From the 20th of December to early January the economic and social chaos in Argentina was headline news. The economy went into free fall, the population took to the streets and five presidents came and went within as many weeks. These events expressed a spectacular worsening of the economic, social and political crisis in Argentina. This article seeks to analyse the main implications of this situation for the working class.
The Argentinean economy is totally bankrupt: it has been in recession for the last three years, and now the level of debt represents more than half of the GNP. Three quarters of export earnings are eaten up by simply paying the interest of the $150 billion foreign debt; unemployment affects half the active population. Argentina is a country which in the space of ten years has gone from hyperinflation to hyper-debt. After three years of recession and the “salvage” plan of 2000 the IMF refused, last November, to unblock billions of dollars that had been promised. Without this money to service its gigantic debt, the government imposed a “little bank holiday”: people could now only take out a maximum of 1000 pesos a month. Savings and wages were kidnapped by the state itself. After three years of recession, three years of galloping unemployment, poverty, job insecurity, after wages and pensions being cut month after month, people are now faced with their bank accounts being confiscated by the state. Everywhere, economists, experts, all sorts of hacks, are putting forward their analyses of Argentina’s particular misfortunes (seeing the cause in corruption, domination by US capital and similar symptoms). But whatever analysis it puts forward, the bourgeoisie’s “solution” is the same as always: to make the proletariat pay, to exploit it even more. Wherever similar economic disasters have taken place, be it South East Asia, Russia, Turkey or Mexico, such “new plans” have amounted to nothing more than the same old trick.
Argentina is no exception; rather it is a forerunner of what is going to happen throughout large areas of the world.
In Argentina’s case the IMF is doing all it can to avoid it contaminating neighbouring countries and even Europe. The IMF has made it very clear that it would be suicidal to provide the bottomless pit that is Argentina with new loans. Such actions would indeed only spread the disease of hyper-debt. Therefore, the only way to proceed is, as always, to squeeze the workers and non-exploiting classes even more.
At the same time, the IMF, as the representative of the western bourgeoisie, has to put up a wall against its particularly corrupt and arrogant Argentinean counter-parts. If in March 2001 there were three finance ministers within 10 days, now within the space of 15 days there have been 5 presidents one after the other! All of these have used every nuance of Peronism, from the comic populism of Rodriguez Saa who promised “the immediate stoppage of debt payments” this “to be followed by a million jobs”, to the dyed-in-the-wool populist Duhalde who was the Peronist candidate against De La Rua and who now criticises “all the stupid and corrupt who have got us into this mess” referring, amongst others, to his former buddy Menem.
The unpegging of the Peso from the Dollar
Along with the blocking of savings, the new government decided to unpeg the peso from the dollar, which means that two “floating” pesos are worth a dollar. This measure has been presented in a very demagogic way: it is necessary to stop the flight of capital; thus for those who want to buy dollars, 1 peso will still equal 1 dollar. On the other hand, in order to buy foreign goods, it will be necessary to use the “actual” peso, which is worth much less. The result of this for a population where pauperisation is already widespread is price increases for essential necessities. The “miracle worker” Cavallo (former Economics Minister) who invented “dollarisation” ten years ago in order to strangle hyperinflation, was brought back in to strangle hyper-debt. Now the self-same Cavallo can be thanked for the return of inflation and an increase in the cost of living, along with a freeze on wages. However, it is clear that today the situation is even worse. And, what is more important, the entire world economy is now in open recession.
The working class must not allow itself to be drowned by the other social layers
Over the last three years unemployment and insecurity has increased daily for the working class in Argentina. Today the degradation of its living conditions has gone into freefall.
But another aspect of the Argentinean crisis is the pauperisation of what the sociologists call the “middle class”, the pride of the Argentinean “nation”. By this they mean shopkeepers, small business people, the liberal professions (these petty bourgeois layers are often then thrown into the sociological mix with state employees, who are mainly workers). The “little bank holiday” of accounts was a serious blow for the Argentinean petty-bourgeoisie, which was already impoverished, bitter and desperate. The confiscation law has hit them with full force. Nevertheless, they have to be seen for what they are: the “middle class”, not the proletariat. The hunger riots, the looting of supermarkets and lorries transporting basic foodstuffs, the “cacerolazos” (the banging of saucepan lids as a sign of protest by demonstrators) have been clearly marked by the presence of these social layers. Most of these events have been called by their organisations: in Cordoba, the violent demonstrations were organised by the PME. In Buenos Aires, alongside the shopkeepers have been the lawyers who have led the demonstrations against the “corrupt judges” of the Supreme Court.
It’s true that the initial impetus behind the looting of supermarkets often came from the poorest strata in society, which included many proletarians. But in the first place such actions in themselves are not characteristic of the proletarian struggle, since instead of focussing on the collective appropriation of the means of production and distribution, they centre round the individual acquisition of consumer goods. In the second place, both the looting and the subsequent demonstrations came to be heavily dominated by the petty bourgeois elements, so that the workers could not affirm their independent demands and interests. The weight of the middle classes was symbolised in the loud displays of nationalist flag-waving on many of the demonstrations.
The working class in Argentina thus finds itself in a very difficult situation. Faced with an enormous attack on its living standards and a veritable social and political crisis, it has so far been unable to assert its own class interests or its confidence in itself as a distinct social force, and has been swept along by a growing tide of directionless anger.
The proletariat in Argentina is certainly one of the most combative in Latin America. Since 1968 there have been a number of upsurges of militancy. In 1969 workers in Cordoba - the second biggest city - took control of the city for several days. In the 1990’s and even in 2001 there have been general strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers. And in the last year or so there has been a movement of unemployed workers in Argentina, which has seen assemblies of unemployed workers seeking to organise their struggle. These assemblies have also attracted employed workers. It also appears that prior to the December/January events there had been a growing number of strikes among numerous sectors.
However, despite this combativity the working class in Argentina has been unable to push back the attacks of the bourgeoisie. As well as suffering from the general blows against proletarian self-confidence inflicted by the campaigns against communism and the advancing decomposition of capitalist society, it has also had to battle against more specific ideologies: the democratic illusions inherited from the period of military dictatorship, the populist myths of Peronism, the poison of nationalism (the strength of which was demonstrated by the ability of the hated military junta to mobilise support for the absurd Malvinas adventure in 1982). The unions also have a strong ideological weight in the class. Whilst many workers don’t trust the main union, the CGT, which is run by the Peronist mafia, these state organs are still able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of workers in general strikes. Whilst democratic illusions may have been weakened by experience, with many workers now distrusting all bourgeois politicians, this distrust is being channelled into inter-classist protests about corruption, against the IMF etc.
The very serious nature of the difficulties facing the working class in Argentina is exemplified by a recent event. On Friday the 11th January 600 “piqueteros”, composed of a group of very combative workers and unemployed, gathered in front of the Buenos Aires Central Market to load crates of provisions into lorries in order to take them to workers’ neighbourhoods when they were attacked with sticks by a group of a thousand, underpaid, porters from the Central Market. They were chased into fields where many were beaten and seriously injured. This is not just an anecdote. As an Argentinean newspaper remarked “The confrontation between the exploited and the starving pathetically syntheses the foundations of the Argentinean crisis, the beating up of the “piqueteros”, in order to drive them away from the Central Market by a group of porters”. Here we have a tragic conflict between, on the one hand, the “piqueteros” who have dissipated their combativity in the blocking of roads and other radical actions without any result; and on the on the other hand, the porters manipulated by the Peronist unions as shock troops of Mafiosi politicians.
Today, faced with the situation of poverty which confronts it, the anger of the working class in Argentina is being dissipated amongst a morass of futureless social layers. To claim to help the working class by becoming over-excited about this movement and by uncritically applauding an inter-classist popular revolt, because it appears to be against the interests of the bourgeoisie, is to push the proletariat even further into the arms of the decomposing petty-bourgeoisie. This is precisely the role being played by the leftist groups inside and outside Argentina, particularly the Trotskyists who claim that there is already a revolutionary situation in Argentina (1).
It is only through developing its struggle on its own class terrain, affirming itself as an autonomous class with its own means of struggle - massive strikes and demonstrations around demands common to all the exploited - that it will be able to integrate into its own struggle the other social layers who are victims of poverty and capitalist austerity. And in the longer term, struggling on its own terrain is the only way that will allow the working class to put an end to its misery, through building a balance of force in its struggle that will allow it to overthrow capitalism on a world scale. Only the affirmation of its revolutionary perspective will enable the proletariat to build another society based not on exploitation and profit and the laws of the world market, but on the satisfaction of human need. And it is only in a world communist society that the distribution of the means of consumption will be effectively developed for the whole of humanity.
In this sense, revolutionaries have to be clear; their role is not to console their class, but to insist that it defends its own perspective and its own interests, to put it on guard against the dangers that menace it. In particular, the proletariat cannot allow itself to be lead astray by the inter-classist revolts and democratic illusions.
As we have always made clear, this revolutionary perspective depends essentially upon the development of the struggle of the most concentrated and experienced battalions of the world proletariat, and above all, those in the old Western Europe. Due to their long experience of the traps of the democratic state, of the parliamentary games and union manoeuvres, only the proletariat of the most industrialised countries can open the gates to the international generalisation of struggles and the ultimate overthrow of capitalism. It was in old Europe that capitalism was born and created its own gravedigger. It is in this part of the world that the proletarian giant will deliver the first decisive blows.
To openly acknowledge the difficulties facing our class has nothing to do with ‘Eurocentrism’ or ‘indifference’ towards the workers in the peripheral countries. We cannot hope to succeed against our enemy unless we make an honest appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses on our side of the class barricade.
PN 20.1.02
(1) The leftist and anarchist press has talked about the emergence of “popular assemblies” or “neighbourhood assemblies”, even of assemblies of delegates from these organs. We do not have enough material at our disposal to define the class nature of these organs. Certainly their territorial nature, in the present situation where the working class is finding it so hard to struggle independently, would make them highly vulnerable to the influence of non-proletarian strata, when they are not creations of the leftists pure and simple. But to claim, as the leftists do, that these are embryonic soviets, is to indulge in a false radicalism which serves to prevent the workers from measuring the true scale of the task in front of them.
The world capitalist economy is openly in crisis. Japan, the US and now Germany are officially in recession. The economic indicators are in the red. In 2002, the rate of growth in the 30 OECD countries will not go above 1%. The optimistic assurances of the experts about the recovery being just around the corner look more and more like whistling in the dark.
The reality is that working class living standards are in decline all over the world. Take the growth of unemployment. In the USA, 2 million jobs were lost in 2001. Huge new redundancy plans have been announced in the heart of the industrialised countries, in all sectors, from the car industry (eg, 60,000 at Fords USA) to aeronautics (eg the 6000 at Airbus, following the massive lay-offs in the wake of the September 11 attacks); from new technology (computers, mobile phones) to old industry (mines in Spain, steel in Germany) and services (the tens of thousands of jobs threatened in the post in Britain). Not to mention the collapse of the ‘internet economy’ where the speculative bubble burst some time ago. At the same time we are seeing the dismantling of welfare systems, as in the health service in France and Britain, or the brutal reductions in pensions in Germany and Italy. Flexibility, part-time and precarious jobs are being imposed in different forms in all countries. Since the summer of 2001, the adoption of the Euro has served as a pretext for raising the cost of living across Europe.
After going through three months of recession, Argentina’s dive into bankruptcy is a real pointer to the future that capitalism has in store for us. This country was formerly presented by the world bank as a model of economic improvement. Now the only way that the latest president Duhalde can get the loan he needs from the IMF is to promise another 100,000 redundancies. Not only are other Latin American states like Brazil and Chile teetering on the same brink, but the ‘tiger’ economies of South East Asia, which have already been through the 1997 crash, are facing new alarms. The bankruptcy of Argentina, like the collapse of the US energy giant Enron, are signs of the global bankruptcy of the capitalist system.
The fact that capitalism has no way out of its crisis transforms economic competition between nations into a spiral of military confrontations. Against the background of a saturated world market, the nation states of the world are hurled into conflicts in which strategic interests take over from the immediate hunt for profit. All countries, big and small, are caught up in the logic of imperialism, of accelerated military spending and of open or concealed conflicts with their rivals. Ever since World War One, capitalism has been in a permanent state of war; war has become inseparable from the survival of the capitalist mode of production. This has been shown to be more true than ever since the downfall of the Russian bloc, which was supposed to usher in a new era of world peace. In fact the resulting dissolution of the old bloc discipline has merely released the appetite of every imperialist power to pursue its own national interests and has multiplied the arenas of conflict.
The military intervention in Afghanistan, presented as a “war against terrorism”, is a concentrated expression of the contradictions of the system. It is being led by the world’s cop, the USA, in order to impose a disciplined world order that corresponds to its interests; but it succeeds only in spreading further chaos, in stirring up new conflicts. In Afghanistan itself, which is already in a state of utter ruin, fighting has already begun between the various factions who have been brought in to succeed the Taliban. The Afghanistan conflict has in turn helped to aggravate the rivalries between India and Pakistan, and between Israel and the Palestinians. Meanwhile Bush is talking about an “axis of evil” that includes Iran, Iraq and North Korea, all of whom could be future targets of the “war against terrorism”. US troops have also been sent to the Philippines to help the government crush the Islamic insurgents there. Bush has made it quite clear that the anti-terrorist crusade will go on indefinitely and will be aimed at all who give succour to the USA’s enemies. And these enemies, in the final analysis, also include the USA’s nominal allies. One of the key strategic aims of the Afghanistan war is to enable the US to put a block on any further European (and particularly German) advance towards the Middle East and Central Asia.
In all these conflicts, it is always the civil population, the exploited and the oppressed, who are the main victims � bombed, massacred, exiled, forced to beg for handouts in refugee camps where they face death through starvation, cold and disease. This plunge into the barbarity of war is the clearest of all expressions of the historic bankruptcy of a system which now threatens the very survival of the human race.
The social order which throws millions of workers onto the dole in the industrialised countries is the same social order which slaughters the civil populations in the weaker countries. This is why it’s so important for proletarians to understand this connection: by fighting against the devastating effects of the economic crisis, by affirming their own class interests, workers are also fighting against the roots of war and barbarism. By taking up the combat against job-cuts and wage-cuts, against the deterioration of its living and working conditions, the working class is laying the groundwork for a wider and deeper combat against the capitalist system and its deadly train of war and catastrophe.
WR 2.2.02
War today has become a permanent feature of daily life under capitalism the world over. Since the Gulf War, the world working class has again and again been confronted with the reality of war � numerous wars in Africa and Yugoslavia, the war in Kosovo, the Chechen war, the war in Afghanistan and now the war drive in India and Pakistan where two nations with nuclear weapons are at each others’ throats.
This reality of a war-racked decomposing capitalist system is indeed horrific. Without a historical, marxist framework it may fill one with despair. It is this historical materialist analysis of the reality of capitalism today that provides the key to understanding the wars and the crises ravaging the world capitalist system.
The wars, and the whole cycle of crises, wars, and reconstruction (First World War, Second World War, the setting up of blocs at Yalta), that have ravaged the capitalist system since the beginning of 20th century can only be understood in the framework of the onset of the decadence of this system since 1914. At the same time, the immediate framework in which the current wars are unfolding is defined by the collapse of the system of blocs at the end of the 1980s and the decomposition of the capitalist system. As we have repeatedly shown, the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 in turn led to the collapse of the western bloc. This eliminated the discipline of blocs, which used to contain the uncontrolled eruption of conflicts among the smaller powers. The reality that has unfolded since then is best defined by ‘every man for himself’, where all powers, big or small, are out to satisfy their imperialist appetites at whatever cost. The great powers, including the world’s only superpower, the global gangster, the US, find it more and more difficult to contain these conflicts among the lesser gangsters.
The wars referred to earlier have been the product of this tendency of everyman for himself. The beating of the war drums between India and Pakistan, the war that is being prepared between them today, while rooted in their past, is unfolding in this global framework of spreading chaos, this tendency of everyman for himself.
The latest war drive between India and Pakistan
Since the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, the Indian bourgeoisie has been clamouring for war against Pakistan. In the wake of this attack, all factions of the Indian bourgeoisie met in parliament on 18th Dec and declared their support for any military or diplomatic action, including war, the government might take, like the Americans, to ‘punish’ the ‘terrorists and their backers’.
Immediately after this, the Indian bourgeoisie started a campaign of war-mongering. The politicians started making statements to stir up war hysteria and the media started whipping up war frenzy through ‘patriotic’ reporting about preparations for war. This has been accompanied by a mobilisation for war all along the border. Nearly half a million soldiers have been moved to the border between India and Pakistan. This has been reciprocated by their Pakistani counterparts. Both states have moved their military machines to the borders.
Both India and Pakistan have moved civilian populations out of the border areas. They have been laying mines in the cornfields on the borders.
This sabre-rattling has been accompanied by a ‘diplomatic offensive’ by India, a game in which the Pakistani bourgeoisie is on a weaker wicket at this moment. The Indian bourgeoisie has recalled its ambassador from Pakistan. Each one has asked the other to cut diplomatic staff by 50% and has restricted the movement of diplomatic personnel to capital cities. Both have forbidden each other from the use of their air space for civilian flights and have cut all transport links. There is also talk of abrogating some old treaty � the ‘Indus Water Treaty’. At one level they have completed all preparations for war, with both armies standing face to face to start killing each other at any time.
“Either we live or you live”
On the surface all this is just a result of the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament. But if it finally breaks out, this war won’t be the first between Pakistan and India. Since their birth in 1947, India and Pakistan have already fought four open wars (1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999) and have been on the brink of open war on a number of occasions. When not engaged in open war, they have been involved in ‘proxy wars’ as in Kashmir, or earlier in the Indian Punjab and in Karachi/Sindh.
The very birth of these two states is rooted in war. Their relation � in the minds of their ruling bourgeoisies � seems to be defined by a simple, deadly equation � “Either we live, or you live”. An equation that characterised the relations of the two blocs during the cold war and ended with the destruction of the Soviet bloc. The bourgeoisie in Pakistan speaks of “bleeding India to death by a thousand cuts” (daily war in Kashmir, Khalistan, elsewhere). And the Indian bourgeoisie often speak of the need for a “final war” with Pakistan, which alone will allow peace to prevail. This talk of “bleeding through a thousand cuts” and of a “final war”, in addition to expressing their mutual hatred, also expresses their respective strengths and strategic calculations.
Who carried out the December 13th attack?
Regarding the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament in which 14 people were killed, the Indian bourgeoisie quickly decided and declared, as the Americans did after 11th Sept for Bin Laden, that these were carried out by Let and Jaish, the two Pakistani based terrorist groups, with the help of ISI, the Pakistani secret service. They demanded that Pakistan take action against these gangs. Simultaneously they started mobilising for war.
The claims of the Indian bourgeoisie about Let and Jaish have been accepted by the world bourgeoisie � the Americans and British banned them soon after India’s declarations. Under their pressure, Pakistan has also banned Let and Jaish and arrested their leaders.
On the surface the terrorist attack on India has not benefited the Pakistani bourgeoisie. It has in fact come in handy for the Indian bourgeoisie to put Pakistan in a corner. Yet it is possible that Let and Jaish carried it out with the connivance of dissident elements within the Pakistani state who thought a war between India and Pakistan would serve their interests. It is also possible that the Indian state itself allowed this attack to happen. In any case, it has been extremely successful in using it to put Pakistan on the mat. Even before this, the Indian state had strengthened its offensive in Kashmir. More people are now being killed everyday in Kashmir than at any recent time.
But a more concrete encouragement for the Indian bourgeoisie to go onto the offensive has been the turn of events in Afghanistan. For years the Taliban regime in Afghanistan acted as an extension of the Pakistani state. Pakistan used Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as a training centre, as a staging ground to fan separatist movements in Kashmir, but also in central Asia and Chechnya. Afghanistan was for Pakistan what it is now aimed to be for America � a conduit for the spread of its influence in Central Asia. Pakistani strategists used to say that control over Afghanistan gave Pakistan a strategic depth vis-a-vis India. This is one reason why the US has had to kick Pakistan to join the so-called coalition against terrorism and for the destruction of the Taliban regime.
The destruction of the Taliban has been a severe blow to Pakistan. It has relatively weakened its position and thrown the Pakistani bourgeoisie into disarray. It has fostered divisions within its ranks. The Indian bourgeoisie has taken advantage of this situation and accelerated its offensive against Pakistan.
Will war break out?
Left to itself, the Indian bourgeoisie would go to war. But this does not suit the interests of the only superpower, the US. It is engaged in its ‘war against terrorism’ in Afghanistan. Although the Taliban regime has been destroyed, America still needs Pakistani support, forced or willing, to achieve its strategic goals � completely destroying the Taliban, establishing a stable regime that is under its full control, using it to penetrate the Central Asian republics and to oversee the whole landmass around Afghanistan. Immediately, a war between India and Pakistan would jeopardise all this. It would compel the US to take sides and upset its long-term plan to dominate this whole area.
Also, the US is aware that given their deep-rooted hostility, and especially given the desperation of the Indian bourgeoisie, a war between India and Pakistan has the possibility of turning into a bigger conflagration. There is a risk that if war seriously endangers Pakistan, it will compel China to flex its muscles (China has already been expressing its ‘mounting worries’ about the tensions between India and Pakistan and there have been reports of Chinese troop movement on the Indo-China border). This would in turn compel the US to react.
Owning to all this, the US has been putting increasing pressure both on India and Pakistan � on India to ‘use restraint’, on Pakistan to take action against terrorists. In this the US has been joined by a plethora of ‘world leaders’ � Tony Blair, Chirac, Annan etc (although these ‘allies’ don’t hesitate to pursue their own national interests during their ‘peace’ initiatives). So far this pressure has been successful in holding back the two combatants. At this moment, it seems very likely that a war will not break out immediately in south Asia.
Even if ‘peace’ prevails for the moment and the imperialist interests of the global powers are successful in compelling India and Pakistan to disengage and demobilise, it will only be a temporary interlude. This won’t be only because of the legendary enmity of India and Pakistan, but because the very logic of capitalism is war.
The tasks of the working class
As part of its war preparations, the bourgeoisie has been trying to whip up national hatred and patriotic frenzy. But the working class has nothing to gain from this war, these imperialist conflicts of their rulers and exploiters. They must refuse to be taken in by the propaganda of the bourgeoisie. The working class can advance its interests only by developing its class struggle against its exploiters, and by establishing its class unity across national boundaries. The working class and its revolutionary vanguard, the communists, have no sides to choose. They oppose all sides in the war and call for worldwide unity of the working class, for the destruction of capitalism.
CI January 2002
The ICC has just excluded one of its members. Such a measure is not often taken by our organisation. The last exclusion of a member of the ICC goes back to 1995 and the previous one took place in 1981. We only apply such a sanction when we are faced with extremely serious faults, and this is why we generally accompany it with a communiqué in the press because we consider that the element being sanctioned represents a danger not just for our organisation but for the whole proletarian political milieu and the sympathisers of the communist left.
The element who is being excluded, Jonas (who also signed articles in our press with the initials JE) has in fact behaved in a way totally unworthy of a communist militant. We reproduce here extracts from the resolution the organisation has adopted on this matter:
“Jonas presented his resignation in May 2001 with the argument that his health did not permit him to carry on the political combat in our organisation when the latter was, according to him, threatened by an ‘enterprise of demolition’. In reality, the ICC has noted that while Jonas retired from the organisation, he by no means ceased all activity towards our organisation. On the contrary, it has been established that this ‘retirement’ was only a means to carry out, secretly and with impunity, an activity hostile to the ICC, in particular:
- blaming its militants and setting them against each other, by attributing some of them and the central organs with the responsibility of aggravating his health problems;
- taking advantage of his political authority and the sympathy he had acquired to incite a certain number of the organisation’s militants to rebel against its decisions and discipline, pushing them into a destructive and suicidal political dynamic;
- circulating, both inside and outside the ICC, a whole series of extremely grave accusations against a certain number of militants, while at the same time refusing to meet with, or even recognise, the commission charged with examining accusations of this type;
- refusing to meet any delegation of the organisation charged with communicating the accusations against him so that he could present his defence, while he had nothing more to say about a document transmitted to him at the beginning of December 2000 which already described behaviour on his part which was absolutely unacceptable and hostile to the ICC”
One of the most intolerable and repulsive aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign he has waged against a member of the organisation - accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people outside the organisation of manipulating those around them and the central organs on behalf of the police, and of only having participated in previous combats for the defence of the organisation to divert suspicions, while in fact being an accomplice of Simon (an adventurer expelled from the ICC in 1995), with whom in some way there was a “division of labour”.
It can happen that a sincere militant of a communist organisation, rightly or wrongly, can have suspicions towards another militant. It is then up to that militant to raise the issue with the organs which the organisation has given itself to deal with questions of this type and which can then examine the elements upon which the suspicion is based with a maximum of attention, prudence and discretion. But this was not the attitude of Jonas. In fact he categorically refused to meet the commission charged with examining this kind of problem while continuing to distil his poison.
We should make it clear that the ICC member accused by Jonas of being a “cop and an accomplice of Simon” asked that there should be a detailed inquiry about them, in order to be able to continue as a militant in the ICC’s ranks. This inquiry came to the formal conclusion that there was absolutely no basis for the accusation and exposed its lying, malicious character. This did not prevent Jonas from carrying on with his slanders.
“The fact that Jonas refused to meet the ICC to explain his behaviour in itself constitutes proof that he is conscious of having become an enemy of our organisation despite his theatrical declarations to ‘his comrades’, whom in reality he presents (with the exception of those he has dragged along with him) either as ‘cops’, or as ‘Torquemadas’ or as poor ‘manipulated’ cretins”.
Today Jonas has become a bitter enemy of the ICC and is behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur. We don’t know what his underlying motives are, but we are quite sure that he represents a danger for the proletarian political milieu.
ICC, 24/2/02
The official meaning of the war in Afghanistan: the defence of the civilised, democratic world against terrorism and Islamic fanaticism, fought by the civilised and democratic states standing shoulder to shoulder with the USA.
The real meaning: an imperialist conflict where the official enemy is only a scapegoat and the real enemies pose as friends.
Ever since the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc at the beginning of the 1990s, the USA has been faced with a growing challenge to its world domination. Not just from the minor enemies (also former friends in most cases) who have been the target of US bombs � Saddam, Milosevic, bin Laden and the Taliban; not just from second and third rate powers, once loyal clients, who are more and more ready to follow their own immediate aims, like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel; but also, and above all, from the major powers who were once the mainstay of the western bloc, but who, now that the Russian bear is no threat, are themselves pursuing their own imperialist ambitions: France, Germany and Britain.
Three times in the last decade the USA has had to resort to massive displays of military force to remind all its former vassals who is the world’s boss. Each time its success in dragooning its rivals into US-run military ‘coalitions’ has been far outweighed by the sharpening of conflict that followed soon afterwards. Not long after the Gulf war, in which Germany was given a role only as a moneybags, German imperialism revived its historical ‘drive to the east’, provoking the war in Yugoslavia by supporting the independence of Croatia and Slovenia. After nearly a decade of war and massacre in the Balkans, the USA was compelled to launch its air war against Serbia � on the surface to defend the oppressed Kosovans, in reality to enable the US to implant itself in a region previously dominated by Germany, France, Britain and Russia.
The Afghan war takes this pattern to a new level. Presented as a justified response to the horrible slaughter of September 11, the war had in fact already been planned: in July 2001 the US warned Afghanistan that an attack was being prepared, and it had already set up military bases in Uzbekistan. The real motive behind the war was once again to ‘restore order’ in a world where the dominant rule has become ‘every man for himself’. The rows over America’s rejection of the Kyoto treaty, over the ‘Son of Star Wars’ anti-missile programme, over the ‘Euro-army’, helped to swell a growing tide of anti-American propaganda in Europe. September 11 and the campaigns about ‘solidarity with the USA’ called a temporary halt to this, but even while the majority of the European powers claimed to back America’s ‘anti-terrorist’ assault on Afghanistan, the differences were always visible. Most of Europe’s governments officially supported the war, but there was plenty of scope for the expression of doubts and criticisms. For its part America was quite determined to give its allies a minimal role in the fighting. Britain in particular was systematically humiliated, the role of its troops in the actual combat being embarrassingly below the level of Blair’s grand military posturing. This US ‘unilateralism’ has been attacked more and more vociferously by European experts and diplomats who claim that even NATO � which the US formerly used as a cover for its interests against the squabble-prone United Nations � is virtually redundant. “Will the Americans ever fight a war through NATO again? It’s doubtful. The US reserves the right to itself to wage war, and dumps on others the messy, expensive business of nation-building and peace keeping” (former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, quoted in The Observer, 10 February 2002).
In the last month or so the divisions between the US and its ‘allies’ have once again got the press talking about a ‘new low in US-European relations’. First we had Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech which brought forth a storm of polemics from the French, the Germans, even ex-Tory ministers like Chris Patten, who insisted that none of the countries of the ‘axis’ (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) could be proven to have any direct links with al-Qaida. They were especially incensed by the inclusion of Iran in the axis: had Germany and Britain not been wooing Iran since September 11? The US targeting of Iran was partly a response to Iran’s efforts to procure a sphere of influence in the new Afghan carve-up by backing its own choice of war-lords and armed gangs. But it is even more a way of issuing a warning to the likes of Germany and Britain. The naming of North Korea serves a similar purpose in the Far East in relation to the ambitions of China and Japan.
More recently, the press in Europe has revealed America’s determination to launch an attack on Iraq and topple Saddam. According to a US state official cited in The Guardian (14 Feb), it was very unlikely that the Iraqi regime would accept the stringent programme of weapons inspections the US will demand. “As the American intelligence source put it, the White House ‘will not take yes for an answer’, suggesting that Washington would provoke a crisis”. An article published on 5 February in the same paper observes that Germany had led the chorus of protests by European states against the ‘axis of evil’ speech. The words of Berlin’s deputy foreign minister, Ludger Vollmer, were particularly significant “We Europeans warn against it. There is no indication that Iraq is involved in the terrorism we have been talking about for the last few months� this terror argument can be used to legitimise old enmities”.
At the same time the US announced a new defence budget of unprecedented proportions: a 15 percent increase, the biggest in 20 years, and more than double the military spending in all the European Union. Over the next five years the total budget is planned to rise to two trillion dollars. This means that America’s share in the world’s arms expenses will be as big as the next 25 biggest budgets put together. And the gap is not merely financial. It is also technological � no European state can come anywhere near the US in the use of pilotless attack aircraft, satellite information systems, speed and scale of military transport, and so on. And it is strategic: “�the Afghan war has fundamentally reshaped the architecture of international alliances. Central Asia is splattered with new American fortresses, the Pacific and Indian oceans are patrolled by aircraft carriers and fleets of awesome size” (Observer, 10 February, ’Armed to the teeth’ by Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy. ) This article points out how alarmed the Europeans are at all this: “Lord Robertson, the usually unflappable (NATO) secretary general, has been moved to warn some members that unless the declining European defence expenditure is reversed then Europe � and the Europeans in NATO � are in danger of becoming military pygmies”.
Thus we can see the emerging contours of a new arms race, of a new period of rising imperialist tensions between the most powerful states in the world. The ‘war against terrorism’, Bush has always insisted, has the whole world for its stage and will continue indefinitely. That is because its real aim is not to combat terrorism but to permanently terrorise the world into submission to US diktats. The European powers know this, and their opposition to the US has nothing to do with concern for those who will die as a result of thus lurch into unending warfare. It is based solely on the calculation of their own imperialist interests.
Does this mean that we are heading towards a third world war? Not for the foreseeable future. To fight a world war you need more than just temporary alliances or largely economic conglomerations like the EU. You need fully formed imperialist military blocs. The road to the formation of such blocs can only go so far today for a number of reasons. The tendency for each country to pursue its own national-imperialist interests not only causes problems for the US � it also makes it very difficult for the major European powers to sink their own rivalries and enmities and come to together as a single anti-US bloc under the leadership of the most powerful European nation (this, of course, is Germany, whose very history demonstrates the problem). No less important is the vast military imbalance we have already referred to. The war in Afghanistan, while sharpening tensions between the US and its rivals, has underlined this imbalance even more. As Beaumont and Vulliamy put it, “The reality � even before the latest proposed increases in military spending � is that America could beat the rest of the world at war with one hand tied behind its back”. Conflict between European powers and America will continue and indeed worsen, even taking the form of proxy wars fought through local gangs or even nation states. But it cannot yet be an overt confrontation.
But there is another reason why a third world war is not on the agenda. Imperialist blocs require an ideology if they are to mobilise their populations, and above all their proletariats, for war. The US bourgeoisie has certainly achieved a good measure of success in whipping up a massive campaign of nationalist hysteria after the September 11 attacks, and even gives us a glimpse of what capitalism would need to do on an even bigger scale to drag the proletariat off to war. But a war against the Taliban is one thing; even the US bourgeoisie is not ready to mobilise its workers to make war on ‘democratic’ Europe. And in Europe itself, even the ‘war against terrorism’, while creating negative feelings of disorientation and fear, did not at all actively mobilise the proletariat. Underlying this is the fact that the working class today � in contrast to the 1930s � has not been subjected to a massive defeat and is still ready to defend its class interests rather than sacrifice itself on the altar of war.
And this is precisely why the big wars of today are still aimed at scapegoats rather than at the real enemy. The bourgeoisie is still unable to pursue its imperialist rivalries to their ultimate conclusion. But this is no reason to fall into complacency. The efforts of the USA to impose ‘order’ on a world sliding into chaos can succeed only in aggravating and extending that chaos; humanity is even more menaced by a spiral of local and regional wars than by a single world holocaust. Even more dangerous is the fact that such a spiral could take place without the bourgeoisie having to defeat the workers of the central capitalist countries in a direct confrontation. We could be defeated piecemeal, gradually succumbing to the loss of our class identity, by the creeping rot of a disintegrating social system, making it increasingly impossible for the working class as a class to take power and save society by organising it anew.
And still the working class remains the only force capable of preventing this slide into the abyss. Its current struggles may seem puny in the face of the relentless attack on its living standards demanded both by the deepening world economic crisis and the huge growth in military spending and preparations for war. But the simultaneity of these two elements is no accident; they spring from the same source � the decadence and obsolescence of the capitalist system � and they mutually reinforce each other. In struggling against both crisis and war, the working class can come to recognise their intimate connection, and thus to understand the necessity for its own revolutionary alternative.
WR, 2/3/02.
The new outburst of violence between Hindus and Muslims in India that began on 27th February with the burning to death of 58 Hindus on a train has now claimed the lives of at least 295 people. The true figure may be far higher. Men, women and even young children have been the victims of brutal massacres in several parts of the state of Gujarat, some of them being doused in petrol and set alight. The papers have been quick to describe this as the fruit of “deep-rooted sectarian grievances” (Guardian 1/3/02), explaining that the Hindus on the train were returning from a ceremony in Ayodha to dedicate the building of a new temple on a disputed religious site. In 1992, Hindu nationalists destroyed the Ayodha mosque and in the violence that followed some 3,000 people died.
The Indian Government and opposition parties issued a joint statement calling for peace, while troops were sent in to keep peace and a strict curfew was imposed. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee has cancelled plans to attend the Commonwealth summit in Australia in order to deal with the situation. However, the Indian state is not quite the shocked onlooker it presents itself as. In the first place, many of the Muslims, who have been the principle target of the riots since the burning of the train, have had their pleas for help ignored by the police. In city of Ahmedabad, the centre of the violence, all of the inhabitants of one Muslim enclave were burnt to death. To date only 900 troops have arrived to police this city of some 5 million people. In the second place, the current government is dominated by the BJP, which came to power by provoking Hindu sectarianism against Muslims. While the leadership of the BJP today appeals for restraint, in 1992 many of them participated in the destruction of the Ayodha mosque.
However, the violence in India today is no more the simple reflection of ‘deep-rooted sectarian grievances’ than is the case in the former Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland. While such tensions are a historical reality, they are subordinate to the forces that shape the capitalist system that dominates the globe. Sectarian violence, wherever it appears and whatever its original causes, is always subsumed within the political and imperialist struggles of the ruling class. In the Indian sub-continent, one of the determining factors has been the rivalry between India and Pakistan which, since their independence from Britain in 1947, have remained in a state of open or covert war. This reached a new peak in the new year when it seemed that open war was possible, as India piled the pressure on Pakistan following the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13th. However, this situation itself was but a result of the global imperialist struggle which, since the USA’s declaration of the ‘war against terrorism’ has seen changes in the balance of political forces in many parts of the world, even when apparently unconnected with Afghanistan. In the sub-continent, as we showed in this paper last month (see WR 251, ‘Against capitalism’s war drive in India and Pakistan’), this has been expressed in a weakening of Pakistan’s position because of its support for the Taliban, a situation which the India government has sought to exploit.
The Indian and Pakistani governments may or may not have directly orchestrated the latest violence, but it is their imperialist rivalry that sets up the dynamic that produces such violence; meanwhile, behind these third rate powers stand those of the second and first ranks whose manoeuvrings determine the whole global situation.
