Never has the bankruptcy of the capitalist system been more obvious. And never before have such massive attacks on the working class been planned. What developments in the class struggle can we expect?

The crisis is so serious that the bourgeoisie can no longer hide it

The subprime crisis of 2008 led to an open world crisis, resulting in a fall in economic activity without precedent since 1929:

-         within a few months, a whole number of financial institutions fell like dominoes;

-         there was a proliferation of factory closures with hundreds of thousands of workers being laid off worldwide. 

The measures the bourgeoisie has used to prevent the collapse being even deeper and more brutal have been no different from the successive policies applied since the beginning of the 1970s, based on credit. That's the way a new step in world debt has been taken. But today the growth in world debt is such that the present phase in the economic crisis is often called the "debt crisis".

The bourgeoisie has prevented the worst, for the moment. That said, not only has there not been a recovery, but a number of countries present the risk of serious insolvency, with debt above 100% of GDP. Not only Greece but also Portugal, Spain (5th largest economy in the EU), Ireland and Italy. While Britain has not reached this level of debt, it shows signs that specialists regard as very worrying.

Faced with the gravity of the crisis of overproduction, the bourgeoisie has only one resort: the state. But this, in turn, reveals its fragility. The bourgeoisie can only delay their repayment dates while all the economic players have no option but this headlong flight which is becoming more and more difficult and risky: always going further into debt. In this way the historic bases of the crisis tend to become more obvious. The bourgeoisie can no longer camouflage the reality of the crisis, as in the past, making it clearer and clearer that there is no possible solution within its system.

In such a context, the insolvency of a country[1] incapable of paying the interest on its debt from now on can provoke a chain reaction leading to the insolvency of many economic players (banks, enterprises, other countries). Certainly the bourgeoisie still tries to confuse the issue by focusing attention on speculation and speculators. Speculation is real, but it permeates the whole system and not only some "profiteers" or "criminal bosses". Mad finance, meaning unlimited debt and speculation on everything goes with, and is encouraged by, capitalism as a whole, as a means to delay the demands of the recession. This is capitalism's way of life today. The problem also resides in capitalism itself, incapable of surviving without new and ever more massive injections of credit.

What remedies are the bourgeoisie concocting to face the present crisis of debt? The bourgeoisie is in the process of trying to push through a terrible austerity plan in Greece. Another is being prepared in Spain. In France, new attacks on pensions and retirement are being planned.

Can the austerity plans contribute to loosening the grip of the crisis?

Are the austerity plans a way to a new recovery? Will they permit a rise, however small, in the proletarian standard of living that has suffered such hard attacks in the last two years of the crisis?

Certainly not! The world bourgeoisie cannot allow a country like Greece to "run down" (despite all Angela Merkel's thundering), without running the risk of similar consequences for some of its creditors. But the only aid it can give is new credit at "acceptable" rates (however the loans at 6% imposed on Greece by the EU recently are already particularly high). In return guarantees of budgetary rigour have been demanded. The recipient must provide evidence that it will not be a bottomless pit for "international aid". So Greece faces the demand to "reduce its way of life" to slow the growth of its deficit and debt. On condition of harsh attacks on the living conditions of the working class, the world capitalist market will have new confidence in Greece, which will be able to attract foreign loans and investments.

It is no paradox that the confidence accorded to Greece will depend on its capacity to reduce the rate of growth of its debt, and not its ability to stop the growth itself, which would be impossible. This means that for the world's capital markets the solvency of a country hangs by an increase in its debt that is "not too large". In other words, a country that has been declared insolvent because of its debt can become solvent again even if its debt continues to rise. Besides, Greece has every interest in holding out the threat of its "insolvency" to try and lower the interest rates charged by its creditors who, if they are not paid at all, will register a complete loss on their mounting credits and find themselves rapidly "in the red". In today's over-indebted world, solvency is not based on objective reality but on confidence... which is not based on reality.

The capitalists are forced to adhere to this faith; or else they must cease to believe in the durability of their system of exploitation. But if the capitalists have to believe it, this is not the case for the workers! The austerity plans as a whole allow the bourgeoisie to reassure themselves, but do not resolve the contradictions of capitalism at all and cannot even curb the growth of debt.

The austerity plans demand a drastic reduction in the cost of the workforce, which will be applied in all countries since all, to varying degrees, are confronted with enormous problems of debt and deficit. Such a policy, for which there is no real alternative in the framework of capitalism, can prevent a panic, even precipitate a mini-recovery built on sand, but certainly not cure the financial system. Still less can it resolve the contradictions of capitalism which are pushing it ever further into debt on pain of being shaken by more and more brutal depressions. But it must also make the working class accept the austerity plans. For the bourgeoisie these are the highest stakes and it also has its eyes fixed on the proletarian response to these attacks.

In what spirit is the working class approaching this new wave of attacks?

From the beginning of the 2000s the bourgeoisie's calls to "tighten your belts now so that things will be better tomorrow" were no longer succeeding in creating illusions in the working class, even if there were differences between one country and another at this level. The recent aggravation of the crisis has not, up to now, given rise to a broadening of the mobilisations of the working class over the last two or three years. The tendency was even the reverse in 2009. The characteristics of some of the attacks, particularly massive redundancies, have made the working class response to these more difficult because:

-         the bosses and governments have hidden behind the peremptory argument: "It is nothing to do with us if unemployment rises and you are laid off: it's because of the crisis";

-         with the closure of an enterprise or factory, workers lose the strike weapon, which accentuates their feeling of impotence and their disarray.

However, even if these difficulties weigh still more heavily on the working class, the situation is not blocked. This is illustrated by a change in spirit in the working class and expressed by small movements in the class struggle.

Workers' exasperation and anger is fed by a profound indignation in the face of a more and more scandalous and intolerable situation: the very survival of capitalism has, among other things, exposed the reality of two "different worlds" within the same society more plainly than ever. In the first world we find the immense majority of the population who experience all the injustices and poverty and must pay for the second, the world of the ruling class, with an indecent and arrogant display of power and wealth.

More directly linked to the present crisis, the widespread idea that "the banks have left us broke and we can't get out of it" (when we see states themselves close to cessation of payments) is less and less able to mislead and divert the anger against the system. Here we see the limits to the bourgeoisie's speeches which make the banks responsible for the present crisis in order to try and spare its system as a whole. Mud from the "banking scandal" is sticking to the whole of capitalism.

Even if the working class internationally remains stunned and helpless in the face of the avalanche of blows from governments of left and right, it is not resigned to it; it has not failed to react over the last few months. In fact the fundamental characteristics of the majority of workers' mobilisations since 2003 have appeared more explicitly. In particular, workers' solidarity is tending to impose itself anew as a fundamental need of the struggle, after having been denatured and depreciated in the 1990s. At present it is expressed in the form of initiatives which are certainly very minoritarian, but hold promise for the future.

The struggle of the workers of Tekel in Turkey last December and January was a beacon for the class struggle. It united Turkish and Kurdish workers in the same struggle (when a nationalist conflict has divided these populations for years), just as it showed a ferocious will to extend the struggle to other sectors and to oppose union sabotage.

At the very heart of capitalism, while the union framework is more powerful and sophisticated than in the peripheral countries, which allows it to prevent the explosion of massive struggles, we are seeing a renewal of working class combativity. These characteristics were verified in Vigo in Spain in early February. There the unemployed went to employed workers in the naval dockyards and demonstrated together, rallying other workers in order to stop work in the whole naval sector. What was most remarkable in this action was that the initiative was taken by workers laid off from the naval dockyards, having been replaced by immigrant workers "who sleep in the parks and eat just a sandwich a day". Far from eliciting xenophobic reactions from the workers with whom they have been put into competition by the bourgeoisie, these workers expressed their solidarity against the inhuman conditions of exploitation reserved for immigrant workers. These manifestations of workers' solidarity had already also seen in Britain among the construction workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in January and June 2009 as well as in the naval dockyards in Sestao in Spain in April 2009.[2]

In these struggles the working class has, even if still in a limited and embryonic way, shown not only its militancy but also its capacity to counter the ruling class' ideological campaigns to divide it, expressing proletarian solidarity, uniting workers from different corporations, sectors, ethnicities or nationalities in the same struggle. Similarly, the revolt of young proletarians, organised in general assemblies and with the support of the population, in Greece in December 2008, struck terror into the ruling class, fearing the "contagion" of the Greek example for other European countries, especially among the young generation of students. Today it is no accident that the bourgeoisie has again turned its eyes to the proletarian reactions in Greece to the austerity plan imposed by the government and other European Union states. These reactions are a valuable test case for other states threatened by the bankruptcy of their own national economies. Besides, the almost simultaneous announcement of similar plans has also precipitated demonstrations of tens of thousands of proletarians in the streets of Spain and Portugal. So, despite the difficulties that still weigh on the class struggle, a change of spirit is nevertheless at work within the working class. Everywhere in the world workers' exasperation and anger are deepening and generalising.

Reactions to austerity plans and attacks

In Greece...

In Greece on 3rd March the government announced a new austerity plan, the third in three months, including a rise in consumer taxes, a 30% reduction in the 13th month of salary and a 60% reduction in the 14th, premiums affecting civil servants (a fall of between 12% and 30% of their salaries) as well as freezing public sector pensions and private sector pay. But this plan has been very badly received by the population, especially by workers and pensioners.

In November/December 2008 the country was shaken for over a month by a social explosion, mainly led by proletarian youth, following the assassination of a youth by the police. This year the austerity measures announced by the Socialist government are threatening to unleash an explosion not only among students and the unemployed but also among the main battalions of the working class.

A general strike movement on the 24th February 2010 against the austerity plan was widely followed and a demonstration of civil servants mobilised about 40,000. A large number of civil servants and pensioners also demonstrated in the centre of Athens on 3rd March.

The events which followed have shown still more clearly that the proletariat is mobilised: "Just hours after the announcement of the new measures, laid-off workers of Olympic Airways attacked riot police lines guarding the State General Accountancy and have occupied the building, in what they call a open-ended occupation. The action has led to the closing of Athens' main commercial street, Panepistimiou, for long hours."[3]

In the days before the general strike of 11th March a series of strikes and occupations took place: the workers laid off from Olympic Airways occupied the offices of the General State Accountancy, while employees of the electricity company occupied the employment agencies in the name of the "right of the future unemployed, which we are", according to them. The workers at the state publishing company occupied their place of work and refused to print the legal documents for the economic measures, pointing out that until the law is printed it is not valid... Inland revenue officials stopped work for 48 hours; driving school employees in the North of the country struck for 3 days; even the judges and other court officials stopped all activity for 4 hours a day. No rubbish bins were emptied for several days in Athens, Patras and Salonica, the dustmen having blocked the large rubbish dumps in these cities. In the town of Komitini workers at ENKLO textiles held protest marches and strikes: they occupied two banks.

But if wider sections of the working class in Greece have been mobilised than during the struggles in November-December 2008, the bourgeoisie's apparatus to contain those struggles has been better prepared and more effective in order to sabotage the workers' response.

In fact the bourgeoisie has taken centre stage to turn workers' anger and militancy towards political and ideological dead ends. These have emptied out all the potential for proletarian solidarity and for taking control of the struggle that had started to take shape in the struggle of young workers in 2008.

Patriotism and nationalism are widely used to divide the workers and isolate them from their class brothers in other countries: in Greece they used the fact that the German bourgeoisie was refusing to aid the Greek economy, and the PASOK[4] government didn't hesitate to exploit anti-German feelings that persist from the time of the Nazi occupation.

Control by the parties and unions has allowed them to divide workers one from another. So the Olympic Airways employees have not allowed anyone outside the company into the public building they were occupying and the union leaders made them leave it without consulting a mass meeting. When other workers wanted to go to the public Treasury, occupied by workers from the state publishers, they were curtly sent away on the pretext "that they do not belong to the ministry"!

The profound anger of workers in Greece is directed against PASOK and the union leaders who are allied to it. On 5th March the leader of the GSEE, the central private sector union, was abused and hit when he tried to speak in front of the crowd and had to be protected by riot police and hide in the Parliament building, with the crowd hooting ironically that he had found his proper place: in the nest of thieves, assassins and liars.

But the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and its official union, the PAME, pass themselves off as "radical" alternatives to the PASOK while they are conducting a campaign to blame the crisis on the bankers and on "the misdeeds of liberalism".

In November/December 2008 the movement was largely spontaneous and held open assemblies in the occupied schools and universities. The headquarters of the Communist Party (KKE), like the headquarters of the PAME union confederation, were occupied, a sign of the clear distrust of the union and Stalinist apparatus, which had denounced the young demonstrators as lumpenproletarians and spoiled children of the bourgeoisie.

But this time the Greek Communist Party is ostensibly at the head of the most radical strikes, demonstrations and occupations: "On Thursday morning, workers under the Communist Party union umbrella PAME occupied the Ministry of Finance on Syntagma square (...) as well as the county headquarters of the city of Trikala. Later, PAME also occupied 4 TV station in the city in Patras, and the state TV station of Salonica, forcing the news broadcasters to play a DVD against government measures".[5] Many strikes have also been called on the initiative of the Communist Party. On 3rd March it called a "general strike" and a demonstration starting from 4th and from 5th in different cities. PAME has stepped up its spectacular actions, sometimes occupying the Finance ministry, sometimes the locality of the stock exchange.

On 11 March, Greece was 90% paralysed over the whole country for 24 hours by the movement expressing the population's anger following a second call for a general strike in less than a month by the two main unions. More than 3 million people (from a total population of 11 million) took part. The 11 March demonstration in Athens was the largest in 15 years and showed the working class's determination to respond to the capitalist offensive.

...and elsewhere

In all regions in the world, in Algeria, Russia, among immigrant manual workers in the Emirates, super-exploited and deprived of all social protection, among British workers and among students reduced to a precarious existence in the former richest American state, California, the current situation shows an underlying tendency towards the recovery of the class struggle internationally.

The bourgeoisie is confronted with a situation in which, in addition to redundancies from enterprises in difficulties, states must carry out frontal attacks on the working class to make it pay for the debt. The direct responsibility of the state for the attacks in this instance is much more easily identifiable than in the case of redundancies in sectors where the state can present itself as the "protector" of employees, even if not a very effective one. The fact that the state can be clearly seen for what it is, the main defender of the interests of the capitalist class as a whole against the working class as a whole, is a factor which encourages the development of the class struggle, its unity and its politicisation.

In the current situation all the elements for the explosion of massive struggles are developing. But what will set these off is certainly the build up of exasperation, discontent and indignation. The bourgeoisie's application of the different austerity plans in different countries will provide the working class with so many occasions to gain experience of struggle and draw lessons.

Massive struggles, an important step in the development of the class struggle... but not the last

The collapse of Stalinism, and above all the bourgeoisie's ideological exploitation of it, based on the greatest lie of the century which identifies the Stalinist regimes with socialism, has left traces which are still at work in the working class today.

Faced with the bourgeoisie's "evidence" that "communism doesn't work; the proof is that it has been abandoned in favour of capitalism by the populations affected", workers can only turn away from any alternative society to capitalism.

The resulting situation is very different to the end of the 1960s from that point of view. At that time the massive scale of workers' combats, especially the May 1968 strike in France and the Italian "hot autumn" in 1969, showed that the working class could be a significant force in the life of society. The idea that it could one day overturn capitalism did not appear to be an unrealistic dream, as it does today.

The difficulty of embarking on massive struggles shown by the proletariat since the 1990s resulted in a loss of self-confidence, which has not been overcome by the renewal of class struggle since 2003.

Only the development of massive struggles will enable the proletariat to recover confidence in its own strength and put forward its own perspective again. So this is a fundamental step in which revolutionaries must encourage the working class's capacity to understand what is at stake - the historic dimension of its struggles, to recognise its enemies and to take its struggles into its own hands.

However important this future stage in the class struggle, it will not mean an end to the proletariat's hesitations in about setting out on the road to revolution.

Already in 1852 Marx brought out the difficult and tortuous course of proletarian revolution as opposed to bourgeois revolutions which "like those of the 18th century, storm swiftly from success to success".[6]

This difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as revolutionary classes results from the differences between the conditions of the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution.

Taking political power for the capitalist class was the end point of a whole process of economic transformation within feudal society. During this process the old feudal relations of production were progressively supplanted by capitalist relations of production. The bourgeoisie depended on the new economic relations to take political power.

