Since 2008, not a week has gone by without a new draconian austerity plan. Reductions in pensions, tax increases, wage freezes... nothing and nobody can escape. The whole of the world working class is sinking into poverty and insecurity. Capitalism is being hit by the most acute economic crisis in its entire history. The current process, left to its own logic, can only lead to the collapse of capitalist society. This is shown by the complete impasse facing the bourgeoisie. All the measures it takes are revealed as vain and fruitless. Worse! They are actually aggravating the problem. This class of exploiters no longer has any answers, even in the medium term. The crisis did not level out in 2008; it is getting worse and worse. And the impotence of the bourgeoisie is leading to tensions and conflicts in its ranks. The economic crisis is turning into a political crisis.

In the last few months, in Greece, Italy, Spain, the US... governments are becoming more and more unstable, increasingly unable to impose their policies as divisions between different factions within the national bourgeoisie grow in strength. The different national bourgeoisies are also often divided amongst themselves on a global scale when it comes to deciding what measures to take against the crisis. The result of all this is that measures are frequently only taken after months of delay, as we saw with the eurozone’s plan for bailing out Greece. As for the current anti-crisis measures, like the ones that came before them, they can only reflect the growing irrationality of the capitalist system. Economic crisis and political crisis are banging simultaneously on the door of history.

However, this major political crisis of the bourgeoisie is not in itself something that can be celebrated by the exploited. In the face of the danger of class struggle, the bourgeoisie maintains a sacred union, an iron discipline against the proletariat. However difficult the task facing the working class, it holds in its hands the power to destroy this dying world order and to build a new society. This goal can only be attained collectively, through the generalisation of the proletariat’s own struggles.

Why can’t the bourgeoisie find a solution to the crisis?

In 2008 and 2009, despite the gravity of the world economic situation, the bourgeoisie breathed a sigh of relief as soon as the situation seemed to stop getting worse. To believe them, the crisis was just a passing event. The ruling class and its servile specialists claimed in all languages that they had the situation in hand, that everything was under control. The world was merely seeing an adjustment of the economy, a small purge needed to eliminate the excesses of previous years. But reality has mocked the lying discourse of the bourgeoisie. The last quarter of 2011 has seen a whole series of international summits, every one of them described as “last chance meetings” aimed at saving the eurozone from falling apart. The media, conscious of this danger, talk of little else but the “debt crisis”. Every day the papers and the TV are filled with their analyses, each one in contradiction with the next. There is a real note of panic in their voices. And even then they often forget that the crisis is continuing to develop outside the eurozone: the USA, Britain, China, etc. World capitalism is faced with a problem which it cannot solve. This can be represented by the image of a wall that cannot be scaled: the “wall of debt”.

For capitalism, its overall debt has become fatal. It’s true that a debt in one part of the world is equal to a loan somewhere else, so that some people claim that world debt actually stands at zero. But this is a pure illusion, a clever accountant’s trick, a game written on paper. In the real world, all the banks for example are in a more or less permanent situation of bankruptcy. And yet their accounts are “balanced”, as they like to put it. But what is the real value of their shares in the Greek or Italian debts, or the ones in Spanish or US housing loans? The answer is clear: virtually nothing. The tills are empty and all that remains is debt and more debt.

But why, at the beginning of 2012, is capitalism facing such a problem? What is the origin of this ocean of money loans which has for so long been totally disconnected from the real wealth of society? Debt has its source in credit. These are the loans agreed by central or private banks to all the economic agencies in society. These loans become a barrier for capital when they can no longer be paid back, when it becomes necessary to create new debts to pay the interest on previous debts or to reimburse a small fraction of the actual debts.

Whichever organism gives out the money, whether central banks or private ones, it is vital, from the standpoint of global capital, that enough commodities are sold for a profit on the world market. This is a condition for the survival of capital. But this hasn’t been the case for the last 40 years. In order for all the commodities produced to be sold, it has become necessary for money to be loaned to pay for the goods, to reimburse previously contracted debts, and to pay back the interest accumulated on them. And this has meant contracting new debts. The time comes when the overall debt of particular banks or states can no longer be honoured, and in more and more cases this goes for the servicing of the debts. This marks the general crisis of debt. This is the moment when debt and the creation of growing amounts of fictitious money have become a poison contaminating capitalism’s entire body.

What is the real gravity of the world economic situation?

The beginning of 2012 has seen the world economy fall back into recession. The same causes always produce the same effects, but at a more serious and dramatic level. At the beginning of 2008, the financial system was on the verge of collapse. The new credits injected into the economy were soon eaten up and the economy went into recession. Since then, the American, British and Japanese central banks, among others, have injected further billions of dollars. Capitalism bought itself some time and was able to revive the economy in a very minimal way while preventing the banks and assurance companies from going under. How did all this turn out? The answer is now known. States are massively in debt to the central banks and the markets are taking over a very small part of the debt of the banks. Nothing has really changed.

At the beginning of 2012, the impasse facing global capital can be illustrated, among other things, by the €485bn earmarked by the European Central bank to save the banks in the zone from immediate bankruptcy. The ECB has lent money to the central banks of the zone in exchange for toxic shares. Shares which are part of the state debts of this zone. The banks in turn then have to buy up new state debts for those which are not collapsing. Each is holding up the next, each one is buying the next one’s debt with what is in effect money printed for the purpose. If one goes down, they all go down.

As in 2008, but in a much more drastic way, credit is no longer going into the real economy. Each player protects his own money in order to avoid collapse. At the beginning of this year, at the level of the private economy, investments in enterprises are becoming very rare. The impoverished populations are pulling in their belts. The depression is with us again. The eurozone, like the USA, has a near-zero growth rate. The fact that the USA saw a slightly better economic activity in comparison to the rest of the year does not mean any lasting change in the general tendency. In the short term, according to the IMF, growth in 2012 will be between 1.8% and 2.4% depending on the country. And then again, that’s if “everything goes well”, ie. if there is no major economic event, something noone would care to bet on right now!

The “emerging” countries, like India and Brazil, are seeing a rapid reduction in activity. Even China, which since 2008 has been presented as the new locomotive of the world economy, is officially going from bad to worse. An article on the website of the China Daily on 26th December said that two provinces (one being Guandong which is one of the richest in the country since it hosts a large part of the manufacturing sector for mass consumer products) have told Beijing that they are going to delay the payments on the interests for their debt. In other words, China is also faced with bankruptcy.

2012 is going to see a contraction of world economic activity on a scale which no one can yet predict. At best, world growth is calculated to be around 3.5%. In December, the IMF, OECD and all the economic think tanks revised their predicted growth figures downwards. It seems clear that the colossal injection of new credit in 2008 created the present wall of debt. Further debts contracted since then have only made the wall higher, and have been less and less effective in getting the economy moving. Capitalism is thus on the edge of a precipice: in 2011, the financing of debt, ie. the money needed to pay debts that had reached their deadline, and the interest on the overall debt, reached $10,000bn. In 2012, it is predicted to reach $10,500bn, while the world’s reserves are estimated at $5,000bn. Where is capitalism going to find the money to pay for this?

At the end of 2011 we saw not only the debt crisis of the banks and assurances, but also the growing implication of the sovereign debts of states. It is legitimate to ask who is going to go down first? A big private bank and thus the whole world banking system? A new state like Italy or France? The eurozone? The dollar?

From economic crisis to political crisis

In the previous International Review we pointed to the very wide disagreements between the main countries of the eurozone in facing the financial problem of the cessation of payment by certain countries, whether this was already happening (as in the case of Greece) or threatening to happen (as in the case of Italy), and the differences between Europe and the USA in dealing with the problem of world debt.1

Since 2008, all policies have led to a dead-end, while disagreements within the different national bourgeoisies about the debt and the problem of growth have led to tensions, disputes and open confrontations. With the inevitable development of the crisis, this “debate” is only just beginning.

There are those who want to reduce the debt through violent austerity budgets. For them, there is one slogan: drastic cuts in all state expenditure. Here Greece is a model showing the way for everyone. The real economy there has been through a 5% recession. Businesses are closing; the country and the population are sinking into ruin and poverty. And still this disastrous policy is being taken up all over the place: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Britain, etc. The bourgeoisie has the same illusion as the doctors of the Middle Ages who believed in the virtues of a good bleeding. But the economy will do no better from such a remedy than their patients did.

Another part of the bourgeoisie wants to monetise the debt, ie. transform it into issues of money. This is what the American and Japanese bourgeoisies have been doing on an unprecedented scale, for example. It’s what the ECB has been doing on a smaller scale. This policy has the merit of making it possible to play for time. It makes it possible to deal with debt deadlines on a short-term basis. It makes it possible to slow down the recession. But it has a catastrophic side effect: eventually it will result in a general fall in the value of money. Capitalism can no more live without money than a man can live without breathing. Adding debt to a debt, which is already, as in the US, Britain or Japan, preventing a real revival of the economy can only lead, in the end, to a more profound collapse.

Finally, there are those who think you can combine the two previous approaches. They are for austerity and growth based on the creation of money. This orientation is probably the clearest expression of the impasse facing the bourgeoisie. And yet it’s what they’ve been doing for the last two years in Britain and what Monti, the new chief of the Italian government, is calling for there. This part of the ruling class reasons as follows: “if we make an effort to drastically reduce expenditure, the markets will regain confidence in the capacity of states to repay their debts. They will then lend to us as tolerable rates and we can again go into debt”. The circle is complete. This part of the bourgeoisie really thinks it can go back in time, to the situation before 2007-8.

None of these alternatives are viable, even in the medium term. They all lead capital into an impasse. While the creation of money by the central banks seems to lead to a bit of respite, the journey will still end up at the same destination: the historic downfall of capitalism.

Governments are more and more unstable

Capitalism’s economic dead-end inevitably engenders a historic tendency towards political crisis within the bourgeoisie. Last spring, in the space of a few months, we saw spectacular political crises in Portugal, the USA, Greece and Italy. In a more discreet manner, the same crisis is advancing in other central countries like Germany, Britain and France.

For all its illusions, a growing part of the world bourgeoisie is beginning to grasp the catastrophic state of its economy. We are hearing increasingly alarmist statements. As this anxiety, disquiet and even panic spreads amongst the bourgeoisie, they are beginning to go back to some of the old, rigid certainties. Each part of the bourgeoisie is fixating on the best way to defend the national interest, according to the economic or political sector it belongs to. The ruling class is coming to blows over the various hopeless solutions we looked at above. Each political orientation proposed by the government team provokes violent opposition from other sectors of the bourgeoisie.

In Italy, the total loss of credibility in Berlusconi’s ability to impose the austerity plans that are supposed to reduce public debt led the former president of the Italian Council to quit, following pressure from the “markets” and the main representatives of the eurozone. In Portugal, Spain and Greece, over and above the national specificities, the same reasons led to the hurried departure of the governments in place.

The example of the USA is historically the most significant. This is the world’s leading power. This summer, the American bourgeoisie was torn apart around the question of raising the ceiling on debt. This has been done many times since the 1960s without posing any major problems. So why this time did it provoke such a crisis that the American economy was a hair’s breadth from total paralysis? It’s true that a faction of the bourgeoisie which has acquired a growing weight in the political life of the US ruling class, the Tea Party, is totally irresponsible even from the standpoint of defending the interests of the national capital. However, contrary to those who would like us to believe it, it’s not the Tea Party which is the main cause of the paralysis of the American central administration but the open confrontation between the Democrats and the Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives, with each one thinking that the solution put forward by the other is catastrophic, suicidal for the country. This led to a dubious, fragile compromise, which will probably, only last a short time. It will be put to the test during the forthcoming elections. The continuation of the economic weakening of the USA can only fuel the political crisis there.

But the growing impasse of the present policies can also be seen in the contradictory demands that the financial markets are making on governments. These famous markets are demanding at one and the same time draconian plans of “rigour” and at the same time a revival of economic activity. When they start losing confidence in the ability of a state to repay significant parts of its debt, they quickly raise the interest rates on their loans. The end result is guaranteed: these states can no longer borrow on the markets. They become totally dependent on the central banks. After Greece, the same thing is beginning to happen for Spain and Italy. The economic noose is tightening on these countries, adding more fuel to the political crisis.

The attitude of Cameron at the last EU summit, rejecting the same budgetary and financial discipline for everyone, spells the eventual end of the line for the Union. The British economy only survives thanks to its financial sector. Even thinking about controls over this sector is out of the question for the majority of British Conservatives. Cameron’s position has led to conflicts between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, making the governing coalition weaker than before. It has also sharpened dissensions in Wales and Scotland over the issue of belonging to the EU.

Finally, a new factor favouring the development of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie has raised its head in recent debates. An old demon, held in check for a long time, is now straining at the leash: protectionism. In the USA and the eurozone, many conservatives and populists of right and left are calling for new customs barriers. For this part of the bourgeoisie, which is now being joined by a number of “socialists”, the way forward is to reindustrialise your country, to “produce nationally”. China is already protesting against the measures that the USA has taken towards its imports. In Washington itself there is still much tension over this question. The Tea Party but also a significant part of the Republican party are pushing these demands to the limit, forcing Obama and the Democrats (as with the question of the debt ceiling) to dub these sectors as locked in the past and as irresponsible. This phenomenon is only just beginning. For the moment, no one can foresee how far it’s going to go. But what’s certain is that it will have an important impact on the coherence of the bourgeoisie as a whole, its ability to maintain stable parties and government teams.

However we look at this crisis within the bourgeoisie, it can only go in one direction, towards the growing instability of governing teams, including those in the leading powers of the planet.

The bourgeoisie divided by the crisis but united against the class struggle

The proletariat cannot celebrate the political crisis of the bourgeoisie in itself. Divisions and conflicts within the ruling class are no guarantee of success for its struggle. All proletarians and above all the young generations of the exploited need to understand that, however deep the crisis within the bourgeoisie, however acute its internal faction fights, it will always unite against the class struggle. This is known as the Sacred Union. This was the case during the Paris Commune of 1871. Let’s remember how the Prussian and French bourgeoisies managed to unite in time to crush the first great proletarian uprising in history. All the big movements of the proletarian struggle have come up against this Sacred Union. There is no exception to the rule.

The proletariat cannot count on the weaknesses of the bourgeoisie. Political divisions within the enemy class don’t guarantee its victory. It can only count on its own forces. And we have been seeing these forces emerging in a number of countries recently.

In China, a country where an important part of the world working class is now concentrated, struggles are taking place almost daily. There are explosions of anger involving not only the wage workers but the more general impoverished population, such as the peasantry. Miserable wages, unbearable working conditions, ferocious repression... Social conflicts have been developing, notably in the factories where production is being hit by the slow-down in European and American demand. Here in a shoe factory, there in a factory in Sichuan, there at HIP, a subsidiary of apple, at Honda, Tesco etc. “There is a strike almost every day, said labour rights activist Liu Kalming.”2 Even if these struggles remain, for the moment, isolated and without much perspective, they show that the workers in Asia, like their class brothers and sisters in the West, are not ready to just knuckle down and accept the consequences of the economic crisis of capital. In Egypt, after the big mobilisations of January and February 2011, the feeling of revolt is still very much alive in the population. Generalised corruption, total impoverishment, the political and economic impasse, have pushed thousands of people onto the streets and the town squares. The government, currently led by the military, responds with slander and bullets, a repression made all the easier by the fact that, unlike last year, the working class has not been able to mobilise itself en masse. For the bourgeoisie this is where the danger lies: “you can understand the army’s anxiety about the insecurity and social turbulence that has developed in the last few months. There is a fear of the contagion of strikes in the enterprises where the employees are deprived of any social and union rights while any protest is seen as a form of treason” (Ibrahim al Sahari, a representative of the Centre of Socialist Studies in Cairo3).

Here it’s said clearly: what the bourgeoisie fears is a workers’ movement developing on its own class terrain. In this country, democratic illusions are strong after so many years of dictatorship, but the economic crisis can limit their impact. The Egyptian bourgeoisie, whatever faction is in government after the recent elections, cannot prevent the situation from worsening and the unpopularity of the government from growing. All these workers’ struggles and social movements, despite their limitations and weaknesses, express the beginnings of a refusal, by the working class and a growing part of the oppressed population, to passively accept the fate reserved for them by capitalism.

The workers in the central countries of capitalism have also not been inert in the last few months. On 30th November in Britain, two million people came onto the streets to protest against the permanent deterioration of their living conditions. This strike was the biggest for several decades in a country where the working class, which in the 1970s was the most militant in Europe, was crushed under the heel of Thatcherism in the 1980s. This is why seeing two million people demonstrating on the streets in Britain, even though it was a sterile, union controlled “day of action”, is a very significant sign of the revival of working class militancy on a world scale. The movement of the “Indignados”, especially in Spain, has shown in an embryonic way what the working class is capable of. The premises of its own strength appeared very clearly: general assemblies open to everyone, free and fraternal debates, the attempt to take charge of the struggle by the movement itself, solidarity and self-confidence (see the numerous articles about these movements that we have published on our website4). The ability of the working class to organise itself as an autonomous force, as a unified collective body, will be a vital element in the development of massive proletarian struggles in the future. The workers of the central countries, who are best placed to unmask the democratic and trade union mystifications which they have faced for decades, will also show the proletariat of the world that this is possible and necessary.

World capitalism is in the process of collapsing economically, and the bourgeois class is being more and more shaken by political crises. Every day, it becomes a little clearer that this system is totally unviable.

Counting on our forces also means knowing what we lack. Everywhere a movement of resistance against the attacks of capitalism is being born. In Spain, in Greece, in the USA, the criticisms coming from the proletarian wing of this movement are directed against this rotten economic system. We are seeing the beginnings of a rejection of capitalism. But then the key question is posed to the working class. We can see the necessity to destroy this system, but what are we gong to put in its place? What we need is a society without exploitation, without poverty and war. A society where humanity is at last united on a world scale and no longer divided into nations or classes, no longer separated by colour or religion. A society where everyone will have what they need to fully realise themselves. This other world, which has to be the goal of the class struggle when it launches its assault on capitalism, is possible. It is the task of the working class (those at work, the unemployed, future proletarians still in education, those who work behind a machine or at a computer, manual labourers, technicians, scientists etc) to undertake this revolutionary transformation and it has a name: communism, which obviously has nothing in common with the hideous monstrosity of Stalinism which has usurped the name! This is not a dream or a utopia. Capitalism, in order to develop itself, has also developed the technical, scientific and productive means which will make a world human society possible. For the first time in its history, society can leave behind the realm of scarcity and reach the realm of abundance and of respect for life. The struggles which are developing now all over the world, even if they are still very embryonic, have begun to re-appropriate this goal under the lash of a failing social order. The working class carries within itself the historic capacity to reach this goal.

Tino 10.1.12

We publish below a contribution from a political group in the proletarian camp, OPOP,1 about the state in the transition period and its relationship with the organisation of the working class during this period.

Although this question is not of "immediate topicality", it is a fundamental responsibility of revolutionary organisations to develop theory that will enable the proletariat to carry out its revolution. In this sense, we welcome the effort of the OPOP to clarify an issue that will be of primary importance in the future revolution, if it is successful, in order to implement the global transformation of the society bequeathed by capitalism into a classless society without exploitation.

The experience of the working class has already contributed to the practical clarification and theoretical elaboration of this issue. The brief experience of the Paris Commune, where the proletariat took power for two months, has clarified the need to destroy the bourgeois state (and not to conquer it as revolutionaries previously thought) and for the permanent revocability of delegates elected by the workers. The Russian Revolution of 1905 gave rise to specific organs, the workers' councils, organs of working class power. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin in his book The State and Revolution condensed the gains of the proletarian movement on this issue at that time. It is the conception summarised by Lenin of a proletarian state, the Council-State, that is addressed in the OPOP’s text below.

For OPOP, the failure of the Russian Revolution (because of its international isolation) does not permit us to draw new lessons with regard to Lenin’s point of view. On this basis, it rejects the ICC’s conception that challenges the notion of the "proletarian state". While developing its critique, OPOP’s contribution takes care to define the scope of disagreement between our organisations, which we welcome, pointing out that we have in common the idea that "workers' councils must have unlimited power and [...] must constitute the core of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat".

The view of the ICC on the question of the state only continues the theoretical effort led by the left fractions (Italian in particular) that arose in response to the degeneration of the parties of the Communist International. While it is perfectly fair to find the root cause of the degeneration of the Russian revolution in its international isolation, this does not mean that this experience cannot provide lessons about the role of the state, thus enriching the theoretical basis that is Lenin’s State and Revolution. Unlike the Paris Commune, which was clearly and openly crushed by the savage repression of the bourgeoisie, in Russia it was somehow from "inside", from the degeneration of the state itself, that the counter-revolution came (in the absence of the extension of the revolution). How to understand this phenomenon? How and why could the counter-revolution take this form? It is precisely by basing ourselves on the theoretical gains made on the basis of this experience that we criticise the position of the "proletarian state" advocated in Lenin’s work, as well as some formulations of Marx and Engels made in the same sense.

Of course, unlike the “positive” gains of the Commune, the lessons we learn about the role of the state are "negative", and in this sense they are an object of open questioning, not having been decided by history. But as we said above, it is the responsibility of revolutionaries to prepare for the future. In a future issue of the International Review we will publish a response to the theses developed by OPOP. We can mention here, in a very summarised way, the main ideas on which this will focus:2:

• it is inappropriate to speak of the state as being the product of a particular class. As Engels showed, the state is the product of the entire society divided into antagonistic classes. Identifying with the dominant production relations (and therefore with the class that embodies them), its function is to preserve the established economic order;

• after the victorious revolution, different social classes still exist, even after the defeat of the bourgeoisie at the international level;

• if the proletarian revolution is the act by which the working class constitutes itself as the politically dominant class, this class does not become the economically dominant class. It remains, until the integration of all members of society into associated labour, the exploited class of society and the only revolutionary class, that is to say bearing the communist project. As such, it must permanently maintain its class autonomy to defend its immediate interests as the exploited class and its historic project of communist society.

ICC

Workers' councils, proletarian state, dictatorship of the proletariat in the socialist phase of transition to a classless society

1. Introduction

The lefts are behind in the very urgent discussion on questions of strategy, tactics, organisation and also on the transition [to communism]. Among the many subjects that need answers, one that stands out particularly is that of the state, which deserves a systematic debate.

On this question, some left forces have a different view from ours, mainly regarding the councils, the real structures of the working class, which arise as organs of a pre-Commune-State, and by extension, of the Commune-State itself. For these organisations, the state is one thing and the councils another, totally different. For us, the councils are the form through which the working class constitutes itself at the organisational level in the state, as the dictatorship of the proletariat, seeing that the state means the power of one class over another.

The marxist conception of the proletarian state contains, for the short term, the idea of the need for an instrument of class rule, but for the medium term it indicates the need for the end of the state itself. What it proposes and what must prevail in communism is a classless society and the absence of the need for the oppression of man or woman, since there has never been more antagonism between different social groups than there is today because of private ownership of the means of production and the separation of direct producers from the means – and the conditions – of work and thus of production.

Society, which will then be highly developed, will enter a stage of self-government and the administration of things, where there will be no need for the transitory social organisations experienced since homo sapiens has existed, with the exception of the council form which is the most evolved form of the state (its simplified character, its dynamic of deliberate and conscious self-extinction and its social force are nothing but manifestations of its superiority over all other past forms of the state). The working class will use this form to pass from the first phase of communism (socialism) to a higher phase of society, a classless society. But to reach this stage, the working class must build, well in advance, the means of the transition, which are the councils on a global scale.

The task will then fall to marxist organisations, not to control the state, either from the outside or the inside, but to constantly struggle within the Commune-State built by the working class and all of the proletariat through the councils, so that it rises to the most revolutionary heights of its combat. The councils, in turn, will actually assume the struggle for the new state, with the understanding that it is they themselves who are the state, which was not without reason called by Lenin the Commune-State.

The Council-State is revolutionary as much in form as in content. It differs, in essence, from the bourgeois state of capitalist society as much as the other societies which precede it. The Council-State results from the constitution of the working class as the ruling class, as posed in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 written by Marx and Engels. In this sense, the functions it takes on differ radically from those of the bourgeois capitalist state, to the extent that a change takes place, a quantitative and qualitative transformation at the same moment as the rupture between the old power and the new form of social organisation: the Council-State.

The Council-State is at the same time and dialectically the political and social negation of the earlier order; this is why it is, equally dialectically, the affirmation and negation of the form of the state: negation in that it undertakes its own extinction and at the same time of all forms of the state; affirmation as an extreme expression of its own strength, the condition of its own negation, in that a weak post-revolutionary state would be unable to resolve its own ambiguous existence: to carry out the task of repression of the bourgeoisie as the first premise of its decisive step, the act of its disappearance. In the bourgeois state, the relation of dictatorship-democracy is achieved through a combined relationship of (dialectical) contradictory unity in which the great majority is subdued through the political and military domination of the bourgeoisie. In the Council-State, on the contrary, these poles are reversed. The proletariat, which previously had no political participation because of the process of manipulation and exclusion from decisions through which it was subdued, will play the dominant role in the process of class struggle. It will establish the greatest political democracy known to history, which will be associated, as it should, with the dictatorship of the exploited majority over a stripped and expropriated minority, who will do anything to organise the counter-revolution.

It is the Council-State, the ultimate expression of the proletarian dictatorship, that uses this power not only to ensure greater democracy for workers in general and the working class in particular, but before and above all, to suppress in an extremely organised manner the forces of the counter-revolution.

The Council-State condenses in itself, as has already been said, the unity between content and form. It is during the revolutionary situation, when the Bolsheviks organised the insurrection in Russia in October 1917, that this issue became clearer. At that time, it was impossible to distinguish between the project proposed by the working class, socialism, the content and form of organisation, and the new type of state it wanted to build on the basis of the soviets. Socialism, the power of the workers and the soviets; it was all the same, so that we could not talk about one without understanding that they were talking automatically about the other. Thus, it is not because in Russia a state organisation was built that moved further and further away from the working class that we must abandon the revolutionary attempt to establish the Soviet State.

The soviets (councils), through all the mechanisms and elements inherited from the bureaucracy in the USSR, were deprived of their revolutionary content to become, in the mould of a bourgeois state, an institutionalised body. But that does not mean we should give up the attempt to build a new type of state, functioning along basic principles which would necessarily be in line with the most important thing the working class has created through the historical process of its struggle, namely a form of organisation that needs only to be improved in certain aspects in order to complete the transition, but which, basically since the Paris Commune of 1871, has been through a number of rehearsals, a series of trials and errors, which will enable us to achieve the Council-State.

Today, the task of establishing the councils as a form of organisation of the state is situated not only in the perspective of a single country but at the international level, and that is the main challenge facing the working class. Therefore, we propose through this short essay, to make an attempt to understand what the Council-State is, or in other words, to make a theoretical elaboration on a question that the working class has already experienced practically, through its historical experience and in its confrontation with the forces of capital. Let’s turn to the analysis.

2. Preamble

To avoid duplication and redundancy, we consider it to be established that, in this text, we accept the letter of all the principal theoretical and political definitions that define the body of doctrine of Lenin’s State and Revolution. Further, we warn the reader that we will only recall the Leninist premises to the extent they are indispensable to theoretically establish some of the assumptions necessary for the really urgent need to update this subject. In addition, we will only do that if the premises in question are needed to clarify and establish the theoretical-political objective that concerns us, namely the relationship between the council system and the proletarian state (= dictatorship of the proletariat) with its prior form, the pre-state.

From another point of view, Lenin's above mentioned work proves equally necessary and indispensable, as it includes the most comprehensive overview of the passages by Marx and Engels relating to the state in the phase of transition, thereby putting within easy reach a more than sufficient quantity of existing and authorised positions produced on The State and Revolution in the whole political literature.

3. Some premises of workers' power

Commenting on Engels, in two passages of his text Lenin makes the following statements: “The state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms [...] According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen nor maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes” and “...the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another”.3 Conciliation and domination are two very precise concepts in Marx, Engels and Lenin’s doctrine of the state. Conciliation means the negation of any contradiction whatsoever between the terms of a given relationship. In the social sphere, in the absence of contradictions in the ontological constitution of the fundamental social classes of a social formation, to speak of the state does not make sense. It is historically proven that in primitive societies there is no state, simply because there are no social classes, exploitation, oppression or domination by one class over another. On the other hand, when it comes to the ontological constitution of social classes, domination is a concept that excludes hegemony, as hegemony supposes the sharing – very unevenly – of positions within the same structural context. The result is that in the field of bourgeois sociality, which extends to that of the revolution, in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are situated and are fighting from diametrically antagonistic positions, to speak about hegemony of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat does not make sense, whereas one can talk of hegemony between the fractions of the bourgeoisie who share the same state power, and it also makes sense to speak of the hegemony of the proletariat over the classes with which it shares the common goal of taking power by overthrowing the common strategic enemy.4

Moreover, quoting Engels, Lenin speaks of public force, this characteristic pillar of the bourgeois state – the other being the bureaucracy – consisting of an entire specialised military and repressive apparatus, which is separated from society and above it, “...which no longer directly coincides with the population organising itself as an armed force.”5 The identification of this core component of the bourgeois order here has a clear objective: to show how, in return, it is equally essential to establish an armed force, even stronger and more coherent, by which the armed proletariat can suppress, with an even more resolute determination, the beaten but not dead class enemy, the bourgeoisie. In which body of the proletarian dictatorship must this repressive force be found?. This is a question to be addressed in a specific chapter of this text.

The other pillar on which bourgeois power rests is the bureaucracy, comprising state functionaries, who enjoy a pile of privileges, including honorary payments, positions assigned for an easy life, who accumulate all the benefits of practices inherent in a major and recurring corruption. As with the popular militias which are all the stronger to the extent that they are structurally simplified, so it is for the executive, legislative and judicial tasks, which are all the more efficient when they are also simplified, and for exactly the same reason. The executive tasks of the courts and legislative functions are strengthened to the extent that they are taken in hand directly by the workers in conditions where revocability is established in order to curb, from the start, the tendency for the resurgence of castes that has badly affected all societies born from "socialist" revolutions throughout the twentieth century.

The bureaucracy and professional law enforcement, the two main planks on which the political power of the bourgeoisie is based, the two pillars whose functions must be replaced by the workers with structures which are simplified (in the course of their extinction) but also much stronger and more efficient; simplification and strength thus oppose and attract each other in the movement that accompanies the whole transition process until there is no trace of the previous class society. The problem we are now posed is: what is the body which, for Marx, Engels and Lenin, must assume the dictatorship of the proletariat?

4. The dictatorship of the proletariat for Marx, Engels and Lenin

Our trio leaves no doubt about it:

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible."6

Or again, the proletarian state (sic) = "the proletariat organised as the ruling class." "The state, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling class." (sic). So far, the sense of the reasoning of Lenin, Marx and Engels is: the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie by the revolution; by overthrowing the bourgeois state machine, it will destroy the state machine in question to immediately erect its own state, simplified and heading for extinction, which is stronger because it is run by the revolutionary class and assumes two types of tasks: to suppress the bourgeoisie and to construct socialism (the phase of transition to communism).

But where does Marx get this belief that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletarian state? From the Paris Commune ... simple! Indeed, “The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class".7 The question goes much further: members of the proletarian state (sic), the Commune-State, are elected in district councils, which does not mean that there are no councils of workers which put themselves at the head of such councils, as in Russia, in the soviets. The question of the hegemony of the workers’ leadership is guaranteed by the existence of a majority of workers in these councils and, of course, by the leadership which the party must exercise in such instances.

Only one ingredient is missing to articulate the position of proletarian state, Council-State, Commune-State, socialist state or dictatorship of the proletariat: the method of decision-making, and here it is here that we must refer to the universal principle that many marxists fail to understand: democratic centralism, “But Engels did not at all mean democratic centralism in the bureaucratic sense in which the term is used by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologists, the anarchists among the latter. His idea of centralism did not in the least preclude such broad local self-government as would combine the voluntary defence of the unity of the state by the ‘communes’ and districts, and the complete elimination of all bureaucratic practices and all ‘ordering’ from above.”8. It is clear that the term and concept of democratic centralism is not the creation of Stalinism, as some like to argue, thus distorting this essentially proletarian method – but of Engels himself. Therefore, it cannot be given the pejorative connotation that comes from the bureaucratic centralism used by the new state bourgeoisie in the USSR.