And while the bourgeois factions and nations manoeuvre, it is the exploited and the oppressed who pay the price. The vast majority of those burnt and beaten to death are the poor, the slum-dwellers, the proletarians. What is more, every religious or racial slaughter is a blow against the ability of the working class to unite and fight back against growing poverty and war. Indeed, it is a prefiguration of the dark future that capitalism in its death agony offers humanity, a world where the exploited have lost all hope and plunge into hell with their hands round each others’ throats. But that future is not yet assured; and we who raise the flag of workers’ unity are not idle dreamers, but the only ones who point to an alternative future for mankind.
North, 2/3/02
Since its origins, the workers’ movement has had to face up to repression from the bourgeoisie. However, it would be a serious error, a real expression of naivety, to think that such repression only takes the form of physical repression directed against workers’ strikes or uprisings.
The proletarian revolution is the first in history whose success fundamentally depends on a revolutionary class consciousness about its own goals, about the final aims of its combat against capitalism: communist society. Inevitably, in capitalist society, this historical consciousness develops in the proletariat in an uneven way; and this is why revolutionary class consciousness is initially crystallised in the political organisations of the proletarian vanguard.
It is an irony of history that the bourgeoisie has often shown itself to be more far-sighted than the working class masses on the crucial role of revolutionary organisations. The ruling class has always paid particular attention to the political organisations that defend the need for a communist revolution, even in periods in which they are an extreme minority, even completely unknown to the vast majority of the working class. This remains true whatever the political regime of the day. To give just two examples that concern ourselves directly:
Only once in history have the methods of the political police been examined in an exhaustive manner by revolutionaries: after the October revolution in Russia, when the archives of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks. It was on the basis of these archives that Victor Serge wrote his book What Every Revolutionary Should Know About Repression, which to this day remains a very valuable expose of police methods. As Serge put it, the Okhrana was “the prototype of the modern political police”. However, as we shall see, spying and police provocation weren’t born with the Okhrana, and revolutionaries didn’t wait until Serge’s book before understanding that they were the subject of police interest.
What is the aim of this police interest? It’s not simply to spy on, repress and destroy revolutionary organisations. The bourgeoisie and its political police know very well that the political organisations of the proletariat are not generated in the heads of the individuals who compose them, but by the very conditions of the class struggle, the permanent opposition between the working class and capitalist society.
It’s therefore no accident if the figure of the agent provocateur has always been so abhorred in the workers’ movement, both in its political organisations and the organs the class gives rise to during the course of its struggles (general assemblies, factory committees, etc). From their beginnings the political organisations of the working class have tried to protect themselves against the activities of agents provocateurs. Thus in the 1795 statutes of the London Corresponding Society, one of the first working class political organisations, we have the following rule: “Persons attempting to trespass on order, under pretence of showing zeal, courage, or any other motive, are to be suspected. A noisy disposition is seldom a sign of courage, and extreme zeal is often a cloak of treachery” (cited in Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1968 Pelican edition, p 539). In the same way, the Communist League (for which Marx wrote the famous Communist Manifesto in 1848) stated in its article 42: “individuals who have been kept at arms length or excluded, as well as suspicious elements in general, must be watched by the League and placed beyond the pale” However, the effectiveness of police provocation has its limits. As Victor Serge put it: “Provocation can only wipe out individuals or groups and is almost impotent against the revolutionary movement as a whole. We have seen how an agent provocateur became responsible (in 1912) for bringing Bolshevik propaganda into Russia; how another (Malinovski) gave speeches written by Lenin in the Duma (...) Whether a revolutionary leaflet is handed out by a secret agent or a devoted revolutionary, the results are still the same: the essential thing is that it should be read (...) When the secret agent Malinovski acted as Lenin’s voice in the Duma, the Minister of the Interior was wrong to rejoice over the success of his hired agent. Lenin’s words were far more important to the country than the mere voice of a wretch like him”.
Much worse than provocation in itself is suspicion, the distrust that can grow up in an organisation when its members feel themselves to be the target of provocation. This is all the more the case because - apart from this unique case when the Okhrana archives were seized - revolutionaries obviously aren’t in a position to find proofs in the police archives, while the police themselves do all they can to cover their tracks and protect the real spies. The worst thing is that often the police don’t actually need to do anything; they can just let suspicion and distrust take root and gather the fruits: the paralysis or even the break up of the revolutionary organisation. Thompson’s book The Making of the English Working Class gives us a striking example of this kind of paralysis: “In 1794 one Jones, of Tottenham, was accused (mistakenly) of being a spy, because of his violent resolutions which were alleged to be for the ‘purpose of entrapping the society’. Jones (the genuine informer, Groves, reported with wry relish) complained: ‘If a Citizen made a Motion which seemed anyways spirited he was set down as a Spy sent among them by the Government. If a Citizen sat in a corner and said nothing he was watching their proceedings that he might better report it (...) Citizens hardly knew how to act’” (op cit.).
While distrust within a revolutionary organisation can bring about paralysis and disintegration, suspicion is a burden which often proves unbearable for the individual militant (Serge cites examples of militants who committed suicide, or carried out desperate acts, because they were unable to clear themselves of an unjustified suspicion). A communist militant sets himself in opposition to the whole of bourgeois society; he is placed outside the normal order of things, accused by the bourgeois propaganda machine of being a fanatic or a bloody criminal. He can be hunted down like a wild beast. To keep his head held high, a communist militant must not only maintain an unquenchable conviction in the historic cause of the proletariat, in the future of humanity, in the necessity and possibility of a communist revolution; he must also preserve his honour as a militant, the respect and confidence of his comrades in arms. There is no worse shame for a communist militant than to be designated a traitor. Suspicion is terribly easy to sow, and very hard to wipe out. This is why communist militants have the duty to defend their dignity faced with suspicion and slander, just as the organisation has the responsibility not to tolerate these poisons, which can only destroy its unity and solidarity between comrades.
It was not for nothing that in 1860, Karl Marx published his denunciation of Karl Vogt, a spy in the service of Napoleon III, who himself accused Marx of being a police agent. ‘Well-meaning’ bourgeois commentators often see this text as a weakness of Marx’s, a distraction from his ‘philosophical’ work, a futile attack on a pathetic individual. It has also been claimed that the text, with its minute attention to Vogt’s most lamentable activities, is an example of Marx’s ‘authoritarianism’, his inability to take criticism. This is to understand nothing of Marx’s motives. Marx hated talking about himself or his personal affairs in public, but he felt obliged to devote a year to this indispensable work in order to defend both his personal honour as a revolutionary, and also and above all the movement of which he was a part.
Victor Serge was quite correct to write: “There is a tradition of it: the enemies of action, the cowards, the well-entrenched ones, the opportunists, are happy to assemble their arsenal... in the sewers! Suspicion and slander are their weapons for discrediting revolutionaries”.
The danger of uncontrolled suspicion within the organisation was well understood by revolutionaries of the past, as we can see from the statutes of the League of the Just, the predecessor of the Communist League (these draft statutes are from 1843): “If someone wants to complain about someone or some question connected to the League, they must do so openly in the (section) meeting. Denigrators will be excluded” (point 9).
Towards the end of the 19th century, this basic position was further refined. It was not enough to expel the denigrator; it was necessary to deal with unfounded accusations so that they wouldn’t undermine the organisation. This method of the workers’ movement was formulated in the statutes of the Berlin section of the German social democratic party, which in 1882 (when the party was working in illegality) declared: “Every militant - even when it’s a well-known comrade - has the duty to maintain discretion about the subjects discussed in the organisation, whatever the issue. If a comrade hears an accusation about another comrade, he has the duty in the first place to deal with it confidentially, and he must demand the same from the comrade who informed him of the accusation; he must establish the reasons behind the accusation and know what lies behind it. He must inform the secretary (of the section), who must clarify the question in a confrontation between the accused and the accuser (...) Any other action, as for example the sowing of suspicion without definite proofs attested by the secretaries (ie those responsible to the section) can cause considerable damage. Since the police have an obvious interest in promoting divisions in our ranks by spreading denigrations, any comrade who does not stick to the procedure described above runs the risk of being considered as someone working for the police” (cited from Fricke, History of the German Workers’ Movement 1869-1917).
It is evident that in the conditions of illegality of that time, revolutionaries were preoccupied on a day to day basis by the danger of police infiltration. But suspicion within the organisation is not always the work of police action; it can arise without the slightest provocation from the state. Even when accusations are launched with the best intentions of protecting the organisation, the distrust they sow can be even more dangerous to the health of the organisation, and to the security of its militants, than real provocation. This is what Serge again draws attention to: “Accusations are murmured about, then said out loud, and usually they cannot be checked out. This causes enormous damage, worse in some ways than that caused by provocation itself (...)This evil of suspicion and mistrust among us can only be reduced and isolated by a great effort of will. It is necessary, as the condition of any real struggle against provocation - and slanderous accusation of members is playing the game of provocation - that no-one should be accused lightly, and it should also be impossible for an accusation against a revolutionary to be accepted without being investigated. Every time anyone is touched by suspicion, a jury formed of comrades should determine whether it is a well-founded accusation or a slander. These are simple rules which should be observed with inflexible rigour if one wishes to preserve the moral health of revolutionary organisations”.
In the first part of this article, we have tried to show:
The communist organisation does not have a ‘natural’ place in bourgeois society; on the contrary, it is a foreign body within it. The antagonism between communist principles and bourgeois ideology is played out not only outside the organisation, but inside it as well. The infiltration of ideologies alien to the proletariat can take the form of opportunist political positions being taken up by a part of the organisation, but also and much more insidiously through forms of individual behaviour which are passed on from the ruling class (or from certain social strata with no historical future) and which are diametrically opposed to what should be the comportment of a communist militant.
The ICC has always insisted that the question of the political behaviour of militants is a question linked to the principles of a class which is the bearer of communism. Against the poison of distrust and suspicion, we say in our platform that “the relations between the different parts of the organisation and the ties between militants necessarily bear the scars of capitalist society and therefore cannot constitute an island of communist relations within capitalism. Nevertheless, they cannot be in flagrant contradiction with the goals pursued by revolutionaries, and they must of necessity be based on that solidarity and mutual confidence which are the hallmarks of belonging to an organisation of the class which is the bearer of communism”. Similarly our statutes say that the behaviour of a militant cannot be in contradiction with the aims we are fighting for, and that debates in the organisation “are carried out with the greatest political rigour, while avoiding personal attacks which cannot take the place of coherent political argument”. To forget these rules of behaviour, to allow oneself to be carried away by the spirit of competition which is inculcated by bourgeois society, can lead one further and further away from the terrain of debate between communists; in certain circumstances (for example when militants are in a minority and are short of political arguments) it can lead them to launching campaigns of slander against their comrades, who are seen as enemies to bring down.
The use of campaigns of slander against militants within revolutionary organisations has dotted the history of the workers’ movement since its origins. We only have to recall Bakunin’s slanders against Marx within the First International, where the latter was accused of being a “dictator” (as a result of being a Jew and a German!); the calumnies spread after the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party by the Mensheviks against Lenin, who was accused of wanting to introduce a reign of terror in the party, like Robespierre. We can also cite the extreme case of the campaigns of denigration aimed against Rosa Luxemburg by the opportunist elements in German social democracy, who were to betray the principles of the working class in 1914. Thus in the corridors of the party Luxemburg was accused of having the morals of a libertine, and even of being an agent of the Okhrana, by militants who a few years later, in January 1919, would organise her murder: we refer to the ‘bloodhound’ Noske and his accomplices Ebert and Scheidemann.
To give one last example, our predecessors in the Gauche Communiste de France also had to deal with slanders inside the organisation, as we can see in this resolution adopted at the GCF conference in July 1945:
“Approving the resolution of the general assembly of 16 June which registered the break from the organisation by these elements, the conference raises its voice in particular against the campaign of base slander, which has become the preferred weapon of these elements against the organisation and against its militants as individuals.
By resorting to such methods, these elements, while exposing their real policies, create a poisonous atmosphere by introducing suspicion, the threat of pogroms (to use their own expression), gangsterism, thus perpetuating the infamous tradition which up to now has been the speciality of Stalinism.
Considering it urgent to put an end to such slander, to prevent it from taking the place of political debate in the relations between revolutionary militants, the conference decides to address itself to the revolutionary groups, requesting that they institute a court of honour which will take position on the revolutionary morality of the militants who have been slandered, and to refuse entry into the proletarian movement of slander and slanderers”.
Thus our organisation, by rejecting slander and slanderers, is in full continuity with the combat of past revolutionaries for the defence of the organisation against all the efforts to destroy it. Slander not only has no place in the ranks of the proletariat, but is one of the preferred weapons of the bourgeoisie for discrediting communist organisations and sowing generalised distrust towards the positions they defend. To be convinced of this we only have to recall the campaign of slander against Lenin (accused by the Kerensky government of being an agent of the Kaiser and German imperialism) on the eve of the Russian revolution, with the aim of discrediting the Bolshevik party; and those waged against Trotsky (accused of being an agent of Hitler and of fascism) to discredit any struggle against Stalinism in the 1930s.
The fight against slander is not only a vital necessity for militants and the organisations they belong to. It concerns all the organisations of the communist movement. This is why, when faced with destructive behaviour of this kind, which can only play the game of the bourgeois state, the ICC has always alerted the whole proletarian political milieu: “When such behaviour comes to light, it is the duty of the organisation to take measures not only in defence of its own security, but also in defence of the security of other communist organisations” (‘Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation’, International Review 33).
Since the following article was written the ICC has held an Extraordinary International Conference in which the organisation as a whole was able to discuss and take a position on the behaviour of the 'Fraction'. In next month's WR there will be an article on the work of this conference.
Revolutionary organisations have always had to defend themselves against attempts to discredit them (see our article in WR252, "The struggle of revolutionary organisations against provocation and slander"), and the ICC has not been spared this task during its more than 30 years of existence. Today, it is once again the target of a destructive attack by a small number of its own 'discontented' militants, who for months have been carrying out a scorched earth policy within the organisation. They have produced a text titled On dit qu'ils ont la rage! (Note 1) [12], which some of our subscribers have received in the post. This text was also distributed at the ICC's Paris public forum on 16th March, along with another titled New exclusions from the ICC. Our intention here is to make our own position clear, and to counter this flood of lies and slander with the truth. We will return to a more in-depth analysis of the significance of a method which consists in covering a revolutionary organisation in dirt.
The two texts protest against several of the ICC's political positions and attitudes:
The exclusion of Jonas, "a founding militant of the ICC [whose] only fault was to have been one of the first and most determined to combat, without hesitation or compromise, what we had begun to analyse in recent years (and not only in France) as an alarming turn within the ICC both on the level of its internal functioning and at the level of its general political orientations".
The supposed 'persecution' directed against a 'fraction' which has emerged within the ICC, and which is the author of the two texts in question: "Today, it is not just an isolated ex-militant who has been treated as unclean and expelled from the ICC; the exclusion of a fraction is in progress. It only remains for the ICC to find a 'credible' justification in order to make public the exclusion of the other members of this fraction, one after the other".
Still according to the authors of these two texts, this situation is the result of a serious crisis within the organisation, which is described as follows: "The ICC is today confronted with a flagrant contradiction between the image it wants to give of a healthy, open, fraternal organisation that encourages debate and (...) the reality of its present refusal of any expression of internal disagreement, along with a regime of constant pressure, rumours, and slanders against its own militants". In fact, the ICC is supposedly in a state of degeneration, as one of the two texts suggests elsewhere: "The ICC's accusation of 'political unworthiness' has as much effect on us as that directed by a degenerating Communist International against Bordiga, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik militants to justify their exclusion".
We are thus confronted with a group of militants, proclaiming themselves an 'internal fraction of the ICC', who openly defend an ex-militant of the ICC, Jonas, whose exclusion we have made public in a communiqu� published in WR252.
The exclusion of Jonas: an individual whose behaviour was that of an agent provocateur
Among the reasons we gave for this exclusion was the following: "One of the most disgusting and intolerable aspects of his behaviour was the veritable campaign that he both led and promoted against a member of the organisation (...) with accusations, behind the scenes and even before people outside the ICC, of manipulating both friends and family, and the central organs, on behalf of the police" (Communiqu� to our readers (Note 2) [13]). The members of the so-called 'fraction' cannot deny this fact which is obvious to all within the ICC, nor have they ever done so any more than Jonas himself. In reality, "the fact that Jonas has refused to meet the ICC to explain his behaviour is in itself an admission of the fact that he is aware of having become a sworn enemy of our organisation, despite the theatrical declarations to his 'comrades' whom in reality (with the exception of those he has succeeded in dragging in his wake) he depicts as either 'cops', inquisitors, or poor manipulated cretins". In deciding to exclude Jonas, we have done no more than adopt the traditions of revolutionary organisations within the working class: "Since the beginning of the workers' movement, its political organissations have always reacted with unbending severity (including with exclusion) against the authors of slanderous accusations against their militants, even when these were in good faith...". (Note 3) [14]
The militants of the 'fraction' recently informed us of their disagreement with the decision to exclude Jonas, which they considered 'iniquitous', and 'demanded' that the ICC give them the right to reply in our press.
It is perfectly possible that the facts with which a militant is charged may be contested either by himself or by others (which is not the case as far as Jonas is concerned), but the press is not the place for the expression and discussion of such disagreements. The organisations of the working class have adopted specific means for dealing with such delicate questions, in commissions mandated to do so. As a last resort, a militant who considers himself unjustly dishonoured can also appeal to a jury of honour drawn from groups of the Communist Left. Needless to say, we have also proposed this possibility to Jonas.
However, we have accepted that the members of the 'fraction' should put forward an opposing viewpoint on the sanction, but with the following proviso: "For it to be productive, the defence of such a viewpoint should make critical reference to our article on 'The struggle of revolutionary organisations against provocation and slander'; in particular it should demonstrate in what way our predecessors in the workers' movement were mistaken, or in what way historical conditions have changed such that their practice in the defence of the organisation is no longer valid today". The 'fraction' has answered the ICC's proposal by distributing, behind our backs, one of the two texts denigrating the ICC (our subscribers informed us of its existence as soon as they received it), while we only discovered the existence of the other at our public forum in Paris.
In reality, Jonas' refusal to defend himself according to the rules and methods in the workers' movement corresponds to the fact that his real concern, above anything else, is that the group that has remained faithful to him should take his defence by covering the ICC in dirt. And this is indeed what the 'friends of Jonas' are doing.
The 'fraction': a parasitic body within the ICC
After trying for months to destroy the organisation from the inside, Jonas' friends have now begun the same destructive attack against the ICC and the contacts around it on the outside. Why are they behaving like this?
This is not the first time that the ICC has confronted organisational problems. We have already given an extensive account of these in our press (Note 4) [15], in particular as regards a tendency to personalise political questions, more especially as the result of the domination by criteria of affinity and individual loyalties, to the detriment of a party spirit, which presupposes the fullest development of militants' individual commitment and responsibility in the service of the collective body that is the organisation.
We have also highlighted the similarities between the problems with which we have been affected and some of the episodes of the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) in 1903. Faced with the attitude of the Mensheviks, the attacks of which he was the target, and the subjectivity which had infected Martov and his friends, Lenin replied: "The 'minority' regroups within the Party heterogeneous elements united solely by their desire, conscious or not, to maintain the relations of the circle, the forms of organisation that preceded the Party". These elements "naturally raise the standard of revolt against those vital restrictions that the organisation demands, and they erect their spontaneous anarchism into a principle of struggle, wrongly describing this anarchism (�) as a demand in favour of 'tolerance', etc". Later he continues, "When I consider the behaviour of Martov's friends after the Congress (...) I can only say that it is an insane attempt, unworthy of Party members, to tear the Party apart (�) And why? Solely because they are displeased at the composition of the central organs, since objectively this is the only thing that divides us, the subjective considerations (offence, insults, expulsion, pushing aside, wounding, etc) being nothing more than the fruit of wounded pride and a diseased imagination" (Lenin, Account of the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP).
The historical experience of revolutionary organisations shows that questions concerning their functioning are political questions in their own right, and deserve to be treated with the closest attention and the greatest depth. This is why we will return in our press to the analysis of those weaknesses which have made it possible for such difficulties to reappear in our own ranks. For the moment, we will concentrate on this concrete expression of those difficulties.
These comrades' discontent was crystallised by the fact that the ICC's 14th Congress called into question certain orientations that they had defended, both within and outside the old central organ. Contrary to the 2nd Congress of the Russian party, the make-up of the central organ was not in question, since those among them who had previously belonged to the central organ were re-elected by the Congress, which counted precisely on their experience and the confidence which up to then they had deserved.
As the 14th Congress' resolution on its activities demonstrated, the ICC diagnosed the existence of a threat to its organisational tissue and functioning, resulting from the persistence of a circle or clan mentality, an idea to which the comrades were bitterly opposed. The Congress also rejected their previous positions by highlighting the danger of over-optimism in our ranks, leading us to underestimate these difficulties. Moreover, the Congress appointed an investigation commission mandated to shed light on the malfunctioning in the permanent commissions of our central organs, something that these comrades saw as a real threat, with the consequence that they shortly began to do whatever they could to sabotage the investigation commission's work.
Just like the Bolshevik party before its Stalinist degeneration, the ICC does not have a monolithic conception of the organisation. The existence and expression of disagreements within the organisation are not a problem in themselves. The existence of differences is recognised in our statutes as being a part of the necessary process of clarifying political disagreement. What is a problem however, is the fact that since then a certain number of militants in our French section have adopted a policy of systematically violating our organisational rules. Reacting out of "wounded pride", they adopted an anarchistic attitude of violating the decisions of the Congress, of denigration, slanders, bad faith, and outright lies. After several violations of our organisational rules, some of them serious to the point of forcing the organisation to react firmly, these comrades held a series of secret meetings during August 2001, which finally gave birth to a group baptised a 'collective for reflection'.
The organisation has since acquired a copy of the proceedings of one of these secret meetings � something the participants would have liked to avoid. These proceedings demonstrated clearly to the other members of our organisation that these comrades were fully aware that they were fomenting a plot against the organisation, demonstrating a total lack of loyalty towards the ICC, which was expressed in particular through:
the creation of a strategy to deceive the organisation and impose their own policy on it;
a putschist, leftist approach, which posed the political problems we were confronting in terms of "recovering the means of functioning" (in other words, control of the central organs);
the creation of an "iron solidarity" among the participants and against the central organs, clearly turning their backs on the freely accepted discipline of a proletarian organisation.
We have since learnt that at the same time, some of these militants were already establishing a secret correspondence with members of other ICC sections.
After lengthy discussion, notably on the significance of the approach expressed in the notes of the secret meetings, those taking part in or supporting the 'collective' decided to dissolve it, and to rejoin the debate within the organisation's framework. They recognised in particular that a real desire to clarify has nothing to fear from an open debate, where every comrade is called to involve himself completely with a view to strengthening the organisation. They recognised that only after such a debate would it be possible to see whether there existed two irreconcilable political orientations, and if such were the case, whether it were necessary to form a tendency or fraction with a real and responsible content. Moreover, the comrades committed themselves to undertake a profound reflection on the reasons that had led them to behave as enemies of the organisation.
Sadly, a month later some of the members of the late 'collective' turned their backs on their own previous decision and formed a group which they called 'internal fraction of the ICC'; they then began a campaign of systematically and repeatedly violating our organisation's statutes. To cite only a few examples: the use of other comrades' personal addresses; refusal to pay their dues in full; refusal to attend the meeting of the central organs to which they belonged or were invited, under the pretext that the ICC should "first discuss the 'fraction's' status"; threat to publish in public the internal documents of the life of the organisation; refusal to deliver to the organisation a document that circulated among certain militants and apparently contains extremely serious accusations against other militants; refusal to meet with other members of the organisation on the pretext that the organisation had decided to retain the notes (which could be consulted at any moment) from any meeting of this kind. (Note 5) [16] On top of this long list, we now have to add yet another: the theft of the file of addresses of the subscribers to R�volution Internationale by the member of the central organ to whom this responsibility had been entrusted, even before the 'collective's' existence was openly declared.
Faced with such destructive behaviour, and not because of any political differences, the organisation had no other choice than to defend its own survival by adopting the sanctions laid down in the statutes. Without the common respect of those organisational rules which are embodied in our statutes and freely accepted by all, there is no organisation.
This phenomenon of an organisation within the organisation, acting within it like a parasitic and destructive body, is not new either. It existed in the First International in the form of Bakunin's Alliance for Socialist Democracy, against which Engels declared: "It is high time to put an end, once and for all, to the internal struggles which are provoked daily within our Association by the presence of this parasitic body.
These quarrels only serve to waste that energy which should serve to combat the regime of the bourgeoisie. By paralysing the International's activity against the enemies of the working class, the Alliance admirably serves the bourgeoisie and all its governments" (The General Council to all the members of the International).
Contempt for the spirit and the letter of the ICC's statutes
Each time that a group of militants has left our organisation, trying as they did so to cause it the maximum possible damage, they have never failed to accuse the ICC of 'Stalinist' degeneration, and to present themselves as its real continuation. The militants who today have grouped under the banner of the 'internal fraction of the ICC' are no exception. Their declarations claiming that they want to undertake a political struggle within the ICC are nothing but a fig-leaf to hide their constant war against its internal life and its activity.
In fact, it was these comrades' own behaviour that created a growing conviction within our organisation that their proclaimed desire to undertake the work of a real fraction was nothing but a bluff. The problem is that � for a while at least � they are likely to create confusion and distrust outside the organisation, now that they have decided to reveal their idiocies in public. We can only answer whatever doubt they may succeed in sowing by reminding our readers that throughout its existence the ICC has only very rarely excluded a militant, and then only on the grounds of extremely serious faults that endangered the organisation. Never has any militant been excluded for political disagreements. Today, the ICC attributes the greatest possible importance to the clear expression and confrontation of disagreements, on the basis of texts and contributions to its internal bulletins, while all the discussions are summarised in reports at every level of the organisation, to give an overview of the advance of the debate. However, for us as for Rosa Luxemburg, the principle of freedom of criticism within the organisation is accompanied by this non-negotiable precondition: "independent thought is of the greatest importance to us. But this is only possible if � all slanders, lies and insults aside � we welcome gratefully and without distinction of tendency, the opinions of people who may be mistaken, but whose only aim is the health of our Party" (Freedom of criticism and science). (Note 6) [17]
As for the accusation that the ICC is violating its own statutes by refusing to recognise the 'fraction', this is a gross falsehood.
The 'collective' and the 'fraction' that followed it were not formed on the basis of a positive alternative orientation to a position adopted by the organisation, but by a gathering of the 'discontented', who put all their disagreements into a common stew and then tried to give them a semblance of coherence. This is why the premature and totally unprincipled formation of the 'fraction' has nothing to do with what the fractions in the workers' movement represented historically: "Unlike the tendency, which only arises in the case of differences of orientation on circumstantial questions, the fraction is justified by programmatic disagreements which can only end either in the exclusion of the bourgeois position or in the departure of the communist fraction" ("Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation", point 10, in International Review n�33). The organisation could not simply ignore this analysis because of the 'fraction's' temper tantrums and its demands for recognition. Nor has it in any way violated its statutes by calling into question the right of organised tendencies or fractions to exist within the ICC. Quite the contrary. It is precisely because, as our statutes say, "the organisation cannot judge when such an organised form should be either constituted or dissolved", that the members of the 'fraction' can meet as they choose to put forward collectively within the organisation whatever positions they choose. Just as for any other comrade of the organisation, the press is also open to them to put forward clearly elaborated minority positions. Indeed, it is for this very reason that we proposed that these militants should use the columns of the International Review to express their disagreements with our conception of the fraction's historical role, as we presented it in an article in n�108 of the Review. Needless to say, they hastened to 'accept' this proposal� by posing a whole series of preconditions which were completely unacceptable to us because they implied that the whole organisation should in fact adopt their positions. This episode is eloquent in demonstrating that the expression of their disagreements with the ICC, in public and before the working class, is the last of their concerns.
Far from adopting an approach aimed at convincing us of their positions through serious political argument, these militants' 'struggle' for the official recognition of their "fraction" has in their eyes justified a series of gross violations of our statutes (to the point where within the ICC these comrades are commonly known as the 'infraction'). They have trampled underfoot one basic principle of our functioning: "the fact that they defend minority positions in no way absolves members of the organisation from any of their responsibilities as militants" (extract from the ICC's statutes). Without this, a united organisation that allows disagreements to exist within it, is impossible. One of their violations � the reduction by 70% of their dues (obligatory for all), in order to cover their own expenses � is a clear demonstration of this. If the organisation were to accept this, then it would be violating its own statutes, and would open the door to a situation where every militant could vary his dues according to his level of agreement with this or that position of the organisation. Such a situation would lead directly to the destruction of the organisation.
The 'friends of Jonas' clearly intend to drag the organisation to its destruction. And against such 'rabid' destructiveness, the ICC is more determined than ever to defend itself and to defend the principles of the workers' movement.
ICC, 21st March 2002
NOTES
(1) We can render this roughly as "They claim we have rabies", a reference to a French saying according to which if you want to kill your dog, you first accuse it of having rabies. (Back) [18]
(2) In the same communiqu�, we also reported that the militant of the ICC accused by Jonas of being "a cop" demanded that a vigorous enquiry into the truth or otherwise of the accusation be conducted, before being allowed to continue to work within our ranks. The enquiry concluded that these accusations were totally without foundation and were indeed slanderous and ill-intentioned. This did not prevent Jonas from continuing to spread his slander. (Back) [19]
(3) Extract from a resolution voted during a discussion in a meeting of the ICC, and for which those members of the 'fraction' who were present also voted. (Back) [20]
(4) See in particular the International Review n�82, and the article on the 11th ICC Congress and the struggle to build the organisation, and the "Theses on parasitism" in International Review n�94. (Back) [21]
(5) A practice on the organisation's part which was all the more justified by the blackmail to which we were subjected by the 'fraction' threatening the public distribution of our internal documents. (Back) [22]
(6) This restriction, apart from the extreme measures of suspending comrades, has taken another form. All the militants who had taken part in the 'activity' of the 'collective' were asked to develop in writing the reasons that they had already given orally for its dissolution. Our organisation's intention was to allow all its members to get to the roots of the incomprehension which had allowed such hostile and destructive behaviour to develop amongst us. Since no such contribution was forthcoming, we decided that the comrades concerned could not write on organisational questions in the internal bulletins, until this condition was satisfied. This is the reality that the 'fraction' now fraudulently travesties as a demand for Maoist-style 'self-criticism'. When the 'fraction' appeared, the organisation changed this requirement, given that the 'fraction' actually defended the late 'collective'. We no longer asked the militants concerned to undertake an in-depth criticism of their destructive behaviour, but only to take an argued position on the facts, either for or against. To this day, and despite the promise published in the "fraction's" own Bulletin n�1, they have failed to do so. This is why the members of the 'fraction' who took part in the meetings of the late 'collective' cannot publish contributions in the ICC's internal bulletins. This has not stopped the organisation itself from taking the decision to publish certain of their texts when it was necessary for one reason or another that the ICC be aware of their content. (Back) [23]
The escalation of barbarism in the Middle East is part of the escalation of military conflicts across the whole planet. Following the September 11th attacks the USA launched a long term crusade against 'terrorism', starting with the war in Afghanistan, an intervention which had been planned well before the destruction of the Twin Towers. This was followed by the increase in tensions between India and Pakistan. Then came the build-up towards a new attack on Iraq, supposedly to make it accept UN weapons inspectors again, or even to depose Saddam. And to emphasise the seriousness of the USA's intent, the Pentagon 'leaked' US plans to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, against anyone else alleged to possess weapons of mass destruction, such as China, Russia, North Korea, Syria, Libya or Iraq.
All this is an expression of the US strategy to maintain its status as the world's sole superpower against any potential rival. It is not Afghanistan or Iraq that threaten the world's most powerful imperialism, nor even Russia or China, despite being nuclear powers themselves, but the great European powers and Japan. Germany has the greatest potential to form an imperialist bloc to rival the USA because of its industrial might and geographical position at the heart of Europe; but it is far from being able to realise that potential today because its military arsenal is puny in comparison to the American armed forces. This has been demonstrated time and again, in Iraq in 1991, in the Balkans and most recently in Afghanistan when the USA was able to go it alone in a military campaign half way round the world. (See 'The real motivations for the US offensive', p.8 and 'Is Britain America's poodle?', p.2 for more in-depth analysis).
Yet each time the US demonstrates its massive power and imposes its 'order' on the world it stirs up new instability and more resentments which can in turn be aggravated and used by its most important rivals. After war in Afghanistan, conflict between India and Pakistan. After new threats against Iraq, increased fighting in Israel and Palestine.
Palestinian suicide bombings have increased in number and in their horrifying effects. Following the killing of 22 Israelis in Netanya at the start of the Passover holiday, Israel launched its largest military operation for 20 years. This spiral of violence can only be understood as part of the growing imperialist chaos in the world today. When preparing the Afghan war, the US talked of support for a future Palestinian state, much to Israel's irritation, but only to keep the support of the Arab countries. The success of the Afghan operation "has dealt a serious blow to the 'Arab cause', and is therefore a catastrophe for Arafat who has been greatly weakened. This helps Israel to push its Palestinian enemy onto the ropes with the consequence of aggravating the open war that it has been dragging out for years" (International Review 108). Since these words were written (last November) Arafat has found himself confined to a cellar in his headquarters, unable to communicate with the outside world except by Israeli agreement.
This has allowed Israel - acting on behalf of the US - to block the European powers from gaining influence in the Middle East conflict; it openly prevented the delegation of Javier Solana, EU foreign policy spokesman, and Josep Pique, Spanish foreign minister, from meeting Arafat, unless he agreed to leave the area with them. They were allowed to meet Peres, but would get little change from such a firm US ally. Nevertheless, the European powers can only base their attempts to gain some influence, or destabilise this US sphere, on contact with the Palestinians and Arabs. Hence the rearguard actions such as the British, French, Italians and others who have travelled to the West Bank to act as human shields, or the balance of media propaganda in Europe, which is highly critical of Israeli actions.
The US, Israel's greatest ally, has been mindful of its wider imperialist interests in its approach to the Middle East. It is clear that the USA supports the present Israeli action: Bush has condemned terrorism and supported Israel's right to defend itself. Both Bush and Colin Powell have said that Arafat and the Palestinians brought their situation on themselves.
But the US is also aware that Arab countries' support for further attacks on Iraq will depend on it appearing to make some attempt to restrain Israel and work for 'peace' in the region. So they have also called for Israeli withdrawal and insisted on US envoy Zinni being allowed to meet Arafat, even if the media were kept well away. This is a real dilemma that seems to have caused disagreements within the US administration, and explains the constant changes in the Americans' language about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
There is no lack of peace initiatives - from the US, from Europe, from Saudi Arabia. These follow the Madrid conference, the Oslo Accords, the historic handshake at Camp David. Leaders of the conflict on both sides, Arafat, Peres and Rabin, have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which is their reward for fomenting war and terrorism for decades. The more they talk of peace the more they drag the population of the region into war.
On the one hand the Palestinians face the bombardment of their homes and refugee camps with the destruction of vital infrastructure, the shooting of anything that moves including children and ambulances. And more recently tanks in their streets, curfew. This is used by the Palestinian bourgeoisie and its backers to feed anti-Jewish hatred and recruit more suicide bombers.
On the other hand the Israeli population is facing murderous attacks by gunmen and suicide bombers, whether dispatched by the Islamic radicals of Hamas or the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, which is directly linked to the Palestinian Authority. This is used by the Israeli bourgeoisie and its backers to feed nationalist anti-Arab propaganda.
In reality it is not one 'people' or the other, but the global imperialist 'game', involving both Israel and the Palestinian Authority as well as their more powerful backers, that is responsible for all this barbarism. And this game will not be stopped by campaigns that advocate solidarity with Israel or with Palestinian nationalism. The only force that can oppose imperialist war is the proletarian class struggle, which owes no allegiance to any nation, and whose ultimate aim is to make the entire planet a homeland for humanity.
WR, 6/4/02
The anti-terrorist crusade that the American ruling class has been carrying out for the past 6 months has been a considerable success.
The USA has installed its military headquarters at the heart of a new strategic region, Central Asia, not only by directly occupying the former military bases of the former USSR republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan, but also, more recently, by sending US military advisers to Georgia. This country, still run by Gorbachev’s former minister Shevardnaze, is thus totally outside of Russia’s control at the precise moment when Russia had envisaged intervening in Georgia, which has been accused of acting as a base for ‘Chechen terrorists’. We are also beginning to see America’s attempts to take control of Yemen, which occupies a key position between the African and Asian continents via the Gulf of Aden which links the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.
A military escalation across the entire planet
With its intervention in Afghanistan, the US has reaffirmed its status as the only world cop, demonstrating its ability to intervene in any part of the planet, even in Afghan mountains reputed to be impregnable. After the installation of the provisional government in Kabul, which has been struggling to survive the bloody skirmishes between the factions who make up the fragile anti-Taliban coalition, Operation Anaconda aims to wipe out the last pockets of Taliban/al Qaida resistance in the Afghan mountains. This has involved two months of incessant bombings which have cost the lives of more Afghan civilians and even eight US soldiers. The US has warned that the war is far from over, thus preparing the ground for further murderous raids in the area.