The process of proletarian revolution is completely different. Communist relations of production, which are not market relations, cannot develop within capitalist society. Because it is the exploited class in capitalism, deprived by definition of property in the means of production, the working class does not have and cannot have any economic power in the conquest of political power. It relies on its consciousness and organisation in the struggle. In contrast to the revolutionary bourgeoisie, the first act of communist transformation of social relations must be conscious and deliberate: taking political power at the world level by the proletariat as a whole organised in workers' councils.

The enormity of this task is evidently one to make the working class hesitate, and doubt its own strength. But it is the only road for the survival of humanity: the abolition of capitalism, of exploitation, and the creation of a new society.

FW, March 31st 2010.

 

---

 

[1]. It is evident that the bankruptcy of a state does not at all have the same characteristics as that of an enterprise: if it becomes incapable of repaying its debts there is no question of a state "shutting up shop", laying off all its civil servants and dissolving its structures (police, army, education or administrative bodies) even if, in some countries (notably in Russia or certain African countries), the state employees can go unpaid for months due to the crisis.

[2]. See the following articles on our website, internationalism.org: on the strikes in Britain "Construction workers at the centre of class struggle"; on "Turkey: Solidarity with Tekel workers' resistance against government and unions!"; on Spain "Vigo: joint struggle of the unemployed and shipyard workers".

[3]. Blog on libcom.org.

[4]. PASOK - Panhellenic Socialist Movement

[5]. From libcom.org: https://libcom.org/article/mass-strikes-greece-response-new-measures [1]

[6]. In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

 

Engels discerns the approach of capitalism's historic crisis

According to a certain school of academic Marxologists, councilists and anarchists, marxist theory entered a period of sterility after Marx's death in 1883.  The social democratic parties and the Second International, in this view, were actually dominated by "Engelsism", an attempt by Marx's second fiddle and his camp-followers to turn Marx's method of investigation into a semi-mechanical system which falsely equates radical social criticism with the approach of the natural sciences. "Engelsism" is also attacked for being a regression to quasi-mystical Hegelian dogmas, particularly in its efforts to elaborate a "dialectics of nature". In this view, what is natural is not social, and what is social is not natural. If the dialectic exists, it can only be applied to the social sphere.

This break in continuity between Marx and Engels - which in its extreme form dismisses almost the whole of the Second International as a vehicle for integrating the proletarian movement into the needs of capital - is frequently used to reject any idea of continuity in the political history of the working class. From Marx, whose work few of our anti-Engelsists repudiate (indeed they frequently become experts on the minutiae of the value/price transformation problem or other partial aspects of Marx's critique of political economy), we are encouraged to leap over Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, and the Second and Third Internationals; and although parts of the communist left may, despite being the scions of this dubious parenthood, be grudgingly acknowledged to have hit upon a few insights, the real continuity of Marx's theory passes from Marx to....the scattering of brilliant individuals who have really understood him in the last few decades - none other, in fact, than the proponents of the "anti-Engelsist" thesis.

We can't respond to this whole ideology here. Like all myths, it is based on a certain element of truth which is then distorted and exaggerated beyond measure. During the period of the Second International, a period when the workers' movement was establishing itself as an organised force within capitalist society, there was a real tendency to schematise marxism and to turn it into a form of determinism, just as there was a real pressure on the workers' movement from the weight of reformist ideas; and even the best marxists, including Engels himself, were not immune from this.[1] But even if Engels did make some important errors during this period, to flatly dismiss Engels' work in the years after Marx's death as a negation and a perversion of Marx's real thought is an absurdity given the extremely close cooperation between the two men from the beginning to the end of their relationship. It was Engels who took on the immense task of editing and publishing Marx's Capital and it is ironic that so many of those who try to drive a wedge between Marx and Engels are perfectly happy to quote the Marx of volumes two and three of Capital, despite the fact that they only appeared in public via the allegedly uncomprehending mind of Engels.

One of the principal exponents of this "anti-Engelsist" line of thought is the Aufheben group in the UK, whose series "Decadence: Theory of decline or the decline of theory"[2] has been taken by some to have driven the last nail into the coffin of the notion of capitalist decadence, given the number of times the series is cited by those who are hostile to this notion. In their view, the decadence of capitalism is essentially an invention of the Second International: "The theory of capitalist decadence first comes to prominence in the Second International. The Erfurt Programme supported by Engels established the theory of the decline and breakdown of capitalism as central to the party's programme."[3] And they cite the following passages: 

"Private property in the means of production has changed... From a motive power of progress it has become a cause of social degradation and bankruptcy. Its downfall is certain. The only question to be answered is: shall the system of private ownership in the means of production be allowed to pull society with itself down into the abyss; or shall society shake off that burden and then, free and strong, resume the path of progress which the evolutionary path prescribes to it? [p. 87] The productive forces that have been generated in capitalist society have become irreconcilable with the very system of property on which it is built. The endeavour to uphold this system of property renders impossible all further social development, condemns society to stagnation and decay. [p. 88] The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time. Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalist production. The erection of a new social order for the existing one is no longer something merely desirable; it has become something inevitable. [p. 117] As things stand today capitalist civilisation cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism".

In the summary that begins the next article in the series (Aufheben n° 3), the argument that the concept of decadence was rooted in "Second International Marxism" is even more explicit:

"In Part I we looked at how this idea of the decline or decadence of capitalism has its roots in Second International Marxism and was maintained by the two claimants to the mantle of true continuers of the 'classical Marxist tradition' - Trotskyist Leninism and Left or Council communism".

Although the quotes Aufheben describes as being from the Erfurt Programme appear to come from Kautsky's comments on the programme (The Class Struggle, 1892) rather than the document itself, the preamble to the actual programme certainly contains a reference to the notion of capitalist decline and indeed asserts that this period has already opened up: "The gulf between the propertied and the propertyless is further widened by crises that are grounded in the nature of the capitalist mode of production, crises that are becoming more extensive and more devastating, that elevate this general uncertainty into the normal state of society and furnish proof that the powers of productivity have grown beyond society's control, that the private ownership of the means of production has become incompatible with their appropriate application and full development".  As a matter of fact, however, despite Aufheben's view that the Erfurt programme is so dependent on the theory of decadence, a cursory reading of the programme gives the impression that there is hardly any connection at all between the overall diagnosis cited above and the demands put forward in the programme, which are all essentially a series of minimum demands to be fought for inside capitalist society; and even Engels' many detailed points of criticism of these demands makes almost no reference to the historical context in which these demands are being raised.[4]  

That said, it is certainly true that in the work of Engels and other marxists in the last part of the 19th century we find increasing references to the notion of capitalism entering upon a crisis of old age, a period of decline.

But while for Aufheben this was a departure from Marx - who, they maintain merely maintained that capitalism was a "transitory" system and did not put forward any idea of an objective process of decline or breakdown as a foundation for the revolutionary struggle against the system - we have tried to show in previous articles in this series that the conception of capitalist decadence (as of the decadence of previous class societies) was entirely in line with Marx's own thinking.

Again, it's certainly the case that Marx's writings on political economy were produced during the period when capitalism was still in its triumphant ascendancy. Its periodic crises were crises of youth which served to impel the imperious march of this dynamic mode of production across the surface of the globe. But Marx had also been able to see these convulsions as harbingers of the system's eventual demise, and had already begun to see signs of capital completing its historic mission by opening up the more remote areas of the planet, while in "old Europe", in the wake of the events of the Paris Commune, he affirmed that the phase of heroic national wars had come to an end. 

Furthermore, during the period after Marx's death, the approaching signs of a crisis of historical proportions, and not just a repetition of the old cyclical crises, were becoming increasingly clear. 

Thus, for example, Engels pondered the significance of the apparent end of the "ten year cycle" of crises and the onset of what he termed a chronic depression affecting the original capitalist nation, Great Britain. And while new powerful capitalist nations were thrusting their way onto the world market, above all Germany and the USA, Engels saw that this would inevitably result in a much more profound crisis of overproduction:

"America will smash up England's industrial monopoly - whatever there is left of it - but America cannot herself succeed to that monopoly. And unless one country has the monopoly of the markets of the world, at least in the decisive branches of trade, the conditions - relatively favourable - which existed here in England from 1848 to 1870 cannot anywhere be reproduced, and even in America the condition of the working class must gradually sink lower and lower. For if there are three countries (say England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for the possession of the Weltmarkt, there is no chance but chronic overproduction, one of the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity required".[5] 

Simultaneously, Engels saw capitalism's tendency to engineer its own ruin in the accelerating conquest of the non-capitalist hinterland that surrounded the capitalist metropoles: 

"For it is one of the necessary corollaries of grande industrie that it destroys its own home market by the very process by which it creates it. It creates it by destroying the basis of the domestic industry of the peasantry. But without domestic industry the peasantry cannot live. They are ruined as peasants; their purchasing power is reduced to a minimum; and until they, as proletarians, have settled down into new conditions of existence, they will furnish a very poor market for the newly-arisen factories.

"Capitalist production being a transitory economical phase, is full of internal contradictions which develop and become evident in proportion as it develops. This tendency to destroy its own market at the same time it creates it, is one of them. Another one is the insoluble situation to which it leads, and which is developed sooner in a country without a foreign market, like Russia, than in countries which are more or less capable of competing on the open world market. This situation without an apparent issue finds its issue, for the latter countries, in commercial revulsions, in the forcible opening of new markets. But even then the cul-de-sac stares one in the face. Look at England. The last new market which could bring on a temporary revival of prosperity by its being thrown open to English commerce is China. Therefore English capital insists upon constructing Chinese railways. But Chinese railways mean the destruction of the whole basis of Chinese small agriculture and domestic industry, and as there will not even be the counterpoise of a Chinese grande industrie, hundreds of millions of people will be placed in the impossibility of living. The consequence will be a wholesale emigration such as the world has not yet seen, a flooding of America, Asia and Europe by the hated Chinaman, a competition for work with the American, Australian and European workman on the basis of the Chinese standard of life, the lowest of all--and if the system of production has not been changed in Europe before that time, it will have to be changed then.

"Capitalistic production works its own ruin, and you may be sure it will do so in Russia too...."[6]

The growth of militarism and imperialism, aimed above all at completing the conquest of the non-capitalist areas of the planet, also enabled him to see with remarkable lucidity the danger of these developments rebounding back to the centre of the system - to Europe, threatening to engulf civilisation in barbarism while at the same time accelerating the maturation of the revolution.

"No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt-of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any storm of locusts has ever done. The devastation of the Thirty Years War compressed into three or four years, and spread over the whole Continent: famine, pestilence, general descent into barbarism, both of the armies and the mass of the people; hopeless confusion of our artificial system of trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy, collapse of the old states and their traditional elite wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens on the pavement and there will be nobody to pick them up; absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the final victory of the working class".[7]

As it happens, however, Engels did not see such a war as inevitably bringing forth socialism: he had a well-founded fear that the general exhaustion would affect the proletariat as well and render it incapable of accomplishing its revolution (hence, we could add, a certain attraction for somewhat utopian schemes that might delay or put off the onset of war, such as the replacement of standing armies with a popular militia). However, Engels had grounds to hope that the revolution would break out prior to a pan-European war. A letter to Bebel (24-26 October, 1891) encapsulates this "optimistic" view:

"...According to the reports, you said that I had prophesied the collapse of bourgeois society in 1898. There is a slight error there somewhere. All I said was that we might possibly come to power by 1898. If this does not happen, the old bourgeois society might still vegetate on for a while, so long as a shove from outside does not bring the whole ramshackle old building crashing down. A rotten old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed"

In this passage you have both the illusions of the movement of the time and its underlying theoretical strength. The steady gains of the social democratic party, above all on the electoral front and in Germany, gave rise to exaggerated hopes that there could be a kind of inexorable progress towards the revolution (and even the revolution itself could be seen in semi-parliamentary terms, despite oft-repeated warnings against the parliamentary cretinism that was a central aspect of the rapidly burgeoning ideology of reformism). At the same time, the consequences of the failure of the proletariat to take power are laid out clearly: capitalism surviving for several decades as a "rotten old casing" - although Engels, like most revolutionaries of his day, would probably not have thought that it could survive its crisis of decline for a century or more. But the theoretical underpinning for anticipating such a state of affairs is clearly laid out in this passage.   

Luxemburg leads the battle against revisionism

And yet, precisely because the great imperialist expansion of the last decades of the 19th century made it possible for capitalism to experience dramatic rates of growth, this phase is remembered above all as one of unprecedented prosperity and progress, of steadily improving living standards for the working class, thanks not only to the favourable objective conditions but also to the growing influence of the workers' movement organised in trade unions and social democratic parties. This was especially the case in Germany, and it was here that the workers' movement was faced with a major challenge: the rise of revisionism.

Spearheaded by the writings of Eduard Bernstein at the end of the 1890s, the revisionists argued that social democracy should recognise that the evolution of capitalism had invalidated some fundamental elements in Marx's analysis - above all the prediction of ever-growing crises and consequent impoverishment of the proletariat. Capitalism had shown that by using the mechanism of credit and organising in huge trusts and cartels it could overcome its tendency towards anarchy and crisis and, under the impulsion of a well-organised workers' movement, could make growing concessions to the working class. The "ultimate" goal of revolution enshrined in the programme of the social democratic party had therefore become redundant; and the party should acknowledge itself for what it really was: a "democratic-socialist party of reform", advancing gradually and peacefully towards a transformation of capitalism into socialism.

A number of figures on the left wing of the social democracy responded to these arguments. In Russia Lenin polemicised against the Economists who wanted to reduce the workers' movement to the fight for "bread and butter" issues; in Holland Gorter and Pannekoek led the polemic against the mounting influence of reformism in the trade union and parliamentary arenas. In the USA Louis Boudin wrote an important book, The Theoretical System of Karl Marx (1907), in answer to the revisionist arguments - we shall return to this later on. But it was above all Rosa Luxemburg in Germany who is associated with the struggle against revisionism, at the core of which was the reaffirmation of the marxist notion of the decline and catastrophic collapse of capitalism.

Reading Luxemburg's polemic with Bernstein, Social Reform or Revolution (1900), it is striking how much the arguments that the latter put forward have been repeated over and over again, almost every time that capitalism gave the appearance - however superficial - of overcoming its crises.  

"According to Bernstein, a general decline of capitalism seems to be increasingly improbable because, on the one hand, capitalism shows a greater capacity of adaptation, and, on the other hand, capitalist production becomes more and more varied.

"The capacity of capitalism to adapt itself, says Bernstein, is manifested first in the disappearance of general crises, resulting from the development of the credit system, employers' organisations, wider means of communication and informational services. It shows itself secondly, in the tenacity of the middle classes, which hails from the growing differentiation of the branches of production and the elevation of vast layers of the proletariat to the level of the middle class. It is furthermore proved, argues Bernstein, by the amelioration of the economic and political situation of the proletariat as a result of its trade union activity."[8]

How often have we been told, not only by the official ideologists of the bourgeoisie, but also by those who claim to have a far more radical ideology in their pockets, that crises are a thing of the past because capitalism today is organised on a national or even international scale, because it can have infinite recourse to credit and other financial manipulations; how many times have we been told that the working class has ceased to be a revolutionary force because it is no longer facing the absolute misery described in Engels' book about the conditions of the working class in Manchester in 1844, or because it is becoming more and more indistinguishable from the middle classes? Certainly these were the grand sociological refrains of the 1950s and 60s, given a radical gloss by the likes of Marcuse and Castoridadis; and they were dragged out of the cupboard again in the 1990s after the collapse of the eastern bloc and with the credit-fuelled boom that has only recently been exposed as a hollow sham.

Against these arguments, Luxemburg insisted that far from overcoming crises, the "organisation" of capital through cartels and credit was a response to the contradictions of the system and tended to raise these contradictions to a higher and more devastating level.

Credit was seen by Luxemburg essentially as a means for facilitating the extension of the market while concentrating capital in fewer and fewer hands. At this point in history, this was certainly the case - there was a real possibility for capitalism to expand outwards and credit greatly accelerated this expansion. But at the same time Luxemburg was able to grasp the destructive side of credit as this expansion of the market was also the premise for future conflict with the mass of productive forces set in motion:

"We see that credit, instead of being an instrument for the suppression or the attenuation of crises, is on the contrary a particularly mighty instrument for the formation of crises. It cannot be anything else. Credit eliminates the remaining rigidity of capitalist relationships. It introduces everywhere the greatest elasticity possible. It renders all capitalist forces extensible, relative and mutually sensitive to the highest degree. Doing this, it facilitates and aggravates crises, which are nothing more or less than the periodic collisions of the contradictory forces of capitalist economy."[9]

Credit was not yet what it has largely become today - not so much a means of accelerating the expansion of a real market, but an artificial market in itself, upon which capitalism has become increasingly dependent. But its function as a medicine that aggravates the disease has thereby become even more evident in this epoch, and above all since the outbreak of the so-called "credit crunch" of 2008.