5. Council system and dictatorship of the proletariat

The antithetical separation between the council system and post-revolutionary state is an error for several reasons. One of them is that it is a position which distances itself from the conception of Marx, Engels and Lenin in reflecting a certain influence of the anarchist conception of the state. To separate the proletarian state from the council system comes back to breaking the unity that should exist and persist in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Such a separation defines, on one side, the state as a complex administrative structure, to be managed by a body of officials – an aberration in the simplified conception of the state of Marx, Engels and Lenin – and on the another, a political structure, in the framework of the councils, to put pressure on the first (the state as such). This conception results in an accommodation to a vision influenced by anarchism that identifies the Commune-State with the (bourgeois) bureaucratic state. It is the product of the ambiguities of the Russian Revolution and places the proletariat outside of the post-revolutionary state, creating a dichotomy, which itself is the germ of a new caste breeding in an administrative body organically separate from the councils.

Another cause of this error, which is related to the preceding one, is in the establishing of a strange connection that identifies in an uncritical way the state that emerged in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union – a necessarily bureaucratic state – with the conception of the State-Commune of Marx, Engels and Lenin himself. It is an error that arises from a misunderstanding of the ambiguities that resulted from the specific historical and social circumstances that blocked not only the transition but also the beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR. Here, one ceases to understand that the dynamic taken by the Russian Revolution– unless you opt for the easy but very inconsistent interpretation in which deviations in the revolutionary process were the result of the policies of Stalin and his entourage – did not obey the conception of the revolution, the state and of socialism that Lenin had, but resulted from the restrictions of the social and political terrain from which the power of the USSR emerged, characterised among others, to recall, by the impossibility of the revolution in Europe, by civil war and the counter-revolution within the USSR. The resulting dynamic was foreign to the will of Lenin. He himself thought about this problem, but repeatedly came up with the ambiguous formulations present in his later thinking and just before his death. Such ambiguities were situated more in the advances and setbacks of the revolution than in the basic political theoretical conceptions of Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders who continued to agree with him.

A third cause of this error is to not take into account that the organisational and administrative tasks put on the agenda by the revolution are essentially political tasks, whose implementation must be carried out directly by the victorious proletariat. Thus, burning issues such as central planning – given a bureaucratic form in Gosplan (Central Planning Commission) has long been confused with "socialist centralisation" – are not purely "technical" questions but highly political and, as such, cannot be delegated, even if they are "checked" from the outside, by the councils, by means of a body of employees located outside the council system, where the most conscious workers are found. Today, we know that ultra-centralised "socialist" planning was only one aspect of the bureaucratic centralisation of "Soviet" state capitalism which kept the proletariat remote and outside of the whole system of defining objectives, decisions about what should be produced and how it should be distributed, the allocation of resources, etc.. Had it been a real socialist planning, all of this should have been the subject of wide discussion in the councils, or the Commune-State. Seeing that the proletarian state merges with the council system, the socialist state is “a very simple ‘machine’, almost without a ‘machine’, without a special apparatus, by the simple organisation of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, we would remark, running ahead).”"9

Another misunderstanding is in the non-perception that the real simplification of the Commune-State, as described by Lenin in the words reported earlier, implies a minimum of administrative structure and that this structure is so small and in the process of simplification/extinction, that it can be assumed directly by the council system. Therefore, it makes no sense to take as a reference the "soviet" state of the USSR to put in question the socialist state that Marx and Engels saw born in the Paris Commune. In fact, to establish a link between the Council-State and the bureaucratic state that emerged from the Russian Revolution, amounts to giving the proletarian state a bureaucratic structure that a true post-revolutionary state, simplified and in the process of simplification / extinction, not only does not possess but specifically rejects.

In fact, the nature and extent of the Council-State (proletarian state = socialist state = dictatorship of the proletariat= Commune-State = transition state) are beautifully summarised in this passage written by Lenin himself: “the ‘state’ is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word.”10 But, you say, if that were the true conception of the socialist state of Lenin, why was it not "applied" in the USSR after the October Revolution, seeing that what appeared then was the exact opposite of all that, from the distortions of the extreme bureaucratic centralisation (from the army to the state bureaucracy to the production units) to the most brutal repression of the Kronstadt sailors? Well, it only reveals that revolutionaries of the stature of Lenin can potentially be overcome by contradictions and ambiguities of this magnitude – and this was in the specific national and international context of the October Revolution – that can lead, in practice, to actions and decisions often diametrically opposed to their deepest convictions. In the case of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, one of the impossibilities [of the revolution. Ed. Note] - and they were many - was sufficient to steer the revolution in an undesired direction. One of these impossibilities was more than sufficient: the situation of isolation of a revolution that could not retreat, but found itself isolated and had no choice but to try to pave the way for building socialism in one country, in Soviet Russia – a contradictory attempt which was initiated already at the time of Lenin and Trotsky. What were War Communism, NEP, and other initiatives, if not this?

And then what do we do? Do we stand firm on the conceptions of Lenin, Marx and Engels on the state, programme, revolution and the party so that, in the future, when practical problems such as the internationalisation of the class struggle, among others, show the real possibilities for the revolution and building socialism in several countries – do we put them forward and give substance to the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin? Or, conversely, should we, faced with the first difficulties, give up the positions of principle, trading them for cheap political imitations that can only lead to the abandonment of the perspective of the revolution and socialist construction?

6. For a conclusion: council, (socialist) state and (socialist) pre-state

a) The Council-State

After analysing the economic premises of the abolition of social classes, that is to say, the premise “that ‘all’ can take part in the administration of the state,” Lenin, always referring to the formulations of Marx and Engels, said that “it is quite possible, after the overthrow of the capitalists and the bureaucrats, to proceed immediately, overnight, to replace them in the control over production and distribution, in the work of keeping account of labour and products, by the armed workers, by the whole of the armed population.” “Accounting and control-that is mainly what is needed for the ‘smooth working’, for the proper functioning, of the first phase of communist society. All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers of a single countrywide state ‘syndicate’.”11. In addition, “Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing. The ‘socialist stage’ “will create such conditions for the majority of the population as will enable everybody, without exception, to perform ‘state functions’.”12

All citizens, remember, organised in the council system, or in other words, in the workers’ state, seeing that for Marx, Engels and Lenin, simplifying tasks will reach a point where the basic "administrative" tasks, reduced to the extreme, not only can be taken over by the proletariat and people in general, but can be taken in charge by the council system, which, after all, is the state itself.

Thus, the proletarian state, the socialist state, the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing other than the council system, which will ensure the hegemony of the working class as a whole, will take over directly, without the need for any specific administrative body, both the defence of socialism and the management functions of the state and units of production. Finally, this unity of the proletarian dictatorship will be guaranteed by the simplified administrative/ political unit, in a single whole called the Council-State.

b) The pre-Council-State

The council system which, in the post insurrectionary situation, will be responsible for the structural transition (establishment of new relations of production, elimination of all hierarchy in production, rejection of all mercantile forms, etc.) and in the superstructure (elimination of all hierarchy inherited from the bourgeois state, of all bureaucracy, rejection of all ideology inherited from the previous social formation, etc.), is the same council system as the one that, before the revolution, was the revolutionary organisation that overthrew the bourgeoisie and its state. So this is the same body whose tasks have changed over the two stages of the same process of social revolution: having completed the task of the insurrection, it must start to implement a new task that will complete the real social revolution – the break with the social formation that has expired and the inauguration of a new one, socialism, which itself is soon to turn into the communist transition, the second classless society in history (the first was, of course, primitive society).

Well, that's the council system that we call the (proletarian) pre-state. We see that the name is, by its content, nothing original, as it was, is and always will be a proof of the revolutionary process opened up by the Paris Commune. There, the Communards who seized power from the districts were the same as those who had assumed state power – the dictatorship of the proletariat – and who had begun, although with obvious errors of youth, the construction of a socialist order. A similar process occurred again in October 1917. The first experiment could not, in the circumstances where it occurred, reach its completion and was struck by the counter-revolutionary force of the bourgeoisie, after barely two months of memorable life. The second, as we know, could not reach completion due to the lack of conditions, external and internal, including the impossibility of completing the construction of socialism in one country.

In both cases, there was a pre-state, but in both cases, a pre-state which, if on the one hand it could conduct the insurrection, on the other it could not be prepared in time for the task of building socialism. In the case of 1917, it was not until the eve of October that the only party (the Bolshevik party) equipped with the theoretical prerequisites to prepare the vanguard of the class organised in soviets, especially in St. Petersburg, could teach the class only the most urgent tasks of the insurrection. For us it seems that, despite the consciousness, especially by Lenin, of the fundamental importance of the soviets since 1905, it was only after February 1917, in the case of Lenin, that this consciousness became conviction. That is why the party of Lenin (whose return to Russia was easily predictable, as he had previously returned in 1905) did not worry about fully mobilising the militancy of its worker activists in the soviets (the Mensheviks had arrived earlier), or including them in the prior preparations of the workers for a resurgence of the soviets, sooner and by more effective training. Such training, including the most determined vanguard of the class organised in the soviets, was to include, under the fire of an incessant debate between these workers, the questions of the insurrectional seizure of power and notions of marxist theory concerning the establishment of their state and the construction of socialism. This debate was flawed, by the inability to perceive earlier the importance of the soviets, and by lack of time to take the debate among the workers of the soviets only two months before the insurrection. Nevertheless, the unpreparedness of the vanguard to seize power and to exercise it, through its intervention and its leading role, for the construction of socialism, was one of the unfavourable factors for a real dictatorship of the proletariat (on the basis represented by the councils) in the USSR. Such a gap, caused largely by the lack of a suitable pre-state, that is to say a pre-state that constitutes a school of revolution, was an additional difficulty in the shipwreck of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

As Lenin himself always pointed out, communist revolutionaries are men and women who must have a very solid marxist background. A solid marxist background requires relative knowledge of the dialectic, political economy, historical and dialectical materialism, that allows the militants of a party of cadres, not only to analyse and understand past and present circumstances, but also to capture the essentials of predictable processes, at least in terms of the broad lines (such levels of prediction can be identified in many of the analyses in Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks). Hence the fact that a real marxist training can provide militant cadres of a genuine communist party with the ability to anticipate the possible scenarios for the development of a crisis like the current crisis. Similarly, to anticipate a broad process of revolutionary situations does not constitute a "beast with seven heads."13

In addition, it is perfectly feasible to predict the most obvious thing in this world, the emergence of embryonic forms of councils – because, here and there, they are beginning to emerge in an embryonic way. They must be analysed, in all frankness, without prejudice, so that, once interpreted theoretically, workers can correct the mistakes and shortcomings of such experiences, so that they can multiply and reinforce their content, until they become, in a near future – this guarantee is provided by the advanced stage of the structural crisis of capitalism – in the context of concrete revolutionary situations, the system of councils, from the dialectical interaction of small circles (in the workplace, education and housing), factory committees, and councils (of districts, regions, industrial zones, national, etc.) that will form, at the same time, the backbone of the insurrection and, in the future, the organ of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

7. In conclusion: the ICC and the question of the post-revolutionary state

For us, the workers’ councils must have unlimited power, and as such must be the basic organs of workers' power, besides the fact that they must constitute the core of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. But it is from here that we differentiate ourselves from some interpreters of marxism who make a separation between the councils and the Commune-State, as if this Commune-State and the councils were two qualitatively distinct things. This is the position, for example, of the ICC (International Communist Current). After making this separation, such interpreters establish a link whereby the councils must exert pressure and their control over the "semi-state of the transition period", without which this state (= Commune) – that in the ICC's vision, "is neither the bearer nor the active agent of communism" – will not fulfil its immanent role as conserver of the status quo (sic) and "obstacle" to the transition.

For the ICC, “The state always tends to grow disproportionately. It is the ideal target of careerists and other parasites and easily recruits the residual elements of the old decomposing ruling class.”14 And it finishes its vision of the socialist state by stating that Lenin at least foresaw (this function of the state) when he “talked about the state as the reconstitution of the old Tsarist apparatus”.and when he says that the state born from the October Revolution tended “to escape our control and go in the opposite direction from the one we want it to go.” For the ICC, “The proletarian state is a myth. Lenin rejected it, recalling that it was “a workers’ and peasants’ government with bureaucratic deformations.”” Moreover, for the ICC:

“The great experience of the Russian Revolution is there to prove it. Every sign of fatigue, failure or error on the part of the proletariat has the immediate consequence of strengthening the state; conversely each victory, each reinforcement of the state weakens the proletariat a little bit more. The state feeds on the weakening of the proletariat and its class dictatorship. Victory for one is defeat for the other.”"15

It also says, in other passages,16 that “The proletariat retains and maintains complete freedom in relation to the state. On no pretext will the proletariat subordinate the decision-making power of its own organs, the workers’ councils, to that of the state; it must see that the opposite is the case”; that the proletariat “won’t tolerate the interference of the state in the life and activity of the organised class; it will deprive the state of any right or possibility of repressing the working class” and that “The proletariat retains its arms outside of any control by the state”. “The precondition for this is that the class does not identify with the state.”

What is the situation with this vision of the ICC comrades on the Commune-State? First, that neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin, as we have seen in the observations made above and taken from The State and Revolution, defend the conception of the state developed by the ICC. As we have seen, the Commune-State was, for them, the Council-State, the expression of the power of the proletariat and its class dictatorship. For Lenin, the post-revolutionary state was not only not a myth, as the ICC think, but the proletarian state itself. How can this state be so described by the ICC when at the same time it conceives it as a Commune-State?

Second, as we have already analysed above, the paradoxical separation between the councils and post-revolutionary state, posed by the ICC, distances itself from the conception of Marx, Engels and Lenin and reflects a certain influence of the anarchist conception of the state. We need to reiterate what we have said before, that to separate the proletarian state from the council system amounts to breaking the unity that should exist and exists under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that such a separation places, on the one hand, the state as a complex administrative structure and managed by a body of officials – a nonsense in the simplified design of the state according to Marx, Engels and Lenin – and, on the other, a political structure in which the councils exert pressure on the state as such.

Third, we repeat: this conception, which results from an accommodation to a vision influenced by anarchism that identifies the Commune-State with the bureaucratic (bourgeois) state, comes from the ambiguities of the Russian Revolution, putting the proletariat outside of the post-revolutionary state while actually creating a dichotomy that, itself, is the germ of a new caste reproducing itself in the administrative body separated organically from the workers' councils. The ICC confuses the concept of the state of Lenin with the state produced by the ambiguities of the Revolution of October 1917. When Lenin complained about the atrocities of the state as it developed in the USSR, this does not mean that he rejected his conception of the Commune-State, but the deviations from the Russian Commune-State after October.

Fourth, the comrades of the ICC do not seem to realise, as we also discussed above, the fact that the organisational and administrative tasks that the revolution puts on the agenda from the beginning, are essentially political tasks, whose implementation must be carried out directly by the victorious proletariat.

Fifth, the comrades of the ICC do not seem to realise that, as we also indicated above, the real simplification of the Commune-State, in the sense that Lenin expressed, makes the administrative structure so minimal that it can be managed directly by the council system.

Sixth and final point. Only by assuming directly and from within, simplified tasks under the guidance of the Council-State, of defence and socialist transition/construction, will the working class will be in a condition to prevent a schism occurring between a foreign state and the Council-State, so that it can exercise its control, not only over what happens within the state, but also within society as a whole.

For this, it is worthwhile to recall that the proletarian state, the Commune-State, the socialist state, the dictatorship of the proletariat are nothing other than the council system that has taken charge of the basic organisational tasks of the militias, the length of the working day, work brigades and other equally revolutionary types of tasks (revocability of positions, equal pay, etc.)... tasks, also simplified, concerning the struggle and organisation of a society in transition. For this, it will not be necessary to create an administrative monster, and still less a bureaucratic one, nor any kind of form inherited from the beaten bourgeois state or even something resembling the bureaucratic state capitalism of the ex-USSR.

It would be great if the ICC examines the passages we have highlighted in this text from Lenin’s State and Revolution, where this justifies, on the basis of Marx and Engels, the need for the Commune-State, the Council-State, the proletarian state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

OPOP

(September 2008, revised December 2010)

Is capitalism a decadent mode of production and why? (I)

At the time of a major acceleration of the world economic crisis we have decided to return to the fundamental questions of the dynamic of capitalist society. Only by understanding them can we fight a system that is condemned to perish either by its own contradictions or by its overthrow and replacement by a new society. These questions have already been looked at in numerous publications of the ICC, so if we judge it necessary to raise them again it is to critique the vision developed in the book Dynamics, contradictions and crises of capitalism.1 This book explicitly defends, with quotations, the analyses of Marx concerning the characterisation of the contradictions and the dynamic of capitalism, notably the fact that the system, like other class societies that have preceded it, necessarily goes through an ascendant phase and a phase of decline. But the manner in which this framework of theoretical analysis is sometimes interpreted and applied to reality opens the door to the idea that reforms would be possible within capitalism which would permit the attenuation of the crisis. In opposition to this approach, the article that follows attempts an argued defence of the insurmountable character of the contradictions of capitalism.

In the first part of this article we examine whether capitalism has ceased to be a progressive system since the First World War, and if it has become, according to Marx's own words, “a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour”.2 In other words, do the production relations of this system, after having been a formidable factor in the development of the productive forces, constitute, since 1914, a brake on the development of these same productive forces? In a second part we will analyse the origin of capitalism's insurmountable crises of overproduction, and unmask the reformist mystification of a possible attenuation of the crisis by 'social policies'.

Has capitalism been a brake on the growth of the productive forces since the First World War?

The blind forces of capitalism, unleashed by the First World War, destroyed far more productive forces than in all the economic crises of capitalism since its birth. They plunged the world, particularly Europe, into a barbarism threatening to engulf civilisation. This situation would provoke, in reaction, a world revolutionary wave aiming to finish with a system whose contradictions was now a threat to humanity. The position defended at the time by the vanguard of the world proletariat followed the vision of Marx for whom “The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms.”3 The Letter of Invitation (end of January 1919) to the Founding Congress of the Communist International declared: “the present period is that of the decomposition and collapse of the whole world capitalist system, it will be the collapse of European civilisation in general, if capitalism, with its insurmountable contradictions, is not defeated.”4 Its Platform underlined that: “A new epoch is born: the epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”.5

The author of the book, Marcel Roelandts, (MR) accepts this characteristic of the First World War and the international revolutionary wave that followed it, often in the same terms. His analysis partly restates the following elements in relation to the evolution of capitalism since 1914 and which, for us, has confirmed the diagnosis of the decadence of capitalism:

• the First World War (20 million dead) lowered the production of the European powers involved in the conflict by more than a third, an unprecedented phenomenon in the whole history of capitalism;

• it was followed by a phase of feeble economic growth leading to the crisis of 1929 and the depression of the 1930s. The latter caused a greater fall in production than that caused by the First World War;

• the Second World War, even more destructive and barbaric than the first (more than 50 million dead) provoked a disaster to which the crisis of 1929 provides no possible comparison. The alternative posed by revolutionaries at the time of the First World War had been tragically confirmed: socialism or barbarism.

• since the Second World War there hasn't been a single instant of peace in the world and instead hundreds of wars and tens of millions killed, without counting the resulting humanitarian catastrophes (famines). War, omnipresent in numerous regions of the world, had nevertheless spared Europe, the principle theatre of the two world wars, for a half century. But it made a bloody return there with the conflict in Yugoslavia that began in 1991;

• during this period, except for the period of prosperity in the 50s and 60s, capitalism has not been able to avoid recessions that require the injection of more and more massive doses of credit. Growth has only been maintained by the fiction that these debts will be finally repaid;

• after 2007-2008 the accumulation of colossal debt has become an insurmountable obstacle to the maintenance of even the weakest growth. Not only businesses and banks but also states have been fundamentally weakened or threatened with bankruptcy. A recession without end is now on the historical agenda.

We have limited ourselves here in this summary to the most salient elements of the crises and wars which have made the 20th century the most barbaric that humanity has even known. The dynamic of the economy is not necessarily the direct cause but it cannot be dissociated from the nature of this period.

With what method can we evaluate capitalist production and its growth?

For MR this picture of the life of society since the First World War is not sufficient to confirm the diagnosis of decadence.

For him, “if certain arguments of this analysis of capitalist obsolescence can still be defended, one is forced to recognise that there are others (since the end of the 1950s) which cannot.” He rests on Marx for whom capitalism can only be decadent if “the capitalist system becomes an obstacle for the expansion of the productive forces of labour”. So, according to MR, the quantitative data does not reasonably permit the idea “that the capitalist system is a brake on the productive forces” nor “that it has shown its obsolescence in the eyes of humanity”. Moreover, he says, “in comparison with the period of the strongest growth of capitalism before the First World War, development since then (1914-2008) is clearly superior.”6

The empirical data must necessarily be taken into account. But that is clearly not enough. A method is needed to analyse it. We cannot be content with an account sheet, but must go beneath the raw data to closely examine what production and growth are made of, in order to identify the actual existence of brakes on the development of the productive forces. This is not the point of view of MR for whom “those who maintain the diagnosis of obsolescence can only do so if they avoid confronting reality or use expedients to try and explain it: by credit, military expenses, unproductive expenses, the existence of a supposed colonial market, the so-called statistical manipulation or mysterious manipulations of the law of value, etc. Actually there are few marxists who have made a clear and coherent explanation of the growth of the Thirty Glorious Years7 and been able to discuss certain realities in flagrant contradiction with the diagnosis of the obsolescence of capitalism."8 We imagine that MR is of the opinion that he himself belongs to that rare category of marxists and therefore would quickly grasp the following question, to which no trace of response can be found in his book: in what way is the invocation of 'unproductive costs' an 'expedient' to explain the nature of growth in the phase of decadence?

In fact, understanding what capitalist production is made of corresponds completely to the needs of the marxist method in its critique of capitalism. It permits us to see how has this system, thanks to the social organisation of production, allowed humanity to make the enormous leap of developing the productive forces to a level where a society based on the free satisfaction of human needs becomes a possibility once capitalism is overturned. Can we say that the development of the productive forces since the First World War and the price paid for it by society and the planet, is a necessary condition for the victorious revolution? In other terms, has capitalism continued to be, since 1914, a progressive system, favouring the material conditions for the revolution and communism?

The quantitative data for growth

Graph 19 represents (in the horizontal lines) the average annual growth in different periods between 1820 and 1999. It also shows significant departures from the rates of growth, above and below the average figures.

The average rate of growth in Graph 1 has been restated in Table 1 concerning the period 1820-1999. To complete this table, we have estimated the average annual rate of growth for the period 1999-2009 using a statistical series relative to this period 10 based on a negative world growth of 0.5% in 2009.11

From the figures presented here, a certain number of elementary conclusions can be drawn:

• the four most important dips in economic activity have all occurred since 1914 and correspond to the two world wars, the crisis of 1929 and the recession of 2009;

• the most splendid period in the life of capitalism before the First World War was between 1870-1913. It is the period that most represents a mode of production that has completely freed itself from the relations of production inherited from feudalism and possessing, following imperialist conquest of the colonies,12 a world market whose limits have not yet been reached. Moreover, as a consequence of this situation, the sale of an important mass of goods can compensate for the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and free up a mass of profit sufficient for continued accumulation. It is also the period, which closes the phase of ascendance and opens up the phase of decadence marked by the outbreak of the First World War that occurs at the height of capitalist prosperity;

• the period that follows the First World War and extends till the end of the 1940s fully confirms the diagnosis of decadence. In this sense we share the appreciation of MR for whom the characteristics of the period 1914-1945, and even beyond, up until the end of the 1940s, completely correspond to the description given by the revolutionary movement in 1919, in continuity with Marx, that the phase of the decadence of capitalism opens with the world war;

• the period of the Thirty Glorious Years, between approximately 1946-1973, with far superior growth rates than those of 1870-1913, are in enormous contrast to the preceding period;

• the following period, until 2009, shows a rate of growth slightly superior to the best phase of the ascendance of capitalism.

Do the Thirty Glorious Years put the analysis of decadence in question? Does the following period confirm that it has not been an exception?

The level of economic activity of each of these two periods is explained by the qualitative modifications of production since 1914, in particular the swelling of unproductive expenses, the way in which credit has been used since the 1950s, and by the creation of fictitious value through what is called the ‘financialisation’ of the economy.

Unproductive expenses: What are they?

We include in the category of unproductive expenses the costs of that part of production whose use value cannot be employed in any way in the simple or enlarged reproduction of capital. The clearest example is that of the production of armaments. Weapons may serve to make war but do not produce anything, not even other weapons. Luxury spending destined essentially to sweeten the life of the bourgeoisie also comes into this category. Marx speaks of it in pejorative terms: “A great part of the annual product is consumed as revenue and does not return to production as means of production: pernicious products (use values) which only assuage the most wretched whims and passions”.13

The reinforcement of the state machine

Another entry in this category are all the state expenses required to face up to the growing contradictions of capitalism on the economic, imperialist and social levels. Thus, beside arms spending one also finds the cost of the upkeep of the repressive and judicial apparatus, as well as that of the containment of the working class – the trade unions. It is difficult to estimate the part of the state expenses which is included in the category of unproductive expenses. A sector like education, which is necessary for the upkeep and development of the labour force and its productivity, also has an unproductive side of masking youth unemployment and making it tolerable. In a general way, as MR strongly argues, “The reinforcement of the state machine, as well as its growing intervention in society, is one of the most obvious manifestations of the phase of obsolescence of a mode of production (...) Fluctuating around 10% throughout the ascendant phase of capitalism, the share of the state in the OECD countries climbs progressively since the First World War to reach around 50% in 1995, varying between a low of about 35% for the US and Japan, and a high of 60-70% for the Nordic countries."14

Among these expenses, the cost of militarism is usually more than the 10% that the military budget reached in certain circumstances in some of the most industrialised countries, since the manufacture of armaments must be added to the cost of the different wars. The growing weight of militarism15 since the First World War is clearly not an independent phenomenon in the life of society but the expression of the high level of economic contradictions which constrain each power to increasingly engage in military preparations in order to survive in the world arena.

The weight of unproductive expenses in the economy

Unproductive costs, which certainly represent more than 20% of GDP, in reality only correspond to a sterilisation of a significant amount of accumulated wealth which therefore cannot be used for the creation of greater wealth, which is contrary to the fundamental essence of capitalism. We have here a clear manifestation of the braking effect on the development of the productive forces which has its origin in the relations of production themselves.

To these unproductive expenses may be added another type: that of illegal trafficking of all kinds, drugs in particular. This is an unproductive consumption but is however counted as part of GDP. Thus the laundering of the revenues of this activity represents several percentage points of world GDP: “Drug traffickers will have laundered around 1,600 billion dollars or 2.7% of world GDP in 2009 (...) according to a new report published on Tuesday by the United Nations Office against Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (...) The report of the UNODC indicates that all the benefits of this criminality, excluding tax evasion, will rise to about 2,100 billion dollars, or 3.6% of GDP in 2009”.16

To restore the truth about real growth, around 3.5% of the additional amount of GDP must be amputated because of money laundering for the different traffic.

The role of unproductive expenditure in the miracle of the Thirty Glorious Years

Keynesian measures, aimed at stimulating final demand and which thus helped to ensure that the problems of overproduction did not manifest themselves openly during any part of the period of the Thirty Glorious Years, were largely unproductive expenditures whose cost was supported by the state. Among them were wage increases, beyond what is socially necessary for the reproduction of labour power. The secret of the prosperity of the Thirty Glorious Years amounts to an enormous waste of surplus value that could then be supported by the economy due to the important productivity gains registered during this period.

The miracle of the Thirty Glorious Years, therefore, under favourable conditions, was enabled by a policy of the bourgeoisie which, educated by the 1929 crisis and the depression of the 1930s, took pains to delay the open return of the crisis of overproduction. In this sense, this episode in the life of capitalism fits well with what MR says: "The exceptional period of prosperity after the war appears in all points analogous with the periodic recoveries during the periods of ancient and feudal obsolescence. We therefore endorse our assumption that the Thirty Glorious Years only constitutes an interval in the course of a mode of production that has exhausted its historic mission." (Dyn p.65)
Would Keynesian measures be possible again? We cannot rule out scientific and technological advances that could again enable significant productivity gains and reduce the production costs of goods. Nevertheless this would continue to pose the question of a buyer for them since there are no more extra-capitalist markets and hardly any potential to increase demand through additional debt. Under these conditions the repetition of the boom of the Thirty Glorious Years appears totally unrealistic.

The financialisation of the economy

We reproduce here the most commonly accepted meaning of that term: "Financialization is strictly the use of funding and in particular to indebtedness on the part of economic agents. One can also call financialization of the economy the growing share of financial activities (banking, insurance and investments) in the GDP of developed countries in particular. It comes from an exponential multiplication of these types of financial activities and the development of the practice of financial operations, both by businesses and other institutions and by individuals. One can also speak of a rise of finance capital as distinguished from the narrower concept of capital focused on production equipment ".17 We distinguish ourselves completely from the anti-globalisation movement, and from the left the capital in general, for whom the financialisation of the economy is the cause of the current crisis in capitalism. We have widely developed in our press how it is exactly the opposite.18 Indeed, it is because the "real" economy has been plunged for decades in a deep slump that capital tends to shy away from this sphere which is less and less profitable. MR seems to share our view. That said, he does not seem interested in taking into account the significant implications of this phenomenon for the composition of GDP.

The U.S. is certainly the country where financial activity has been the most important development. In 2007, 40% of private sector profits in the U.S. were made by banks, which employ only 5% of employees.19 Table 2 shows, for the United States and Europe, the weight gained by financial activities20 (the parallel evolution of industrial production in the US over the same period has been given as a guide):

Unlike unproductive expenditures, we are not dealing here with a sterilisation of capital, but in the same sense as this, the development of finance leading to the artificial inflation of the estimate of the annual wealth of some countries ranging from 2% for the EU to 27% for the United States. Indeed, the creation of financial products is not accompanied by the creation of real wealth, so that, in all fairness, its contribution to national wealth is zero.

If we get rid of GDP activity corresponding to the financialisation of the economy, all major industrialised countries would see their GDP reduced by a percentage varying between 2% and 20%. An average of 10% seems acceptable in view of the respective weight of the EU and US.

The increasing recourse to debt from the 1950s

In our view, the failure to take into account the increase in debt which has accompanied capitalist development since the 1950s reveals the same prejudice that discards a qualitative analysis of growth.

Can we deny that it is a fact? Graph 2 illustrates the evolution of world debt as a whole (relative to the growth of GDP) from the 1960s. Over this period debt increases faster than economic growth.

In the United States (Graph 321) debt starts to take off at the beginning of the 1950s. It goes from less than 1.5 times GDP at that time to reach a figure that is more than 3.5 times GDP today. Prior to 1950 it reached a peak in 1933 due to private debt but then decreased again.

It should be noted that the 1946 peak in public debt (at a moment when private debt was weak) was the result of growth in public spending to finance the New Deal. It was fairly low at first but increased dramatically from 1940 onwards in order to finance the war effort.

From the 1950s-60s, debt acted as "solvent demand" allowing the economy to grow. This was an ever-increasing debt that was basically destined never to be re-paid, as testified by the present situation of excessive debt on the part of all the economic players in every country. This situation risks leading to the bankruptcy of the main economic players, the nation states that is, and so heralds the end of growth by means of increasing debt. In other words, this means the end of growth all together, except for limited periods within a general course towards depression. It is vital that our analysis takes into account that reality is inflicting a dramatic lowering of the growth rate since the 1960s. This is the boomerang effect of this shameless cheating with the law of value. MR rejects the expression "cheating with the law of value" to describe this practice of international capitalism. Nevertheless it is essentially the same as the protectionist measures taken in the USSR in order to artificially keep alive an economy that was less efficient than that of the main countries of the western bloc. The collapse of the eastern bloc revealed the truth. Will it take the collapse of the world economy to convince MR of the consequences of a mass of existing debt that cannot be repaid?

In order to make an objective and rigorous assessment of real growth since the 1960s, we should deduct the amounting accumulation of debt from the official increase in GDP between 1960 and 2010. In fact, as Graph 2 shows, the increase in world GDP is less relevant than the increase in world debt in this period, to the point that not only did this important period of post war boom fail to generate wealth but it also helped to create a global deficit which reduces the miracle of the post war boom to nothing.