At the same time, the US has taken new steps up the global military escalator. Alongside the 11 March speech by Bush about the “dangers that face America”, a Pentagon report revealed an “emergency plan” for the use of nuclear weapons against other major nuclear powers such as Russia and China, but also against the threat of chemical and biological weapons by Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Libya. Strengthened by their success in taking control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal (a little publicised benefit of the intervention in Afghanistan), the USA is upping the stakes in its policy of dissuading other powers from opposing it. At the same time it is conditioning its population to live in permanent fear of attack and to accept as ‘normal’ the US of these kinds of weapons in response or even as a deterrent.
US policy in the Middle East
Today, the US is offering a sordid trade to the Arab states as well as to the European powers: the recognition of a Palestinian state in exchange for war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. This is why we are seeing the return of US emissary Zinni to the Middle East and Vice-President Cheney’s tour around nine ‘friendly’ Arab states and Israel. The USA’s about-face, which took the form of getting a vote in the UN for a resolution which “recognises the right of existence of a Palestinian state alongside Israel”, when it has for years been exercising its veto against similar resolutions, costs it very little and doesn’t change much on the ground. At the same time, the retreat of Israeli tanks from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the efforts to resume bi-lateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, are also the product of pressure from Washington. But they in no way mean that we will see an end to the violent exactions by Israel or to Palestinian suicide bombings, or to Israeli pressure on the Palestinian Authority. On the other hand they do serve to sweep the carpet from under the feet of international protest. This benefits the US as well as Israel. The multiplication of massacres and outrages, such as the killing of an Italian journalist in Ramallah or the firing at ambulances by the Israeli army, only plays into the hands of the European powers, adding fuel to their criticisms of the US and enabling them to present themselves as defenders of the Arab states. With the ‘affair’ of the US-based Mossad agents who didn’t pass on to the US government all the information they had relating to September 11, alongside Colin Powell’s criticisms of Israel’s policy of reprisals and repression, the US is hoping to put pressure on the Sharon government not to be too much of a Lone Ranger.
As for the peace plan presented by Saudi Arabia, the US has expressed a lot or reticence towards it, seeing it as an attempt by regional powers to assert their own claims and squirm away from US tutelage; at the same time the US has remodelled the plan to suit its own purposes. For America, the essential thing is to remain master of the game and leave no space for any of its imperialist rivals.
Getting ready for a new Desert Storm
If the American bourgeoisie is preparing so actively for a new and spectacular operation against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (a mobilisation of 200-300,000 men has been announced), it’s because the latter is a major strategic objective for the US. There are two main reasons for this. First, a new demonstration of force is vital. Through their intervention in Afghanistan, the US has proved that is still a superpower, the only one that can play world cop. It has also demonstrated its capacity to act alone, indicating to the other powers that if they want to keep their slice of the imperialist cake, they can only do this on the coat-tails of the US, playing out the role assigned to them by Washington. However, even though they have been paralysed in this campaign and incapable of offering any alternative, the European tendency to challenge the US has still been more rapid and direct than it was eleven years ago, after the Gulf War. Right after the fall of the Taliban we had the European media campaign about the USA’s Camp X-Ray prisoners being kept in conditions outside the provisions of the Geneva Convention. In mid-February, the French minister of foreign affairs, Vedrine, described the American approach to the struggle against terrorism, which presents it as a struggle between good and evil, as being “simplistic” and based on a “utilitarian unilateralism”. This exasperated the White House and led to the French ambassador being called in. But there have been many other criticisms of US arrogance, notably in Germany (the ‘Green’ minister Fischer saying that “the allies are not satellites”), in Spain and even in Britain (as the European Commissioner for foreign affairs, Chris Patten put it, “true friends don’t lick your boots”). This is why the US is once again banging the drums of war, well aware that the European powers can do little about it. Indeed in the last few weeks there has been a real change of tone: France, which for years has been protesting against the sanctions and military operations that have continued to be directed against Iraq by the US (and Britain), now admits that “it is necessary to act against Saddam Hussein’s policy of re-armament” and participated in the ultimatum concerning the readmission of UN arms inspectors to Iraq. Even if the resistance is stronger in the Arab states (Dick Cheney was faced with having to respond to the argument of the crown prince of Bahrain, who said that “the people who are dying in the street today are not victims of any Iraqi action but of Israeli action”), these states lack the means to stand up against American ambitions for very long.
The second motive is that the USA is animated by a major strategic interest in intervening massively against Iraq. In its offensive aimed at ensuring control of the main strategic zones of the planet, the USA is being pushed to more and more exploit its advantageous position. And here Iraq plays a key role. From now on, "Washington intends no longer to count on allied states which enjoy a certain margin of manoeuvre, but on vassal states which owe it absolute allegiance. The establishment of such a regime in a country like Iraq would be the first step in this direction" (from the newspaper Al Hayat published in London; cited by Courrier International of 14 March). In the perspective of anchoring its presence and influence in Central Asia right up to the gates of China, Russia and the Indian sub-continent, America is seeking to establish a single and continuous geostrategic sphere of influence: "the strengthening of hegemony over Iraq and its transformation into an axis of US influence is a matter of the first importance, because Iraq is the junction of the two areas: the ‘far east’ of the Arab world, it is also a look-out post onto Central Asia. On this chessboard, states and their frontiers, their peoples, their destinies, are nothing but pawns. And there is only one player (op cit). We should add that from Iraq it is also possible to keep a close watch over the neighbouring states which are least reliable or most threatened by instability: Iran and Syria on the one hand, Jordan and Turkey on the other.
Today, contrary to 1991, the US is seeking to exert a direct control over Iraq and the Baath party, which demands the elimination of Saddam Hussein, especially because today there is no longer the same threat of Iraq breaking up: the Kurdish and Shiite minorities have become too weak to play a major role. Again this is unlike 1991, when Bush Senior cynically pushed these minorities to rebel, the better to leave them to the mercy of the Republican Guard � the very part of the Iraqi army that the Americans allowed to survive so it could carry out its dirty work.
At the time of the Gulf war, we showed that the operation against Iraq was just a pretext which was really aimed at halting the dynamic towards the dissolution of the western bloc; in particular, that it was mainly directed against the European powers, to prevent them from freely pursuing their own imperialist agendas. Today, the dominant trend in imperialism all over the world is ‘every man for himself’, and this is being aggravated by the phenomena of decomposition (terrorism, exacerbated nationalism). If it is to preserve its imperialist dominion, the US gendarme has only one resort: massive force directed at the least challenge to its authority, no matter where it comes from. Twelve years ago we were promised a new world order of peace. Every day since then has proved this to be a lie. The multiplication of US operations aimed at ‘restoring order’ all over the world really demonstrates that capitalism as a whole can offer us nothing more than ever-widening military chaos and barbarism.
ED, 22/3/02.
This article is adapted from Revolution Internationale No 322, publication of the ICC in France. Since it was written there have been several shifts in the situation. For the most recent developments see the lead article of this issue [26].
The recent election in Zimbabwe was, according to a Guardian editorial (14/3/2) a "crime against the people". The election was "thoroughly fixed, fiddled, manipulated, and comprehensively stolen". Surveying the scene the editorial-writer found that "The evidence of massive fraud, rooted in intimidation and skulduggery of every kind, was to be found in every province, every township and every polling station. In short, the whole thing stinks."
There was indeed a lot of evidence for this fraud. There was the intimidation by the army, people forced to vote for the government in postal ballots, the reduction of polling stations in the areas where the opposition MDC had the strongest presence, rural no-go areas for the MDC, voting procedures made deliberately laborious with queues of 20 or 30 hours in the biggest towns, ballot boxes already stuffed with votes before they arrived in polling stations, people just removed from the electoral roll, the last-minute appearance of a second voters' list with an extra 400,000 names on it: all these were cited by those who condemned the election as not being 'free and fair'.
On the other hand, there were those, not just in Africa, who thought that the election was 'legitimate', that criticisms of it sprang from 'colonialist' interests, or were at least tinged with hypocrisy.
The Mugabe government was foremost in describing the colonialist manoeuvres of the British government and its allies in trying to 'destabilise' Zimbabwe. That the British High Commissioner had previously played a sinister role in Belgrade was grist to the 'anti-imperialist' mill. It was claimed that Britain had set up bases in Zambia, Botswana and Mozambique in preparation for an invasion. A Zimbabwean paper reported that the MDC had requested British military intervention if it lost the election.
Meanwhile, some commentators gave examples of other recent elections, some of which had been 'rigged', and others that were at least 'flawed', saying how two-faced it was to single out Zimbabwe for the full glare of publicity. Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, the Republic of the Congo, Montenegro, Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia and Italy have been among the countries cited for varying degrees of electoral irregularity. In addition, the example of George W Bush's election to the US presidency has often been mentioned, as well as the complete absence of elections in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
The situation facing the mass of Zimbabweans
With all this concern about elections there has been little space left in the media for reporting what life in Zimbabwe is like. Inflation is between 100-120%, unemployment is at 60% (80% for young people), life expectancy has gone down 10 years during the last decade, and 25% of adults have HIV/AIDS. These are the things that concern people in Zimbabwe, along with the terror of state repression, Zimbabwe's participation in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the hunger that comes from extensive food shortages. Until recently Zimbabwe was a net food exporter, now nearly half its domestic needs have to be imported. After the election it was reported that Zimbabwe "plans to import huge amounts of food to stave off starvation caused by drought and agricultural chaos. It wants 200,000 tonnes of corn from Kenya, Brazil and Argentina" (Guardian, 23/3/02).
In government for the last 22 years, ZANU-PF have presided over a deterioration in the living standards of the working class and other exploited strata. Their land policy - redistributing white-owned farms to Mugabe's cronies, 'war veterans' and others who want to become small proprietors - has not so far benefited a hungry population, nor is there any prospect that it will in the future.
As for the 'alternative' of the MDC, it has gradually evolved since it was founded by unions in 1999. In accordance with the demands of the IMF and the World Bank, it is committed to privatisation and similar 'free market' policies. There is no evidence that such an approach has ever worked in favour of the exploited or oppressed. In Zimbabwe, as everywhere else in the world, bourgeois democracy means the continuing domination of the same exploiting ruling class. When Jack Straw said that "Zimbabweans have been denied their fundamental right to choose by whom they are governed" (Guardian, 15/3/02) he was showing what 'democratic rights' mean in decadent capitalist society. ZANU-PF and the MDC have expressed many violent differences of view, but they are united in their desire to maintain capitalist exploitation and the order of the state.
The poison of democracy
Although the bourgeoisie can't offer any genuine improvements in the conditions of life of the non-exploiting population, through its democratic campaigns it tries to convince us that we have common interests with our rulers. They have all their armaments, but we are told that the power of the ballot box is the greatest force on earth. In one sense that is close to the truth, for the mystification of democracy is one of the most powerful weapons that capitalism has.
A week before the election the Daily News in Zimbabwe declared that "It is now left to Zimbabweans themselves to deliver themselves from evil. And their only weapon is their vote." In a few short phrases the classes in society, with their different, opposing interests, are reduced to a mass of atomised individuals, fodder for the parties of the bourgeoisie in its democratic system.
The opposition of the MDC fed on widespread discontent throughout the country. It called itself the Movement for Democratic Change, but while it offered lots of democratic rhetoric it could not offer any change in the situation for those who live in Zimbabwe. Before the election MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said of ZANU-PF: "They may want to arrest me, and at worst kill me, but they will never destroy the spirit of the people to reclaim their power". Elsewhere Trevor Ncube, publisher of a weekly newspaper insisted that "the people's passion and craving for change is palpable." These oppositionists respond to the discontent and unrest in Zimbabwe, but only with propaganda for a capitalist system that has proved itself bankrupt. Talk of the indestructible "spirit of the people" and "the people's passion" is not going to keep hunger at bay nor miraculously dissolve the state's repressive apparatus.
It is worth adding that the left-wing Socialist Workers Party has a sister organisation in Zimbabwe, and an MP who is part of the MDC. They say that "Only struggle can win real freedom" (Socialist Worker 16/3/02), but before the election result was known thought that "If Mugabe declares he has won and gets away with it, most workers will feel crushed, intimidated and beaten". If workers feel 'beaten' it's because they swallowed the illusions that the SWP sowed in the democratic farce.
Capitalism's democratic campaign
It's not just in Zimbabwe that capitalism's democratic campaign is important. Just as with the first post-apartheid election in South Africa, where lengthy queues were shown as evidence of people's gratitude for the opportunity to vote, the Zimbabwean election has been used as an argument against growing 'cynicism' about the democratic process in Europe.
A typical article, from Hugo Young in the Guardian (12/3/02), headlined "The people of Zimbabwe have put us all to shame", praises the commitment to democracy shown by people in Zimbabwe. The election "sets an example to all democrats". The political "literacy" of the people "produces an understanding of what democracy means, and an extraordinary willingness to fight for it against obstacles which, in Europe, could not be contemplated". He says there are "universal values and ... democracy is one of them". He talks of the betrayal of "people who in the last few weeks have suffered more for the cause of democratic representation than any western politician has ever had to do".
This is an appeal for people to value and treasure the 'democratic way of life'. By criticising Mugabe's 'cheating' the bourgeoisie elsewhere implies that they are custodians of systems that are 'free and fair'. In reality all the various capitalist parties have their differences of emphasis, but when it comes down to basics - the defence of the interests of the bourgeoisie through state capitalism, imperialism and the repression of the working class - they are united in their commitment to the continuation of the capitalist mode of production. All capitalism's elections are 'rigged' - in ways that are more or less sophisticated - because democracy is an integral part of the bourgeoisie's class dictatorship.
Car, 4/4/02.
ICC Introduction
We are publishing the platform of one of the new groups in Russia, which is moving towards the positions of the communist left. The ICU originated as the Kirov Marxist group in 1997 following a strike by teachers in that city. Initially the group attempted to work with the official Communist Party, later with various leftist groups, but more and more found that such activity was a “useless waste of time”. The current title of their paper in Russia is World Revolution.
The platform is followed by extracts from a letter we sent in response, focussing on the contradiction we see between the fundamentally internationalist approach of the ICU text and the concessions to the ideology of ‘national liberation’ that are contained within it. This is a problem for a number of the new Russian groups and we will be returning to it in other articles.
International Communist Union: Our platform
The ICU’s conception of the world and theoretical basis is Marxism.
The historical movement from primitive communism to integral communism is a process that forms the material conditions for the construction of a world communist society. The construction of such a society will lead not to the end of history but to the beginning of the conscious history of humanity.
The present capitalist mode of production is distinct from all preceding modes of production because of its worldwide, generalised character and is characterised by the exacerbation of class contradictions. At the same time capitalism forms the conditions for the construction of communism. Its development necessarily leads to the development of its contradictions and engenders, reinforces and develops the social force whose mission is the destruction of the capitalist system and the construction of communism - the proletariat. The limit of capital is capital itself.
During the course of its development modern capitalism advances more and more destructive means for solving its contradictions. Two world wars have carried off 60 million human lives. The new world war, the military blocs for which are beginning to form today, will not only bring far greater calamities, but will threaten the very existence of humanity. In this situation there is only one alternative: socialism or barbarism, the world communist revolution or the destruction of humanity.
The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first attempt by the proletariat to carry out this revolution in an epoch when the conditions for it were insufficiently mature. The October revolution of 1917 in Russia was the first step of the authentic world communist revolution towards an international revolutionary wave, which put an end to the first imperialist war. The defeat of this revolutionary wave, notably in Germany 1919-23, condemned the revolution in Russia to isolation and rapid degeneration. Stalinism became the gravedigger of the October revolution.
The statified regimes which saw the light of day under the name of ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ in the USSR, eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea etc. were and remain capitalist countries, which the ruling ideology has painted with ‘marxist’ rhetoric drawn from the communist programme, the better to hide their bourgeois nature.
Where there is wage labour, there is capital.
Our principles
1. We reject any possibility of building socialist society within national boundaries. In continuity with the traditions of the communist movement, we consider that the task of the social liberation of the working class and of all the toilers is the work of the united world working class, and this solution is only possible in the context of a world proletarian revolution. Faced with the globalisation of the world capitalist economy, the working class must fight not for the narrow interests of this or that state but for the unification of the revolutionary struggle of the workers of all countries under the leadership of the international communist party. The goal of the communists’ struggle is not the well being of this or that nation and its state, but the utilisation of the productive forces created by capitalism in order to build a world classless society - communism. The creation of the conditions for communism demands the overturning of capitalist social relations based on wage labour, commodity production and national frontiers. It demands the creation of a world community whose activity will be geared towards the full satisfaction of human needs.
2. The instrument for building such a society is the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat through which the working class will create the conditions for the withering away of classes and the state.
3. The revolutionary political organisation is the vanguard of the proletariat, the active factor in the propagation of class consciousness within the proletariat. Its role consists in organising the diverse forms of working class struggle into a unified revolutionary struggle. What distinguishes the communists is the awareness that they stand for the common class interests of the proletariat and this is expressed in their actions. They are the most consistent organised force given the necessity for the communist movement to have a truly worldwide and centralised leadership.
4. During the course of the 20th century the numerous imperialist wars which have been part of the unremitting struggle between states large and small for the conquest or maintenance of influence in the international arena have more and more brought humanity nothing but death and destruction. The working class can only respond to them through its international solidarity and the struggle against the bourgeoisie in all countries.
5. At the same time a number of revolutionary wars and national liberation struggles have made a considerable contribution to human progress, leading to the independent development of young states and developing national industry and a growing proletariat. However the process of the globalisation of the world economy has considerably changed this process. No country in the world can develop its economy on its own without integrating itself into the process of globalisation. This is why wars of liberation can no longer lead to national independence for any people, and why national liberation movements have become mere puppets of this or that imperialist grouping. In these conditions, there is more truth than ever in the principle that the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, however just it may be, must not result in the subordination of this or that national detachment of the working class to ‘its own’ bourgeoisie. This right must be used by the revolutionary workers of the imperialist states to wage a struggle against the stifling of the small exploited nations by their own capitalism. The slogan of the working class in all nations large and small is that the main enemy is its own national capital, that victory is only possible through the unity of the workers of all nationalities.
6. All nationalist ideology, such as national ‘independence’ or ‘autonomy’, whatever the pretext - ethnic, historical, religious, etc, is a real poison for the workers. Having the aim of getting the workers to take the side of this or that faction of the bourgeoisie, it sets workers from different nations against each other, leading to their mutual extermination for the wars and ambitions of their exploiters.
7. All factions of the bourgeoisie are equally reactionary. To defend itself from revolutionary attack, the bourgeoisie always resorts to social democratic and leftist factions as the last ramparts of the state. All the so-called ‘working class’, ‘socialist’ or ‘Communist’ parties, the leftist organisations (the Trotskyists, Maoists and anarchists) constitute the left wing of the political apparatus of capital. Any tactic of ‘popular fronts’, by mixing up the interests of the proletariat with those of one or another bourgeois faction, can only serve to obstruct and deform the proletarian struggle.
8. Terrorism is in no sense a means of struggle for the working class. It is the expression of social strata that have no historical future. It always provides a favourable terrain for the manipulations of the bourgeoisie. By advocating secret actions by an insignificant minority, it stands in total contradiction with class violence, which is born out of the massive, conscious and organised actions of the proletariat.
Our historical antecedents
The positions of revolutionary organisations and their activity are the product of the past experience of the working class and the lessons drawn from it. The ICU lays claim to the consistent contributions to this cause by the Communist League of Marx and Engels (1847-1852), the three Internationals (the International Workingmen’s Association, 1864-1872, the Socialist International, 1889-1914, and the Communist International, 1919-24), as well as the left fractions which detached themselves from the Third International in 1920-30 during the course of its degeneration.
ICC reply
Dear comrades,
We are very glad to have made contact with your group and are eager to know more about its history, the discussions within it, the content of its publications, and so on. When we first saw the platform on the left-dis website it was obvious to us that we have much in common. We also salute your effort to respond to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers from an internationalist standpoint. Concerning the platform, there seems to be a high level of agreement with a number of key positions: the perspective of socialism or barbarism, the capitalist nature of the Stalinist regimes, recognition of the proletarian character of the Russian revolution of 1917, opposition to imperialist war and all fronts with the bourgeoisie, including its left wing. What we’re less sure about is whether you agree with the ICC on the historical framework which gives substance and coherence to many of these positions: the conception that capitalism has, since 1914, been a decadent, declining social system.
To give a precise illustration of the problem we are raising: in your statement you argue against ‘fronts’ with the bourgeoisie on the grounds that all bourgeois factions are equally reactionary. And we agree. But this position has not always been valid for marxists. If capitalism today is a decadent system, i.e. one in which the social relations have become a permanent fetter on the productive forces and thus on human progress, it has, like previous forms of class exploitation, also known an ascendant period when it represented progress in relation to the previous mode of production. This is why Marx did support certain fractions of the bourgeoisie, whether the northern capitalists against the southern slaveholders in the American civil war, the Risorgimento movement in Italy for national unification against the old feudal classes, and so on. This support was based on the understanding that capitalism had not yet exhausted its historical mission and that the conditions for the world communist revolution had not yet fully matured.
Now, although you seem to recognise this latter point when you say that the Paris Commune was “the first attempt of the proletariat to bring about the revolution in an epoch in which conditions for this revolution were not quite mature”, the consequences of not having a clear and consistent view of the general historical period become explicit when you come to the national question.
In your view, national struggles have been a source of considerable progress, and the demand for national self-determination still has validity, if only for the workers of the more powerful capitalist countries in relation to the countries oppressed by their own imperialism. You then appear to argue that national struggles have lost their progressive character since the advent of “globalisation”. These statements demand a number of comments on our part.
Our position on the decadence of capitalism is not our own invention. Based on the fundamentals of the historical materialist method (in particular when Marx talks about “epochs of social revolution” in his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy), it was concretised for the majority of revolutionary marxists by the outbreak of the first world war, which showed that capitalism had already “globalised” itself to the point where it could no longer overcome its inner contradictions except through imperialist war and self-cannibalisation. This was the position of the Communist International at its founding congress, although the CI was not able to draw all the consequences for this as regards the national question: the theses of the second congress still saw a ‘revolutionary’ role of some kind for the bourgeoisie of the colonial regimes. But the left fractions of the CI were later on able to take this analysis to its conclusions, particularly following the disastrous results of the CI’s policies during the revolutionary wave of 1917-27. For the Italian left in the 1930s, for example, the experience of China in 1927 was decisive. It showed that all factions of the bourgeoisie, no matter how ‘anti-imperialist’ they claimed to be, were equally counter-revolutionary, equally compelled to massacre the proletariat when it struggled for its own interests, as in the Shanghai uprising of 1927. For the Italian left this experience proved that the theses on the national question from the second congress had to be rejected. Moreover, this was a confirmation of the correctness of Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the national question as against those of Lenin: for Luxemburg, it had already become clear during the first world war that all states were inevitably part of the world imperialist system. Supporting one nation against another always meant supporting one imperialist constellation against another, and all the national liberation wars of the 20s century have reinforced this view. What the Italian left made absolutely explicit was that this also applied to colonial bourgeoisies, to capitalist factions seeking to establish a new ‘independent’ state: they could only hope to attain their ends by subordinating themselves to the imperialist powers which had already divided up the planet. As you say in your platform, the 20th century has been one of incessant imperialist wars for the domination of the planet: for us, this is both the surest confirmation that capitalism is a senile and reactionary world order, and that all forms of ‘national’ struggle are entirely integrated into the global imperialist game.
Luxemburg also made a very rigorous critique of the slogan of ‘national self-determination’ even before the first world war, arguing that it was an illusion of bourgeois democracy in any capitalist state, it is not the ‘people’ or the ‘nation’ who are ‘self-determined’ but the capitalist class alone. Marx and Engels made no secret of the fact that when they called for national independence, it was to further and support the development of the capitalist mode of production in a period in which capitalism still had a progressive role to play. But even in the ascendant epoch the reality of capitalist class rule could not be abolished by any degree of formal ‘democracy’. In the decadent epoch, national liberation, national self-determination, national independence - these are all aspects of nationalist ideology which as you rightly say is “poison for the proletariat”.
The ICC decided, earlier this year, to change the 15th Congress of its French section into an Extraordinary International Conference.
The fundamental task of this conference was to face up to an organisational crisis the most serious in the history of the ICC that emerged suddenly right after its 14th International Congress in April 2001.
Our readers will have read in our press that an ex-militant, Jonas, has been excluded from the ICC for political unworthiness, consisting, amongst other things, of destroying the fabric of the organisation by circulating in a persistent and underhand way calumny and rumours about comrades of the organisation in order to cause disruptions in several sections of the ICC.
This individual regrouped around him, largely on the basis of these rumours, other militants who were mobilised into an all-out war on the organisation, attempting to unravel its centralised statutory principles of functioning, threatening the very existence of the ICC.
This clique directed by Jonas proclaimed itself a ‘fraction’, even though it had been totally incapable of putting forward the least programmatic divergence justifying such a title. The only ‘principle’ of these elements was destructive hate and an insatiable thirst for vengeance. Because they were put in a minority, and were themselves discredited by being incapable of developing the least political argumentation, their actions consisted of plotting against the central organ of the ICC through secret meetings, then systematically sabotaging the activity of the organisation through manoeuvres, provocations, campaigns of calumny, blackmail and the threat to spread their calumnies to the outside, as testified by the content of their infamous ‘internal bulletins’ which are now sent to certain groups and sympathisers of the communist left.
After a year of destructive behaviour trying to destabilise the organisation (as a member of the ‘fraction’ said explicitly in a secret meeting: ‘we must destabilise them’) and pushing militants to rebellion against the central organs of the ICC, the clique of Jonas carried out its last, most miserable act against the organisation. It refused to attend the International Conference unless the organisation recognised this ‘fraction’ in writing and withdrew the sanctions that it had taken in conformity with its statutes (notably the exclusion of Jonas). Faced with this situation, all the delegations of the ICC, even though ready to hear the appeal of these elements (to this effect, the delegations had formed an international commission of appeal on the eve of the Conference composed of militants of several ICC sections so that the four Parisian members of the ‘fraction’ could present their arguments) had no alternative but to recognise that these elements had put themselves outside the organisation. Faced with their refusal to defend themselves in front of the conference and to make an appeal in front of the commission, the ICC recognised their desertion and could no longer consider them as members of the organisation.
The Conference also condemned unanimously the loutish methods used by the Jonas clique to ‘kidnap’ at the airport two delegates of the Mexican section, members of the ‘fraction’, coming to the Conference to defend their positions (these delegates were complicit in their own ‘disappearance’). While the ICC had paid their airplane tickets so they could come to the Conference to defend the positions of the ‘fraction’, these two Mexican delegates were taken away by two Parisian members of the ‘fraction’ preventing them from attending the Conference. In reply to our protests and our demand to be reimbursed for the tickets if the Mexican delegates (who had received a mandate of their section) did not attend the Conference, one of the two Parisian members of the ‘fraction’ in their ‘welcoming committee’ (an ex-member of the central organ of the ICC) laughed in our face: ‘that’s your problem!’. What incredible cynicism! Faced with the hijacking of the funds of the organisation and the refusal to reimburse the ICC for the two tickets, typical of the gangster methods used by the Jonas clique, all the militants of the ICC expressed their deep indignation by adopting a resolution condemning this behaviour. These methods, which are quite comparable to those of the Chenier Tendency (who stole the material of the organisation in 1981), convinced those last comrades still hesitant about the parasitic and anti-proletarian nature of this pseudo-fraction.
The conference was therefore confronted with two necessities. The first and most pressing need was to continue to defend the ICC and its organisational principles in the most rigorous and intransigent way against the repeated attacks and provocations of this parasitic grouping. The second was to draw the profound lessons of these events: what weaknesses of the organisation allowed the parasitic grouping, instigated by Jonas, to appear and develop so rapidly and destructively? It is the second aspect that the present article proposes to develop. (For the first aspect our readers can refer to the article ‘A parasitic attack aimed at discrediting the ICC [36]’ published on our website).
The defence and construction of a revolutionary organisation is a permanent combat
According to bourgeois propaganda revolutionary organisations of the proletariat are doomed to failure since the communist principles that assure their cohesion proletarian solidarity and mutual confidence inevitably come into conflict with the naturally selfish, competitive motivations of the individuals that compose them. Revolutionary organisations, according to this vision, can only be mirror images of the corruption that reigns in the political parties of the bourgeoisie. The latter, not only incessantly propagates the ideology of ‘everyman for himself’ it also gives this theory a practical support through open repression, when necessary, and by fomenting disunity within revolutionary organisations by directly or indirectly encouraging the work of agents provocateurs, adventurers and parasites.
The exploited nature of the working class makes its revolutionary organisations extremely vulnerable to the destructive pressures of bourgeois society. The construction of revolutionary organisations has always required a permanent effort, a constant vigilance, a critical and self-critical attitude without which they run the risk of being destroyed and losing years of effort, thus setting back the revolutionary process.
The struggle of the Marxists in the First International for centralisation against the destructive intrigues of Bakunin in 1872, the struggle of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the organisational opportunism and ‘landlord anarchism’ of the Mensheviks in 1903, the struggle of the communist left against the degenerating 3rd International in the twenties and thirties, have all prefigured the series of struggles that the ICC has waged since its inception for the internal application of centralised rules of functioning against the circle spirit and clannism, against individualism and petit-bourgeois democratism.
In the same spirit the ICC, contrary to other groups of the communist left who have also been shaken by splits, has always revealed its internal problems so that the revolutionary movement can draw the lessons and strengthen the whole of the proletarian political milieu. We are perfectly aware that groups and elements of the parasitic milieu will descend like vultures on this organisational crisis of the ICC to feed their malicious gossip about the supposed ‘Stalinist degeneration’ of our organisation. Nevertheless, the ICC must continue to draw the lessons of each crisis that it experiences in order to reinforce itself politically.
Given the difficulty of constructing revolutionary organisations, the idea that they are immunised against opportunist degeneration, whether at the programmatic or organisational level, and that they can develop peacefully and without clashes, is particularly dangerous.
It was precisely the development of such an illusion within the ICC, the idea that henceforth the organisation could construct itself without major political combats within it, that the International Conference stigmatised. Thus the ICC showed a certain naivete and a lack of vigilance faced with the persistence of the circle spirit. We had the illusion that this weakness, coming from the historic circumstances of the foundation of the ICC (marked by the weight of petit-bourgeois ‘68ism’ and its leftist and anarchist components) had been eradicated for ever thanks to its combat of 1993-95.
This illusion not only revealed an amnesia about the history of the Marxist movement, but also a loss of sight of the extremely difficult conditions facing the ICC in the present period of the social decomposition of capitalism.
In fact one of the factors which crystallised the recent crisis of the ICC was a discussion on confidence and solidarity within the organisation which, from the beginning, had been oriented by the majority of the members of the International Secretariat (the permanent commission of the central organ) with a different method to that used previously by the ICC in all its debates. From the opening of this discussion, these members of the International Secretariat began a real campaign aimed at discrediting minority comrades in order to put them ‘outside the ICC’ (according to the actual words of a member of the so-called fraction). They began to introduce a monolithic conception within the central organ, totally foreign to the principles of the ICC, even to the extent of opposing the publication in the internal bulletins of contributions of comrades having divergences with the policy of the majority of the International Secretariat. Faced with this serious deviation, that risked leading to the abandonment of the principles of functioning of the ICC and to an organisational degeneration, the central organ of the ICC took the decision, ratified at the 14th Congress of the ICC, to nominate an Investigation Commission charged with clarifying the disfunctioning within its International Secretariat.
Faced with the disavowal of the policy of the International Secretriat Jonas immediately announced his resignation presenting himself as a victim ‘of an enterprise of demolition of the organisation’. According to Jonas, if the International Secretariat (of which he was a member) was disavowed in this way by the central organ of the ICC, then this could only be the work of a ‘cop’. Just after his resignation, Jonas (who didn’t have the courage to come to the 14th Congress of the ICC to defend his positions) immediately pushed seven of the comrades closest to him to meet secretly to form a ‘fraction’. He said to a delegation of the IB: ‘Since we are no longer in charge, the ICC is lost’. The vision of Jonas (of being ‘in charge’) is not the ICC conception of the role of the central organs. This vision, that of bourgeois cliques, little bureaucrats, adventurers and Stalinists cannot tolerate the least divergence, and, bereft of arguments, uses the method of calumny to create disruption first within the organisation and now within the proletarian political milieu too.
Faced with manoeuvres of Jonas and his supporters, aiming to stifle any divergence in the name of ‘confidence’ toward the majority of the International Secretariat (i.e. calling on the ICC to have a blind, unprincipled faith in it) the debate on confidence and solidarity had to be reoriented by the central organ just after the 14th Congress of the ICC, using an historical and theoretical framework that the clique of Jonas continuously denigrated without - as the Extraordinary Conference noted - any political argumentation. This orientation allowed the Conference to begin to develop a serious and argumented debate, within which all the militants without exception could defend their position, expressing their doubts or disagreements in a constructive and fraternal spirit. Clarifying disagreements with the sole objective of reinforcing the organisation as a unified and thus centralised political body, replaced the goal of denigrating comrades who didn’t share one’s point of view.
The weight of democratic ideology
Among the other weaknesses in which Jonas and his clique found a prop, were not only the weight of the circle spirit but also the pressure of democratist ideology on the organisation. In the ICC, democratism was recently manifested through an opportunist tendency to put in question our principles of centralisation, especially through the idea that confidence can only develop within the organisation in inverse proportion to its centralisation. Once the ICC became conscious of the danger of liquidating our principles of centralisation under the weight of democratic ideology, the Jonas clan persisted in the defence of this revisionist version and took it to its pitiful, liquidationist, conclusion. Thus on the 31 January the so-called fraction addressed a declaration to all the militants of the ICC (published in the fraction’s internal bulletin) renouncing all loyalty to the ICC. In place of a centralised debate, clearly posing the divergences while respecting the statutes of the ICC, this clique demanded that the militants of the ICC take up its own litany of insults and calumnies against the central organs of the ICC and some of its members. In other words the clan of the friends of Jonas demanded a whole series of bourgeois rights: the right to spread the worst lies and calumnies against militants and against the central organs in the name of ‘freedom of expression’, the right to destabilise the organisation by plotting behind its back, the right to flout all the rules of functioning of the ICC, the right to only pay 30% of their dues, the right to desert meetings they should attend, the right to steal address lists of subscribers, the right to steal the notes of the central organs to falsify them, the right to steal money from the ICC and to sequest two delegates of the Mexican section to prevent them attending the Conference (out of fear that it would convince them). All this in the name of the ‘freedom of expression’; in fact the freedom to sabotage and destroy! The Conference clearly revealed that the manoeuvres of Jonas had destroyed militants by transforming them into a gang of impostors and forgers. These militants were naive enough to think that by baptising themselves a ‘fraction’, they would be able to mask their petit-bourgeois democratism and their destructive individualism against our principles of centralisation. In other words the clan of the friends of Jonas followed the slogan of the students of May 68: it took its desires for reality. And when the ICC defended itself, did not let itself be destroyed by their putschist methods, and applied the sanctions called for in the statutes, it was denounced in an hysterical way as a degenerate, Stalinist sect, manipulated by a ‘cop’ and ‘Torquemadas’ (according to Jonas’ own words!) This was the sordid motor force behind the formation of this pseudo-fraction. It was nothing other than the weapon of citizen Jonas against the proletarian political milieu: the most shameful and dangerous clan in the whole history of the ICC.
The analysis of this clan’s ideological and political roots was the task set by the Extraordinary Conference of the ICC. The debates at this conference were very rich and the manner of its conduct underlined that, contrary to the calumnies of the ‘fraction’ and the whole anti-ICC parasitic milieu, our organisation, far from stifling divergences, exhorted all the militants to assume their responsibility and express their disagreements. The political depth and passion which animated the debates of this Conference showed the determination of the ICC to mobilise itself for the defence of the organisation and its principles. Finally the ICC recognised the gravity of the stakes for the proletarian political milieu contained in the methods of the clique of Jonas (which is trying to infiltrate the IBRP in order to drag it into its policy of destroying the ICC).
Even though the ICC, throughout its history, has experienced several splits, it has been able to resist their negative effects. Despite numerical losses, the ICC has been able to maintain and politically reinforce an international centralised organisation, comprising sections in fourteen countries. Even though this crisis has been the most serious in the history of the ICC the manoeuvres of the Jonas clique failed to destroy our sections in the USA and Mexico (just as the Chenier Tendency, in the 1981 crisis, failed to destroy the section of the ICC in Britain). The ICC has been able to limit the damage and our numerical losses have been relatively minor in relation to the ambitions of the Jonas ‘fraction’. We have lost some militants but we have saved the organisation and its principles.
The Conference was deeply dismayed at the destructive and suicidal folly into which Jonas had dragged some ICC militants. Militants who were comrades of struggle for many years, in particular one who had always, up till then, shown the greatest loyalty toward the ICC, the greatest confidence toward the central organ and an exemplary determination in the different struggles for the defence and construction of the organisation. The ICC saved two comrades who had participated actively in the secret meetings of the ‘collective’ (which became the ‘fraction’). Becoming conscious of the particularly destructive and suicidal character of their trajectory, these two comrades reported in detail to the Investigation Commission how they were dragged into this sordid adventure. Two other militants that Jonas presented as ‘centrists’ and who had also participated in the secret meetings of the ‘collective’ preferred to resign rather than join the ‘fraction’ and follow the miserable course of this parasitic regroupment.
