial capacity to a low level and instead give agriculture a greater priority, In order to eliminate the German economy's capacity to wage war, it was decided to implement a total ban on the German output of strategic products such as aluminium, synthetic rubber and synthetic benzene. Furthermore Germany would be obliged to reduce its steel capacity to 50% of its 1929 level, and the superfluous equipment would be dismantled and transported to the victorious countries of both East and West"3.

It is not difficult to imagine the 'concrete decisions' that had been made in respect of the welfare of the population:

"At the surrender in May 1945, schools and universities were closed, as well as radio stations, newspapers, the national Red Cross and mail service. Germany was also stripped of much coal, her eastern territories, [accounting for 25 % of Germany's arable land] industrial patents, lumber, gold reserves, and most of her labour force. Allied teams also looted and destroyed Germany's factories, offices, laboratories and workshops ... Starting on May 8th, the date of the surrender in the West, German and Italian prisoners in Canada, Italy, the USA and the UK, who had been fed according to the Geneva convention, were suddenly put on greatly reduced rations ... ( .... )

"Foreign relief agencies were prevented from sending food from abroad; Red Cross food trains were sent back to Switzerland; all foreign governments were denied permission to send food to German civilians; fertiliser production was sharply reduced; and food was confiscated during the first year, especially in the French zone. The fishing fleet was kept in port while people starved".

Germany was effectively turned into a vast death camp by the Russian, British, French and American occupying powers. The Western democracies captured 73 % of all German prisoners in their zones of occupation. Many more of the German population died after the war than had during battle, air raids, and concentration camps during the war. Between 9 and 13 million people perished as a result of the policy of Allied imperialism between 1945-50. There were three main foci of this monstrous genocide.

* Firstly amongst a total of 13.3 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern parts of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary etc., as allowed by the Potsdam agreement. This ethnic cleansing was so inhumane that only 7.3 million arrived at their destination within the post-war borders of Germany; the rest 'disappeared' in the most gruesome circumstances.

* Secondly amongst the German prisoners of war who died as a result of the starvation and diseased conditions of the allied camps - between 1.5 and 2 million.

* Finally amongst the population in general who were put on rations of around 1000 calories per day, guaranteeing slow starvation and sickness - 5.7 million died as a result.

The full extent of this unimaginable barbarism still remains the best kept secret of the democratic imperialisms. Even the German bourgeoisie is to this day covering up the facts so that they can only be gleaned by independent research comparing inconsistencies in the official records. For example the estimate of the number of civilians who perished in this period is reckoned, among other ways, by the enormous shortfall in population recorded by the census of Germany in 1950. The role of the democratic imperialisms in this extermination campaign has become clearer after the fall of the Soviet Empire and the opening of the Soviet archives. Many of the losses that had previously been blamed on the USSR by the West have turned out to be the latter's responsibility: many more prisoners of war for example died in the camps run by the Western powers than did those in the Russian zone. Their deaths were simply not recorded or were hidden under other headings. The scale of the slaughter is not surprising considering the conditions: prisoners were left without food or shelter; the numbers were swelled by the sick turned out of the hospitals; at night they could be randomly machine-gunned for sport. Feeding the prisoners by the civilian population was decreed a capital offence4.

The extent of the starvation of the civilian population, 7.5 million of whom were homeless after the war, can be deduced also from the rations that were allocated to them by the Western occupiers. In the French zone where conditions were worst the official ration in 1947 was 450 calories per day, half the ration of the infamous Belsen concentration camp.

The Western bourgeoisie still presents this period as one of 'readjustment' for the German population after the inevitable horrors of World War II. The deprivations were a 'natural' consequence of post-war dislocation. In any case, the bourgeoisie argues, the German population deserved such treatment as retribution for starting the war and to pay for the war crimes of the Nazi regime. This repulsive 'argument' is particularly hypocritical for a number of reasons. Firstly because the complete destruction of German imperialism was already a war aim of the allies before they had decided to use the 'great alibi' of Auschwitz to justify it. Secondly, those immediately responsible for National Socialism and its imperialist ambitions - the German bourgeoisie - emerged relatively unscathed from the war and its aftermath. While many figureheads were executed at the Nuremburg Trials, the majority of the functionaries and bosses of the Nazi era were 'recycled' and took up posts in the new democratic state set up by the allies.5 The German proletariat that suffered the most from the post-war policy of the allies had no responsibility for the Nazi regime: they were the first of its victims. The allied bourgeoisies, which had supported Hitler's repression of the proletariat after 1933, targeted an entire generation of the German working class during and after the war not out of revenge for the Hitler era, but to exorcise the spectre of a German revolution that haunted them from the aftermath of World War I.

It was only when this murderous objective had been achieved and when US imperialism realised that the exhaustion of Europe after the war might lead to the domination of Russian imperialism over the whole continent that the policy of Potsdam had to be changed. The reconstruction of Western Europe demanded the resurrection of the German economy. Then the wealth of the United States, swollen in part by reparations already looted from Germany, could be funnelled into the Mar hall Plan to help rebuild the European bastion of what was to become the Western bloc. The Berlin airlift of 1948 was the symbol of this change of strategy.

The crimes of imperialism in their fascist and Stalinist form are well known. When those of the democratic imperialisms are clearer to the world's working class, then the scope of the proletariat's historic mission will be more sharply revealed. No wonder the bourgeoisie wants to try and fraudulently assimilate the ork of the communist left on this question [Q the lies of the extreme right and to ‘negationism'. The bourgeoisie wants to hide the fact that genocide, instead of an aberrant exception perpetrated by evil madmen, has been the general rule of the history of decadent capitalism.

Como

1 International Review 83 "Hiroshima: The Lies of the bourgeoisie". IR 88 "Anti-fascism justifies Barbarism ", lR 89 "Allies and Nazis both responsible for the holocaust".

2 According to The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939-45, The Official Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit, that has only just been published!

3 Hennan Van der Wee, Prosperity and Upheaval, Pelican 1987.

4 James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies, The fate of German civilians under Allied occupation 1945-50, Warner Books.

5 See Tom Bower, Blind eye to Murder

In the industrialised countries, the summer period is one where, in general, the bourgeoisie concedes holidays to its exploited in order that they may recover their energy for work and become more productive for the rest of the year. The workers in turn have learnt to their cost, that the dominant class profits from their dispersion, their separation from the place of work and their lack of vigilance to accelerate the attacks against their living conditions. Thus, while the workers rest, the bourgeoisie and its governments do not remain inactive. However, for several years, the holiday period has also become one of the most fertile for the aggravation of imperialist tensions. For example, Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, leading to the Gulf crisis and war. In the summer of 1991 ex-Yugoslavia began to break up and brought war to the heart of Europe for the first time for nearly half a century. More recently, the summer of 1995 saw the NATO bombardment and US-supported Croat offensive against the Serbs. We could go on giving more examples.

By contrast, the summer of 1997 was particularly calm from the standpoint of imperialist confrontations. The international situation was no calmer as a result: during this summer, and independently of any calculation by the capitalists and their governments, there began the financial crisis in the South East Asian countries, which presaged the convulsions in which the world economy is floundering today.

The summer of 1998 returned to the "traditional" sharpening of imperialist conflict, with the war in the Congo and the bombing of two US embassies in Africa, followed by the American bombardment of Sudan and Afghanistan. At the same time, the state of the world economy has worsened considerably.

In particular, the chaos in Russia has been followed by a sharp decline in "emerging countries" such as those in Latin America, and by a historic fall in the value of stock markets in the developed world.

This recent unfurling of convulsions throughout the capitalist world is no accident. It expresses a new step by bourgeois society into insurmountable contradictions. There is no direct, mechanical link between today's economic upheavals and the increase in military confrontations. But they all spring from the same source: the world economy's plunge into a crisis which expresses the capitalism's historical dead-end ever since it entered its decadent phase with the outbreak of World War I.

This is why the 20th Century which is drawing to a close is recognised as the century of the greatest tragedies in human history. And only the world working class, by carrying out the communist revolution, can prevent the 21st Century from being worse still. This is the main lesson that workers must draw from world capitalism's plunge into crisis and increasing barbarism.