By the same token, the tendency of capitalism and the capitalists to organise themselves on a national and even international scale was seen by Luxemburg not as a solution to the antagonisms of the system but as a potent force for raising them onto a higher and more destructive level:

"capitalist combinations aggravate the contradiction existing between the international character of capitalist world economy and the national character of the State - insofar as they are always accompanied by a general tariff war, which sharpens the differences among the capitalist States. We must add to this the decidedly revolutionary influence exercised by cartels on the concentration of production, technical progress, etc.

"In other words, when evaluated from the angle of their final effect on capitalist economy, cartels and trusts fail as ‘means of adaptation'. They fail to attenuate the contradictions of capitalism. On the contrary, they appear to be an instrument of greater anarchy. They encourage the further development of the internal contradictions of capitalism. They accelerate the coming of a general decline of capitalism".[10]

These predictions - above all as the organisation of capital passed from the stage of cartels to the national "state capitalist trusts" which confronted each other for control of the world market in 1914 - were to be profoundly vindicated by the entire history of the 20th century.

Luxemburg also responded to Bernstein's arguments that the proletariat did not need to make a revolution because it was enjoying growing living standards as a result of its effective organisation in trade unions and through the activities of its representatives in parliament. She warned that trade union activity had inherent limitations, describing it as a "labour of Sisyphus", necessary, but constantly frustrated in its efforts to increase the worker's share in the products of his labour because of the inevitable increase in the rate of exploitation brought about by the development of productivity. Later developments in capitalism would expose even more thoroughly the historical limits of trade unionism, but even while activity in the trade unions (as well as the parallel fields of action in parliament and cooperatives) still retained a validity for the working class, the revisionists were already falsifying reality by arguing that such activities could secure for the working class a constant and indefinite improvement in its living conditions.

And while Bernstein saw a tendency towards the attenuation of class relations through the proliferation of small-scale enterprises and thus the growth of the middle class, Luxemburg affirmed the existence of the tendency that was certainly to become predominant in the century that followed: the evolution of capitalism towards increasingly gigantic forms of concentration and centralisation, both at the level of the "private" enterprise and the state and imperialist alliance.   Others on the revolutionary left, such as Boudin, responded to the claim that the proletariat itself was becoming middle class by arguing that many of the "white collar" and technical strata which were supposedly swallowing up the working class were in reality themselves a product of the process of proletarianisation - again, a tendency that has become increasingly marked in the last few decades. Boudin's words from 1907 thus have a very modern ring to them, as do the specious arguments they are directed against:

"A very great proportion of what is termed new middle class, and appears as such in the income statistics, is really a part of the regular proletariat, and the new middle class, whatever it may be, is a good deal smaller than might be supposed from the tables of incomes. This confusion is due, on the one hand, to the old and firmly-rooted prejudice, according to which Marx is supposed to ascribe value creating properties only to manual labour, and on the other to the severance of the function of superintendence from the possession of property - effected by the corporations as noted before. Owing to these circumstances large sections of the proletariat are counted as belonging to the middle class, that is, the lower strata of the capitalist class. This is the case with almost all those numerous and growing occupations in which the remuneration is termed ‘salary' instead of ‘wages'. All these salaried persons, no matter what their salaries may be, who make up perhaps the bulk, and certainly a great portion, of the ‘new' middle class, are in reality just as much a part of the proletariat as the merest day-labourer."[11]

Heading towards the debacle of bourgeois civilisation

Today's open economic crisis is taking place in a very advanced stage of capitalism's decay. Luxemburg was responding to Bernstein in a period which she characterised, again with remarkable lucidity, as being not yet that of the period of decline, but as one in which the approach of this period was becoming increasingly evident.  This passage occurs in Luxemburg's response to Bernstein's empirical (and empiricist) question: why have we not seen any expressions of the old decennial cycle since the early 1870s? Luxemburg's answer is to insist that this cycle was in fact the product of a youthful phase of capitalism; the world market was at that point in a "transitional period" between its period of maximum growth and the onset of an epoch of decline:

"The world market is still developing. Germany and Austria only entered the phase of actual large industrial production in the 1870s; Russia only in the 1880s; France is still in large part in the stage of smallscale production; the Balkan states, for the most part, have still not stripped themselves of the chains of a natural economy; and only in the 1880s did America, Australia and Africa enter into a large and regular exchange of goods with Europe. Thus, on the one hand, we now have behind us the sudden and large opening up of new areas of the capitalist economy, as occurred periodically until the 1870s; and we have behind us, so to speak, previous youthful crises which followed these periodic developments. On the other hand, we still have not progressed to that degree of development and exhaustion of the world market which would produce the fatal, periodic collision of the forces of production with the limits of the market, which is the actual capitalist crisis of old age. We are in a phase in which the crises are no longer the accompaniment of the growth of capitalism, and not yet that of its decline."[12]

Interestingly, however, in the second edition of the pamphlet, published in 1908, Luxemburg omitted this passage and an ensuing paragraph and mentioned the crisis of 1907-8, centred precisely in the most powerful industrial nations: evidently, for Luxemburg, the "transitional period" was already drawing to a close.

Furthermore, she also hints that the previous expectation of the new period being opened by a "great commercial crisis" might prove to have been mistaken - already in Social Reform or Revolution she points to the growth of militarism, a development that was to preoccupy her more and more. It is surely the possibility that the opening of the new period might be marked by war rather than open economic crisis that lies behind the following observation:

"Socialist theory up to now declared that the point of departure for a transformation to socialism would be a general and catastrophic crisis. We must distinguish in this outlook two things: the fundamental idea and its exterior form.

"The fundamental idea consists of the affirmation that capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible. There were good reasons for conceiving that juncture in the form of a catastrophic general commercial crisis. But that is of secondary importance when the fundamental idea is considered".[13]

But whatever form the dawning of the "crisis of senility" might take, Luxemburg insisted that without this vision of the catastrophic downfall of capitalism, socialism becomes a mere utopia: 

"According to scientific socialism, the historic necessity of the socialist revolution manifests itself above all in the growing anarchy of capitalism, which drives the system into an impasse. But if one admits with Bernstein that capitalist development does not move in the direction of its own ruin, then socialism ceases to be objectively necessary...

"Revisionist theory thus places itself in a dilemma. Either the socialist transformation is, as was admitted up to now, the consequence of the internal contradictions of capitalism, and with the growth of capitalism will develop its inner contradictions, resulting inevitably, at some point, in its collapse, (in that case the ‘means of adaptation' are ineffective and the theory of collapse is correct); or the ‘means of adaptation' will really stop the collapse of the capitalist system and thereby enable capitalism to maintain itself by suppressing its own contradictions. In that case socialism ceases to be an historic necessity. It then becomes anything you want to call it, but it is no longer the result of the material development of society.

"The dilemma leads to another. Either revisionism is correct in its position on the course of capitalist development, and therefore the socialist transformation of society is only a utopia, or socialism is not a utopia, and the theory of ‘means of adaptation' is false. There is the question in a nutshell".[14]

In this passage Luxemburg draws out with stark clarity the intimate relationship between the revisionist outlook and the rejection of Marx's theory of capitalism's decline - and conversely, the necessity for such a theory as the foundation-stone of a coherent conception of revolution. 

In the next article in this series we will look at how Luxemburg and others sought to locate the origins of the approaching crisis in the underlying process of capitalist accumulation.

Gerrard, Winter 2009.

 

 

---

[1]. See for example the article "1895-1905: parliamentary illusions hide the perspective of revolution" (International Review n°88), the concluding chapter of our book Communism is not a nice idea but a material necessity.

[2]. Aufheben n°s 2 and 3: https://libcom.org/aufheben [5]

[3]. Aufheben n° 2.

[4]. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm [6]

[5]. Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. February 3 1886 [7].

[6]. Letter to Nikolai Danielson, Sept 22 1892.

[7]. 15 December 1887, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol. 26, p451.

[8]. Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, Chapter 1, "The opportunist method".

[9]. Ibid. Chapter 2, "The adaptation of capitalism".

[10].  Ibid.

[11]. The Theoretical System of Karl Marx, 1907, p 207.

[12]. Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, Chapter two.

[13]. Ibid, Chapter 1.

[14]. Ibid.

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World debt has reached astronomical proportions, no longer making it possible to go on "re-launching" the economy through a new spiral of debt without threatening the financial credibility of states and the value of their currencies. Faced with this situation, revolutionaries have a responsibility to make an in-depth analysis of the ways in which capitalism has up till now kept its system artificially alive by "cheating" its own laws. This is the only method that can result in a pertinent evaluation of the impasse which the world bourgeoisie now faces.

Studying the period known as the "Thirty Glorious Years", so lauded and so regretted by the bourgeoisie, is no exception to this and revolutionaries obviously need to refute the interpretations offered by the defenders of capitalism, in particular when they want to convince us that capitalism can be reformed.[1] while at the same time engaging in a fraternal confrontation with the different points of view that exist on this subject within the proletarian camp. This is the aim of the debate to which our organisation has opened the columns of the International Review for two years now.[2]

The view developed in our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism, according to which the destruction that took place during the Second World War, by creating a reconstruction market, were the source of the boom of the 1950s and 1960s, has been subjected to a critique in the ICC, particularly from the position of the thesis we defend, referred to as "extra-capitalist markets and debt". As its name indicates, this thesis considers that it was selling to extra-capitalist markets and selling on credit that was the motor for capitalist accumulation during the 1950s and 60s, and not Keynesian measures, as defended in the other thesis, referred to as the Keynesian-Fordist thesis.[3] In International Review n° 138 there was a contribution signed by Salome and Ferdinand, defending the latter point of view and which, by putting forward a number of arguments that have not yet been publicly discussed, has reanimated the debate. While responding to the arguments of these two comrades, this article has the following objectives: to recall the foundations of the thesis of extra-capitalist markets and debt; to present some statistical elements which, in our opinion, illustrate its validity and to examine its implications for the ICC's global framework of analysis of the period of capitalist decadence.[4] 

The main theoretical arguments

The analysis defended in The Decadence of Capitalism sees a certain economic rationality in war (war as having positive economic consequences). In this sense, it is in contradiction with older texts of our organisation which argue that "what characterises all these wars, like the two world wars, is that unlike those of the previous century, at no time have they permitted any progress in the development of the productive forces, having had no other result than massive destructions which have bled dry the countries in which they have taken place (not to mention the horrible massacres they have provoked)".[5]

In our opinion the mistake in our pamphlet is the result of a hasty and erroneous application of the following passage from the Communist Manifesto: "And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones". In fact, these lines do not attribute the destruction of the means of production with the virtue of opening a new solvent market capable of getting the economic machine back in motion. In conformity with all the economic writings of Marx, it's necessary to interpret the effects of the destruction of capital (or rather the devaluing of capital) as helping to disgorge the existing market and counter the tendency towards the falling rate of profit.[6]

The thesis referred to as Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism offers an interpretation of the years of "prosperity" in the 1950s and 1960 different both from the one put forward in The Decadence of Capitalism and the extra-capitalist markets and debt thesis. "The guaranteed growth in profits, state spending and the rise in real wages, were able to guarantee the final demand so vital if capital were to continue its accumulation."[7] Two arguments have been put forward in response to this idea:

Increasing wages above what is necessary for the reproduction of labour power constitutes, from the capitalist point of view, a pure and simple waste of surplus value which can in no way contribute to the process of accumulation. Furthermore, while it's true that increasing workers' consumption (through raising wages) and augmenting state spending create an outlet for a growth in production, the overall consequence of this is a sterilisation of wealth which cannot usefully serve the valorisation of capital.[8]

Among the sales made by capitalism, the part which can be devoted to the accumulation of capital, and which thus participates in its real enrichment, correspond to sales realised through trade with extra-capitalist markets (internal or external). This is effectively the only way of permitting capitalism to avoid finding itself in a situation where "capitalists are exchanging among themselves and consuming their own production", which, as Marx said "does not at all permit the valorisation of capital".[9]

In their article in International Review n° 138, comrades Salome and Ferdinand come back to this subject. Here they make a precision, a perfectly appropriate one in our view, regarding what they see as the framework of this debate: "One might reply that such an increase in the size of the market is not enough to realise the whole of the surplus value necessary for accumulation. This is true in general and in the long term. Those of us who defend the ‘Keynesian-Fordist' thesis do not think that we have discovered a solution to capitalism's inherent contradictions, which could be endlessly repeated".

They then illustrate via a schema (based on those used by Marx in the second volume of Capital to present the problem of enlarged reproduction) how accumulation can continue despite the fact that a part of the surplus value is deliberately returned to the workers in the form of wage increases. From their point of view, the same underlying logic explains why an extra-capitalist market is not indispensible to the development of capitalism: "if the conditions are such as those assumed in the schemas, and if we accept the consequences (conditions and consequences which can be analysed separately), then a government which controls the entire economy can theoretically organise it in such a way that accumulation functions according to the schema"

For the comrades, the balance sheet of this redistribution of surplus value, even if it slows accumulation down, is nevertheless positive, since it makes it possible to enlarge the internal market: "If this profit is high enough, then the capitalists can increase wages without losing all the increase in extracted surplus value...The only ‘damaging' effect of this ‘waste of surplus value' is that the increase in capital's organic composition is less frenetic than it would otherwise have been".

We agree with the observation the comrades make regarding the effects of the "waste of surplus value". But on this subject they also say: "we cannot assert that this ‘waste of surplus value' plays no part in the process of accumulation. On the contrary this distribution of profit obtained through the increase in productivity plays a complete part in accumulation". It is clear, as the comrades themselves recognise, that the waste in question does not participate in the process of accumulation through the injection of capital into the process of production. Indeed it diverts capital which could have been accumulated away from the capitalist goal of accumulation. There is no doubt a momentary usefulness in this for the bourgeoisie, since it allows it to artificially maintain, or even increase, a certain level of economic activity. It thus postpones the problem of the lack of sufficient markets for capitalist production. This is the function of Keynesian measures; but, once again, this does not participate in the process of accumulation. Rather it participates in the process of production in the conditions of the decadence of capitalism, when this system, more and more unable to function "normally", has to multiply unproductive expenses in order to keep economic activity going. This waste is added on to the already enormous amount of waste made up of military spending or the cost of keeping society under control. Motivated by the necessity to create an artificial internal market, it is an expense equally as irrational and unproductive as the last two.

While Keynesian measures did allow for a very important growth in GNP in the main industrial countries during the 50s and 60s, thus giving the illusion of a lasting return to the prosperity of the ascendant phase of capitalism, the wealth really created during this period grew at a rhythm that was necessarily much more modest since a significant part of the growth of GNP was made up of unproductive expenses.[10]

To finish this part, we will examine another implication of the comrades' reasoning, which holds that "at this level there is no necessity for extra-capitalist markets". Contrary to what the comrades announce, we have not found here the least new argument putting into question the necessity for a buyer outside capitalist relations of production. The schema that they put forward of is that of a "government which controls the entire economy (and so) can theoretically organise it" in such a way as to allow the enlargement of production (through the increase in the means of production and of the means of consumption), without having recourse to an external buyer and by paying the workers more than is necessary for the social cost of reproducing their labour power. Very good, but this does not represent enlarged accumulation as capitalism practises it. More precisely, enlarged accumulation could not be practised in this way under capitalism whatever the level of state control over society, and this is true whether or not the workers receive extra wages.

The explanation given by Rosa Luxemburg for why this is impossible, in her description of the infinite merry-go-round implied in the enlarged reproduction schemas (elaborated by Marx in Volume Two of Capital), refers to the concrete conditions of capitalist production. "According to Mark's diagram, Department I has the initiative: the process starts with the production of producer goods. And who requires these additional means of production? The diagram answers that Department II needs them in order to produce means of consumption in increased quantities. Well then, who requires these additional consumer goods? Department I, of course - replies the diagram - because it now employs a greater number of workers. We are plainly running in circles. From the capitalist point of view it is absurd to produce more consumer goods merely in order to maintain more workers, and to, turn out more means of production merely to keep this surplus of workers occupied."[11]

At this stage in our reflection it would be opportune to examine a remark made by the comrades: "If there were no credit, and if it were necessary to realise the whole of each year's production in money form then yes, an outside purchaser would be necessary for capitalist production. But this is not the case".