We are fully conscious that the ICC’s achievement is modest faced with the capitalist hostility that surrounds us. But that in no way diminishes the work of the defence of the organisation realised by the recent Extraordinary Conference which contained not only important lessons for the reinforcement of the ICC, but also for the development of a wider debate in the proletarian political milieu on the dangers which threaten revolutionary organisations. The whole of the milieu must be capable of resisting the destructive forces of bourgeois society, the opportunist temptation and the sirens of parasitism, today and in the period to come.
ICC.
19.04.02
Le Pen’s score in the first round of the presidential elections was an event of historic and international proportions. For the first time, the Front National is posing a threat to French ‘democracy’.
Under the slogan of ‘shame’, a huge anti-Le Pen campaign was unleashed not only throughout France, but internationally as well. Since the results were announced there have been enormous demonstrations, consisting especially of young people, school and college students, determined to ‘bar the way to fascism’. All the forces of the left - the Communist and Socialist parties, anti-racist groups, trade unions etc have been actively organising the protests: on May Day they brought a million people onto the streets. Meanwhile an even broader political spectrum has been calling on everyone to use their vote in the second round to vote for Chirac in order to keep out Le Pen. The slogan of the young demonstrators has been ‘vote for the crook, not the fascist’.
In a future issue of this paper we will look at some of the factors which led to this unexpected result. But even if Le Pen’s victory shows the difficulties the French bourgeoisie has in controlling its own electoral process, the ruling class has certainly succeeded in using this event to mount a new attack on working class consciousness. It has, in short, put all its energies into trying to convince us that democracy is our most precious gift, and that we have no choice but to mobilise massively to defend it.
All the factions of the bourgeoisie are trying to line up the workers behind the false alternative of democracy or fascism. They are trying to build a holy national union against Le Pen, and so prevent the working class from fighting for its own interests.
As soon as the result was announced, all the pundits were telling us that the FN owes its success in large part to the ‘abstentionists’. They are seeking to put the burden of ‘shame’ on the workers who have shown their disgust at the electoral process and the bourgeois parties who take part in it by staying away from the polling booths. These ‘bad citizens’ have put democracy in danger. The moral? We have to make up for this by going en masse to the polling booths in the second round, not to defend our interests as an exploited class, but to defend capitalist democracy, which is portrayed as a ‘lesser evil’ A very similar message, even if in a lower key, is being put across in Britain with reference to the local elections and the danger of the BNP (see ‘Capitalist democracy uses the fascist bugbear’, p.2).
But the cynicism of bourgeois propaganda doesn’t stop there. The ruling class and its media have also taken advantage of the rise of the FN in towns which have for years been dominated by the CP to unleash a campaign aimed at demoralising the workers, at making them feel guilty and at setting them against each other. Proof of this are the headlines of Le Monde on 25 April: “The workers who voted for Le Pen”, “The lost children of the working class”. By presenting the workers as ‘fachos’, reactionary xenophobes, bourgeois propaganda is trying to discredit the proletariat and sow the illusion that the future of society does not lie in the class struggle of the exploited against their exploiters but in the united front of the ‘people of Republican France’ against the fascist danger.
The working class must not be lured into this trap! It must reject the false alternative between fascism and democracy. It must never forget the lessons of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century: it was thanks to the mobilisation of tens of millions of workers behind the banners of anti-fascism in the 1930s that the parties of the left were able to dragoon the working class into the second imperialist world war. It was in the name of defending democracy against fascism that millions of workers laid down their lives for a cause which was not their own.
Today the historic situation is radically different. The working class has not suffered a massive defeat and is not ready to sacrifice itself for the national flag. But if the current threat is not that it will be drawn into another world war in the name of anti-fascism, there is still a considerable danger in the anti-fascist campaigns � the danger that these campaigns will serve to destroy its class identity and politically dissolve it into an inter-classist movement of ‘citizens’. And that could only prevent it from re-discovering its own revolutionary perspective: the destruction of the bourgeois state, whether ‘democratic’ or ‘totalitarian’.
Workers must never lose sight of the fact that democracy and fascism are two sides of the same coin, the two faces of the implacable dictatorship of capital. It is decadent capitalism which gave birth to fascism. It was the respectable democratic Weimar Republic which, thanks to the treason of social democracy, massacred the revolutionary workers after the first world war and paved the way for Nazism.
It is the same decaying capitalist system which is now creating the conditions for the rise of the FN and similar parties.
On the purely political level, it was Mitterand’s Socialist Party which quite deliberately provided the bases for the FN to develop as a party. It was the SP which originally brought in proportional representation and cynically used the danger of the FN to boost its own democratic credentials.
On a deeper level, however, it is the accelerating decomposition of this society which provides the nutrients for the growth of Le Pen and his kind: crime, mindless violence, terrorism, racism. It is the collapse of whole swathes of the capitalist peripheries under the blows of crisis and war that pushes millions of impoverished human beings to seek shelter in the central countries, creating a refugee problem which the system can only respond to with repression and xenophobic campaigns (which are by no means limited to the ‘fascist’ parties).
The only way out of the nightmare being produced by this dying order is the struggle of the world working class for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a new society, a society without exploitation, without national frontiers, without economic crisis and war. A true human community where people will no longer have any need to live in fear of neighbours or strangers. A society based not on the hunt for profit, but on the satisfaction of human needs. Only such a society can free humanity once and for all from all the scars of capitalist barbarism � of which the ideology of the far right is only one expression among many.
And it is certainly not in the polling booths that the working class can affirm its own perspective. Contrary to the excuses of counterfeit ‘revolutionaries’ like the Socialist Alliance or Lutte Ouvriere in France, the working class cannot give any expression to its needs and goals on the electoral terrain.
The only way to fight the extreme right and its national-capitalist programme is to develop the struggle against the capitalist system, against bourgeois democracy, against all the governments, whether of right or left. All of them have one programme to offer us: more exploitation, more unemployment, more barbarism.
Against all the lying campaigns of the bourgeoisie, the working class, which has no choice but to fight for its own interests and with its own methods, is not a reactionary class. On the contrary it is the only revolutionary class in this society, the only force that can take humanity out of the dead-end into which capitalism has led it. The historic alternative is not between fascism and democracy, but between the proletarian revolution and the destruction of the human species.
The democratic game is just a cover for the dictatorship of capital. This is why we do not call on workers to mobilise for Chirac or other crooks; nor do we encourage a purely apathetic attitude to elections. Our slogan is: Workers don’t vote, fight!
ICC.
4/5/02.
The strong electoral showing of Le Pen in France and the party of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands has led to talk in the media of the danger of fascism returning to Europe. “Not since the 1930s has the threat of racism and fascism been so great” wrote a commentator in the Guardian (9/5/02). The Socialist Workers Party has been saying we’re living through the “1930s in slow motion” for some time. With the increased prominence of political parties that explicitly base themselves on intolerance, xenophobia, and opposition to immigration, while posing as ‘new’ alternatives to the tired old parties of the centre, we’re being asked to believe that fascism is on the agenda again in Europe.
Fascism between the wars
The usual explanation for the appearance of fascist governments in Europe in the 1920s and 30s is as historic aberrations, alien forces of obscurantism, exceptions to the normal ‘civilised’ functioning of capitalism. According to this story fascism came to power against the wishes of the bourgeoisie. This version allows the ruling class to deny any connection with what happened, while at the same time hiding the real historic conditions in which they resorted to this sort of regime as the best suited for the needs of the capitalist state.
In reality the appearance of the fascist regimes corresponded to the needs of capitalism faced with the force of its economic crisis. Following the First World War, in the countries that had been defeated or left impoverished, the only alternative facing the ruling class was to try and gain more of the imperialist cake, to mobilise for a new world war. To do this required the concentration of all powers in the state, to accelerate the development of the war economy and the militarisation of labour, and put an end to conflicts within the bourgeoisie. The fascist regimes were constituted in a direct response to the demands of the national capital. In this they were, like stalinism, only one of the most brutal expressions of the general tendency toward state capitalism which is characteristic of the domination of capital in its historic period of decadence since 1914. Far from the expression of the dispossessed petit-bourgeoisie, fascism was the policy favoured by the big industrial bourgeoisie, in Germany as it had been in Italy.
But if the economic crisis and the necessity for state capitalism are the fundamental conditions for fascism, they are not the only ones. The other major, essential, precondition for fascism is the defeat of the working class. The bourgeoisie has never tried to impose fascism faced with the working class mobilised on its own terrain. In Germany and Italy, the countries where the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 had its widest expression outside Russia, fascism was not imposed until the democratic forces, above all those of the left posing as the friends of the workers, had crushed the revolutionary outburst physically and politically. It was not the Nazis who massacred the revolution in Germany, it was the socialists Noske and Scheidemann, who, in the name of the social-democratic government, bloodily repressed the mobilisation of the working class and murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, using the Freicorps, the embryo of the future Nazi militia. In Italy in 1919-20 the first wave of repression came from the democratic government of Nitti, repressing strikes with hundreds of workers dying. But, even more than the direct repression, what broke the workers’ spirit was being trapped by the unions and the Italian Socialist Party in the factory occupations with widespread illusions in the possibilities of workers’ control of production. The occupation of the factories was doomed to failure, and it was only after the defeat of autumn 1920 that massive repression was unleashed against the working class by the joint forces of the democratic state and the fascist gangs. It was only after the defeat of the working class that Mussolini’s movement was able to develop, with the help of the bosses who financed him and the state that encouraged him. Ultimately it was the defeat of the international revolutionary wave that allowed fascism to take power.
The extreme right today
It is true that the current plunge of capitalist society into decomposition has encouraged the development of all sorts of ideologies searching for scapegoats for the general collapse of society, compensating for the absence of any perspective with ideas that are openly xenophobic and racist. At this level Le Pen, the BNP or neo-nazis elsewhere in Europe are as much a manifestation of social decomposition as are the flight into drugs or religious sects, expressions of a capitalist society that has no future, that is rotting on its feet.
But the bourgeoisie does not need to bring the extreme right to power in Europe because the governmental teams in power are implementing the policies that are needed by the various national capitals, in particular the attacks on workers’ living and working conditions demanded by the state of the economy. Capitalism today needs to deploy its democratic forces to deal with the working class. We are not in the 1930s where workers paid a terrible price for the defeat of the revolutionary wave. Whatever the difficulties facing the working class today it has not experienced a historic defeat and its capacity to resist the attacks of capital is still intact. Figures such as Le Pen in France or Griffin of the BNP would not be capable of controlling the social situation, whereas the democratic mode of capitalist domination, with its various unions, its parliament, its game of government-and-opposition and the ‘diversity’ of its media has a terrible effectiveness in insuring the maintenance of social control and in deploying its ideological manipulations. And the only reason that the bourgeoisie has any need for the extreme right is to give a spurious validity to the democratic state.
To say that fascism is not on the agenda and that the bourgeoisie today prefers the methods of democracy should not give the impression that the democratic state is not capable, when necessary, of bringing repression to bear against workers struggles or communist minorities, nor that it won’t use extreme-right-wing gangs should the need arise. History shows that’s eminently possible, starting with the example of January 1919 in Germany.
For the working class there can be no choosing the ‘anti-fascist’ forces of the bourgeoisie as they have shown that they are every bit as anti-working class as the forces of the right. You need only look at the policies of Blair in this country, or Schroder in Germany, to see that at home the bourgeoisie continues to worsen the conditions in which workers live and work, while abroad pursuing its imperialist interests.
Bourgeois ideology makes the struggle between ‘democracy’ and ‘fascism’, or between ‘freedom’ and ‘totalitarianism’ the keystone of 20th century history. This is pure lies, as it is the same bourgeoisie, the same capitalist state, which turns to one or other of these flags according to its needs and the historic possibilities.
This supposed conflict served as the lying justification for the barbarity of the Second World War, which was presented as a ‘just’ war between the ‘good’ democrats and the ‘bad’ fascists and not for what it really was: the deadly and barbaric confrontation between imperialist sharks. According to the dominant ideology, fascism was the cause of the Second World War, when, in fact, the opposite was the truth: it was the drive to war, the veritable mode of existence for decadent capitalism, that created fascism. Fascism, the ‘absolute evil’, was supposed to have the unique responsibility, with stalinism, for all the horrors that have taken place across the face of the planet during the last century, when, in reality, the ‘other side’, democracy has nothing to learn about massacres and butchery, from Dresden to Hiroshima, from the Vietnam war to the wars in the Gulf and against Afghanistan.
For the working class there is no ‘lesser evil’ in the democratic bourgeoisie. The future of humanity is in the hands of the working class, and one of the biggest obstacles it faces are the ideological campaigns by the ruling class to defend the democratic state with anti-fascist mobilisations. It is the consciousness and the revolutionary perspective of the working class that the bourgeoisie is trying to attack with its proposed false responses to the open failure of its system. Today the myths of ‘peace’ and prosperity are long gone; so the ruling class tries to rally workers with illusions about democracy being the last rampart against barbarism.
Today the greatest danger facing the working class and its capacity to destroy capitalism is not ‘fascism’, real or imagined, but the democratic traps of the ruling class.
PE (adapted from RI 323), 18/05/02
In May the ICC began a series of forums on the theme of the defence of the revolutionary organisation. Despite the very serious events taking place on an international level (the US ‘war on terror’, the massive anti-fascist campaigns in Europe, etc), the ICC felt that it was necessary to keep to this theme because it has been subjected to a very grave attack, in the shape of a campaign of slander being waged by a few ex-members of the ICC grouped under the name of the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’ around the element Jonas, who has been expelled from our organisation for political unworthiness (Note 1) [43]. Faced with such a situation it was the responsibility of the ICC to carry out the public defence of its principles of functioning. Without an organisation, there can be no intervention, and this is precisely the aim of the bourgeois state and its accomplices in the parasitic milieu: to destroy revolutionary organisations from the inside and discredit them in the eyes of the working class, and above all in front of those who have been looking for a class perspective in this moribund social system.
The ICC’s section in Britain held a meeting around this theme on May 18. A number of sympathisers came from several towns to offer their solidarity with the ICC against the attacks being mounted by the so-called ‘Fraction’. Some wrote letters of support which we publish below. All the participants regretted the decision of the Communist Workers Organisation (British affiliate of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) not to attend the meeting. According to a verbal communication, this decision was a matter of principle based on a disagreement with the theme of the meeting. We await a more developed written explanation from the comrades. But as we said at the forum, if the CWO felt that the ICC was making mistake in talking about organisational questions at a public meeting, it would have been better to have argued the case at the meeting rather than boycott it. More importantly, we think that the CWO’s decision is based on a real underestimation of the dangers facing revolutionary organisations in today’s period - above all the danger of parasitism which the ‘Fraction’ expresses so graphically. The IBRP is itself by no means immune from this danger: we refer readers to the latest issue of our publication in the USA, Internationalism 122, which contains an analysis of the recent crisis among the IBRP’s US affiliates or sympathising groups. In our estimation, the evolution of the Los Angeles Workers Voice group, which has recently broken away from the IBRP, is another clear manifestation of the phenomenon of parasitism - political activity geared not towards the construction of serious revolutionary organisations, but towards the discrediting and destruction of the whole proletarian political milieu.
The following article is an account of the meeting that took place in Paris on 4 May, which is of particular interest because it is where the ICC and its sympathisers confronted the ‘Fraction’ directly.
Sixty people, coming from a number of towns in France, but also from Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Belgium, judged the question sufficiently important to attend this meeting in order to hear the arguments of the ICC and confront them with those of the ‘Fraction’. Other contacts, not present at the meeting, sent us letters of support and solidarity that were read out to the meeting.
The choice of the theme for this public meeting was strongly criticised by an ex-member of the IBRP who recently left that organisation. He considered that the ICC was being scandalously irresponsible not to have dedicated the meeting to the situation in France at a time when the working class was faced with a huge anti-fascist campaign.
In reply, we pointed out that in 1872, even though the working class had just been through the two of the most important events of this phase of history - the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune - the Hague Congress of the First International (the only one where Marx and Engels were personally present) made the question of the defence of the organisation its priority.
In fact, if the intervention of this element exposed any irresponsibility, it was his own. This was no surprise to the ICC who had already underlined at a previous public meeting that he had been irresponsible in leaving the IBRP because he had disagreements with the organisation’s analysis of the events of 11 September. It is obvious that you cannot expect the least rigour on organisational questions from an element who has spent the last 20 years roaming through virtually every group in the proletarian political milieu, thus demonstrating the elasticity of his convictions. There has been however one constant in all the variations in his positions: his unbreakable hostility to the ICC owing to the fact that we didn’t integrate this element in 1982, because we considered that he had not overcome all the political confusions that derived from his Trotskyist past. A hostility which, during the course of this public meeting, led him to make common cause with the members of the ‘Fraction’, who in the last few months have shown their ‘sympathy’ towards him as well.
The real nature of the so-called ‘Fraction’
We haven’t got space in the context of this article to give a complete history of this parasitic circle that calls itself ‘The Internal Fraction of the ICC’. In the previous WR we wrote about the extraordinary conference of the ICC which was held at the end of March. A good part of this article dealt with the activities of this ‘Fraction’ and we also refer the reader to the article in WR 253, ‘A parasitic attack on the ICC’ which response to the first public slanders which these knights in shining armour hurled at the ICC.
To summarise the heroic exploits of this so-called ‘Fraction’ we can cite:
The systematic use of lies as an argument, based on the master of Nazi propaganda, Goebbels’ “a lie repeated often enough becomes a truth” and “The bigger the lie the more force it has to banish doubt”;
Using the most repulsive slanders and denigrations as a way of silencing those who don’t share their point of view;
The repeated violation of the organisation’s statutes (such as the refusal to pay their full dues, the secret circulation of documents and the holding of secret meetings aimed essentially at spreading slanders and refining lies);
Undying loyalty to citizen Jonas who has been behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur;
Behaving like thugs, through provocations, threats, the theft of material (money, address lists, internal documents).
The only other example of such behaviour on the part of militants of the ICC is the Chenier tendency in 1981. At that time, the ICC showed that this gangster-like behaviour was inspired principally by the individual Chenier, expelled in September 1981, who was later revealed as an agent of the bourgeois state. Today it is clear to the ICC that the thuggish behaviour of the members of the Fraction has been inspired largely by Jonas, who has played a role quite comparable to that of Chenier (even if the ICC has not yet pronounced on the underlying reasons for his behaviour and has renewed the mandate of the investigation commission at our extraordinary conference in order to shed the maximum possible light on this question).
The presentation of the discussion at the public meeting
The presentation had the aim, before reporting on the destructive behaviour of Jonas and his friends, of affirming the positions of the ICC and the whole workers’ movement on the question of the defence of communist organisations against the attacks of the ruling class. It focused particularly on the following questions, which the activities of the so-called ‘Fraction’ have highlighted.
1. Communist organisations need to arm themselves with statutes and its militants have to respect them, otherwise they will paralyse or destroy the organisation. In the case of members who do not respect the statutes, communist organisations must be able to apply sanctions in proportion to the kind of breaches committed. This has the dual aim of allowing the organisation to defend itself and the militants to understand the gravity of their mistakes and get back on the rails.
2. Political debates aimed at clarifying divergences have to be carried out openly within the organisation. Nothing is more alien to the methods of the proletariat than conspiratorial practices which seek to elaborate stratagems, spread calumnies or destabilise militants in order to take over or stay in “command” (this is Jonas’ own term).
3. The bourgeoisie always has the objective of destroying revolutionary organisations. In certain circumstances, it uses direct repression, going as far as jailing or murdering militants. However, even when it doesn’t use such methods, the bourgeois state doesn’t renounce its overall objectives, but uses different means, one being the infiltration of agents provocateurs whose role is to accentuate conflicts between militants and introduce suspicion and distrust between them (as the GPU did in the Trotskyist movement of the 30s). Alongside common political convictions about matters of principle, confidence between militants is one of the main bonds of the organisation; as soon as this confidence is lacking, the organisation is in mortal danger. When it comes to the problem of agents provocateurs, the organisations of the workers’ movement have always created particular organs (commissions of inquiry, juries of honour) which ensure that any suspicions about a militant cause the minimum damage to the organisational tissue. It is directly mandated organs of this type which have to shed light on such matters, not the subjective impressions of this or that individual. The presentation pointed out that at the time of the foundation of the Communist Party of the USA, one of its leaders, Fraina, was accused on several occasions of being a state agent; in fact the person who originated these accusations turned out to be an agent of the FBI.
The performance of the ‘Fraction’
After this introduction, the ICC opened the meeting to all those present, giving priority to the members of the ‘Fraction’. Its spokesman began by declaring that the ‘Fraction’ demanded to be re-integrated into the ICC while asserting that it was carrying out political work with an element expelled from the ICC (as we learned in a letter sent to us by the ‘Fraction’, Jonas is officially a member of the ‘Fraction’). He then made a long intervention (the essentials being contained in a leaflet distributed to the participants), the main aim of which, apart from a series of absolutely inapplicable historical analogies, was to justify the ‘Fraction’s’ acts of indiscipline, its violations of the statutes. Concerning the secret meetings, the spokesman of the ‘Fraction’ had the nerve to justify them by referring in particular to the example of the left oppositions within the Bolshevik party in the 1920s, at a time when the members of the opposition risked prison; whereas the ICC, which had counted on the capacity of its militants to get a grip on themselves (which two of them actually did) did not take the least sanction after the discovery of these secret meetings and of their scandalous content. Apart from this point, the spokesman of the ‘Fraction’ did not give the slightest response to the questions raised in the ICC’s presentation.
The ‘arguments’ of the supporters of the ‘Fraction’
The interventions of the three ‘sympathisers’ of the ‘Fraction’ only confirmed the political vacuity of this parasitic clan and the destructive nature of its activities.
The first was an ex-militant of the ICC who resigned in September 2001 after participating in the secret meetings which were held during the summer of 2001. His intervention was a series of totally untruthful complaints about the bad treatment he had receivedber of the ‘Fraction’). He then made a long intervention (the essentials being contained in a leaflet distributed to the participants), the main aim of which, apart from a series of absolutely inapplicable historical analogies, was to justify the ‘Fraction’s’ acts of indht lying to it. As the presidium remarked, when the secret meetings were discovered, we asked this element how many of them had been held; he replied two when there had really been five and he knew this quite well. This liar is also a braggart because, during the 4th secret meeting (the minutes of which fell into the hands of the organisation by chance), he boasted to his acolytes that he had succeeded in duping a member of the central organ of our section in France. All the evidence indicates that what really concerns this ex-militant today is not the defence of the ICC’s principles, but the defence of his own little personality and of his pals in the ‘Fraction’, to use the words of one of its members in a secret meeting, maintaining “an iron solidarity between us”. Against this “iron solidarity” of a parasitic body within the organisation, the ICC defends the class solidarity that has to unite all the militants of a communist organisation.
It’s not the first time that a militant, tired out by a number of years of commitment, has been unable to admit his new passion for his slippers and his night-cap, and has blamed the organisation for his fatigue. To such ex-militants, one of our subscribers addressed the following advise in a letter to the ICC: “if they are tired, they should just go to sleep”. We could add: that would be the best service they could render to the proletariat.
The second supporter of the ‘Fraction’ is also an ex-militant of the ICC who resigned in 1996. He gave the ICC a lesson in the defence of the organisation by declaring that this meant first and foremost the defence of its principles. These were fine words but this element has not been to an ICC public forum since 1996, even when they were devoted to the defence of communist principles in the face of imperialist barbarism faced with the Kosovo war or more recently the war in Afghanistan. It’s only very recently that this element, a bit like Sleeping Beauty, woke from a long sleep to come and give us lessons in morality. It seems that the ‘Fraction’s’ public attacks on the ICC have had the same effect on this element as the prince’s kiss. His whole political approach is summed up in the fact that it’s only now that he comes to our forums to sow trouble among our contacts. During the 1993 crisis in our organisation (which he described as “war between chiefs”), this former militant of the ICC distinguished himself by engaging in all kinds of manoeuvres, in doublespeak and corridor denigration against other militants, notably members of central organs. In response to this behaviour the organisation passed a special resolution on this element, adopted by all the members of the present ‘Fraction’, calling on him to cease this behaviour and make a criticism of it. This was too much to ask of him and he preferred to leave the organisation shortly afterwards, maintaining a deep hostility towards the ICC, a hostility which was obvious to all the sympathisers present at this meeting.
In his intervention, this element asserted that the ICC had rejected his demand for a jury of honour to clear him of the accusation of being a state agent. If that had been the opinion of the ICC as he claimed (he even said he had “proof” of this), this element would have been expelled and publicly denounced via a communique in our press, which was not at all the case. Furthermore, it’s not up to the ICC to call for a jury of honour for a militant whose intrigues we have certainly criticised, but who left the organisation by his own choice.
These are the kinds of ‘sympathisers’ that the Fraction is waking up today: elements who came to this public meeting not to defend the principles of the workers’ movement and the ICC by taking position on our presentation, but to settle old personal scores with our organisation. This supporter of the ‘Fraction’, having avoided taking any position on the ICC’s presentation and the behaviour of Jonas, presented himself as a victim of ICC slander. It is thus the ICC which has been spreading slanders and not the individual which it has expelled from its ranks. We should also note that in his intervention this element also in a subtle way took up the defence of JJ, whom the ICC expelled in 1995, and whose friends at the time formed a parasitic grouping called ‘The Paris Circle’. Should we then expect to see a rapprochement between the latter and the ‘Fraction’? We know in any case that the ‘Fraction’ has begun to send its “internal bulletins”, which it now says will be sent out “for discussion within the proletarian political milieu” (bulletin no. 9 of the ‘Fraction’), to members of this circle. Do the friends of Jonas now consider that the Paris Circle belongs to the proletarian political milieu and not to parasitism, which was their position when they were still militants of the ICC?
The third ‘sympathiser’ of the ‘Fraction’ (as he described himself) was also a former member of the ICC who resigned in 1993 (Note 2) [44]. But contrary to the second supporter of the ‘Fraction’, this element has up till now been one of our most loyal fellow travellers, who has always intervened with us and given us invaluable support over the years. It was with deep consternation that all the ICC militants and the sympathisers who know this element witnessed the sad spectacle of his turn towards parasitism. This element made an incomprehensible intervention that showed only that he has become violently hostile to the ICC. This is a success for the policy deliberately being carried out by Jonas and his ‘Fraction’: to destroy our milieu of contacts and turn the ICC’s sympathisers into its enemies.
The mobilisation of the ICC’s sympathisers for the defence of the organisation
The numerous contacts of the ICC who intervened supported the political framework given in the presentation and called on the ‘Fraction’ to take position on it. Several interventions protested vigorously against the theft of the list of the addresses of our subscribers, insisting that they had confided their address to the ICC as a political group and not to Mr Jonas and his cabal.
Faced with the interventions by our contacts who, with different arguments, affirmed the necessity for a revolutionary organisation to defend its statutes and to condemn very firmly the methods used by Jonas, what was the response of the ‘Fraction’? Silence! The members of the ‘Fraction’ refused to speak in response to the questions posed to them by the subscribers to whom they had sent their parasitic prose.
In response to this evasive attitude, one of our contacts called on them again to answer. What was the response of the ‘Fraction’? To quietly sidle out (followed by their supporters) giving the pretext that their departure was motivated by “family obligations” (their families seem to be very well synchronised!)
In reality, the reason they preferred to quit the room all together on tip-toe was that they knew that they would be unable to sell their wares to the serious elements of the proletarian political milieu who had come to this public meeting.
Following the remarkable performance of this so-called ‘Fraction’, several of our contacts who had not spoken before intervened to give their full support to the ICC. As one of them said at the end: “I did not see things very clearly when I arrived at this meeting. I give my support to the ICC. It is the attitude of this ‘Fraction’ which has convinced me. These people have discredited themselves by leaving the room when they had been asked to reply to the questions and to take position on what the ICC is saying”.
Before the departure of the ‘Fraction’, one of our comrades (an ex-member of the Jonas clique) gave an eye-witness account of the conspiratorial methods of this enterprise of destruction into which he himself had been dragged. One of our contacts saluted this intervention and said that, in contrast to the vengeful complaints of the fractionists and their supporters, “real courage is what this militant has shown”, because he had managed to put the historical interests of the proletariat above his personal pride, and remain a loyal militant of the organisation.
This public meeting clearly showed that the parasitic behaviour of this ‘Fraction’, animated by loyalty towards declassed elements who have become adventurers, is a pure reflection of the social decomposition of capitalism. The intervention of a sympathiser from Germany demonstrated that the repeated slanders by Jonas and his ‘Fraction’ against members of the organisation in order to destroy them (or “destabilise” them, according to the term used at one of the secret meetings) are very similar to the phenomenon of “mobbing” which has been seen in various workplaces. This sympathiser had himself been a victim of this and talked about his own experience (Note 3) [45].
The discussion also highlighted the danger this cabal represents for the proletarian political milieu, as can be seen from their meeting with the IBRP (which the ‘Fraction’ has described in no. 9 of their bulletin, sent to all our subscribers in France).
One of our sympathisers said clearly that this policy of the Jonas clan is aimed at getting the IBRP publicly mixed up with its intrigues, and thus at compelling it to take up the cause of the ‘Fraction’ against the ICC. “This was not just opportunism but the worst kind of manoeuvring”. For our part, we consider that publishing the discussion between the IBRP and the ‘Fraction’ can only have the aim of discrediting the IBRP in the proletarian political milieu (Note 4) [46].
At the end of the meeting, certain contacts came up to us to offer their help, considering that, as in 1981, the ICC had to recuperate the material and money stolen by the fractionists.
The ICC’s sympathisers cannot help feeling directly concerned in this, seeing that the funds of the organisation emanate not only from the dues paid by its militants but also from their own subscriptions as sympathisers of the ICC. Thus, it’s a part of the money from these subscriptions that has been stolen without scruple by the ‘Fraction’. This is why the ICC is continuing to insist that the Jonas cabal return money stolen from the working class (here we see no problem in the racketeers opening a subscription among their own supporters in order to help reimburse their debts). This is a matter of principle on which the ICC will make no concession, whatever the ‘historical’ and ‘theoretical’ justifications which the fractionists have cooked up to cover their sordid little deeds.
This public meeting showed that, faced with the lumpen methods of the Jonas clique, the Marxist method does indeed “carry enough weight” (Note 5) [47].
The ICC has never before received so many letters of support (some of them were read out at the meeting). Or as the ex-member of the IBRP rather spitefully observed “we have never seen so many people at a public meeting of the ICC in Paris”!
This public meeting was a step in the ICC’s combat for the defence of communist principles. But we know that this combat is not over because revolutionary organisations, being irreducible enemies of the capitalist order, will always be the object of the efforts of the bourgeoisie to destroy them or discredit them. These attacks may be carried out by specialised organs of the bourgeois state or by declasse individuals, as well as by former militants whose loss of conviction can turn into hatred of the organisation they once belonged to and of their old comrades in arms. It is this wearing out of conviction which can push them into resigning over the smallest difficulty, into capitulation to bourgeois ideology and the betrayal of proletarian principles. The fractionists are trying to cover up their real betrayal of the organisational principles of the ICC by posing as the real continuators of the principles of the ICC and all the left fractions before it. Well, a child of five can imagine himself to be Superman, Wonderwoman or Luke Skywalker, but that doesn’t mean that this is true and that grown ups are fooled. Our knights of the ‘Fraction’ may try to tell us that they are the real heroes of the defence of communist principles. However, their political behaviour and their intervention in this public meeting have shown how far away from this they are, and our sympathisers could see it quite clearly. “It’s in their practise that men prove the truth of their thinking” said Marx. The practise of the fractionists proved only the truth of their imposture.
ICC, 25/5/02.
NOTES
(1) See the ‘Communique to our readers’ [48] in WR 252. Among other things this communique says “One of the most intolerable and repulsive aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign he led against a member of the organisation, accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people outside the organisation of manipulating those around them and the central organs on behalf of the police”. (Back) [49]
(2) This element, who at his first reappearance for at least 10 years at a public meeting of the ICC, last winter, had begun to denigrate the IBRP, told us twice at this meeting that the break up of the International Communist Party (the main Bordigist group) in 1982 was something to be welcomed! The destruction of revolutionary organisations, even when they are gangrenous with opportunism, has always been a blow against the proletariat and communists never salute such an event. The amiable exchanges between this element and the members of the ‘Fraction’ were founded upon a common political denominator: hostility not only towards the ICC, but also towards the whole proletarian political milieu, even if the ‘Fraction’ claims the opposite. (Back) [50]
(3) This phenomenon of ‘mobbing’ typical of capitalist decomposition has also appeared in the Satanic games at certain educational establishments where gangs of adolescents amuse themselves by selecting one of their number as a target and subjecting them to all sorts of torture, even murder. Perverted games like this are, as with serial killers, an obvious product of a deep mental unbalance, but they are above all expressions of the barbarism of a rotting society which has turned Nazi sadism or the methods of the torturers from the Algerian war into a parlour game. (Back) [51]
(4) And this is indeed Mr Jonas’s aim: to lure the IBRP into a trap and discredit it while at the same time spreading all kinds of suspicion between the groups of the communist left. (Back) [52]
(5) When a delegation of the ICC met the ‘Fraction’ to discuss the modalities of recuperating material belonging to the organisation and to demand the reimbursement of money stolen from the ICC, the brave spokesman of the Jonas clique offered the following threats against our comrades, illustrating the thuggish mentality of this so-called ‘Fraction’: “In any case, in Paris, you don’t carry enough weight!” (Back) [53]
The threat of war between nuclear powers casts a terrifying shadow across the whole world. It is not an empty threat, an episode of sabre-rattling where India and Pakistan will just go to the brink before ‘seeing sense’ and coming to an agreement. “The British and American Governments are seriously contemplating a doomsday scenario in which there is an unstoppable momentum toward a nuclear war in India and Pakistan that would kill millions of people and make millions more homeless across the sub-continent” (The Times, 1/6/02). In an inferior position - Pakistan has 700,000 troops to India’s 1.2 million, 25 nuclear missiles with a lesser range than India’s 60 - “Pakistan has already made it clear that, in the face of a superior enemy, it would be prepared to initiate a nuclear confrontation” (Guardian 23/5/2). British “diplomatic and defence sources” have suggested that neither President Musharraf of Pakistan nor Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee “appeared to be taking into account the sheer scale of the disaster that would follow if nuclear weapons were used, and that they seemed incapable of visualising the disaster that would overwhelm their countries as a result” (The Times, 1/6/2). While “military sources” felt that “neither leader was thinking logically or with any common sense” (ibid), in reality it is a gruesome illustration of the insane logic of the imperialist appetites of the ruling class. Here we have the ruling classes of two countries, where poverty, disease and death stalk the majority of the population daily, setting in motion theie blame for all this with ‘religious fundamentalism’. The Indian ruling class blames Pakistan-backed Islamic fundamentalists for terrorist attacks in Kashmir and on the Indian parliament. On the other side, the Pakistan ruling class blames the fervent nationalism of the Hindu fundamentalism of the ruling BJP party in India, in particular with its brutal counter-insurgency against ‘freedom fighters’ in Kashmir. As for the ‘democratic’ and ‘civilised’ bourgeoisie in the West, they weep crocodile tears about the ‘intransigence’ of the leaders of both countries and call on them to be ‘reasonable’ and seek peace under the guidance of the leaders of the very countries, such as Britain and the US, that train and provide the weaponry for their armed forces.
The ruling classes in India and Pakistan have certainly used fundamentalism in stirring up a war psychosis in each country. The BJP in India uses terrorist attacks in Kashmir and the rest of India as justification for its military threats against Pakistan. Meanwhile the BJP has been implicated in the inter-communal massacres in the state of Gujarat where hundreds of Hindu fundamentalists were incinerated in a train by Islamic militants and in reply thousands of Muslims were slaughtered. The Indian state has deliberately whipped up this hatred which is then directed against Pakistan. Meanwhile the Pakistani bourgeoisie has not only been trying to destabilise India through its backing for the Kashmiri struggle against Indian rule, they also claim that India is backing terrorist groups in Pakistan. Constantly fuelling the most virulent nationalism has enabled both sets of exploiters to drag large parts of their populations into support for their imperialist ambitions.
The use of such nationalisms in conjunction with religious prejudice and racial stereotyping is not new or confined to the peripheries of capitalism. The bourgeoisies of the main capitalist countries have developed this into a fine art. In the First World War both sides portrayed the other as ‘evil ‘ and a ‘threat to civilisation’. In the 1930s both the Nazis and Stalinists used anti-semitism and nationalism to mobilise their populations. The ‘civilised’ Allies did everything to whip up anti-German and anti-Japanese hysteria, which culminated in the cynical use of the Holocaust to justify the bombardment and massacre of an ‘inhuman’ enemy. During the Cold War similar hatreds were cultivated by both blocs to portray the enemy as power-hungry maniacs. And since 1989 the ‘humanitarian’ leaders of the great powers have manipulated and stirred up the growth of the ethnic cleansing, religious and racial hatred that has penetrated so many areas of the planet in a cycle of wars and massacres. At the moment, in ‘civilised’ democratic countries across Europe, we are seeing politicians of the Left and Right fomenting the most crude racism against refugees and other immigrants, in order to justify strengthening state repression, sow divisions in the population and portray the state as the last rampart against invading ‘hordes’.