The victorious conquest of power by the working class in Russia in October 1917 lit a flame that illuminated the whole world. The working class of neighbouring countries immediately followed the example given by the Russian workers. In November 1917 the working class in Finland joined the fight. In the Czech provinces, in Poland, in Austria, in Rumania and Bulgaria in 1918, waves of strikes shook the regimes in power. And when, in turn, in November 1918, the German workers took the stage, the revolutionary wave had reached a key country, a country which would be decisive for the ultimate outcome of the struggles, and where the defeat or victory of the revolution would be determined.

The German bourgeoisie responded by putting an end to the war in November 1918, and by using Social Democracy and the unions - working hand in glove with the army - to sabotage the movement and to empty it of its content. Finally, through provoking a premature uprising and above all by making full use of the forces of 'democracy', the bourgeoisie prevented the working class from taking power and thus extending the Russian revolution.

The international bourgeoisie unites to stop the revolutionary wave

The series of uprisings which took place in 1919, in Europe as in other continents, the foundation of the Hungarian soviet republic in March, the formation of workers' councils in Slovakia in June, the wave of strikes in France in the spring as well as the powerful struggles in the USA and Argentina, all these events took place at a time when the extension of the revolution to Germany had suffered a major set-back. Since the key player in the extension of the revolution, the working class in Germany, had not succeeded in overthrowing the capitalist class with a sudden and rapid assault, the wave of struggles began to lose its élan in 1919. Although the workers continued to battle heroically against the offensive of the bourgeoisie in a series of confrontations, in Germany itself with the Kapp putsch in March 1920 and in Italy in the autumn of the same year, these struggles did not manage to push the movement forward.

By the same token, these struggles did not break the offensive that the capitalist class had launched against the isolated proletarian bastion in Russia. In the spring of 1918, the Russian bourgeoisie, which had been overthrown very quickly and almost without any violence, began to wage a civil war, supported by 14 armies of the 'democratic' states. In this civil war, which was to last almost three years and was accompanied by an economic blockade aimed at starving the workers, the White armies of the capitalist states bled the Russian working class dry. After the years of blockade and encirclement, the Russian working class, through the military offensive of the Red Army, had won the civil war, but it was completely exhausted, with over a million dead, and, above all, it was politically enfeebled.

At the end of 1920, when the working class had already been through its first major defeat in Germany, when the working class in Italy had been caught in the trap of the factory occupations, when the Red Army had failed in its march on Warsaw, the communists began to understand that the hopes for a rapid and continuous extension of the revolution were not going to materialise. At the same time the capitalist class realised that the principal, mortal danger represented by the insurrection in Germany had retreated, for the moment at least.

The generalisation of the revolution had been countered above all because the capitalist class had quickly drawn the lessons of the workers' successful conquest of power in Russia.

The historical explanation of the explosive development of the revolution, and its rapid defeat, lies in the fact that it arose in response to an imperialist war, and not to a generalised economic crisis as Marx had envisaged. Unlike the situation which prevailed in 1939, the proletariat had not been defeated in a decisive manner before the First World War; it was thus capable, despite three years of carnage, of coming up with a revolutionary answer to the open barbarism of world imperialism. Putting an end to the war and thus preventing the massacre of even more millions could only be done rapidly and decisively, by directly attacking the regimes in power. This is why the revolution, once it had broken out, developed and spread so quickly. And in the revolutionary camp, everyone hoped for a rapid victory of the revolution, at least in Europe.

However, while the bourgeoisie is incapable of ending the economic crisis of its system, it can stop an imperialist war when it is faced with the threat of revolution. This is what it did once the revolutionary wave reached the heart of the world proletariat in Germany, in November 1918. In this way the exploiters were able to reverse the dynamic towards the international extension of the revolution.

The balance sheet of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave shows conclusively that world war, even before the era of atomic weapons, does not provide a favourable soil for the victory of the proletariat. As Rosa Luxemburg argued in The Junius Pamphlet, modern world war, by killing millions of proletarians, including the most experienced and conscious battalions of the class, poses a threat to the very foundations of the victory of socialism. Furthermore, it creates conditions of struggle which are different depending on whether the workers are in the victorious or the losing countries. It was no accident that the revolutionary wave was strongest in the camp of the defeated, in Russia, Germany, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but also in Italy (which only formally belonged to the victorious side), and that it was much less strong in countries like Britain, France and the US. These latter were not only able to temporarily stabilise their economies thanks to the spoils of war, but also to contaminate many workers with the euphoria of 'victory'. The bourgeoisie even succeeded to some extent in stoking up the fires of chauvinism. Thus, despite the world wide solidarity with the October revolution and the growing influence of internationalist revolutionaries during the course of the war, the nationalist poison secreted by the ruling class continued to do its destructive work in the proletariat once the revolution had begun. The revolutionary movement in Germany gives us some edifying examples of this: the influence of extremist and so-called 'left communist' nationalism - that of the 'national Bolsheviks' who, during the war, in Hamburg distributed anti-semitic leaflets against the Spartacist leadership because of its internationalist positions; the patriotic feelings sharpened after the signing of the Versailles Treaty; the anti-French chauvinism stirred up by the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, etc. As we will see in a subsequent article, the Communist International, in its phase of opportunist degeneration, more and more tried to ride this nationalist wave instead of opposing it.

But the intelligence and deviousness of the German bourgeoisie was not only revealed when it put an end to the war as soon as the workers began to launch their assault on the state. Unlike the working class in Russia, which was faced with a weak and inexperienced bourgeoisie, the German workers came up against a unified bloc of the forces of capital, with Social Democracy and the unions at its head.

By drawing maximum profit from the illusions the workers still had in democracy, by using and aggravating the divisions resulting from the war, notably between 'victors' and 'vanquished', by setting up a whole series of political manoeuvres and provocations, the capitalist class succeeded in luring the working class into traps and defeating it.

The extension of the revolution had been halted. Having survived the first wave of workers' reactions, the bourgeoisie could then go onto the offensive. It was to do everything in its power to turn the balance of forces in its favour.

We will now examine how the revolutionary organisations reacted in the face of this blockage in the class struggle and what were {he consequences for the working class in Russia.

The Communist International between its 2nd and 3rd Congresses

When the working class began to move in Germany in November 1918, the Bolsheviks, from December, began calling for an international conference. At this time most revolutionaries thought that the conquest of power by the working class in Germany would succeed at least as quickly as in Russia. In the letter of invitation to his conference, it was proposed that it be held in Germany (legally) or in Holland (illegally) on 1 February 1919. Initially, no-one foresaw holding it in Russia. But the crushing of the Berlin workers in January, the assassination of the revolutionary leaders Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and the repression organised by the Freikorps under the direction of the SPD made it impossible to hold this meeting in the German capital. It was only at this point that Moscow was chosen. When the Communist International was founded in March 1919, Trotsky wrote in Izvestia on 29 April 1919: "If today the centre of the Third International lies in Moscow - and of this we are profoundly convinced - then on the morrow this centre will shift west- ward: to Berlin, to Paris, to London".

For all the revolutionary organisations the policy of the CI was determined by the interests of the world revolution. The initial debates at the congress were centred on the situation in Germany, on the role of Social Democracy in crushing the working class in January and the necessity to combat this party as a capitalist force.

In the article just mentioned Trotsky wrote: "The revolutionary 'primogeniture' of the Russian proletariat is only temporary ... The dictatorship of the Russian working class will be able to finally entrench itself and to develop into a genuine, all-sided socialist construction only from the hour when the European working class frees us from the economic yoke and especially the military yoke of the European bourgeoisie". And again: "if the European people do not rise up and overthrow imperialism, it is we who will be overthrown ... there is no doubt about this. Either the Russian revolution opens the floodgates to the struggles in the west, or the capitalists of all countries will annihilate and strangle our struggle" (Trotsky to the 2nd Congress of Soviets).