We agree with the comrades that it is not necessary for an external buyer to intervene in each cycle of production, as long as credit exists. This said, it doesn't eliminate the problem but simply extends it in time, ensuring that it is posed less often but at each step in a more significant way.[12] Once an external buyer is present, for example after 10 cycles of accumulation involving the cooperation of sectors one and two, and he buys the means of production or consumption needed to reimburse the debts contracted during those ten cycle of accumulation, then all goes well for capitalism. But if in the final instance there is no external buyer, the debts accumulated can never be reimbursed, or only at the price of new loans. Debt then swells inevitably and immeasurably until the outbreak of a new crisis which merely has the effect of increasing the spiral of debt. It is exactly this process that we have been seeing with our own eyes, in an increasingly serious manner, since the end of the 1960s.

Redistributing part of the extracted surplus value in the form of wage increases only, in the end, increases the cost of labour power. But this in no way eliminates the problem of the endless merry-go-round pointed out by Rosa Luxemburg. In a world made up only of capitalists and workers, there is no answer to the question which Marx kept posing in Volume Two of Capital "but what is the source of the money needed to pay for the increase both in means of production and means of consumption?" In another passage in The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg takes up this problem and poses it in a very simple way:   "Part of the surplus value is consumed by the capitalist class itself in form of consumer goods, the money exchanged for these being retained in the capitalists' pockets. But who can buy the products incorporating the other, the capitalised part of the surplus value? Partly the capitalists themselves - the diagram answers - who need new means of production for the purpose of expanding production, and partly the new workers who will be needed to work these new means of production. But that implies a previous capitalist incentive to enlarge production; if new workers are set to work with new means of production, there must have been a new demand for the products which are to be turned out... Where does the money for realising the surplus value come from if there is accumulation, i.e. not consumption but capitalisation of part of the surplus value?"[13] In fact, Marx himself provided a response to this question by pointing to "foreign markets".[14]

According to Luxemburg, bringing in a buyer who is outside capitalist relations of production resolves the problem of the possibility of accumulation. This also resolves the other contradiction in Marx's schemas that results from the difference in rhythm in the evolution of the organic composition of capital in the two sections (means of production and means of consumption).[15] In their text the two comrades come back to this contradiction noted by Rosa Luxemburg: "this distribution of profit obtained through the increase in productivity plays a complete part in accumulation. Not only that, it attenuates the problem identified by Luxemburg in Chapter 25 of The Accumulation of Capital, where she insists that with a tendency towards an ever-increasing organic composition of capital, the exchange between the two main sectors of capitalist production (production of the means of production on the one hand, and of the means of consumption on the other) becomes impossible in the long term". In this regard the comrades make the following comment: "Sternberg considers this point of made by Luxemburg is the most important ‘of all those that have been carefully avoided by those who criticise Luxemburg'. (Sternberg, El imperialismo)." Here again we don't share the position of the comrades, nor that of Sternberg, which doesn't really correspond to the way Rosa Luxemburg posed the problem.

For Luxemburg, this "contradiction" is resolved in society by placing "ever increasing portions of the surplus value earmarked for accumulation in Department I rather than in Department II. Both departments being only branches of the same social production - supplementary enterprises, if you like, of the "aggregate capitalist" - such a progressive transfer, for technical reasons, from one department to the other of a part of the accumulated surplus value would be wholly feasible, especially as it corresponds to the actual practice of capital. Yet this assumption is possible only so long as we envisage the surplus value earmarked for capitalisation purely in terms of value."[16] This presupposes the existence of "external buyers" regularly intervening in the successive cycles of accumulation.

In fact, while such a "contradiction" contains the risk of making exchange between the two sectors of production impossible, it is essentially in the abstract world of the schemas of enlarged reproduction, as soon as an "external buyer" is taken out of the equation:

"The adjustments we have tried out on Marx's diagram are merely meant to illustrate that technical progress, as he himself admits, must be accompanied by a relative growth of constant as against variable capital. Hence the necessity for a continuous revision of the ratio in which capitalised surplus value should be allotted to c and v respectively. In Marx's diagram, however, the capitalists are in no position to make these allocations at will, since the material form of their surplus value predetermines the forms of capitalisation. Since, according to Marx's assumption, all expansion of production proceeds exclusively by means of its own, capitalistically produced means of production."[17]

In fact we think that the comrades have never been convinced by Rosa Luxemburg's demonstration of the necessity of an outside buyer to permit capital to accumulate (or, if not, a resort to credit which is however non-reimbursable). On the other hand, we have not identified the way in which the objections they put forward, based on the arguments of Sternberg (who we also have good reasons to think did not really assimilate the essentials of Luxemburg's theory of accumulation[18]) actually put into the question the cardinal positions of this theory.

As we have already underlined in previous contributions, the fact that extra wages given to the workers do not serve to augment either constant capital or variable capital is already enough to conclude that, from the standpoint of capitalist rationality, these expenses are a total waste. From the strictly economic point of view, the same effects would be produced by increasing the personal expenditure of the capitalists. But to arrive at this conclusion it is not necessary to look to Rosa Luxemburg.[19] This said, if we have judged it necessary to reply to the comrades' objections to the theory of accumulation defended by Rosa Luxemburg, it is because we consider that the debate on this question helps to provide us with a more solid basis for understanding not only the phenomenon of the Thirty Glorious Years but also the problem of overproduction, which is hard to deny lies at the heart of the current difficulties of capitalism.

The part played by extra-capitalist markets and debt in accumulation during the 1950s and 60s

Two factors are at the origin of the increase in GNP during this period:

• an augmentation of society's real wealth through the process of capital accumulation;
• a whole series of unproductive expenditure, which grew as a consequence of the development of state capitalism and in particular the Keynesian measures that were put in place.

In this section we are interested in the way that accumulation took place. It was the opening of the accelerated exploitation of extra-capitalist markets which was at the origin of the phase of very powerful expansion of capitalism during the second half of the 19th century, a phase brought to a halt by the First World War. The period of capitalist decadence was globally characterised by the relative insufficiency of these markets in relation to the ever-growing need for outlets for commodities. But should we conclude from this that extra-capitalist markets no longer played anything but a marginal role in accumulation in the period of capitalism's life opened by the war of 1914? If that was the case, then these markets could not explain, even partially, the accumulation carried out in the 1950s and 60s. This is the reply given by the comrades in their contribution: "For us, the mystery of the Reconstruction boom cannot be explained by the remaining extra-capitalist markets, since these have been insufficient for the requirements of expanded capital accumulation ever since World War I". For our part, we think on the contrary that these extra-capitalist markets played an important role in accumulation, especially at the beginning of the 1950s, progressively decreasing until the end of the 1960s. The more insufficient they became, the more debt took over the role of external buyer for the capitalists; but obviously this was debt of a "new quality", having no prospect of being reduced. In fact, we have to look back to this period to find the origin of the phenomenon of the explosion of world debt that we are seeing today, even if the value contribution of debt in the 1950s and 1960s, compared to today's debts, is rather derisory.

Extra-capitalist markets

Statistically, it was in 1953 that we saw the high point  in the portion of exports from the developed countries towards the colonial countries, evaluated as a percentage of world exports (see figure 1, where the curve of imports from colonial countries is supposed to be the same as those of exports from developed countries towards the colonial countries.). The rate of 29% attained at that point was thus an indication of the importance of exports towards the extra-capitalist markets in the colonial countries since, in this period, the colonial markets were still to a large extent extra-capitalist. After that, this percentage diminished to around 22% of exports in 1966. In reality, the shrinking of this percentage, relative to GNP and not exports, was much more rapid than this since during this period GNP grew more rapidly than exports.

Figure 1 Imports from colonial markets as a percentage of world imports (tables taken from the BNP Guide Statistique 1972. Source: P Bairoch, op cit, OECD Communiqué, November 1970)

To the exports in the direction of the extra-capitalist markets of the colonies, we should add the sales achieved in capitalist countries like France, Japan, Spain, etc to sectors like agriculture which were as yet only partly integrated into capitalist relations of production. Similarly, in Eastern Europe there was still an extra-capitalist market, since the outcome of the First World War had condemned capitalist expansion in these countries to stagnation.[20]

Thus if we take into account all the sales carried out by regions dominated by capitalist relations of production towards those still producing under pre-capitalist relations, whether these were external or internal markets, we can see that they were able to support an important part of the real growth that took place during the Thirty Glorious Years, at least at the beginning of that period. In the final part of this article we will come back to the appreciation of the level of saturation of markets at the time capitalism entered into its period of decadence, in order to characterise this more precisely.

Debt

Right at the beginning of our internal debate, those who put forward the Keynesian-Fordist thesis opposed our hypothesis that debt played a major role in supporting demand during the 1950s and 60s, arguing that "total debt practically did not increase during the period 1945-1980. It was only in response to the crisis that it exploded. Debt can therefore not explain the vigorous post-war growth" The whole question is to know what lies behind this "practically did not" and whether, despite everything, this was enough to complete the process of accumulation alongside the extra-capitalist markets.

It is quite difficult to find statistical data for the evolution of world debt during the 1950s and 60s for most countries, except for the US.

We do have figures for the evolution of the total debt and of the American GNP, year by year, between 1950 and 1969. Studying this data (figure 2) should enable us to reply to the following question: is it possible that, each year, the growth of debt was sufficient to cope with the part of the augmentation of GNP which did not correspond to sales directed towards extra-capitalist markets? As we have already said, as soon as these markets are no longer available, it's debt that plays the role of buyer outside the capitalist relations of production.[21]

Year	49	50	51	52	53	54	55	56	57	58	59	60	61	62	63	64	65	66	67	68	69
GNP	257	285	328	346	365	365	398	419	441	447	484	504	520	560	591	632	685	750	794	866	932
Debt	446	486	519	550	582	606	666	698	728	770	833	874	930	996	1071	1152	1244	1341	1435	1567	1699
%annual Debt/GNP		171	158	159	160	166	167	167	165	172	172	174	179	178	181	182	182	179	181	181	182
%over  the period Δ Debt /ΔGNP	185%
Δ annual GNP		28	44	17	19	0	33	21	22	6	36	20	16	40	30	42	53	65	44	72	67
Δ annual Debt		40	33	31	31	24	60	33	30	41	63	41	56	66	75	81	93	97	94	132	132
(Δ annual Debt- Δ annual GNP)		12	-11	14	12	24	27	11	8	35	27	21	40	26	45	39	40	32	50	60	65

Figure 2 Comparative evolution of US GNP and debt between 1950 and 1960[22] (Source (of GNP and debt): Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/scb/page/6870 [11] https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/scb/page/6870/1615/download/6870.pdf [12]

 

Year	50	55	60	65	70
%annual Debt/GNP	22	39	47	67	75

Figure 3 Evolution of debt in West Germany between 1950 and 1970. Source: Survey of Current Business (07/1975) - Monthly Review (vol 22, no.4, 09/190, p 6)

The increase in the value of debt as a percentage of the increase in the value of GNP is, for the period in question, 18%. In other words, the increase in the value of debt is almost double the increase in GNP over 20 years. In fact, this result shows that the evolution of debt in the USA was such that, overall during this period, it could on its own have ensured the growth in GNP in the US (and even play a part in the growth of other countries) without the need to have recourse to sales on extra-capitalist markets. Furthermore, we can see that each year, with the exception of 1951, the increase in debt is superior to that of GNP (it was only in 1951 that the difference between the increase in debt and the growth in GNP was negative). This means that, for all of these years except one, it is debt which took charge of the augmentation of GNP. This was more than was necessary given the contribution that extra-capitalist markets could still make at the time.

The conclusion from this regarding the US is the following: the theoretical analysis which holds that the resort to credit took over from sales to extra-capitalist markets in order to allow accumulation to take place is not refuted by the real evolution of debt in these countries. And while such a conclusion cannot be automatically generalised to all the industrial countries, the fact that it concerns the world's biggest economic power does confer a certain universality on it, and this is confirmed by the case of West Germany. With regard to the latter, we do dispose of statistics on the evolution of debt in relation to GNP (figure 3) which illustrate the same tendency.

What are the implications for our analysis of decadence?

What was the level of the saturation of markets in 1914?

The First World War broke out in the midst of a phase of prosperity for the world capitalist economy. It was not preceded by any open economic crisis; but still, it was the growing imbalance between the development of the productive forces and the relations of production which lay at the origin of the world conflict and, along with it, the entry of capitalism into its phase of decadence, The development of this system had been conditioned by the conquest of extra-capitalist markets, and the end of the colonial and economic conquest of the world by the great capitalist metropolises led the latter into a confrontation over their respective markets.  

Contrary to the interpretation by comrades Salome and Ferdinand, such a situation does not imply that "the extra-capitalist markets ...have since the First World War been insufficient with regard to the necessities of enlarged accumulation reached by capitalism" If that had been the case, the crisis would have manifested itself at a purely economic level before 1914.

It was these characteristics of the period (imperialist rivalries around the remaining non-capitalist territories) which were expressed very precisely in the following passage from Luxemburg: "Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment. Still the largest part of the world in terms of geography...."[23] On several occasions Luxemburg came back to the state of the world during this period: "alongside the old capitalist countries there are still those even in Europe where peasant and artisan production is still strongly predominant, like Russia, the Balkans, Scandinavia and Spain. And finally, there are huge continents besides capitalist Europe and North America, where capitalist production has only scattered roots, and apart from that the people of these continents have all sorts of economic systems, from the primitive communist to the feudal, peasantry and artisan."[24]

In fact, "The world war, while ultimately a product of the system's economic contradictions, had broken out before these contradictions could reach their full import at a 'purely' economic level. The crisis of 1929 was thus the first global economic crisis of the decadent period."[25]

If 1929 was the first significant manifestation, during the period of decadence, of the insufficiency of extra-capitalist markets, does this mean that after that date it was no longer possible for them to play any significant role in capitalist prosperity?

In the ten years that preceded 1929, it had not been possible to "dry up" the vast pre-capitalist zones which existed around the world in 1914: this was a period which was not marked by intensive economic activity on a world scale. Similarly, during the 1930s and a good part of the 1940s, the economy had slowed down. This is why the crisis of 1929, while revealing the limits of the extra-capitalist markets which had been opened up at this point, did not mark the end of any possibility of them playing a role in the accumulation of capital.

The exploitation of a virgin extra-capitalist market, or the better exploitation of an old one, depends to a large extent on factors such as the productivity of labour in the capitalist heartlands, which determines the competitiveness of the commodities they produce, and the means of transport available to capital to ensure the circulation of commodities. These factors constitute the motor of the expansion of capitalism around the world, as was already pointed out in The Communist Manifesto.[26] Furthermore, the process of decolonisation, by relieving trade of the burden of maintaining an apparatus of colonial domination, made certain extra-capitalist markets much more profitable.

The cycle "crisis-war-reconstruction-new crisis" is put into question

Some time ago the ICC corrected the false interpretation that the First World War was the consequence of an open economic crisis. As we have seen, the cause and effect relationship between crisis and war has to be considered by seeing the term crisis in broad terms, as a crisis of the relations of production.

As for the sequence "war-reconstruction-new crisis", we have also seen that it was not able to take account of the prosperity of the 1950s and 60s, which cannot be attributed to the post Second World War reconstruction. It's the same regarding the revival that took place after the First World War, when capitalism re-connected with the pre-war dynamic based on the exploitation of extra-capitalist markets, but on a much smaller scale given the effects of the destruction brought about by the war. There is indeed a process of reconstruction after war, but far from facilitating accumulation, it is part of the faux frais needed to get the economy going again.

And since 1967, when capitalism once again entered into a period of economic turbulence, crises have come one after the other and capitalism has ravaged the planet by multiplying imperialist conflicts without at all creating the conditions for a reconstruction that is synonymous with a return to prosperity, even in a limited and momentary sense.