The evolution in the living conditions of the working class

During the ascendant period the working class was able to exact lasting economic reforms in terms of working hours and wage increases. This was because of the struggle for demands and also because the system was able to grant them, thanks in particular to a significant increase in production. This situation changes with capitalism's entry into decadence when, with the exception of the post-war boom, productivity increases are increasingly placed at the service of each national bourgeoisie's mobilisation against the contradictions that assail it at all levels (economic, military and social) and it leads, as we have seen, to the strengthening of the state apparatus.

Wage increases following the First World War generally serve only to compensate for the constant increase in prices. The increases granted in France in June 1936 (the Matignon agreement: 12% on average) were wiped out in six months as from September 1936 to January 1937 alone prices increased by about 11%. In the same way, we know what remained one year later of the increases obtained in May 1968 with the Grenelle agreement.

On this point, MR says this: "In the same way, the communist movement has defended the idea that after the First World War it is impossible to win real and lasting social reforms. However, if we look at the evolution of real wages and working hours in the course of the century, not only do we find nothing to back up this conclusion, but also the facts show that the opposite is the case. Whereas real wages in the developed countries doubled or tripled at most before 1914, they increased six or seven-fold after that date: that is, three or four times more during the "decadent" period of capitalism than when it was ascendant."22

It is rather difficult to discuss this analysis as the figures given are very approximate. We can understand that it is difficult to do better given the material available on this question but a minimum of scientific rigour demands that at least the sources be cited from which extrapolations are made. Moreover, assertions are made about wage increases in the ascendance and decadence of capitalism with no indication of the precise period referred to, It is easy to see that an increase over thirty years cannot be compared to an increase over 100 years (unless it is given in the form of the annual mean increase, which obviously is not the case). In addition, it is important to understand the period so that the comparison can integrate other aspects of social life, which are of primary importance to our mind in placing the wage increases in perspective. Of particular importance is the development of unemployment. An increase in wages accompanied by a rise in unemployment can very easily result in a lowering of workers' living standards.

Following the passage that we have just discussed, there is a graph in the book whose title indicates that it concerns real wage increases in Great Britain from 1750 to 1910 and a financial deal in France concerning the years from 1840 to 1974. However the figures relating to the French deal for the period between 1840 to 1900 are missing and those concerning the period 1950-1980 are illegible. We can make more use of the information on Great Britain. From 1860 to 1900 it would seem that real wages increased from 60 to 100, which corresponds to an annual increase of 1.29% over the period.

In examining wages in decadence we divide the period into two sub-periods:

• from 1914 to 1950; we do not have a series of statistics for this period but rather scattered and heterogeneous figures, which nevertheless indicate that living standards were affected by the Second World War and the 1929 crisis;

• the subsequent period, which goes up to the present day, for which we have more reliable and homogenous data.

1) 1914-1950 23

For the European countries the First World War is synonomous with inflation and the shortage of goods. Once it ended the two camps were confronted with the need to repay a colossal debt (three times the national income in the case of Germany) that had been incurred in order to finance the war effort. The bourgeoisie saw to it that the working class and the petty bourgeoisie paid for it through inflation which, while reducing the amount of debt, also drastically reduced income and sent savings up in smoke. In Germany in particular, from 1919 to 1923, workers saw a non-stop reduction in their income, with wages much lower than before the war. In was the same in France and in England too but to a lesser extent. But in the case of the latter the entire inter-war period was characterised by permanent unemployment that paralysed millions of workers, a phenomenon that was unknown up to then in the history of capitalism, either in England or internationally. In Germany from the end of the period of astronomic inflation, around 1924, up to the 1929 crisis the number of unemployed stayed generally above 1 million ( 2 million in 1926).

In 1929, unlike Germany, but like France, Great Britain had not returned to its 1913 position.

The trajectory of the United States was very different. Before the war, American industry developed faster than in Europe. This tendency strengthened from the end of the war up to the beginning of the world economic crisis. So the United States experienced prosperity throughout the First World War and the subsequent period until the open crisis of 1929. But this crisis reduced the real wage of American workers to a level inferior to that of 1890 (it was 87% of the latter). The development over this period is presented in Table 3:24

2) from 1951 to the present day (compared to 1880-1910)

Table 4 contains statistics concerning the evolution of the wages of French workers:

• expressed in Francs for the period 1880-1910;25

• expressed in terms of a base of 100 for 1951 for the period 1951-2008.26

Table 4 demonstrates the following facts:

1. The period 1951-1970, at the heart of the post-war boom, experienced the highest rate of wage increases in the history of capitalism, which is consistent with the phase of economic growth to which it corresponds and its specificities, such as, among other things, Keynesian measures to sustain demand with a view to increasing wages.

There are also other factors, which are by no means secondary, to explain this growth in wages:

• the standard of living in France in 1950 was very low, which is shown by the fact that it was only in 1949 that ration cards, introduced in 1941 to tackle the poverty of the war period , were abolished;

• from the 1950s the cost of reproducing the work force includes a number of significant expenses which did not exist previously: the increased demand for technical knowledge for a large number of jobs means that the children of the working class must receive more years of schooling and so remain at the cost of their parents longer; "modern" working conditions in large cities also increase costs. Although the modern proletariat is surrounded by household goods which they did not have in the 19th century, this does not mean that their standard of living is higher, because their relative exploitation goes on increasing. Many of these "household goods" did not exist previously; in bourgeois houses the domestic servants did everything by hand. They have now become indispensable in workers' households in order to save time because often both the man and woman have to work to support the family. Likewise, when the car appeared on the scene it was a luxury of the rich. Now it has become indispensable for many proletarians to get to work without having to spend hours on public transport with its inadequate services. It is the rise in the productivity of labour which has made it possible to produce such things, which are no longer a luxury, at a price that is compatible with the level of workers' wages;

• The subsequent period, 1970-2005, saw wage increases that were on a par with those in the ascendant period of capitalism (1.18% versus 1.16% - bearing in mind that in Great Britain there was a 1.29% increase in the period 1860-1900). Having said this, we should take into account a number of factors that show that the living conditions of the working class did not really improve to that extent and that they even got worse than in the previous period:

• this period witnessed a dramatic increase in unemployment, which greatly affected the standard of living in working class households. We have figures for unemployment in France, which are presented in Table 5:27
  

• from the 1980s legislation aiming to lower the official unemployment figures led to changes in the way the number of unemployed are counted (for example, by excluding partial employment) and also ended up excluding unemployed from the figures by means of increasingly strict criteria. This basically explains the lower rate of increase in unemployment afterwards;

• the period after 1985 witnessed the development of precarious work with fixed term contracts and part-time work, which are really disguised unemployment;

• the assessment of the real wage, adjusted to take account of the official estimate of the cost of living, is greatly over-estimated by the official figures, to the point that the INSEE (National Institute for Economic Statistics and Studies) in France have been forced to admit that there is a difference between official inflation and "perceived" inflation, the latter being based on a household view of price increases in basic, essential products (the expenses that one cannot cut down on), which is much higher than official inflation.28

• The period 2005-2008, although shorter than the previous period, is more indicative in its official rate of wage increases as around 0.5% because it heralds the future. In fact this increase of only 0.5% corresponds to a much more significant deterioration, in that all the factors mentioned for the previous period must still be taken into account but in much larger proportions. In fact, it is the statistics on wages that lead us to give 2008 as the end of the period beginning in 2005. From 2008 onwards the situation of the working class deteriorated drastically as is attested by the evolution in the figures regarding poverty and we cannot ignore this fact when studying the period. In 2009 the percentage of poor people in French cities has not only increased but their degree of poverty has also increased. They now represent 13.5% of the population, that is 8.2 million people, 400,000 more than in 2008.

What can we conclude from nearly a century of capitalist development?

We have seen that the inclusion in GDP of all unproductive expenses, of activities that are merely financial or criminal, greatly contributes to an over-estimation of the wealth created annually.

We have also seen that the contradictions of capitalism itself wipe out a significant percentage of capitalist production (particularly through "unproductive" production). As for the living conditions of the working class, they are by no means as brilliant as the official statistics try to make us believe.

In addition, there is an aspect that we have not brought out in our examination of production or of working conditions, that is, the cost exacted by the domination of capitalist productive relations since the First World War, in terms of the destruction of the environment and the exhaustion of the world's resources of raw materials. This is difficult to quantify but absolutely crucial for the future of humanity. This is another reason, and by no means a minor one, to exclude decisively any idea that capitalism has been a progressive system as regards the future of the working class or of humanity for nearly a century now.

MR notes that capitalist development in this period has been accompanied by war, barbarism and environmental damage. On the other hand, and rather surprisingly, he concludes his defence plea, which aims to show that the relations of production after the 1950s have not acted increasingly as a brake on the development of the productive forces, by affirming that the system is well into its decadence: "In our opinion there is therefore no contradiction between recognising, on the one hand, the undeniable prosperity of the post-war period and all its consequences and in nevertheless maintaining, on the other hand, the diagnosis that capitalism has been historically obsolete since the beginning of the 20th century. It follows that the vast majority of the working population does not yet see capitalism as an out-dated tool that it must get rid of: it is always possible to hope that 'tomorrow will be better than yesterday'. Although this scenario is being reversed in the old industrial countries today, it is by no means the case for the emerging countries."29 If you reject the marxist criteria of a brake on the productive forces to characterise the decadence of a mode of production, what then is it based on? MR's reply: the "domination of wages on the scale of a now unified world market". He explains it in this way: "The end of colonial conquest at the beginning of the 20th century and the domination of wages on the scale of a now unified world market marked an historic turning point and inaugurated a new capitalist phase"30 And in what way does this characteristic of the new phase of capitalism explain the First World War and the revolutionary wave of 1917-23? What is its link with the resistance struggles that are so necessary for a proletariat faced with the manifestations of capitalism's contradictions? We have found no reply to these questions in the book.

We will return in part to these questions in the second part of this article, in which we will also examine how MR adapts the marxist theory and puts it at the service of reformism.

Silvio (December 2011)

It is well known that French imperialism liberally drew its cannon fodder from among the youth of its African colonies, as was demanded by its high level involvement in the Second World War. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers, the overwhelming majority of them young workers and unemployed, were enrolled and sacrificed in the bloody imperialist slaughter. With the conflict over, a period of reconstruction opened up for the French economy whose repercussions were felt in the colony in an unbearable exploitation that the workers began to courageously struggle against.

Bloody suppression of the soldiers’ revolt and strike action

It began with the revolt of the soldiers who had survived the great world butchery, who rebelled against the non-payment of money owed to them. Having returned home to a demob camp in Thiaroye (a Dakar suburb) in December 1944, hundreds of soldiers demanded a pension from the “provisional government” headed by General de Gaulle. The blunt response they received from their commanders was a hail of bullets. Officially 35 were killed in the attack, 33 injured and 50 arrested. This is how the workers and veteran fighters who had supported the “liberators” of France were thanked by the latter, who included in their ranks the “communist” and “socialist” members of de Gaulle’s government. The famous “French Resistance” gave a great lesson in “humanism” and “brotherhood” to its “native foot soldiers” in rebellion against the non-payment of their meagre pensions.

However, this bloody response of the French bourgeoisie to the demands of the rebels could not prevent the outbreak of sustained struggles. In fact a general unrest was about to unfold:

“The teachers’ strike action broke out first, from December 1st to 7th 1945, and then it was the industrial workers from December 3rd to 10th. The strike broke out again in January, with the steelworkers again involved, but also employees in the commercial sector and the ancillary staff of the Governor General. The requisition measures taken by the Governor on January 14th 1946 provoked a general strike supported by 27 unions. The civil servants only resumed work on January 24th, those in the commercial sector on February 4th, and the steelworkers on February 8th.”1

Despite suffering terribly during the war, the working class was beginning to raise its head again in rebellion against poverty and exploitation.

But the resumption of combativity was taking place in a new environment that wasn’t conducive to working class autonomous action. In fact, the proletariat of French West Africa (FWA) in the post-war period could not avoid being caught between the advocates of Pan-African ideology (independence) and the colonial forces of the left of capital (SFIO, PCF and the trade unions). But despite this, the working class continued its struggle against the attacks of capitalism with great pugnacity.

The heroic and victorious strike of the railway workers between October 1947 and March 1948

During this period the railway workers across the whole of FWA went on strike to satisfy a number of demands, including that both Africans and Europeans should be employed on the same basis and in opposition to 3,000 employees being made redundant.

“Railway workers were originally organised within the CGT. Some 17,500 of these workers left in 1948 following a very hard strike. During this strike, a number of the French employees had expressed violent opposition to any improvement in the situation of the African staff.”2

The railway strike ended victoriously through the active solidarity of workers in other sectors (dockworkers and others employed in the industrial sector) who went on strike for 10 days, forcing the colonial authorities to satisfy most of the strikers’ demands. Everything was decided during a big meeting in Dakar called by the Governor General. In the hope of putting a brake on the movement, the floor was given over to political notables and religious leaders whose mission was to beguile and to intimidate the strikers. And customarily, the most zealous were the religious leaders.

“A campaign was undertaken by the ‘spiritual leaders’, the imams and the priests from different sects, to demoralise the strikers and especially their wives … The imams, furious at the resistance of the workers to their injunctions, railed against the delegates, accusing them of every possible sin: atheism, alcoholism, prostitution, infant mortality, even going so far as to predict that these sinners would bring about the end of the world.”3

But nothing was achieved. Despite being accused of all these “sins”, the railway workers were determined and their combativity stayed intact. It was strengthened even further when their appeal for solidarity in a general assembly found increasing support from workers in other sectors who chanted: “We, the builders, are for the strike! We, the port workers, are for the strike! We, the steelworkers…We, the…”.4

And indeed, the very next day, there was a general strike in almost every sector. However, before this could happen, the railway workers not only had to suffer pressure from the political and religious leaders, but were also subjected to terrible repression from the military. Some sources5 indicate that people died, and the colonial authority used its “sharpshooters” to suppress a “march of women” (the wives and relatives of the rail workers) to Dakar that was in support of the strikers.

The working class can only rely on itself. It’s symbolic that the CGT collected financial contributions from Paris, and back in FWA it criticised “those who wanted their independence” and who launched a “political strike”. In fact, the CGT took cover behind “the opinions” of the European citizens of the colony who rejected the demands of the “natives”. In addition, this behaviour of the CGT pushed the native railway workers to abandon the Stalinist union en masse following this magnificent class combat.

SFIO, PCF, unions and African nationalists divert the struggle of the working class

The railway workers’ strike that ended in March 1948 took place in an atmosphere of great political turmoil following the referendum giving birth to the “Union Francaise”.6 Hence the actions of the railway workers acquired a highly political dimension, obliging all the political colonial forces and those in favour of independence to tactically position themselves either in favour or against the strikers’ demands. So the PCF was seen hiding behind the CGT to sabotage the strike movement, while the SFIO in power attempted to suppress the movement using every possible means. For their part, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Sekou Toure, two rival Pan-Africanists who would become presidents of Senegal and Guinea respectively, openly declared themselves in support of the demands of the railway workers.

But the day after the strikers’ victory, the left forces and African nationalists clashed, each claiming to be for the working class. By exploiting the struggles of the working class to serve their own interests, they managed to divert the autonomous struggle of the proletariat from its real class objectives.

Thus, the unions took up the question of the Labour Code to poison relations between workers. Indeed, through this “code”, the French social legislation had established a real geographic and ethnic discrimination in the colonies: firstly, between workers of European origin and workers of African origin and secondly, between those hailing from different colonies, even between citizens of the same country.7 It turned out that the SFIO (forerunner to today’s French Socialist Party), which had promised the abolition of the iniquitous Labour Code in 1947, prevaricated until 1952, providing the unions, particularly those in favour of African independence, to focus the workers’ demands exclusively on this question by systematically raising the slogan of “equal rights for white and black”. This idea of equal rights and negotiating with Africans was openly opposed by the most backward European union, the CGT, and we should say that in this situation the CGT played a particularly despicable role insofar as it justified its position by the support it gained from its opposition.

Moreover, in response, the CGT militants of African origin8 decided to create their own union to defend the “specific rights” of African workers. All this gave rise to the formulation of increasingly nationalist and interclassist demands as this passage from the organisation’s rulebook illustrates:

“The concepts adopted [those of French metropolitan unionism] insufficiently illuminate the evolution and the tasks of economic and social progress in Africa, especially since, despite the contradictions existing between the various local social strata, colonial rule makes inappropriate any references to class struggle and avoids the dispersal of forces into doctrinal competition.”9

Thus the unions were able to pass the act effectively because, despite the persistence of a ceaseless militancy of the working class between 1947 and 1958, all the movements struggling for wage claims and in order to improve working conditions, were diverted into fighting colonial rule and winning “independence”. Clearly, during the movement of the railway workers in 1947-48, the working class of the colony of FWA still had the strength to successfully take the struggle onto the class terrain, on the other hand, subsequently the strikes were controlled and directed towards the objectives of the bourgeois forces, the unions and political parties. It was precisely this situation that was the springboard for Leopold Sedar Senghor and Sekou Toure to draw the people and the working class behind their own struggle for the succession to colonial rule. And after the countries of the FWA proclaimed their “independence”, the African leaders decided immediately to integrate the unions into the bosom of the state by assigning them the job of policing the workers; in short, they were watchdog for the interests of the new black bourgeoisie that was now in charge. This is clear from the words of President Senghor:

“Despite its service, because of its service, trade unionism must today change itself to have a more specific understanding of its precise role and its tasks. Because there are now well-organised political parties that represent the whole nation at the general political level, unionism must return to its natural role, which is primarily that of defending the purchasing power of its members… The conclusion to this analysis is that unions will broadly support the political programme of the majority party and its government.” 10

In short, the unions and political parties must share the same programme in order to defend the interests of the new ruling class. Union leader, David Soumah, echoed the words of Senghor:

“Our slogan during this (anti-colonial) struggle was that the unions didn’t take any responsibility for production, that they did not have to worry about the repercussions their demands would have on an economy’s development when it was managed in the sole interest of the colonial power and organised by it for the expansion of its own national economy. This position has become irrelevant following the accession of the African countries to national independence and a change of role has become necessary for the unions.”11

Consequently, during the first decade of “independence”, the proletariat of the former FWA was left without an effective class response, completely shackled by the new ruling class assisted by the unions in its anti-worker policy. It would be 1968 before we would see it re-emerge on the proletarian class terrain against its own bourgeoisie.

Lassou (to be continued).

While the post war-boom led many to conclude that marxism was obsolete, that capitalism had discovered the secret of eternal youth,1 and that the working class was no longer a force for revolutionary change, a small minority of revolutionaries, very often working in conditions of almost complete isolation, remained loyal to the fundamental tenets of marxism. One of the most important of these was Paul Mattick in the USA. Mattick responded to Marcuse’s search for a new revolutionary subject by publishing Critique of Marcuse, one dimensional man in class society (1972), which reaffirmed the potential of the working class to overthrow capitalism. But his most lasting contribution was probably Marx and Keynes, the limits of the mixed economy, first published in 1969 but based on studies and essays from the 1950s onwards.

Although by the end of the 1960s the first signs of a renewed phase of open economic crisis were becoming visible (for example in the devaluation of the pound sterling in 1967), to argue that capitalism was still a system mined by a deep, structural crisis was very much to swim against the stream. But here was Mattick, more than 30 years after his major work “The permanent crisis” had summarised and developed Henryk Grossman’s theory of capitalist breakdown2, still insisting that capitalism remained a regressive social system, that the underlying contradictions in the accumulation process had not been conjured away and were fated to return to the surface. Focusing on the bourgeoisie’s use of the state to regulate the process of accumulation, whether in the Keynesian “mixed economy” form favoured in the west, or the Stalinist version in the east, he showed that the obligation to interfere with the workings of the law of value was not a sign of the system overcoming its contradictions (as Cardan, for example, had argued, particularly in Modern capitalism and revolution) but was precisely an expression of its decay:

“Notwithstanding the long duration of rather ‘prosperous’ conditions in the industrially-advanced countries, there is no ground for the assumption that capital production has overcome its inherent contradictions through state intervention in the economy. The interventions themselves point to the persistence of the crisis of capital production, and the growth of government-determined production is a sure sign of the continuing decay of the private-enterprise economy [...] The Keynesian solution will stand exposed as a pseudo-solution, capable of postponing but not preventing the contradictory course of capital accumulation as predicted by Marx”3

Thus Mattick maintained that “capitalism has ceased to be a socially progressive system of production and has become – notwithstanding all superficial appearances to the contrary – a regressive and destructive one.”4 Thus at the opening of chapter 19, “The imperialist imperative”, Mattick affirms that the drive to war cannot be done away with by capital because it is a logical result of blockages in the process of accumulation. But while “waste production by way of war might bring about structural changes of world economy and shifts of political power conducive to a new period of capital expansion for the victorious capitalist powers”, he quickly adds that the bourgeoisie should not be too reassured by this: “this kind of optimism cannot prevail in view of the destructiveness of modern warfare which may well include the use of atomic weapons.”5 But for capitalism “the recognition that war may be suicide, which is by no means unanimous, does not affect the drift towards a new world war.”6 The perspective announced in the last sentence of the book, therefore, remains the one which revolutionaries had put forward at the time of the First World War: “socialism or barbarism”.

There are however some flaws in Mattick’s analysis of capitalist decadence in Marx and Keynes. On the one hand he sees the tendency to distort the law of value as an expression of decline; on the other hand, he claims that the fully statified countries of the eastern bloc were no longer subject to the law of value and thus to the tendency towards crises. He even argues that, from the point of view of private capital, these regimes “may be described as state-socialism simply because it centralises capital in the hands of the state”,7 even if from the point of view of the working class, it has to described as state capitalism. In any case, “the state capitalist system does not suffer that particular contradiction between profitable and non-profitable production which plagues private-property capitalism...the state capitalist system may produce profitably and non-profitably without facing stagnation.”8 He develops the idea that the Stalinist states in some sense constitute a different system, profoundly antagonistic to western forms of capitalism – and it is here that he seems to find the driving force behind the Cold War, since he writes that imperialism today “differs from the imperialism and colonialism of laisser faire capitalism because capital competes for more than just raw-material sources, privileged markets, and capital exports; it also fights for its very life as a private-property system against new forms of capital production which are no longer subject to economic value relations and the competitive market mechanism.”9 This interpretation goes along with Mattick’s argument that the eastern bloc countries do not, strictly speaking, have their own imperialist dynamic.

The group Internationalism in the US, which later became a section of the ICC, noticed this flaw, in the article it published in Internationalism n 2 in the early 70s, “State capitalism and the law of value, a response to Marx and Keynes”. The article showed that Mattick’s analyses of the Stalinist regimes serves to undermine the concept of decadence which he defends elsewhere: for if state socialism is not subject to crises; if it is indeed, as Mattick also argues, more favourable to cybernation and the development of the productive forces; if the Stalinist system is not pushed to follow its imperialist drives, then the material foundations for the communist revolution begin to disappear and the historic alternative posed by the epoch of decline has also been obscured:

“Mattick’s use of the term state capitalism, then, is misnomer. State capitalism or ‘state socialism’, as Mattick describes it, as an exploitative but non-capitalist mode of production, bears a startling resemblance to Bruno Rizzi’s and Max Schachtman’s description of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’, worked out in the years preceding the Second World War. The economic breakdown of capitalism, of the mode of production based on the law of value, which Mattick argues is inevitable, leads not to the historical alternatives, socialism or barbarism, but to the alternative socialism or barbarism or ‘state socialism’.”

Reality has come down on the side of Internationalism’s article. It’s true that the crisis in the east did not generally take the same form as in the west. In general it manifested itself in underproduction rather than overproduction, certainly regarding consumer goods. But the inflation which ravaged these economies for decades, and which was often the spark for major workers’ struggles, was one sign that the bureaucracy had by no means conjured away the effects of the law of value. Above all, the collapse of the entire eastern bloc at the end of the 80s, however much it also reflected an impasse at the military and social level, was also the “revenge” of the law of value on regimes which had indeed tried to circumvent it. In this sense, just like Keynesianism, Stalinism revealed itself a “pseudo-solution capable of postponing but not preventing the contradictory course of capital accumulation.”10

Mattick had been steeled by the direct experience of the German revolution and by the defence of class positions against the triumphant counter-revolution of the 30s and 40s. Another “survivor” of the communist left, Marc Chirik, had also maintained his militancy in a period of reaction and imperialist war. He had been a key member of the Gauche Communiste de France whose contribution we looked at in the previous article. During the 1950s he was in Venezuela and temporarily cut off from organised activity. But in the early 60s he started to gather a circle of young comrades around him, forming the group Internacionalismo which based itself on the same principles as the GCF, including of course the notion of the decadence of capitalism. But whereas the latter group had struggled to hold out in a dark period for the workers’ movement, the Venezuelan group expressed something stirring within the consciousness of the world working class. It was able to recognise with startling clarity that the financial difficulties beginning to gnaw away at the apparently healthy body of capitalism actually signified a new plunge into crisis, which would be met by an undefeated generation of the working class. As it wrote in January 1968: "We are not prophets, nor can we claim to predict when and how events will unfold in the future. But of one thing are conscious and certain: the process in which capitalism is plunged today cannot be stopped and it leads directly to the crisis. And we are equally certain that the inverse process of developing class combativity which we are witnessing today will lead the working class to a bloody and direct struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state". This group was one of the most lucid in interpreting the massive social movements in France in May of that year and Italy and elsewhere the following year as marking the end of the counter-revolution.

For Internacionalismo, these class movements were a response of the proletariat to the first effects of the world economic crisis, which had already produced a rise in unemployment and attempts to control wage rises. For others this was a mechanical application of outdated marxism: what May ‘68 showed above all was the proletariat’s direct revolt against the alienation of a fully functioning capitalist society. This was the view of the Situationists who dismissed the attempts to connect crisis and class struggle to the work of dinosaur-like sects. "As for the debris of the old non-Trotskyist ultra-leftism, they needed at least a major economic crisis. They subordinated any revolutionary movement to its return, and so saw nothing coming. Now that they have recognized a revolutionary crisis in May, they have to prove that this ‘invisible’ economic crisis was there in the spring of 68. Without any fear of being ridiculed, they are working at it now, producing schemas on the rise in unemployment and inflation. So for them, the economic crisis is no longer that terribly visible objective reality that was lived so hardly in 1929, but a son of eucharistic presence that supports their religion."11 In reality, as we have just seen, Internacionalismo’s view of the relationship between crisis and class struggle had not been doctored in retrospect: on the contrary, their faithfulness to the marxist method had enabled them to envisage, on the basis of a few unspectacular portents, the outbreak of movements like May ‘68. The rather more noticeable deepening of the economic crisis after 1973 soon made it clear that it was the SI – who had more or less adopted Cardan’s theory of a capitalism that had overcome its economic contradictions –which was tied to a period in capitalism’s life that was now definitively over.

The hypothesis that May ‘68 reflected a profound resurgence of the working class was further strengthened by the international proliferation of groups and circles seeking to develop an authentically revolutionary critique of capitalism. Naturally, after such a long period of retreat, this new proletarian political movement was extremely heterogeneous and inexperienced. Reacting against the horrors of Stalinism, there was often a suspicion of the very notion of political organisation, a visceral reaction against anything that smacked of “Leninism” or the perceived rigidity of marxism. Some of these new groups lost themselves in frenetic activism which, lacking any long-term analysis, did not long survive the end of the first wave of international struggles begun in 1968. Others did not deny that there was a link between workers’ struggles and the crisis, but saw it from an entirely different standpoint: workers’ militancy had essentially produced the crisis by raising unrestrained wage demands and refusing to knuckle down to capitalist plans for restructuring. This view was put forward by the Groupe de Liaison pour l’Action des Travailleurs in France (one of Socialisme ou Barbarie’s many offshoots), and in particular by the workers’ autonomy current in Italy, which saw “traditional” marxism as hopelessly “objectivist” (we will come back to this in another article) in its understanding of the relationship between crisis and class struggle.

However, this new generation was also rediscovering the work of the communist left and an engagement with the theory of decadence was part of this process. Marc Chirik and some of the younger comrades from Internacialismo group had come to France and, in the heat of the 1968 events, helped to form the first nucleus of the group Révolution Internationale. From its inception, RI placed the conception of decadence at the heart of its political approach, and was able to convince a number of councilist and libertarian groups and individuals that their opposition to the unions, national liberation and capitalist democracy could only be properly understood and defended on the basis of a more coherent historical framework. The early issues of the journal Révolution Internationale saw the publication of a series on “The Decadence of Capitalism” which was later to be published as the first pamphlet of the International Communist Current. This text is available online12 and still contains the essential foundations of the ICC’s political method, above all in its broad historical sweep which goes from primitive communism through the various class societies before capitalism before examining the rise and decline of capitalism itself. As with the current series, basing itself on Marx’s notion of “epochs of social revolution”, it draws out some of the key elements and common characteristics of all class societies in periods when they have become a barrier to the development of mankind’s productive powers: intensification of wars between factions of the ruling class, growing role of the state, decomposition of ideological justifications, growing struggles of oppressed and exploited classes. Applying this general approach to the specifics of capitalist society, it attempts to show how capitalism since the beginning of the 20th century has in turn gone from being a “form of development” to a “fetter” on the productive forces, pointing to the phenomenon of world wars and numerous other imperialist conflicts, the revolutionary struggles that broke out in 1917, the enormous growth in the role of the state and the incredible waste of human labour through the development of the war economy and other forms of unproductive expenditure.

This general outlook, presented at a time when the first signs of a new economic crisis were becoming more than apparent, convinced a number of groups in other countries that a theory of decadence was an essential starting point for left communist positions. It was not only at the centre of the ICC’s platform but was also taken on board by other tendencies such as Revolutionary Perspectives and subsequently the Communist Workers Organisation in Britain. There were significant disagreements on the causes of capitalist decadence: the ICC pamphlet adopted Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis, broadly speaking, although its explanation of the post-war boom (seeing the reconstruction of war-shattered economies as a kind of new market) was later to be disputed within the ICC, and there have always been other views on economic questions in the ICC, in particular, comrades who favoured the Grossman-Mattick theory, which was also taken up by the CWO and others. But at this point in the re-emergence of the revolutionary movement, the “theory of decadence” seemed to be making significant gains.

Balance sheet of a moribund system

Our survey of the successive efforts of revolutionaries to understand the decline of capitalism has now reached the 1970s and 80s. But before looking at the developments – and the numerous regressions – that have taken place at the theoretical level since those decades and the present day, it seems useful to recall and update the balance sheet we drew in the first article in this series13, particularly at the economic level where there have been some dramatic developments since early 2008 when the first article appeared.