After several parties had joined the CI in a short space of time, it was noted at its Second Congress in July 1920 "In certain circumstances, there can be a danger of the CI being diluted in a milieu of semi-convinced groups that have not yet freed themselves from the ideology of the 2nd International. For this reason, the 2nd World Congress of the CI considers that it is necessary to establish very precise conditions for the admission of new parties".

Although the International was founded in the heat of the situation, it established certain clear delimitations on questions as central as the extension of the revolution, the conquest of political power, the clearest possible demarcation from Social Democracy and the denunciation of bourgeois democracy. On the other hand other questions, like the unions and the parliamentary question, were left open.

The majority of the CI adopted the orientation of participating in parliamentary elections but without this being an explicit obligation. This was the result of the fact that a strong minority (notably the group around Bordiga , then known as the 'abstentionist fraction') was totally opposed to this. On the other hand, the CI decided that it was obligatory for all revolutionaries to work in the trade unions. The delegates of the KAPD, who in a totally irresponsible manner had left the Congress before it had begun, were unable to defend their point of view on these questions, unlike the Italian comrades. The debate, which had already begun prior to the Congress with the publication of Lenin's Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, would evolve around the question of the methods of struggle in the new epoch of the decadence of capitalism. It was through this political battle that the communist left made its appearance.

With regard to the perspectives for the class struggle, the 2nd Congress was still optimistic. During the summer of 1920 everyone was expecting an intensification of the revolutionary struggle. But after the defeat of autumn 1920, this tendency went into reverse.

The reflux in the class struggle, springboard for opportunism

In the "Theses on the International Situation and the Tasks of the Comintern", at its Third Congress in July 1921, the CI analysed the situation as follows:

"During the year that elapsed between the Second and Third Congresses of the Communist International a series of working class uprisings and battles have resulted in partial defeats (the Red Army offensive against Warsaw in August 1920; the movement of the Italian proletariat in September 1920; the uprising of the German workers in March 1921).

The first period of the revolutionary movement after the war is characterised by the elemental nature of its onslaught, by the considerable formlessness of its methods and aims and by the extreme panic of the ruling classes; and it may be regarded by and large as terminated. The class self-confidence of the bourgeoisie and the outward stability of its slate organs have undoubtedly become strengthened (...) The leaders of the bourgeoisie ... have everywhere assumed the offensive against the working masses, on both the economic and the political fronts (...) In view of this situation the Communist International presents 10 itself and to the entire working class the following questions: To what extent do these new political interrelations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat correspond to the more profound interrelationship of forces between these two contending camps? Is it true that the bourgeoisie is about to restore the social equilibrium which had been upset by the war? Are there grounds for assuming that the epoch of political paroxysms and class battles is being superseded by a new and prolonged epoch of restoration and capitalist growth? Doesn't this necessitate a revision of programme or tactics on the part of the Communist International?"

And in the "Theses on Tactics" it was suggested that "The world revolution ... will necessitate a longer period of struggles ... The world revolution is not a linear process".

The CI would adapt to the new situation in different ways.

The slogan 'to the masses': a step towards opportunist confusion

In a previous article, we have already looked at the pseudo-theory of the offensive. Part of the CI and a part of the revolutionary camp in Germany were pushing for an 'offensive', to 'strike a blow' in support of Russia. They theorised their adventurism in a 'theory of the offensive', according to which the party can launch an assault on capital, without taking into account the balance of forces or the militancy of the class, as soon as the party is sufficiently brave and determined.

However, history shows that the proletarian revolution cannot be provoked in an artificial manner and that the party cannot compensate for a lack of militancy and initiative among the masses. Even if the CI finally rejected the adventurist actions of the KPD at its Third Congress in July 1921, it then went on to advocate opportunist methods of increasing its influence among the undecided masses: ""to the masses", this is the first slogan that the Third Congress sends to the communists of all countries". In other words, if the masses were marking time, the communists had to go to the masses.

In order to increase its influence among the masses, the CI in autumn 1920, had already pushed for the establishment of mass parties in a number of countries. In Germany, the left wing of the centrist USPD had joined the KPD to form the YKPD in December 1920 (which raised its membership to 400,000). In the same period, the Czech Communist Party with its 350,000 members and the French Communist Party with its 120,000 were admitted to the International.

"From the day of its foundation the Communist International has clearly and unambiguously made its goal the formation not of small communist sects ... but participation in the struggle of the working masses, the direction of this struggle in a communist spirit and the creation in the course of this struggle of experienced, large, revolutionary mass communist parties. From the beginning of its existence, the CI has rejected sectarian tendencies by calling on its associated parties - whatever their size - to participate in the trade unions in order to overturn from within their reactionary bureaucracy and to make the trade unions mass revolutionary organs, organs of struggle ... At its Second Congress the Communist International publicly rejected sectarian tendencies in its resolutions on the trade union question and on arliamentarism ... Thanks to the tactics of the Communist International (revolutionary work in the trade unions, the open letter, etc) communism in Germany ... has become a great revolutionary mass party. In Czechoslovakia, the communists have managed to win over the majority of the politically organised workers ... Sectarian communist groups (like the KAPD) on the other hand, have not had the slightest success" ("Theses on tactics", Third Congress of the CI).

In reality, this debate on the means of the struggle and the possibility of a mass party in the new epoch of decadent capitalism had already begun at the founding congress of the KPD in December 1918-January 1919. At this time, the debate revolved around the union question and around whether it was still possible to use bourgeois parliaments.

Even though, at this congress, Rosa Luxemburg still pronounced herself in favour of participating in parliamentary elections and for working in the unions, it was with the clear vision that new conditions of struggle had arisen, conditions in which revolutionaries had to fight for the revolution with the greatest perseverance and without the naive hope in a 'rapid solution'. Warning against impatience and precipitation, she said with great emphasis: "If I describe the process in this way, it is because this process seems to be a longer one than we at first imagined". Even in the last article she wrote, just before she was murdered, she affirmed: "from all this we can conclude that we cannot expect a final and lasting victory at this moment" ('Order reigns in Berlin').

The analysis of the situation and the evaluation of the balance of forces between the classes has always been one of the primordial tasks for communists. If they do not correctly assume these responsibilities, if they continue to see things moving forward when they are about to move backwards, there is the danger of falling into impatient reactions into adventurism, and into trying to substitute artificial measures for the real movement of the class.

It was the leadership of the KPD, at its conference of October 1919, after the first reflux of the struggles in Germany, which proposed to orient the party towards working in the unions and parliamentary elections in order to increase its influence in the working masses. In doing so it was turning its back on the majority vote taken at the founding congress. Two years later, at the Third Congress of the CI, this debate resurfaced.

The Italian left around Bordiga had already attacked the orientation of the Second Congres on participation in parliamentary elections (see its "Theses on Parliamentarism"), warning against an approach which would be a fertile soil for opportunism. And though the KAPD failed to make itself heard at the Second Congress, its delegation intervened at the Third Congress in more difficult circumstances and fought against this opportunist dynamic. Whereas the KAPD stressed that "the proletariat needs a highly formed party-nucleus", the CI sought salvation in the creation of mass parties. The position of the KAPD was rejected.

As for the opportunist orientation of 'going to the masses', it was to facilitate the adoption of the tactic of the 'United Front', which was adopted a few months after the Third Congress.

What is notable here is that the CI embarked on this journey at a time when the revolution in Europe was not extending and the wave of struggles was in retreat. Just as the Russian revolution of 1917 was only the opening of an international wave of revolutionary struggles, the decline of the revolution and the political regression of the International were simply the result and expression of the evolution of the international balance of class forces. The historically unfavourable circumstances of a revolution emerging out of a world war, combined with the intelligence of the bourgeoisie which had put an end to the war and played the democratic card, had prevented the extension of the revolution and created the conditions for opportunism to grow within the International.

The debate on the evolution of Russia

In order to understand the reactions of revolutionaries to the isolation of the working class in Russia and the change in the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, we have to examine the evolution of the situation in Russia itself.