As the ICC has shown, the entry into decadence did not mean the end of accumulation as the continuation of growth between 1914 and today has shown, although overall it has taken place at a rhythm inferior to the most rapid phases of the ascendant period (most of the second half of the19th century until 1914). This continued accumulation was based on the exploitation of extra-capitalist markets until the point where they were exhausted. It was then non-reimbursable debt which took up the baton, while at the same time piling up increasingly insurmountable contradictions.

Thus, and contrary to what's implied by the formula "crisis-war-reconstruction-new crisis", the mechanism of destruction/reconstruction was not what enabled the bourgeoisie to prolong capitalism's life, neither after the First World War nor the Second. The main instruments of such an enterprise, Keynesianism and above all debt, while having an immediate effect by postponing the impact of overproduction, are by no means a miraculous answer. The most striking proof of this is the abandonment of Keynesian measures in the 1980s and the present impasse of generalised, bottomless debt. 

Silvio, 1st Quarter, 2010.

 

 

---

 

[1]. Faced with the crisis, there is no lack of voices on the "left" (and even for a good part of the right these days) calling for a return to Keynesian measures, as can be seen from the following passage taken from a working document by Jacques Gouverneur, a teacher at the Catholic University of Louvin in Belgium. As the reader can see, the solution he puts forward involves making use of increases in productivity to install Keynesian measures and alternative policies...rather like the ones that were advocated by the left of capital in response to the aggravation of the economic situation at the end of the 1960s, with the aim of mystifying the working class about the possibility of reforming the system. "To get out of the crisis and solve the problem of unemployment, should we reduce - or, on the contrary should we increase - wages, social security benefits (unemployment pay, pensions, health benefits, family allowances) public spending (education, culture, public works...)? In other words: should we carry on with restrictive policies inspired by neo-liberalism (as we have done since the beginning of the 1980s) or should we on the contrary advocate a return to the expansive policies, inspired by Keynesianism, and applied during the period of growth between 1945 and 1975? In other words: can enterprises simultaneously increase their profits and their outlets? For this two conditions are necessary. The first resides in a general increase in productivity, in the sense that with the same number of workers (or inhabitants) the economy produces a greater volume of goods and services. To use an image, an increase in productivity over a given period...enlarges the size of the "cake" produced, increases the number of slices to be given out. In a period when productivity increases, the establishment of Keynesian measures is the second condition for enterprises to have at their disposal bigger profits and wider outlets...The perpetuation of neo-liberal policies will multiply social dramas and will lead into a major economic contradiction: it accentuates the divorce between the global growth of profits and the global growth of outlets. But it does favour enterprises and the dominant groups: the latter will continue to exert effective pressure on the public authorities (national or supranational) in order to prolong these pernicious policies. The return to Keynesian policies presupposes a change in the current balance of forces: it will not however be enough to resolve the economic and social problems highlighted by the structural crisis of the capitalist system. The solution to these problems demands alternative policies: an increase in public taxes (essentially on profits) in order to finance socially useful production, reduction of working time in order to develop levels of employment and free time, a sliding composition of wages in order to promote solidarity" https://www.capitalisme-et-crise.info/telechargements/pdf/FR_JG_Quelles_... [13] (our emphasis).

[2]. The presentation of this debate and of the three main positions involved can be found in the article "ICC internal debate: The causes of the post-war economic boom" in IR n° 133; we then published the following articles: "The origins, dynamics, and limits of Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism" in IR n° 135; "The bases of capitalist accumulation" and "War economy and state capitalism" in IR n° 136; "In defence of the "Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism" thesis  (reply to Silvio and Jens)" in IR n° 138.

[3]. "In defence of the "Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism" thesis  (reply to Silvio and Jens)" in IR n° 138.

[4]. If the present contribution doesn't look into Salome and Ferdinand's response to the war economy and state capitalism thesis, this is because we see the discussion raised by the latter as being less of a priority, though still necessary to come back to. This is because this thesis is not first and foremost determined by a particular conception of the process of accumulation but more by the geopolitical conditions in which accumulation takes place.

[5]. "War, militarism and imperialist blocs in the decadence of capitalism", International Review n° 52, cited in the article which opened up this debate in IR n° 133. '

[6]. See  "The decadence of capitalism: the mortal contradictions of bourgeois society" in IR n° 139

[7]. "Origins, dynamic and limits of Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism", IR n° 135

[8]. See "The bases of capitalist accumulation" in IR n° 136

[9]. See the section on the extra-capitalist markets and debt thesis in "The causes of the post-1945 economic boom" in IR n° 133. The references in Marx are from Capital Vol. 3, part III, "The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall", chapter XV, "Exposition of the internal contradictions of the law", 3, "Excess capital and excess population".

[10]. On this point see the section on extra-capitalist markets and debt in the article in IR n° 133.

[11]. The Accumulation of Capital, chapter 7, "Analysis of Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction".

[12]. It is undeniable that credit plays a regulating role and makes it possible to attenuate the need for extra-capitalist markets during each cycle. But it does not at all do away with the basic problem, which can be looked at, as Rosa Luxemburg puts it, through the study of an abstract cycle resulting from the elementary cycles of various capitals: "The characteristic feature of enlarged reproduction of the aggregate social capital - just as in our previous assumption of simple reproduction - is the reproduction of individual capitals, since production as a whole, whether regarded as simple or as enlarged production, can in fact only occur in the form of innumerable independent movements of reproduction performed by private individual capitals" Accumulation of Capital, chapter 6. Similarly, it is obvious that only in certain of these cycles does an external buyer intervene

[13].  These two passages are from chapters 7 and 9.

[14]. This response can be found, among other places, in volume 3 of Capital: "How could there otherwise be a shortage of demand for the very commodities which the mass of the people lack, and how would it be possible for this demand to be sought abroad, in foreign markets, to pay the labourers at home the average amount of necessities of life? This is possible only because in this specific capitalist interrelation the surplus-product assumes a form in which its owner cannot offer it for consumption, unless it first reconverts itself into capital for him. If it is finally said that the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities among themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it". (Part III, "The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall", chapter XV, "Exposition of the internal contradictions of the law", 3, "Excess capital and excess population").

[15]. The rising organic composition of capital (i.e. the greater growth of constant capital in relation to variable capital) in the means of production sector is on average faster than in the means of consumption sector, given the technological characteristics of these two sectors.

[16]. Accumulation of Capital, "Contradictions within the diagram of enlarged reproduction".

[17]. Ibid

[18]. Despite the excellent illustrations and interpretations of the development of world capitalism which he produced, drawing from the theory of Rosa Luxemburg, in particular in The Conflict of the Century, we can nevertheless ask whether he really assimilated this theory in depth. Thus, in this same book, Sternberg analyses the crisis of the 1930s as a result of capitalism's inability during this period to synchronise the increase in production with that of consumption: "the attempt to synchronise, on the basis of the capitalist profit economy and without any major external expansion, on the one hand the growth in production and productivity, and on the other hand the increase in consumption, ended in failure. The crisis was the result of this failure" (p 344). This leads us to understand that such synchronisation is possible under capitalism and this is the beginning of an abandonment of the rigour and coherence of Rosa Luxemburg's theory. This is confirmed in Sternberg's study of the post- Second World War period, where he develops the idea that it is possible to transform society through nationalisations and to improve workers' living conditions. The following passage gives us a glimpse of this: "...the integral realisation of the Labour programme of 1945 was a great step towards the complete socialisation of the British economy, making it possible for further steps in the same direction to be taken more easily...During the first years after the war, the Labour government sought to carry out the mandate conferred on it by the people. Keeping strictly to the methods and means of traditional democracy, it brought in radical changes to the capitalist state, society and economy" (chapter headed "The world today", p 629). The aim here is not to make a radical critique of Sternberg's reformism. It is simply a question of showing that his reformist approach necessarily involved a considerable underestimation of the economic contradictions that assail capitalist society, an under-estimation that is hardly compatible with Rosa Luxemburg's theory as developed in The Accumulation of Capital   

[19]. As illustrated in our text "The bases of capitalist accumulation", which is based on the writings of Paul Mattick. For the latter, unlike Rosa Luxemburg, for accumulation to be possible, the intervention of  buyers outside capitalist relations of production is not necessary. 

[20]. The Conflict of the Century, III, "The stagnation of capitalism; the halt in capitalist expansion; the halt in the external expansion of capitalism".

[21]. We should not however forget that the function of debt is not only to create an artificial market.

[22]. % annual Debt/GNP = (Debt/GNP)*100;  % over the period  Δ Debt/ΔGNP = ((Debt in 1969 - Debt in 1949) / (GNP in 1969 - GNP in 1949))*100 ; Δ annual GNP = GNP in (n) - GNP in (n-1) ; Δ annual Debt for the year (n) = Debt for the year n - Debt for the year (n-1) 

[23]. The Accumulation of Capital, "Protective tariffs and accumulation", our emphases.

[24]. The Accumulation of Capital, an Anticritique, our emphases.

[25]. "Resolution on the international situation" 16th ICC Congress, International Review n° 122.

[26]. "The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate" (our emphasis).

In the first part of this article [17] ,[1] we looked at the controversy within the German trade union movement and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) that led to the creation of the Free Association of German Trade Unions (Freie Vereinigung Deutscher Gewerkschaften, FVDG), the organization that would be the precursor of German revolutionary syndicalism. This survey covered the period from the 1870s to 1903. The FVDG, founded in 1897, explicitly saw itself from then up until 1903, as a combative part of the Social Democratic trade union movement. It had no links with revolutionary syndicalism or anarchism, which were very active in other countries like France or Spain. In a very logical way and at the theoretical level, the FVDG defended the need for workers organised in unions to be involved not only in economic matters but in political ones too.

Owing to dispersion from the time of its birth under the anti-socialist laws and to disputes with the General Trade Unions Confederation, the FVDG was not able to develop sufficient internal agreement to wage a collective struggle. The IWW, an established revolutionary syndicalist organisation in the United States, was far ahead of the FVDG in centralising its activity. The preference for federalist dispersal, even if not theorised in the FVDG, remained a constant weakness of this organisation. Confronted with the appearance of the mass strike, the reluctance to centralise its combat would increasingly hinder the FVDG's political activity.

The discussion around the new forms of struggle that started with the appearance of the workers' mass strikes in the early years of the 20th century proved a big challenge to the FVDG. As a consequence, it began moving towards revolutionary syndicalism. As we will show in this article, this tendency would continue to strengthen up to the outbreak of the First World War.

The mass strike eclipses the old trade union spirit

At the start of the 20th century the growth of the mass strike was seen more and more to be a new form of the class struggle at the international level. With its spontaneous dynamic towards extension, going beyond the professional and trade divisions of the unions and raising political demands, the mass strike was quite different from the practices of the old class struggle unionism of 19th century, completely organised by the trade union apparatus, limited to sectoral and economic demands. The mass strikes, which sprang up across the world, also exhibited a working class vitality that effectively rendered obsolete strikes that were well prepared in advance and completely dependent on the state of the unions' strike funds.

Already in 1891, a strike of 125,000 workers had taken place in Belgium, and then in 1893 another of 250,000 workers. Then in 1896 and 1897 there were general strikes of textile workers in St. Petersburg in Russia. In 1900 it was the turn of miners in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and then, in 1902 and 1903, those in Austria and France. In 1902 there was a new mass strike in Belgium for universal suffrage and in 1903 it was the turn of railway workers in the Netherlands. In September 1904 there was a national strike wave in Italy. In 1903 and 1904 big strikes shook the whole of southern Russia.

At this time, Germany, despite the strengths of its powerful union traditions and its concentrated and organised working class, was not at the epicentre of the new phase of class struggle that was spreading in powerful waves. Nevertheless, the question of the mass strike was passionately debated within the ranks of the working class in Germany. The old notion of the unions "controlling the class struggle" so as not to disturb a sacrosanct "public order", came into direct conflict with the energy and the solidarity of the proletariat in the new mass struggles. As Arnold Roller wrote in 1905 during a struggle of miners in the Ruhr that involved 200,000 workers: "They [the unions] were constrained in having to turn strikes into a kind of peaceful demonstration, with a wait-and-see approach, with the possibility of getting some kind of concessions in recognition of our ‘reasonable behaviour'. The miners in the other coalfields organised in a similar spirit, in Saxony, Bavaria, etc., showing their solidarity in their support of the strike and, paradoxically, in working overtime to produce thousands of tons of extra coal - that would be shipped and used by industry in the service of Capital during the strike [...] While the workers in the Ruhr suffered from hunger, their representatives in Parliament negotiated and got promises legally of some improvements but only after there was a return to work. Of course, the German trade union leadership rejected the idea of putting strong pressure on the bosses by extending the strike across the whole coal industry."[2]

The celebrated "debate on the mass strike" in 1905/06 inside the SPD and the German trade unions was undoubtedly inspired to a large extent by the powerful mass strike of 1905 in Russia which surpassed everything that had gone before it in size and political dynamic.[3]

For the unions, the mass strikes were a direct challenge to their existence and historical function. Did it mean their role of organising the permanent economic defence of the working class was at an end? The mass strike of 1905 in Russia, a direct reaction to the appalling misery for the working class and peasantry caused by the Russo-Japanese war, had shown precisely that political questions like war and, ultimately, revolution, were now central to the workers' struggle. Issues like these went far beyond the limits of traditional union thinking. As Anton Pannekoek very clearly wrote: "Now this is entirely in harmony with the innermost character of trade unionism. Trade unionism is an action of the workers that does not go beyond the limit of capitalism. The aim is not to replace capitalism with another form of production, but to secure good living conditions within capitalism. Its character is not revolutionary, but conservative".[4] 

To blame the leaders of the powerful German unions for a lack of flexibility because they did not sympathise with the political form of struggle of the mass strike doesn't give the full picture. Their defensive attitude vis-à-vis the mass strike was a direct product of their nature and how the union organisations they represented saw their role, which meant they were unable to meet the new demands of the class struggle.

Hence, the political organisations and parties of the working class needed to develop an understanding of the nature of the new form of struggle the workers were engaged in with the mass strike. However, "the overwhelming majority of Social Democratic leaders still mouthed the axiom: the general strike is the general nonsense".[5] Unwilling to accept reality, they believed that the appearance of the mass strike was nothing but a clear and simple expression of the "general strike" that was advocated by the anarchists and the supporters of the former co-founder of Dutch Social Democracy, Domela Nieuwenhuis. A few decades previously, in his text The Bakuninists at work in 1873, Engels had, quite justifiably, called the vision of a general strike prepared behind the scenes with a written plan of insurrection, totally stupid. The old vision of the "general strike" was based on the idea that a simultaneous and general stoppage of work led by unions would weaken the power of the ruling class and bring it down within a few hours. In this sense, the leaders of the SPD and the unions justified their reservations and used Engels' words as an excuse to reject and ignore the opening up of the debate on the mass strikes called for by the Left around Rosa Luxemburg inside the SPD.

However, a closer examination of the false opposition between the "anarchist general strike" and the "day to day work of the unions", shows clearly that the old anarchist dream of a grandiose general economic strike and the conception of the main union federation were not in fact very far apart. In both these conceptions, it was exclusively the numbers involved in the struggle that mattered most and they brushed to one side the need to address the political questions that were now posed, at least potentially, by massive struggles.

Up to this point the FVDG had always supported workers' political activity. Would it be in a position to react to events?

The position of the FVDG on the mass strike

Prompted by the experiences of massive movements in Europe at the end of the 19th and the start of 20th century, in 1904 the FVDG began discussing the mass strike ahead of the Amsterdam Socialist Congress where this question was on the agenda. Within the ranks of the FVDG, where the first attempts at understanding the phenomenon of the mass strike began, the debate came up against a certain conception of union work. In its general view of how union work should be conducted, the FVDG didn't distinguish itself in any way at all from the main Social Democratic unions. However, its weak influence did not put it in a position to control the class struggle, and it was much more open to the question of the mass strike than the large trade unions.

Gustav Kessler, co-founder of the "Localist" current and political authority inside the FVDG, died in June 1904. In the FVDG leadership he had represented the strongest orientation towards Social Democracy. The highly heterogeneous nature of the FVDG, a federated union of tradesmen, had always left it tolerant of minority anarchist tendencies, like that around Andreas Kleinlein Platz. Kessler's death and the election of Fritz Kater to the head of the FVDG executive committee in the summer of 1904 would initiate a period of greater openness vis-à-vis revolutionary syndicalist ideas.