1. At the economic level

In the 70s and 80s the international class struggle went through a series of advances and retreats, but the economic crisis advanced inexorably, undermining the thesis of the autonomists that workers’ struggles themselves were the root cause of capitalism’s economic difficulties. The depression of the thirties, which coincided with a major historical defeat for the working class, had already provided a strong argument against the autonomists; and the visible evolution of the economic debacle even in times of retreat by the working class, such as we saw intermittently in the mid-70s and early 80s, and in a more sustained and profound way during the 1990s, implied that there was indeed an “objective” process at work here, something that was not fundamentally determined by the level of resistance coming from the working class. Nor was it subject to effective control by the bourgeoisie. Abandoning the Keynesian policies which had accompanied the boom years but which were now a source of runaway inflation, the bourgeoisie in the 80s now sought to “balance the books” with policies which set in motion a tide of mass unemployment and deindustrialisation in most of the key capitalist countries. In the decades that followed there were new attempts to stimulate growth by a massive recourse to debt, resulting in short-lived booms, but underneath accumulating profound tensions which were to explode to the surface with the crash of 2007-8. A general overview of the capitalist world economy since 1914 thus gives us the scenario not of a mode of production in ascent but of a system unable to escape its impasse whatever techniques it tries out:

• 1914 to 1923: World War One and the first international wave of proletarian revolutions; the Communist International proclaims the dawn of the “epoch of wars and revolutions”;

• 1924-29: brief recovery which does not relieve the post-war stagnation of the “old” economies and empires in the wake of the war; the “boom” is restricted mainly to the USA;

• 1929: the exuberant expansion of US capital ends in a spectacular crash, precipitating the deepest and widest depression in capitalism’s history. There is no spontaneous revival of production as was the case with the cyclical crises of the early 19th century. State capitalist measures are used to re-launch the economy but they are part of a drive towards the Second World War;

• 1945-67: a major development of state spending (Keynesian measures financed essentially through debt and based on unprecedented gains in productivity) create the conditions for a period of growth and prosperity unlike anything before it, although this excludes a large part of the “third world”;

• 1967-2008: 40 years of open crisis, demonstrated in particular by the galloping inflation of the 70s and the mass unemployment of the 80s. However, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s, the crisis is more “open” in some phases and in some parts of the globe than others. Elimination of restrictions on the movement of capital and on financial speculation; a whole series of industrial relocations to areas where labour power is cheap; development of new technologies and above all the resort to virtually unlimited credit for states, companies and households, create a “growth” bubble in which vast profits are made by small elites, frenzied industrial growth takes off in countries like China, and credit-card consumerism reaches new heights in the central capitalist countries. But the warning signs are discernable throughout this period: booms are regularly followed by busts (for example, the recessions of 1974-75, 1980-82, 1990-93, 2001-2, the stock market crash of 1987...). And after each recession the options open to capital become narrower, in marked contrast to the “busts” of the ascendant period when there was always the possibility of an outward expansion into geographic/economic areas hitherto outside of the capitalist circuit. Lacking this outlet to all intents and purposes, the capitalist class is increasingly forced to “cheat” the law of value which is condemning its system to collapse. This applies equally to the openly state capitalist policies of Keynesianism and Stalinism, which make no secret of their resolve to rein in the market through deficit financing and shoring up unprofitable economic sectors in order to sustain production, and the so-called “neo-liberal” policies which seemed to sweep all before them after the “revolutions” personified by Thatcher and Reagan. In reality, these policies are themselves emanations of the capitalist state, and with their encouragement of unlimited credit and speculation, they are in no way rooted in a respect for the classical laws of capitalist value production. In this sense, one of the most significant events prior to the current economic debacle is the collapse of the “Tigers” and “Dragons” of the far east in 1997, in which a phase of frenetic growth fuelled by (bad) debt suddenly comes up against a brick wall – the need to start paying it all back. This is a harbinger of what is to come, even if China and India subsequently step in to claim the role of “locomotive” that had been reserved for the other far eastern economies. Neither does the “technological revolution”, particularly in the sphere of computing, that was so hyped in the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, save capitalism from its inner contradictions: it raises the organic composition of capital and thus lowers the profit rate, and this cannot be compensated by a real extension of the world market. Indeed it tends to aggravate the problem of overproduction by spewing out more and more commodities while simultaneously throwing more workers onto the dole;

• 2008-... World capital’s crisis reaches a qualitative new situation in which the “solutions’ applied by the capitalist state over the previous four decades, and above all the recourse to credit, explode in the face of the politicians, financiers and bureaucrats who had been practising them so assiduously and with such misplaced confidence in the preceding period. Now the crisis rebounds to the very centres of world capitalism – to the USA and the Eurozone – and all the recipes used to maintain confidence in the possibilities of constant economic expansion are revealed to be worthless. The creation of an artificial market through credit is now displaying its historical limitations, as it threatens to destroy the value of money and generate runaway inflation; at the same time the reining in of credit and attempts by states to slash their spending in order to begin paying back their debts only further restrict the market. The net result is that capitalism is now entering a depression which is in essence deeper and more insoluble than the one in the 1930s. And as depression descends on the west, the great white hope of a country like China carrying the global economy on its shoulders is also proving to be a complete illusion: China’s industrial growth is based on its capacity to sell cheap goods to the west, and if this market dries up, China faces economic meltdown.

Conclusion: whereas in its ascendant phase, capitalism went through a cycle of crises which were both the expression of its internal contradictions and an indispensable moment in its global expansion, in the 20th and 21st century capitalism’s crisis, as Paul Mattick argued from the 30s onwards, is essentially permanent. Capitalism has now reached a stage where the palliatives it has used to keep itself alive have become an added factor in its mortal sickness.

2. At the military level

The drive towards imperialist war also expresses the historic impasse of the capitalist world economy:

“The more the market contracts, the more bitter becomes the struggle for sources of raw materials, and for the mastery of world market. The economic struggle between different capitalist groups concentrates more and more taking on its most finished form in struggles between states. The aggravated economic struggle between states can only be finally resolved by military force. War becomes the sole means, not of resolving the international crisis, but through which each state tries to overcome its problems at the expense of its rivals.

“The momentary solutions found by individual imperialisms in economic or military victories have the effect not simply of worsening the situation of opposing imperialisms, but of still further aggravating the world crisis, and of destroying huge quantities of the values built up over decades and centuries of social labour.

“Capitalism in the imperialist epoch is like a building where the construction materials for the upper stories are taken from the lower ones and the foundations. The more frenetic the upward building, the weaker becomes the base supporting the whole edifice. The greater the appearance of power at the top, the more shaky the building is in reality. Capitalism, compelled as it is to dig beneath its own foundations, works furiously to undermine the world economy, hurling human society towards catastrophe and the abyss”.14

Imperialist wars, whether local or world-wide, are the purest expression of capitalism’s tendency to destroy itself, whether we are talking about the physical destruction of capital, the massacre of entire populations, or the immense sterilisation of value represented by military production, which is no longer restricted to phases of open warfare. The GCF’s recognition of the essentially irrational nature of war in the period of decadence was somewhat obscured by the reorganisation and reconstruction of the global economy that followed the Second World War, but the post-war boom was an exceptional phenomenon which can never be repeated. And whatever mode of international organisation adopted by the capitalist system in this era, war has also been permanent. After 1945, when the world was divided between two huge imperialist blocs, military conflict generally took the form of endless “national liberation” wars as the two superpowers vied for strategic dominance; after 1989, the collapse of the weaker Russian bloc, far from mitigating the drive to war, made direct involvement of the remaining superpower much more frequent, as we saw in the 1991Gulf war, in the Balkans at the end of the 90s, and Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001. These interventions by the USA were largely –and very unsuccessfully – aimed at stemming the centrifugal trend opened up by the dissolution of the old bloc system, which has seen an aggravation and proliferation of local rivalries, expressed in the horrific conflicts that have ravaged Africa from Rwanda and Congo to Ethiopia to Somalia, exacerbated tensions around the Israel-Palestine problem, and come close to producing a nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan.

The first and second world wars brought about a major shift in the balance of power between the major capitalist countries, essentially to the benefit of the USA. Indeed the overwhelming domination of the USA after 1945 was a key factor in the post-war prosperity. But contrary to one of the slogans of the 1960s, war is not “the health of the state”. Just as its vastly bloated military sector helped bring about the collapse of the USSR, so the USA’s commitment to remaining the world’s gendarme has also become a factor in its own decline as an empire. The vast sums annihilated in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not been offset by the quick profits nabbed by Halliburton or other crony capitalists; on the contrary they have helped to turn the USA from the world’s creditor into one of its principal debtors.

Some revolutionary organisations, like the Internationalist Communist Tendency, argue that war, and above all world war, is eminently rational as far as capitalism is concerned. They argue that by destroying the swollen mass of constant capital which is the source of the falling rate of profit, war in capitalism’s decadence has the effect of restoring the rate of profit and launching a new cycle of accumulation. This isn’t the moment to enter into this discussion, but even if such an analysis were right, this can no longer be a solution for capital. First because there is little evidence that the conditions for a Third World War – which require, among other things, the formation of stable imperialist blocs – are coming together in a world increasingly following the rule of “every man for himself”. And even if a Third World War was on the cards, it would certainly not initiate a new cycle of accumulation, but would almost certainly result in the obliteration of capitalism and probably of humanity15. That would be the final demonstration of capitalism’s irrationality, but none of us would be here to say “I told you so”.

3. At the ecological level

Since the 1970s revolutionaries have been obliged to recognise a new dimension to the diagnosis that capitalism has outlived its usefulness and has become a system bent on destruction: the increasing devastation of the natural environment, which is now threatening disaster on a planetary scale. The pollution and destruction of the natural world has been inherent to capitalist production from the beginning, but over the last century, and particularly since the end of the Second World War, it has been made all the more extensive and deeply rooted thanks to capitalism’s relentless occupation of every last corner of the planet. At the same time, and as a consequence of capitalism’s historic impasse, the spoliation of the atmosphere, the land, the seas, rivers and forests have been exacerbated by increasingly ferocious national competition for natural resources, cheap labour, and new markets. Ecological catastrophe, especially in the shape of global warming, has become a new horseman of capitalism’s apocalypse, and successive international summits have shown the inability of the bourgeoisie to take the most basic measures to stave it off.

A recent illustration: the most recent report from the International Energy Agency, a body not previously noted for making doom-laden predictions, argues that governments around the world have five years to reverse the course of climate change before it's too late. According to the IEA and a number of other scientific institutions, it is vital to ensure that global temperatures do not rise above 2 degrees. “To keep emissions below that target, civilization could continue with business as usual for only five more years before the total allowed budget of emissions would be ‘locked in.’ In that case, to meet the targets for warming, all new infrastructure built from 2017 onward would have to be completely emissions-free.”16 One month after this report came out, in November 2011, came the Durban summit which was heralded as a breakthrough because for the first time at any of these international meetings between states, it was agreed that there should be legally binding limits on carbon emissions. But these would have to be agreed in 2015 and would come into effect in 2020 – far too late according to the predictions of the IEA and many of the environmental bodies associated with the conference. Keith Allott, head of climate change at WWF-UK (World Wide Fund for Nature, Britain), said: "Governments have salvaged a path forward for negotiations, but we must be under no illusion — the outcome of Durban leaves us with the prospect of being legally bound to a world of 4C warming. This would be catastrophic for people and the natural world. Governments have spent crucial days focused on a handful of specific words in the negotiating text, but have paid little heed to repeated warnings from the scientific community that much stronger, urgent action is needed to cut emissions."17

The problem for the reformist conceptions of the ecologists is that capitalism is being strangled by its own contradictions and fights ever more desperately for its life. Caught in a crisis, capitalism cannot become less competitive, more cooperative, more rational, but is driven to the extremes of competition at all levels, and above all at the level of national state capitalist gladiators grappling in a barbarian Thunderdome for the least chance of immediate survival. It is forced to seek the most short-term profits, to sacrifice everything else to the idol of “economic growth” – ie, of the accumulation of capital, even if it is to the debt-addled and largely fictitious growth of these last few decades. No national economy can allow itself the least moment of sentiment when it comes to exploiting its national natural “property” to the absolute limit. Neither can there be, under the capitalist world economy, a structure of international law or governance that would be able to subordinate narrow national interests to the overall interests of the planet. Whatever the actual deadline posed by global warming, the ecological question as a whole provides further evidence that the continuing rule of the bourgeoisie, of the capitalist mode of production, has become a danger for the survival of humanity.

Let’s look at an edifying illustration of all this – and one which also elucidates the fact that the ecological danger, just like the economic crisis, cannot be separated from the threat of military conflict.

“In recent months, oil companies have begun lining up for exploration rights to Baffin Bay, a hydrocarbon-rich region on Greenland’s western coast that until recently was too ice-choked for drilling. U.S. and Canadian diplomats have reopened a spat over navigation rights to a sea route through the Canadian Arctic that could cut shipping time and costs for long-haul tankers.

“Even ownership of the North Pole has come into dispute, as Russia and Denmark pursue rival claims to the underlying seabed in hopes of locking up access to everything from fisheries to natural gas deposits.

“The intense rivalry over Arctic development was highlighted in diplomatic cables released last week by the anti-secrecy Web site Wikileaks. Messages between U.S. diplomats revealed how northern nations, including the United States and Russia, have been manoeuvring to ensure access to shipping lanes as well as undersea oil and gas deposits that are estimated to contain up to 25 percent of the world’s untapped reserves.

“In the cables, U.S. officials worried that bickering over resources might even lead to an arming of the Arctic. ‘While in the Arctic there is peace and stability, however, one cannot exclude that in the future there will be a redistribution of power, up to armed intervention,’ a 2009 State Department cable quoted a Russian ambassador as saying.”18

Thus: one of the most serious manifestations of global warming, the melting of the polar ice caps, which contains the possibility of cataclysmic flooding and a “feedback loop” of warming once the ice caps are no longer there to deflect the sun’s heat away from the Earth’s atmosphere, is immediately seen as a huge economic opportunity for a whole queue of nation states – with the ultimate consequence of burning more fossil fuels, further adding to the greenhouse effect. And at the same time, the struggle over dwindling resources – in this case oil and gas, but elsewhere it could be water or fertile land – produces a four or five way mini-imperialist conflict (Britain has also been involved in this dispute as well). This is a feedback loop of capitalism’s growing insanity.

The same article ends with the “good news” of a modest treaty signed between some of the contenders at the Artic Council meeting in Nuuk, Greenland. And we know how reliable are diplomatic treaties when it comes to forestalling capital’s inbuilt drive towards imperialist conflict.

The global disaster that capitalism is preparing can only be averted by a global revolution.

4. At the social level

What is the balance sheet of capitalism’s decline at the social level, and in particular for the main producer of capitalism’s wealth, the working class?

When the Communist International proclaimed, in 1919, that capitalism had entered its epoch of inner disintegration, it was also drawing a line under the period of social democracy, in which the struggle for durable reforms had been necessary and feasible. Revolution was necessary because henceforward capitalism could only make deeper and deeper attacks on working class living standards. As we have shown in previous articles in this series, this analysis was repeatedly confirmed over the next two decades, which saw the greatest depression in capitalism’s history and the horrors of the Second World War. But it came into question, even among revolutionaries, during the boom years of the 50s and 60s, when the working class of the central capitalist countries experienced unprecedented rises in wages, an impressive reduction in unemployment, and a series of state-backed welfare benefits: sickness pay, paid holidays, access to education and healthcare, and so on.

But do these advances really invalidate the claim, maintained by revolutionaries who adhere to the thesis that capitalism is in overall decline, that long-lasting reforms are no longer possible?

The issue here is not whether these gains were “real” or significant. They were and they do need to be explained. This is one of the reasons that the ICC, for example, opened up a debate about the causes of the post-war prosperity, internally and then in public. But what needs to be understood above all is the historic context in which these gains took place, because it can then be shown that they bear little resemblance to the steady improvement of working class living standards during the 19th century, the majority of them won through the organisation and struggle of the worker’s movement:

• while it’s true that many of the post-war “reforms” were brought in to make sure that the war did not give rise to a wave of proletarian struggles on the model of 1917-19, the initiative for measures like the health service or full employment came directly from the capitalist state apparatus, particularly its left wing. They had the effect of increasing the working class’s confidence in the state and decreasing confidence in its own struggle;

• even during the boom years, economic prosperity was severely limited. Large swathes of the working class, particularly in the third world but also in significant pockets of the central countries (example: the black workers and poor whites of the USA), were excluded from these gains. Throughout the “third world”, capital’s inability to integrate millions from the ruined peasantry and other strata into productive labour created the basis for today’s mega-slums, for world-wide malnutrition and poverty. And these masses were also the first victims of the inter-bloc rivalries which resulted in bloody proxy battles in a host of “underdeveloped” countries from Korea and Vietnam to the Middle East and the southern and eastern Africa;

• further evidence of capitalism’s inability to really improve the quality of working class life can be seen at the level of the working day. One of the signs of “progress” in the 19th century was the continued lessening of the working day, from up to 18 hours in the early part of the century to the 8-hour day which was one of the main demands of the workers’ movement at the end of the century and which was formally granted in many countries between the 1900s and the 1930s. But since that time – and this includes the post-war boom - the working day has remained more or less stagnant, while technological development, far from freeing workers from drudgery, has led to de-skilling, widespread unemployment with more intensive exploitation of those that remain at work, longer journeys to work, and the boon of working non-stop away from the workplace thanks to mobile phones, lap-tops, and the internet;

• whatever the gains made during the boom, they have been under more or less continuous assault for the past four decades and with the impending depression they are now being subject to even more massive attacks, with no prospect of any respite. Throughout the last four decades of crisis, capitalism has been relatively cautious in directly cutting wages imposing mass unemployment and dismantling the welfare state. The savage austerity measures now being foisted on countries like Greece are a harbinger of what is to come for workers everywhere.

On the broader social level, the decay of capitalism over such a long period carries a tremendous threat to the proletariat’s ability to become a class “for itself”. When the working class revived its struggles at the end of the 1960s, its capacity to develop a revolutionary consciousness was greatly hampered by the trauma of the counter-revolution it had been through – a counter-revolution which to a large extent had presented itself in the “proletarian” garb of Stalinism, making generations of workers deeply suspicious of their own political traditions and organisations. The fraudulent equation between Stalinism and communism was even pushed to the maximum when the Stalinist regimes collapsed at the end of the 80s, further eroding the self-confidence of the working class, its ability to evolve a political alternative to capitalism. Thus a product of capitalist decadence – Stalinist state capitalism – has been used by all factions of the bourgeoisie to stultify class consciousness.

During the 80s and 90s, the evolution of the economic crisis demanded the break-up of industrial concentrations and working class communities in the central countries, transferring much of industry to regions of the world where working class political traditions are not so strong. The creation of urban wastelands across much of the “developed’ world brought with it a weakening of class identity and a more general wearing away of social ties, with their counterpart in the search for a variety of false communities, which are not neutral but have terribly destructive effects. We can point to the attraction of a sector of disenfranchised white youth to extreme right wing gangs like the English Defence League in Britain; of Muslim youth, facing the same material situation, to fundamentalist Islam and jihadi politics. More generally we can point to the corrosive effects of gang culture in nearly all the urban centres of the industrialised countries, even if these have had their most spectacular impact on peripheral countries like Mexico where the country is gripped by an almost permanent civil war between unbelievably murderous drug gangs, some of them directly linked to a no less corrupt central state.

These phenomena – the frightening loss of any perspective for the future, the rise in nihilistic violence – are a slow ideological poison in the veins of the world’s exploited, making it increasingly difficult to see themselves as a unified class, a class whose essence is international solidarity.

At the end of the 80s there was a tendency in the ICC to see the waves of struggle of the 70s and 80s as more or less linear in their advance towards a revolutionary consciousness. This was criticised very sharply by Marc Chirik who, on the basis of interpreting terrorist bombings in France and the sudden implosion of the eastern bloc, was the first to put forward the idea that we were entering a new phase in the decadence of capitalism, which he described as a phase of decomposition. This new phase was determined fundamentally by a kind of social stalemate, where both the ruling class and the exploited class were unable to put forward their respective alternatives for the future of society: world war for the bourgeoisie, world revolution for the working class. But since capitalism can never stand still and its long-drawn out economic crisis was fated to plumb new depths, in the absence of any perspective society was doomed to rot on its feet, in turn bringing increasing obstacles to the development of working class consciousness.

Whether or not the theoretical parameters of the ICC’s concept of decomposition are accepted, essential to this analysis is its affirmation that this is the final phase of capitalism’s decay. The evidence that we are witnessing the last stages of the system’s decline, its actual death agony, has surely mounted considerably over the last few decades, to the point where “apocalyptic moods”, a recognition that we are on the edge of the abyss, have become more and more commonplace19. And yet, within the proletarian political movement, the theory of decadence is far from being unanimous. We will look at some of the arguments against the theory in the next article in this series.

Gerrard

In Syria, every day brings new massacres. The country has joined the other theatres of imperialist war in the Middle East. After Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, now it’s Syria’s turn. Unfortunately this situation immediately poses a very disquieting question. What’s going to happen in the period ahead? The Middle East seems to be on the verge of a conflagration whose limits are difficult to foresee. Behind the war in Syria, it’s Iran which is the focus of imperialist fears and appetites, but all the main imperialist brigands are ready to defend their interests in the region. This is a part of the world that is on a war footing – a war that could have irrational and destructive consequences for the whole capitalist system.

Mass destruction and chaos in Syria: who is responsible?

For the international workers’ movement, for all the exploited of the earth, the answer to that question can only be: capital alone is responsible. This was already the case for the first and second world wars. But also with the incessant wars which, since 1945, have brought more deaths than the two world wars combined. It’s just over 20 years ago that the first George Bush, president of the USA at the time, well before his son became president, triumphantly declared that the world was entering a New World Order. The Soviet bloc had literally crumbled, the USSR was no more, and along with this we were supposed to see the disappearance of wars and massacres. Thanks to victorious capitalism, and under the benevolent protection of the USA, peace would now reign throughout the world. All these lies would soon be exposed by reality. Was it not the same president who, not long after this cynical and hypocritical speech, unleashed the first Iraq war?

In 1982 the Syrian army bloodily crushed the rebellious population of Hama. The number of victims has never been reliably counted: estimates vary between 10,000 and 40,000.[1] At the time nobody talked about intervening to protect the population; nobody demanded the resignation of Hafez el-Assad, the father of today’s Syrian president Bashir al-Assad. The contrast with the situation today is quite considerable! The reason is that in 1982, the world scene was still dominated by the rivalry between the two great imperialist blocs. Despite the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by the Ayatollahs at the beginning of 1979 and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan a year after, American domination over the region was not contested by the other great powers and it even guaranteed a certain stability.

Since them things have changed a lot: the collapse of the old bloc system and the weakening of US “leadership” have given free rein to the imperialist appetites of regional powers like Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Israel...the deepening of the crisis is more and more reducing the populations to poverty and is sharpening feelings of exasperation and revolt against the existing regimes.

Today no continent is escaping the rise in imperialist tensions, but all the dangers are most concentrated in the Middle East. And the centre of all this at the moment is Syria. It began with several months of demonstrations against unemployment and poverty, involving the exploited from all kinds of backgrounds: Druze, Sunni, Christian, Kurds, men, women and children all together in their protests for a better life. But the situation in this country has taken a sinister turn. Social protest has been recuperated and dragged onto a terrain which has nothing to do with its original motives. The working class in this country is very weak and, given the present state of workers’ struggles throughout the world, this sad outcome was more or less inevitable.

The different factions of the Syrian bourgeoisie leapt onto the back of this rebellious, distressed population. For the government and the pro-Assad armed forces, the stakes are clear. It’s a question of staying in power at any price. For the opposition, whose different sectors are quite willing to fight among themselves and who are only kept together by the need to get rid of Assad, it’s a question of taking power for themselves. During the recent meetings of these opposition forces in London and Paris, no minister or diplomat wanted to be very precise about their composition. Who does the Syrian National Council or the National Coordination Committee or the Free Syrian Army actually represent? What is the influence within them of the Kurds, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafist jihadis? This is just a mish-mash of bourgeois cliques, each one rivalling the other. One of the reasons that the Assad regime has not been overthrown is that it has been able to play on the internal rivalries within Syrian society. The Christians look askance at the Islamists and fear that they will suffer the same fate as the Copts in Egypt; some of the Kurds are trying to negotiate with the regime; and the latter holds onto the support of the Alawite religious minority, to which the presidential clique belongs.

In any case, the National Council would have no significant political or military existence if it were not supported by outside forces, each one trying to pull its chestnuts from the fire. These include the countries of the Arab League, with Saudi Arabia at the front, and Turkey, but also France, Britain, Israel and the USA. 

All these imperialist sharks are using the pretext of the inhumanity of the Syrian regime to prepare for total war in this country. Via the Russian channel The Voice of Russia, relaying the Iranian public TV channel Press TV, information has come out that Turkey is planning, with US support, to attack Syria. The Turkish state is massing troops and materiel at its Syrian frontier. This information has been taken up by all the western media. And in Syria itself, ballistic missiles made in Russia are being readied in underground bunkers in the region of Kamechi and Deir ez-Zor, near the frontier with Iraq. Because the Assad regime is also supported by foreign powers, notably China, Russia and Iran.

This ferocious battle between the most powerful imperialist powers on the planet is also being waged inside the den of thieves known as the UN, where Russia and China have twice vetoed draft resolutions on Syria. The most recent one proposed by the Arab League calls for nothing less than the ousting of Bashir al-Assad. After several days of sordid negotiations, the hypocrisy of all concerned was as clear as daylight. On March 21st the UN Security Council, with the accord of Russia and China, adopted a declaration that aimed to put a stop to the violence through the dispatch of a famous special envoy, Kofi Annan, leading a delegation which, it was clearly understood, had no power to constrain anyone. Which means that this was strictly for those who believed in it.

The question that we can pose here is very different. How is it that, for the moment, not one of the foreign imperialist powers involved in this conflict has yet intervened directly – obviously for its own national interests – as was the case for example in Libya a few months ago? Mainly because the factions of the Syrian bourgeoisie ranged against Assad officially oppose it. They don’t want a massive foreign military intervention and they have let this be known. Each one of these factions has the legitimate fear that this would make it impossible to set itself up in a new regime. But this is no guarantee that the threat of all-out imperialist war, which is knocking at Syria’s door, won’t break out in the near future. In fact, the key to this situation is to be found elsewhere.

We need to ask why this country is attracting such interest from the imperialist powers. The answer to this question is to be found some kilometres from Syria. We have to turn our eyes to Syria’s eastern frontier to discover what’s essentially at stake in the whole drama around the conflict in Syria. Its name is Iran.  

Iran at the heart of the world imperialist torment

On February 7th last year the New York Times declared: “Syria is already the beginning of the war with Iran”. A war that has not been unleashed overtly but which lurks in the shadows behind the Syrian conflict.

The Assad regime is Tehran’s main ally in the region and Syria is an essential strategic zone for Iran. The alliance with this country gives Tehran a direct opening to the strategic space of the Mediterranean and Israel, with military means directly on the borders of the Zionist state. But this potential, hidden war has its roots in the fact that the Middle East is once again a focus for all the imperialist tensions built into this rotting system.

This region of the world is a great crossroads between east and west. Europe and Asia meet in Istanbul. Russia and the northern countries look across the Mediterranean to the African continent and the major oceans. And above all, as the world economy is on the verge of toppling over, black gold has become a vital economic and military weapon. Everyone has an interest in controlling it. Without oil, no factory can run and no plane can take off. This is one of the key reasons why all the imperialisms are involved in this part of the world. However, none of these motives are the most direct and pernicious motives pushing this region towards war.  

For several years, the USA, Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia have been orchestrating an ideological campaign against Iran. This campaign has been accelerating violently of late. The recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) let it be understood that there is a possible military dimension to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And an Iran possessing nuclear weapons is intolerable for a number of imperialist states. The rise to power of a nuclear Iran, imposing itself across the whole region, is quite unacceptable for these imperialist sharks, all the more because of the permanent instability created by the Israel-Palestine conflict. Iran is completely encircled militarily. The American army is installed on all its frontiers. As for the Persian Gulf, it’s so stuffed full of war ships that you could cross it without getting your feet wet. The Israeli state doesn’t cease proclaiming that it will never allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons and that it will have the capacity to build one within the next year. Israel’s declaration to the world is terrifying because this is a very dangerous situation: Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a country of over 70 million people with a “respectable” army.

Catastrophic consequences

Economic

But Iran’s use of atomic weapons is not the only danger, nor the most pressing: Iran’s political and religious leaders have asserted recently that they would respond with all means at their disposal if their country were attacked. Iran has a capacity to do harm which is difficult to measure. If it was led to block all navigation through the Straits of Hormuz by sinking its own ships, this would be a disaster for the global economy.

A major part of world oil production would not be able to reach its destination. The capitalist economy, already in an open crisis of senility, would automatically be hurled into a maximum force storm. The damage to an already sick economy would be enormous.

Ecological

The ecological consequences could be irreversible. Attacking Iranian atomic sites, which are buried under thousands of tons of concrete and rock would require an air assault using tactical nuclear weapons. The military experts of all these imperialist powers have explained this. If this happened, what would become of the entire Middle East? What would be the repercussions for the populations and the ecosystem on a planetary scale? None of this is the product of the morbid imagination of a mad Doctor Strangelove, or the scenario of a new disaster movie. This plan is an integral part of the strategy studied and prepared by the Israeli state and, for the moment from a certain distance, by the US. The Israeli military HQ, in the course of its preparations, has studied the possibility, if a conventional air attack proved unsuccessful, of moving on to this level of destruction. It’s capital in its decadence that is becoming mad.

Humanitarian

Since the outbreak of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, total chaos rules in these countries. War goes on and on. There are daily murderous bombings and shootings. The populations desperately try to survive from day to day. The bourgeois press says it openly: “Afghanistan is suffering from a general lassitude. The fatigue of the Afghans is met with the fatigue of the westerners.”[2] But while for the bourgeois press the world is simply tired of the war in Afghanistan, for the population itself it’s more a matter of exasperation and despair. How can you survive in a situation of permanent war and decomposition? And if war against Iran took place, the human catastrophe would be even more widespread. The concentration of the population, the means of destruction that would be used, oblige us to envisage the worst. The worst would be Iran in flames and the Middle East in total chaos. None of the mass murderers who run the world’s states are capable of saying where war in Iran would end. What would happen to the population of this whole region? The prospects are genuinely frightening.        

Divided national bourgeoisies, imperialist alliances on the verge of a major crisis

Just considering some of the possible consequences of an attack on Iran scares those sectors of the bourgeoisie that are trying to maintain a minimum of lucidity. The Kuwaiti paper Al-Jarida has recently leaked some messages which the Israeli secret services want to be made public. Their previous director Meir Dagan has said that “the perspective of an attack on Iran is the stupidest idea I have ever heard”. This opinion also seems to be shared in another branch of the Israeli security services: Shin Bet.  

It’s a well known fact that a whole section of the Israeli state does not want this war. But it’s also well-known that part of the Israeli political elite, organised around Netanyahu, does want to unleash it at a moment judged propitious for the Israeli state. In Israel, in the face of these questions of imperialist policy, a political crisis is brewing. In Iran, the religious leader Ali Khamenei is at loggerheads over this issue with the president Mohamed Ahmadinejad. But the most spectacular split is between the US and Israel. The US administration does not, at the present time, want open war with Iran. The Americans’ experience in Afghanistan and Iraq is hardly encouraging, and the Obama administration would prefer to rely on increasingly heavy sanctions. US pressure on Israel, aimed at making the latter adopt a more patient stance, is enormous. But the historic weakening of US leadership is also having its impact on its traditional ally in the Middle East. Israel is affirming loud and clear that there is no way it will allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, whatever the opinion of its closest allies. The grip of the American superpower continues to weaken and even Israel is now openly challenging its authority. For certain bourgeois commentators, we could see the first real breaks in the hitherto unquestioned US/Israel alliance. 

The major player in the region on the immediate level is Turkey, which has the most significant armed forces in the Middle East (more than 600,000 in active service). Although in the past Turkey was a reliable ally of the US and one of the few local allies of Israel, with the rise of the Erdogan regime the most “Islamist” sector of the Turkish bourgeoisie is trying to play its own card of “democratic” and “moderate” Islamism. It is trying to profit as much as it can from the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. This also explains the turnaround in its relations with Syria. There was a time when Erdogan took his holidays with Assad, but once the Syrian leader refused to bow to the demands of Ankara and negotiate with the opposition, the alliance broke down. Turkey’s efforts to export its model of “moderate” Islam are also in direct opposition to the efforts of Saudi Arabia to increase its own influence in the region on the basis of ultra-conservative Wahabism.

The possibility of a war over Syria, and then in Iran, is serious enough to persuade the two biggest allies of these countries, China and Russia, to react with increasing strength. For China, Iran is of considerable importance because it supplies it with 11% of its energy needs.[3] Since its industrial take-off, China has become a new major player in the region. Last December, it warned of the danger of a global conflict around Syria and Iran. It thus declared through the Global Times:[4]

“The West suffers from an economic recession, but its efforts to overthrow non-Western governments due to politics and military interests culminate. China, as well as its mammoth neighbour Russia, should keep on high alert and adopt countermeasures if necessary.

“China should not shrink before a possible showdown with the West but seek a solution favouring itself. China will adopt concrete measures to show its determination to take its own path. Such a choice is important for China's interests.”[5]

Even if a direct confrontation between the world’s big imperialist powers can’t be envisaged in the current global context, such declarations show how serious the situation is.

Capitalism is heading straight for the abyss

The Middle East is a powder keg and there are some who would be willing to put a match to it. Certain imperialist powers are coldly preparing to use types of nuclear weapons in a coming war with Iran. 