In October 1917, when the working class, under the leadership of the Bolshevik party, took political power, there was no illusion that socialism could be built in Russia alone. The whole class had its eyes fixed on the outside, awaiting help from there. And when the workers took the first economic measures like the confiscation of the factories and steps towards taking control of production, it was precisely the Bolsheviks who warned them against any false hopes in such measures. The Bolsheviks were particularly clear on the fact that political measures were the vital priority, ie measures oriented towards the generalisation of the revolution. They were clear that the conquest of political power in one country did not do away with capitalism. As long as the working class had not overthrown the ruling class on a world scale, or at least in the most decisive regions, political measures remained primordial and decisive. In the economic sphere, the proletariat could only administer, to the best of its interests, the scarcity that characterises capitalist society.

But the situation was more serious than this. In the spring of 1918 when the capitalist states imposed an economic blockade and entered the civil war on the side of the Russian bourgeoisie, the workers and peasants of Russia faced a truly disastrous economic situation. How were they to resolve the grave problems of food shortages while at the same time dealing with the sabotage orchestrated by the capitalist class? How were they to organise and coordinate the military effort needed to respond to the attacks of the White Armies? Only the state was able to assume such tasks. It was indeed a new state that had arisen after the insurrection and which, at many levels, was still composed of the old layers of functionaries. And to deal with the breadth of the tasks imposed by the civil war and the fight against sabotage from within, the militias of the initial period were no longer sufficient; it was necessary to create a Red Army and special organs of repression.

Thus, while the working class had genuinely held the reins of power in the short period since the October revolution, a period where the main decisions were taken by the soviets, a process rapidly developed in which the soviets were more and more to lose their power and their means of coercion to the benefit of the post-insurrectionary state. Instead of the soviets controlling the state apparatus, exerting their dictatorship over the state and using it as an instrument in the interests of the working class, it was this new "organ" which the Bolsheviks erroneously called a "workers' state" - which began to undermine the power of the soviets and impose its own directives on them. This evolution had its origins in the fact that the capitalist mode of production continued to prevail. Moreover, not only did the post-insurrectionary state not tend to wither away - it tended to swell more and more. This tendency was to become more acute the more the revolutionary wave ceased to extend and began to go into retreat, leaving the working class in Russia increasingly isolated. Less and less was the proletariat able to put pressure on the capitalist class on an international level; less and less was it able to counteract its plans and in particular to prevent its military operations against Russia. In this way the bourgeoisie was to dispose of a greater margin of manoeuvre in order to strangle the revolution in Russia. And it was within this overall dynamic that the post-insurrectionary state in Russia was to develop. Thus, it was the capacity of the bourgeoisie to prevent the extension of the revolution which was at the basis of this state becoming more and more hegemonic and "autonomous".

In order to deal with the growing scarcity imposed by the capitalists, with the bad harvests, with sabotage by the peasants, with the destruction caused by the civil war, with the famines and epidemics which resulted from all this, the state directed by the Bolsheviks was forced to take more and more coercive measures of all kinds, such as the requisitioning of the grain harvest and the rationing of nearly all goods. It was equally forced to try to strike up commercial links with the capitalist countries; this was posed not as a moral question but as a question of survival. Scarcity and trade could only be administered by the state. But who controlled the state?

Who should control the state? The party or the councils?

At the time, the concept that the class party should take power in the name of the proletariat and thus hold the commanding posts in the new state was widely shared among revolutionaries. Thus after October 1917 the leading members of the Bolshevik party occupied the highest positions in the new state and began to identify themselves with the state.

This conception could have been put into question and rejected if, after a number of victorious insurrections elsewhere, and especially in Germany, the working class had triumphed over the bourgeoisie on an international level. After such a victory, the proletariat and its revolutionaries would have been better placed to see the differences, and even the conflict of interests, between the state and the revolution. It would have thus been easier for them to have made a more effective critique of the errors of the Bolsheviks. But the isolation of the Russian revolution meant that the party more and more stood for the interests of the state instead of the interests of the international proletariat. Progressively, every initiative was taken out of the hands of the workers and the state became more and more autonomous, spreading its tentacles everywhere. As for the Bolshevik party, it was at once the main promoter and the main hostage of this development.

At the end of the civil war, the famine got even worse during the winter of 1920-21, to the point where the population of Moscow, part of which tried to flee the famine fell by 50 % , and that of Petrograd by two thirds. Peasant revolts and workers' protests were on the increase. A wave of strikes broke out in the Petrograd region and the Kronstadt sailors were the spearhead of this resistance against the deterioration of living conditions and against the state. They put forward economic and political demands rejecting the dictatorship of the party and calling for the renewal of the soviets.

The state, with the Bolshevik party at its head, decided to confront the workers violently, considering them to be counter-revolutionary forces manipulated from the outside. For the first time, the Bolshevik party participated in a homogeneous manner in the violent crushing of a part of the working class. And this took place at the very moment it was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune and two years after Lenin at the founding Congress of the CI, had inscribed the slogan 'all power to the soviets' on the flag of the International. Although it was the Bolshevik party which concretely assumed the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising, the whole revolutionary movement of the time was mistaken about its nature. The Russian Workers' Opposition, like the parties that belonged to the International, denounced the rising clearly.

In response to this situation of growing discontent, and in order to encourage the peasants to produce more and bring their crops to market, it was decided in March 1921 to introduce the New Economic Policy (NEP), which, in reality, did not represent a "return" to capitalism since capitalism had never been abolished, but was merely an adaptation to the phenomenon of scarcity and to the laws of the market. At the same time, a trade agreement was signed between Russia and Britain.

With regard to this question of the state and the identification of the party with the state, there were divergences within the Bolshevik party. As we wrote in the International Review nos 8 and 9, the left communists in Russia had already rung the alarm and warned against the danger of a state capitalist regime. In 1918, the journal Kommunist had protested against the measures of discipline imposed on the workers. Even though, with the civil war, most of these criticisms were put on the back-burner, and the party closed ranks to face up to the aggression by the capitalist states, an opposition continued to develop against the growing weight of bureaucracy within the party. The Democratic Centralism group around Ossinski, founded in 1919 criticised the workers' loss of initiative and called for the reestablishment of democracy within the party, notably at the 9th Congress in the autumn of 1920, where it denounced the party's growing bureaucratisation.

Lenin himself, despite holding the highest state responsibilities, was the one who in many ways saw most clearly the danger that the new state could represent for the revolution. He was often the most determined in his arguments calling for the workers to defend themselves against this state.

Thus, in the debate on the union question, Lenin insisted on the fact that the unions had to serve in the defence of workers' interests, even against the "workers'" state which in fact suffered from severe bureaucratic deformations. This was clear proof that Lenin admitted that there could be a conflict of interest between the state and the working class. Trotsky, on the other hand, called for the total integration of the unions into the "workers" state. He wanted to complete the militarisation of labour, even after the end of the civil war. The Workers' Opposition group which appeared for the first time in March 1921, at the 10th Congress of the party, wanted production to be controlled by the industrial unions, themselves under the control of the soviet state.

Within the party, decisions were more and more transferred from party conferences to the Central Committee and the recently formed Politburo. The militarisation of society which the civil war had provoked had spread throughout the state to the very ranks of the party. Instead of pushing for the initiative of party members in the local committees, the party submitted the whole of its political activity to the strict control of the leadership, through the system of political "departments". This led to the decision, at the 10th Congress, to ban fractions in the party.

In the second part of this article, we will analyse the resistance of the communist left against this opportunist tendency and the way the International more and more became the instrument of the Russian state.

DV

Over the summer there was no pause in the convulsions of the capitalist world. On the contrary, as has often been the case in recent years, the summer period was marked by a brutal aggravation of imperialist conflicts and military barbarism. The bombings of the US embassies in Africa, the US reprisals in Sudan and Afghanistan, the rebellion in the Congo against the new Kabila regime, involving a number of neighbouring states, etc. All these new events can be added to the multitude of armed conflicts that have been devastating the world and highlight the fact that under the reign of capitalism human society is sinking into bloody chaos.

On a number of occasions we have shown in our press that the collapse of the eastern bloc at the end of the 1980s did not result in a "new world order" as announced by the US President of the day, George Bush, but in the greatest chaos in human history. Since the end of the second imperialist butchery, the world had lived under the yoke of two military blocs whose constant confrontations over a period of more than four decades led to more deaths than during the world war itself. However, the division of the world between the two imperialist blocs, while fuelling many local conflicts, obliged the two superpowers to exert a certain discipline in order to keep these conflicts within "acceptable" limits and prevent them degenerating into a general state of chaos.