It was above all the French revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT, with its concept of the "general strike", which seemed to be able to find a response in part of the FVDG. Under Kessler's influence, the FVDG had until early 1904 refused to make official propaganda in support of the general strike. Reacting against this, the FVDG then asked itself whether different expressions of the recent mass strike across the world were or were not historical confirmation of the old and theatrical vision of the general strike.

Two documents reveal the FVDG's clearest understanding of the mass strike: the pamphlet published by Raphael Friedeberg in 1904, Parliamentarism and the general strike, and a resolution adopted in August of that year by the FVDG. The viewpoint of Friedeberg (he remained a member of the SPD until 1907) was very influential inside the union and in its subsequent thinking.[6]

Friedberg's pamphlet is devoted primarily to a correct and subtly formulated critique of the destructive and stultifying influence of parliamentarism as it was then practiced by the Social Democratic leadership: "Parliamentary methods, the overvaluation of parliamentarism, are too entrenched in the masses of the German proletariat. They are also too accepting of it, everything, any changes to social relations, has to come from legislation; all that anyone has to do is to place his socialist ballot paper in the box every two years (...) This is a very bad way of educating the proletariat. (...) I am willing to concede that parliamentary democracy has had an historical function to carry out in the historical formation of the proletariat, and it will have again." As can be seen, this rejection of parliamentarism was not a rejection in principle, but was only applicable to the current historical stage in which that form of propaganda had become totally ineffective for the proletariat.

Just as Rosa Luxemburg had done, he emphasised the emancipatory nature of mass strike for the proletariat: "The workers educate themselves through the strike. It gives them moral strength, gives them a sense of solidarity, a way of thinking and a proletarian awareness. The idea of the general strike gives unions a horizon just as broad as that given to it until now by the idea of political power of the movement." He also wrote about the ethical aspect to the struggle of the working class: "If workers want to overthrow the class State, if they want to build a new world order, they must be better than the strata they are fighting against, those they want to remove. This is why they must learn to reject everything that is base and vile in themselves, everything that is unethical. This is why the principle characteristic behind the idea of the general strike, is that of an ethical means of struggle."

What is noticeable about Friedeberg's text is the use of the term "general strike" even when he's talking about the actual political mass strike of the previous year.

Even if the spirit of Friedeberg's pamphlet is one of real indignation against the prevailing conservatism of the main union federation, something he shared with Luxemburg, he came to quite different conclusions:

He clearly rejected the tendency inside the FVDG to confront political questions: "we are not carrying out any political struggle and, therefore, we do not need any form of political struggle. Our struggle is economic and psychological."  This is a clear break with the previous position of the FVDG. By making an equation between "parliamentarianism" and "political struggle" he rejected the political dynamic expressed by the mass strike.

In addition, Friedeberg developed a non-materialist vision (albeit that of a very small minority inside the FVDG) of the class struggle based on a psychological concept and on the strategy of a "rejection of personality"- which he called "historic psyche". We can see here that he agreed specifically with some clearly anarchist ideas according to which it is the spirit of individual rebellion that is the engine of class struggle and not the collective development of class consciousness.

Although Friedeberg correctly poured scorn on the reformist social-democrat idea of the proletariat gradually taking state power, he tended to adopt the same kind of gradualist conception but from a syndicalist perspective: "In these last years alone the unions have increased in size by 21% and membership has risen to over a million. Since these things follow a pattern, we can say that in three or four years we will have two million members, and in ten years between three and four million. And when the idea of the general strike has penetrated the proletariat more deeply (...) it will call on between four and five million workers to stop work and then to eliminate the class State." In fact, the largest ever recruitment of the working class into the unions provided no better conditions for proletarian revolution but, on the contrary, was a barrier to it.

Behind the propaganda about a "pure non-violent means of struggle", Friedeberg also hugely underestimated the ruling class's capacity for unleashing brutal repression in a revolutionary situation: "What the general strike fundamentally represents is a way of struggling ethically. [...] What comes afterwards, when our adversaries are seeking retribution and we are having to defend ourselves legitimately, we cannot here foresee."

Friedeberg saw the mass strike essentially as confirmation of the old anarchist idea of the general strike. His greatest weakness was in not recognising that the mass strikes that were taking place could only be developed through the political activity of the working class. Breaking with the tradition of FVDG, which had hitherto continually warned against a purely economic struggle, he reduced the perspective of the mass strike solely to this aspect. The grass roots membership of the FVDG was not united behind the views of Friedeberg who represented a minority wing moving towards anarchism and leading the FVDG towards revolutionary syndicalism. However Friedeberg's positions were adopted for a short period by the FVDG. Friedeberg himself left the FVDG in 1907 to return to an anarchist community in Ascona.

The FVDG could not understand the mass strike by following the theories of Friedeberg. The revolutionary spirit that was developing, expressed by this new form of working class struggle, posed the question of a fusion of political and economic questions. The question of the general strike, which was once again the FVDG's prime concern, was a step backwards in relation to the mass strike and a retreat from the political questions of the day.

However, despite all the confusions that Friedeberg's writing brought back to the surface, the debate within the FVDG did help to stir up the German workers' movement. He deserves some credit since, well before the brilliant and famous pamphlets on the mass strike of 1905 (like those of Luxemburg and Trotsky) were written, he did raise this question inside the SPD.

It is hardly surprising that the FVDG (which was itself an amalgam of various unions) still continued at that time to see trade unions as revolutionary organs. It would have been a step forward if the FVDG had begun to question its own form of organisation. On the other hand, even Rosa Luxemburg still counted a lot on the unions, which she described in many countries (for example in Russia) as a direct product of the mass strike. It took almost five years before Trotsky's book, 1905, which chronicled the experience of workers' councils as revolutionary organs replacing the unions, was published.[7] What remained a constant in the FVDG, and the organisations that succeeded it, was their blindness vis-à-vis the workers' councils and a deep-seated attachment to the unions as revolutionary organs. This weakness would prove fatal in the revolutionary uprising in Germany after the war.

Secret negotiations opposing the mass strike and the debate in Mannheim in 1906

Inside the SPD, a fight broke out over the question of whether the mass strike should be discussed at the Party Congress in 1906. The Party leadership tried feverishly to rule out discussing the most important manifestation of class struggle claiming there was little interest in the topic. The SPD Congress in Jena in 1905 only took a position on its form in a resolution declaring that the mass strike was "a measure worth promoting in the future". It reduced the mass strike to only being an ultimate means of defence against a possible withdrawal of the right to vote. The majority of the SPD leadership characterised the lessons drawn from the mass strike in Russia by Rosa Luxemburg as "revolutionary romanticism" and declared that they had no possible application in Germany.

It is not surprising that shortly after the Jena Congress in February 1906, the SPD leadership and the central committee of the major unions agreed in secret negotiations to work together to prevent mass strikes. The arrangement was nonetheless uncovered. In its newspaper Die Einigkeit (Unity) the FVDG published sections of the minutes of the meeting that had fallen into its hands. Among other things, they read: "The central committee of the Party has no intention of spreading the political general strike, but will try, as far as possible, to prevent it". Its publication produced, "the indignation of villains caught red-handed" inside the SPD leadership and meant that they had to put the debate on the mass strike back on the agenda of the Party Congress on 22nd and 23rd September 1906, whether they liked it or not.

Bebel's first words in his inaugural speech to the Congress in Mannheim reflected the cowardice and ignorance of the party leadership, who felt highly inconvenienced by having to confront a question they had in fact hoped to avoid: "When we left the Jena Congress last year, nobody foresaw that we would have to discuss the mass strike again this year. (...) Because of the gross indiscretion of Die Einigkeit in Berlin, we are now facing a big discussion."[8] To overcome the embarrassment of the secret talks, brought into the open by Die Einigkeit, Bebel simply resorted to mocking the FVDG and Friedeberg's contribution: "No-one can understand how it is possible for the unions organised locally to achieve anything in the context of these developments and with the power of the employer class vis-à-vis the working class. In any case, the party leadership and the great majority of the party believe that local unions are totally powerless in carrying out their duties for the working class".[9] Who, eight years later, faced with the vote for war credits, was "Totally powerless to assume its duties for the working class"? Precisely the leadership of the same SPD! The FVDG, by contrast, faced with the question of war in 1914, was able to take a proletarian position.

During the very poor debate on the mass strike that took place at the Congress, instead of any political arguments, recriminations and bureaucratic justifications were served up, to explain why Party members should stick to the resolution on the mass strike made the previous year at the Jena Congress, or the one at the trade unions' Congress in May 1906, which clearly rejected the mass strike. The discussion revolved around the proposal of Bebel and Legien to give an ultimatum to Party members organised inside the FVDG that they return to the main union federation, under threat of exclusion from the Party should they refuse.

Rather than dealing with the political lessons of victorious mass strikes, or discussing Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet published in the previous week, the debate was reduced to a deplorable quarrel over legal niceties!

While the invited delegate of the FVDG, the Berlin editor of Die Einigkeit, was ridiculed, Rosa Luxemburg strongly objected to plans drawn up to sideline the key debate on the mass strike with formal and purely disciplinary measures: "Furthermore, I think it's irresponsible the way the Party wields a big stick against a group of determined trade unionists, and that we have to endorse the quarrel and discord within the party. There are still undoubtedly a great number of good comrades to be found in the local organisations and it would be irresponsible if, in providing direct help to the unions with this matter, we introduce discord in our own ranks. We respect the opinion that the Localists must not push the dispute in the unions to the level of hindering the union organisation; but in the name of sacrosanct equal rights, we must still at least recognise the same thing with regard the Party. If we directly exclude anarcho-socialists from the Party, as the central committee of the Party proposes, we will be in a very sad state: we will lose our drive and energy since it's a matter of imposing restrictions on the left of our party, while leaving the doors wide open as before on the right.

"Von Elm has told us what Die Einigkeit or a conference of Local organisations would say, as an illustration of what he calls anarchist absurdity: ‘The general strike is the only means of truly revolutionary class struggle'. Of course, this is nonsense and nothing but. However, dear friends, this is no further away from social democratic tactics and principles than the proposals of David showing us that the only means of struggle for social democracy is the legal parliamentary road. We are told that the Localists, the anarcho-socialists, are gradually undermining social democratic principles with their agitation. But when a member of the central committee, like Bringmann, declares himself to be against class struggle in principle as he did at your conference in February, he is also attacking the principles of the grass roots members of social democracy."[10]

As she did at the Hamburg Party Congress in 1900, in the debate on trade unions, Luxemburg opposed the attempts to use the weaknesses of the FVDG as a convenient pretext to suppress key questions. She saw that the greatest danger did not come from a minority union like the FVDG moving towards revolutionary syndicalism, whose militants were often aligned with the left wing inside the SPD, but rather from the centre and the right of the Party.

The FVDG split and the final break with the SPD in 1908

To the leaderships of the reformist SPD and the main union federation, the FVDG in no way represented the same danger as the revolutionary wing of the Social Democracy around Liebknecht and Luxemburg. However, the revolutionary wing could not take too much account of the FVDG simply due to the fact that it constituted a small minority and did not really acknowledge the lessons of mass strikes. The international appearance of powerful revolutionary syndicalist movements from 1905, like the IWW in the United States, did make revolutionary syndicalist tendencies a potential danger to reformism.

The strategy, unveiled in 1906 at the Mannheim Party Congress, to pressurise members of the FVDG to join the main union federation, continued for months. On the one hand, some experienced and militant members of the Local unions were offered paid positions in the bureaucracies of the Social Democratic unions. On the other hand, for the SPD Congress that would be held in 1908 in Nuremberg there appeared another motion on the incompatibility of dual SPD and FVDG affiliation.

But the FVDG would fail above all because of its ambiguities and because of the differences of orientations within its professional associations. At the time when it was important to understand the political mass strike and the emergence of workers' councils, it broke up following an argument over whether to rejoin the main union federation or to move towards revolutionary syndicalism, subordinating political questions to economic ones. At its Extraordinary Congress in January 1908, the FVDG would examine a motion from the stonemasons asking the unions to dissolve the FVDG into the main union federation. Although this motion was rejected, it heralded a split in the FVDG and thus the end of the long history of immense union opposition based on the proletarian tradition of social democracy. More than a third of its members left the FVDG immediately to join the main union federation. The number of members fell from 20,000 to less than 7,000 in 1910.

It was easy therefore for the leadership of social democracy, in September 1908, to endorse the split within the FVDG at the Party Congress with a permanent ban on dual membership of the FVDG and SPD. After this, the remnants of the FVDG no longer posed a serious danger for Legien et al.

In the history of the birth of revolutionary syndicalism in Germany, the year 1908 thus marks the beginning of a new stage, with a change of direction towards revolutionary syndicalism, and this with less than half of the members of the FVDG remaining.

Towards revolutionary syndicalism

Since the FVDG from its birth had appeared as a union opposition movement firmly linked to social democracy, hence to a political organisation of the workers' movement, it was never characterised, before 1908, as revolutionary syndicalist. Indeed, revolutionary syndicalism does not simply mean a wildly enthusiastic commitment exclusively to trade union activities, but also the adoption of a conception that sees the union as the only form of organisation for overthrowing capitalism - a role that, by its nature as an organ of struggle for reforms, it has never been and will never be able to play.

The new programme of 1911, "What do the Localists want? Programme, goals and methods of the FVDG", indicated the direction it was taking and expressed its viewpoint as follows: "The struggle for the emancipation of the workers is mainly an economic struggle that the union, according to its nature as an organisation of producers, must carry out on all fronts. [...] The union (not the political party) is alone in its capacity to expand the economic power of the workers in the right direction..."[11]

In the preceding years, the big mass strikes were evidence of the spontaneous dynamic of the class struggle, and in 1903 the Bolsheviks abandoned the concept of the "mass party", while at the same time clarifying the need for organisations of revolutionary political minorities. However, the new programme of the FVDG, albeit with good will and while fighting against the old "dualism", started from false conclusions: "This is why we reject the harmful dualism (bipartition), as practiced by social democracy and its big trade unions. By this we mean the absurd division of workers' organisations into political and union branches. (...) Because we reject the parliamentary struggle and have replaced it with a direct political struggle through union methods and not for political power, but for social emancipation, any workers' political party, like Social Democracy loses all rationale."[12]

This new program showed itself to be totally blind to the historical emergence and revolutionary character of the workers' councils and took refuge in hopeful theorising of a new type of union as:

• an alternative to the (de facto) out-dated mass party;
• an alternative to large bureaucratic unions;
• an organ of revolution;
• and finally, an architect of the new society.

What a daunting task!

In the manner characteristic of revolutionary syndicalism, the FVDG defended a clear opposition to the bourgeois state and to the unbridled parliamentarism of the time. It correctly underlined the need for the struggle of the working class against war and militarism.

In the years preceding the First World War, the FVDG did not move closer to anarchism. The theories of Friedeberg having led it away from social democracy towards anarchism in 1904-07, although they were emblematic, did not signify a shift of the whole organisation towards anarchism. Instead, the forces strongly oriented towards revolutionary syndicalism gathered around Fritz Kater also feared the kind of "stewardship" on the part of the anarchists like that exerted by the SPD over the unions. In Die Einigkeit in August 1912, Kater again characterised anarchism as being "just as superfluous as any other political party."[13] It would be wrong to assume that it was the presence of known anarchists within it that led the FVDG to revolutionary syndicalism. Hostility towards political parties, born of the hard controversies within the SPD, was a common feature of all anarchist organisations in the years before the war. It is in no way the influence of the charismatic anarchist Rudolf Rocker in 1919 that introduced the hostility towards political parties within the organisation that succeeded the FVDG, the FAUD. Such a development had already clearly occurred. Rocker theorised the hostility of German revolutionary syndicalism to political parties much more clearly in the 1920s than was the case before the war.

The years before the outbreak of war in 1914 were marked for the FVDG by a withdrawal into itself. The big debates within the parent organisations were at an end. The split with the Confederation of affiliated trade unions had taken place in 1897. The break with the SPD was a good ten years later, in 1908.

Hence a curious situation came about, revealing the recurring paradox that revolutionary syndicalism comes up against: defining itself as a union wishing to have firm roots within the working class at large, the membership of the FVDG did, however, considerably reduce. Among its 7,000 or so members only a fraction were fully active. It was no longer a union! The remains of the FVDG formed propaganda circles for revolutionary syndicalist ideas instead, and had more of the character of a political group. But they didn't want to be a political organisation!