The creation of the most virulent nationalism and crude racism is an essential part of imperialist mobilisations - not just with today’s developing nightmare in South Asia, but in all the imperialist massacres since before the beginning of the 20th century. In order for any imperialism to wage war it has to portray its rival in practically sub-human terms. “War is methodical, organised, gigantic murder. But in normal human beings this systematic murder is possible only when a state of intoxication has previously been created. This has always been the tried and proven method of those who make war. Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses; the latter must prepare and accompany the former” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet). It should be added, on the question of ‘bestiality’, that most animals only kill for food, some in defence of territory or their young. However “Imperialism, with all its brutal policy of force, with the incessant chain of social catastrophe that it itself provokes, is, to be sure, a historic necessity for the ruling classes of the present world” (ibid). Massive devastation comes from the actual needs of capitalist states trying to defend their interests through imperialist war.
Imperialist barbarism
Today relations between capitalist states take the form of an imperialist free-for-all, a situation unleashed by the disintegration of the Russian and US blocs. In the period of the Cold War the bitter rivalries between nation states were kept in check through the discipline required by each bloc. Today all these ambitions have free play. The 50 year old conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is not constrained by the discipline of the US bloc but is threatening to escalate to an unprecedented level where the use of nuclear weapons cannot be discounted. This comes after several years of a more or less open war in Kashmir where tens of thousands have already died with the conflict at a level that the rest of the world’s states found ‘acceptable’.
The intensity of the antagonism between these two nuclear powers can be seen by the extent to which the US, the world’s only superpower, appears to be finding it difficult to impose its will on the situation. The US doesn’t want a full blown conflict. It wants to control south Asia, not see it destroyed. But each sides justifies its military build-up with the same justification used by the US for its imperialist onslaught across the globe: ‘the war against terrorism’. The situation expresses the real instability of the world situation. Only a few months after the US made a massive display of force in Afghanistan to compel other nation-states to line up behind it, two of its allies in this war are at each others throats. Disaster is threatened in a region where the US thought it could impose its order through military means.
This is the latest and potentially most devastating in a series of such situations. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has launched massive military operations to show the world that it will not accept any challenge to its leadership. After the 1991 Gulf War, instead of the New World Order came the horror of the war in the Balkans. In 1999 after the US’s show of force against Serbia the European imperialist powers became increasingly open in their opposition to US policies such as ‘Son of Star Wars’. It was in response to this challenge that the US laid waste to Afghanistan, using the convenient justification of 11th September. Now it is faced with two of its ‘allies’ in the region preparing for a conflict that would have horrendous consequences.
Every display of US power, each expression of open belligerence to other states, every time another agreement or weapons treaty is discarded, every increase to the already enormous US military budget - all these measures only add more fuel to the fire of imperialist tensions. All its rivals, whether they are Germany, France or Britain, or regional powers such as Russia, China, India or Pakistan, are being pushed to strike out in an effort to defend their own interests. For India and Pakistan in particular, seeing the US impose itself in the region has left them no choice but to undermine the other in the desperate defence of their own interests.
Nuclear insanity
The ‘great powers’ are certainly very concerned about the possibility of nuclear war breaking out. The whole world situation would be thrown into disarray with every nation-state desperate to defend its position in a situation where the world’s major power was unable to stop two 3rd rate imperialist powers from trying to annihilate each other. However, we should not forget that it is countries such as the US, Britain and France that have the greatest stocks of ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The US, for example, has recently made it quite clear that it now has a ‘first strike’ policy with its nuclear weaponry, ready to act against any other state, regardless of their military status, from impoverished Afghanistan to, ultimately, its great power rivals. US nuclear weapons’ policy follows the logic of imperialism: crush your enemy. And with the US declaring its ‘first strike’ policy, neither India or Pakistan will have any hesitation in using their ultimate weapons.
A massive threat to the working class and the rest of humanity
The campaigns to mobilise the population for war have the aim of destroying any class solidarity between the workers of each country. Workers are exploited and threatened by the same capitalist class, but called upon to massacre each other in the name of the national interest. It is because of the threat from the working class that capitalism feels the need to use all its lies to boost nationalism and throw workers off the path of struggle.
At a local level, in south Asia, the working class is not showing the militancy that could stop a war. Internationally the working class is a spectator as capitalism tears itself apart. If nuclear weapons are used it will not just cause unimaginable millions of deaths, and environmental destruction, it will be the most massive blow against the working class, a setback in the struggle for communism. It would represent a qualitative development in the decomposition of capitalism and would pose the question of whether the working class is going to be able to pose its own alternative. If the ruling class can fight even one war with nuclear weapons it could unleash a deadly and apocalyptic cycle that would ultimately make communism a total impossibility.
And yet the fundamental point remains: the only force that can stop this happening is the international working class, above all that in the main capitalist countries. Through the development of its struggles to defend its own interests it could show the workers on the sub-continent that there is a class alternative to nationalism, religious and ethnic hatred. This places a huge responsibility on the working class of the metropolitan heartlands. It has to see that while it must defend its interests as a class, it also has the future of humanity in its hands. It has to begin the process of political clarification on the nature of the system it faces and the stark alternative it is faced with: struggle as a class or be destroyed as individuals.
Faced with the insanity of capitalism in full decay, workers in the region and around the world must take up the slogan: WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE, your enemy is your national bourgeoisie, not the working class in other countries. Capitalism can only drag us to war and barbarism. The working class struggle is the key to the only alternative: the worldwide communist revolution.
WR, 1/6/02.
The killing and maiming in the Middle East is continuing and escalating. The construction of the huge Israeli wall to keep Palestinians out is destroying the water supply to many people, and will also further damage the economy. It is just one dramatic step in the escalating cycle of violence. After the Israeli offensive against the Palestinian areas, including the near destruction of Jenin, the riposte was bloody and determined. Time and again suicide bombers have entered the towns and cities of Israel, exploding their bombs at bus stops and in restaurants or driving a car filled with explosives into a bus. Men and women going to work, teenagers returning from a trip to the countryside and children going to school have all been slaughtered. And each time Israel has replied in kind, occupying more Palestinian areas, using tanks and planes to shell towns and villages and killing people out looking for food in the mistaken belief that a curfew had ended. All the time it is workers and their families who pay the price, who are considered legitimate targets by both sides, who live in fear, and who struggle every day just to survive. This situation, however, is not some aberration, but is typical of war in this period. Civilian casualties are neither avoided nor accidental but are the main focus of the war.
The responsibility of the great powers
This escalation of the fighting has been matched by an increasingly open antagonism between the US and most major European powers over Washington’s call for the Palestinian leadership to be replaced and its refusal to have any further dealings with Yasser Arafat. This has not stopped them all prattling on about ‘peace’ and ‘conflict resolution’. The Oslo Accords and the Saudi proposals are still bandied about, while the US and the EU have murmured about possible new talks. All of these soothing sounds are meant to convince us of their concern and their commitment to peace and ending the bloodshed. Above all it is meant to preserve the lie that the barbarism that haunts every shattered refugee camp and every mangled bus has nothing to do with them, that it flows from the obtuse, irrational hatreds of those who dress babies as suicide bombers and who shoot children. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole history of the region has been determined by the great powers. America has long been Israel’s protector, without whom the country would have been destroyed years ago, while the Palestinian ‘liberation’ struggle was a pawn of Russia’s imperialist ambitions during the Cold War. After 1989, Washington seemed able to impose the Pax Americana across the whole region, making overtures to the Palestinians while asserting tighter control over Israel. The latter however, in common with many other countries freed from the grip of the blocs, began to assert its own interests.
In the period since September 11, the US has mounted a global offensive, declaring a state of permanent war and stating that all who are not with it are against it. It has shown a determination to act on its own, as and when it sees fit. Its aim has not really been the so-called “axis of evil” but the rival great powers, in particular Germany, France and Britain, who have repeatedly struggled to assert their own interests and undermine the US. The message was driven home by the war in Afghanistan, during which the US made no pretence of needing any kind of international alliance. This was underlined through its deliberate humiliation of Britain, which, after posturing about its vital role and the professionalism of its military, was left chasing rumours and blowing up empty caves. The will to impose its massive military force without any assistance has been underlined again by Washington’s drive to go to war with Iraq, a war that would have the removal of Saddam Hussein at its heart. America has seized the initiative and, to date, has retained it. It has less need to win countries over since it has been able simply to impose its will on them. Behind this lies its overwhelming military superiority, which gives it the means to wage war around the globe on several fronts at one time. Its contempt for the international bodies that its rivals try to use to contain it was shown again at the start of July when it refused to recognise the new International Criminal Court.
Washington’s change of policy
In the Middle East the US has remained dominant throughout this period. Its major rivals have been unable to mount any real challenge. Arafat may be photographed welcoming various envoys from Europe, but it is always America that he watches and whose words make him respond. Israel still remains dependent on the US. American policy may have become more supportive of Israel’s harsh responses, but it is not Israel that dictates to America, despite the strength of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. The parameters of the game continue to be defined by the US. On the one hand it continues to fund Israel and supply it with arms, on the other it still retains influence with the Palestinians, the CIA, for example, continuing to advise Arafat on possible ‘reforms’ to his police force.
However, the fact that America is the dominant force does not mean that it controls everything. The corrosive violence that has marred the area for so long continues to get worse and to spread. Arafat, who had been given some power on the basis of his ability to control the militants, has shown himself unable to contribute as America hoped when it gave him its backing.
These are the reasons why President Bush, in his policy speech on the Middle East on 24 June, called on the ‘Palestinian People’ “to elect new leaders, not compromised by terror” and why, a few days later, it was made clear that the US government would no longer have any official dealings with Arafat. By giving its backing to Israel the US is acting in continuity with its ‘anti-terrorist’ crusade - after all Al-Qaida and many similar gangs constantly refer to the situation of the Palestinians. It is also an admission that, whatever they say in their propaganda, there is no possibility of peace within capitalism, only a new stalemate, albeit at a higher level of violence.
However, Washington is no longer aiming for any appearance of a peace process. For all Bush may make pious calls for a Palestinian state in the future, the refusal to deal with Arafat is the refusal to deal with the Palestinians. Full stop. If not Arafat, which faction will they deal with? Hamas? The USA’s new aggressive policy is supporting the crushing, undermining and humiliation of the Palestinian forces that are the only potential clients of rival great powers wanting a foothold in the Middle East.
The American ruling class, like all ruling classes, is not concerned about the death or suffering of innocent people. Indeed, the terror that now hangs over the whole region serves its interests well.
America’s rivals try to fight back
The strength of the US in the Middle East has not prevented its main rivals from trying to undermine its efforts in the region. Leading politicians in France and Germany have openly criticised America’s apparent change of policy. The new French Foreign Minister said, “Only the Palestinians themselves can choose their leaders”, a view echoed by the German Foreign Minister. The Danish Prime Minister declared “We will not demand that Arafat or any other leader in the region is removed” (Guardian 26/6/02).
Britain has joined this criticism, Prime Minister Blair arguing “It is up to the Palestinians to choose their own leaders” (ibid). Cherie Blair said that the suicide bombers’ behviour was understandable because of their desperate situation. This was backed up by foreign secretary Straw a few days later saying much the same thing in more diplomatic language.
As the US has become more aggressive, more vocal in its criticism of Arafat and more tolerant of Israel’s retaliation, so a campaign has been built up on the theme of Bush’s ‘bad leadership’. The Guardian newspaper has been particularly prominent in this. In early June it took up the argument for a peace conference, calling on the US to support it since “unless the US becomes fully engaged, the process will never start” (Guardian, 6/6/02). It also declared that Bush’s speech “ends any remaining pretence of US impartiality” and concluded, “Mr Bush has ... set back the cause of peace. Forget Mr Arafat for a moment. Americans and Israelis also deserve better leaders” (Guardian 26/6/02).
This campaign shows the determination of the other great powers, Germany, Britain and France, to try and maintain a toehold on the region. But it also shows their present weakness. When the US and Israel are imposing their will with massive brute force, they bleat on about a ‘peace conference’ and ‘impartiality’; when Washington’s ally has massive military superiority, they are left trying to curry favour with a Palestinian leader who can only step outside his front door when given leave by his enemies.
The place of the working class
The working class has an interest in all of this. But it does not lie in the hypocritical ‘humanitarianism’ of the governments which have tears in their eyes and blood on their hands. Nor does it lie in the equally hypocritical calls on workers to take sides, to defend Palestinians against Israeli oppression or Israelis against Palestinian terrorism. In Britain it is mostly the former that is peddled by the left under the pretence that the Palestinian ‘liberation’ struggle is somehow progressive and ‘anti-imperialist’. This is nothing more than a trap set for workers who have begun to see through the lies about the good intentions of the ruling class. No. The interests of the working class are diametrically opposed to this. Where the ruling class calls on it to take sides its interests lie in uniting with fellow workers everywhere. Where the bourgeoisie want to obliterate the conflict between the classes, under the false unity of ‘humanity’, the interests of the working class lie in tearing this veil off, exposing the real class antagonism that dominates capitalist society and taking up the class struggle.
WR, 6/7/02
Earlier this year the American ruling class proudly announced the end to the post-September 11 recession it had only recently acknowledged. Very reluctantly, faced with worsening economic statistics, the US bourgeoisie admitted its economy had in fact been in recession since March of 2001. Nevertheless, soon after this sombre admission, the American bourgeoisie precipitously declared the end to the ‘shortest recession in American history’ and announced the beginnings of an economic recovery. Since then, we have seen corporate bankruptcies (including the continuing circus surrounding Enron, which, at the time, was the largest bankruptcy in US history), spiralling redundancies and stock market turbulence which clearly give the lie to health of the US ‘model’.
The impact has already spread through the stock markets of the world. This profound acceleration of the economic crisis of capitalism clearly stems directly from the very heart of the capitalist system, not from the peripheries. Previously the ruling class could say that different aspects of the crisis were expressions of the immaturity of the ‘tiger’ economies, of the difficulties of Russia adapting to ‘market forces’. Japan and other ‘unenlightened’ countries were admonished for their supposedly unique lack of ‘correct’ banking practices (i.e. correct accounting).
The continuing trouble on Wall Street, layoffs that never seem to stop and the American economy’s faltering international competitiveness has made all the pronouncements about the advantages of the ‘American way’ of managing capitalism sound ever more hollow and ridiculous. The WorldCom debacle was the final straw: the American bourgeoisie has had to admit that it may have been too hasty in concluding that the recession was in fact over. As for the boasts about the ‘American model’, there is embarrassed silence.
Furthermore, the damage inflicted by the scandal at WorldCom has precipitated a major crisis of confidence in Wall Street which has spread immediately to the other key international stock markets � London and Tokyo. The stock market index in London has fallen to a level lower than when Labour first took office, destroying billions of pounds worth of ‘value’. Although this value wiped off shares all around the world is ‘only’ paper value, it nonetheless has real effects both on the wider capitalist economy, and even directly on workers since it adds enormously to the problem of the funding of pensions schemes (in the next issue we will deal with this attack in more detail) and insurance policies.
The impact of the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals on the bourgeoisie is not because the capitalists who speculate on these markets are morally outraged by the massive fraud carried out by WorldCom, rather, they are horrified by the prospect of yet more WorldComs, and even pillars of the ‘old economy’ such as IBM, declaring accountancy errors and exposing the cracks in the edifice of capitalism - an edifice that is held up by a mountainous scaffolding of debt. If new proposals being discussed in Europe for making accountancy practices more ‘transparent’ � i.e. proposals to reduce the amount of actual lying involved in the production of company accounts � were to be adopted, then billions more dollars would be wiped off the value of US companies in particular, because of their very widespread use of the financial technique of stock options.
This is not an expression of a merely contingent situation for capitalism, which can simply be overcome by belatedly instituting a new policy of ‘honesty’ in company reporting. The whole period of rapid ‘growth’ in the world economy � especially the US economy � during the nineties has, as the ICC has consistently pointed out, been built on sand. The implosion of the technology bubble was the first direct, open, confirmation of this. The present loss of confidence amongst the bourgeoisie in their own capital markets simply underlines the incredibly shallow, tenuous nature of all this supposed ‘growth’.
WorldCom, the second largest telecommunications provider in the US with extensive foreign operations, demonstrates - even more dramatically than Enron - the fragility of the current state of the capitalist economy. Recent revelations have shown that since January 2001, WorldCom has systematically hidden more than $3.8 billion in expenditures by classifying normal operating expenses as ‘capital expenditures’. This has allowed the company to spread these costs out over a number years and thus give the impression of making a healthy profit, while in reality it is currently saturated with more than $30 billion in debt. From a high, three years ago, of $64.50 per share, WorldCom stock now sells for less than a dollar. Should WorldCom file for bankruptcy protection, a move a number of analysts see as likely, it would surpass Enron as the largest bankruptcy in American history. As a result of this fiasco, workers have seen their retirement stock portfolios hammered as they are revealed for what they really are: worthless pieces of paper laying claim to fictitious wealth that never really existed.
In these circumstances, how can the bourgeoisie have confidence in the reporting of any of its companies? Lacking this confidence, how does the capitalist know what he is investing in when he hands over his money for shares? In the casino economy, as the ICC has dubbed it, money chases money, with ‘profits’ fuelled by endless speculation. While this underlying reality will not change, the Enron revelations followed so soon by the WorldCom affair, shows even the most hardened ‘bull market’ investor that the reality is simply a pack of cards, waiting to fall. And the bourgeoisie do not invest in order to lose their money.
At the time of the Enron revelations, the American bourgeoisie smoothly tried to play off the disaster as the workings of a few corrupt executives and hyped the need for closer government regulation of corporations. This time around the bourgeoisie has once again tried to play the ‘few corrupt businessmen’ card, promising criminal prosecution of those responsible. Nevertheless, what this ‘scandal’ really reveals is not the rapacious appetite of a few unscrupulous corporate bigwigs, but the utter rot of the capitalist economy after thirty years of open crisis, an economy in which the illusion of health has only been maintained through shrewd accounting manipulations, worthless speculation and ever growing oceans of debt. Already, the WorldCom revelations have been followed by accusations of accounting irregularities at Xerox that overstated company revenue by $6.4 billion. Thus, one of the supposed mainstays of the United States’ post-Second World War economic prosperity finds itself in deep trouble. In the coming period there will undoubtedly be more such ‘scandals’ as the crisis strains the ruling class’s ability to cover up the deepening crisis eating at its very heart.
As capitalism’s crisis intensifies and the working class is faced with accelerating attacks on its working and living conditions (WorldCom already plans to slash a fifth of its workforce, with more layoffs expected), workers must not be taken in by the bourgeoisie’s ‘anti-corruption’ propaganda. All this propaganda emanates from the capitalist state, which tries to give the impression that if it intervenes in the situation then the turmoil in the markets will be smoothed over. As even some capitalist commentators have observed, the state, far from being the least disposed to engage in the manipulation of figures, is at the leading edge of this practice � for instance the constant ‘redefinition’ of the unemployment figures in all countries. In Britain Labour has continued with this process in the same line as the Tories did. The US state tried to mask the reality of the current open recession until it could no longer avoid it. And, in all countries, the state is the biggest liar and manipulator of all.
Although the state must and will intervene in the situation because it is the final bastion of the bourgeoisie and responsible for keeping the economic crisis under some kind of control, in the final analysis, the bourgeoisie cannot stop the crisis, only slow it down. The present emergence of the crisis in an open way is the best evidence of this. It is this kind of open expression of the crisis at the heart of its system that the bourgeoisie has been struggling to avoid for the last ten years, even though it is fundamentally aware that conjuring tricks cannot work for ever. The key reason for this is that the bourgeoisie is aware of the impact this can have on the working class. The economic crisis � along with war � is a key factor in the long term potential for the development of working class consciousness, because it reveals the bankruptcy of the entire capitalist system.
HHP, 6/6/02.
In Argentina in the first five months of 2002 there have been more than 11,000 demonstrations as well as various others forms of mobilisation - rallies, hunger strikes, the blocking of main roads and workers’ strikes. In a very mixed social movement the working class has found it very difficult to defend its particular class interests, to struggle as an independent class when so many other social strata are acting in response to the austerity imposed by the economic crisis hitting the country.
In Germany, where there is open admission that the economy is in recession and official figures for the rising number of unemployed are over 4 million, there has recently been a wave of strikes. There has been a10-day strike in the engineering sector, others among banking staff, print workers, and in Deutsche Telekom. The most significant was a week-long national strike in the 950,000 strong construction industry, the first in the post-Second World war period. With 500,000 construction jobs lost since 1995 it is understandable that there is widespread discontent. Less than half of building workers are in the IG Bau construction union which started the strike initially only with Hamburg and Berlin. In the latter, on the first day, 8000 workers on 400 sites were involved. After 4 days the strike spread to all regions, ultimately involving 32,000 workers on 2800 sites. Even allowing for the role of the unions (set up on the British model by the German state after the war) there is no mistaking the current militancy in the working class in Germany.
In Britain in recent months there have also been a number of struggles simmering. December last year and January this saw strikes in job centres and benefit offices against the removal of safety screens. There has been a series of rail strikes. There was a two-day strike of college lecturers. In March there was a strike of 40,000 London teachers, the biggest in 30 years. In the public sector there has been a ballot on future action for 1.2 million local government workers, giving support for a strike on July 17. There was a strike in the British Museum against job cuts. There has been a demonstration of fire fighters, the biggest since their strike of 1977. There have been demonstrations against cuts by local councils. In the media there has been speculation about the possibility of a “summer of discontent”. Throughout the working class in Britain there is indeed an undercurrent of discontent, which breaks into various forms of action, limited, diverted or defused by the unions.
At the beginning of the year the TUC forecast that 150,000 jobs in manufacturing industry would go in 2002. This prediction hardly required rocket science as it is the continuation of a long-term trend - 400,000 jobs, 10% of the manufacturing workforce, have gone during the last three years. The pay deals in manufacturing in decline (low profits, low orders and fierce international competition on prices) are now at a level lower than any since 1980, when manufacturing was in the middle of its worst post-war slump. Meanwhile, although the so-called ‘service sector’ has bigger pay deals it’s often because of the lower starting point - the average annual wage for the thousands of call centre workers, for example, is £13,000.
On top of attacks on jobs and wages there are the attacks on pensions and the decline in the transport system and the health service. Although the Labour government tries to make out that things are improving, or that, at least, they are not as bad as they would have been under the Tories, there are in fact very real material reasons for the working class to struggle.
However, the unions and their left wing friends spend a great deal of time giving workers false goals to pursue. Take the example of nationalisation. Because of the state of rail and bus travel there have been calls for their renationalisation and for more public spending. With the health service there have been many denunciations of the different schemes for its financing (PFI, PPP etc) and demands that it be kept away from profit-making businesses. Against proposals to extend sales of public sector housing there has been a campaign to ‘defend council housing’. State control is presented as the solution to all social problems, real or imagined.
However, the working class’s experience of the capitalist state is unambiguous. The tendency for the state to increasingly intervene in all aspects of economic and social life has dominated the whole period of capitalist decadence since the First World War. The attacks against the working class have been managed by the very state that the left present as the workers’ saviour. Under the last Labour government, for example, British Leyland was declared bankrupt in 1975 and then nationalised with massive state intervention. Labour appointed Michael Edwardes to do the work required by the ruling class. After four years the workforce had been cut by 90,000. Under the Thatcher government the strike of steelworkers in 1980 was against proposals by state-run British Steel for up to 52,000 redundancies. In all the major miners’ strikes since nationalisation (1972, 1974, 1984-85) workers faced the state-controlled National Coal Board.
And yet, when the Post Office says that 40,000 jobs are under threat, with the possibility of another 17,000 to be cut on top of that, the left says that the main problem is the possibility of privatisation. As the capitalist state cuts jobs the left want workers to give their support to that very state.
That the unions can obstruct the development of workers’ struggles is not a well-kept secret. The left will often blame ‘right-wing leadership’, or say that unions should be more responsive to the ‘rank and file’. Recently a number of left-wingers have been installed in important union offices, and there are further significant union elections to come. As we showed in a recent article in WR 252 (“Unions turn left to derail the class struggle”) the change in union leadership has made no difference to the way that the unions have tried to isolate workers going into struggle.
A new twist has been added to this with recent manoeuvres in the civil servants’ union, the PCS. SWP member Mark Serwotka was elected general secretary, but, just days before retiring leader Barry Reamsbottom was due to go, the “Moderate” faction organised a national executive meeting at short notice. This meeting decided to keep Reamsbottom on for two years, and declared Serwotka’s election “unlawful”. Subsequently a court has declared the Moderates’ meeting to be “unconstitutional” and leftists of all persuasions have launched a campaign over the “coup against union democracy”.
This campaign is aimed at getting workers engaged in the mire of union politics, rather than in organising to defend their interests. Serwotka himself was aware that not everyone has a taste for union machinations, as he wrote in Socialist Worker (1/6/02) “Some people are so angry and disgusted that they say they’re going to resign from the union”. As the Right attacks Serwotka for being a Trotskyist, and the Left denounces the Right for being undemocratic, there are many false trails being laid for workers to follow.
The campaign is also tied up with the unions’ need to distance themselves from the Labour government. The GMB has cut funding to the Labour party, the RMT has withdrawn support from MPs who don’t agree with its policies, and now, in the PCS, a line is being drawn between the ‘moderate’ supporters of Blair and the advocates of a ‘strong, fighting’ union. The unions are posing as the means to oppose the attacks of capitalism.
Across the world the working class is showing that it is not just accepting the economic regime that the ruling class wants to impose. However, its struggles are still contained within the union framework, often drawn into support for the state through anti-privatisation and democratic campaigns. To develop its confidence and take the path towards the extension and self-organisation of its struggles the working class will have to confront all the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, from the Right to the Left
Car, 5/7/02.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg from August 26 to September 4 addressed issues that are vital for the survival of the human species, just as the previous summit held in Rio did ten years ago. And just like Rio it will not mark a turning point in the despoliation of the planet but the start of a new descent as capitalism plunges ever further into crisis, dragging humanity with it. Capitalism threatens humanity
The statistics of death, disease and poverty have been repeated so many times and are of such enormity that they threaten to lose all meaning. 3 million people die every year from the effects of air pollution. 2.2 million die from contaminated water. 1.2 billion people live on 70p a day. A child dies every 3 seconds from disease, hunger or war. 1.1 billion people rely on unsafe water. In the 1990s another 2.4% of the world's forests were destroyed, mostly in Africa and Latin America. Half of the world's rivers are polluted. 11,000 species are threatened with extinction. 60% of coral reefs and 34% of all fish species are at risk. Water shortages are predicted to increase as extraction rates go above sustainable levels in major parts of the world. Global warming has reduced the polar ice caps, so much so that in the near future the famous north-west passage will become an open water-way for part of the year. Over the next 80 years sea levels are expected to rise by 44cm. Higher temperatures lead to more evaporation and consequently increased rainfall, while the destruction of the forests makes the consequent floods far more serious. The climatic changes have increased both the number and severity of 'natural' disasters. The recent floods in Europe were the worst for hundreds of years, but are as nothing compared to those elsewhere. In 1991 139,000 people died in floods in Bangladesh. In 1996 100 million people lost their homes or livelihoods in China because of floods. In 1998 the figure was 180 million. In both thousands died. In the same year 10,000 died when Hurricane Mitch tore through Central America. As more of the oceans reach the critical surface temperature of 28�C the number of hurricanes is predicted to increase. Alongside the escalation of 'natural' disasters diseases carried by micro-organisms that thrive in the warmer conditions are escalating. By 2050 it has been estimated that 3 billion people will be at risk of malaria. The bourgeoisie has no solution
On 4 September the conference ended with the adoption of a final statement that spoke of the "deep fault lines that divide human society between rich and poor" and of the need for 'fundamental changes' in the lives of the poor and of the "adverse effects of climate changes" that "rob millions of a decent life" (Guardian 5/9/02). The summit set a target of halving the 1.2 billion without basic sanitation by 2015, providing clean water for half of those without it, of halving the 1.2 billion who live on less than $1 a day, of restoring fishstocks by 2015 and reducing the loss of biodiversity by 2010. The World Trade Organisation will be required to consider environmental issues and an action plan on sustainable consumption is to be published within the next decade. A lot of noise followed about the lack of targets, as had been contained in Agenda 21 adopted at Rio, and 30 countries including the EU pledged themselves to set more precise targets. The reality, as the ten years that followed Rio confirmed, is that targets or not the bourgeoisie is incapable of even slowing the acceleration of the destruction of the environment, let alone halting and reversing the process.
The reason for this was evident throughout the summit when every issue was reduced to the level of grubby deals, of every nation putting its economic interests first. The negotiations over energy are one example: "There were two proposals: The EU, keen to see its strong renewable energy companies expand, wanted a target of 15% renewables by 2015. The US, Japan and Opec countries, who all fear that the rise of renewables will hurt their own strong fossil fuel companies, were opposed to the targets" (Guardian 4/9/02). The negotiations went up to ministerial level and into the final days of the summit and became one element within the overall manoeuvrings, with first one country then another putting forward proposals: "Japan now played its hand. With the EU it was proposing water and sanitation targets; but with the US it was opposing energy targets� The EU, battling to save its targets, held out, but after a 10-hour session the negotiators knew that without Japan they were isolated" (ibid).
This is not some aberration, but a manifestation of the logic, the very essence, of capitalism, as each nation uses the negotiations to defend its interests on the world market. Imperialist confrontation
The presentation - in the European media at least - of the US as the main obstacle to the summit was a constant theme throughout the summit: "If we all lived the way that George Bush jealously protects for the US we would need the resources of three additional planets" (Observer leader, 25/8/02). President Bush's refusal to attend was reported as a "snub" (Guardian 17/8/02), despite the best efforts of Tony Blair, wher energy are one example: "There were two proposals: The EU, keen to see its strong renewable energy companies expand, wanted a target of 15% renewables by 2015. The US, Japan and Opec countries, who all fear that the rise of renewables will hurt their own strong fossil fuel court. This is because its imperialist rivals - which include all of its supposed allies in the democratic west, including Britain -have spent the last decade and more using these as traps to snare American ambitions. The Earth Summit was no exception and in fact went hand in hand with the efforts to use the UN to try and rein back the planned assault on Iraq. The reception given to Bush's representative Colin Powell - a reception that must have had at least the tacit support of the organisers and main participants for it to happen in the conference centre - expressed most publicly the hostile anti-Americanism that had been built up in the months and weeks before the summit as well as during the summit itself.
Britain played an active part in this, although its approach was more discreet. Rather than criticise Bush directly, the press tended to report other people's criticisms. The Guardian, for example, in its report on Bush's decision not to attend, quoted the Greenpeace spokesman in Washington as saying "The fact that President Bush will be on vacation in Crawford speaks volumes for how little he cares for the environment�He's turning his back on the world" (17/8/02). The truth is that all of the heads of state who made such a fuss about going most just showed their faces for a few hours and spoke for a few minutes (the full text of Blair's speech is less than 700 words long). Blair for his part played the role of candid friend to Bush. While his speech in Mozambique, in which he criticised the US for not signing the Kyoto Agreement on climate change, was described as "a calculated rebuff to the American president" (Guardian 2/9/02) it was followed by a declaration of support for a war against Iraq. This two-faced approach is the strategy Britain has pursued with the US for a number of years. The loyal opposition
The Summit wasn't only attended by the world's governments and business leaders; there was also a noisy 'left wing' made up of Non-Government Organisations and environmentalist groups of various degrees of radicality, whose mouthpieces are figures such as Jonathan Porritt, George Monbiot and Naomi Klein. Such elements may attack the summit, they may denounce the politicians and the multinationals with varying degrees of vigour but they share the logic. For Porritt "you'd have to be an insane optimist to have any expectations at all of the World Summit" (Observer 25/8/02). The solution lies in government and industry changing and "some multi-nationals have genuinely become a 'force for good'" (ibid). Monbiot goes further: the last summit was partly responsible for the "environmental catastrophe" of the 1990s (Guardian 22/8/02) and the solution lies in "a global peoples' movement led by the poor world" resulting in "a world parliament" that will "hold government's to account for their actions" (Guardian 22/8/02). For Klein "the entire process was booby-trapped from that start" because it is now in the hands of the big corporations and the solution lies outside: "unlike a decade ago, the economic model of laissez-faire development is being rejected by popular movements around the world" (Guardian 4/9/02). What unites these critics, not only one with another but also with those they are criticising, is the call to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism.
The fact is that it is not the excesses of capitalism that cause the problem, but capitalist accumulation itself: "Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie�" (Marx, Capital vol. 1, chapter XXIV). Even in its early days capitalism was capable of causing tremendous local destruction of the environment, but this was largely outweighed by the historic potential that capitalist industrialisation was creating for mankind. However, with the decadence of capitalism the process of destruction became qualitatively worse as competition for the world market became more murderous - quite literally more murderous as it overflowed into the orgy of destruction represented by the two world wars and many more local imperialist wars that went on during the twentieth century. Today, when declining capitalism has begun to rot on its feet, its debt-fuelled and increasingly irrational 'growth' has become completely destructive, not only endangering the basis for our future on this planet but causing increasing misery right now. Any apology for capitalism, with the multinationals becoming 'a force for good', as Porritt would have it, or in the hands of corporations that are smaller, as Klein wants, or with Monbiot's 'world parliament', is nothing but a prop for the very system which is pulling the human species towards the abyss.
The working class - a term not mentioned in any of the mountains of articles written - is the only force capable of saving humanity because it is the only force capable of replacing the capitalist mode of production with communism, of replacing competition between national states with a unified world community, production for production's sake with conscious, planned production for need. To do this it will have to take on not only the governments and multi-nationals of the world but also all of their green and radical friends.
North, 7/9/02
Since the spring, the world economy has been the victim of a series of financial tremors: whole states, and some of the developed world's biggest companies, have gone bankrupt, the stock exchanges have rarely been so unstable and fragile. The bourgeoisie's clever economists have trotted out a whole list of explanations for this avalanche of problems: they have 'denounced' the disastrous policies of the IMF, pouring oil on the fire as it came to the 'rescue' of countries in difficulty, the scandal of stock-options encouraging stock market fiddling on a grand scale, the headlong flight into financial speculation and debt by companies, etc.
Obviously, there is a tangible reality to all these elements of capitalism's functioning. But however 'critical' these economists may be of 'bad management', they remain the spokesmen of the ruling class, spreading the illusion that there are remedies to be found. But while their cures may prolong the life of a dying patient, they will never cure it of its mortal sickness.
In fact, we have entered a new phase of capitalism's open recession, which is nothing other than an expression of its historic crisis. The bourgeoisie's pessimistic forecasts for future growth are - with a large degree of understatement - an expression of this reality.
The world proletariat at the heart of the economic storm
The coming recession threatens to be both long and profound. The world working class will bear the cost, in terms of large-scale redundancies and falling wages. The attempts by shaky companies to reduce their debt can only lead to reductions in investment and in wage costs. Stronger companies - whether in the private or the state sector - will inevitably adopt the same measures in order to preserve their own financial health.
The last 18 months have seen repeated announcements of substantial redundancies in every sector of the economy and every size of company. A few figures illustrate the extent of the economic disaster: Hewlett-Packard has cut 4,770 jobs and is preparing for 15,000 lay-offs; Nortel has laid off 59,000 workers since December 2000, and is preparing to sack 7,000 more in one go; WorldCom will lay off 17,000 employees. By themselves, these are only examples: the full extent of the recession is far greater.
We can therefore expect an increase in the rise of unemployment, already revealed in this year's statistics despite the systematic fiddling that these are subjected to by the ruling class, in order to make workers believe that things are not really as bad as they can sense that they are in their own daily lives.
We are at the beginning of a period of brutal attacks on workers' living conditions, and not just in terms of unemployment. Employee shareholding in large companies, and shares-based retirement plans, will become important factors in the pauperisation of the working class. The collapse in share prices has wiped out workers' savings and pensions. The collapse in Vivendi Universal's share price (-70% since January) has affected the savings accumulated by 160,000 employees over as much as 20 years for some. For pensioners, the situation is even worse, especially (but not only) in the US: WorldCom's pension plan has lost 90% of its value.
An unprecedented plunge into economic crisis
The last months' economic tremors did not come out of a blue sky. They represent an acute episode in a 'creeping' - but nonetheless violent - stock exchange crash that has been going on for the last two years: since summer 2000, Europe's stock exchanges have halved in value, while New York's technology stock index has fallen from 5300 to 1300. The US Federal Reserve started the movement in order to put the brake on a speculative frenzy that threatened to run out of control. The crash has been accelerated this year by a series of bankruptcies and the subsequent discovery of financial fiddling on a grand scale in some of the world's most powerful companies. By July 2002, $6.7 trillion had gone up in smoke. Capitalism is balancing on a mountain of debt
In the final analysis, indebted companies can only survive to the extent that they are able to honour their commitments and pay back their debts. This they are finding more and more difficult as it becomes more and more difficult to achieve sufficient sales on the market.