The collapse of the Eastern bloc, and the resulting disappearance of the opposing bloc, did not bring an end to imperialist antagonisms between capitalist states, on the contrary. The threat of a new world war may have retreated for the time being, since the blocs that might have waged it no longer exist, but, sharpened by the capitalist economy sinking into an insurmountable crisis, rivalries between states have intensified and become increasingly uncontrollable. In 1990, by deliberately provoking the Gulf crisis and the war in which it gave evidence of its enormous military superiority, the USA tried to affirm its authority over the whole planet, and particularly over its former allies in the Cold War. However, the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia saw these allies confronting each other and putting American hegemony into question. Some supported Croatia (Germany), others Serbia (France and Britain), whereas the USA, after first supporting Serbia, ended up supporting Bosnia. This was the beginning of a tendency towards "every man for himself" in which international alliances have become more and more temporary and in which America has found it harder to exert its leadership.

We had the most striking illustration of this situation last winter when the USA had to renounce its military threats against Iraq and accept a solution negotiated by the General Secretary of the UN and supported by a country like France which since the beginning of the 90s has been openly challenging US hegemony (see International Review 93, "A reverse for the US which will raise military tensions"). What has happened over the summer provides further illustration of this tendency towards each for themselves and even of a spectacular acceleration of it.

The war in the Congo

The chaos that now marks the relations between states becomes blindingly obvious when you survey the various conflicts that have shaken the planet recently. For example, in the war that is now going on in the Congo, we can see countries which less than two years ago were giving their support to the offensive waged by Laurent-Desire Kabila against the Mobutu regime, ie Rwanda and Uganda, now fully supporting the rebellion against this same Kabila. More strangely, these countries, which had seen the US as their main ally against the interests of the French bourgeoisie, now find themselves on the same side as the latter, which is giving discrete support to the rebellion against Kabila, considered as an enemy since he overthrew the pro-French Mobutu regime. Still more surprising is the decisive support Angola gave the Kabila regime when it was on the verge of collapse. Kabila, who at the beginning did have Angolan support (notably through the training and equipment of the Katanga gendarmerie) has been allowing the troops of UNIT A, which is at war with the present regime in Luanda, to take refuge and train in Congolese territory. Apparently, Angola has been paying him back for this disloyalty. To further complicate matters, Angola, which just one year ago helped bring about the victory of the Denis Sassou Ngesso clique, supported by France against Pascal Lissouba for control of Congo- Brazzaville, now finds itself in the camp opposing France. Finally, with regard to the USA's efforts to strengthen its grip on Africa, particularly against French interests, we can say that, despite the successes represented by the installation of a "friendly" regime in Rwanda, and above all by the elimination of Mobutu who was supported to the bitter end by France, the Americans are now just treading water. The regime which the world's first power set up in Kinshasa in May 1997 has now succeeded in arraying against itself not only a considerable proportion of the population which had welcomed it with flowers after thirty years of "mobutism", but also a good number of neighbouring countries, and particularly its Ugandan and Rwandan patrons. In the present crisis, American diplomacy has been particularly silent (it has restricted itself to "demanding instantly" that Rwanda should not get involved and should suspend all military aid to the country), while its French adversary, notwithstanding its necessary discretion, has been clearly supporting the rebellion.

In reality, what is so striking about this, in the midst of the chaos engulfing central Africa, is the fact that the various African states are more and more escaping the control of the great powers. During the cold war, Africa was one of the stakes in the rivalry between the two imperialist blocs who dominated the planet. The old colonial powers, and especially France, were given a mandate by the Western bloc to police the continent on the latter's behalf. One by one, the different states which, shortly after independence, had tried to ally with the Russian bloc (for example, Egypt, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique) changed camp and became faithful allies of the American bloc, even before the collapse of its Soviet rival. However, as long as the Eastern bloc, even though weakened, maintained its presence, there existed a fundamental solidarity between the Western powers in their efforts to prevent Russia from regaining its footholds in Africa. It was precisely this solidarity which fell apart as soon as the Russian bloc disintegrated. For the USA, the fact that France still maintained a grip over a good part of the African continent, a grip out of proportion with its economic and above all its military weight on the world arena, became an anomaly, all the more so because France lost no opportunity to challenge American leadership. In this sense, the fundamental element underlying the different conflicts which have ravaged Africa over the last few years has been the growing rivalry between these two former allies, France and the USA, with the latter trying by all possible means to chase the former out of its traditional spheres of influence. The most spectacular concretisation of this American offensive was the overthrow of the Mobutu regime in May 1997, a regime which for decades had been one of the key pieces in France's imperialist strategies in Africa (and in the strategy of the US during the cold war). When he came to power, Kabila took no time in declaring his hostility towards France and his "friendship" towards the USA, which had just put him in power. At this time, behind the rivalries between the different cliques, particularly ethnic ones, which were confronting each other on the ground, the mark of the conflict between France and America was clearly visible, as it had been not long before with the change of regimes in Rwanda and Burundi to the benefit of the pro-American Tutsi factions.

Today it would be difficult to discern the same lines of conflict in the new tragedy which is sweeping the Congo. In fact it appears as if the different states involved in the conflict are essentially playing their own game, independent of the fundamental confrontation between France and the USA which has determined African history in the recent period. Thus Uganda, which was one of the main artisans of Kabila' s victory, is now dreaming of heading up a "Tutsiland" which would regroup Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and the western provinces of Congo. Rwanda, for its part, by participating in the offensive against Kabila, aims at carrying out an "ethnic cleansing" of the Congolese sanctuaries of the Hutu militias, which have been continuing their raids against the Kigali regime. Rwanda also wants to get its hands on the Kivu province (furthermore, one of the leaders of the rebellion, Pascal Tshipata, said on 5th August that it had come about as a result of Kabila breaking his promise to cede Kivu to the Banyamulenge who had supported him against Mobutu).

Neither did Angola's support for Kabila come without strings. In fact this support is more like the rope that supports the hanged man. By ensuring that the survival of the Kabila regime depends on its military aid, Angola is in a position to dictate its terms: banning UNIT A rebels from Congolese territory and the right to pass through Congolese territory to the Cabinda enclave which is geographically cut off from its Angolan owners.

The general tendency towards "every man for himself" which had been expressed more and more by the former allies of the American bloc, and which came out in a striking manner in ex-Yugoslavia, has taken a supplementary step with the Congo conflict; now, countries of the third or fourth rank, like Angola or Uganda are affirming their imperialist ambitions independent of the interests of their "protectors". And it is this same tendency that we could see at work in the bombings of the American embassies on 7th August and the "reprisals" by the US two weeks later.

The bombing of the American embassies and the US reprisals

The detailed preparation, coordination and murderous violence of the August 7th bombings makes it likely that these actions were not carried out by an isolated terrorist group but were supported or even organised by a state. Moreover, immediately after these attacks, the American authorities declared that the war against terrorism would from now on be the leading objective of their policy (an objective forcefully underlined by President Clinton at the UN on 21st September). In reality, and the US government is very clear about this, the target of such declarations is the states which practice or support terrorism. This policy is not new: for a number of years now the US has been pointing the finger at "terrorist states" such as Libya, Syria and Iran. Obviously, there are "terrorist states" which don't rouse the anger of the US: those which support movements which serve its interests (as is the case with Saudi Arabia which has financed the Algerian fundamentalists at war with a regime allied to France). However, if the world's leading power has accorded such importance to this question, this is not just a matter of propaganda for circumstantial interests. The fact that terrorism has today become a means used more and more commonly in imperialist conflicts is an illustration of the chaos developing in the relations between states1, a chaos which is allowing countries of no great importance to argue the toss with the great powers, especially the greatest of them all - a development which can only further undermine its authority.