The vestiges of the FVDG remained - and for the working class this is absolutely key - on an internationalist terrain and was opposed, despite all their shortcomings, to the militarism and war of the bourgeoisie. The FVDG and its press were banned in August 1914, immediately after the declaration of war, and many of its still-active members imprisoned.

In a future article, we will examine the role of revolutionary syndicalists in Germany up until 1923, a period covering the First World War, the German revolution and the international revolutionary wave.

Mario, 6/11/2009

 

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[1]. "The birth of revolutionary syndicalism in the German workers' movement", International Review n°.137

[2]. Arnold Roller (Siegfried Nacht), Die direkte Aktion, 1912. (our translation). Roller personifies what was until then a very small anarchist wing inside the FVDG.

[3]. See International Review n°s 90, 122, 123, 125 in English, Spanish and French.

[4]. Anton Pannekoek, "Trade Unionism [18] ", International Council Correspondence, n°. 2 - January 1936. Published in English under the pseudonym, John Harper.

[5]. Paul Frolich, Rosa Luxemburg, Her Life and Work, section on "The political mass strike", Monthly Review Press, p128.

[6]. Friedeberg didn't come from anarchism himself but was the local representative of the SPD and a leading member of the Berlin Social Democratic Party.

[7]. Trotsky initially wrote Our Revolution in 1907. Some of the chapters became the basis of his book, 1905, which was written in 1908/1909.

[8]. Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Mannheim, 23. bis 29. September 1906 (Verbal record of the debates at the congress of the Geman Social Democratic Party, Mannheim, 1906), page 227(Our translation).

[9]. Ibid, p.295. (Our translation).

[10]. Ibid, p.315 (Our translation).

[11]. Our translation.

[12]. Our translation.

[13]. See Dirk H. Müller, Gewerkschaftliche Versammlungsdemokratie und Arbeiterdelegierte vor 1918, p.191-198.

The aim of this series is to respond to a question posed by many comrades (readers and sympathisers), above all among the youngest: what are the workers' councils? In the first article of this series [26] ,[1] we saw how they appeared for the first time in history in the heat of the 1905 revolution in Russia and how the defeat of this revolution led to their disappearance. In this second part, we are going to see how they reappeared during the February 1917 revolution and how, under the domination of the old Menshevik and Social Revolutionary (SR) parties who betrayed the working class, they distanced themselves from the will and growing consciousness of the worker masses, becoming, in July 1917, a point of support for the counter-revolution.[2]

Why did the soviets disappear between 1905 and 1917?

Oskar Anweiler, in his work The Soviets,[3] underlined how numerous attempts took place to revive the soviets following the defeat of the revolution in December 1905. A workers' council thus appeared in Spring 1906 in St. Petersburg, which sent delegates to factories in order to push for the renewal of the soviet. A meeting, which regrouped 300 delegates in Summer 1906, came to nothing because of the difficulties in taking up the struggle again. This council wasted away little by little with the weakening of the mobilisation and definitively disappeared in spring 1907. In Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, Poltava, Ekaterinburg, Baku, Batoum, Sostoum and Kronstadt, councils of the unemployed, though more or less ephemeral, also appeared throughout 1906.

 Some soviets also appeared sporadically in 1906-07 in some industrial towns of the Urals. It was however in Moscow that the most serious attempt to set up a soviet took place. A strike broke out in July and quickly spread to numerous workers' concentrations. It rapidly mandated some 150 delegates who aimed to meet up, form an Executive Committee and launch appeals for the extension of struggles and the formation of soviets. Conditions however were not those of 1905 and the government, aware of the faint echo aroused by the mobilisation in Moscow, unleashed a violent repression which put an end to the strike and to any new soviet.

The soviets disappeared from the social scene until 1917. This disappearance surprises many comrades who ask how is it possible that the same workers who had participated with so much enthusiasm in the soviets of 1905 could have forgotten them? How do you understand why the "council" form, which had demonstrated its efficacy and its strength in 1905, disappeared as if by magic for just over a decade?

In order to answer this question, one cannot start off from the point of view of bourgeois democracy, a view that considers society as a sum of "free and sovereign" individuals, as "free" to set up councils as to participate in elections. If that were the case, how do you understand that millions of citizens who "had decided" to set up soviets in 1905 then "chose" to neglect this form of organisation for long years?

Such a point of view can't understand that that the working class is not a sum of "free and self-determined" individuals, but a class which can only express itself, act and organise when it affirms itself through its collective action in the struggle. This struggle is not the result of "individual decisions" but rather the dynamic product of a whole series of objective factors (the degradation of the conditions of existence and the general evolution of society), and of subjective factors (indignation, concern about the future, the experience of the struggle and the development of class consciousness animated by the intervention of revolutionaries). The action and organisation of the working class is a social, collective and historic process, which reveals an evolution in the balance of forces between the classes.

Further, this dynamic of class struggle must in its turn be put in the historic context that permits the birth of the soviets. During the historic period of capitalism's ascendency - and particularly during its "golden age" of 1873-1914 - the proletariat had been able to constitute great permanent mass organisations (particularly the trade unions) whose existence was one of the first conditions for undertaking successful struggles. In the historic period which opened at the beginning of the 20th century, that of the decadence of capitalism marked by the First World War, the general organisation of the working class was constructed in and through the struggle, disappearing with it if the latter was unable to go to the end, that's to say up to a revolutionary combat to destroy the bourgeois state.

In such conditions, the acquisitions of the struggles could no longer be reckoned in the manner of an accountant, as a sum of staggered gains consolidated year on year, nor by mass permanent organisation. These acquisitions were concretised by "abstract" gains (the evolution of consciousness, enrichment of the historic programme due to lessons from the struggle, perspectives for the future...) won in great moments of agitation which then disappear from the immediate understanding of the larger masses and retreat to the small world of minorities, thus giving the illusion of never having existed.

February 1917: the heat of the struggle gives rise to the soviets

Between 1905 and 1917, the soviets were thus reduced to no more than an "idea" orienting the reflection and also the political struggle of a handful of militants. The pragmatic method which only accords importance to what one can see and touch doesn't allow for the idea that the soviets contained an immense material power. In 1917, Trotsky wrote: "Without doubt the revolution's next new assault will bring in its wake everywhere the establishment of workers councils."[4] The great actors of the February revolution were effectively the soviets.

The revolutionary minorities, and more particularly the Bolsheviks after 1905, defended and propagated the idea of setting up soviets in order to push the struggle forward. These minorities kept alive the flame of the workers' councils in the collective memory of the working class. It was for this reason, with strikes breaking out in February, which rapidly took on great breadth, that there were numerous initiatives and appeals for the constitution of soviets. Anweiler underlines that "the idea took hold of re-establishing the soviet, both in the striking factories and among the revolutionary intelligentsia.  Eye-witnesses report that as early as February 24 spokesmen were elected in some factories to a projected soviet."[5] In other words, the idea of soviets, which for a long time had remained confined to some minorities, was largely taken in charge by the masses in struggle.

Secondly, the Bolshevik Party contributed significantly to the rise of the soviets. And it did so not by basing itself on a prior organisational schema of imposing a chain of intermediary organisations which would lead to the formation of soviets, but through a quite different contribution, as we will see, related to a hard political combat.

During the winter of 1915, when strikes began to break out above all in Petersburg, the liberal bourgeoisie contrived a plan to dragoon the workers into war production, proposing that in the factories a Workers' Group was elected within the committees of the war industry. The Mensheviks stood for this and, having obtained a large majority, tried to use the Workers' Group to put forward demands. They were proposing in fact, in the image of the unions in other European countries, to use a "workers' organisation" to sell the war effort.

The Bolsheviks opposed this proposal in October 1915 through the words of Lenin: "We oppose participation in war-industries commissions which further the imperialist, reactionary war"[6]. The Bolsheviks called for the election of strike committees and the Petersburg Party Committee proposed that "Representatives of factories and workshops, elected by proportional representation in all cities, should form an all-Russian soviet of workers' deputies".[7]

At first, the Mensheviks, with their electoral policy in favour of Workers' Groups, controlled the situation with an iron grip. The strikes of winter 1915 and the more numerous strikes of the second half of 1916 remained under the control of the Menshevik Workers' Groups but despite that, here and there, strike committees appeared. It was only in February that the seeds began to germinate.

The first attempt to set up a soviet took place during an improvised meeting held at the Tauride Palace on February 27. Those that participated were not representative; there were some elements of the Menshevik Party and the Workers' Group with some Bolshevik representatives and other independent elements. From this arose a very significant debate which put on the table two totally opposed options; the Mensheviks maintained that the meeting had to call itself the Provisional Soviet Committee; the Bolshevik Shliapnikov "opposed [this], arguing that this couldn't be done in the absence of representatives elected by the workers. He asked for their urgent convocation and the assembly agreed with him. It was decided to end the session and to launch summons to the main workers' concentrations and to the insurgent regiments."[8]

The proposal had dramatic effects. On the night of the 27th it began to spread to the workers' districts, the factories and the barracks. Workers and soldiers closely followed the development of events. The following day, numerous assemblies took place in the factories and barracks and, one after the other, they took the same decision; to set up a soviet and elect a delegate. In the afternoon the Tauride Palace was full from top to bottom with workers' and soldiers delegates. Sukhanov, in his Memoires,[9] describes the meeting that went on to make the historic decision to constitute the soviet: "when the session opened there were perhaps 250 deputies, but new groups endlessly entered the room."[10] He recalled how, when voting for the agenda, the session was interrupted by soldier's delegates who wanted to relay messages from the assemblies of their respective regiments. And one of them made the following summary: "The officers have disappeared. We no longer want to serve against the people, we are associating ourselves with our brother workers, all of us united to defend the cause of the people. We will give our lives for this cause. Our general assembly asked us to salute you". Sukhanov adds: "And with a voice full of emotion, in the middle of thunderous applause, the delegate added: Long Live the Revolution!"[11] The meeting, constantly interrupted by the arrival of new delegates who wanted to transmit the position of those that they represented, progressively confronted different questions: the formation of militias in the factories, protection against looting and the actions of Tsarist forces. One delegate proposed the creation of a "literary commission" to draw up an appeal addressed to the whole country, which was unanimously approved.[12] The arrival of a delegate from the Semionovski regiment - famous for its allegiance to the Tsar and its repressive role in 1905 - led to a new interruption. The delegate proclaimed: "Comrades and brothers, I bring to you salutations from all the men of the Semionovski regiment. Up to the last man, we have decided to join the people". This provoked "a current of enthusiasm which ran throughout the assembly" (Sukhanov). The assembly organised a "general staff of the insurrection" occupying all the strategic points of Petersburg.

The assembly of the soviet didn't take place in a void. The masses were mobilised. Sukhanov underlines the atmosphere  which surrounded the session: "The crowd was very compact; tens of thousands of men came there to salute the revolution. The rooms of the Palace could no longer contain so many men and, in front of the doors, the cordons of the Military Commission arrived in order to contain a more and more numerous crowd".[13]

March 1917: a gigantic network of soviets spreads throughout Russia

In 24 hours, the soviet was master of the situation. The triumph of the Petersburg insurrection provoked the extension of the revolution throughout the country: "The local workers and soldiers soviets throughout Russia were the backbone of the revolution."[14] How could such a gigantic extension happen that, in so little time, spread throughout the whole of the Russian territory? There were differences between the formation of the soviets in 1905 and in 1917. In 1905, the strikes broke out in January and successive waves of strikes unfolded without any massive organisation bar a few exceptions. The soviets were really constituted in October. In 1917 on the contrary, it was at the beginning of the struggle that the soviets were set up. The appeals of the Petersburg Soviet of February 28 fell on fertile soil. The impressive speed with which this soviet was set up was, by itself, indicative of the will to bring it into being that animated large layers of workers and soldiers.

Assemblies were held daily and didn't limit themselves to electing delegates to the soviet. It often happened that they were accompanied by a general assembly. Also and at the same time, workers' district soviets were set up. The soviet itself made such an appeal and, the same day, the workers of the combative Vyborg district, a proletarian area on the outskirts of Petersburg, took the lead in constituting a District Soviet and launched a very combative call for such soviets to be formed throughout the country. Workers in many other popular quarters followed their example in the ensuing days.

And in the same way factory assemblies constituted factory councils. The latter, although born out of the need for immediate demands and the organisation of work, didn't limit themselves to these aspects and became more and more politicised. Anweiler recognised that "In time the Petrograd factory committees achieved a solid organization that to some extent competed with the soviet of workers deputies. They united into borough councils and elected representatives to a central council, headed by an executive committee ... Because the committees represented the worker right at his place of work, their revolutionary role grew proportionately as the soviet consolidated into a permanent institution and lost touch with the masses."[15]

Thus, the formation of the soviets spread like wildfire. In Moscow "elections were held in the factories, and the soviet met for its first session, at which a three-man Executive Committee was elected. On the following day the workers soviet received its final form; ratios for representatives were set, deputies to the Petrograd soviet were elected, and formation of a new Provisional Government was approved." [16] "The revolution's triumphal march through Russia, leading in only a few days to collapse of the czarist government and its administrative machinery, was accompanied by a wave of revolutionary organisation among all levels of society, most strongly expressed in formation of soviets in al cities of the nation, from Finland to the pacific".[17]

Even if the soviets were concerned with local affairs, their main preoccupation was with general problems: the world war, economic chaos, the extension of the revolution to other countries, and they took measures to concretise these preoccupations. We should underline that the efforts to centralise the soviets came from "below" and not above. As we saw above, the Moscow Soviet decided to send delegates to Petersburg, considering it quite natural as it was the centre of the whole movement. Anweiler emphasises that "Workers and soldiers councils in other cities sent delegates to Petrograd or maintained permanent observers."[18] From mid-March, initiatives began to appear for a regional congress of soviets. In Moscow a conference of this nature took place on the 25th to the 27th with the participation of 70 workers' councils and 38 soldiers' councils. In the Donetz basin, there was a conference with the same characteristics which brought together 48 soviets. All these efforts culminated in the holding of a First All Russian Congress of Soviets which took place on the 29th March to the 3rd of April and regrouped delegates of 480 soviets.

The "organisational virus" spread to soldiers who, sick of war, deserted the battlefields, mutinied, expelled their officers and decided to return home. Contrary to 1905, where they practically never existed, soldiers' councils multiplied and proliferated in the regiments, armouries, naval bases and arsenals... The army was made up of a conglomeration of social classes, essentially peasants, the workers being a minority. Despite this heterogeneity, the majority of the soviets united around the proletariat. As the bourgeois historian and economist Tugan Baranovski noted: "it is not the army that has unleashed the insurrection, it's the workers. It wasn't the generals, but soldiers who went to the Duma of the Empire.[19] And the soldiers supported the workers, not at all to docilely comply with the injunctions of their officers, but... because they felt related by blood to the workers as a class of toilers like themselves."[20]

Soviet organisation progressively won ground, broadening out from May 1917 when the formation of peasant councils began to move these masses, for centuries used to being treated like beasts of burden. This was also a fundamental difference with 1905, where there were relatively few, mostly totally disorganised, uprisings. That all of Russia was covered by a gigantic network of councils is a historic fact of enormous significance. As Trotsky noted, "in all preceding revolutions, the workers, artisans and a certain number of students, fought on the barricades; some soldiers played their part; then, the well-to-do bourgeoisie, who had prudently observed events on the barricades through their windows, recovered power"[21], but this didn't happen this time. The masses stopped fighting "for the others" and fought for themselves through the councils. They applied themselves to all the business of economic, political, social and cultural life.

The worker masses were mobilised. The expression of this mobilisation was the soviets and, around them, a great network of soviet-type organisations (district councils, factory councils), a network that fed on itself and, in its turn, impulsed an impressive number of assemblies, meetings, debates and cultural activities that multiplied... Workers, soldiers, women and youth took up a feverish activity. They lived in a sort of permanent assembly. Work stopped to attend the factory assembly, the town or district soviet, gatherings, meetings and demonstrations. It's significant that after the strike of February, there were practically no strikes except at particular moments and in one-off or local situations. Contrary to a limited vision of the struggle, restricted to that of the strike, the absence of the latter did not mean a demobilisation. The workers were in permanent struggle, but the class struggle, as Engels said, constitutes a unity formed by the economic, political and ideological struggle. And the worker masses were involved in simultaneously taking on these three dimensions of their combat. With massive actions, demonstrations, gatherings, debates, the circulation of books and papers... the worker masses of Russia had taken their own destiny in hand and found in themselves inexhaustible reserves of thought, initiative, and research, all being addressed tirelessly in collective forums.