The military and strategic means are already there. In dying capitalism the worst scenario is always the most probable and we cannot rule it out. In any case, the trajectory of this senile and obsolete system is increasingly irrational. Imperialist war amounts to a real self-destruction of capitalism. That capitalism, which has already been condemned by history, should disappear is not a problem for the proletariat and for humanity. Unfortunately this self-destruction of the system goes together with the threat of the total destruction of humanity. But recognising that capitalism is caught up in a process leading to the ruin of civilisation should not be a reason for despair or passivity. In the last issue of this Review, for the first part of this year, we wrote “The economic crisis is not a never-ending story. It announces the end of a system and the struggle for another world”. This assertion was based on the real evolution of the international class struggle. This world-wide struggle for another world is now beginning. Certainly with all kinds of difficulties, still very slowly, but it is now definitely present. And this new force in movement, illustrated most clearly by the struggle if the Indignados in Spain, enables us to see that there is a real possibility of ridding the planet from the barbarism of capital.

Tino 11/4/12

While governments of every country are bent on imposing more and more violent austerity plans, the mobilisations of 2011 – the movement of the Indignant in Spain, Greece, etc., and the occupations in the United States and other countries – continued during the first quarter of 2012. However, the struggles came up against a powerful union mobilisation that managed to seriously hold back the process of self-organisation and unification, which began in 2011.

How do we get out from under the unions’ thumb? How do we once again find and revive the tendencies that appeared in 2011? We are going to try to give some elements of a response to these questions.

Massive demonstrations

We will begin by briefly recalling the struggles (see our territorial press for a more detailed chronology).

In Spain, brutal social blows (in education, health and basic services) and the adoption of a “Labour Reform”, which makes sacking easier and allows firms to immediately lower wages, have provoked big demonstrations, particularly in Valencia but also in Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao.

In February, there was an attempt to create a climate of police terror in the street, by using the pupils of secondary education as punch-bags, and workers of all generations came onto the streets to struggle shoulder to shoulder with the schoolchildren. The wave of protests spread throughout the country, generating demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona, Saragossa, Seville, which were often spontaneous or decided upon during the course of improvised assemblies.[1]

In Greece, a new general strike in February led to massive demonstrations throughout the country. Participating in them were employees of the public and private sectors, young and old, as well as the unemployed. Even some cops joined in. Workers from the hospital at Kilki occupied their workplace, calling for solidarity and for the participation of the whole of the population, and launching an appeal for international solidarity.[2]

In Mexico, the government concentrated most of its attacks against workers of the teaching sector, waiting to generalise them to other sectors, in the context of the general degradation of living conditions in a country where it was said they were “armour-plated against the crisis”. Despite the extremely strong union grip, the teachers demonstrated in large numbers in the centre of Mexico.[3]

In Italy, in January several strikes broke out against the avalanche of job losses and the measures adopted by the new government: among rail workers, in firms like Jabil ex-Nokia, Esselunga di Pioltello in Milan; FIAT at Termini Imerese, Ceramica Ricchetti in Mordado/Bologna; the refineries at Tapani; among the precarious workers of the Gasliani de Genes hospital, etc; and, also among sectors close to the proletariat such as lorry drivers, taxi drivers, shepherds, fishermen, peasants... That said, these movements have been very dispersed. An attempt at co-ordination in the Milanese region failed, as it remained imprisoned within a trade unionist vision.[4]

In India, a country which, together with China is considered to be “the future of capitalism”, a general strike convoked by the unions broke out on February 28. More than a hundred unions representing 100 million workers throughout the country answered the summons (although far from all workers were called out by their union). This mobilisation was widely hailed as one of the most massive strikes in the world up to now. However, it was above all a day of demobilisation, a way of letting off steam in response to a growing wave of struggles since 2010, at the spearhead of which were the automobile workers (Honda, Maruti-Suzuki, Hyundai Motors). Thus, recently, in the car production factories, workers acted on their own initiative and didn’t wait for union orders to mobilise, showing strong tendencies for solidarity and a will to extend to other factories. They also expressed tendencies to self-organisation and the setting up of general assemblies, as in the strikes at Maruti-Suzuki in Manesar, a new town whose development is linked to the industrial boom in the region around Delhi. During the course of this struggle, the workers occupied the factory against the advice of “their” union. Workers’ anger rumbled on and that’s why the unions were agreed on a common appeal for the strike... in order to put up a united face against the working class![5]

2011 and 2012: one and the same struggle

Young people, the unemployed and precarious workers have been the motor force of the actions of the Indignants and Occupy in 2011, even if these mobilised workers of all ages. The struggle tended to organise itself around general assemblies, which went together with a critique of the unions. It didn’t put forward any concrete demands, focussing instead on the expression of indignation and looking for explanations for the situation.

In 2012, the first struggles in response to the attacks of the state came in a different form: here the spearhead is made up of  “established” workers of 40-50 years old from the public sector, strongly supported by the “users” (heads of families, parents of the sick, etc.), who were joined by the unemployed and youth. The struggles polarised around concrete demands and the tutelage of the trade unions is very much present.

It seems then as if it’s a matter of “different” if not “opposed” struggles as the various media try to make us think. The first are supposedly “radical”, “political”, animated by some “idealists having nothing to lose”; the second on the contrary, are made up of fathers of families impregnated with a union consciousness who don’t want to lose their “acquired privileges”.

Such a characterisation of these “two types of struggle”, which obscures the profoundly common social tendencies, has the political aim of dividing and opposing both reactions from the proletariat, which are products of the maturation of consciousness and express the beginnings of a response to the crisis, and which will have to unite in the perspective of massive struggles. It’s much more a question of two pieces of a puzzle that have to fit together.

This however will not be easy. A struggle where the workers play a more and more active and conscious part, in particular in the most advanced sectors of the proletariat, is a real necessity and its first condition is a clear assessment of all the weaknesses affecting the workers’ movement.

The mystifications

One of them is nationalism which has particularly affected Greece. Here, the anger provoked by the unbearable austerity has been channelled “against the German people”, whose so-called “wealth”[6] is supposed to be at the origins of the misfortunes of the “Greek people”. This nationalism is used to propose “solutions” to the crisis based upon “getting back economic national sovereignty”, an autarkic vision shared by both the Stalinists and neo-fascists.[7]

The so-called rivalry between right and left is another of the mystifications with which the state tries to weaken the working class. We can particularly see it at work in Italy and Spain. In Italy, the eviction of Berlusconi, a particularly repugnant individual, has allowed the left to create an artificial euphoria – “We are finally free!” – which has been a strong factor in the dispersion of the workers’ responses that we saw in the beginning of the austerity plans imposed by the “technocratic” government led by Monti.[8] In Spain, the authoritarianism and the brutality of the repression which traditionally characterises the right has allowed the unions and the parties of the left to attribute the responsibility for the attacks to the “wickedness” and venality of the right and divert discontent towards the “defence of the social and democratic state”. In this sense we can see a convergence of mystifications, both from the traditional forces for corralling the working class, the unions and the parties of the left, and those more recently deployed by the bourgeoisie in order to face up to the movement of the Indignant, in particular DRY (“Democracia Real Ya!” – “Real Democracy Now!”). As we’ve said: “the strategy of DRY, in the service of the democratic state of the bourgeoisie, consists in fact of putting forward a citizens’ movement of democratic reform to try to avoid the appearance of a social movement of struggle against the democratic state, against capitalism.”[9]

The union barrier

In 2011, the bourgeoisie in Spain was surprised by the movement of the Indignant, which, paradoxically, managed to quite freely develop the classical methods of the workers’ struggle: massive assemblies, open demonstrations, wide-ranging debates.[10] This is connected to the fact that it was mobilised not on the terrain of the firm but in the streets and that the young and precarious workers, who constituted its motor force, fundamentally distrusted all “recognised” institutions such as the unions.

Today, the implementation of austerity plans is on the agenda for all states, particularly in Europe, provoking strong discontent and a growing militancy. These states don’t want to be taken by surprise and, to this end, they accompany the attacks with a political operation that obstructs the emergence of a united, self-organised and massive struggle of the workers that can take forward the tendencies which appeared in 2011.

The unions are the spearhead of this operation. Their role is to occupy the social ground by proposing demonstrations which create a labyrinth where the efforts, combativity and the growing indignation of the masses of workers cannot be expressed, or flounders on a field mined with divisions.

We clearly see this in one of the preferred tools of the unions: the general strike. In the hands of the unions, such endless mobilisations, which often bring together a good number of workers, cut the class off from any possibility of taking charge of a struggle and turning it into a massive riposte to the attacks of the bourgeoisie. No less than sixteen general strikes have been called in Greece in the last three years! There have already been three in Portugal; another is being prepared in Italy; a strike – limited to the education sector! - was announced in Britain; we’ve already talked about the strike in India at the end of February; and, in Spain, following the general strike of September 2010, another was announced for March 29th.

The multitude of general strikes convoked by the unions is of course an indication of the pressure exercised by the workers, of their discontent and combativity. But, for the most part, the official general strike is not a step forward. Rather it’s a way of letting off steam faced with social discontent.[11]

The Communist Manifesto argued that “The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers”; the principal acquisition of a strike is found in the unity and consciousness, the capacity for initiative and organisation, the expressions of solidarity and the active links that are allowed to be established.

It is these acquisitions that the top-down general strikes and the union methods of struggle weaken and distort.

The union leaders announce the general strike in a loud press and TV song and dance, launching great proclamations invoking “unity” but, at places of work, the “preparation” for the general strike in fact constitutes an immense manoeuvre of division, confrontation and atomisation.

Participation in the general strike is presented as the personal decision of each worker. In many firms, there are even management or administration staff who ask workers about their possible participation, with all that means in terms of blackmail and intimidation. This is what the “constitutional” right of the “citizen” to strike comes down to!

This manoeuvre faithfully reproduces the lying schema of the dominant ideology, according to which each individual is autonomous and independent, deciding “in all conscience” what to do. The strike is another of the thousand agonising dilemmas that life imposes on us in this society and to which we must respond alone in the greatest distress: must I accept this work? Must I profit from this occasion? Must I buy this object? Who should I vote for? Should I go on strike? From these dilemmas we come out with the feeling of being still more alienated: it is the world of competition, of the struggle of each against all, of everyone for themselves, that’s to say the quintessence of this society.

The days preceding the general strike see a proliferation of scenes of conflict and tensions between workers. Everyone confronts agonising questions: should I strike knowing we will get nothing? Am I letting down my comrades who are on strike? Can I afford the luxury of losing a day’s pay? Will I lose my job? The workers are caught between a rock and a hard place: on one side the unions, who try to make those that don’t take part feel guilty, on the other the bosses, who make all sorts of threats. It’s a real nightmare of confrontations, of divisions and tensions between workers, exacerbated by the question of whether to maintain a “minimum service”, which is a new source of conflicts.[12]

The capitalist world functions as an addition of millions of “free individual decisions”. In reality, none of these decisions are free but are subjected to a complex network of alienated relationships; from the infrastructure of the relations of production – the market and wage labour – up to the immense structure of juridical, military, ideological, religious, political and policing relations.

Marx said that “the real intellectual richness of the individual depends entirely on the richness of real relationships”[13] these latter being the pillar of proletarian struggle and of the social force which alone will be able to destroy capitalism, whereas union summonses dissolve the social relations and enclose the proletarians in isolation, the corporatist prison, suppressing the conditions which would allow them to consciously decide: the collective body of the workers in struggle.

It’s the capacity of the workers to collectively discuss the pros and cons of an action that gives them their strength, because it is in this framework that they can examine the arguments, the initiatives, the clarifications, taking into account doubts, disagreements, feelings, the reservations of everyone, in a framework where they can take common decisions. It is this way of carrying out a struggle where the greatest number of workers can involve themselves with their responsibilities and convictions.

It is precisely all this which is thrown into the bin by the union call to “forget the talking shop” and “get rid of sentimentalism”, in the so-called “strength we get from blocking production or services where we work”. The working class draws its strength from the central place that it occupies in production, from the fact that it produces almost all the riches that the bourgeoisie appropriates. Thus, through the strike, the workers are potentially capable of stopping the whole of production and paralysing the economy. But in reality, the tactic of the “immediate blockade” is often used by the unions as a means to divert the workers away from their first priority, which is to develop the struggle through taking charge of it and its extension.[14] Moreover, in the period of the decadence of capitalism, and especially in periods of crisis such as we’re living through today, it’s the capitalist system itself, with its chaotic and contradictory functioning, which is responsible for the paralysis of production and its social services. Blockages in production – which can often last well over 24 hours! – are put to the profit of capitalism in order to eliminate stocks. Regarding services such as teaching, health or public transport, blockades can be used by the state in order to pit the “users”, most of them workers, against their comrades on strike!

The fight for a single and massive struggle

During the movements of 2011, the exploited masses were able to act on their own initiative and take up their most profound aspirations, expressing themselves according to the classical methods of the working class, inherited from the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, May 68 etc. The present imposition of union tutelage makes this “free expression” more difficult, but the latter will continue to find a way. Against the union grip, workers’ initiatives are beginning to appear: in Spain for example we’ve seen several expressions of them. At the demonstration of March 29th in Barcelona, Castillon, Alicante, Valencia and Madrid, strikers carried their own banners, formed pickets to explain their mobilisation, claimed the right to speak at union meetings, held alternative assemblies... It is significant that these initiatives happened in the same way as those which developed around events in France in 2010 against the retirement reform.[15]

We are faced with the need to join a combat on booby-trapped ground in order to open up the way to authentic proletarian struggle. The rule of the unions seems insurmountable but conditions are ripening for the wearing out of their authority and thus for strengthening the autonomous capacities of the proletariat.

The crisis, which has already lasted five years and threatens to break out in new convulsions, little by little dispels illusions about “light at the end of the tunnel”, and reveals in its turn a profound preoccupation about the future. The growing bankruptcy of the social system becomes more and more evident, with everything that this implies about living conditions, human relations, thought, culture... Whereas during periods when the crisis wasn’t so sharp, the workers seemed to be able to follow a road mapped out in advance, despite the often terrible sufferings that go along with exploitation, this road is progressively disappearing. And this dynamic is today worldwide.

The tendency, which was already expressed in 2011 with the movement of the Indignant in Spain and Occupy[16] to take to the streets and squares in large numbers, is another powerful lever of the movement. In the present life of capitalism, the street is a place of alienation: traffic jams, solitary crowds buying, selling, managing, running businesses... When the masses take over the streets for “another use” – assemblies, massive discussions, demonstrations – they can become a space of freedom. This allows the workers to begin to glimpse the social force it is capable of becoming if it learns to act in a collective and autonomous fashion. It sows the first seeds of what could be the “direct government of the masses” through which it educates itself, frees itself from all the rags that this system sticks to its body, and finds the strength to destroy capitalism and construct another society.

Another force that pushes the movement towards the future is the convergence of generations of workers in the struggle. This phenomenon has been seen in miniature in struggles such as those against the CPE in France (2006)[17] or in the revolts of youth in Greece (2008).[18] The convergence all working class generations in common action is an indispensable condition for undertaking a really revolutionary struggle. At the time of the Russian revolution in 1917, proletarians of all ages kept close to each other, from children raised on the shoulders of their brothers or fathers, up to white-haired oldsters.

There is a whole range of factors that will help the working class to develop its powers, but this will not be immediate or easy. Hard battles, animated by the persevering intervention of revolutionary organisations, punctuated by often bitter defeats and moments of difficulty, confusion and temporary paralysis, will still be necessary in order to allow the full delivery of this power. The weapon of criticism, a firm criticism of errors and weaknesses, will be fundamental in order to go forward.

“On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here!”[19]

C.Mir 27/3/12

Is capitalism a decadent mode of production and why? (ii)

Overproduction, a fundamental contradiction of capitalism, is linked to the existence of wage labour. This will be analysed in this second part of our article in order to reply to important questions on which we have serious disagreements with Marcel Roelandts’ book Dynamics, contradictions and crises of capitalism:[1] Why does increasing workers’ wages not resolve the problem of overproduction? Where does the demand exterior to the workers come from and what are its role and limitations? Is there a solution to the overproduction at the heart of capitalism? How to characterise those currents that propose wage increases as the solution to capitalism’s crises? Is capitalism doomed to a catastrophic collapse?

Is there a solution to the crisis at the heart of capitalism?

The nature of overproduction

Overproduction is a characteristic of capitalist crises, unlike the crises of the modes of production that preceded it, which were characterised by scarcity.

This is a product, in the first place, of the way that this mode of production exploits the workforce, wage labour, which means that the workers must always produce more than would suffice for their own needs. It is this characteristic that is basically explained in the following passage by Marx:

“The mere relationship of wage-labourer and capitalist implies […] that the majority of the producers, the workers, …must always be over-producers, produce over and above their needs, in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs.”[2]

This then presupposes the existence of demand that is exterior to that of the workers as the latter by definition can never be enough to absorb all of capitalist production.

“It is forgotten that, as Malthus says, ‘the very existence of a profit upon any commodity pre-supposes a demand exterior to that of the labourer who has produced it’ and hence ‘the demand of the labourer himself can never be an adequate demand’.”[3]

It is precisely when the demand external to that of the workers is insufficient that overproduction appears: “If the demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs.”[4]

The contradiction is all the more violent as, on the one hand, the workers’ wage is reduced to the minimum socially necessary to reproduce the workforce and, on the other hand, the productive forces of capitalism tend to be developed to the maximum:

“The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.”[5]

Why do wage increases for the workers fail to resolve the problem of overproduction?

There are various procedures that enable the bourgeoisie to mask overproduction:

1. By destroying excess production in order to prevent its availability on the market from lowering the selling price. This is what happened in the 1970s and 1980s in particular with agricultural production in the countries of the European Economic Community. This procedure has the disadvantage for the bourgeoisie of revealing the contradictions of the system and of arousing indignation as the produce destroyed in this way is in desperately short supply for a large part of the population.
2. By reducing the use of productive capacity or even destroying a part of it. An example of this way of drastically reducing production was the Davignon plan set in motion in 1977 by the European Commission to carry out the industrial reconstruction of the metal industry (with tens of thousands of redundancies) in the face of the overproduction of steel internationally. It led to the destruction of a large number of blast furnace plants in several European countries and the redundancy of tens of thousands of steel workers, which produced important struggles, in particular those in France in 1978 and 1979.
3. By increasing demand artificially, that is, generating demand that is not based on the need for investment to become more profitable but is motivated by the need to keep the productive apparatus working. This is typically the case with Keynesian measures, in which the state pays out and which therefore have repercussions on the competitive edge of the national economy which uses such measures. This is why it can only be used if conditions allow it to compensate for the loss of competivity by means of a significant increase in productivity. This kind of measure may involve either wage increases or else public works programmes which yield no immediate profit.

These three procedures, although different in form, have the same significance for capitalist development and can basically be reduced to the first and most obvious example; the deliberate destruction of production. It may seem shocking, from a workers’ point of view, to hear that wage increases that are not justified by the need to reproduce the workforce are a “waste”. It is obviously a waste from the viewpoint of capitalist logic (which has nothing to do with the well-being of the worker), according to which paying the worker more in no way increases his productivity.

MR, who thinks that the mechanism at work during the post-war boom has been understood by very few marxists,[6] has not himself understood, or does not want to understand, that according to Marx, “the aim of capital is not to minister to certain wants, but to produce profit”[7] (quoted at the end of the article), whether the consumption is that of the working class or of the bourgeoisie.

We may call this wastage “regulation”, as does MR, without acknowledging that we are talking about wastage; this perhaps allows him to make his thesis more acceptable. But this by no means changes the fact that, to a large extent, the prosperity of the post-war boom is the wastage of a part of the gains of productivity used to produce for production’s sake.

Where does demand exterior to the workers come from?

For MR, and contrary to the position of Rosa Luxemburg whose theory of accumulation he criticises, the demand that does not come from the workers can quite well come from capitalism itself, and not necessarily from societies based on productive relations not yet capitalist and which have co-existed with capitalism for a long time.

According to Marx this demand does not come from the workers or from the capitalists themselves but from the markets that have not yet entered the capitalist mode of production.

In his book MR refers to Malthus’ opinion on this point: “It should be noted that this ‘demand exterior to that of the worker who has produced it’ concerns, according to Malthus, demand that is entirely within capitalism because it concerns social strata whose purchasing power comes from surplus value and not from extra-capitalist demand according to the Luxemburgist theory of accumulation”.[8] Marx, who supports Malthus on this point, states categorically that this demand cannot come from the worker: “The demand created by the productive labourer himself can never be an adequate demand, because it does not go to the full extent of what he produces. If it did, there would be no profit, consequently no motive to employ him.”[9] He also states explicitly that for Malthus this demand comes from “social strata whose purchasing power comes from surplus value” but at the same time he rejects Malthus’ motivation on the defence of the interests of the “Church and State hierarchy”: “Malthus is interested not in concealing the contradictions of bourgeois production but on the contrary, in emphasising them, on the one hand, in order to prove that the poverty of the working classes is necessary (as it is, indeed, for this mode of production) and, on the other hand, to demonstrate to the capitalists the necessity for a well-fed Church and State hierarchy in order to create an adequate demand for the commodities they produce. […] Thus he emphasises the possibility of general overproduction in opposition to the view of the Ricardians.”[10] So just because Malthus thinks that adequate demand may come from “social strata whose purchasing power comes from surplus value” does not mean that Marx does so too. On the contrary, the latter is very explicit on the point that adequate demand cannot come either from the workers or the capitalists: “The demand of the workers does not suffice, since profit arises precisely from the fact that the demand of the workers is smaller than the value of their product, and that it [profit] is all the greater the smaller, relatively, is this demand. The demand of the capitalists among themselves is equally insufficient.”[11]

On this point, we should point out that MR’s intentions are not entirely honourable when, in order to give his readers the means to broaden their reflection, he reports Marx’s opinion on the need for demand other than that coming from the workers and capitalists. Otherwise how can we explain why he did not cite the following passage in which Marx explains explicitly the need for “orders from abroad”, from “foreign markets” to sell the goods produced:

“How could there otherwise be a shortage of demand for the very commodities which the mass of people lack, and how would it be possible for this demand to be sought abroad, in foreign markets, to pay the labourers at home the average amount of necessities of life? This is possible only because in this specific capitalist interrelation the surplus-product assumes a form in which its owner cannot offer it for consumption, unless it first reconverts itself into capital for him. If it is finally said that the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities among themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it.”[12]

This quotation does not give us details enabling us to characterise these “foreign markets” or the “orders” from abroad but it states explicitly that the demand referred to cannot come from the capitalists themselves because the aim of production is the valorisation of capital, not consumption, and nothing prevents us from reflecting on this fact. Nor can the demand in question come from some other economic agent within capitalism which lives off the surplus value extracted and redistributed by the bourgeoisie. Who is left then within capitalist society? No-one, and this is why it is necessary to have recourse to “foreign markets”, that is, those not yet integrated into the relations of capitalist production.

This is exactly what the Communist Manifesto tells us when it describes the conquest of the planet by the bourgeoisie, impelled by the need to find ever larger outlets:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. (…) The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”[13]

Marx gives us a more detailed description of the way exchange takes place with non-capitalist mercantile societies of various kinds to make it possible for capital to benefit both from an outlet and also from a supply source that is necessary for its development: “Within its process of circulation, in which industrial capital functions either as money or as commodities, the circuit of industrial capital, whether as money-capital or as commodity-capital, crosses the commodity circulation of the most diverse modes of social production, so far as they produce commodities. No matter whether commodities are the output of production based on slavery, of peasants (Chinese, Indian ryots), of communes (Dutch East Indies), of state enterprise (such as existed in former epochs of Russian history on the basis of serfdom) or of half-savage hunting tribes, etc – as commodities and money they come face to face with the money and commodities in which the industrial capital presents itself and enter as much into its circuit as into that of the surplus-value borne in the commodity-capital, provided the surplus-value is spent as revenue; hence they enter in both branches of circulation of commodity-capital. The character of the process of production from which they originate is immaterial. They function as commodities in the market, and as commodities they enter into the circuit of industrial capital as well as into the circulation of the surplus-value incorporated in it. It is therefore the universal character of the origin of the commodities, the existence of the market as world-market, which distinguishes the process of circulation of industrial capital.”[14]

Did the primitive phase of accumulation modify capital’s relationship with its external sphere?

In addition, MR also reproduces the second part of the above quotation from the Communist Manifesto, taking care however to emphasis that “all the capacity and limitations of capitalism drawn out by Marx in Capital were arrived at by simply extracting its relationship with its external non-capitalist sphere. To be exact, Marx analyses the latter solely within the framework of primitive accumulation because he chooses to deal with the other aspects of ‘the extension of the external field of production’ separately in two volumes, one of which is specifically devoted to international trade and the other to the world market”.[15]

He goes on to affirm that, for him, “foreign markets” ceased to play an important role for the development of capitalism once the primitive phase of accumulation had been completed: “However once its basis had been cemented by three centuries of primitive accumulation, capitalism operated essentially on its own foundations. As for the importance and dynamism of capitalist production, its external environment became fairly marginal to its development.”[16]

Marx’s reasoning shows, as we have seen, the need for an external market. The description he gives of this external zone in the Communist Manifesto shows that it consists of commodity-producing societies that have not yet entered into capitalist relations of production. Marx obviously does not explain in detail why this sphere must be external to capitalist relations of production; however the necessity for it flows from the characteristics of capitalist production. If Marx or Engels had thought (as MR does) that there had been important changes since the first publication of the Manifesto regarding capital’s relationship to its external sphere and that the “foreign markets” had ceased to have the role that they had during primitive accumulation, we can suppose that they would have felt the need to mention it in the prefaces to the subsequent editions of the Manifesto,[17] as both of them witnessed, in different periods, the triumphal march of capitalism after the phase of primitive accumulation. Not only did they not do so but, what is more, book III was begun in 1864 and “finished” in 1875. One would think that at the time, Marx would have acquired sufficient hindsight on the question of the phase of primitive accumulation (from the end of the Middle Ages to the middle of the 19th century) and yet in this work he continues the idea contained in the Communist Manifesto by referring to “orders from abroad”, “foreign markets”.

MR persists in his thesis, claiming that it corresponds to Marx’s vision: “This is why we think, with Marx, that ‘the tendency to overproduction’ does not result from insufficient extra-capitalist markets, but rather from “the immediate relations of capital” within pure capitalism: ‘It goes without saying that we do not intend to analyse in detail here the nature of overproduction; we will just remark the tendency towards overproduction which is present in the immediate relations of capital. So here we can leave aside all that regards other possessing or consuming classes, etc, who do not produce but rather live off their revenue, that is, those who engage in exchange with capital and as such constitute an exchange point for it. We will mention them only where they are really important, that is, at the origins of capital’ (Grundrisse, chapter on capital).”[18]

What the quotation from Marx says is that, in examining overproduction, we can leave aside the role played by the possessing classes in their exchange with capitalism because, from this point of view they have no more than a marginal role. The possessing classes referred to here are those that remained  from the old feudal order. On the other hand, what the quotation does not say is exactly what MR wants to make it say; that the “foreign markets”, “orders” that arrive from “abroad” have no more than a marginal role in relation to overproduction. It is precisely this that is at the heart of the polemic.

The accumulation theory of Rosa Luxemburg put to the test

It was Rosa Luxemburg who demonstrated that capitalist enrichment as a whole depended on goods produced within it and exchanged with pre-capitalist economies, that is, those that practice commodity exchange but which have not yet adopted the capitalist mode of production. Rosa Luxemburg simply developed Marx’s analysis and, when she felt it necessary, she also made a critique, in the Accumulation of Capital, regarding accumulation schemas, in which there were certain errors in her opinion because they do not include the intervention of extra-capitalist markets, although these are indispensable for the realisation of enlarged reproduction. She attributed this error to the fact that Capital is an unfinished work and Marx was saving the study of capital in relation to its environment for a future work.[19]

MR criticises the accumulation theory of Rosa Luxemburg. In his view Marx deliberately disregards the sphere of extra-capitalist relations when describing accumulation schemas and he also thinks that he was theoretically correct to do so: “Understanding the place that Marx assigns to this sphere in the historic development of capitalism enables us to understand why he eliminates it from his analysis in Capital: not just as a methodological hypothesis as Luxemburg thinks, but because it represents an obstacle that capitalism had to get rid of. By ignoring this analysis, Luxemburg fails to understand the deeper reasons leading Marx to disregard this sphere in Capital.”[20] On what basis does MR make such an affirmation? By using the argument which we have already rejected, that for him and for Marx, the “markets abroad” no longer played anything but a marginal role in capitalist development after its phase of primitive accumulation.

MR puts forward another three arguments which, according to him, support his critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s accumulation theory.

1) “For Rosa Luxemburg, the strength of capital depends on the importance of the pre-capitalist sphere and its exhaustion is its death knell. The view held by Marx is the opposite: ‘As long as capital is weak, it still itself relies on the crutches of past modes of production, or of those which will pass with its rise. As soon as it feels strong, it throws away the crutches, and moves in accordance with its own laws.’ This sphere does not therefore constitute an area in which capitalism could nourish itself in order to expand, but a crutch that weakened it and which it had to get rid of in order to gain strength and develop according to its own laws.”[21] This conclusion is at the least hasty and forced.[22] The Manifesto contains an idea very close to that contained in the above quotation from Marx taken from Capital, but it is expressed in a way that, contrary to what MR thinks, makes it possible to assert that the pre-capitalist milieu acted as a terrain that nourished capitalism:

“Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.”[23]

2) “The best estimates of sales towards the third world show that capitalism’s enlarged reproduction did not depend on extra-capitalist markets outside the developed countries: ‘In spite of a wide-spread view to the contrary, there has never been, in the history of the developed western world, a period in which the outlets offered by the colonies, or even of the whole of the third world, played a big role in the development of its industries. The third world does not even represent a very important outlet…, the third world absorbs an estimated 1.3%  to 1.7% of the total volume of production from the developed countries, of which only 0.6% to 0.9% from the colonies.’ (Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l’histoire economique, p 104-105). This percentage, which is already very small, is in fact an over-estimate as only a part of the sales to the third world are destined for the extra-capitalist sphere.”[24]

We will deal with this objection more generally by taking into consideration the following: “It is those countries which have a vast colonial empire which have the lowest growth rates, although those that sell on the capitalist market have much higher rates! This is true throughout the history of capitalism , and particularly when the colonies played, or should have played, their most important role! So in the 19th century, when the colonial markets intervened most, all the un-colonised capitalist countries experienced much more rapid growth than did the colonial powers (71% faster on average – an arithmetic mean of the growth rates not weighted according to the respective populations of the countries). It is enough to take the growth rates of the GDP per inhabitant during the 25 years of imperialism (1880-1913) that Rosa Luxemburg describes as the most prosperous and dynamic period of capitalism:

1. Colonial powers: Great Britain (1.06%), France (1.52%), Holland (0.87%), Spain (0.68%), Portugal (0.84%);
2. Countries not or little colonised: USA (1.56%), Germany (1.85%), Sweden (1.58%), Switzerland (1.69%), Denmark (1.79%) (Annual average growth rate; source: www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison [64]).”[25]

We can answer this in a few words. It is wrong to identify extra-capitalist markets and colonies because the extra-capitalist markets also include the internal markets that the colonies have not yet subjected to the relations of capitalist production. During the period 1880-1913, all the countries referred to above benefited at least from access to their own internal extra-capitalist market and also to that of the other industrialised countries. Moreover, because of the international division of labour, commerce with the extra-capitalist sphere was also of benefit indirectly to countries who did not actually possess colonies.

As for the United States, they are a typical example of the role played by extra-capitalist markets in economic and industrial development. Following the destruction of the slave economy of the southern states by the civil war (1861-1865), capitalism spread over the next 30 years towards the American west in a constant process that we can summarise thus: the massacre and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population; the setting up of an extra-capitalist economy by means of the sale and concession of the new territory annexed by the government to the colonisers and small scale cattle ranchers; destruction of this extra-capitalist economy through debt, fraud and violence and the extension of the capitalist economy. In 1898, a document of the American State Department explained: “It is more or less certain that each year we will be faced with an increasing overproduction of goods from our factories and workshops that will have to be placed on foreign markets if we want American workers to work all year around. Increasing foreign consumption of the foods produced in our factories and workshops has become a crucial question for the authorities of this country as it is for commerce in general.”[26] It then experienced a rapid imperialist expansion: Cuba (1898), Hawaii (also 1898), Philippines (1899), the zone around the Panama canal (1903). In 1900, Albert Beveridge (one of the main defenders of American imperialist policy) stated in the senate: “The Philippines will always be ours…. And behind the Philippines there are the unlimited markets of China…. The Pacific is our ocean… Where will we find consumers for our surplus? Geography gives us the answer. China is our natural client.” We do not need “the best statistics” to prove that the trump card that made it possible for the United States to become the main world power before the end of the 19th century was the fact that it had privileged access to huge extra-capitalist markets.