The two US ripostes to the attacks on its embassies, the cruise missile strikes on a factory in Khartoum and Osama Ben Laden's base in Afghanistan, illustrate in a striking manner the real state of international relations today. In both cases, the world's leading power, in order to reassert its global leadership, has once again resorted to what constitutes its essential strength: its enormous military superiority over everyone else. The American army is the only one that could bring death on such a scale and with such diabolical precision tens of thousands of kilometres away from its own territory, and without taking the slightest risk. This was a warning to any country that might be tempted to lend support to terrorist groups, but also to the Western powers which maintain good relations with such countries. Thus, the destruction of the factory in Sudan, even if the pretext given for it (that it was making chemical weapons) has not stood up well to investigation, did allow the US to hit an Islamic regime which maintains good relations with France.

However, as on other occasions, this recourse to military force proved to be of little use as a means of rallying other countries around the US. To begin with, nearly all the Arab or Muslim countries condemned the strikes. Secondly, the big Western countries, even when they made a show of supporting the action, made known their reservations about the methods used by the US. This is new testimony to the considerable difficulties that the world's most powerful country is having in affirming its leadership: in the absence of another superpower (as was the case when the USSR and its bloc existed), the use of military force does not succeed in consolidating alliances around the US, or in overcoming the chaos it aims to combat. Very often such policies only sharpen the antagonism towards the US and further aggravate the tendency towards every man for himself.

The constant development of this tendency and the difficulties of American leadership appeared clearly with the bombing of Ben Laden's bases in Afghanistan. The question whether he really did order the bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi has not been clarified. However, the fact that the US decided to deploy its cruise missiles against his training bases in Afghanistan shows that the US does consider him to be an enemy. And yet during the time of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, this same Ben Laden was one of the USA's best allies, and they financed and armed him generously. Even more surprising is the fact that Ben Laden enjoys the protection of the Taliban, for whom US support (with the complicity of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) was a decisive factor in their conquest of Afghan territory. Today, the Taliban and the USA are on opposing sides. But in fact there are several reaSOI1~ that enable us to understand why the US struck this blow against them.

First, the unconditional support hitherto accorded the Taliban by Washington has been an obstacle to the "normalisation" of its relations with the Iranian regime. This process was advanced in a spectacular manner with the friendly exchanges between the US and Iranian football teams in the last World Cup. However, in their diplomacy towards Iran, the US has lagged behind countries like France, which at that very same moment was sending its minister of foreign affairs to Tehran. For America it was important not to miss the opportunities afforded by the warming of its relations with Iran and not to allow other countries to pull the carpet from under its feet.

But the blow against the Taliban was also a warning against the latter's temptations to take their distance from Washington now that their almost complete victory on the home front has made them less dependent on American aid. In other words, the world's leading power wants to avoid what happened with Ben Laden happening on a bigger scale with the Taliban - its former friends becoming enemies. But in this case as in many others, there is no guarantee that the US coup will pay off. Every man for himself and the chaos it leads to cannot be counter-acted by the world cop resorting to force. These phenomena are an integral part of the current historical phase of capitalist decomposition and they are insurmountable.

Furthermore, the basic inability of the US to resolve this situation is having its repercussions in the internal life of its bourgeoisie. Behind the crisis facing the US administration over "Monicagate", there are probably internal political causes. Also, this scandal, which has been covered so systematically by the media being used to divert the workers' attention from a worsening economic situation and the growing attacks of the bosses, a need demonstrated by the rise of working class militancy (strikes at General Motors, American Airline, etc). There again, the surreal aspect of the trials of Clinton is further witness to the fact mat bourgeois society is rotting on its feet, However, such an offensive against an American president, which could lead to his downfall, reveals above all the malaise of the bourgeoisie of the world's most powerful country which is incapable of imposing i leadership on me planet.

This said, the problems of Clinton and even of me whole American bourgeoisie are only a minor aspect of me drama now being out on a world scale. For a growing number of human beings, and today this is particularly me case in me Congo, the chaos that keeps on growing all over the world is synonymous with massacres, famines, epidemic and barbarism. A barbarism which took a new step forward in the summer and which will continue LO get worse as long as capitalism has not been overthrown.

Fabienne

1 In the article 'Faced with the slide into barbarism the necessity and possibility of the revolution' in International Review 48, first quarter of 1987, we already showed that terrorist attacks like the ones in Paris in 1986 were one of the manifestations of capitalism's entrance into a new phase in its decadence, the phase of decomposition. Since then, all the convulsions which have shaken the planet, particularly the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc at the end of the 80s have abundantly illustrated capitalism's continuing descent into decomposition.

Those who are today posing questions about the revolutionary perspectives of the working class come across a proletarian political milieu which is considerably dispersed1. The movement towards this milieu by newly arising militant forces is held back by several factors. First there is the general pressure of the ideological campaigns against communism. Then there is the whole confusion sown by the 'leftist' currents of the bourgeois political apparatus as well as the array of parasitic groups and publications which claim to be communist but which merely make the content and organisational form of communist politics look ridiculous2. Finally there is the fact that the different organised components of the communist left mutually ignore each other most of the time and run away from the public confrontation of their political positions, whether we are talking about their programmatic principles or their organisational origins. This attitude is a barrier to the clarification of communist political positions, to the understanding of what the different tendencies of this milieu have in common, and of the divergences which explain their separate organisational existence. This is why we think that anything which goes towards breaking with this attitude has to be welcomed, providing that it is based on a political concern to publicly and seriously clarify the positions and analyses of other organisations.

This clarification is all the more important as regards the groups that present themselves as the heirs of the 'Italian Left'. This current is composed of a number of organisations and publications which all refer back to the same common trunk - the Communist Party of Italy in the 1920s (which mounted the most consistent opposition to the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist International) and also to the constitution of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt) in Italy in 1943. This 1943 PCInt was to give rise to two tendencies in 1952: on the one hand the Partito Cornunista Internazionalista (PCInt)3, on the other hand the Partito Comunista Internazionale (PCI)4 animated by Bordiga. Over the years the latter has dislocated and given birth to at least three main groups who all call themselves the PCI, as well as a multitude of more or less confidential small groups, without mentioning the individuals who nearly all present themselves as the "only" continuators of Bordiga. The label of "Bordigism" is often used (frequently as a term of abuse) to describe the continuators of the Italian Left, because of the personality and the notoriety of Bordiga.

For its part the ICC, while it does not refer back to the PCInt of 1943, does refer to the Italian Left of the 1920s, to the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy which later became the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left in the 1930s, as well as to the French Fraction of the Communist Left which in the 1940s opposed the dissolution of the Italian Fraction into the newly-formed PClnt, since it considered the constitution of the party to be premature and confused 5.

What are the common positions and the divergences? Why such an organisational dispersion? Why so many groups and "parties" coming from the same historical tendency? Such are the questions which any serious group has to deal with, if it is to respond to the need for political clarity which exists in the working class as a whole, as well as among the more politicised minorities which appear within the class.

It is in this sense that we have welcomed the recent internal polemics within the Bordigist milieu, which has shown an attempt, serious if a little timid, to go into the question of the political roots of the explosive crisis of the PCI-Programma Comunista in 1982 (see International Review 93). It was in the same spirit that we briefly took position, in the article 'Marxism and mysticism' in IR 94, on the debate between the two Bordigist formations which publish respectively Le Proletaire and II Partito Comunista. In this article we showed that while Le Proletaire was correct in criticising Il Partito's slide towards mysticism. these ideas did not come out of the blue but have their roots in Bordiga himself; and we concluded this article by affirming that Le Proletaire's criticisms of Il Partito "must go deeper, to the real historical roots of its errors and in doing so, engage with the rich heritage of the entire communist left". And it is again in this spirit that we are welcoming the appearance of a pamphlet published by Battaglia Comunista on Bordigism: 'Among the shades of Bordigism and its epigones', a critical balance sheet of the Bordigism of the post-war period, which explicitly presents itself as a "clarification" as it says in the pamphlet's subtitle.