April 1917: the combat for "all power to the soviets"

"The Soviet took possession of all the post offices and telegraphs, the radio, all the stations, printers, so that without its authorisation it was impossible to send a telegram, leave Petersburg or publish a manifesto" were the words in his Memoires of a Cadet Party deputy.[22] However, as Trotsky noted, a terrible paradox existed since February: the power of the soviets had been entrusted by the majority (Menshevik and Social Revolutionary) to the bourgeoisie, practically obliging it to create the provisional government,[23] presided over by a Tsarist prince and made up of rich industrialists, cadets, and, to top it all, the "socialist" Kerensky.[24] The provisional government, hiding behind the soviets, pursued its policy of war and showed little concern for finding any solution to the serious problems that the workers and peasants were posing. This led the soviets to become ineffective and to disappear, as one can surmise from these declarations of leading Social Revolutionaries: "From their beginning the soviets did not...want to replace an all-Russian constituent assembly... On the contrary, leading the country toward a constituent assembly was their primary purpose... The soviets represent neither a state power paralleling the constituent assembly, nor one aligned with the Provisional Government. They are advisers to the people in the struggle for their interests...and they know that they represent only part of the country and are trusted only by the masses for whom they fight.  Therefore the soviets have always refused to pre-empt power and form a government."[25]

At the beginning of March, a sector of the working class was however becoming conscious of the fact that the soviets were tending to act as a screen for, and an instrument of, the policies of the bourgeoisie. There were also very animated debates in some soviets, factory and district committees on the "question of power". The Bolshevik minority were then lagging behind, its Central Committee[26] having just adopted a resolution of support critical of the provisional government, despite strong opposition from different sections of the party.[27]

The debate redoubled in intensity in March. "The Vyborg Committee called a meeting of thousands of workers and soldiers who, almost unanimously, adopted a resolution on the necessity for the Soviet to take power (...) The Vyborg resolution, by virtue of its success, was printed and displayed through posters. But the Petrograd Committee formally prohibited this resolution..."[28]

The arrival of Lenin in April radically transformed the situation. Lenin, who had followed with concern, since his exile in Switzerland, the little information on the shameful attitude of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, was reaching the same conclusions as the Vyborg Committee. In his April Theses he expressed it clearly: "The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution, which - owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie - to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants."[29] Many writers do not see in this decisive intervention of Lenin an expression of the role of the avant-garde of the revolutionary party and its most remarkable militants but, on the contrary, consider it an act of political opportunism. According to them, Lenin grasped the opportunity to use the soviets as a platform for conquering "absolute power", shedding his "strict Jacobin" clothes in order to put on those of an anarchist partisan of the "direct power of the masses". In fact, an old party member let fly that: "For many years, the place of Bakunin in the Russian revolution has been unoccupied; now it's taken by Lenin."[30] This legend is completely false. The confidence that Lenin had in the soviets in fact went very far back, to the lessons he drew from the 1905 revolution. In a draft resolution he proposed to the 4th Party Congress in 1906, he said that: "insofar as the soviets represent cells of revolutionary power, their strength and significance depend entirely on the vigour and success of the insurrection", and he added that "Such institutions are inevitably doomed to failure if they do not base themselves on the revolutionary army and overthrow the government powers (that is, transform them into a provisional revolutionary government."[31] In 1915, he returned to the same idea: "Soviets of workers deputies and similar institutions may be considered instruments of the insurrection and of revolutionary power. These institutions can be of definite usefulness only in spreading the political mass strike and an insurrection, depending on the degree of preparation, development, and progress."[32]

June - July 1917: the crisis of the soviets

Lenin was conscious however that the battle had only just begun: "It is only in fighting against this unconscious trust of the masses (a struggle which can only and must be made with the ideological arms of friendly persuasion, by referring to living experience) that we will really be able to rid ourselves of the present outbursts of revolutionary phrases, and really impulse the consciousness of the proletariat as well as that of the masses' local initiative, audacity and resolution."[33]

This would be bitterly verified at the time of the First Congress of All-Russian Soviets. Convoked in order to unify and centralise the network of different types of soviets spread out over the territory, its resolutions not only went against the revolution but led towards the destruction of the soviets. In June and July, a serious political problem appeared: the crisis of the soviets and their estrangement from the masses.

The general situation was marked by total disorder: a rise in unemployment, paralysis of transport, crop failures in the countryside and general rationing. Desertions multiplied in the army along with attempts to fraternise with the enemy on the front. The imperialist camp of the Entente (France, Britain and latterly the United States) pressurised the Provisional Government to launch a general offensive against the German front. The Menshevik and SR delegates, happy to oblige, adopted a resolution at the Congress of Soviets supporting the military offensive, whereas an important minority, regrouping not just the Bolsheviks, was against. To crown it all, the Congress rejected a proposal to limit the working day to 8 hours and had no interest in the agrarian problem. From the voice of the masses, it became the spokesman for what they hated above all, the continuation of imperialist war.

The circulation of Congress resolutions - and, in particular those supporting the military offensive - provoked a profound disappointment in the masses. They saw that their organisation was slipping between their fingers and they began to react. The district soviets of Petersburg, the soviet of the neighbouring town of Kronstadt and various factory councils and committees of several regiments proposed a great demonstration for June 10 whose objective would be to bring pressure on the Congress so that it changed its policy and oriented itself towards the taking of power, expelling the capitalist ministers.

The response of the Congress was to temporarily forbid the demonstrations under the pretext of the "danger of a monarchist plot". Delegates of the Congress were mobilised to move around the factories and regiments in order to "convince" the workers and soldiers. The evidence of a Menshevik delegate is eloquent: "Throughout the night, the majority of the Congress, more than five hundred of its members, stayed awake and went to factories, workshops and the Petrograd barracks, urging men not to go on the demonstration. In a good number of workshops and factories, and also in some parts of the garrison, the Congress had no authority... The Congress delegates were very often welcomed in a strongly unfriendly manner, sometimes with hostility and were frequently, angrily, shown the door".[34]

The leadership of the bourgeoisie had understood the need to save its main card - the confiscation of the soviets - to use against the first serious attempt of the masses to recuperate them. This it did, with its congenital Machiavellism, by utilising the Bolsheviks as a test of strength, launching a furious campaign against them. At the Congress of Cossacks which took place at the same time as the Congress of Soviets, Miliukov proclaimed that "the Bolsheviks were the worst enemies of the Russian revolution... It is time to finish with these gentlemen."[35] The Cossack congress decided "to support the threatened soviets. We Cossacks will never quarrel with the soviets."[36] As Trotsky underlined, "against the Bolsheviks, the reactionaries were even ready to march with the soviet in order to put it down much more quietly afterwards."[37] The Menshevik Liber clearly showed the objective in declaring to the Congress of Soviets: "If you want for yourselves the masses that are turning towards the Bolsheviks, break with Bolshevism."

The violent bourgeois counter-offensive against the masses was made in a situation where, on the whole, they were still politically weak. The Bolsheviks understood this and proposed the cancellation of the June 10 demonstration, which was only reluctantly accepted by some regiments and the most combative factories.

When this news reached the Congress of Soviets, a delegate proposed that a "really soviet" demonstration be convoked for the 18th of June. Miliukov analysed this initiative thus: "Following some speeches with a liberal tone at the Congress of Soviets, having succeed in preventing the armed demonstration on June 10...the socialist ministers felt that they went too far in their rapprochement with us, that the ground shifted under their feet. Alarmed, they abruptly turned towards the Bolsheviks". Trotsky rightly corrected this: "Understand that it's not a question of a turn towards the Bolsheviks, but of something quite different, an attempt to turn towards the masses, against the Bolsheviks."[38]

This was a bitter setback for the bourgeois-dominated Congress of Soviets. Workers and soldiers participated massively in the June 18 demonstration, brandishing banners calling for "all power to the soviets", the dismissal of the capitalist ministers, the end of the war, appeals for international solidarity. The demonstrations took up the orientations of the Bolsheviks and demanded the opposite of what the Congress asked for.

The situation got worse. Pressed by its allies in the Entente, the Russian bourgeoisie was in an impasse. The famous military offensive turned out to be a fiasco, the workers and soldiers wanted a radical change of the policy of the soviets. But the situation wasn't so clear in the provinces and the countryside where, despite a certain radicalisation, the great majority remained faithful to the SRs and to the Provisional Government.

The moment was approaching for the bourgeoisie to try to lay an ambush for the masses in Petersburg by provoking a premature confrontation which would allow it to deliver a sudden blow to the avant-garde of the movement and thus open the door to the counter-revolution.

The forces of the bourgeoisie reorganised. "Officers' soviets" were set up whose task was to organise elite forces in order to militarily wipe out the revolution. Encouraged by the western democracies, the Tsarist black gangs raised their heads. According to the words of Lenin, the old Duma functioned as a counter-revolutionary office without the social-democratic traitor leaders posing the least obstacle to it.

A series of subtle provocations were programmed in order to drive the workers of Petersburg into the trap of a premature insurrection. First of all the Cadet Party withdrew its ministers from the Provisional Government so that the latter was only composed of "socialists". This was a sort of invitation to the workers to demand the immediate taking of power and launch themselves into insurrection. The Entente then gave a real ultimatum to the Provisional Government: choose between the soviets or a constitutional government. Finally, the most violent provocation was the threat to remove the most combative regiments from the capital and send them to the front.

Important numbers of workers and soldiers in Petersburg took the bait. From numerous district, factory and regimental soviets, an armed demonstration was called for July 4. Its slogan was that the soviets take power. This initiative showed that the workers had understood that there was no outcome other than revolution. But, at the same time, they were demanding that power was assumed by the soviets as they were then constituted, that is to say with the majority in the hands of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries whose concern was to subordinate the soviets to the bourgeoisie. The subsequently celebrated scene, where a worker addressed a Menshevik soviet member, "why don't you take power once and for all?" is significant of the persisting illusions within the working class. This was like inviting the wolf into the sheep-pen! The Bolsheviks warned against the trap that was being laid. They did not do so with complacency, from high on a pedestal, telling the masses on which points they were mistaken. They put themselves at the head of the demonstration, shoulder to shoulder with the workers and soldiers in order to contribute all their forces so that the response was massive but didn't slide towards  a decisive confrontation whose defeat was written in advance.[39] The demonstration ended in good order and did not launch a revolutionary assault. A massacre was avoided, which was a victory for the masses for the future. But the bourgeoisie couldn't retreat; it had to continue its offensive. The Provisional Government entirely made up of "worker" ministers then unleashed a brutal repression aimed particularly against the Bolsheviks. The party was declared illegal, numerous militants were imprisoned, its entire press was forbidden and Lenin had to go into clandestinity.

Through a difficult but heroic effort, the Bolshevik Party contributed decisively to avoiding the masses' defeat, dispersion and rout that was threatened by their disorganisation. The Petersburg Soviet, by contrast, supporting the elected Executive Committee at the recent Congress of Soviets, reached the depths of ignominy by endorsing the unleashing of a brutal repression and reaction.

How was the bourgeoisie able to derail the soviets?

The organisation of the masses in workers' councils from February 1917 created the opportunity to develop their strength, organisation and consciousness for the final assault against the power of the bourgeoisie. The period which followed, the so-called period of dual power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, constituted a critical stage for the two antagonistic classes, which could lead, for one or the other, to a political and military victory over the enemy class.

Throughout this period, the level of consciousness in the masses, which was still weak relative to the need for proletarian revolution, constituted a breach that the bourgeoisie had to try to fill in order to abort the emerging revolutionary process. For this it used a weapon as dangerous as it was pernicious, the sabotage from within exercised by bourgeois forces behind a "radical" " workers'" mask. This Trojan Horse of the counter-revolution was at this time in Russia constituted by the Menshevik and SR "socialist" parties.

At the beginning, many workers entertained illusions in the Provisional Government and saw it as a product of the soviets, whereas in reality it was their worst enemy. As for the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, they enjoyed a certain trust among the great mass of workers who they had  deceived with their radical speeches, their revolutionary phraseology, which allowed them to politically dominate the great majority of the soviets. It was from this position of strength that that they strove to empty these organs of their revolutionary content in order to place them at the service of the bourgeoisie. If they failed in this attempt it was because the permanently mobilised masses, through their own experience, led them with the support of the Bolshevik Party, to unmask the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, to the point that the latter were led to assume the orientation of the Provisional Government on such fundamental questions as war and the conditions of life.

In the next article, we will see how, from the end of August 1917, the soviets were able to regenerate themselves and really become launch-pads for taking power, culminating in the victory of the October revolution.

C.Mir, March 8 2010

 

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[1]. Cf. International Review n°. 140.

[2]. We now have lots of material and much more detail on how the Russian revolution developed, and also on the decisive role played by the Bolshevik Party. In particular, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed, our pamphlets on the Russian revolution as well as numerous articles in our International Review, cf. n°s. 71, 72, 89 to 91.

[3]. Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921, Pantheon, 1974. Very anti-Bolshevik, the author could nevertheless narrate the facts faithfully, and with impartiality recognize the contribution of the Bolsheviks, which contrasts with sectarian and dogmatic judgments delivered from time to time.

[4]. Quoted by Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.90.

[5]. Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.104.

[6]. Ibid., p.99.

[7]. Ibid., p.100.

[8]. Gérard Walter, Overview of the Russian revolution.

[9]. Published in seven volumes in 1922, they give the perspective of an independent socialist, a collaborator of Gorki and Martov's Menshevik internationalists. Even though he disagreed with the Bolsheviks, he supported the October revolution. This and the following quotes are extracted and translated from a summary of his Memoires, published in Spanish.

[10]. According to Anweiler, there were around 1,000 delegates at the end of the session and up to 3,000 by the next one.

[11]. Sukhanov, Op. Cit., p.54.

[12]. This commission proposed the permanent edition of a soviet paper: Izvestia (The News), which appeared regularly from then on.

[13]. Sukhanov, Op. Cit., p.56

[14]. Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.116.

[15]. Ibid., pp.125-6.

[16]. Ibid., pp.113-4.

[17]. Ibid., p.113. This quote differs slightly from that in the French version of this article.

[18]. Ibid., p.122.

[19]. Chamber of Deputies.

[20]. Quoted by Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. Constitutional Democratic Party (KD) of the big bourgeoisie, hastily formed in 1905. Its leader was Miliukov, eminence grise of the Russian bourgeoisie at that time.

[23]. Trotsky tells how the bourgeoisie was paralysed and how the Menshevik chiefs used their influence in the soviets to reserve for themselves unconditional power, of which Miliukov "made no bones about showing his satisfaction and agreeable surprise" (Memoires of Sukhanov, a Menshevik very close to events within the provisional government).

[24]. This lawyer, very popular in workers' circles before the revolution, ended up being appointed head of the provisional government and then led various attempts to finish off the workers. His intentions are revealed in the memoires of the British ambassador at the time: "Kerensky urged me to have patience, assuring me that the soviets would end up dying a natural death. They would soon give up their functions to the democratic organs of autonomous administration."

[25]. Cited by Anweiler Op. Cit., p.142..

[26]. Composed of Stalin, Kamenev and Molotov. Lenin was in exile in Switzerland and had no practical means of  contacting the party.

[27]. During the Petrograd Party Committee meeting on March 5th, the draft resolution presented by Shliapnikov was rejected. It said: "The task now is development of a provisional revolutionary government through federation of local soviets. For conquest of the central power it is essential...to secure  the power of the workers and soldiers deputies" (Cited by Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.147).

[28]. Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[29]. We can't discuss here  the content of these Theses,  extremely interesting though they are. Cf. International Review n°. 89, "The April Theses: Signpost to the Proletarian Revolution".

[30].  Cited by Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[31].  Cited by Anweiler, Op. Cit., p.82.

[32].  Ibid., p.85.

[33].  Lenin, Selected Works. 

[34].  Cited by Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[35]. That the head of the bourgeoisie in Russia could talk in the name of the revolution reveals all the cynicism typical of this class!

[36]. These regiments were characterised by their obedience to the Tsar and to established order. They were the last to go over to the revolution.

[37].  Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[38]. All the quotes are extracts from Trotsky, Op. Cit.

[39],  See our article on "The July days and the indispensable role of the party", International Review n°. 90. We refer our readers to this article for a more detailed analysis of this event.