3) There is another argument in the book that needs a short comment: “Reality therefore is in conformity with Marx’s vision and is the opposite of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory. This can be easily explained by various reasons that we cannot go into here. We will mention briefly that as a general rule, any sale of goods on an extra-capitalist market exits the circle of accumulation and so tends to act as a brake on the latter. The sale of goods outside capitalism may well allow individual capitalists to realise their goods but it brakes the global accumulation of capitalism because such sales represent a loss of the material means of the accumulation circle within pure capitalism.”[27]

Far from being a hindrance to accumulation, sales to extra-capitalist sectors actually benefit it. Not only do goods sold to the extra-capitalist sphere not hinder accumulation owing to the dynamism of this mode of production which, by its very nature, tends constantly to produce in excess, but in addition it makes it possible for the sphere of capitalist productive relations to receive payment (the product of the sale) which, in one way or another, increase the capital accumulated.

An examination of MR’s “arguments” for affirming that the existence of a substantial extra-capitalist sector did not constitute the condition for a significant development of capitalism, shows that they are not consistent. But obviously we are willing to consider any critique of the method that we have used in our own critique.

The limits of the market exterior to capitalism

The abundance of extra-capitalist markets in the colonies made it possible, up until the first world war, to sell off the excess production of the main industrial countries. But within these countries in this period there were still extra-capitalist markets, more or less important (Great Britain was the first industrial power to exhaust them), that served as an outlet for capitalist production. During this phase in the life of capitalism the crises were less violent. “However different they were in many ways, all of these crises had one thing in common: they represented a relatively brief interruption in the gigantic ascendant movement which on the whole can be considered as continuous.”[28]

But the extra-capitalist markets were not limitless, as Marx emphasised: “the market is limited externally in the geographical sense, the internal market is limited as compared with a market that is both internal and external, the latter in turn is limited as compared with the world market, which however is, in turn, limited at each moment of time.”[29] It was Germany that was the first to demonstrate this reality.

The phase of rapid industrial development experienced by this country took place in a period in which the division of the world’s riches was more or less completed and the possibility of new imperialist openings was increasingly rare. In fact, this nation state arrived on the world market at a time in which the territory formerly free of European domination had been almost completely divided up and reduced to the rank of colonies or semi-colonies of these older industrial states, which were its most formidable competitors. Overproduction and the need to export at all cost were the factors that oriented German foreign policy from the beginning of the 20th century (on this point see the developments in Conflict of the Century, pp.51, 53 and 151 in the French edition). The reduced access to extra-capitalist markets was a consequence of their transformation by the big colonial powers into protected hunting grounds. This was to such an extent that the dawn of the 20th century was marked by the increase in international tensions borne from imperialist expansion, which led to world war in 1914 when Germany initiated a war to re-divide the world and its markets.

MR mentions the great disparity of analysis within the revolutionary vanguard to explain the onset of decadence marked by the outbreak of the first world war: “Although this historic sentence (capitalism’s entrance into a spiral of crises and wars) was generally shared within the communist movement, the factors put forward to explain it found much less agreement”.[30] He omits, however, to mention the remarkable level of agreement between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin on the analysis of a war to repartition the world. Lenin expresses it in this way: “…the characteristic feature of this period is the final partition of the globe – not in the sense that a new partition is impossible – on the contrary, new partitions are possible and inevitable – but in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet. For the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only re-division is possible; territories can only pass from one ‘owner’ to another, instead of passing as unowned territory to an ‘owner’.”[31]

To talk of the need for countries endowed with fewer colonies to re-divide the world, is not the same as saying that there is a lack of extra-capitalist markets relative to the needs of production. An identification between the two has too often been made. In fact at the beginning of the 20th century there were still plenty of extra-capitalist markets (in the colonies and even within the industrialised countries), the exploitation of which was still able to produce leaps forward in capitalist development. This is the point that Rosa Luxemburg put forward in 1907 in her Introduction to Political Economy: “With each step that it takes in its development, capitalist production inevitably nears the period in which it must develop more and more slowly and with increasing difficulty. The development of capitalism in itself has a long road ahead of it because capitalist production as such is no more than a tiny part of world production. Even in the oldest industrial countries in Europe there still exist, side by side with large-scale industrial businesses, lots of little, backward, artisan enterprises; the greater part of agricultural produce, peasant production, is not capitalist. Besides that, in Europe there are entire countries in which large-scale industry has hardly developed, where local production is of a peasant or artisan character. On the other continents, with the exception of North America, capitalist enterprises form no more than small scattered islands in the midst of huge regions that have not yet gone over even to production with simple trading. (…) The capitalist mode of production has room for enormous expansion if it must drive out backward forms of production everywhere. Its evolution is moving in this direction.”[32]

It was the 1929 crisis that gave warning of the lack of substantial extra-capitalist markets, not in absolute terms but relative to the need for capitalism to export goods in increasingly large quantities. These markets were by no means exhausted. The developments in industrialisation and the means of transport made in the capitalist metropoles made it possible to better exploit the existing markets, to the extent that they could still play a role in the 1950s as a factor in the prosperity of the post war boom.

However at this stage, according to Rosa Luxemburg, the question of the very impossibility of capitalism was raised: “Thus, this evolution traps capitalism in a fundamental contradiction: the more that capitalist production replaces more backward modes of production, the more narrow become the limits to the market created by the search for profit, in relation to the expansion of existing capitalist enterprises. This becomes quite clear if we try to imagine for a moment that the development of capitalism has advanced to such an extent that, over the whole face of the globe, everything is produced in a capitalist way, that is, exclusively by private capitalist entrepreneurs, in large factories, with modern wage workers. Now the impossibility of capitalism leaps to view.”[33] How was this impossibility overcome? We will come back to this later when examining the question of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism.

There is no solution to overproduction within capitalism

The fact that it is not possible under capitalism to resolve the crises of overproduction by increasing workers’ wages or by constantly increasing the solvent demand that does not come from the workers, means that overproduction cannot be overcome within capitalism. In fact this can only be done by abolishing wage labour and replacing capitalism by a society of freely associated producers.

MR cannot reconcile himself to this implacable and unavoidable logic for capitalism and its reformers. In fact he has amply quoted Marx in various ways around the theme “the worker cannot provide adequate demand” and has then rapidly forgotten it and contradicted the fundamental idea that “if the ‘demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself’ disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs.” So he makes it seem that the crisis of overproduction is a result of the diminution of the mass of wages, which is none other than a recycling of the Malthusian concepts that Marx fought against: “the mass of wages in the developed countries increases by an average of two thirds of the total revenue and has always been a large component of the final demand. Its diminution restricts the markets and results in a slump which is the basis of the crises of overproduction. This reduction in consumption directly affects wages but it also indirectly affects businesses because demand is restricted. In fact the corresponding increase in profits and the consumption of the capitalists only manages in a very partial way to compensate for the relative reduction in wage demand. It is even less the case as reinvestment of profits is limited by the general contraction of the markets.”[34]

It is undeniable that the reduction in wages, as well as the development of unemployment, has a negative effect on the economic activity of businesses producing consumer goods, in the first place those producing the necessaries for the reproduction of the work force. But it is not the compression of wages that causes the crisis. The reverse is the case. It is because of the crisis that the state or the bosses are led to sack workers or reduce wages.

MR has turned reality on its head. His reasoning becomes “if the demand of the labourer himself shrinks up, then the collapse occurs.” He therefore thinks that the cause of the last stock exchange crash that took place immediately before the book was written (4th quarter 2010) lies in the compression of wage demand: “The best proof is the dynamic that led to the last stock exchange crash: as wage demand was drastically compressed, growth was obtained only by boosting consumption (graph 6.6) through an increase in debt (which began in 1982: graph 6.5), a reduction in the level of savings (which also began in 1982: graph 6.4) and an increase in patrimonial income.”[35] This more or less attributes the present level of debt to the compression in wage demand.

From that to the idea that the crisis is the product of the rapacity of the capitalists is a small step.

As we will show, and as is quite clear to anyone who approaches this question seriously and honestly, MR defends an analysis of the basic causes of the economic crises of capitalism that is different from that defended by Marx and Engels in their time. This is well within his rights, and even his responsibility if he thinks it necessary. In fact, whatever the value and the depth of the considerable contribution that Marx brought to proletarian theory, he was not infallible and his writings should not be treated like holy texts. This would be a religious approach that is totally foreign to marxism and also to any scientific method. Marx’s writings should also be subjected to the critical marxist method. This is the approach adopted by Rosa Luxemburg in the The Accumulation of Capital (1913) when she brings out the contradictions contained in Book II of Capital. Having said this, when one questions a part of Marx’s writings, political and scientific honesty requires one to follow this trajectory explicitly and clearly. This is what Rosa Luxemburg did in her book and it produced a huge outcry from the “orthodox marxists” who were scandalised that she could openly criticise the writings of Marx. Unfortunately, this is not what MR does when he discards Marx’s analysis while pretending to remain faithful to it. For our part, we defend Marx’s analyses on this point because we think that they are correct and that they reflect the real life of capitalism.

In particular, we completely defend the revolutionary vision that they contain and we resolutely close the door against a reformist vision. Unfortunately this is not the case with MR, who declares his faithfulness to Marx’s texts and then does a bit of fast footwork to smuggle in a reformist vision “gently”. This, without doubt, is the most deplorable aspect of his book.

How can we characterise the currents who propose to resolve the capitalist crisis by means of wage increases?

Marx defended the need for the struggle for reforms but he energetically denounced the reformist tendencies that tried to imprison the working class and who “saw in the wage struggle only the wage struggle” and not a school for struggle in which the class forges the weapons of its definitive emancipation. In fact Marx criticised Proudhon for seeing “in misery only misery” and the trade-unions who “fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system”.[36] When capitalism’s entry into decadence put the proletarian revolution on the agenda and made any real reformist policy within the system impossible, there was a huge mystification trying to derail the proletariat from its historic goal by getting it to believe that it could still eke out a place for itself within the system, in particular by bringing to power good teams, good people, generally those belonging to the left or extreme left of the political apparatus of capital. For this reason, once the proletarian revolution is historically on the agenda, the defence of the struggle for reforms is no longer an opportunist side-track within the workers’ movement, it is openly counter-revolutionary. This is why it is a responsibility of revolutionaries to combat any illusions spread about by the left of capital that try to make the reform of capitalism seem credible, while encouraging the resistance struggles of the working class against the degradation of its living conditions within capitalism. These struggles are indispensable in preventing it from being ground down by the constant encroachments of capitalism in crisis and are an indispensable preparation for the confrontation with the capitalist state.

In this respect it is worthwhile showing, as we have already done, how MR’s theory offers gaping holes for reformism. His book mentions his political commitment. Permit us to doubt this somewhat given his dealings with representatives of “marxism”, who are also politically committed but very clearly in the defence of reformist theses. This is why we think it necessary to underline the homage he pays to the contribution of “certain marxist economists”: “too little attention is given to the evolution of the rate of surplus value, the problems of re-distribution, the state of the class struggle and the development of the proportion of wages. It is only because of the work of certain marxist economists (Jacques Gouverneur, Michel Husson, Alain Bihr, etc) that these concerns are coming a little to the fore. We agree with them and hope that they will be followed by others”. [37] The first of these, Jacques Gouverneur, who “provided” MR with “numerous indications for deepening Capital”[38] is the author of a “working document”[39] with a revealing title, “Which economic policy against crisis and unemployment?”, in which he pleads against neo-liberal policies and for a return to an assortment of Keynesian policies that are “alternative policies” (“increase in public levies – essentially on profits – to finance socially useful production…”). As for Michel Husson, a member of the scientific council of Attac, who “has taught much” to MR “through the rigour and enormous richness of his analyses”,[40] let’s hear his reflections on struggling against unemployment and precarious work: “So we must examine the left’s proposals on labour questions. On this point, the programme of the Socialist Party is very weak, even if it contains some interesting proposals (as do all programmes) […] rather than increasing wealth, we should change its re-distribution. In other words, we cannot count on growth and especially not on changing its content, which is absolutely impossible with the present re-distribution of income. This means, in the first place, the need to deflate financial taxes and seriously review the fiscal laws on capital revenue.”[41] And finally, Alain Bihr, who is less well-known than his reformist predecessors: although less right-wing than Husson, he is not backward in making his contribution to the campaign aiming to attribute the ravages of capitalism to liberalism: “The adoption of neo-liberal policies, their being carried out resolutely and followed methodically for more than thirty years has had the effect of creating the conditions for a crisis of overproduction by compressing wages too much: in brief, a crisis of overproduction because of under-consumption related to wages.” All of these people have taught MR, if he did not already know it, that the root of capitalist crises is to be found, not in its insurmountable contradictions, but in its neo-liberal policies, a bad division of wealth and consequently the state must be called upon to put into practice Keynesian policies, tax the revenues of capital, increase wages, in a word: try to regulate the economy.

MR also seems to sympathise with the idea, dear to Alan Bihr, that the proletariat is in crisis because of the capitalist crisis and that de-unionisation is a demonstration of this so-called crisis in the working class,[42] when he writes: “the fear of losing one’s job destroys workers’ solidarity and the percentage unionised has diminished to begin a rapid decline from 1978-79. A significant aspect of this is the isolation of the long struggle of the British miners in 1984-85.”[43] This is no mean contribution to the bourgeoisie’s discourse, when we consider that the main factor in the isolation and defeat of the British miners was the union and the illusions that persisted in the working class regarding its radical version, “base unionism”.

Is capitalism condemned to a catastrophic collapse?

Now that it has reached a certain stage in its history, capitalism can only cast society into greater and greater convulsions, destroying the progress that it had previously ushered in. It is within this context that the class struggle of the proletariat unfolds with the perspective of overthrowing capitalism and bringing about a new society. If the proletariat does not manage to raise its struggle to the highest level of consciousness and organisation necessary, capitalism’s contradictions will make a new society impossible and will lead to “the common ruin of the contending classes”, as was the case with certain class societies in the past: “oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”[44]

Within this context it is important to understand whether, over and above the increasing barbarism inherent to the decadence of capitalism, the economic characteristics of the crisis must of necessity make it impossible at a given moment for the system to go on functioning according to its own laws, so making accumulation impossible.[45] This is essentially the view of a number of marxists and we share it.[46] So, for Rosa Luxemburg, “The impossibility of capitalism leaps to view” once “the development of capitalism has advanced to such an extent that, over the whole face of the globe, everything is produced in a capitalist way” (see the preceding quotations from the Introduction to Political Economy).[47] Even so, Rosa Luxemburg makes the following precision: “This is not to say that capitalist development must be actually driven to this extreme: the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe.”[48]

Likewise Paul Mattick,[49] who also thinks that the system’s contradictions must lead to economic collapse, although he thinks that these contradictions are basically expressed in the form of a fall in the rate of profit and not in the saturation of the markets, recalls how this question has been approached historically: “The discussion around Marx’s theory of accumulation and crisis led to the development of two antithetical views, each giving rise to several variants. One insisted that the accumulation of capital has absolute limits and that an economic breakdown of the system is inevitable. The other held this to be absurd, maintaining that the system would not disappear from economic causes. It goes without saying that the reformists, if only to justify themselves, adopted the latter position. But even ultra-leftists – Anton Pannekoek, for example – saw the idea that the breakdown of capitalism would be a ‘purely economic’ process as a falsification of historical materialist theory. […] He thought the shortcomings of the capitalist system as Marx described them and the concrete phenomenon of crisis, produced by the anarchy of the economy, were sufficient to provoke the development of revolutionary consciousness among the proletariat and thus to lead to proletarian revolution.”[50]

MR does not share this view of capitalism condemned by its fundamental contradictions (saturation of the markets, fall in the rate of profit) to a catastrophic crisis. On the contrary, he sees it like this: “In fact, there is no material point alpha at which capitalism will collapse, whether this be percentage X of the rate of profit or a quantity Y of outlets or a number Z of extra-capitalist markets. As Lenin says in Imperialism the highest stage: ‘there is no situation from which capitalism cannot find a way out’!”[51]

MR explains his vision thus: “The limits to modes of production are above all social, a product of their internal contradictions and by the collision between relations that have become obsolete and the productive forces. This means that it is the proletariat which will abolish capitalism and that the latter will not die out of its own accord because of its ‘objective’ limits. This is the method put forward by Marx: ‘Capitalist production tends constantly to over-reach its inherent limits (editor’s note: the periodic depreciation of constant capital accompanying crises in the production process); it manages to do so only by means that once more raise barriers before it but on a scale that is even more forbidding, and then again on an even greater scale, the same barriers rise up again before it.’ (Le Capital, 1032. La Pleiade Economie II  [our translation from the French]). This is by no means a catastrophic vision, but rather sees the growing contradictions of capitalism raising the stakes to an ever higher level. However, it is clear that even if capitalism will not sink of its own accord, it will not however escape its destructive antagonisms.”[52]

It is hard to see how the proletariat could overthrow capitalism if, as MR persists in trying to prove in his book, the whole history of this system since the second half of the 20th century has been exerting itself against the reality of impediments to the development of the productive forces.

Having said this, although it is right to say that only the proletariat can abolish capitalism, this in no way means that capitalism cannot collapse under the weight of its basic contradictions, which obviously is by no means the same as its revolutionary replacement by the proletariat. Nowhere in his text does MR formally demonstrate that this is impossible. Instead of this he tacks onto the crisis of the decadent period, the characteristics of the crises as they were manifested in the period of Marx. Moreover, in describing the latter he does not base his analysis on the quotations of Marx about the saturation of the markets, such as this one, for example: “…in the cycle through which capital passes during its reproduction - a cycle in which it is not simply reproduced but reproduced on an extended scale, in which it describes not a circle but a spiral – there comes a moment at which the market manifests itself as too narrow for production. This occurs at the end of the cycle. But it merely means: the market is glutted. Over-production is manifest. If the expansion of the market had kept pace with the expansion of production there would be no glut of the market, no overproduction..”[53] MR prefers those passages in which Marx deals only with the problem of the rate of profit. This allows him to claim that capitalism can always recover from its crises while covering himself with the authority of Marx. In fact, within this framework the devaluation of capital wrought by the crisis is often the condition for the recovery of a rate of profit that makes it possible for accumulation to take off again at a higher level. The only problem is that to attribute the present crisis first and foremost to the contradiction “fall in the rate of profit” is to side-step the reality that has produced the level of debt that we have today. There is another problem with this approach and one which confronts MR with the contradictions of his speculative constructions; that is, elsewhere he actually says: “It is completely incongruous to affirm – as is too often done – that the perpetuation of the crisis since the 1980s is due to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.”[54]

In fact even prior to the first world war the development of capitalism made it impossible to characterise the crises as a cyclical phenomenon. Engels referred to this development in a note within Capital, in which he says: “The acute form of the periodic process with its former ten-year cycle, appears to have given way to a more chronic, long drawn out, alternation […] Thus every factor, which works against a repetition of the old crises, carries within itself the germ of a far more powerful future crisis.”[55] This description from Engels of the beginning of the open crisis shows us a precursor of the crisis of capitalist decadence, which is violent, generalised and deep and is by no means cyclical. It is rather prepared by a whole accumulation of contradictions, as witnessed by the occurrence of two world wars, the 1929 crisis and the 30s, and the present phase of the crisis that began at the end of the 1960s.

To say, as does MR, on the basis of quotations from Marx always dealing with the fall in the rate of profit and taken out of context: “The very mechanism of capitalist production therefore removes the obstacles that it creates”[56] can only contribute to minimising the depth of the contradictions that undermine capitalism in its decadent phase. This can only lead to underestimating the seriousness of the present phase of the crisis, in particular, by relegating to second place the contradictions in question and talking twaddle about how capitalism can be regulated.

The objection could be made that Rosa Luxemburg’s predictions have been shown to be inexact because the drying up of the last extra-capitalist markets in the 1950s did not lead to the “impossibility” of capitalism. In fact, it is clearly the case that capitalism did not collapse at that moment. However it could go on developing only by mortgaging its future through the injection of higher and higher doses of credit that can never be re-paid. The insoluble problem confronting the bourgeoisie now is that whatever austerity cures it inflicts on society, it is unable to reduce the level of debt. On the one hand, payment defaults and the bankruptcy of some of the economic players, including nation states, mean that this same situation infects their partners as well, thus aggravating conditions leading to the collapse of the house of cards. On the other hand, being unable to kick-start the economy adequately by means of new debts or printing money, capitalism cannot avoid a dive into recession. Contrary to the magic formulas spouted in this book, this dive is not preparing a future resurgence through the devaluation of capital that comes with it. However, it is preparing the ground for the revolution.

Silvio 12/11

This is the last part of our series of five articles on the class struggle in French West Africa, centred in particular on Senegal. The series covers the period from the end of the 18th century up to 1968 and began publication in International Review n°145.

May 1968 in Africa, an expression of the recovery of the international class struggle

A “May 68” actually took place in Africa, more precisely in Senegal, with characteristics very similar to those of the “French May” (student unrest forming a prelude to the emergence of the workers’ struggles) – which is not surprising given the historical ties between the working class of France and that of its former African colony.

If the global nature of “May 68” is generally acknowledged, its expression in certain corners of the world is nonetheless little known, or simply ignored: “This is largely explained by the fact that these events occurred at the same time as others of a similar nature around the world. This has made it easier for analysts and propagandists who followed the events to blur the significance of the Senegalese May 68, by opting for a selective reading emphasising the university and high school student side in the crisis at the expense of its other dimensions.”[1]

In fact the “Senegalese May” was better known among students: students sent messages of protest from around the world to the government of Senghor which was suppressing their fellow African comrades. We should also note that the University of Dakar was the only university in the colonies of French West Africa (FWA) until after “independence”, which explains the presence within it of a significant number of foreign African students.

The organs of the bourgeois press had different interpretations of what caused the outbreak of the May movement in Dakar. For some, like Afrique Nouvelle (Catholic), it was the crisis in education that was the root cause of the movement. Marches Tropicaux et Mediterraneens (for the business community) considered it an extension of the movement in France. Jeune Afrique pointed out the connection between the student political unrest and the social unrest of wage earners.

There was another point of view that made a connection between this movement and the economic crisis: it came from Abdoulaye Bathily, one of the oldest participants in the famous revolt when he was then a student; later, in his role of researcher, he would make a general appraisal of the events of “May in Dakar.” We will quote him a lot in this article for his testimonies from inside the events.

The Sequence of Events

“May 1968 has gone down in history characterised across the world by the massive social upheaval in which students and high school pupils were the spearhead. In Africa, Senegal was very clearly the theatre for the university and high school protests. Many contemporary observers concluded that the events in Dakar were nothing more than an extension to May 68 in France [...] Having participated directly, and at the highest level in the students’ struggle in Dakar, in May 68, this thesis has always appeared to me to be wrong. [...] The explosion of May 68 was undoubtedly fostered by a particularly tense social climate. It was the culmination of an unprecedented agitation by employees in the towns, the unsatisfactory national economic indicators from the continued French rule, and members of the bureaucracy disgruntled that the technical advisers were in control of the state. The agricultural crisis also contributed to the growing tension in the towns and in Dakar, notably from the influx from the rural areas [...]. The memorandum of the Union Nationale des Travailleurs de Senegal [UNTS] on May 8th calculated that purchasing power had declined by 92.4% since 1961.”[2]

So, this was the context in which Dakar, between May 18th and June 12th, also experienced a “May 68” which almost definitely undermined the pro-French regime of Senghor with wildcat general strikes by the students and then by the workers, before the government stepped in to end the movement, with the police and military imposing a brutal clampdown and with French imperialism providing critical support.

The “Senegalese May” had been preceded by several clashes with the Senghor government, especially between 1966 and 1968, when students organised demonstrations in support of “national liberation” struggles and against “neo-colonialism” and “imperialism”.

Similarly, there were “warning strikes” in high schools. Students at the high school in Rufisque (a suburb of Dakar) walked out of lectures on 26th March 1968 following disciplinary measures taken against a student. The movement lasted three weeks and the agitation and protests against the government spread to schools across the region.

The trigger for the movement

The movement of May 1968 was initially sparked off by the decision by the government of President Senghor to cut the number of monthly instalments of student grants from 12 to 10 per year, and by so doing to greatly reduce the spending on these, citing “the difficult economic situation facing the country”.

“The news of the government decision spread like wildfire on the campus, causing widespread anxiety and provoking a general feeling of revolt. It was the only topic of conversation on the campus. Upon election, the new executive committee of the Democratic Union of Senegalese students [UDES] started to campaign over student grants, amongst students in the high schools and also with the trade unions.”[3]

Indeed, after this government announcement there were constant protests and the opposition to the government grew, especially on the eve of the elections that were denounced by the students, as the heading of one of their leaflets demonstrates: “From the economic and social situation in Senegal to the eve of the election farce on February 25th...” The agitation continued and on May 18th students decided to announce a “general strike” following the failure of negotiations with the government about their conditions, and there was a massive strike in all the faculties.

Galvanised by the clear success of the strike, and angered by the government’s refusal to meet their demands, the students called an unlimited general strike and a boycott of exams from May 27th. Already, before this, meetings were taking place on campus and in high schools generally; in brief, this was a showdown with the government. For its part, the government seized control of all the official media and announced a series of repressive measures against the strikers, hoping to stir some opposition from the workers and peasants to the students, who it labelled “privileged”. And the Senegalese Progressive Union (Senghor's party) tried to denounce the “anti-nationalist position” of the students’ movement, but without any real echo; quite the contrary, the government campaigns only increased the anger of the students and gave rise to workers’ solidarity and won sympathy from the public.

“The meetings of the Student Union of Dakar (UED) were the focal point of the agitation on the campus. They attracted a considerable number of students, pupils, teachers, unemployed youths, political activists and, of course, many government spies. Over time, they were the barometer indicating the size of the political and social protest movement. Each meeting was a sort of gathering of the Senegalese opposition and of those on campus from other countries. The interventions were punctuated by pieces of revolutionary music from around the world.”[4]

Indeed, a real showdown was on the cards. In fact, at midnight on May 27th, students awoke to hear the sound of boots and to see the arrival en masse of police who cordoned off the campus. Then a crowd of students and pupils gathered and converged on the residential quarters to mount picket lines.

By encircling the university campus with police, the government hoped to prevent any movement onto or out of the campus.

 “So, some of their colleagues were deprived of meals and others of their beds because as the UED repeatedly said, the social conditions were such that many of their colleagues (those without grants) ate in the town or slept there from the lack of housing on campus. Even medical students who treated patients in the hospital would be stuck in the town along with the other students in a medical emergency. It was a typical example of where academic freedoms were violated.”[5]

On May 28th, during an interview with the rector and the deans of the university, the UED demanded the lifting of the police cordon, while university authorities required students to make a declaration within 24 hours “to declare that the strike is not aimed at overthrowing the Senghor government”. Student organisations responded that they were not allied with any specific regime and that within the time granted to them, they wouldn’t be able to consult their members. After this, the President of the Government ordered the closure of all the academic institutions.

 “The anti-riot squad, reinforced by the police, went on the offensive and entered the living quarters one after the other. They had orders to remove the students by all means possible. So with truncheons, rifle butts, bayonets, tear gas grenades, sometimes crazed, smashing doors and windows, these henchmen entered the students’ rooms looking for them. The riot squads and the police behaved just like looters. They stole what they could and smashed up things blocking their path, tore up clothes, books and notebooks. Pregnant women were abused and workers mistreated. Married women and children were beaten in their homes. There was one death and many wounded (around one hundred) according to official figures.”[6]

The explosion

The brutality of the government's reaction led to an outburst of solidarity and sympathy for the student movement. There was strong disapproval throughout the capital of the regime’s brutal behaviour and against police cruelty and the confinement of large numbers of students. On the eve of May 29th all the ingredients were present for a social conflagration because things had reached fever pitch for the students and salaried workers.

The high school students were already massively involved in the “warning strikes” of March 26th, and on May 18th were the first to start an indefinite strike. After this the university students and those in the high schools started to link up. And one after the other, all the institutions in secondary education declared a total and unlimited strike, formed struggle committees and called for demonstrations with the university students.

Alarmed by the increased numbers of young people joining the protests, on the same May 29th President Senghor made an announcement to the media of an indefinite closure of all learning establishments (high schools and colleges) in the vicinity of Dakar and St. Louis, and called on parents to keep their children at home. But with little success.

“The closure of the university and the high schools only increased social tension. University students who had escaped the police cordons, high school students and other young people began erecting barricades in neighbourhoods like Medina, Grand Dakar, Nimzat, Baay Gainde, Kip Koko, Usine Ben Talli, Usine Nyari Talli, etc.. On the 29th and 30th particularly, young demonstrators occupied the main streets of Dakar. Vehicles belonging to government officials and the leading personalities of the regime were tracked down. It was rumoured that many ministers were forced to abandon their official cars, famous cars like the Citroen DS 21. In people’s eyes, and those of the university and high school students in particular, this type of official vehicle symbolised ‘the lavish lifestyles of the comprador and political-bureaucratic bourgeoisie.’”[7]

Faced with growing combativity and the escalation of the movement, the government reacted by tightening its repressive measures, extending them to the whole population. So, the government issued a decree that from May 30th all public buildings (cinemas, theatres, cabarets, restaurants, bars) would close day and night until further notice; and also, that meetings, demonstrations and gatherings of more than 5 persons would be prohibited.

A workers’ general strike

Faced with these martial measures and with continued police brutality against young people in struggle, the whole country stirred and the revolt intensified, this time with more of the salaried working class becoming involved. It was at this point that the official union apparatus, notably the National Union of Workers of Senegal, the umbrella body for several unions, decided to make its play to avoid being bypassed by the rank and file workers.

“The rank and file unions pressed for action. On May 30th, at 18.00 hours, the regional union, UNTS de Cap-Vert (a region of Dakar), following a joint meeting with the National headquarters of UNTS, announced plans for an indefinite strike from midnight on May 30th.”[8]

Given the difficult situation facing his regime, President Senghor decided to address himself to the nation and spoke threateningly to the workers urging them to disobey the call for a general strike, while accusing the students of being “under a foreign influence”. But despite the real threats of the government to requisition certain categories of workers, the strike was well supported in both the public and the private sectors.

General assemblies were planned in the labour union hall for 10am on May 31st, in which the invited strikers’ delegations would decide the next steps for the movement.

“But the police had cordoned the area off. At 10 o’clock the order to attack the workers inside the hall was given. Doors and windows were smashed, cabinets pulled apart, records destroyed. Tear gas and truncheons overwhelmed the most foolhardy workers. In response to the police brutality, the workers in amongst the students and the lumpen proletariat, attacked vehicles and shops, some of which were torched. The next day Abdoulaye Diack, Secretary of State for Information, revealed to reporters that 900 people were arrested in the labour union hall and the surrounding area. Among these, there were 36 union leaders including 5 women. In fact, during the week of crisis, no less than 3,000 people were arrested. Some union leaders were deported [...]. These actions only heightened popular indignation and readied the workers for the fight.”[9]

Indeed, directly after this press conference when the government’s spokesman gave statistics about the victims, the strikes, demonstrations and riots were intensifying and so the bourgeoisie decided to call a halt.

“The unions, allied to the government and the employers, felt it was necessary to make concessions to the workers to avoid them adopting a hard line, since in the demonstrations they had been able to sense their power.”[10]

Therefore, on June 12th, after a series of meetings between government and unions, President Senghor announced an 18 point agreement to end the strike with a 15% increase in wages. Accordingly, the movement officially ended on that date, which did not prevent further discontent and the resurgence of other social movements, because the strikers were really suspicious regarding any promises from the Senghor government. And, in fact, just weeks after signing the agreement to end the strike, social movements were spreading more than ever, with some lively episodes, right up until the early 1970s.

Ultimately, it is worth noting the state of disarray in which the Senegalese government found itself at the height of its confrontation with the “May movement in Dakar”:

“From June 1st to 3rd, it seemed that there was a power vacuum. The isolation of the government was expressed in the inertia of the ruling party. Faced with the scale of the social explosion, the party machine of the UPS (Sengho’s party) did not react. The UPS Students’ Federation was happy to covertly distribute leaflets against the UDES in the early stages. This situation was all the more striking since the UPS had boasted three months earlier about having won a landslide victory in the parliamentary and presidential elections in Dakar on February 25th, 1968. But now it was unable to provide an acceptable response to what was happening.