A good critique of the conceptions of Bordigism

We share the essentials of BC's analysis and critique of Bordigism's conceptions about the historical development of capitalism: "In sum, the risk is precisely one of taking up an abstract stance in the face of a 'historical development of situations' of which - and here we are in agreement with Bordiga - 'the party is both a factor and a product', precisely because historical situations are never like a simple photocopy of each other, and their differences must always be estimated in a materialist fashion".

We can also underline the validity of the critique that BC makes of the implications these conceptions have for the capacity of the organisation to live up to the demands of the situation: "It is a materialist truth that the party is also a historic product, but there is the risk of reducing this principle to a completely contemplative affirmation, to a passive and abstract view of social reality. There is the risk of once again falling into mechanical materialism, which has nothing dialectical about it, and which neglects the links, the phases the movement has to pass through over various situations. There is the risk of not understanding the relations which reciprocally influence each other in historical development, and thus of reducing the preparation and activity of the party to an idealist 'historic' presence, or to a 'formal' appearance".

A strong point of BC's critique of Bordigism resides in the fact that BC tries to go to the roots of the divergences, by going back to the various positions which already made their appearance within the PCInt of 1943, up to 1952 when the split took place between the Bordigists on the one hand and the Battaglists on the other. With regard to this we should note that BC has made a particular effort to document and analyse this period by publishing two Quaderni di Battaglia Comunista, no 6 'The process of the formation and birth of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista' and no. 3, 'The Internationalist Split of 1952, Documents'.

The richness of BC's critique also resides in the fact that it deals with aspects of the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation as well as with the programmatic positions it has to defend.

In the next part of this article, we will limit ourselves to certain questions relating to the first point, around which BC develops a very effective critique of organic centralism and the myth of unanimism as theorised by Bordiga and defended by his political heirs.

Organic centralism and unanimism in decisions

In substance, organic centralism, as opposed to democratic centralism, corresponds to the idea that the revolutionary organisation of the proletariat must not submit to the logic of the formal approval of decisions by the majority of the party; this 'democratic' logic is a logic borrowed from the bourgeoisie for whom the position that wins out is the one that receives the most votes, independent of whether it corresponds to the needs and perspectives of the working class:

"The adoption and general or partial use of the criterion of consul1ation and deliberation on the basis of numbers and majorities, when it is foreseen in the statutes or in the technical praxis, has a technical or expedient character, but not the character of a principle. The bases of the party organisation cannot therefore resort to rules which are those of other classes or other forms of historical domination, like the hierarchical obedience of simple soldiers to the various officers and leaders inherited from military or pre-bourgeois theocratic organisations, or to the abstract sovereignty of electors delegated to representative assemblies or executive committees which are typical of the juridical hypocrisy of the capitalist world, the critique and destruction of such organisations is the essential task of the proletarian and communist revolution" (Bordigist text published in 1949 and reproduced in BC's pamphlet 'The Internationalist Split').

We can understand Bordiga's fundamental concern when, with his return to active politics after the war, he was trying to stand up to the invasive ideology of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, to the grip they could so easily have over a generation of militants newly integrated into the PCInt, most of them inexperienced, not well formed theoretically and often even influenced by counter-revolutionary ideologies7. The concern can be understood, but we cannot agree with the solution that Bordiga came to. BC rightly responds:

"To condemn democratic centralism as the application of bourgeois democracy to the revolutionary political organisation is above all a method of discussion comparable to that used on many occasions by Stalinism ". BC then recalls how "Bordiga, after 1945, on a number of occasions ridiculed the 'solemn resolutions of sovereign congresses' (and the foundation of Programme Communiste in 1952 had its origins in precisely such a disdain for the first two congresses of the Partito Comunista Iniemasionalista)".

Naturally, in order to realise organic centralism, it was necessary to validate "unanimism", ie the idea that the party cadres are ready to passively accept the (organic) directives of the centre, setting aside their divergences, or hiding them, or at most circulating them discretely in the corridors at the official meetings of the party. Unanimism is the other side of the coin to organic centralism. All this can be explained by the idea - which was taken up by a large part of the PClnt in the 1940s (the part which was later to form Programme) - according to which Bordiga was the only one intellectually capable of resolving the problems posed to the revolutionary movement after the war. Let us cite this significant testimony by Ottorino Perrone (Vercesi):

"The Italian party is for the most part made up of new elements, without theoretical formation - political virgins. The old militants themselves have for 20 years been isolated, cut of ffrom any developing political thought. In the present situation the militants are incapable of dealing with problems of thought and ideology. Discussion can only disturb them and will do more harm than good. For the moment they need to walk on solid ground, even if it is made up of old positions which are now out of date but which have at least been formulated and are comprehensible to them. For the moment it is enough to group together those who have a will to act. The solution to the great problems raised by the experience between the wars demands the calm of reflection. Only a 'great mind' can approach them fruitfully and give them the answers they require. General discussion will only lead to confusion. Ideological work cannot be done by the mass of militants, but only by individuals. As long as these brilliant individuals have not arisen, we cannot hope to advance ideologically. Marx and Lenin were such individuals, such geniuses, in the past. We must await the arrival of a new Marx. We in Italy are convinced that Bordiga is such a genius. He is now working on a whole series of responses to the problems tormenting the militants of the working class. When this work appears, the militants will only have to assimilate it, and the party to align its politics and its action with these new developments" (taken from the article 'The concept of the brilliant leader', lntemationalisme 25, August 1947, reproduced in IR 33, second quarter of 1983).

This testimony is the expression of a whole conception of the party which is alien to revolutionary marxism, in that unlike the stupidities against democratic centralism cited above, we have here a truly bourgeois conception of the revolutionary vanguard. Consciousness, theory, analysis, are presented asthe exclusive task of a minority - and even at some level, of a single intellectual - while the party has to do no more than wait for the directives from the leader (imagine how long the working class as a whole would have to wait if it had a party like that for its guide!). This is the real meaning of organic centralism and the need for unanimity8. But how can this be squared with the fact that Bordiga was the comrade who, in order to defend the positions of the minority, created and animated the abstentionist fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, and who demonstrated his militant courage in defending the views of his party within the Communist International, and as a result of all this was an inspiration to the comrades in exile who, during the years of fascism in Italy, constituted the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy with the aim of drawing up a balance sheet of the defeat in order to form the cadres of the future party? No problem: all that can be dismissed by saying that the Fraction is no longer of any use; now, the brilliant leader will resolve everything.

When such a party has been fanned and is active, it has no further use within itself for fractions which are divided ideologically and still less organisationally" (extract from 'Notes on the bases of the organisation of the class party', a Bordigist text published by the PClnt in 1949 and reproduced in BC's pamphlet 'The Internationalist Split').

The limits of Battaglia's critique

As we said before, we consider that BC's criticisms are very valuable and we agree on a good number of the points dealt with. There is however a weak point in the critique which has often been a subject for polemics between our two organisations, and which is important to clarify. This weak point concerns the analysis of the formation of the PClnt in 1943, which for us obeyed an opportunist logic - an analysis which BC obviously doesn't share - which is a considerable weakness in its critique of Bordigism. We cannot go back over each aspect of the problem here; in any case we have examined this question in the two recent articles we have already mentioned, 'On the origins of the ICC and the IBRP', but it is important to recall the main points:

1. Contrary to what BC says, ie that in any case we were always opposed to the formation of the party in 1943, let us remember that "When in 1942-43 the great workers' strikes began, that were to lead to the fall of Mussolini and his replacement by the pro-Allied Badoglio ... the Fraction considered, in line with the position it had always held, that 'the course towards the transformation of the Fraction into the Party is open in Italy'. The Conference of August 1943 decided to renew contact with Italy, and asked its militants to prepare to return as soon as possible" (IR 90).

2. Once the modalities for building this party in Italy were known - modalities which consisted of regrouping comrades from the old Livorno party of 1921, each with their own history and its consequences, without the slightest verification of a common platform, thus throwing away all the work carried out by the Fraction in exile10, the Gauche Communiste de France11 began to develop some very strong criticisms, which we share in all their essentials.

3. Among other things, this critique concerned the integration into the party, and in a position of highest responsibility, of someone like Vercesi who had been expelled from the Fraction for participating, at the end of the war, in an anti-fascist committee in Brussels. Vercesi had not made the slightest criticism of his activity.