In many cases they have only been able to borrow on the strength of their stock market valuation, seen as a guarantee of the banks' confidence in their health. In order to improve their share value, companies became less and less scrupulous in the dodges they used. Some sold capital just before the year's financial statement in order to show an increase in cash flow� only to buy it back again immediately afterwards. Others, more pragmatically, simply faked the accounts. Today, such 'immorality' on the part of CEO's is the target of outraged denunciation by the media, under orders from the bourgeois state. The cheating that they pretend to discover today was an open secret that served the interests of the whole bourgeois class as long as everything was going ok. It's common practice to find a few scapegoats for the fundamental failings of a system, which only survives by systematic cheating - above all by those self-same states. States are the greatest speculators, and stock market speculation is only a consequence of the crisis of over-production. The less attractive the productive sector becomes for investors, with low and uncertain returns, the more they turn to speculation, which is equally uncertain but which offers higher returns.
Debt can never be a real solution to the world crisis. This was demonstrated at the beginning of the year by the sudden bankruptcy of hyper-indebted countries like Venezuela and Argentina.
The collapse this August of the Uruguayan banking system, and worse still the financial crisis in Brazil, have once again shown that these countries still survive only thanks to massive and repeated injections of dollars, whose interruption inevitably drops them into economic chaos at the mercy of the upheavals of the stock exchange. The only 'cure' able to prevent a total rout in Brazil - an economically central country - was a $30 billion 'recovery plan', in other words a new plunge into still more debt which may put off the day of reckoning but can only make it more painful.
The most developed countries are also in debt, and so confronted by the same contradictions that have turned a country like Argentina into an industrial desert. While their greater strength means that they are not about to go the same way as the latter, these contradictions are going to become an ever more devastating social scourge.
The spectacular financial convulsions of 1987-88 and 1997-98 (the crisis in South East Asia) were comparatively brief and limited in extent, because they occurred at a time of relative (though drugged) economic growth, which the bourgeoisie was still able to maintain. Today's collapse on the world's stock markets and among its biggest companies comes at a time when the world economy is in open recession. Inevitably, this will seriously affect their ability to confront the problem.
Intervention by the state
This does not mean that the state is completely impotent, but its measures to soften the crisis can only aggravate the disease. Some members of the US administration envisage a recourse to budget deficits, which means nothing other than the state itself using debt to hold up an exhausted economy. After proclaiming the victory of 'economic liberalism' behind Reagan and Thatcher, as the only way out of the crisis in the 1980s and 90s, the bourgeoisie is now being forced to return to the 'old methods' of direct state intervention. The effects will be limited, but also damaging since the European states' budgets are already badly in deficit. It will only liberate the inflationary tendencies that they all fear.
While the present deepening of capitalism's crisis will not cause the system's complete collapse, or sudden blockage like that of 1929, the present crash demonstrates once again capitalism's utter bankruptcy as a social and economic system. It cannot be reformed or improved, contrary to what the trade unionists, leftists, and left parties of every description tell us. It cannot be reformed by better accounting methods or improved business morals, any more than by a struggle against globalisation.
The bourgeoisie has no solution to offer to the devastating consequences of its system's crisis. Witness the solution proposed by the 'humanitarians' appointed by our exploiters to handle the monstrous growth of poverty, for example in the one-time Latin American 'miracles' where 44% of the population lives below the poverty line and unemployment has doubled in ten years: a 'new' method of economic exchange, barter. In other words, a return to prehistory and resigned acceptance of generalised poverty!
The working class is confronted by economic crisis and unprecedented attacks looming all over the world. It must become aware that it cannot remain passive and that it must develop its struggles. To fail to take the path of active and resolute resistance against a disintegrating capitalism, is to leave the bourgeoisie's hands free, and to open the road to the unlimited exploitation of the workers and to the unleashing of chaos over the whole planet.
MS, 29/08/02
One year after September 11, what balance sheet can we draw of the USA's 'war against terrorism'?
It is first of all clear that the overthrow of the Taliban regime and the operations against Al Qaida in Afghanistan have resolved nothing: the broad anti-terrorist coalition set up by the White House last year no longer exists - a reality confirmed by Bush's desperate efforts to create a new coalition for the proposed assault on Iraq.
Above all, we have seen a steep rise in military tensions and conflicts - not only the threats against Iraq but also a worsening of the bloody mess in the Middle East and the renewed menace of nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
At the same time the USA has installed its military forces at the heart of central Asia - in Afghanistan, in Tadjikstan and Uzbekistan, and more recently in Georgia, which as a result is under a lot of pressure from Russia which has had to respond to this US advance into its backyard.
All this is part of a much vaster strategic aim - not only to win control of this region but also of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. And by placing North Korea within the 'Axis of Evil', it is clear that the USA is also issuing a challenge to China and Japan. Above all it is pursuing a strategy of encircling the western European powers, and of blocking the advance of its most serious rival, German imperialism, towards the Slav and eastern regions.
And yet despite this gigantic offensive, we are more and more seeing the decline of American world leadership. The 1991 Gulf war already demonstrated that "faced with the tendency towards generalised chaos that characterises the phase of decomposition, and which the collapse of the eastern bloc has considerably accelerated, capitalism has no option, in its efforts to hold together the different parts of a body which is tending to disintegrate, to resort to the iron corset of armed force. In this sense, the very means it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody chaos are themselves a major factor in the aggravation of the military barbarism into which capitalism has sunk" ('Militarism and decomposition', International Review 64, winter 1991).
The present situation is more and more confirming the growth of this permanent barbarism in a capitalist world dominated by the war of each against all among imperialist powers large and small.
Military force is the only means the US has to impose its authority. If it renounced the use of its military superiority, this would only encourage other countries to challenge its authority more and more. But at the same time, whenever America does resort to brute force, even if it does momentarily succeed in compelling the other powers to rein in their ambitions, in the long run the latter are only led to seek their revenge at the first opportunity, and to try to further weaken the USA's grip. The first consequence of this situation is that the US bourgeoisie is increasingly obliged to go it alone.
The juggernaut of US imperialism rolls on
The 1991 Gulf war was conducted 'legally' in the framework of UN resolutions; the Kosovo war was carried out 'illegally' but in the framework of NATO; the campaign in Afghanistan was waged under the banner of 'unilateral action' by the USA. All this has served to sharpen the hostility of the other states towards Uncle Sam. It's this contradiction which is reflected in the debates and disagreements that have arisen within the American bourgeoisie.
At the beginning of the second world war we saw disagreements between the 'isolationists' and the 'interventionists' about whether the USA should enter the war. Generally speaking the Republicans were in the isolationist camp whereas the interventionists mainly came from the Democratic Party. In 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbour, which had been deliberately provoked by Roosevelt (see 'The machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie' in International Review 108), enabled the interventionists to carry the day. Today this old split has disappeared. But the contradictions of American policy have given rise to a new internal cleavage that cuts across the traditional parties. Within the American bourgeoisie there is no disagreement about the fact that the US must be able to preserve its world imperialist supremacy. The difference of appreciation bears on whether the USA should accept the dynamic which is pushing it to act alone, or should it try to keep a certain number of allies on its side, even if such alliances can have no real stability? These two positions can be seen clearly with regard to the two main areas of concern: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the plan to intervene against Iraq. In the first case we have seen the USA oscillating between on the one hand total support for Sharon and attempts to get rid of Arafat, to declarations about the inevitability of a Palestinian state on the other. In the aftermath of September 11the USA pursued a policy of almost unconditional support for Israel but it soon became clear that Sharon's ruthless policy of military invasion irritates them. Large sectors of the Arab bourgeoisie - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria in particular - are drawn towards an alliance with the European powers. The latter in turn have stated their opposition to the elimination of Arafat; and although they have proved themselves incapable of acting as 'peacemakers', they can certainly create all sorts of problems by wielding the weapon of diplomacy.
The most publicised disagreements however are over the planned intervention in Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein, even though they are really about the way to act and when. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfield, Vice President Dick Cheney and security adviser Condoleeza Rice defend the idea that the USA has to intervene alone and as soon as possible, while other eminent members of the Republican 'staff' such as Colin Powell, James Baker and Henry Kissinger (supported by certain business interests who are concerned about the cost of the operation which the US would have to bear alone at a time when the economy is in trouble) are much more reticent, preferring to alternate between the carrot and the stick.
What is at stake in this war? By making a new demonstration of force, the US aims to reinforce its domination of the region and of the entire planet. During the first Gulf war, there was a lot of propaganda talk about overthrowing Saddam; but in the end the USA had to accommodate him for lack of any alternative strong man to prevent the disintegration of Iraq. Today however, the USA has no further use for Saddam to police the region because it is in a position to assume a much more direct military presence there. And despite the difficulties it involves, an attack on Iraq has the merit of dividing the European powers, particularly Britain on the one hand and France and Germany on the other. Although Britain has certainly taken its distance from the USA over this affair, the leading factions of the British bourgeoisie will stand behind the US, not out of any genuine solidarity but because British imperialism has always seen the overthrow of Saddam as a means to restore its influence in what was once a British colony. By contrast, France has, ever since the Gulf war, expressed its opposition to any further military intervention against Iraq and has tried to maintain links with Saddam. Thus it has consistently called for an end to the embargo against Iraq. Germany, for its part, has always sought to affirm its interests in the Middle East through a Berlin-Baghdad land axis via Turkey.
Towards an aggravation of military barbarism
The 'hawks', partisans of a rapid US intervention in Iraq, seem to be winning out, even if Bush has declared that action is not imminent. We are already seeing a marked increase in Anglo-American air raids both in the northern and southern 'no fly zones'; military commanders in the area have openly admitted that these are rehearsals for a bigger assault. The White House is laying down the strategic foundations for an intervention (more than 50,000 US troops are stationed in Kuwait). And while some supporters of the 91war have defected, others have come on board: Turkey, its palms greased with offers of financial aid, has already agreed to serve as a rear base for US troops. The Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and especially Qatar, will still serve as bases in the immediate region. [1] Jordan will also allow its territory to be used to neutralise Iraq's western frontier, which is closest to Israel. Nevertheless, the enterprise is even more perilous than the operation in Afghanistan, because the US has nothing comparable to the Northern Alliance to do its dirty work on the ground and so spare it any loss of US troops; a bloody invasion that cost it a lot of American lives could result in a reappearance of the 'Vietnam syndrome'. The creation of a broad 'democratic opposition' on the ground, capable of taking over from Saddam Hussein, is far from assured. Another difficulty is that, even more than in Afghanistan, there is a multiplicity of conflicting influences in Iraq. The Kurdish and Shiite minorities are unreliable from the American point of view; the former are highly susceptible to European influence, the latter are too closely tied to Iran. Turkey will also have difficulties staying onside given its sensitivity on the Kurdish question: Saddam Hussein has in fact acted as the gendame of its borders. Also Turkey is increasingly drawn towards the European Union. The other major risk is that the US bourgeoisie will definitively lose its claim to being the peacemaker in the Middle East. Connected to this is the concern that an attack on Iraq will give an impetus to anti-American Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region, above all in the key state of Saudi Arabia.
Thus the prospect we face is a continuation of the warlike policy we have seen in the first Gulf war, then in ex-Yugoslavia, then in Afghanistan, but at a higher level, creating in its wake even more instability and chaos, even more uncontrollable consequences, and in a vast area from the Middle East to Central Asia, and from the Indian sub-continent to South East Asia. All this is a confirmation that the conflicts between imperialist powers in the phase of capitalist decomposition pose a deadly threat to the survival of humanity.
Wim, 7/9/02.
1. As for Saudi Arabia, it views with some concern the prospect of Shiite participation in any future Iraqi government, and has its own 'anti-American' factions to take into account. The USA has taken note of its reticence to serve as a base for American troops by starting to dismantle the Al-Kharg platform, which was used extensively during the 91 war, and transferring it to the new base being built at Al-Udeid, on the eastern coast of Qatar.
The Midlands Discussion Group (MDG) has existed for more than two years now, involving people from Leicester and Birmingham from various political backgrounds - left communist, councilist, anarchist, environmentalist, leftist. The aim of the group is to discuss the proletarian alternative to capitalism, like other discussion groups that exist or have existed in Mexico, India, France, Spain, Switzerland and Australia. Discussion circles: important moments in the development of class consciousness
Discussion circles (DCs) can only be understood in the context of the historical development of class consciousness. They are part of the proletariat's effort to develop its class consciousness through trying to understand the meaning and implications of the crises of capitalism within the framework of the political positions of the proletariat. "Class-consciousness is by nature a political consciousness: a consciousness of the necessity to develop the class struggle against the bourgeois state and the building of communism; a consciousness which involves an understanding of the need for the proletariat to create its own political party to deepen and extend communist consciousness" ('The proletariat: class of consciousness', WR 83). This consciousness does not develop in a mechanical and linear way, but through a very difficult historical process of twists and turns, of advances and retreats. An essential part of this is the subterranean maturation of consciousness. Whilst the mass open struggle of the class is essential for the generation of revolutionary consciousness: "the degree to which mass struggles can give rise to such a consciousness also depends on a prior process of 'semi-concealed' or subterranean maturation within the class - the 'old mole' that Marx talked about... On the broadest level, a subterranean maturation takes place in the mass of workers, in the growing contradiction between the way bourgeois ideology describes reality and the way the workers themselves experience it. Initially this development may remain 'unconscious' to most workers, or take the negative form of disillusionment with bourgeois ideals. But this 'negative' stage is a precondition for the emergence of a more positive and conscious critique when the struggle comes out into the open.
"But the term subterranean maturation doesn't only refer to this semi-conscious form of development. It also takes place through workers reflecting on past struggles, forming discussion circles in order to make sense of their situation, and so on" ('The subterranean maturation of consciousness', WR 73).
In the present historical situation it is important to underline that, with the ever growing imperialist and economic chaos engulfing the world the process of the growth of class consciousness has been extremely difficult, particularly since the collapse of the eastern bloc. The work of discussion circles is thus of real importance to the future development of the proletariat's understanding of its historical role. An open forum for discussion and clarification
The MDG initially began as the Leicester Discussion Group with some people who had been discussing with a long-term contact of the ICC in the area. These discussions had been stimulated by the war in Kosovo. In order to give these discussions a more systematic and fruitful form the ICC suggested that they form a discussion circle. The initial discussions of the LDG were animated by an ICC article which drew the political lessons of a discussion group that had existed in Zurich, Switzerland, in the 1990s. This article explained that, "A circle is an open, but not permanent coming together of workers, who meet because they want to discuss and clarify political questions. They are places which the proletariat creates in order to push forwards its consciousness, above all in times when there is no party and no workers' councils... We consider them to be a concrete expression of the class. They express the consciousness of the class, showing that it is not willing to accept the crisis and the bankruptcy of capitalism without resistance; that it wants to defend itself against the attacks of the capitalist system. Also, they express an attempt to search for ways to fight back and to develop a revolutionary perspective..." (WR 207, 'Discussion circles in the working class: a world-wide phenomenon'). Regarding the function of Discussion circles the article also underlined that, "The goal of a discussion circle is the political clarification of the individual participants. The framework of discussion is a common one, corresponding to the collective nature of the working class. The direction and pace of political clarification however, vary according to each person. Since a circle is not an organisation regrouping with a political platform, a circle is not a permanent or stable entity. Rather, it is a moment of political clarification, allowing the militants, through participation in a collective discussion process, to find out where they stand politically in relation to the major questions of proletarian politics and in relation to the already existing historical and international currents of the marxist proletarian milieu...
"What's proletarian about a discussion circle is not a common 'local' programme but the common will to discuss and clarify. Thus, a discussion circle isn't the same as a political group with a fixed programme. Rather it is a place, a meeting place for political clarification." (ibid.). A positive process of clarification and opening out
Central to the discussions of the MDG has been a determination to better understand the main theoretical and historical questions of the workers' movement and to combine this with a concern to address and discuss international and national events as they have unfolded. Thus, after 11 September 2001 they too discussed the meaning of the events using the leaflets and communiqu�s issued by the ICC and other groups of the Communist Left. This particular meeting saw the attacks as an expression of worsening imperialist tensions. This concern to denounce imperialist war from a proletarian perspective has been a great strength for the group. All the participants have made clear their opposition to the Kosovo, Afghan and all imperialist wars.
The MDG's discussions are planned and comrades prepare presentations, reading lists are proposed for the preparation of the discussions. This systematic organisation of its discussions has allowed the MDG participants to carry out a serious process of clarification. The publication in WR 257 of the presentation for a discussion on the Paris Commune demonstrates the depth and quality of its discussions. Amongst other things, the MDG has discussed: the anti-capitalist movement; the Russian Revolution (which the group sees as proletarian, although there are disagreements on the role of the Bolsheviks and the reasons for its degeneration); and the consciousness of the bourgeoisie focusing on the role of the left against the working class
The confrontation of positions has been strengthened with the involvement of people from different towns and different political backgrounds. This rejection of localism has enabled a wider and deeper process of discussion to take place, and has allowed all of the participants to undergo a process of clarification at different levels.
From its beginning the MDG has made the Communist Left a reference point. It has invited the groups of the Communist Left to participate in its meetings. It has meant the participants have gained not only a better understanding of the positions of the different groups but also the experience of discussing with the political expressions of the proletariat. The ICC has intervened in the group's meetings since its founding, and the Communist Workers Organisation has also intervened more recently. Progress gained through determined political struggle
The MDG has succeeded in fulfilling its central role, that of clarification. But it has had to struggle in order to achieve this. In particular it has had to deal with confusions over its own nature and the role it plays.
The MDG initially based its work on the lessons of the wider experience of the working class, especially that of the Zurich discussion circle. However, the full assimilation of these lessons has been hampered by confusions within the group about its relationship to the ICC. Some elements, whilst initially seeing the need for an open forum, began to see the function of the MDG as being a place for the discussion of the positions of the ICC. This vision tended to see the group as kind of ante-chamber to the ICC. The ICC firmly rejected this vision and has often stressed the need for the group to discuss the wider history of the workers' movement and the positions of other communist organisations.
The ICC has always held the view that discussion circles are places for clarification, not appendages or the property of proletarian political organisations. They include anyone seeking clarification: not just those who agree with the ICC's or any other proletarian organisation's positions. The only reason for stopping someone from attending would be if they wanted to disrupt or take over its work. MDG meetings have been attended by leftists, which has led to a healthy confrontation with bourgeois positions. Far from being a distraction, such discussions have lead to clarification on the nature and role of leftism.
Thus, as is the case with the MDG, discussion circles can be very heterogeneous. But there is nothing wrong with this. To seek to impose political criteria for participation means undermining their fundamental strength: their open nature, because this implies prior agreement on the political criteria - that is, a certain level of clarification - which is to put the cart before the horse. Any attempt to impose such criteria would lead to the freezing of the process of clarification. The political evolution of those who participate in the discussion is a result of the confrontation between different positions.
However, if a discussion circle is not the property of one organisation, neither is it a political group or organisation in its own right. "A political organisation of the proletariat is necessarily an internationally orientated organ, a product of the historical effort of the working class fighting for its programmatic clarity. It doesn't arise locally, but is a direct continuation of the political and organisational traditions of the marxist movement. A circle however, is a phenomenon that is limited geographically and in time. It is restricted to one area. Elements come together in one area in order to discuss matters of relevance to the proletariat and clarify them" (ibid.).
This does not mean that it is not the duty of proletarian political organisations to stimulate the emergence of such groups and to intervene towards them in order to contribute to the most effective clarification. The ICC's defining principles for its intervention are to carry out an "Organised intervention, united and centralised on an international scale, in order to contribute to the process which leads to revolutionary actions of the proletariat" (Basic Positions of the ICC). It is the duty of the ICC and other proletarian political organisations to intervene within discussion circles in order to work towards them having the healthiest proletarian life possible.
The MDG has also had to deal with a certain amount of personal tension in its ranks. However, following some frank discussion all the participants agreed that the interests of the group came first, and that the personalisation of discussion should be rejected.
Since confronting these difficulties the group has flourished. At the beginning of 2002 the MDG held a meeting on proletarian opposition to imperialist war. This drew in people that had not been to meetings before, along with the CWO and the SPGB (See WR 252). Most of these elements have since participated in the discussions of the MDG. Perspectives
In recent months individuals in the group have participated in meetings of the Sheffield No War But Class War; it has contacts with the London NWBTCW Discussion Group; the CWO has participated in its meetings; and the group has held another public meeting on the question of communism, all of which pose questions about activity of the MDG. We will not deal here with the questions of Sheffield NWBCW and the CWO's conception of discussion groups - they will be addressed in a forthcoming articles. What does need addressing is how to maintain and improve the healthy dynamic the MDG has had since last summer.
Central to the development of the group's life is the maintenance of its nature as an open forum for discussion. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. In the present very difficult situation for the proletariat the central need is for reflection upon and discussion of the historical and political questions and challenges facing the working class. The greatest danger for the group is to forget that discussion groups are not permanent political organs of the proletariat but moments in the development of class-consciousness. To seek, even if unconsciously, to turn the MDG into a political group would be a mistake and a failure to understand the nature of discussion circles and the class struggle in the period of decadence.
The holding of public meetings poses important questions. The meeting on proletarian opposition to war was based on the group's unanimous opposition to the Afghan war and defence of proletarian internationalism. The desire to make this opposition widely known was a proletarian response to a vital event. Nevertheless, it contained the potential for confusion on the role of the MDG. The fundamental characteristic of a discussion group is that it is an open place of clarification. To hold regular public meetings would call this into question and expresses an emerging idea of the circle as a semi-political group with its own positions to defend. Whilst most of the participants of the MDG support the positions and intervention of the Communist Left, its role is not to defend these before the class - which is the role of communist organisations - but to provide an area for the confrontation of positions. A recent public meeting on the nature of communism showed the problem: why a meeting on such a question? It is not a pressing immediate question confronting the working class, as it was with the war in Afghanistan. It is a question where there are many positions and ideas amongst the participants and therefore a question to be discussed in the usual way. The comrades need to discuss the danger of mistaking the nature of their role. Warning of such a danger is a vital duty for the ICC because its central concern is to defend the healthy proletarian life of the group.
The Midlands Discussion Group has expressed the wider effort of the proletariat to develop its consciousness. The dynamic that the participants have been able to maintain expresses the political vitality of this group. All of the participants have undergone a real process of clarification in their political understanding. This does not mean that everyone has gone beyond their various political backgrounds, but it does mean that the participants are much clearer on what they defend and don't defend, on how they see their political futures. The MDG is at a very important point in its development: will it continue as a forum of open discussion or will it increasingly solidify into a permanent semi-political organisation? The ICC is determined to do all it can to impulse the former and to struggle against the latter. We urge the MDG and all those interested in it to seriously discuss the analysis we have made.
WR, 4/10/02.
The bourgeoisie's war drums are beating all over the planet. The famous promise made by Bush Senior in 1990 that we were entering a 'New World Order' of peace and prosperity have proved to be a cynical lie; in reality war has become more and more permanent and threatening for humanity. Those who talk the most about 'peace' and 'humanitarianism' and the 'fight against terrorism' are worthy defenders of a system which is dragging the human race towards mass destruction.
Each military conflict, far from bringing peace, leads to even wider and more destructive conflicts. The frightening demonstration of American power in Afghanistan has only served to heighten instability in all the surrounding regions, in particular by intensifying the danger of a war between the two nuclear-armed states of India and Pakistan. And hardly had the American operation in Afghanistan been completed when Iraq became the next target of US threats. Of course there are disagreements between the great powers about military intervention against Baghdad, but it's not because any of them have any concern for saving the Iraqi population from a new bloodbath; it's simply because the imperialist interests of these vultures are increasingly at odds with one another, a reality which contains the seeds of even worse massacres to come.
The hands of all the world's powers and leaders are stained with blood! Not just Bush and Blair, who are calling for a new crusade against Saddam Hussein, eleven years after the slaughter which cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. But also the countries and politicians that prattle on about 'international law' and the need for UN approval of any action against Iraq. This opposition, led by countries like France, Germany and Russia, and echoed by the so-called 'doves' in the US and Britain, is simply a new attempt to pursue their own imperialist appetites. Let's not forget that in 1991, France and others were also reluctant to take part, but they ended up doing their bit, not least when all the major powers cooperated in pushing the Kurdish and Shiite minorities to rise in rebellion, only to be crushed by Saddam's elite units, which had been carefully spared by the 'allies'.
And let's also recall that less than six months after the first Gulf war, the same imperialist powers found themselves on different sides of the war in Yugoslavia, instigated by the growing imperialist ambitions of a reunified Germany, which had called on Slovenia and Croatia to proclaim their independence from Belgrade. For the next eight years, in the name of 'humanitarian intervention', Germany, France, Britain, the US and Russia armed and advanced their various pawns, who carried out a ceaseless genocide of the population, reaching its peak with the Kosovo war in 1999.
As in the Gulf war, the hypocrisy of the great powers was limitless. In 1991, as today, Saddam was painted as the great tyrant, the new Hitler, in order to justify military intervention; but those who most pointed the finger at him were the very ones who had set him up in the first place. "He may be a bastard - but he's our bastard" was the cynical description of Saddam by the US during the 80s when he was useful in reining in Iranian ambitions in the region. In Yugoslavia the evil tyrant was Milosevic, now on trial for war crimes; but for most of the war in ex-Yugoslavia he was supported by Britain and France to counter the advance of the Americans and the Germans. War across the planet
The story is the same in the Middle East. We are encouraged by the media to see the conflict there as the result of some blood feud between Jews and Arabs, or of the extremism of Sharon on the one hand and of the radical Islamic groups on the other. And certainly both of these local expressions of capitalism are constantly trying to outdo each other in the pitiless murder of terrorised populations. But once again, behind all the local killers lurk the great powers, who talk peace while aiming to sabotage the interests of their great power rivals through all kinds of intrigues and underhand manipulations.
It's the same in Africa: there are wars all over the continent, and the hand of imperialist powers large and small can be seen in all of them. In Algeria the US has backed the Islamic fundamentalists to weaken France, which props up the military regime; in Rwanda France trained the Hutu death squads which spearheaded the genocide of 1994, while the US and Britain supported the Tutsi rebels of the RDF; when this conflict spilled over into ex-Zaire, nearly all of the local states became embroiled, and once again the bigger powers were stoking the fires in the background.
The war games of decomposing capitalism are being played all across the planet. Countless massacres, stirring up the worst forms of racism and religious fanaticism, deepening the terrible and growing poverty which blights the majority of the world's population - this is the only perspective which the capitalist system can offer us today.
Faced with such a scenario, calls for peace and disarmament are not just empty words, they are more and more being revealed as yet another justification for imperialism. When the USA's rivals paint themselves in 'anti-war' colours, it's only to carry out their own imperialist policy in a different way, given that they cannot compete with the US directly on the military level.
The only force that can block the spiral of war is the class struggle of the international proletariat. This was proved in 1917-18 when the revolutions in Russia and Germany, the mutinies across Europe, forced the bourgeoisie to call a halt to the butchery. It was further confirmed after 1968 when the revival of workers' struggles across the globe was the key factor preventing a third world war between the two great imperialist blocs.
The interests of the working class are directly opposed to the national and imperialist interests of the ruling class. The working class is the first to suffer in imperialist wars - whether as conscripts in the front line, or through the increasing attacks on living and working conditions demanded by the national economy, which is more and more revealed as a war economy. By struggling tooth and nail against these attacks, the working class can become aware of its real strength as an international social force.
Working class internationalism is not some pious wish; it corresponds to the real material interests of the world's workers. The struggle against war starts with the immediate struggle against the economic attacks launched by 'our own' ruling class. But this is the same struggle in all countries, and it can only advance by generalising across national frontiers and transforming itself into a political offensive aimed at the victory of the world communist revolution.
ICC, 5/10/02.
We have already dealt in our press with the so-called "Internal Fraction of the ICC" (IFICC). This is a parasitic group which constituted itself within our organization; under the cover of fine phrases about its desire for "correcting and saving the ICC", its real function has been sabotaging its work and trying to destroy it. The International Extraordinary Conference of the ICC which was held at the end of March 2002 noted that the Parisian elements constituting this supposed "fraction" (which also has an offshoot in Mexico) were deliberately placing themselves outside our organization on a number of counts: their repeated violations of our statutes (in particular the refusal to pay their contributions fully) and their refusal to make a commitment to respect them in the future; their refusal to present their defence before the extraordinary conference; the theft of money and of material of the ICC (internal files of addresses and documents).
As of January 2002, while its members formally belonged to our organisation, the IFICC started systematically pouring out towards the outside calumnies that it had previously only peddled on the inside. Today, through an Internet site (membres.lycos.fr/bulletincommuniste) and the documents that it sends to the subscribers of our press whose addresses were stolen by one of the members of the IFICC, it continues its slanders against the ICC and its attempted destruction of the proletarian political milieu.
We shall not return in this short article to the totality of the lies and calumnies which the IFICC has been spreading against our organisation and its militants. We have already expressed ourselves at some length about this and will return to it later if necessary. We want simply to discuss a "communique", which IFICC seeks to get published "in all the press organs of the proletarian political milieu, including in the publications and on the site of the ICC as a right of reply"(Footnote 1 [61]). The communique affirms: "Following the articles published in the press of the ICC, we deny all the charges made by the ICC against our fraction and its members". In fact, this "denial" is itself only a web of lies. Some examples:
1) Concerning Jonas, excluded from ICC at the beginning of 2002 for "conduct absolutely unworthy of a communist militant": "All the charges which the current leadership of the ICC makes today against his honesty and loyalty to the communist cause are nothing but infamies".
In our official statement published in WR..252, we wrote that one example of behaviour justifying the exclusion of Jonas consisted of "circulating, including outside of the ICC, a whole series of extremely serious accusations against a certain number of its militants, while at the same time he always refused to meet (and to even recognise) the commission (�) charged with examining this type of accusation". And the communique specified: "One of the most intolerable and repugnant aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign that he promoted and carried out against a member of the organisation (�) accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people external to the ICC of manipulating his followers and the central organs on behalf of the police force".
It is necessary to note that not one member of the IFICC ever contradicted the facts which are reported here. In the public meetings of the ICC where we had invited the members of the IFICC to come to present their position (in Paris on 4 May 2002 and in Mexico City on 3 August 2002), the latter carefully refused to come to a conclusion about the truthfulness of facts such as these, as requested by the presidium and the participants, or else tried to get out of trouble by lying. In Paris, they courageously left the room en bloc (justifying this "by family obligations"!) after a sympathiser insisted that they pronounce on the question; and in Mexico City a member of the IFICC affirmed that Jonas had actually made this type of accusation but in front of "the appropriate organ".
But perhaps the IFICC considers that for a communist militant to accuse another militant of the organisation of being a cop (according to the expression of Jonas) - and that in the corridors and not in front of the bodies responsible for this type of question - constitutes completely correct conduct? The IFICC should take a position on this and in particular say what it thinks today of the following assertions: "since the beginning of the workers' movement, its political organisations have always acted with the greatest severity (often leading to exclusion) against even well-meaning authors of slanderous accusations against their militants.� any suspicion, even well founded, towards a member of the organisation must be communicated exclusively to a proper body responsible for dealing with this kind of problem (a central organ or a specialised commission) and should certainly not become the object of discussions or speculations within the organisation as a whole. Anybody who acts outside of the formal structures of the organisation to conduct 'his own' investigation into a particular individual or a particular 'collective' on an issue of this kind is making an organisational transgression of the most serious kind, similar to an act of police provocation (even if it is inspired by the best intentions). Therefore it will be dealt with as such".
These passages are extracted from a resolution adopted in January 2002 by a full session of the central organ of the ICC with the full support of the two members of the IFICC who took part in it. Let us note that the passage of our communique on Jonas affirming that he "has behaved in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur" was itself directly inspired by this resolution.
2) Concerning the payment of the dues and the theft of material of the organization: "We have never refused to pay our dues nor, even less, have ever stolen money from the ICC, as it implies constantly. Thus, during the last months of our presence within the ICC, we placed at the disposal of the organisation part of our militant dues and preserved the remainder for the operation of our fraction as is the tradition in the revolutionary movement."
We have never written that the members of the IFICC had "refused to pay their dues"; we simply announced what they recognise in this official statement: they refused to pay the entirety of their dues. It is an old dishonest method this: fraudulently attributing lies to others, in order to better be able to "denounce" them. In addition, under the pen of the members of the IFICC, "tradition in the revolutionary movement" has the flip side of justifying no matter what breach of the organisation's rules of operation (Footnote 2 [62]). This is why the statutes of the ICC specify that: "The fact that members of the organisation defend minority positions does not release them from any of their responsibilities as militants". This is also true for the payment of the entirety of dues, which constitute one of the major responsibilities for each militant. It is necessary to note that the statutes of the ICC were adopted by the totality of the Parisian members of the IFICC and that the Mexican members of the latter affirmed the desire to respect them while part of our organisation, as does any militant who integrates into our ranks. As for the affirmation that the members of the IFICC have never stolen the money of the ICC, this is an enormous lie. Yes or no, have they refused to refund the cost of the air tickets which made it possible for two Mexican members of the IFICC to come to France, not to take part in the extraordinary conference of the ICC of March 2002, as they had received the mandate of their section to do and as they were committed to do, but to take part in a meeting of the IFICC? As we have already written, it would seem that the IFICC endorses this assertion of Goebbels, the person responsible for Nazi propaganda: "An enormous lie carries with it a force which removes doubt".
Before concluding, we would like to comment on the support that the IFICC is receiving today.
The "communique" was published with "its support and its understanding" by a small free sheet entitled Le prol�tariat universal (PU). Pierre Hempel, the person in charge of publication and sole writer of this sheet adds: "� the ICC functioned for20 years with full freedom of internal criticism � it was a time, it is true, when a representative of the old revolutionary tradition - neither sectarian nor intolerant (Marc Chiric) - was still living. This spirit � has fled the ICC. This is why I myself fled this sect in 1996". In July 1984, our comrade MC had written an article (RI No. 123) in connection with the publication by a former member of the ICC, RC, of a small review entitled Jalons, comparable to PU with the difference that it was not free and did not fill its columns with attacks against the ICC nor with gossip worthy of a concierge. On this subject, MC wrote: "This question is of interest largely exceeding the person of this comrade. It touches the essence of what separates marxism from anarchism. Marxism is the theory of a class with associated work, the working class, which tends towards unity, towards a collective activity, the re-establishment of the human community. Anarchism, in all its forms, is the ideology of the lower middle class, the handicraft maker, of individual work, and which aspires to unbridled individualism, to the Ego of Stirner. Comrade RC would like himself to be marxist in theory, but does not manage to remove the mud of individualistic anarchism in practice, which sticks to his skin, like another anarchist who claimed to be carrying out the general strike all by himself".
This appreciation also corresponds rather well to Hempel. Furthermore, MC had severely criticised the individualism of RC as well as that of Hempel in contributions to our internal bulletins. It was also no accident that RC and Hempel followed the same path for a while after the "flight" of the latter from the ICC. This was before, very logically, as incorrigible individualists, they separated. Unable to put up with the discipline of a proletarian organisation, frustrated that we do not recognise his literary talents to the same extent that he does, dissatisfied that we criticised his conduct (criticisms that MC had made or had supported, but which he was no longer prepared to accept after MC's death), Hempel has found nothing better to do than plant his cabbages all alone, justifying his "flight" with the old charge of the parasitic milieu that the IFICC endorses today: our organisation is a sect. That is to say, the classic accusation of bourgeois propaganda against the organisations which fight for the communist revolution, a propaganda to which parasitism contributes its share. As opposed to what Hempel says, and to what the IFICC is now arguing, there has not been any change in the ICC as far as "freedom of internal criticism" is concerned. Hempel was quite able to express his point of view and his disagreements, as were the members who now form the IFICC. On the other hand Hempel - like the IFICC, and whatever their disagreements - still had to respect the statutes of the ICC.
In itself, the type of support which the IFICC gathers in its campaigns says a lot about the role that it now plays, not in the service of the proletariat, but in playing the game of the ruling class.
ICC, September 2002.
(1) We want to make a point of affirming that we do not regard ourselves as being obliged to publish a document of the IFICC as part of a "right of reply". Our press, while it is open to the expression of the disagreements or critiques formulated by readers or by other groups of the proletarian political milieu, does not have the task of conveying the slanders of a parasitic group, aimed not at a "correction", as it claims, but at the destruction of our organisation. It is thus not a question at all of "censorship" on our part against the positions of a group of the communist left, as the IFICC likes to pretend. Still less do we feel any obligation here, given that thanks to the material which its members stole from the ICC, it has the wherewithal to spread its assertions far and wide. Back [63]
(2) See on this subject our article: 'The left fractions and the question of organisational discipline' in International Review No. 110. Back [64]
A week after the Countryside Alliance's march in London (for "Liberty and Livelihood") came the demonstration initiated by the Stop the War coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain ("Don't Attack Iraq - Freedom for Palestine"). The earlier march was characterised as a lot of 'toffs' and Tories coming to town, but not every one there was a big 'fat cat' landowner: some were agricultural workers, some impoverished small farmers and some who've felt the very real decline in rural services. Similarly there were many who went on the 28 September march who were genuinely concerned about the drive towards war and wanted to find a way to express their fears. From the noise and crush of the start at the Embankment to the procession of speakers at the end in Hyde Park many must have wondered what sort of 'anti-war' event they'd got themselves involved in. A policy for imperialism
As with the speeches of union leaders and left-wingers at the Labour Party conference there was a great emphasis on the role of the United Nations. The actions of the US were seen as undermining the UN efforts for 'peace'. In reality the UN, like its predecessor the League of Nations, has been used in the military strategies of the biggest imperialisms. The UN had not been long founded before it was used to co-ordinate the forces arrayed against North Korea and Russian imperialism in the early 1950s. If there are occasions when the UN has expressed a view contrary to the US, then firstly it has been in the interests of other imperialisms and, secondly the US will act unilaterally anyway if it feels the need to. The UN is not a force that's above or against imperialist conflicts - it's an integral part of the way different imperialisms relate to each other. Turning to the UN or ignoring it are both imperialist policies. In Britain at the moment the current emphasis on the UN is being used as a means of advancing the particular interests of British imperialism.