“Rumour had it that ministers were holed up in the administrative building, the seat of the government, and that senior party and state officials were hiding in their homes. This was very strange behaviour from party leaders who claimed to have a majority in the country. At one moment, the rumour ran that President Senghor had taken refuge in the French military base at Ouakam. These rumours were made even more believable following the news in Dakar that De Gaulle had “fled” to Germany on May 29th.”[11]

Indeed, the Senegalese government was truly reeling and in this context, it was quite symptomatic that de Gaulle and Senghor were seeking the protection and support of their respective armies at the same time.

Moreover, at the time, other more persistent “rumours” clearly indicated that the French army had forcibly intervened to prevent the protesters marching on the presidential palace, inflicting several deaths and injuries.

Let’s also recall that the Senegalese government did not only use its normal guard-dogs, namely the police, to bring an end to the movement but that it also had recourse to the more reactionary forces like the religious leaders and peasants from the remote countryside. At the height of the movement, on May 30th and 31st, the leaders of the religious cliques were invited to use media day and night by Senghor to condemn the strike in the strongest terms and to urge the workers to go back to work.

As for the peasants, the government tried unsuccessfully to turn them against the strikers, by making them come to town to support pro-government demonstrations.

“The recruiters had led the peasants to believe that Senegal had been invaded from Dakar by a nation called ‘Tudian’ (student) and that they were being called on to defend the country. Groups of these peasants were actually located in the alleyways of Centennial (now Boulevard General de Gaulle) with their weapons (axes, machetes, spears, bows and arrows).

“But they very quickly realised that they had been taken for a ride. [...] The young people dispersed them with stones and divided up their food amongst themselves. [...] Others were vilified on their way to Rufisque. In any event, the riot revealed the fragility of the political standing of the UPS and of the regime in the urban areas, particularly in Dakar.”[12]

Undoubtedly, the government of Senghor would utilise every means available, including the most obscure, to bring the social uprising against its regime to an end. However, to permanently extinguish the fire, the most effective weapon for the government could only be that in the hands of Doudou Ngome. He played his part at the time as the leader of the main union, the UNTS. He would “negotiate” the terms for smothering the general strike. Moreover, as a thank you, President Senghor would make him a minister a few years later. It’s another illustration of the strike-breaking role of the unions who, in cahoots with the former colonial power, definitely saved Senghor’s neck.

The high-school students’ role in starting the movement

 “The high schools in the Cap-Vert region, ‘aroused’ by the strike at Rufisque High School in April, were the first to spring into action. These students were especially quick to take to the streets as they saw themselves, like the university students, as victims of the education policy of the Government and were concerned in particular by the cut-backs in the grants. As future university students themselves, they were actively involved in the struggle of the UDES. The strike spread rapidly from Dakar to other secondary schools around the country from May 27th [...] The leadership of the students’ movement was very unstable, and from one meeting to the next, the delegates, and there were many, changed. [...] An important nucleus of very active strikers also drew the attention of the teacher training college for young girls at Thies. Some student leaders even moved to the old town and coordinated the strike from there. Subsequently, a national committee of the high schools and other secondary education colleges in Senegal was formed, becoming a sort of general staff of the student movement.”[13]

Here the author is describing the active role of the high-school students in the mass movement of May 68 in Senegal, in particular the way the struggle was organised with general assemblies and ‘co-ordinations’. Indeed, in every high school, there was a struggle committee and general assembly with an elected and revocable leadership.

The magnificent involvement of the high school students, both male and female, was highly significant as this was the first time in history that this part of the youth were mobilised in large numbers to protest against the new ruling bourgeoisie. If the starting point of the movement was a solidarity action with one of their comrades, victimised by the school authority, the high-school students, like the other students and workers, also saw the need to fight against the effects of the capitalist crisis that the Senghor government wanted to make them pay for.

Western imperialism comes to Senghor’s aid

At the imperialist level, France was keeping close track of the crisis that the events of 1968 had given rise to, and for good reason; it had a lot invested in Senegal. Indeed, apart from its military bases (sea, air and land) located around Dakar, Paris had appointed a “technical advisor” to each ministry and to the president’s office to steer the policies of the Senegalese government in a direction that would clearly serve its own interests.

In this respect, we can recall that before being one of the best “pupils” of the Western bloc, Senegal was for a long time the principal historic bastion of French colonialism in Africa (from 1659 to 1960) and for this reason Senegal participated with its foot soldiers in all the wars that France was involved in around the world, from the conquest of Madagascar in the 19th century, to both World Wars and the wars in Indochina and Algeria. It was therefore only natural for France to use its role as “local gendarme” of the Western imperialist bloc in Africa to protect Senghor's regime using every means at its disposal:

“In the aftermath of the events of 68, France intervened with support from its EEC partners to rescue the Senegalese regime. The State was not able to meet its debts following negotiations that took place on June 12th. In a speech on June 13th, President Senghor said that the agreement with the unions would cost 2 thousand million francs (local currency). A week after these negotiations, the European Development Fund (EDF) agreed to the stabilisation fund for groundnut prices with an advance of 2 thousand and 150 million francs (local currency) ‘intended to mitigate the effects of the fluctuations in world prices during the 1967/68 campaign’. [...] But even the U.S., which had been taken to task by the President Senghor during the events, participated with the other Western countries in restoring a peaceful social climate in Senegal. Indeed, the U.S. and Senegal signed an agreement for the construction of 800 housing units for middle income groups for a total of 5 million dollars.”[14]

It is clear that in doing this the main issue for the Western bloc was avoiding the collapse of Senegal and its defection into the enemy camp (that of China and Eastern Bloc).

Thus, having regained control of the situation, President Senghor immediately set off to visit the “friendly countries”, and Germany, amongst them, welcomed him to Frankfurt, just after the bloody suppression of the strikers in Senegal. This welcome in Frankfurt is also highly instructive because Senghor went there to get help and to be “decorated” by a country that was a leading member of NATO. On the other hand, this visit was an opportunity for the German students, for whom “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit was the mouthpiece, to show support in the streets for their Senegalese comrades, as the newspaper Le Monde reported, 25/09/1968:

 “Daniel Cohn-Bendit was arrested on Sunday in Frankfurt during demonstrations against Mr Leopold Senghor, President of Senegal, and he was charged on Monday afternoon (along with 25 of his comrades) by a local German magistrate of inciting riot and illegal assembly...”

In their struggle, the Senegalese students would also receive support from their comrades overseas who often occupied the Senegalese embassies and consulates. News of the movement in Senegal reverberated throughout Africa:

 “In Africa, there were further repercussions from the events in Dakar owing to the actions of the national unions (student unions). On returning to their home countries African students, expelled from the University of Dakar, continued campaigning. [...] The African governments of that time regarded the students from Dakar with suspicion. And in so far as most of them showed their irritation at the way their nationals were expelled, they also feared the contagion of their country with the ‘subversion arriving from Dakar and Paris’.”[15]

Actually, almost all African regimes feared “contagion” and “subversion” from May 68, starting with Senghor himself who had to resort to violent repressive measures against the educated youth. Hence, many of the strikers experienced prison or forced military service not dissimilar to deportation into military camps. And equally, large numbers of foreign African students were expelled en masse; some of whom were ill-treated on their return home.

Some lessons from the events of May 68 in Dakar

“May in Dakar” was unquestionably one of the links in the chain of a worldwide May 68. The significance of the involvement of the Western imperialist bloc in saving the Senegalese regime was an indication of the power of the movement of the workers and the university and high school students.

But over and above the radicalism of the student action, the movement of May 68 in Senegal, with its working class involvement, came about through a return to the spirit and the form of the proletarian struggle that the working class of the colony of French West Africa had achieved at the beginning of the 20th century, but which the African bourgeoisie in the government had succeeded in stifling, especially during the early years of “national independence”.

May 68 was thus more than an opening to another world breaking with the counter-revolutionary period; it was a moment of awakening for many protagonists, especially the youth. Through their involvement in the fight against the forces of the national capital, they exposed a number of myths and illusions, including the “end of the class struggle” under the pretext there was no antagonism between the (African) working class and the (African) bourgeoisie.

It should also be noted the police repression and imprisonment of thousands of strikers proved insufficient for achieving victory over the social movement; it also had to be lured into the union trap and the intervention of France and the Western bloc in support of their “favourite junior partner”. But it was also necessary to meet the demands of students and workers with a large increase in pay.

The basic thing is that the strikers did not “sleep” for long after the agreement that ended the strike because the following year, the working class took up the fight more than ever participating fully in the wave of international struggles that May 68 set in train.

Finally, it is noteworthy that this movement used truly proletarian modes of organisation, proletarian strike committees and general assemblies, strongly demonstrating self-organisation; in short, a clear taking of the struggles into their own hands by the strikers. This is one specific aspect that characterises the struggle of a fraction of the world working class, fully involved in the battle to come for the communist revolution.

Lassou 5/12

In the previous article in this series, we noted that among the new revolutionary groups which emerged out of the world-wide revival of class struggle in the late 60s, the “theory of decadence”, which had been defended by an intransigent minority despite the apparent triumph of capitalism evidenced by the post-war boom, gained a number of new adherents, providing a coherent historical framework for the revolutionary positions which this new generation had initially come to in a more or less intuitive manner: opposition to trade unions and reformism, rejection of national liberation struggles and of alliances with the bourgeoisie, recognition of the so-called “socialist” states as a form of state capitalism, and so on.

Given that, in the late 60s and early 70s, the open economic crisis of capitalism was only just beginning, and since, over the past four decades, the insoluble nature of this crisis has become increasingly evident, you might have expected that a majority of those attracted towards internationalism over those decades would have been rather easily convinced that capitalism was indeed an obsolete, decaying social system. In reality, not only has this not been the case, but - and this is particularly true with the new generations of revolutionaries which started to appear on the scene during the first decade of the 21st century – one could even speak of a persistent rejection of the theory of decadence, and at the same time a real tendency for many who had previously been convinced of the concept to put it into question and even to jettison it openly.

The attractions of anarchism

With regard to the rejection of the theory by the newer generations of revolutionaries, we are talking to a large extent about internationalist elements influenced by various forms of anarchism. Anarchism has enjoyed a major resurgence during the 2000s in particular and it is not difficult to see why it has such an attraction for young comrades who are eager to fight against capitalism but deeply critical of the “official” left, for a considerable part of which the collapse of “really existing socialism” in the eastern bloc has been such a debacle. Thus the new generation often turns to anarchism as a current which seems not to have betrayed the working class like the social democratic, Stalinist and Trotskyist traditions.

It would take an article in itself to analyse why, especially in the central capitalist countries, so many of the new generation have been drawn towards different brands of anarchism rather than towards the communist left, which is certainly the most coherent of all the political currents which remained loyal to proletarian principles after the terrible defeats of the period from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s. A key element is certainly the problem of the organisation of revolutionaries – the “party question” – which has always been a bone of contention between marxists and the revolutionary strands of anarchism. But our main focus here is the specific question of capitalism’s decadence. Why do the majority of the anarchists, including those who genuinely oppose reformist practices and see the need for international revolution, reject this idea so vehemently?

It’s true that some of the best elements in the anarchist current have not always had this reaction. In a previous article in this series we saw how anarchist comrades like Maximoff, faced with the world-wide economic crisis and the push towards a second imperialist world war, had no difficulty in explaining these phenomena as expressions of a social relation which had become a fetter on human progress, of a mode of production in decline.

But these views were always in a minority within the anarchist movement. At a deeper level, while many anarchists are happy to acknowledge Marx’s unique contribution to our understanding of political economy, they have had a much harder idea with the historical methodology which underlay Marx’s critique of capital. Ever since Bakunin, there has been a strong tendency among anarchists to see “historical materialism” (or, as some prefer, the materialist approach to history) as a form of rigid determinism which underestimates and depreciates the subjective element of revolution. Bakunin in particular saw it as a pretext for an essentially reformist practice on the part of the “Marx Party”, which argued at that time that since capitalism had not yet exhausted its historical usefulness for mankind, the communist revolution was not yet on the immediate agenda, and the working class had to focus on building up its resources and its self-confidence within the confines of bourgeois society: this was the basis for its advocacy of trade union work and the formation of workers’ parties which would, among other activities, contest bourgeois elections. For Bakunin, capitalism was always ripe for revolution. And by extension, if the marxists of the present historical epoch conclude that the old tactics are no longer valid, this is often derided by present-day anarchists as a retrospective justification for Marx’s errors, a way of avoiding the uncomfortable conclusion that the anarchists were right all along.  

We are only touching the surface here. We will come back later to the more sophisticated version of this argument presented by the Aufheben group, whose series criticising the notion of decadence has been seen as definitive by so many in the libertarian communist milieu. But there are other elements to consider in the present generation’s rejection of what for us is the theoretical cornerstone of a revolutionary platform today, and they are less specific to the tradition of anarchism.

The paradox we face is the following: while for us capitalism seems to be becoming more and more rotten, to the point where we can speak of the terminal phase of its decline, for many others capitalism’s success in prolonging this process of decay offers evidence that the very concept of decline has been refuted.  In other words: the more a long senile capitalism approaches its catastrophic end, the more some revolutionaries see capitalism as being capable of almost endless rejuvenation.

It is tempting to apply a little psychology here. We have already noted[1] that the prospect of its own demise is an element in the bourgeoisie’s rejection not only of marxism but even of its own efforts at a scientific understanding of the problem of value, once it became clear that such an understanding meant recognising that capitalism could only be a transient system, condemned to perish by its own inherent contradictions. It would be surprising if this ideology of denial did not affect even those who are attempting to break from the bourgeois world-view. Indeed, since the bourgeoisie’s flight from reality grows increasingly desperate the closer it comes to its actual demise, we would expect to see this defence-mechanism permeating every layer of society, including the working class and its revolutionary minorities. After all, what could be more terrifying, more conducive to the reaction of running away or burying your head in the sand, than the real possibility of a dying capitalism crushing us all in the throes of its final agony?     

But the problem is more complex than this. For one thing, it is connected to the manner in which the crisis has evolved in the past 40 years, which has made it much harder to diagnose the real severity of capitalism’s fatal disease. 

As we noted, the first decades after 1914 offered strong evidence that the system was in decline. It was not until the post-war boom had really got underway, in the 50s and 60s, that a number of elements in the proletarian political movement began to voice profound doubts about the notion that capitalism had reached its epoch of decadence. The return of the crisis – and of the class struggle – at the end of the 1960s made it possible to see the transient nature of the boom and rediscover the foundations of Marx’s critique of political economy. But while in essence this approach has been vindicated by the “permanent” nature of the crisis since the end of the 60s and, above all, by the more recent explosion of all the contradictions that have been building up over this period (the “debt crisis”), the length of the crisis is also testament to capitalism’s extraordinary capacity to adapt and survive, even if it has meant flouting its own laws and piling up even more devastating problems for itself in the long term. The ICC has certainly, on occasions, underestimated this capacity: some of our articles on the crisis in the 80s – a decade where brutal mass unemployment had once again become part of daily life - did not really foresee the “boom” (or rather booms, since there were numerous recessions as well) in the 90s and 2000s, and we certainly did not foresee the possibility of a country like China industrialising itself at the frantic pace we have seen during the 2000s. For a generation reared in these conditions, where rampant and unabashed consumerism in the advanced countries made the consumer society of the 50s and 60s seem quaint by comparison, it is understandable that talk of capitalism’s decline should be seen as somewhat old hat. The official ideology of the 90s and well into the 2000s was that capitalism had triumphed all along the way and that neo-liberalism and globalisation were opening the door to a new and indeed unprecedented era of prosperity. In Britain, for example, the economic mouthpiece of the Blair government, Gordon Brown, claimed in his 2005 budget speech that the UK was experiencing its most sustained period of economic growth since records began in 1701. Little wonder that “radical” versions of these ideas should be taken up even among those arguing for revolution. After all, the ruling class itself continues to dispute about whether it had finally done away with the cycle of “boom and bust”. This problematic has been echoed by many “pro-revolutionaries”, who can cite Marx on the periodic crises of the 19th century and explain that while there may still be periodic crises, each one would serve to clear out the economy’s dead wood and bring about a new spurt of growth. 

Regressions from the coherence of the Italian left

This was all very understandable, but it was perhaps less forgivable in the ranks of the communist left, who had already acquired some education about the diseased basis of capitalist growth in the epoch of its decline. And yet ever since the 70s, we have seen a series of defections from the theory of decadence in the ranks of the communist left, and the ICC in particular, often accompanying quite severe organisational crises.

This is not the place to analyse the origins of these crises. We can say that crises in political organisations of the proletariat are an inevitable part of their lives, as a glance at the history of the Bolshevik party or the Italian and German left will quickly confirm. Revolutionary organisations are part of the working class, and this is a class that is constantly subjected to the immense pressure of the dominant ideology. The “vanguard” cannot escape this pressure and is obliged to engage in a permanent combat against it. Organisational crises generally occur at the point where a part or whole of the organisation is confronted with – or succumbing to - a particularly acute dose of the dominant ideology. Very often these convulsions are initiated or exacerbated by the necessity to confront new situations or by wider crises in society.

The crises in the ICC have nearly always been centred around questions of organisation and political behaviour. But it is also noticeable that virtually all of the most important splits in our ranks have called into question our view of the historic epoch as well.  

The GCI: is progress a bourgeois myth?

In 1987, in International Review n° 48, we began the publication of a new series entitled “Understanding the decadence of capitalism”. This was in response to a growing body of evidence that elements in or around the revolutionary movement were having second thoughts about the concept of decadence. The first three articles in the series[2] were a response to the positions of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, which had originated as the result of a split with the ICC at the end of the 70s. At least some of the elements who initially formed the GCI had seen themselves as continuators of the work of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, opposing what they saw as the councilist deviations of the ICC.  But following further splits within the GCI itself the group evolved towards what the IR articles described as “anarcho-punk Bordigism”: a strange combination of concepts drawn from Bordigism, such as the “invariance” of marxism, and a regression towards the voluntarist outlook of a Bakunin. Both these elements led the GCI to vehemently oppose the idea that capitalism had been through an ascendant and a decadent phase, principally in the article “’Theories of decadence or decadence of theory?”  Le Communiste n° 23, 1985.

The IR articles refuted a number of the charges levelled by the GCI. It attacked the GCI’s gross sectarianism which threw proletarian groups who argue that capitalism is decadent into the same sack as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Moonies and neo-nazis; they exposed their ignorant claim that the concept of decadence arose after the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave when “certain products of the victory of the counter-revolution began to theorise a ‘long period’ of stagnation and ‘decline”; above all they show that what underlies the GCI’s “anti-decadentism” is an abandonment of the materialist analysis of history in favour of  anarchist idealism.

What the GCI really rejects in the concept of decadence is the notion that capitalism was once an ascendant system, was still capable of playing a progressive role for humanity: in fact, the GCI, rejects the very notion of historical progress. For them, this is mere ideology, justifying capitalism’s “civilising” mission: “The bourgeoisie presents all the modes of production which preceded it as ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ and, as historical evolution moves on, they become progressively ‘civilised’. The capitalist mode of production, of course, is the final and highest incarnation of Civilisation and Progress. The evolutionist vision thus corresponds to the ‘capitalist social being’, and it’s not for nothing that this vision has been applied to all the sciences (ie all the partial interpretations of reality from the bourgeois point of view): the science of nature (Darwin), demography (Malthus), Logical history, philosophy (Hegel)...”[3]

But because the bourgeoisie has a certain vision of progress, where everything culminates in the rule of capital, it does not follow that all concepts of progress are false: this is precisely why Marx did not reject the discoveries of Darwin but saw them – correctly interpreted, using a dialectical rather than a linear vision  - as an additional argument in favour of his view of history.

Neither does the marxist view of historical progress mean that its adherents line themselves up with the ruling class, as the GCI claims: “The decadentists are thus pro-slavery up till a certain date, pro-feudal up till another ...pro-capitalist until 1914! Thus, because of their cult of progress, they are at every step opposed to the class war waged by the exploited, opposed to the communist movements which had the misfortune of breaking out in the ‘wrong’ period…”[4] The 19th century marxist movement, while generally recognising that capitalism had not yet created the conditions of the communist revolution, still saw its role as intransigently defending the class interests of the proletariat within bourgeois society, and “retrospectively” it saw the absolutely vital importance of the revolts of the exploited in previous class societies, even while recognising that these revolts could not have resulted in a communist society.

This superficial radicalism of the GCI is frequently found among those who openly espouse anarchism, and indeed has sometimes provided them with a more “sophisticated” and semi-marxist justification for holding on to their old prejudices. While the latter might acknowledge certain of Marx’s theoretical contributions (critique of political economy, concept of alienation etc), they simply can’t abide his actual political practice, which meant building workers’ parties that participated in parliament, developing the trade unions and even in some cases supporting bourgeois national movements. All these practices (with the possible exception of developing the trade unions) were bourgeois (or authoritarian) then and they are bourgeois (or authoritarian) now.

In fact, however, this blanket rejection of a whole section of the past workers’ movement is no guarantee for a genuinely radical position today. As the second article in the series concludes: “for marxists the forms of the proletarian struggle depend on the objective conditions in which it is taking place and not on the abstract principles of eternal revolt. Only by basing yourself on an objective analysis of the balance of class forces, seen within its historical dynamic, can you judge the validity of a strategy or form of struggle. Without this materialist basis, any position you take up on the means of the proletarian struggle is built on sand; it opens the door to disorientation as soon as the superficial forms of eternal revolt – violence, anti-legalism – appear on the scene”. As proof it cites the GCI’s flirtation with the Shining Path in Peru – an ideological stance it has repeated in its more recent pronouncements on the jihadi violence in Iraq.[5]

 IP:  the charge of “productivism”

The series we published in the 80s also contained a response to another group that had emerged from a split in the ICC in 1985: the External Fraction of the ICC, which published the review Internationalist Perspective. The EFICC, falsely claiming that it had been expelled from the ICC and devoting a large part of its early polemics to proving the ICC’s degeneration and even its Stalinism, had begun life with the declared intention of defending the ICC’s platform from the ICC itself – hence the name of the group. However, before long, it began to question more and more of the ICC’s basic political framework, and central to this was our approach to the problem of decadence. The name “EFICC” was eventually dropped and the group adopted the title of its publication. Unlike the GCI, however, IP has never declared that it rejects the very notions of the ascendancy and decadence of capitalism: its stated aim was to deepen and clarify these concepts. This is certainly a laudable project in itself. The problem for us is that its theoretical innovations add little that is genuinely deep and serve mainly to dilute the basic analysis.

On the one hand, IP began more and more to develop a “parallel” periodisation of capitalism, based on what it defined as the transition from the formal domination to the real domination of capital, which in IP’s version more or less corresponds to the same historical time frame as the “traditional” shift into the period of decline in the first part of the 20th century. In IP’s view, the increasing global penetration of the law of value into all areas of social and economic life constitutes the real domination of capital, and it is this which provides us with a key to understanding the class lines which the ICC previously based on the notion of decadence: the bankruptcy of trade union work, of parliamentarism and support for national liberation, and so on.

It is certainly true that the actual emergence of capitalism as a world economy, its effective “domination” of the globe, corresponds to the opening of the period of decadence; and that, as IP also point out, this period has indeed seen the increasing penetration of the law of value into virtually every corner of human activity. But as we argued in our article in IR 60,[6] IP’s definition of the transition from formal to real domination takes a concept elaborated by Marx and stretches it beyond the specific meaning he gave to it. For Marx the transition in question was rooted in the change from the period of manufacturing – where artisan labour was grouped together by individual capitalists, without really altering the old methods of production – to the factory system proper, based on the collective labourer. In essence this change had already taken place in Marx’s day, even when capitalism only “dominated” a small part of the planet: its future expansion was to be based directly on the “real domination” of the process of production. Our article thus found more consistency in the Bordigists of Communisme ou Civilisation who argued that communism had been possible since 1848 because for them this marked the actual transition to real domination.

But there was another prong to IP’s questioning of the concept of decadence it had inherited from the ICC: the charge of “productivism”: In one of the earliest salvos, Macintosh claimed that all the groups of the communist left from Bilan to existing groups like the ICC and IBRP suffered from this malady: they were  "hopelessly, and inextricably entangled with the productivism that is capital's Trojan horse within the camp of Marxism. This productivism makes the development of technology and the productive forces the very standard of historical and social progress; within its theoretical purview, as long as a mode of production assures technological development it must be judged to be historically progressive”.[7] The ICC’s pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism[8] came in for particular criticism. Rejecting Trotsky’s idea, expressed in the 1938 programmatic document The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, that mankind’s productive forces had actually ceased to grow, our pamphlet defined decadence as a period in which the relations of production act as a fetter on the development of the productive forces but not an absolute barrier, and conducted a thought experiment to show how much capitalism might have developed had it not been held back by its in-built limitations. 

Macintosh honed in on this passage and countered it with various figures which for him indicated such fearsome rates of growth in the epoch of decadence that any notion of decadence as a slackening of the development of the productive forces would have to be replaced by a notion which saw that it was precisely the growth of the system which was so profoundly anti-human – as witness, for example, the deepening ecological crisis.

Articles written by other members of IP continued in the same vein, for example, “For a non-productivist understanding of decadence” by E.R. in IP 44.[9] However, there had already been a rather penetrating reply to Macintosh’s text by M Lazare in IP 29.[10] Leaving aside its occasional caricature of the ICC’s alleged caricatures, this article shows quite well how Macintosh’s critique of productivism was still somewhat caught in a productivist logic.[11] First, it challenged Macintosh’s use of figures, which purport to show us that capitalism had grown by a factor of 30 in the 80 years since 1900. ML pointed out that this figure looks much less impressive when it is broken down to an annual rate, giving us average growth of 4.36% per year. But, more importantly, he argues that if we are talking quantitatively, then despite the impressive growth rates that capital in decline has been capable of displaying, when we look at the gigantic waste of productive forces entailed by bureaucracy, arms, war, advertising, finance, a host of useless “services” and recurring or quasi-permanent economic crisis, the “actual” expansion of real productive activity would have been far, far greater. In this sense the notion of capital as a fetter which holds back but does not totally block the development of the forces of production, even in capitalist terms, remains essentially valid. As Marx put it, capital is the living contradiction, and “the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.”[12]

However, and again quite rightly, ML does not leave the argument there. The question of the “quality” of the development of the productive forces in decadence is posed immediately you bring factors like waste and war into the equation. Contrary to certain of ML’s insinuations, the ICC view of decadence has never been purely quantitative, but has always focused on the social and human “cost” of the prolonged survival of the system. Above all, there is nothing in our view of decadence which excludes the idea, also brought in by ML, that we need to have a much deeper concept of what the development of productive forces actually means. Productive forces are not inherently capital, a delusion fostered both by the primitivists who see technological development itself as the source of all our woes, and the Stalinists who measured the progress towards communism in tons of cement and steel. At root, mankind’s “productive forces” are his powers of creation, and the movement towards communism can only be measured by the degree to which humanity’s creative capacities have been liberated. The accumulation of capital  -“production for production’s sake” - was once a step towards this, but once it has laid down the prerequisites of a world communist society, it ceases to play any further progressive role. In this sense, far from being ruled by a productivist vision, the Italian communist left were among the first to criticise it openly, since they rejected Trotsky’s hymns to the miracles of socialist production in Stalin’s USSR, and insisted that the interests of the working class (even in a “proletarian state”) were necessarily antagonistic to the demands of accumulation (ML also notes this, contrary to Macintosh’s accusations against the left communist tradition)

For Marx, and for us, capital’s “progressive mission” can be gauged by the degree to which it contributes towards freeing man’s creative powers in a society where the measure of wealth is no longer labour time but free time. Capitalism constituted an unavoidable step towards this horizon, but its decadence is signalled precisely by the fact that this potential can now only be realised by abolishing the laws of capital.

It is crucial to envisage this problem in its full historical dimension, one that embraces the future as well as the past. Capital’s attempts to maintain accumulation in the straitjacket imposed by its global limitations creates a situation where not only is humanity’s potential being held back – its very survival is under threat as contradictions in the capitalist social relation express themselves more and more violently, pushing society towards ruin. This is surely what Marx hints at in the Grundrisse when he talks about development as decay.[13]

A current illustration: China, whose dizzying rates of growth have so besotted many of the former stalwarts of decadence theory. Has Chinese capital developed the productive forces? In its own terms, yes, but what is the global and historic context in which this is taking place? It’s certainly true that the expansion of Chinese capital has increased the size of the global industrial proletariat, but this has come about through a vast process of de-industrialisation in west, which has meant the loss of many key sectors of the working class in the original countries of capital, along with a great deal of their traditions of struggle. At the same time, the ecological costs of the Chinese “miracle” are gigantic. The raw materials needed for Chinese industrial growth result in the accelerated pillaging of the world’s resources and the resulting production brings with it a grave increase in global pollution. At the economic level, China is entirely dependent on the consumer markets of the west. Both with regard to the internal market, and to exports, the longer-term prospects of the Chinese economy are not at all positive, just like those of Europe and the US. The only difference is that China is beginning from a higher point of departure.[14] But its advantages, or at least some of them, could be lost if it in turn falls victim to a series of bankruptcies.[15] Sooner or later China can only become part of the recessionary dynamic of the world economy.

 Marx, in the late 19th century, saw reasons to hope that capitalist development would not be necessary in Russia because he could see that on a world scale the conditions for communism were already coming together. How much truer is this today?   

Hesitations in the IBRP?

In 2003-4 we began a new series on decadence – in response to a number of new assaults on the concept, but in particular to alarming signs that the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (now the Internationalist Communist Tendency), which had in general based its political positions on a notion of decadence, was also being influenced by the prevailing “anti-decadentist” pressures.

In a statement “Comments on the latest crisis in the ICC” dated February 2002 and published in Internationalist Communist Review n°21, the concept of decadence is criticised as being “as universal as it is confusing […] alien to the critique of political economy […] foreign to the method and the arsenal of the critique of political economy”. We are also asked “What role then does the concept of decadence play in terms of the militant critique of political economy, i.e. for a deeper analysis of the characteristics and dynamic of capitalism in the period in which we live? None. To the extent that the word itself never appears in the three volumes constituting Capital.”[16]

A contribution published in Italian in Prometeo n°8, Series VI (December 2003), and in English in Revolutionary Perspectives n°32, third series, summer 2004,[17] “For a definition of the concept of decadence”, contained a whole series of worrying assertions.

The theory of decadence is apparently seen as leading to a fatalist notion of the trajectory of capitalism and the role of revolutionaries:  “The ambiguity lies in the fact that decadence, or the progressive decline of the capitalist mode of production, proceeds from a kind of ineluctable process of self-destruction whose causes are traceable to the essential aspect of its own being [...] the disappearance and destruction of the capitalist economic form is an historically given event, economically ineluctable and socially predetermined. This, as well as being an infantile and idealistic approach, ends up by having negative repercussions politically, creating the hypothesis that, to see the death of capitalism, it is sufficient to sit on the banks of the river, or, at most, in crisis situations (and only then), it is enough to create the subjective instruments of the class struggle as the last impulse to a process which is otherwise irreversible.” 

 Decadence no longer seems to result in the alternative between socialism and barbarism, since capitalism is endlessly capable of renewing itself: “The contradictory aspect of capitalist production, the crises which are derived from this, the repetition of the process of accumulation which is momentarily interrupted but which receives new blood through the destruction of excess capital and means of production, do not automatically lead to its destruction. Either the subjective factor intervenes, which has in the class struggle its material fulcrum and in the crises its economically determinant premise, or the economic system reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions, without creating in this way the conditions for its own self-destruction”

As in the 2002 statement, the new article argued that the concept of decadence has little to do with a serious critique of political economy: it could only be considered useful if we can “prove” it economically, by examining the tendencies in the rate of profit: “Nor is the evolutionary theory valid, according to which capitalism is historically characterised by a progressive phase and a decadent one, if no coherent economic explanation is given (...) The investigation of decadence either individuates these mechanisms which regulate the deceleration of the valorisation process of capital, with all the consequences which that brings with it, or it remains within a false perspective, which prophesises in vain (...) But the listing of these economic and social phenomena, once they have been identified and described, cannot, by itself, be considered as a demonstration of the decadent phase of capitalism. These are only the symptoms, and the primary cause which brings them into existence is to be identified in the law of the profit crisis.” 