4. The criticism also concerned the integration into the party of elements from the minority of the Fraction in exile who had split to go and carry out propaganda work among the republican militias during the war in Spain in 1936. Here again, the criticism was not about the integration of these elements as such but about the fact that it had been done without any prior discussion on their past errors.

5. Finally, there was a criticism of the PClnt's ambiguous attitude towards the anti-fascist partisans.

A fair number of the criticisms that BC make of the Bordigist wing of the PClnt in the years 1943-52 concern errors that were really the expression of this unprincipled unification which had been at the basis of the formation of the Party; comrades of both wings of the Party were aware of this and the GCF had denounced it without any concessions12. The subsequent explosion of the Party into two branches in a phase of great difficulty resulting from the reflux of the struggles which had broken out during the war, was the logical consequence of the opportunist way the Party had been constructed.

It is precisely because this is the weak point of its text that BC is led into some strange contortions: sometimes it minimises the differences between the two tendencies within the PCInt at the time; at other times it makes out that they only appeared at the time of the split and, at still other times it attributes them to the Fraction in exile itself.

When BC minimises the problem, it gives the impression that before the PCInt there was nothing, that there wasn't the whole work of the Fraction beforehand and later of the GCF which carried out a major work of reflection and came to a number of important conclusions:

"When we reconsider all these events, the short but intense historic period in which the Pclnt was formed has to he kept in mind: it was among other things inevitable that after nearly two decades of dispersion and isolation of the surviving cadres of the Italian left, that there would he some internal differences, based mainly on misunderstandings and on different balance-sheets drawn from various personal and local experiences" (Quademi di Battaglia Comunista no. 3, 'The Internationalist Split').

When BC makes it look as if the divergences only appeared at the time of the split, it is simply committing a historical falsehood which tends to hide the responsibility of its political ancestors for trying to swell the party's ranks with as many militants as possible in a purely opportunist manner:

"What happened in 1951-52 took place precisely in the period in which certain of the most negative characteristics of this tendency - which would have continued to cause other damage, notably thanks to the work of the epigones - manifested themselves for the first time" (ibid, our emphasis). Finally, when BC attributes to the Fraction the divergences which later expressed themselves within the Party, it only shows that it has not understood the difference between the of a fraction and those of a party. The task of a fraction is to make a balance sheet of a historic defeat and to prepare the cadres of the future party. It is inevitable that in malting this balance sheet different points of view will be expressed and this is why Bilan defended the idea that, in this internal debate, it was necessary to make the widest possible criticisms without any ostracism. The task of the party, on the other hand, is to assume, on the basis of a platform and a programme which is clear and agreed upon by all, the political leadership of workers' struggles in a decisive moment of class confrontations, so that an osmosis develops between party and class and the party is recognised as such by the class "But in the Fraction before the Party and within the Party afterwards there cohabited two states of mind which the definitive victory of the counter-revolution ... was led to separate" (ibid).

It is precisely this incomprehension of the respective functions of fraction and party which has led BC (like Programma itself through its various splits) to carry on calling its organisation a party, even though the workers' upsurge at the end of the war was completely exhausted and it was necessary to go back to the patient but no less absorbing work of completing the balance sheet of the defeat and forming the future cadres. In this regard, despite the falsity of certain arguments put forward by Vercesi and other elements of the Bordigist wing, BC is also wrong to dismiss as liquidationist the idea that since the historic period had changed, it was necessary to go back to the work of a fraction:

"They were the first steps which would later lead certain elements to envisage the demobilisation of the Party, the suppression of the revolutionary organisation and the renunciation of any contact with the masses, by replacing the militant function and responsibility of the party by the life of a fraction, of a circle which would be a school of marxism" (ibid).

On the contrary, it was precisely the formation of the Party and the pretence of developing the work of a party when the objective conditions for this did not exist which pushed and still pushes Battaglia to take a few steps towards opportunism, as we showed recently in an article that appeared in our territorial press about BC's intervention towards the GLP, a political formation that has come out of the autonomist milieu:

"Honestly, our fear is that BC, instead of playing its role of political leadership towards these groups by pushing them to clarify and to reach a political coherence, is tending out of opportunism to adapt itself to their activism, closing its eyes to their political deviations, and thus running the serious risk of being pulled into the leftist dynamic which the GLP contain"13.

This is a serious matter because, leaving aside the danger of sliding towards leftism, BC is limiting its intervention to that of a local group with an intervention towards students and autonomists. In reality BC has a vitally important role to play both in the current dynamic of the proletarian camp, and in the development of the IBRP itself.

5th September 1998, Ezechiele

To obtain the pamphlet in Italian Fra les ombre del bordighismo e dei sui epigone: Battaglia Comunista, Casella Postale 1753, 20101, Milano, Italy.

1 As we have already developed on a number of occasions in our press. what we understand by the proletarian political milieu is made up of those who derive from or who are moving towards the positions of the communist left. Because it is made up of groups and organisations who have been able to maintain the principles of proletarian internationalism in and since the Second World War, and who have always denounced the counter-revolutionary character of Stalinism and the left of capital. the communist left. With those who take up its principles and attach themselves to this tradition, is the only authentically proletarian political milieu.

2 See IR 94, 'Theses on parasitism'

3 This is the group which publishes Prometeo and Battaglia Comunista and which in the 1980s formed the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) with the Communist Workers' Organisation of Britain.

4 The theoretical organ of the PCI after the split was Programma Comunista in Italy and Programme Communiste in France, the countries where it had its strongest representation.

5 See the polemic 'On the origin of the ICC and the IBRP: The Italian Fraction and the Communist Left of France', IR 90; 'The formation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista', lR 91.

The different Bordigist groups have the bizarre habit of all calling, themselves the International Communist Party. To differentiate them we refer to them by the best known periodical each one publishes internationally, even when these groups exist in several countries. We therefore talk about Le Proletaire (which publishes II Comunista in Italy); II Partito (which publishes under the same name) and Programma Comunista, which is now distinct from Programme Communiste in France).

6 The pamphlet currently exists in Italian; it will be available in French at the end of 1998 and in English the following year.

7 Consider the following passage taken from a letter to the Executive Committee in March 1951 (this was right in the middle of the split) and signed by Bottaioli, Stefanini, Lecci and Damen: "In the Party press we often find theoretical formulations, political indications and practical justifications which show the determination of the EC to develop Party cadres who are not organisationally very reliable and are politically unprepared, rather like guinea pigs for experiments of political dilettantism which has nothing in common with the politics of a revolutionary vanguard" (our emphasis).

8 The alternative to organic centralism is naturally not anarchism, the obsessive search for individual liberty, the lack of discipline, but to assume one's militant responsibility in the debates of the revolutionary organisation and in the class, all the while applying the orientations and decisions of the organisation once they have been adopted.

9 See also the older polemics on this theme: 'The party disfigured: the Bordigist conception' in IR 23 'Against the concept of the brilliant leader', IR 33; 'Discipline. Our principal strength' in IR 34.

10 On the very low level of political formation of the party cadres, we have already cited at the beginning of this article testimonies both from the Battaglia and Programma wings of the Party.

11 The Gauche Communiste de France was formed around the positions of the Italian Fraction in 1942, initially taking the name French Nucleus of the Communist Left, then the French Fraction.

12 This is how the Bordigist group Le Proletaire put it in an article devoted to the 1952 split:

"Another point of disagreement was the way of seeing the process of the formation. of the Party as a process of 'aggregating' dispersed nuclei whose lacunae would be compensated mutually (this was in particular the case with the famous attempt at the 'four way regroupment' - quadrofolio - through the fusion of different groups, including Trotskyists, which went through various re-editions, all of them unfruitful, before being incarnated in the formula of the 'Bureau' ... " (Taken from 'The meaning of the
1952 split in the Partito Comunista Internazionalista', Programme Communiste 93, March 1993).

13 See the article 'The Proletarian Struggle Groups': an incomplete attempt to reach a revolutionary coherence', Rivoluzione Internazionale, soon to be published in Revolution Internationale.