"Don't Attack Iraq" read the placards. On banners and badges US imperialism was marked out as the main enemy. The front page of Socialist Worker headlined with "STOP BUSH. He is the threat to peace. He has got nuclear weapons. His doctrine is imperialism". On posters and in leaflets from a range of groups the implications of this were spelt out. The British government should not support American belligerence. No one seemed under any illusion that a demonstration through London would influence American foreign policy, but the spirit of much of the material produced for the march showed that there were some who thought that the British government had to make itself "accountable" to "democratic protests".
In reality the British state determines its military actions according to its imperialist needs. More to the point, the demand for Britain to act independently from the US actually corresponds to a policy within the British ruling class. They know there are occasions when British imperialism's interests will coincide with aspects of US policy, but they want at all times to ensure that Britain's particular interests come first.
The fact that there are states in Europe which oppose the strategy of US imperialism is easily understood - as that strategy is directed against them! Socialist Worker reported the re-election of Schr�der in Germany as "bad news for George Bush and the warmongers". But it had to admit that this was "partly a reflection of the fact that German big business does not believe its interests will be advanced by a US victory in the Middle East". So in fact the election of Schr�der corresponds to the interests of 'the warmongers' (of the German ruling class), in the same way that the military stance of the Blair government is determined by the needs of British imperialism. Marching to war
On the demonstration the abstraction of 'Freedom for Palestine' was made very concrete. Demands for a Palestinian state, for a state 'between the river and the sea', for the 'return of land' are imperialist. The fact that the conflict in Palestine/Israel is currently between suicide bombers and a state armed with nuclear weapons and all the latest military technology does not alter this. The pro-Palestine demands are one side of an imperialist conflict in which workers, poor peasants and people from the refugee camps are used as soldiers for the cause of the Palestinian bourgeoisie (and any imperialism that feels it can use the Palestinian cause). This is not a hypothetical situation but a conflict that has in various stages gripped the region for decades and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The 1948-49 war, the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and the subsequent years of attrition, the Jordanian attack on the Palestinians in 1970, the war of 73, the Syrian invasion of the Lebanon in 75-76, the Lebanese 'civil war' of 1975-1990 including the Israeli invasions of the south of the country, the 'Intifada' of the last two years - this is the continuing conflict that the organisers of the march support. The demand for a Palestinian state (supported by all major imperialisms) is no less reactionary than the insistence that the Israeli state has a 'right to exist'. Both calls are for the mobilisation of the exploited and oppressed in the service of their class enemies.
While the organisers found those dressed as suicide bombers just too blatant for a 'Stop the War' march, Islamic 'jihad' militants were omnipresent. A contingent wearing uniform T-shirts saying "Reject Western solutions" was marshalled round orange banners expressing support for various imperialist causes related to the Middle East.
While the dominant note of the march was a plea for there to be no attack on Iraq, there were the usual leftist calls for the actual defence of Iraq, even for the 'victory' of Iraq. Again, this amounts to a demand that workers abandon any thought of the defence of their own interests so that they can enter the military service of their exploiters. The proponents of this line of thought always make a distinction between 'military support' for Iraq going alongside 'political opposition' to Saddam's regime. This distinction is meaningless from the point of view of class realities. For the ruling class at war 'military support' is all it actually requires in its defence. For the working class anything that mobilises it in the defence of its exploiters can only serve the interests of the ruling class. For class opposition to war
A year ago with the demonstrations around the war on Afghanistan there were many elements wanting to defend a class position against the 'war against terrorism', and a certain amount of co-ordination and joint activity between different groups and individuals took place. This was not the case with the 28 September demonstration. This was a much bigger demonstration, with a more clearly pro-war atmosphere, but it was political dispersal that further undermined the impact of a proletarian stance. This time there were separate leaflets from the 'No War But The Class War' groups in London and Sheffield, and a general lack of co-ordination which saw these two groups in different parts of the march. Furthermore, the focus of both these groups, and of the IBRP which has a major influence on the Sheffield group, on finding a place within the march added to the difficulty of making a distinctive proletarian intervention. We will take this problem up in more depth next issue.
A year ago delegations from the organisations of the communist left, the ICC and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, were able to get together with some from the London 'No War But the Class War' group at the end to attempt an impromptu meeting in opposition to the official platform. Whatever the difficulties and weaknesses of that attempt, we must not underestimate the importance of working together to give the small internationalist voice the greatest possible impact. Nothing of the kind happened this time.
While the intervention of revolutionaries was swamped at this demonstration, and will continue to be very difficult to raise at such events in future, we will continue to participate in meetings wherever working class opposition to war may be discussed, to relate to any current that puts forward the need for the class war as the only way to oppose imperialist war, and ensure that our press shows what's at stake in the current proliferation of military conflicts.
Only the international revolution of the working class can put an end to the capitalist system that engenders imperialist war. While capitalism's spectacular demonstrations make all their noise, the work of revolutionaries, the discussions in the working class, the evolution of class consciousness continue, as part of the only movement that can really end war.
Car, 2/10/02.
We are told that terrorism is a threat to civilised values; that all freedom-loving and civilised nations must unite against it. In truth, the multiplication of terrorist attacks, from New York to Moscow, from Bali to Tel Aviv, reveal how absolutely rotten present day civilisation has become.
Terrorism was once - at best - a misguided response of the oppressed against the rich and powerful. Today it hafs become a major weapon in the arsenal of the state - an instrument of imperialist politics, of inter-capitalist war. Terrorism today is not only an arm of weak and 'failed' states like Afghanistan under the Taliban, or Iran under the Mullahs, or occupied Chechnya, not only of aspiring would-be states like the Palestinian Authority or the IRA, but also and above all, of the world's most powerful, most democratic, most civilised states.
In short, every capitalist state, involved in an insane war of each against all, no longer has any hesitation in employing the most insidious, ruthless and murderous methods in the defence of its national interests. And the victims of these methods are always the civilian populations - whether, like the Palestinians, they are blown apart by the missiles and shells of official armies, or, like the Israelis, by suicide bombers manipulated by shady terrorist gangs which in turn act in the interests of various regional or global powers. The chief victims of the September 11 attacks in the USA were the mass of employees working in the vertical factories of the World Trade Center. The majority of the victims of the USA's brutal response in Afghanistan were unwilling conscripts in the Taliban armies, civilians buried under the rubble left by US 'smart' bombs, or starved to death in panic flight from the cities and farms. Today the US prepares another war against another sponsor of terrorism, Saddam Hussein, and once again the principal victims will be Saddam's own principal victims - the exploited and the oppressed of Iraq. At the moral level there is absolutely nothing to choose between the terrorist gangs and the official masters of state violence. Between Hamas and Sharon. Between Bush and bin Laden. Between Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein. The sinister conspiracies of imperialist states
But there is more and there is worse. Not only do all the civilised states use terrorist groups and terrorist methods against the populations of rival states. There is growing evidence that they are perfectly prepared to turn their own populations into hostages and victims of terrorist attacks.
September 11
The notion that the US state 'allowed' September 11 to happen in order to whip up support for its global 'war against terror' - a war planned long in advance of the assault on the Twin Towers - is no longer in the domain of outlandish conspiracy theory. The Observer (27.10.02) published a four page feature by Gore Vidal cataloguing the succession of 'errors', 'breakdowns in communication' and 'failures to act' by the US military and security services which add up to a case so damning that mere incompetence or negligence cannot explain it. The German weekly Die Zeit published an article on the same subject, concluding that "the American investigators knew that terrorist attacks were being prepared, but they let the suspects act�" (cited in Le Monde, 5 October). As Vidal notes, there is a historical precedence for exactly such intrigues: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which again was 'allowed to happen' so that the US could mobilise a reluctant American population for war.
Bali
As we show in the article on page 4, there are equally suspicious circumstances surrounding the terrorist bombings in Bali, which left nearly 200 dead and many more gravely injured. Our article focuses on the 'benefits' these events can provide to Australian imperialism, but it also points out that behind Australia stands the USA, which in addition has plans to establish a much more direct presence of its own in the region. In the period leading up to the bombings, there were a number of visits to Indonesia by top US officials, including Colin Powell and the director of the FBI; moreover, well-known 'hawks' like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. have been demanding an official resumption of US military aid to Indonesia, which was suspended in 1992 following massacres by the Indonesian forces in East Timor. In October the issue was debated in Congress, having received a letter from Indonesian human rights organisations opposing the resumption, given that there was no improvement in the country's human rights record. The letter also argued that the threat of terrorism - which the Bush administration was citing as the main reason for unblocking restrictions on military aid - was "very much exaggerated".
Add to this the fact that there have long been very tight connections between the radical Islamist groups and the Indonesian secret services and military forces, then suspicions can only increase that the bombings are extremely 'timely' for US imperialism, enabling it to strengthen its arguments in favour of military aid, of using Australia as a local gendarme, and of establishing a much more direct presence itself. This would allow the US to impose its version of 'stability' on a political entity which is vital strategically but divided up into a myriad of islands, many of which are agitating for independence from Jakarta; at the same time a direct military presence in the region would allow the US to begin the effective encirclement of its principal imperialist rivals in the region, China and Japan. Little wonder that the Bush administration wants to blame the bombings on groups linked to al Qaida and thus integrate its Indonesian strategy into the global 'war on terrorism'.
Moscow
In a parallel way, there is every reason to suppose that Russian imperialism will be the first to profit from the recent terrorist crimes in Moscow. The fact that 40 heavily armed Islamic fighters found it so easy to drive through Moscow and take over a theatre in the centre of the city already poses serious questions, especially when we recall that the most recent Russian offensive in Chechnya was justified as a response to a previous terrorist outrage: the mysterious bombings of apartment buildings in the capital which killed hundreds of workers; to this day there are plenty of reasons to think that these bombings were a provocation by Russia's secret services. If the Russian forces again step up their bloody 'pacification' of Chechnya, this would only make it more likely that the hostage crisis in Moscow was indeed "our September 11" as Russian politicians put it.
The comparisons with September 11 have another purpose, as do the efforts to find links between the Chechen gangs and al Qaida: Putin's regime is very anxious to get the Americans to recognise the Chechen war as the equivalent of the USA's 'war on terrorism'. In other words, he wants some underhand deal whereby Russia will not act as too much of an obstacle to US military adventures like the proposed attack on Iraq, if the US keeps quiet about Russian atrocities in Chechnya. He has good reason to put his hopes in such a deal; two years ago, when the Russian offensive was at its bloody height, both Clinton and Blair made it plain that they supported Putin, since they had no wish to see a succession of independence movements pulling the Russian Federation to pieces; and already both the US ambassador in Moscow and Tony Blair have expressed their approval of Russia's handling of the latest crisis, despite the high death toll among the hostages.
What the outcome of the crisis really showed is that the Russian state cared as little for the fate of the hostages as did the Islamist terrorists who were no doubt ready to slaughter them all. The revelation that the vast majority of the hostages who died were killed by the opiate gas used to prepare the storming of the theatre; the failure to provide adequate emergency aid to the victims of the gas; the refusal even to release details of the gas to medical staff so that they could treat the victims with a suitable antidote�all of this was testimony to the brutal indifference of the Russian state to the welfare of its own citizens.
The media in the west has blamed this on the fact that Russia still hasn't completely thrown off its 'Communist' habits. It's quite true that the corpse of Stalinism still infects the structure of the present regime. But when it comes to the state callously sacrificing its own citizens in order to advance its imperialist interests, Russia is a rather crude amateur compared to the professionals in the democratic west.
The truth is this: in all countries, the proletarians and the oppressed are permanent hostages of capital, which in its death throes is spreading war and chaos across the planet. Today, no less than at the time of the Cuba crisis which took place precisely 40 years ago, capitalism holds a gun to the head of humanity. And there are no 'special forces' waiting in the wings to set us free. The proletariat must itself break the chains that bind it, by waging a revolutionary struggle against this entire system of war and terror.
WR, 2/11/02.
When horrific terrorist outrages occur, it's useful to ask who benefits from them. The answer usually sheds light on who could be responsible for these deeds. The Bali bombing on 12 October is no exception to this rule. The accused Indonesian Islamists certainly do not benefit from the Bali bombing. Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of one of the country's principal Islamist organisation, has been arrested and faces a possible death penalty for alleged complicity. New 'anti-terrorist' laws have been announced in Indonesia, after these were demanded by Australia in the wake of the bombing. Some 400 Australian Federal Police and some FBI agents have rushed to Bali and are working in 'partnership' with Indonesian police investigating the bombing. Australia has also donated A$10 million in 'counter-terrorism aid' - allegedly to assist Indonesia to build an effective 'counter-terrorism' capacity, but really to institutionalise an Australian security presence there and to bring Indonesia closer to Australia's expanding sphere of influence.
To ask the question of who benefits is to answer it. The answer is clearly neither the Islamists nor even the Indonesian state, but, most directly, Australia, but also, indirectly, the United States. The bombing provides Australian imperialism with a golden opportunity to impose itself directly on Indonesia in an unprecedented manner. And back in Australia, the bombing has provided the most warlike fraction in the bourgeoisie with a very big stick to cow and morally blackmail workers not convinced of the need to wage all out war on Iraq in the near future. A relentless media campaign from the bombing onwards keeps the horror of this outrage constantly in public consciousness, accompanied by injunctions to "get the bastards who did this" (Prime Minister Howard's words) and to enthusiastically prosecute the 'War on Terror'.
Opinion polls taken just before the Bali bombing indicated that a majority of the population did not support a new Gulf war. Although new polls have not been taken since the bombing, it is clear that there has been a certain shift in opinion in favour of war. A majority of workers probably still do not support the war, but the number who do has probably risen.
So who did carry out the Bali bombing? Given the facts stated above -and the precedents of Pearl Harbor and the US World Trade Center attacks, it is quite possible that this horrendous crime was at least perpetrated with the full knowledge of the Australian and US bourgeoisies, in order to obtain the political results listed above. Was it carried out by Islamists as the bourgeois media alleges? Possibly - but then, the Australian and US bourgeoisies, not to mention the Indonesian bosses, have been manipulating various Indonesian Islamist fractions since at least the 1950s. In Indonesia's recent history, Islamist fractions have been used to first bring the last Indonesian President, the 'moderate' Islamist Abdurrahman Wahid, to power in October 1999 and then to help throw him unceremoniously out again less than 2 years later.
Furthermore, there is something decidedly fishy about the wealth of information now flooding out of the Australian media - most of it openly acknowledged as being from 'security specialists', if not from actual intelligence agencies. These include extremely detailed accounts of numerous alleged meetings of Islamist terrorist leaders in South-East Asia, to plot various atrocities. According to Australia's most respected current affairs programme Four Corners on 28 October, one such meeting was held in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. According to Four Corners:
"The CIA got wind of it ahead of time and tipped off Malaysian intelligence, which carried out video and photo surveillance. The meeting was attended by some of Osama bin Laden's most trusted operatives, including two of the hijackers who would die in the September 11 attacks on the United States.
"The gathering was hosted by Hambali [who is now accused by Australia of being Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant in South-East Asia], who'd come from Indonesia. Bin Laden's man in Manila, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was there as well. Among the others present were the September 11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who were at the controls of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Also there was another al-Qaida bomber later accused of the attack in Yemen on the warship 'USS Cole'".
The meeting is thought to have been a key planning session for those attacks.
The purpose of these claims by Four Corners was to garner support for Australian imperialism's new imperialist ventures in Indonesia, as well - in a turnaround from its attitude prior to the Bali bombing - to build support for the US push for war against Iraq. But perhaps Four Corners tells us too much. For, if the CIA had indeed got wind of the Kuala Lumpur meeting ahead of time (and the meeting did actually take place), why did it not intervene to have the terrorists plotting against it arrested and nip these plots in the bud? Of course, it could be that the meeting did not take place at all, and that this is just one more strand in the mendacious web being woven by the pro-US bourgeoisie to transfer real working class hostility to its war plans into enthusiasm for new imperialist war. But if Four Corners is actually telling the truth, it surely lends considerable weight to the argument that the Bali bombings were carried out with the full knowledge of the Australian and US bourgeoisies, in order to benefit from the bombing's political fallout.
Other evidence tends to support this last, chilling conclusion. Despite claims by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer that warnings were given to Australians intending to travel to Bali before the bombing, cautioning them against the strong possibility of terrorist attacks on that island, this is simply a lie. Downer's department issued travel advice on 20 September, warning of such a danger in Jakarta - but adding in bold type that tourist services in Bali were 'operating normally'. A further statement, issued this time by the Australian Embassy in Jakarta on 3 October, repeated the earlier advice.
This also fits into a pattern. Just as US governments were warned before both Pearl Harbour and September 11 that massive attacks were imminent, so it appears that the Australian Government knew what was afoot in Bali but sat on its hands, in order to make political gains from the ensuing carnage.
The upshot of all this is that Australia now has the biggest presence in Indonesia since that country's independence in the 1940s. Australia's Prime Minister John Howard has been able to cobble together a new 'anti-terrorist' alliance with Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. The new alliance is officially intended to guarantee the safety of regional trade against terrorist attacks. But there can be no doubt that this scheme will be used to force more active support for the US' war plans. This will be particularly useful against Malaysia (whose fiercely nationalist President has denounced the US war drive against Iraq) and Indonesia (whose current President, Megawati Sukarnoputri, has tried to balance between Islamist forces opposed to the US war plans and pro-US elements in another section of the local bourgeoisie). Howard will visit the Philippines and Vietnam in the New Year, to twist these countries' arms to be more active at the regional level in the 'War on Terror'.
The various Asian and Western governments involved and the assorted Islamist fractions are all equally reactionary. Neither 'democracy' (or 'anti-terrorism') nor the US' 'War on Terror' will put an end to the fundamental cause of terrorist atrocities such as the Bali bombing, for the simple reason that it is decomposing capitalism which is producing such massacres across the globe. Just like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the forces most likely to have been behind the Bali atrocity are former clients of the United States. And just as in the cases of Pearl Harbour and September 11, the country whose citizens were the main victims of this particular massacre (Australia) almost certainly conspired to stifle warnings of the impending atrocity from reaching the light of day. In other words, whatever the particular details, innocent people are once again the victims of decomposing capitalism, which is everywhere and in all its forms (Third World, terrorist and democratic) prepared to commit the most horrendous deeds to extend its bloody rule.
Dawson, 29/10/02.
In the last two issues of World Revolution we have published articles concerning discussion groups: in WR 257 we reproduced a text on the Paris Commune of 1871 that introduced a discussion in the Midlands Discussion Group; in our previous issue, WR 258, we published a brief history of the MDG [69]. In the following article we want to look at some more general aspects of what a discussion group is, what function it fulfils and what in our view a discussion group is not, and what objectives it shouldn't try to serve.
In our previous articles we have explained the context in which discussion groups emerge. The MDG was first formed in the wake of the NATO intervention in the Kosovo war, reflecting a need to clarify, in the face of all the justifications by different sectors of the bourgeoisie, the nature of the war and the working class response to it. Discussion groups have emerged in other countries around different events or sometimes have been created without a specific impetus. In our view these groups are one aspect of the coming to consciousness of the working class in a period that is historically favourable to the development of class confrontations. This phenomenon also reflects the relative weakness of the forces of revolutionary organisations, since they tend to emerge in countries or regions where the latter are absent or lack a regular presence. The emergence of discussion groups in the recent period also corresponds to another factor: despite the undefeated nature of the working class today, the period since 1989 and the collapse of Stalinism has led to a profound disorientation within proletarian ranks that echoes the bourgeoisie's deafening propaganda campaigns about the death of communism and marxism and the disappearance of the working class, and the growth of all sorts of radical campaigns along populist lines (the so called anti-capitalist one for example) and the development of anarchist trends that reject a clear class perspective.
The appearance of discussion groups are also a reaction to this disorientation and an attempt to overcome it.
Human consciousness is essentially a product of social interaction and language has been its main vehicle. Discussion, the debate of different ideas and thoughts between individuals, is in turn a powerful driving force for the development of consciousness, for the clarification of human goals and objectives, and is therefore indissolubly linked with human action and practical activity.
The discussion of working class interests and aims represents a particular development of consciousness corresponding to a particular phase of human history.
The working class, in distinction from all previous revolutionary classes, has no economic or institutional power within the old society and so its main weapons of social transformation are consciousness and organisation. In addition, as a non-exploiting revolutionary class it has no new relations of exploitation to create; thus its consciousness tends toward dispelling all the mystifications that the bourgeoisie has used to its advantage. It must also extend class consciousness to the whole of the proletariat whereas previous revolutionary classes have left the theoretical and political defence of their interests to a minority of intellectual specialists.
In contrast with previous exploited classes, working class consciousness cannot limit itself to the immediate struggle of any particular moment but has to be historical and global. Discussion about the future, even the distant future, is extremely concrete and practical for the working class.
A gigantic task! Proletarian consciousness must become historically precise and accurate enough to be a principal means for the overthrow of capitalist society, and it must extend throughout the whole class.
We don't of course expect discussion groups to take this entire work on their shoulders, but it indicates the seriousness and importance of their work. It shows that they are not 'talking shops' and correspond to a real need in the proletariat. The revolutionary nature of class consciousness means that these groups are far from academic in preoccupation, since academicism is not synonymous with discussion without an immediate practical outcome, but means trying to stand above classes and pretending to have an objectivity that is really the defence of the status quo. Thus the activist denial of the role of discussion groups as 'academic' expresses an ignorance of what the working class must become; which is why, when activists wax theoretical, it is they who fall into academicism.
The ICC, basing itself on the above conception of class consciousness, has always insisted therefore that discussion groups take themselves seriously and thoroughly prepare for discussions: the quality and coherence of the text on the Paris Commune is an indication that the discussion group is not about talking for the sake of it. The ICC has also insisted, not always successfully, on the need for a systematic study and discussion of the history of the workers' movement within the discussion groups, since this is the only sure means of arriving at a self-awareness of the working class.
If the preparation for discussion requires serious study of the workers' movement and its theoretical riches, this doesn't imply that they are a forum of pedagogy where the political organisation or party is the teacher of unquestioned truths. On the contrary the revolutionary nature of class consciousness demands that all militants have a highly critical attitude to the patrimony of the revolutionary movement, must question everything, express their doubts and arrive at a solid conviction in class positions instead of a passive consumption of them. This is why the ICC believes that the discussion group should be open to all those, irrespective of their political persuasion, who want to discuss class politics, and has opposed a political delimitation of the discussion group. In the MDG it successfully opposed the attempted exclusion of those who considered themselves to be councilists, sympathisers of ecologism or the cooperative movement.
Nor does the ICC consider that the discussion group is a sort of 'transmission belt' to the party, a kind of political group that is easier to get into than the party because it has less of a programme to agree with. Such a conception falls between two stools; neither fulfilling the tasks of a discussion group which is to explore class consciousness in depth, nor the tasks of a real political organisation which has to delineate itself completely from bourgeois ideology and opportunism as a whole.
In our opinion the Sheffield No War But The Class War group (NW), influenced by the proletarian group, the Communist Workers Organisation, has fallen into this conception since it has defined itself according to a mini-platform of seven points, which on the one hand limit the group as a forum for discussion, and on the other give it political tasks that it is poorly equipped to carry out. In particular, as the last Stop the War march in London showed, it made the group particularly vulnerable to the leftist carnival around this effectively pro-war parade (see WR 258). The Sheffield NW group unfortunately participated in a march where its slogans of proletarian internationalism were drowned out by the deafening chants of 'Allah Akbar' from the reactionary Islamist supporters of a Palestinian state and of Iraq.
The temptation for a discussion group to try and become a political group is very strong today. But rather than a 'natural' tendency, this expresses a widespread disorientation in the proletariat as a whole about the conditions for the creation of the revolutionary vanguard. The latter is a historical product and must be in continuity with the revolutionary parties of the past; it must be a part of a trend towards the centralised international unity of this vanguard since the working class has no local or national interests. Its platform and statutes must therefore be highly developed. Moreover, it must be able to accurately analyse the conditions and balance of class forces within which it operates. The Sheffield NW group is not only ill-equipped at the programmatic level to carry out this political role, but seems to have also significantly overestimated the possibilities of its influence in the current conditions.
While the MDG hasn't fallen into this trap of trying to become a political group, its preoccupation with having public meetings imply a political unity that it can't have.
Discussion groups, like revolutionary organisations, must modestly carry out what is possible in the present period and beware falling into the trap of localism and activism, the privileged terrain of leftism and opportunism. [1]
No doubt our differences with the CWO about discussion groups reflect wider differences between our organisations on the questions of class consciousness and the role of the party which we will touch on below. But there is a fundamental agreement between us on the indispensable role of the party within the development of class consciousness and the need for the discussion groups to be open to their intervention. That's why whatever differences that might exist, the Sheffield NW group has been open to the participation of members of the MDG and of the ICC, and the meetings of the MDG open to the interventions of the CWO.
If there is a danger of discussion groups losing their compass as a result of trying to be political groups, there is a far greater and more immediate danger of losing their class identity, a danger which has at times taken the form of efforts to exclude the intervention of revolutionary organisations. And we don't say this out of self-interest!
The liberation of the working class is the task of the working class itself, said Marx, in helping to construct the Ist International. He meant that the working class had to become politically independent of all bourgeois parties and form its own political party. Anarchism has always given a different spin to this famous slogan: the working class liberates itself without a party, and without politics, which can only be the expression of the ultimate evil of 'authority'. For anarchism (in all its various guises) class consciousness and therefore discussion can only develop autonomously from the political organisations and their 'dogmatism'. This way of thinking can only, if it is taken to its logical conclusion, close up the discussion group in a clique defined by personal interests and deliberately prevents the quest for clarity and coherence that is an essential component of the development of class consciousness. [2]
The latter inevitably has a political character because it expresses the historical process by which the proletariat overthrows the bourgeois state and installs its own class dictatorship. The formation of a class political party is therefore an indispensable expression of class consciousness, indeed its highest expression, since it must delineate in a global and historical way the parameters of the proletariat's interests and goals. However, given the mass character of the proletarian revolution, the party cannot be the 'general staff' of the working class, as Zinoviev proclaimed at the 2nd Congress of the Communist International. The party doesn't take power on behalf of the working class.
The existence of discussion groups is an expression of the fact that the party is not the sole repository of class consciousness.
Nevertheless the development of the latter can only proceed along certain common political bases that are shared both by discussion groups and the revolutionary organisation: separating the latter two expressions of class consciousness inevitably puts these common bases in question.
A concrete example of this danger is provided by the evolution of the London No War But The Class War group that first appeared at the time of the Kosovo war and subsequently excluded the ICC from its discussions (see WR 228, October 1999, 'Political parasitism sabotages the discussion'), even though the ICC had up till then been the most intransigent defenders of internationalism within the group against the 'right of oppressed nations to self-determination', and the need for a militant discussion instead of academicism and activism. The justification for this expulsion - narrowly agreed to by the group - was the supposed dogmatism and domineering tendencies of the ICC in the discussion.
The London NW resurfaced after the September 11th attacks and the preparation for the US war in Afghanistan. Again we participated in this group, believing that it could be a forum for class debate. The CWO also took part in the discussions. But now, once again, the ICC has been excluded, and seemingly also the Sheffield NW group from their deliberations.
But this time there has been even less attempt to explain the reason for the exclusion, which was realised by simply no longer informing us and the Sheffield group of where their meetings were to take place, nor supplying information about their discussions.
We think that behind the accusations of 'dogmatism' there is the attempt to portray the revolutionary organisation as intolerant of opposing points of view, when in fact the ICC wants to see the widest possible debate of different viewpoints. In reality what the London NW group wants, by excluding revolutionary organisations, is the freedom to express incoherent points of view without being criticised for it, a closed environment where discussion is simply the exchange of individual opinions instead of the search for a common clarification. They are looking for personal autonomy not class autonomy, the right to one's own consciousness instead of class consciousness.
The consequences of such a policy, which is certainly influenced by political parasitism, is not only a short circuiting of political discussion, but also a betrayal of their supposed class opposition to imperialist war, and a growing espousal of the worthy pacifist sentiments of the leftist coalition that they claim to oppose [3]. Not surprising the London NW group also ended up traipsing behind the pro-war march, but unlike the Sheffield group is cutting itself off from the means of correcting such errors.
Como, 2/11/02.
1. Its worth noting that while the CWO sees, mistakenly in our view, the possibility of creating a broad internationalist anti-war coalition of various disparate forces, it presumably still doesn't accept the necessity for the existing groups of the communist left to make common statements against imperialist war, as the ICC proposed to it, without success, at the time of the war in Kosovo.
2. The predominance of personal interests over the political needs of discussion, can threaten the existence itself of a discussion group, as the MDG discovered, (see history of the MDG in WR258).
3. See the London NW leaflet given out at the march 'War, what is it good for?', which fails in the crucial task of criticising the 'pacifist' (in fact, pro-war) ideology of the Stop the War Coalition and other sponsors of the march.
Communist Workers Organisation: P.O. Box 338, Sheffield S3 9YX
Sheffield No War But the Class War: [email protected] [70]
Midland Discussion Group: c/o Little Thorn Bookshop, 73 Humberstone Gate, Leicester
London No War But The Class War: [email protected] [71]
For the first time in 25 years there is the threat of a national fire-fighters' strike. This prospect has been the focus of workers' attention in Britain for months. As with nurses and ambulance workers, fire-fighters are respected by other workers for doing an important job which can involve saving lives. This strong feeling of support for the fire-fighters has tended to take the form of sympathy for a 'special case'. The work of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has helped undermine prospects of sympathy being transformed into real working class solidarity. Attacks on the fire-fighters
At present a full-time fire-fighter, after four years, earns £21,531, and receives no extra pay for extra hours or overtime. The union demands are for a 40% pay rise to £30,000, for the same rate for those who do not work full time, but do other jobs and can be called on when necessary (the 'retained' fire-fighters), and the Emergency Control Staff and for a future pay formula. What the union has put forward has got a positive response from the membership, but in reality these demands are aimed at dividing the workers
The desire for equal pay levels is a mark of real solidarity among workers, and the 9-1 ballot for strike action shows that the fire-fighters realise they have to fight to defend their interests, to improve their pay and conditions. However, the level of the pay demand has acted as the pivot for a formidable deployment of forces against the fire-fighters and the rest of the working class.
The government has used the 40% pay claim to launch a vicious attack on the fire-fighters in order to set other workers against them. In Blair's words: "No government could yield to that without putting up people's interest rates and their mortgage rates and causing havoc across the public sector, because other people in the public sector would say: If they are getting 40 percent, I want 40 percent.". Right from the beginning there is the propaganda that a pay increase for one sector has to lead to economic hardship for other workers - rather than the truth that workers' impoverishment comes from the crisis-ridden nature of the capitalist mode of exploitation.
The government has also denounced the fire-fighters for putting the public at risk, and used this as a justification for the use of the army to break possible strike action. Just as the Labour government did in 1977.
In addition, the government, along with all the media, has constantly been comparing today's situation to that of the 'winter of discontent' of 1978-79. The message being put across is that workers' militancy can only lead to workers being worse off - just look at what happened then: workers' struggles led to 18 years of Thatcherism. This message was also pushed during the council workers' strike in the summer. It is a very poisonous campaign because it reinforces the widespread feeling in the working class that it is not able to do anything to defend itself. This is a disorientation that has dominated the working class for more than a decade, and is particularly dangerous because many workers under 35 years old won't remember the important struggles of the 70's and 80's.
We do not have space to go into detail about the real nature of the 'winter of discontent', apart from to say that it was not the workers who brought Thatcher to power, but the ruling class who needed to replace the increasingly threadbare Labour Party, whose image as a 'workers' party' was wearing very thin due to its massive attacks against the working class. False friends
Adopting a more 'conciliatory' stance for the government we have seen the intervention of the Deputy Prime Minister (and veteran trade unionist) John Prescott. Union and local authorities (who run the Fire Service) have begun negotiations and made 'progress' (at time of writing). Prescott let it be know that there was more money for pay but "In reality, 40% was just too high". This was a very clever move because the talks were halted with the bosses having offered a 16% rise (with 'strings' of course). The union leadership went back to 'consult' the membership about calling off the proposed 8-day strike in the first week of November, in order to allow more talks. The only aim of this 'consultation' was to create division among the fire-fighters with all the false alternatives (stick to the 40% claim, accept the 16% offer, continue negotiations, go ahead with the strike etc).
The image of the FBU is of a 'militant' union. Its leader, Andy Gilchrist, appears to be the model of a real fighting trade unionist. On the FBU's website it states that "the Fire Brigades Union is part of the working-class movement and, linking with the international trade union movement, has as its ultimate aim the bringing about of the Socialist system of society". This 'radicalism' has been reinforced by Gilchrist's apparent 'intransigence' in the defence of his members interests, and the attacks on him by Blair and throughout the media.
However, behind the image, the FBU is the same as any other union, existing to control the struggles of the working class. Central to this control is the attempt to divide and rule. This was well demonstrated in the initial reports of the fire-fighters' response to the leadership's proposal to suspend the strike. Powerful divisions were created amongst the fire-fighters. These divisions were planned by the union, which knew that for many fire-fighters the link to the increase in pay for retained and control room staff was more important than the 40% pay demand. The fact that the bosses have agreed to this link, along with the rumoured 16% offer, has been an ideal way of sowing division. Some fire-fighters are for settling, while others will be for continuing the strikes (or the negotiations) because the deal offered is tied to 'modernisation' measures, that is, cuts and other measures which mean higher levels of exploitation.
These divisions have been exacerbated by the differences between 'militant' and 'moderate' regional union bodies putting forward differing recommendations - for or against calling off the strikes, whether to focus on non co-operation with future reviews of pay and conditions, whether to concentrate on demonstrations or other local initiatives. The fire-fighters are divided between 'militant' and 'moderate' regions, stations and individuals, as the union shows its effectiveness in policing the workers and thereby defending the national capital.
The fire-fighters are caught between the hammer of the government and the anvil of the unions. The government has made an offer, but with 'strings attached', while the union sows divisions among the workers with the false alternatives of negotiations or strikes or strikes under certain conditions etc.
This situation reflects the wider problems facing the working class. There is a general discontent faced with the mounting attacks on living and working conditions, but also wide-ranging illusions that somehow the unions will defend workers interests. These illusions have recently been reinforced by the election of more 'militant' figures to the leadership of several major unions. The current campaign of attacks on the fire-fighters shows that holding such illusions can only lead to workers being defeated.
The fire-fighters have been set-up - the 40% demand, the months of union/government preparation, the campaign about the 'winter of discontent'. In particular, the question of sympathy for the fire-fighters as a 'special case' - because they do a very dangerous job - has been used to separate and isolate them from other workers. Instead of seeing that the whole working class face the same attacks we have had the barrage of propaganda comparing different pay rates. This is an essential part of the union work of encouraging this sectoral isolation. The only way that workrs can defend their interests in the long term is to extend their struggles. In order to prepare the ground for this there is an urgent need for reflection and discussion throughout the working class - on the means of struggle and the union obstacles that have to be overcome.
Phil, 2/11/02.
In Britain 52,000 firefighters are pitched against a government determined to hand out a defeat that will be held up as an example to the rest of the working class. The stakes are plain: defeat for the firefighters will not only mean they won't have caught up on all the years their pay has lagged behind, but also draconian attacks on their working conditions in the name of modernisation and a 20% cut in the workforce. This struggle has important implications for the rest of the working class because the defeat of the firefighters will have a powerful impact on the whole working class's confidence in its ability to defend itself. This is all happening at a time when massive lay-offs and attacks in the manufacturing and financial sectors are spreading throughout the working class.
The Labour government has made no bones about its resolve to defeat the firefighters and portray them as enemies of the people. As Tony Blair insisted: "This is a strike they cannot succeed in. The consequence of succeeding is not a defeat for the Government. It would be a defeat for the country."
Blair and Co have also has unleashed a torrent of attacks on the firefighters. Ministers portray them abusing their shift system (which involves doing 4 day and night shifts together), because some have a second job in order to make ends meets. Firefighters are accused of being sexist and racist because there are only a few black and women firefighters. There is also a never ending comparison of the 'brave' soldiers 'gallantly' struggling to save lives, and the workers on the picketlines.
This open abuse of the firefighters and the government's determination to 'take them on' has been compared to Thatcher 'taking on' the miners in 1984/85. And indeed there are comparisons. As in 84, today the government has planned for a showdown with an important section of the working class. They want to inflict a crushing defeat on a group of workers who are respected and supported in the working class in order to deliver a message to the whole working class: struggle does not pay. As with the NUM, the Fire Brigades Union is presented as the enemy. Now, as in 84, there is a second prong to the attack: to boast the image of the unions as defenders of the working class. However, in 1984 the working class in Britain and internationally was in a period of rising class struggle, whereas today the working class is still trying to overcome a decade of disorientation and loss of confidence in itself as a class, something that the ruling class is seeking to reinforce. The less the self-confidence of the workers, the more they feel constrained to turn to the unions to defend them against the attacks they face.
The ruling class know that the deepening world recession is going to mean it will not be able to disguise its growing attacks behind the mask of a so-called economic boom. It sees that there is a growing discontent in the working class: council workers, teachers, college lecturers, health workers, and transport workers have all been involved in disputes at the same time as the fire strike. The government - and union - have prepared the ground to take on the firefighters by ensuring that these disputes have either been settled, like the health workers, or been worn down by a series of one-day strikes, like the teachers and council workers in London. In addition the tube workers' ballot around safety issues directly linked to the fire strike has been called off. This is intended to further isolate the firefighters and undermine class solidarity, again making the union appear to be the only defence workers have. Ideological division of labour
The government and 'rightwing' parts of the media have certainly demonised the FBU and Gilchrist, its leader. There have been warnings about a new 'winter of discontent' and comparisons between the FBU to the NUM - Blair describing Gilchrist as a 'Scargillite'. The Sun accused the FBU and other 'militant' unions of wanting to go back to the 70s. Such attacks reinforce their radical image. This campaign also promotes the myth that in the 70s and 80s the unions were militant and helped the working class hold the government over a barrel, when in reality it was the unions which held the workers in check for the ruling class.
On the other hand, the 'leftwing' of the media: the Mirror, Guardian and Independent pretend to support the firefighters, more or less critically. They give out the message that moderation and negotiation are the way forwards, but "Tony Blair doesn't want to listen. Doesn't want to negotiate. Doesn't want a settlement. He is after total victory. That is no way to treat any group of decent workers" (The Mirror, 26.11.02).
In their different ways all the forces of the ruling class are seeking to push the firefighters and the working class into the arms of the unions. FBU plays its part in the attack
As with the NUM in 84, for all its 'radical' image the FBU is playing its full part in this attack. It pushes the idea that the firefighters can win on their own if they are determined enough and if they can keep 'public support'. This illusion played an important part in the defeat of the miners' strike, in circumstances that were much more favourable than those faced by the firefighters today. No section of the working class can win on its own. 'Public opinion' is a trap. It is the solidarity of the working class that matters, which is not a question of financial help but of seeing that firefighters are part of the working class with the same interests and demands as other workers.
The FBU has also carefully manipulated its 'militant' image to isolate the firemen. For months Gilchrist has defended the need for a 40% rise, based on the premise that firefighters are professionals, separate from the rest of the class. This has made it appear that the FBU is determined to defend its members' interests. Once the strikes began the 40% demand disappeared into thin air, to be replaced by the acceptance of a 16% rise over 3 years (essentially the original 4% offered by the employers plus the next 2 years pay increases added on), this being largely financed by modernisation, that is to say attacks on conditions and jobs. The government rejection of this deal was not due to its determination to defeat the union, but in order to further strengthen the FBU's hold over the workers. The government's intransigence makes the union look militant and the strike seems to be about the defence the FBU.
The firefighters have been set up by the government and unions. What all workers need to understand is that the unions are as much the enemy of the working class as the government and media. This does not mean workers should not struggle, but that we have to learn the lessons of all our defeats in order to avoid them in the future.
Phil, 30/11/02.
In October the ICC held a public meeting in Moscow to present our pamphlet on the decadence of capitalism, recently published in the Russian language.
This meeting and the publication of the pamphlet in Russian are an expression of the emerging revolutionary milieu in Russia, which the ICC has written about extensively (see for example International Review 111).
The understanding that capitalism entered its phase of decline at the beginning of the 20th century was and is a crucial question for revolutionary marxists. It was this understanding that underpinned Rosa Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet (1915) when she wrote:
"� ours is the necessity of Socialism. Our necessity receives its justification with the moment when the capitalist class ceases to be the bearer of historic progress, when it becomes a hindrance, a danger, to the future development of society. That capitalism has reached this stage the present world war has revealed."
(Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet - The crisis in the German social democracy, February -April 1915, Merlin Press, p 130).
And she continues:
"This brutal triumphant procession of capitalism through the world, accompanied by all means of force, of robbery, and of infamy, has one bright phase: it has created the premises for its own final overthrow, it has established the capitalist world rule upon which, alone the socialist revolution can follow" (Ibid).
From this method Rosa Luxemburg makes an historical analysis of the national question:
"Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole � From this point of view only is it possible to understand correctly the question of 'national defence' in the present war" (Ibid).
This is the same method that was used by other revolutionary marxists at the time of the outbreak of the first imperialist war. The 3rd International also adopted this method in 1919, with its notion of an epoch of wars and revolutions.
It is this method that the ICC is carrying on in its pamphlet on the decadence of capitalism. The main aim of the presentation by the ICC at the public meeting in Moscow was to show how this concept of decadence is a cornerstone of communist positions of yesterday and today. Only from this point of view is it possible to understand the changing conditions which inevitably influence the positions of communists, on the national question, on the unions question, on the question of parliamentarism, on the general conditions of the workers' struggle, on the role of revolutionary minorities, etc.
But although the understanding of decadence is a cornerstone of marxist positions today, it is not shared by all the groups and elements of the proletarian political milieu today or in the past (Bordigist groups and councilist groups have both tended to reject the concept of decadence).
We are also seeing today a tendency within the proletarian political milieu to abandon the concept of decadence - recent statements by the IBRP are highly significant in this respect. It is no wonder that the same questioning appears in the Russian milieu. We have already taken up this question in the International Review 111 in answer to the MLP (Marxist Labour Party) and the International Communist Union.
Although these doubts about decadence were not expressed openly at the meeting, a number of questions posed and positions expressed, particularly on the national question and the question of war, revealed a lack of understanding of the concept of decadence; and if there is an understanding of decadence it is placed not at the beginning of 20th century, as Rosa Luxemburg (and the ICC) put it, but at the end of the 20th century with 'globalisation' or the introduction of the microprocessor.
One question posed after the introduction to the ICC was the difference between Lenin's concept of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism and the concept of decadence. Our reply was that there were differences at the time between Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Bukharin, although all of them began from a proletarian point of view. Rosa Luxemburg was the clearest and showed the underlying link between the tendency to overproduction and the imperialist quest for new markets and fields of investment. Bukharin in his Imperialism and World Economy was able to show the development of state capitalism and its consequences. Both Rosa Luxemburg and Bukharin had the same basic method: to view capitalism as a totality and so to draw out its most global implications for the proletarian movement:
"Just as it is impossible to understand modern capitalism and its imperialist policy without analysing the tendencies of world capitalism, so the basic tendencies in the proletarian movement cannot be understood without analysing world capitalism" (Imperialism and world economy, N. Bukharin, Merlin Press, 1976, p 161).
Several of the participants at the meeting stated that they still supported the position of Lenin on the right to national self-determination. The ICC showed with the examples of China, Turkey and Finland how the mistaken policy of Lenin led to massacres of the proletariat, although is was Stalin who directed the policy in China and for very different reasons.
The example of Finland, which was one of the few countries to be 'liberated' by the October revolution, is interesting. Granting national independence to Finland only resulted in boosting democratic illusions within the Finnish workers' movement, and thus delayed the revolutionary preparation of the Finnish proletariat for the inevitable confrontation with the bourgeoisie. We should also note that as soon as it was let loose from the grip of the tsarist regime, the Finnish bourgeoisie rallied to German imperialism to get help to crush the coming proletarian revolution in Finland. The crushing of the revolution in Finland was extremely brutal and the next congress of the Communist International passed a resolution condemning the white terror of the bourgeoisie.
Another important question discussed was the position of the communist left on democracy. The ICC developed the left communist position against the united front, the imperialist nature of the second world war, the trap of democracy of Spain 1936, and in general the false alternative between fascism and anti-fascism. It is obvious that there are deep confusions in the milieu in Russia on this question, especially on the nature of the second world war, where the Stalinist myth of the Great Patriotic War still exerts an influence. There were some participants that defended the idea of a war of 'humanity against barbarism' or of a war to 'defend civilisation'. Against these illusions comrades from both the Group of Revolutionary Proletarians-Collectivists (GRPC) and the Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists (RAS) group in Moscow, together with the ICC, strongly criticized this subtle defence of the 2nd world war and clearly declared it to be an imperialist war.
A more heated debate occurred in relation to the war in Chechnya. At the meeting there were participants who were involved in the work of giving humanitarian aid to the Chechnyan population. One argument was that it was a way to come closer to the Chechnyan workers, to 'create an audience'. There was much focus on 'what to do today, concretely'. On this there were several replies by comrades from the RAS and GRPC as well as the ICC. Although not against expressing human solidarity as such, these interventions criticised the illusion that this is a means for the revolutionary struggle. Firstly because capitalism will continue to create more and more misery and barbarism and no amount of humanitarian aid can counter-act that; and secondly because the only real help to the Chechnyan workers and population is the development of the struggle by the Russian workers against their own bourgeoisie, and ultimately the taking of power by workers in Russia and world wide to stop the imperialist slaughter. As Lenin said "turn the imperialist war into a civil war".
There is an illusion among many elements in this milieu, who want to take an internationalist position on the war, but who tend to weaken this by using humanitarian aid as a means to struggle, and so confuse the task of revolutionaries and dilute the internationalist position on the imperialist nature of the war in Chechnya. This is an expression of opportunism, a tendency to capitulate to the immediate fact, to seek immediate and false victories and solutions to problems that can only be solved on a world historic level.
The meeting in Moscow was a long and very animated meeting, showing the interest and militant attitude and concern among the emerging proletarian elements in Russia to better grasp the positions of the communist left. But this milieu is also very heterogeneous and dispersed, facing great difficulties both materially and ideologically, and confronted with the weight both of the Stalinist counter-revolution and the 'modern' period of decomposition. It is important that a framework is created for the systematic spreading and confrontation of positions within this milieu, to overcome the dispersion and weaknesses.
The tasks confronting this new milieu are of considerable importance. Its emergence is a confirmation of an international tendency towards the development of new revolutionary forces, but it is of particular significance that it is taking place in the 'motherland' of the world revolution.
Anders, 1/11/02.
In its number 463 (August-September 2002), the newspaper Le Proletaire, organ of the Parti Communiste International (PCI) [1] published an article entitled: 'In connection with the crisis in the ICC' which deserves a certain number of corrections. Initially, the article affirms that one of the members of the so-called 'Internal Fraction' ('IFICC') which had been constituted in the ICC [2] "is denounced ... as a probable 'agent provocateur'." Here is what we wrote in World Revolution 252 concerning the exclusion of Jonas (to which Le Proletaire refers implicitly):
"One of the most intolerable and repugnant aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign that he promoted and carried out against a member of the organisation, accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people external to the ICC of manipulating his followers and the central organs on behalf of the police force. Today, Jonas has become a keen enemy of the ICC and is behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur. We don't know what his underlying motivations are, but what we are quite sure that he represents a danger for the proletarian political milieu."
It is clear that the behaviour of Citizen Jonas is more than disconcerting and all the militants of the ICC are convinced that his actions aim at destroying our organisation or at least at causing it as much damage as an agent provocateur could have done [3]. However, all readers will have been able to read that "We don't know what his underlying motivations are" and will be able to thus note that we have never said that Jonas is a "probable agent provocateur". Such a charge, even in the form of assumption, is extremely serious and even if the revolutionary organisations can be moved to bear it against one their former members, it can be only following a very thorough investigation. It is because of that, moreover, that our Extraordinary Conference, which took place last spring, elected a special Commission to continue investigations regarding Jonas. As for the PCI, we think that it would have done better to limit itself strictly to what we really wrote so far, rather than devoting itself to extrapolations which lead to a falsification of our claims.
In addition, the PCI says to us that: "It is obviously out of the question that, as we have been asked to do, we give an opinion for one or the other camp - whether for the dissidents in the name of democracy, or for the majority in the name of the 'defence of the organisations of the proletarian milieu'" This sentence calls for several remarks. Initially, as it is formulated, it makes you think (even if it is not said explicitly) that the ICC, like the 'IFICC' , has asked the PCI to take its side. Nothing is more false. The 'IFICC' actually demanded of the PCI, in a letter that it addressed to it at the same time as to other groups of the communist left, on 27 January 2002, to take a position in its favour against the ICC:
"Today we see only one solution: for us to address you so that you ask our organisation to open its eyes and to rediscover its sense of responsibility Because we are in disagreement, today the ICC has done everything it can to marginalise us and demolish us morally and politically." [4]. However, on 6 February 2002, we actually sent a letter to the PCI, as to other organisations of the communist left (IBRP [5], PCI Il Programma Comunista, PCI Il Partito) concerning the 'IFICC'. But contrary to what is alleged by 'the Fraction', our letter by no means asks the recipient groups to give an opinion for one camp against the other; its objective is to rectify a certain number of lies and calumnies against our organisation which were contained in the letter of the 'Fraction' of 27 January. That said, the principal remark that we should make about the PCI's assertion that "it is obviously out of the question" for it to give an opinion for one or the other camp, is that it is contradicted immediately afterwards. Indeed, one can read some lines further on:
"That however does not prevent us from raising the methods employed by the ICC in response to its current dissidents, which undoubtedly do not go back to yesterday and are unfortunately too well known: 'criminalising' opponents by defamatory charges in order to isolate them completely, to counter any possible doubt or any request for political explanation on behalf of the militants by the creation of a climate of a 'fortress under siege' which makes it possible to mobilise them 'in defence of the organisation' against opponents who end up being depicted as being in the service of the bourgeoisie. These processes of sinister memory were never employed either by Marx or by Lenin; they are in fact characteristic of organisations gangrened by opportunism and/or beset by serious contradictions between their analyses and reality. They would be deadly in a revolutionary party because they inevitably destroy the political homogeneity which constitutes its cement. Whatever might be believed, a system of militarist bureaucratism can only end up choking internal political life. This tends to prevent one from facing and solving the political problems that cannot help but be posed to revolutionary militants, and transforms them into simple parrots. The political questioning that is driven back, however, inevitably continues to act underground and finishes up sooner or later reappearing with all the more virulence, in the form of destructive organisational crises."
In fact, the PCI, which claims to have read "the material published by the two sides", espouses almost to the letter the libellous theses spread by the 'IFICC' and thus clearly takes position in favour of the latter against the ICC.
The internal regime of communist organisations
We should salute the fact that today the PCI affirms that "a system of militarist bureaucratism can only end up choking internal political life, this tends to prevent one from facing and solving the political problems that cannot help but be posed to revolutionary militants, and transforms them into simple parrots"
This is an idea that our current has never tired of repeating in answer to the conceptions of the PCI. In 1947, our comrades of the Gauche Communiste de France (Communist Left of France - political ancestor of the ICC) had the following to say about the organisational ideas of the PCI:
"On this common basis [the criteria of class and the revolutionary programme] tending towards the same goal, many divergences always emerge along the road. These divergences always express either the absence of all the elements for an answer, or the real difficulties of the struggle, or the immaturity of thought. They can neither be conjured away nor prohibited, but on the contrary must be resolved by the experience of the struggle itself and by the free confrontation of ideas. The regime of the organisation, therefore, consists not in stifling divergences but in creating the conditions for their solution. That is to say, to promote, to bring them into the light of day, instead of allowing them to develop clandestinely. Nothing poisons the atmosphere of an organisation more than when divergences remain hidden. Not only does the organisation thereby deprive itself of any possibility of resolving them, but it slowly undermines its very foundations. At the first difficulty, at the first serious reverse, the edifice that one believed was as solid as a rock cracks and collapses, leaving behind a pile of stones. What was only a tempest is transformed into a decisive catastrophe" (Internationalisme 25, 'Discipline our principal strength', republished in International Review 34).
At the beginning of 1983, we used the same language in response to the crisis which the PCI had just undergone:
"Where then is this famous 'monolithic bloc' of a party? This party without faults? This 'monolithism', asserted by the ICP [PCI], has only ever been a Stalinist invention. There never were 'monolithic' organisations in the history of the workers' movement. Constant discussion and organised political confrontation within a collective and unitary framework is the condition for the true solidarity, homogeneity and centralisation of a proletarian political organisation. By stifling any debate, by hiding divergences behind the word of 'discipline', the ICP has only compressed the contradictions until an explosion was reached. Worse, by preventing clarifications both outside as inside the organisation, it has numbed the vigilance of its militants. The Bordigist sanctification of hierarchical truth and the power of leaders has left the militants bereft of theoretical and organisational weapons in the face of the splits and resignations. The ICP seems to recognise this when it writes:
'We intend to deal [with these questions] in a more developed way in our press, by placing the problems which are being posed to the activity of the party before our readers'" ('The International Communist Party (Communist Programme) at a turning point in its history', International Review No. 32).
When we defended these ideas, the PCI did not have enough scornful words to stigmatise our 'democratism' [6] but by comparing what we wrote 50 years and 20 years ago with what the PCI says to us now, one can only be struck by the similarity of the ideas. In fact, it is almost a carbon copy. One can at least deduce one thing from this: the comrades of the PCI, in spite of their great speeches on 'invariance', were able to hear our arguments. We will not ask them for any royalties. However, we think that, more than our own arguments, it is the lasting reality of the facts, and particularly the dramatic collapse of the PCI in 1982, which is the decisive element that has allowed a handful of militants reclaiming the positions of Bordiga to understand the nonsense of certain 'invariant' dogmas about the alleged 'monolithism' of the party [7].
However, we maintain today what we say 20 or 50 years ago and we categorically reject the charges of the PCI concerning our alleged "methods in response to our current dissidents". Today, like yesterday, we consider that the political dissensions which emerge in the organisation must be regulated by wide-ranging centralised debate and not by administrative or 'bureaucratic' measures. Just like 20 years ago, we make and apply the following rules in the face of the divergences which can emerge in our organisation:
"- having regular meetings of the local sections, and putting on the agenda of these meetings the main questions being discussed in the organisation: in no way must this debate be stifled; - the widest possible circulation of various contributions within the organisation through the appropriate instruments [the internal bulletins]; - rejection of any disciplinary or administrative measure on the part of the organisation with regard to members who raise disagreements" ('Report on the Structure and Functioning of the Revolutionary Organisation', adopted by the Extraordinary International Conference of January 1982, published in International Review No. 33).
However, like 20 years ago, we consider respect for the following rules to be indispensable: "- rejection of secret and bilateral correspondence which, far from allowing debate to be more clear, can only obscure it by giving rise to misunderstandings, distrust and the tendency towards the constitution of an organisation within the organisation; - respect by the minority of the indispensable organisational discipline.
While the organisation must prohibit the use of any administrative or disciplinary means in the face of disagreements, that doesn't mean that it cannot use these means in any circumstances. On the contrary, it is indispensable that it resorts to measures such as temporary suspension or definitive exclusion, when it is confronted with attitudes, behaviours or actions which constitute a danger to the existence of the organisation, to its security and its capacity to carry out its tasks.
Moreover, it is important that the organisation takes all the measures necessary to protect itself from attempts at infiltration or destruction by agents of the capitalist state, or by elements who, without being directly manipulated by these organs, behave in a way likely to facilitate their work. When such behaviour comes to light, it is the duty of the organisation to take measures not only in defence of its own security, but also in defence of the security of other communist organisations." (ibid.).
The exclusion of Jonas and the sanctions against members of the 'Fraction'
It is thus in strict application of these principles, and not to "criminalise opponents by defamatory charges in order to isolate them completely" that the ICC decided in early 2002 to exclude the element Jonas and to publish a communiqué in the press about it. We acted in exactly the same way in 1981 with regard to the individual Chenier, who had entered our organisation a few years before. Only a few months after being expelled, Chenier began an official career in a trade union and the Socialist Party (i.e. in the party that was running the government at this time), for whom he had probably been working secretly for a long time. It is clear that the communiqué that we published in our press about this person from then on prevented him from continuing the destructive work he had been doing for several years in the ICC and other organisations he had passed through, notably the PCI. If the latter had taken the trouble to make public its own decision to expel Chenier and the reasons for doing so (which we only learned about from a militant of the PCI after Chenier had been expelled from the ICC), it is obvious that we would never have allowed such an element to enter into our organisation. It was precisely for this reason that we put our readers on their guard against Jonas, who "represents a danger for the proletarian political milieu" just like Chenier had done, even if his motivations may have been different.
Similarly, the disciplinary measures we took towards other members of the 'IFICC' had nothing to do with a will to stifle debate. The opposite is the case: it was because these militants had since the beginning of the debate refused to engage in the discussion (because they knew they did not have serious arguments that could have convinced the militants of the ICC) that they systematically violated the statutes of the organisation. The disciplinary measures that the ICC could not help but impose served as a pretext to create scandals and loud claims that "The ICC is doing everything it can to marginalise us and demolish us morally and politically".
The PCI should say whether it is an example of 'militarist bureaucratism' to take disciplinary measures when militants, among many other infractions: - refuse to be present at meetings in which they have a responsibility to participate; - violate decisions adopted unanimously by the organisation (including by themselves); - organise secret correspondence and meetings with the aim, explicitly recognised among themselves, of plotting against the organisation and waging campaigns of slander against certain of its militants; - refuse to pay their dues in full; - steal the list of our subscribers' addresses, the notes of meetings of the central organs (in order to use them in a fraudulent way), as well as the money of the organisation.
It was not because a 'liquidationist leadership' (to use the terms of the IFICC) has created "a climate of a 'fortress under siege' which makes it possible to mobilise the militants 'in defence of the organisation' against opponents", as the PCI puts it, that our Extraordinary Conference unanimously ratified the sanctions against Jonas and the other members of the so-called 'Fraction'. It was quite simply because ALL the militants of the ICC, apart from the members of this 'Fraction' had been convinced of the necessity for such sanctions faced with an accumulation of evidence of deliberately destructive activity by these elements. The militants of the ICC are neither parrots nor zombies. If some amongst us have decided to trample on the principles which they had hitherto defended by blindly following a particular individual (for reasons of affinity, wounded pride, attempts to settle personal scores, or because of a loss of conviction), all the others rejected such behaviour and were able to make up their minds about this without anyone forcing their hand.
In the second part of this article, which will appear in the next issue of WR, we will see that the PCI has let itself be dragged by the 'IFICC' into also throwing out ant-ICC slanders.
ICC.
Notes
1. This is the PCI which also publishes Il Comunista in Italy, not to be confused with the PCI which publishes Il Programma Comunista and Cahiers Internationalistes in France, nor with the PCI which publishes Il Partito Comunista and La Gauche Communiste. Each of these three PCIs claims to be the true one, representing the current of the communist left of Italy animated by Amadeo Bordiga after the Second World War.
2. See on this subject our articles 'The International Extraordinary Conference of the ICC', 'Public Meetings on the Defence of the Revolutionary Organisation' and '"Internal Fraction" of the ICC: Serving the Bourgeoisie Admirably' in WR 254, 255 and 258 respectively, as well as 'The Fight for Organisational Principles' in International Review No. 110.
3. See on this subject our article 'Revolutionary Organisations Struggle against Provocation and Slander' in WR 252.
4. In spite of this letter, the IFICC has the gall to write in its Bulletin No. 13: "we want to affirm that, on our part, we never asked anybody to take sides between the ICC and Fraction". It is indeed a new shameless lie of the 'IFICC' in the tradition of this regroupment which seems to have endorsed the motto of Goebbels, head of Nazi propaganda: "a lie a thousand times repeated becomes a truth".
5. The IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party): a group laying claim to the Italian communist left, consisting of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in Italy and the Communist Workers' Organisation in Britain.
6. It should be noted that these attacks were primarily carried our in a verbal way by the militants of the PCI and that one finds very few examples of it in its publications. Indeed, at that time, whereas the PCI represented the most significant organisation laying claim to the communist left on an international scale and while it affected a transcendental disdain with regard to the ICC, its press did not condescend to polemicise with ours, unless in an exceptional way. This is not the case any more today, which obviously we salute, except when this polemic is based on unfounded rumours and not on realities.
7. Nevertheless, the comrades of the PCI always seem to themselves assert this 'monolithism', resulting in the exclusion of 'dissidents'. Evidence of this can be found in the article that Le Proletaire published recently, 'In memory of Suzanne Voute': "Marginalised in the Party, Suzanne consequently ceased her participation in the press and the central bodies. Increasingly reticent in the activity which was undertaken, she fell into open opposition at the end of the sixties, when the first signs of a new political crisis started to appear, accusing the Party of having fallen into activism and the leadership of having become the agent of opportunist influences. The divergences were such that they pushed Suzanne and the comrades who followed her to constitute a kind of fractional group inside the Party. The impossibility of joint work and the wish on her part and by the militants who shared her views not to leave the organisation in spite of the political rupture led to the decision to exclude them in 1981." (Le Proletaire 461, March-April 2002). We want to raise the point here that, even according the statements Le Proletaire, the exclusion of Suzanne Voute was based on the fact that she expressed dissensions with the view of the PCI at that time and not on her behaviour within the organisation. Le Proletaire could, however, tell us whether Suzanne, for example, said in the corridors or outside the organisation that such and such a PCI militant was a 'cop', etc. As for the ICC, the only exclusions which it has pronounced have followed the description of "behaviour unworthy of a communist militant" (Chenier in 1981, Simon in 1995, Jonas at the beginning of 2002). Concerning the exclusion of Jonas, that we pronounced only recently (since, as opposed to what they say, the other members of the 'Fraction' were not excluded), the criterion selected had nothing to do with 'political divergences' which they never expressed in any case, but on the fact, as stated above, that he was "behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur".
We are publishing below some extracts from a letter to our publication Révolution Internationale in France. The writer of the letter is very preoccupied with the question of the emancipation of women. It is followed by our response.
"(...) In the country of the 'Rights of Man', as perhaps in certain other states, all of social organisation centres around the man (...) The spaces for women, feminine style clubs or women's assemblies of yesteryear or of the time of Rosa Luxemburg have been suppressed (...) Under the pretext of a generalised mixture, women have been put out to pasture because when they change towns or countries and when they don't have work, the spaces for women which would allow them to regain confidence in themselves are practically non-existent. A good number of women have had to 'accommodate themselves' to this fact as well as they can and have ended up by hiding their condition (...) One could say that the woman remains the proletarian of the man even if the bourgeois institution of marriage has gone out of fashion. One escapes the conjugal duty which is synonymous with conjugal prostitution for a dissolution where the communion between beings can no longer exist as long as inequalities of all kinds have not been abolished and therefore as long as human relations are relations of possession and slavery. To rid ourselves of this it is necessary perhaps (...) for women to again find the space for women; without that we will never reach a true communism. Does capitalism have a masculine origin? I don't think so, but some have had every interest in exploiting the desire for domination of one sex over another in order to maintain themselves in power."
Our Response
Our reader raises a question which has preoccupied the workers' movement since its origins; but it can only be understood as a problem of humanity, and not as a particular question. In the Paris Manuscripts of 1844, Marx posed the question like this: "The immediate relation of man to man is the relation of the man to the woman (...) It allows a judgement on the whole degree of human development. From the character of this relationship, one can conclude up to what point man has become for himself a species being, human and conscious of his destiny." This vision was taken up and developed in the whole evolution of marxist thought and through revolutionaries in the 19th century who took an interest in the question of the oppression of women in capitalist society (Bebel, Engels, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai and Lenin).
Close to two centuries after marxists had posed this question of the oppression of women, it still remains topical. Witness its particular barbarous forms in the Islamic states, inflicting on women the obligation to wear a veil (even forbidding women to work or get an education) or in numerous countries where they are the victims of the worst sexual mutilations. And the intervention of the great western democracies will certainly not resolve this problem, as we were supposed to think from the outburst of bourgeois propaganda at the time of the fall of the Taliban and the 'liberation' of Kabul by the civilised world. In these same countries of the 'civilised' West, with the proliferation of networks of prostitution, a growing number of young girls hardly out of infancy (often of African origin or from the countries of the old eastern bloc) are forced, due to the lack of work, to sell their bodies in order to survive and escape poverty. Although today, with the development of capitalism, women have been integrated into production, although they have acquired the right to participate in the management of public affairs (and even take the reins of government), the oppression of women still remains a reality. But this reality doesn't find its source in the 'natural' and 'biological' domination of one sex over the other.
Only marxism with its scientific, historical materialist and dialectical method can explain the origin of this oppression; and above all it alone provides a way of resolving this problem.
As Marx and Engels showed, the institutions and foundations of bourgeois order have a history. They emerged through a long and tortuous process linked to the evolution of human society. They found their sources in the basic economics of the social relations of production and in the appearance of private property. In the framework of this response we can't lay out all the arguments developed by marxism in the 19th century. We refer our readers to Engels' book The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State which analyses very thoroughly this historical evolution, as well as two articles from our series on communism, in International Review 81 and 85.
Although our reader raises what has been a fundamental question for the workers' movement, the approach she takes in order to respond to it, is, with a certain naivety, identical to that of the 'feminist' movement which flourished at the end of the 60s, notably in the United States. According to feminist ideology, the oppression of women in bourgeois society (as in all class societies) finds its origins in the "desire for domination of one sex over the other". This is not only false but dangerous. Such a vision leads her to put forward a totally erroneous response: women must claim "spaces for women, without which we will never reach a true communism". For marxism, the history of humanity is the history of the class struggle and not the struggle of the sexes. Contrary to the feminist vision (which is nothing other than a variant of leftism, not unlike anti-racism) marxism has always fought all the divisions that the bourgeoisie is permanently trying to impose on the only class capable of building a real communist society on a world scale: the proletariat. Because what constitutes the strength of the working class, and will determine its capacity to overthrow bourgeois order, is first and foremost its capacity to defend its class unity and fight the divisions (racial, national, sexual) that the bourgeoisie tries to introduce into its ranks.
In other respects, our reader correctly recalls the existence of assemblies and clubs at the time of Rosa Luxemburg. First of all we should specify that it's not a question of inter-classist associations indiscriminately regrouping the worker and the wife of the boss, but organisations of 'socialist women' (1). But what was still valid at the end of the 19th century, in the ascendant period of capitalism, is no longer so today. At a time when capitalism could still accord significant reforms to the exploited class, it was legitimate for revolutionaries to put forward immediate demands for women, including the right to vote, while warning against any inter-classist illusions (2). It is in this context that the social democratic parties had to support the specific claims of women, inasmuch as they did not immediately liberate them from capitalist oppression but strengthened the proletariat by integrating women workers into the general struggle against exploitation and for the overthrow of capitalism.
So, even in this epoch where the demands of women had a meaning from the point of view of the proletarian struggle, and contributed to the strengthening of the workers' movement, marxists were always opposed to bourgeois feminism. Far from contributing to the unification of the working class, it could only sharpen divisions within it while favouring inter-classist ideology and leading it off its class terrain.
With the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence all struggles for reform were rendered obsolete and a specifically women's movement could only be recuperated by the dominant class and play into the hands of the bourgeois state.
In the final analysis, the "spaces for women" wished for by our reader risk being a new ghetto isolating those workers from the rest of the proletariat, just like 'immigrant movements' tend to cut off immigrant workers from the general combat of their class. Marxism alone provides a response to the problem of the oppression of women
Our reader also affirms that in capitalist society "the woman remains the proletarian of the man even if the bourgeois institution of marriage has gone out of fashion". This affirmation contains a correct idea that Marx and Engels had put forward as early as 1846 in The German Ideology: "The first division of labour is that of the man and woman for procreation". Subsequently, Engels added that "the first class opposition which manifests itself in history coincides [our emphasis] with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in the conjugal relation, and the first class oppression with the oppression of the feminine sex by the masculine sex".
And it is precisely from the fact of this historic coincidence that he tried to understand the link between the antagonism of the sexes in the monogamous marriage and the appearance of a society divided into classes. The discovery of private property constituted the key to the whole marxist vision, which is the sole method that allows an understanding of the material and economic roots of the oppression of women. In his study on the origins of the family, Engels writes: "The modern conjugal family is based on the domestic slavery, acknowledged or hidden, of the woman, and modern society is a mass which is composed exclusively of conjugal families, like so many molecules. In our days, the man in the great majority of cases must be the supporter of the family and must feed it, at least in the possessing classes; and that gives him a sovereign authority that no juridical privilege needs to support. In the family, the man is the bourgeois; the woman plays the role of the proletariat."
But this formulation of Engels, that our reader takes up (and that feminist ideology deprives of its context in order to exploit and distort it) has nothing to do with a 'sexist' approach. What Engels is trying to show is that, essentially with the appearance of private property, the individual, monogamous family became the prime economic entity of society; in other words, the sexual division of labour contained the germ of the future antagonisms between the classes. Thus Marx could affirm that the patriarchal family came out of the "great historical defeat of the feminine sex"; the overthrow of maternal right "contained in miniature all the antagonisms which, subsequently, developed throughout society and its state".
Marx and Engels thus clearly demonstrated that the oppression of the feminine sex made its appearance in the history of humanity with the rise of monogamy (and its corollaries, adultery and prostitution). This constituted the prime form of family based not on natural conditions, but on economic conditions, that's to say the victory of private property over primitive and spontaneous common property: "Sovereignty of the man in the family and the procreation of children which can only be his and who were destined to inherit his fortune, such was frankly proclaimed by the Greeks as the exclusive objective of conjugal marriage (...) Monogamy is born from the concentration of important riches in one hand - the hand of a man, and from the desire to bequeath these riches to the children of this man and no other. For that, the monogamy of the woman is necessary, not that of the man" (Engels). Thus, contrary to the approach of our reader and of feminist ideology, marxism shows that the inequality of the sexes that we have inherited from previous social conditions is not the cause, but the consequence of the economic oppression of the woman; this oppression emerged with the appearance of private property. This came first of all within archaic societies which, through the accumulation of riches and the development of the means of production, subsequently gave way to a society divided into classes. If woman thus became "the proletarian of the man", it's not because of the will power of the masculine sex, but because, with the patriarchal family (which appeared as a historical necessity allowing humanity to pass from the savage state to 'civilisation'), and more so with the individual, monogamous family, the control of the household lost the public character that it had in the old domestic economy of primitive communism. Whereas in these archaic societies the domestic economy was a "public industry of social necessity" entrusted to women (in the same way that procuring basic necessities was left to men), in the monogamous, patriarchal family it became an "individual service". From here on, the woman was removed from social production and became an "early servant" (Engels). And it was only with the appearance of large-scale industry in capitalist society that the door to production could again be open to the woman. It's for this reason that marxism has always proposed that the condition for the emancipation of woman is to be found in her integration into social production as a proletarian. It is in her place within the relations of production, and in her active participation, as a proletarian, in the united struggle of the whole of the exploited class, that the key to the problem is to be found. It is solely by posing the question in terms of classes and from a class point of view that the proletariat can provide an answer.
By overthrowing capitalism and constructing a truly world communist society, the proletariat will have, amongst other things, to re-establish the socialisation of domestic life by developing it on a universal scale (notably through the taking charge of the education of children by the whole of society and not through the family cell conceived as the prime economic entity). Only the world proletariat, by breaking the shackles of the means of production as private property, will be able to initiate a gigantic leap in the productive forces, definitively put an end to scarcity, and take humanity from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom. Thanks to the building of a new society based on abundance, the proletariat will thus achieve its historic mission as the gravedigger of capitalism by finally realising the old dream of humanity that primitive communism was not capable of achieving.
Contrary to the erroneous vision of our reader, the emancipation of women will not be the work of the struggle of women, with their specific claims, but of the whole working class. Forced to sell its labour or prostitute itself in order to survive (and in decadent capitalism prostitution is not moreover only the 'prerogative' of women), the proletarian, man or woman is, in a system based on the search for profit, nothing other than a commodity.
The oppression of women is an integral part of the exploitation and oppression of a social class deprived of all means of production; it will be ended by the revolutionary action of this class, which can only liberate itself by liberating the whole of humanity from the yoke of capitalist exploitation.
Louise
(1) We should also point out that, contrary to her friend Clara Zetkin who was the president of the socialist women's movement and editor-in-chief of the socialist women's newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality), Rosa Luxemburg was never herself involved in this activity. All her energy was devoted to the combat for revolutionary marxism against reformism. As to Clara Zetkin herself, her name in history, much more than her 'feminist' activity, remains attached to her combat, notably at the side of Rosa, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogisches, against the imperialist war of 1914 and for the foundation of the Communist Party in Germany.
(2) In this same epoch, certain countries were the theatre of bourgeois campaigns for the right of women to vote. In Britain, the country most affected by this movement, this demand was supported from the beginning by the bourgeois philosopher John Stuart Mill and the Conservative Prime Minister, Disraeli. The wife of Churchill was an also an old suffragette: that tells you that there was nothing specifically proletarian about this demand!
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