The two International Review articles written in reply[18] showed that while the Internationalist Communist Party  - Battaglia Comunista, the TCI’s section in Italy, from whom this contribution originated – had always been somewhat inconsistent in its adherence to the notion of decadence, this marked a real regression to the “Bordigist” view which had been one of the elements leading to the 1952 split in the Internationalist Communist Party. Bordiga – whose position was strongly opposed by Damen, as we saw in a previous article in this series[19] -  had claimed that the “theory of the descending curve” was fatalist, while also denying any objective limits to the growth of capital. As for the idea of economically “proving” decadence, the recognition that 1914 opened up a qualitative new phase in the life of capital had been affirmed by marxists like Lenin, Luxemburg and the communist left above all on the basis of social, political and military factors – like any good physician, they had diagnosed the disease from its most evident symptoms, above all world war and world revolution.[20]

We are unclear about how this discussion has been pursued within the ICT following the publication of this article by Battaglia[21]. The fact remains however that both the articles we have mentioned here are a reflection of a more general flight away from the coherence of the Italian left, an expression of this trend within one of the most solid groups of this tradition.

The regression from decadence theory from elements in the communist left may be seen by some as a liberation from a rigid dogmatism and an opening towards theoretical enrichment. But while we are the last to deny the need to elucidate and deepen the whole question of capitalism’s ascent and decline,[22] it seems to us that what we are facing in the main here is a retreat from the clarity of the marxist tradition and a concession to the enormous weight of bourgeois ideology, which is necessarily predicated on faith in the eternal, self-rejuvenating nature of this social order. 

Aufheben: It is capital that is “objectivist”, not marxism

As we said at the beginning of this article, this problem – the incapacity to grasp capitalism as a transient form of social organisation which has already proved its obsolescence – is particularly prevalent in the new generation of politicised minorities, who are strongly influenced by anarchism. But anarchism as such has little to offer at the theoretical level, above all when it comes to the critique of political economy, and is usually obliged to borrow from marxism if wants to give the appearance of real depth. To some extent, this has been the role of the Aufheben group in the libertarian communist milieu in Britain and internationally, much of which has eagerly awaited the yearly production of the Aufheben magazine to provide it with weighty analyses of the questions of the hour written from the standpoint of “autonomist marxism”. In particular, the series on decadence[23] has been seen by many as the definitive refutation of this concept of capitalist decline, seen as a heritage of the mechanical marxism of the Second International, an “objectivist” view of the dynamic of capitalism which totally underestimates the subjective dimension of the class struggle.

 “For the left Social-democrats it is seen as essential to insist capitalism is in decay - is approaching its collapse. The meaning of 'marxism' is being inscribed as accepting that capitalism is bankrupt and thus that revolutionary action is necessary. Thus they do engage in revolutionary action, but as we have seen, because the focus is on the objective contradictions of the system with revolutionary subjective action a reaction to it, they do not relate to the true necessary prerequisite of the end of capitalism – the concrete development of the revolutionary subject. It seemed to the more revolutionary members of the movement such as Lenin and Luxemburg that a revolutionary position was a position of belief in breakdown while the theory of breakdown had in fact worked to allow a reformist position at the start of the Second International. The point was that the theory of capitalist decline as a theory of capitalism's collapse from its own objective contradictions involves an essentially contemplative stance before the objectivity of capitalism, while the real requirement for revolution is the breaking of that contemplative attitude.”[24]

Aufheben considers that both the Trotskyists and left communists of today are the heirs of this (left) social democratic tradition: “Our criticism is that their theory contemplates the development of capitalism, the practical consequences of which being the fact that the trots move after anything that moves in order to recruit for the final showdown while the left communists stand aloof waiting for the pure example of revolutionary action by the workers. Behind this apparent opposition in ways of relating to struggle, they share a conception of capitalism's collapse, which means that they do not learn from the real movement. Although there is a tendency to slip into pronouncements that socialism is inevitable, in general for the decadence theorists it is that socialism will not come inevitably - we should not all go off to the pub - but capitalism will breakdown. This theory can then accompany the Leninist building of an organisation in the present or else, as with Mattick, it may await that moment of collapse when it becomes possible to create a proper revolutionary organisation. The theory of decay and the Crisis is upheld and understood by the party, the proletariat must put itself behind its banner. That is to say 'we understand History, follow our banner'. The theory of decline fits comfortably with the Leninist theory of consciousness, which of course took much from Kautsky who ended his commentary on the Erfurt Program with the prediction that the middle classes would stream ‘into the Socialist Party and hand in hand with the irresistibly advancing proletariat, follow its banner to victory and triumph’.”

As can be seen from this claim that the theory of decadence leads logically to a “Leninist” theory of class consciousness, Aufheben’s general outlook has been influenced by Socialisme ou Barbarie (whose abandonment of the marxist theory of crisis in the 1960s was examined in a previous article in this series[25]) and in particular by Italian autonomism.[26] Both these currents shared a criticism of an “objectivist” reading of Marx, where a focus on the remorseless working out of the economic laws of capital minimises the impact of the class struggle on the organisation of capitalist society and fails to grasp the importance of the subjective experience of the working class in the face of its exploitation. At the same time Aufheben were aware that Marx’s theory of alienation is founded precisely on the subjectivity of the proletariat and criticised Cardan (S ou B’s main theoretician) for erecting a criticism of Marx which failed to take into account this key element of his thought: “S or B's 'fundamental contradiction' does not grasp the full radicality of Marx's critique of alienation. In other words they presented as an innovation what was actually an impoverishment of Marx's critique. [27]

The autonomists also went beyond Cardan’s superficial idea that Marx had written “a monumental work (Capital) from which the class struggle is virtually absent.[28] Harry Cleaver’s book Reading Capital Politically, published in 1979, which explicitly identifies itself with the tradition of “autonomist marxism”, demonstrates very well that in Marx’s approach, capital is defined as a social relation and as such necessarily includes the proletariat’s resistance to exploitation, which in turn modifies capital’s way of organising itself. This was evident, for example, in the struggle for the reduction of the working day and the switch to the extraction of relative surplus value rather than absolute surplus value (during the 19th century), and the system’s growing need for state planning to deal with the proletarian danger (in the 20th century).

This is a valid corrective to a mechanistic “Kautskyite” view which did indeed develop during the period of the Second International, according to which the inexorable laws of capitalist economy will more or less guarantee that power will fall “like a ripe fruit” into the hands of a well-organised social democratic party. Furthermore, as Cleaver also points out, this approach, which really does underestimate the subjective development of class consciousness, is not avoided by a kind of ultra-Leninism which interposes the party as the only true element of subjectivity, as in Trotsky’s famous dictum that “the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.”[29] The party is indeed a subjective factor, but its capacity to grow and influence the class movement depends on a much wider development of proletarian combat and consciousness.

It’s also true that the bourgeoisie is obliged to reckon with the struggle of the working class in its attempts to manage society - not only at the economic level but also at the political and military level. And the ICC’s analyses of the world situation have certainly taken this into account. Several examples can be given: when we interpret the choice of political teams to run the “democratic” state, we always define the class struggle as a central element. This is why during the 1980s we talked about the bourgeoisie’s preference for keeping left parties in opposition to better deal with proletarian reactions to austerity measures. By the same token, the strategy of privatisation not only has an economic function dictated by the abstract laws of the economy (generalising the sanction of the market to every stage of the labour process), but also a social function aimed at fragmenting the proletariat’s response to attacks on its living standards, which are no longer seen as emanating directly from a single boss, the capitalist state. On the more historical plane, we have always maintained that the weight of the class struggle, whether overt or potential, plays a crucial role in determining the “historic course” towards war or revolution. We cite these examples to show that there is no logical link between holding a theory of capitalist decline and denying the factor of class subjectivity in determining the general dynamic of capitalist society.

But the autonomists lost the plot altogether when they concluded that the economic crisis which broke to the surface at the end of the 1960s was itself was a product of the class struggle.  Even if workers’ struggles can at certain moments deepen the bourgeoisie’s economic difficulties and block its “solutions”, we also know only too well that the economic crisis can reach catastrophic proportions in phases when the class struggle is in profound retreat. The Depression of the 1930s provides us with the clearest evidence of this. The view that workers’ struggles provoked the economic crisis had a certain plausibility in the 70s when both phenomena appeared at the same time, but Aufheben themselves are able to see its limitations in the section in the series on decadence which deals with the autonomists: “The class struggle theory of crisis lost its way somewhat in the '80s, for while in the seventies the breaking of capital's objective laws was plain, with capital's partial success the emergent subject was knocked back. It appears that during the '80s we have seen the objective laws of capital given free reign to run amok through our lives. A theory which connected the manifestations of crisis to the concrete behaviours of the class found little offensive struggle to connect to and yet crisis remained. The theory had become less appropriate to the conditions”[30].

So what is left of the equation between decadence theory and “objectivism”? Earlier on we mentioned that Aufheben correctly criticised Cardan for ignoring the real implications of Marx’s theory of alienation. Unfortunately, they commit the same error when they amalgamate the theory of capitalist decline with the “objectivist” vision of capital as nothing more than a machine regulated by its clockwork, inhuman laws. But for marxism, capital is not something hovering above humanity like God; or rather, like God, it is engendered by human activity. But this is an alienated activity, which means that it takes on a life independent of its creators – in the end, both of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, since both are driven by the abstract laws of the market towards an abyss of economic and social disaster.  This objectivism of capital is precisely what the proletarian revolution aims to abolish, not by humanising these laws but replacing them with the conscious subordination of production to human need.

In World Revolution n°168 (October 93)[31] we published an initial response to Aufheben’s articles on decadence. The central argument in the article is that, in attacking the theory of decadence, Aufheben are rejecting Marx’s entire approach to history. In particular, by raising the charge of “objectivism”, they ignore the critical breakthrough made by marxism in rejecting both vulgar materialist and idealist methodologies, and thus in overcoming the dichotomy between the objective and the subjective, between freedom and necessity.[32]

Interestingly, not only did Aufheben’s original articles on decadence recognise the inadequacy of the autonomists’ explanation of the crisis: in a highly critical introduction to the series that accompanies the online version of the series on libcom.org,[33] they admit that they had failed to grasp precisely this relationship between the objective and the subjective factors in a number of marxist thinkers (including Rosa Luxemburg, who certainly defended the notion of capitalist decline) and accepted that our criticisms of them on this key point had been quite valid. Indeed, they realised after the publication of the third article that the whole series had gone off the rails and for this reason had been abandoned. This self-critique is not particularly well known, while the original series continues to be referenced as a final smack down for decadence theory.

Such self-examination can only be welcome, but we are not convinced that its results have been especially positive. The most obvious indication being that, precisely at a time where the economic impasse facing this system seems more and more obvious, the most recent editions of Aufheben show that the group has been engaging in a mountain of labour to produce a very disappointing molehill: for them, the “debt crisis” which broke out in 2007 is not in the least an expression of an underlying problem in the accumulation process but arises essentially from the errors of the financial sector. What’s more it could quite easily lead to a new and extended “upswing” like the one that supposedly preceded it in the 90s and 2000s.[34] We have not got the space to go further into this article here, but this is beginning to look like anti-decadentism reaching the final phase of its decline.  

A very provisional conclusion

We will end this particular polemic here, but the debate about this whole issue will certainly continue. It has been made increasingly urgent by the fact that for more and more people, above all in the younger generation, are becoming aware that capitalism really does have no future, that the crisis is indeed terminal. This is more and more the question to be debated in the class battles and social revolts that the crisis is provoking all over the globe. It is more than ever vital to provide a clear theoretical framework for understanding the historic nature of the impasse facing the capitalist system, of insisting that this is a mode of production that is out of control and is heading towards self-destruction, and thus of pointing out the impossibility of all reformist solutions aimed at making capital more human or democratic. In short, of demonstrating that the alternative of socialism or barbarism, proclaimed loudly and clearly by revolutionaries in 1914, is more relevant today than ever. Such a call is anything but a plea for passive acceptance of the way society is going. On the contrary it is a demand for the proletariat to act, to become increasingly conscious and to open up the road to a communist future which is possible, necessary, but anything but guaranteed. 

Gerrard 5/12

Postscript to the last article in our series on the decadence of capitalism, ‘Decadence of capitalism: rejection and regressions’ (IR 149)[1]

The aim of the original article was to respond to the widespread trend among a number of currents in or around the revolutionary movement to reject the notion of capitalist decadence, a foundation stone for the class positions contained in our platform. We pointed out that this tendency has affected elements in the communist left as well as those coming from anarchism or ‘libertarian’ versions of marxism. One of the groups we referred to was the Internationalist Communist Tendency, formerly the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. We pointed to two articles published in 2002 and 2003 which seemed to us to be expressions of this same trend, since both contained formulations which put the basic concept into question, identifying it with a fatalistic notion that all revolutionaries have to do is sit on their hands and wait for the inevitable collapse of the system and its equally inevitable replacement by socialism.

We noted in our article that the second of the two articles mentioned ‘For a definition of the concept of decadence’[2],   published in Italian in Prometeo n°8, Series VI (December 2003), and in English in Revolutionary Perspectives n°32, third series, summer 2004, was in fact an individual contribution and did not necessarily express the views of either the Italian affiliate of the (then) IBRP or the IBRP as a whole. We also admitted that we were not clear how the discussion about this question within the ICT has evolved since the publication of this text.

As far as we know, the ICT has not published any of the internal discussions relating to this question, so we could be forgiven for some degree of ignorance about how the debate had turned out. However, as a comrade of the ICT in the UK pointed out to the author of the above article in a recent conversation, we should certainly have taken note of the text IBRP’s ‘Refining the concept of decadence’ published in September 2005[3], which contained the following introduction: “The document which follows is the result of a wide-ranging debate among all the organisations which adhere to the International Bureau. The common work is a measure of the increasing degree of homogeneity of the Bureau itself which is a fundamental premise for us to reach the objective which we have set ourselves – the rebuilding of the revolutionary party on an international scale.”

In short, this is a collective statement by the IBRP/ICT that reaffirms the organisation’s conviction that capitalism is a system in decline, posing humanity with the perspective of socialism or a relapse into barbarism. There are many elements in the text which we could take issue with – an over-reliance on Lenin’s particular concept of capitalist decay, including his vision of a labour aristocracy, and the persistence of a redundant polemic against unnamed elements who conclude that the notion of capitalist decadence means that socialist revolution is inevitable. We will certainly come back to some of these ideas in future contributions. However, in its essence, it seems to us that this was a healthy response of the IBRP to some more important confusions which had appeared in the organisation and which were expressed in the previously cited articles.

We would also like to point to a more recent article which has appeared on the ICT website which we also think has a number of positive features: ‘Capitalist crisis, causes and consequences, a brief overview’[4]. In contrast to the 2003 Prometeo contribution, which argues in favour of capitalism’s capacity for perpetual renewal through crises, the new article explicitly affirms that the current world economic crisis is a sign of a terminal stage in capitalism’s decline. And it also opens the door to a more fruitful debate within the revolutionary camp by beginning with the assertion that “Among the various revolutionary organisations the explanation for the capitalist crisis generally centres on two main issues, the tendency for profit rates to decline and the difficulty in finding markets for the enormous productive capacity capitalism generates”. Although the ICT obviously adheres to the first position, we would interpret this paragraph to mean that the second approach still lies within the marxist tradition and is not alien to it.

In pointing out that revolutionary organisations can be affected by the siren songs of bourgeois ideology – in this case, the refrain that capitalism is still a vibrant, ascending system – we do not exempt ourselves from this pressure. On the contrary, the majority of cases referred to in the IR 149 article have their origins in the ICC itself. What is important however is that proletarian organisations have the capacity to fight against such pressure not merely by repeating the basic acquisitions of the past, but by developing them and taking them forward on a firm theoretical foundation.

Gerrard, February 2013.

Looking back at the development of Japan, China and Korea in the 19th century we can see that they were all opened up by capitalism by force. Capitalism did not emerge from within, but it was “imported” from the outside. Unlike many European countries, where a revolutionary bourgeois class was able to cast aside the fetters of feudalism, there were no such bourgeois revolutions carried out by the local bourgeoisie.

Yet while these three countries were opened by foreign capitalists during the same period in the 19th century, they followed three different paths.

Japan was the only country to become an independent capitalist power after a short period. Soon after having been opened by foreign capitalism Japan in turn started to act as a capitalist force searching for new markets and zones of control in the bordering region. Within a few decades Japan became the big regional power. Unlike China and Korea which were quickly crippled in their capitalist development, Japan embarked upon a rapid accumulation of capital. While not handicapped in its capitalist development as its neighbours were by foreign countries, the early dominant role of militarism and of the State are a typical feature in the development of this country.

Even if Japan, much like Germany, arrived “late” on the world market, Japan, unlike Germany, which had to challenge the already “established” imperialist powers, was not a ‘have-not’. It was the first country in the area to establish its zone of influence in the “scramble for colonies” (establishing its control over Korea, parts of Manchuria and Taiwan). Japan was involved and triumphant in all the big wars in the far East – with China in 1894, with Russia in 1905 – and it was also the big regional winner of World War I even if it was not directly involved. Thus Japan could climb on “top of the regional imperialist ladder” before World War I, establishing its position at the expense of the other rivals.

In China, which was ruled by a declining dynasty until the arrival of capitalism, capitalism was also “implanted” from outside. While the Chinese ruling class was unable to induce a powerful capitalist development, the foreign capitalists – while opening up the country to capitalism – imposed strong fetters on the development of national capital. Thus already in the 19th century, the country, marked by all the features of a “handicapped” development, was torn apart by foreign imperialist powers. As we shall see later, China was to carry these characteristics all along the 20th century. While Japan was a leading expanding imperialist force, China had become the most fought over area amongst the European and Japanese imperialist sharks.

Korea in turn, also opened up by foreign capitalists, became the main target of Japanese imperialism. But being an invasion corridor for the appetites of all neighbours, it was condemned to suffer from this specific geo-strategic constellation. Ever since the imposition of capitalism in the far East, Korea has been a permanent battle field of the struggle between the regional and international rivals. Until 1905 Korea was fought over principally by China, Japan and Russia; since the onset of capitalist decadence, as we shall see when looking at the history of the 20th century, Korea has remained an important military and strategic target for all imperialist countries in the far East.

The forth rival in the region, Russia, in its expansion towards the far East, while defending its own imperialist interests in the region, was dragging with it a whole flock of European rivals.

During an initial period of 2-3 decades in the 19th century, the opening of the far East to capitalism unfolded under conditions, where the major European powers and the USA were not yet colliding with each other, because there was still enough “room for expansion”. The situation changed, as the scramble for colonies drew to a close and as the remains could only be divided with one rival gaining something at the expense of the other. The China-Japan war in 1894 and the Russia-Japan war in 1905 showed that it had become impossible that all countries would “receive a piece of the cake”, but that the division had been completed and a new distribution was only possible through war.

Already three years before the outbreak of World War I Rosa Luxemburg noted: “During the past 15 years there was the war between Japan and China in 1895, which was the prelude to the East-Asian period of world politics, 1898 the war between Spain and the USA, 1899-1902 the Boers War with British involvement in South Africa, 1900 the China-expedition of the European big powers, 1904 the Russian-Japanese war, 1904-1907 the German Herero-war in Africa, 1908 the Russian military intervention in Persia, at the present moment [1911] the French military intervention in Morocco, not to mention the incessant colonial skirmishes in Asia and Africa. The mere facts show that during the past 15 years there was almost no year without a war”.1

The level of imperialist rivalries could be kept within certain limits until the turn of the 20th century. But when antagonisms sharpened on a world scale, the world wide rivalries also manifested themselves in the far East. The 1905 war between Russia and Japan heralded World War I and the series of wars which followed in the 20th century.

At the turn of the 20th century, the far East experienced a reshuffling of the imperialist hierarchy. After 1905 Japan had risen to the top of the imperialist pecking order in the region but it was already confronted by the USA and GB as the two remaining imperialist giants in the area. The USA soon after started to “contain” Japan – initially through the policy of “making deals” (such as the one over the Philippines for recognising Japanese interests in Korean) – later, as with the 2nd world war, by going to war against each other.

The development of capitalism in the 19th century in the far East thus illustrates how much the qualitative change that occurred towards the turn of the 19-20th century expressed a new epoch in the global development of capitalism.

There was no more any bourgeois revolution on the agenda, the bourgeoisie in the far East had become as reactionary as elsewhere. And the capitalist system was going to show all its contradictions in the far East, pulling this densely populated part of the globe into a series of wars and destruction.

The war between the two countries was going to be one of the bloodiest, most destructive and longest in the 20th century. Whereas World War I had spared the far East from a direct military escalation, the far East was then going to be the second major theatre of war.

In a first phase, between 1937-1941, the war was more or less “limited” to fighting between Japan and China, which was backed above all by Russia. The second phase began in 1941, when a new war front opened up between Japan and the USA. When Japan started the occupation of China the army was hoping to stage a blitzkrieg and have everything under control within a few months. The opposite was going to be the case. In August 1937 Japan entered into a massive military battle with more than half a million soldiers involved in the fight for the city of Shanghai. Other big battles followed around Wuhan and in December 1937 for Nanking. It is estimated that between August 1937 and November 1938 alone some 2 million Chinese and some 500,000 Japanese soldiers fell.

Yet, despite the heavy Chinese losses, the Japanese army was not able to force the Chinese troops onto their knees. Between October 1938 and the attack on Pearl Harbour (on the 7th December 1941) the China war “stagnated”. Japan only managed to control some enclaves which corresponded to 10% of the territory. In addition, the Japanese government lost financial control over expenditures (the share of arms in the budget rose from 31% in 1931-32 to 47% in 1936-37, at the end of the 1930s arms spending counted for 70% of the budget)..

The more desperate the Japanese military strategy became, the more terror it applied following the motto “kill, burn, loot everything you can”.

When Japanese troops entered the capital city of Nanking in 1937 they committed one of the most atrocious massacres; around 300,000 people were killed in a relentless carnage in Nanking alone. The Chinese troops in turn were making partisan attacks and practising a scorched earth policy.

During the war with Japan, the Chinese bourgeoisie managed to establish only a very fragile “united front”. Even if, following the Japanese attack on China in 1937, the Chinese bourgeoisie closed ranks, in January 1941 both KMT nationalist troops and the Maoist armies clashed again. As the war unfolded, Red Army forces – after many advances and retreats – became the dominant force, reversing the hierarchy which had existed at the beginning of the conflict.

Thus after 1941, after decades of repeated wars in China, after four years of more or less bilateral war between China and Japan, the conflict in Asia then escalated into an all-out confrontation in the whole of Asia. Between 1941 and 1945 the war engulfed all the countries in East Asia and also Australia.

Initially Japan made some quick gains – after its crushing victory at Pearl Harbour. Within a few months Japan conquered large areas of South-East Asia. Its troops occupied the British colony Hong Kong, large parts of the Philippines, landed in the Dutch Indies (later Indonesia), and penetrated into Burma. Within 100 days they reached the coast of Australia and India.1

Whereas World War I had largely spared the far East and South-East Asia from the war, these areas became now involved for the first time in such carnage.2    

The USA for the first time used napalm bombs against housing districts in Japan. On March 9th 1945, the US bombing raid on Tokyo cost the lives of 130,000 people, 267,000 buildings on a surface of 41 square miles were destroyed, and more than one million people became homeless. The second biggest city Osaka was bombed on March 13th, some 4,000 people died, some 100,000 houses were destroyed. Altogether more than 600,000 buildings were destroyed in Japan in 4 bombing raids. In June 1945 – 2 months before the two nuclear bombs were dropped – in Tokyo and Kobe some 50% of the houses were in ruins. The same scorched earth policy was practised in Nagoya, Osaka and Kawasaki.

By the end of the war more than 2 million houses were destroyed and some 13 million people made homeless by napalm bombs alone. While the US justifications of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki try to present this barbaric attack as an exception, saving the life of thousands of US-soldiers, in reality the nuclear bombs on these two cities were a culmination point of a whole spiral of destruction and annihilation, leading yet again in the years following World War II to a systematic build-up of a nuclear arsenal.1

The balance sheet of the 1937-45 war was particularly disastrous for the two major Asian powers China and Japan.

The war cost the lives of 15-20 million people in China and Japan. Japan, the country which had unleashed the war, was the big loser and became utterly exhausted and militarily crippled. It was the first time for centuries that war had raged on Japanese territory. Japan lost all its conquests (from its colonies Korea and Manchuria to its short-lived war conquests in South-East Asia). Unlike Germany, Japan was not divided into several zones of occupation; the main reason being that the conflict between the USA and the USSR had already taken much sharper proportions in East Asia than in Europe a few months before the war ceased in May 1945. Most Japanese cities were destroyed, its population was starving, and much of its navy was sunk or damaged. During the war Japan lost some 1200 commercial ships (which corresponded to 63 % of its trade tonnage). In short the country was “amputated”.

Having lost control over the war spiral, Japan had to submit to US domination and was occupied for the first time. It lost is status as the first regional imperialist shark to the USA.

Destruction in China were equally devastating. The human death toll mounted to several million people. Paradoxically Korea, the Japanese colony, was spared largely from the hostilities – only to become a new theatre of war a few years later.

Once the war in Europe came to an end in May 1945 and the booty in Europe was divided amongst the winners, the battle over the domination of Asia unleashed. Already when the fighting in Europe was drawing to a close, 3 zones of conflict immediately became fierce battle grounds in East Asia.

The first zone of conflict was the domination over Japan. It was obvious that the collapse of the Japanese military regime and its elimination from China and Korea would leave a power vacuum, which could only increase the appetites of all imperialist gangsters.

The first country to try and occupy this “vacuum” was Russia, which barely 4 decades earlier in the 1904-1905 war had suffered a big defeat by Japan. However, in a first phase, i.e. after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 (and also later in 1944/early 1945, at the time of the Yalta conference held in February 1945) the USA still assumed since fighting with Japan was reaching unheard of intensity in the far East that it would want Russian participation in defeating Japan, which meant that they wanted above all Russian cannon fodder for the final battles with Japan. Although economically exhausted and with a death toll of more than 20 million people, the USSR had been able to strengthen itself on the imperialist chess board. At the Yalta conference the USSR laid claim on Manchuria, the Kuril archipelago, Sakhalin and Korea north of the 38th parallel; the Chinese ports of Dalian and Lüshün (named Port Arthur when occupied by the Russians) should become a Russian navy base. Stalin’s regime targeted Japan directly. Thus Russia once again aimed at expanding its rule towards East Asia. With the war drawing to an end in Europe, Russia’s strategic interests had changed. Russia, had been benefiting from the carnage between China and Japan and later from the war between Japan and the USA. If Japan was tied down in war with China and the USA, Japan would not be able to attack Russia in Siberia, as Nazi-Germany had been trying to push Japan to do. Since Russia and Japan had the common interest to keep their back clear from any aggression, (Russia wanting to keep away Japan, the ally of its enemy Germany; and Japan wanting to keep Russia, the ally of the USA, in a neutral position) the two countries practised a “non-aggression policy” towards each other during World War II. But towards the end of 1944/45 when the end of the war in Europe was in sight, the USA pushed Russia to take part in the storm against Japan. Stalin even managed to wrist off US military and logistic support for the arming and transport of Russian troops to the east.

At Yalta, the USSR and the USA still agreed, that once the war had come to an end in Europe, the USSR would receive its share after the defeat of Japan. However, once the war was over in Europe, which saw the USSR as a big winner receiving large parts of Eastern Europe and the Eastern part of Germany, US-imperialism had already changed its strategy. The USA no longer wanted any Russian participation in the war against Japan.

Russian imperialism, however, stuck to its guns, it wanted to seize its chance and mobilised an army of 1.5 million soldiers, more than 5.000 tanks, and 3.800 planes within 100 days after the end of the war in Germany.1 Its troops marched through northern China and occupied a territory of the size of Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Poland taken together. Russia declared war on Japan on August 9th, the day when the USA threw the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and on August 10th Russian troops stormed into Japanese occupied Korea advancing rapidly to the 38th parallel just north of Seoul. With Russian troops having become the occupying force of large parts of China and of northern Korea and mobilising for a landing in Japan, the USA saw their position threatened. The USA had to pay an exorbitant price – having to throw two nuclear bombs on Japan, but at the same time this step was above all aimed at preventing Russia from falling over Japan.

Although militarily Japan was already substantially weakened through the massive carpet bombings before August 1945 and although parts of the Japanese bourgeoisie tried to settle for a truce, the USA decided to launch the first atomic bombs against two Japanese cities because the fight for domination over East Asia saw already a new polarisation between Russia and the USA.

Thus the first major, albeit indirect, clash between Russia and the USA occurred over Japan. But a second theatre of confrontation had already cropped up – the battle over China, where the collapse of Japanese rule sparked the appetites of all the imperialist gangsters.

On the morning of 29th June 2012, as if by magic, a gentle euphoria took hold of the politicians and leaders of the Eurozone. The bourgeois media and the economists soon joined them. Apparently, the Euro summit had taken some “historic decisions” - unlike the numerous decisions taken in the last few years, all of which have failed. But according to many commentators, this time it was different. The bourgeoisie of the Eurozone, for once united and solid, had taken the measures needed to get us through the tunnel of the crisis. For a moment you might have thought you had entered Alice’s Wonderland. But, once the morning mists had dissipated, and you looked a bit closer, the real questions came to light: what was the real content of this summit? What was its significance? Would it really bring a lasting solution to the crisis of the Eurozone and thus of the world economy?

The Euro summit: decisions that deceive the eye

If the June 2012 Euro summit was presented as “historic”, it is because it was supposed to be a turning point in the way that the authorities confront the euro crisis. To begin with, at the level of form, this summit, for the first time, did not, as far as the commentators were concerned, restrict itself to rubberstamping the decisions taken in advance by “Merkozy”, i.e. the Merkel-Sarkozy partnership (in reality the position of Merkel rubberstamped by Sarkozy).1 It now took into account the demands of two other important countries of the zone, Spain and Italy, demands supported by the new French president, François Hollande. Secondly, this summit is supposed to inaugurate a new given in economic and budgetary policy inside the zone: after years in which the only policy followed by the leading authorities of the Eurozone was one of increasingly ruthless austerity, now criticisms of this policy are being taken into account. These criticisms, raised above all by the politicians and economists of the left, argue that without reviving economic activity, hyper-indebted states will be unable to find the fiscal resources to pay off their debts.

This is why the “left” president Hollande, who had come to call for a “pact for employment and growth”, took centre stage in the whole show, proud of his demands and the results obtained. In this satisfaction he was accompanied by two men of the right: Monti the Italian head of government and Rajoy, his Spanish equivalent, who also argued that their calculations had paid off and the financial noose around their country’s necks should be loosened. The real situation was much too serious for these men to assume such a triumphant air, but at least they had a sense of humour: “we could hope to see the beginning of the end of leaving the tunnel of the crisis”. These were the convoluted words of the head of the Italian government.

Before lifting the veil from these optimistic declarations, we need to go back in time a bit. Let’s recall: over the last six months, the Eurozone has twice been in a situation where its banks were in a state of collapse. The first time this gave rise to what was called the LTRO (Long Term Refinancing Operation): the European Central Bank (ECB) accorded them loans of around 1000 billion euros. In reality 500 billion had already been supplied to them to keep them afloat. A few months later the same banks were again appealing for help! Let’s now tell a little story which shows us what is really happening in the world of European finance. At the beginning of 2012 sovereign debts (i.e. debts of states) exploded. The financial markets themselves raised the rates at which they were prepared to lend money to these states. Some of them, notably Spain, could no longer afford to look for loans on the market. It was all too expensive. At this point the Spanish banks gave up the ghost. What could be done? What could be done in Italy, Portugal and elsewhere? A brilliant idea began to germinate in the great minds of the ECB. We are going to make massive loans to the banks, who will themselves finance the sovereign debts of their national states and the “real” economy in the form of loans for investment or consumption. This is what happened last winter. The ECB declared “the bar is open and it’s drinks all round”. The result was that at the beginning of June everyone woke up with cirrhosis of the liver. The banks had not been lending out to the “real economy”. They had put the money in safe places, putting its equivalent away in the Central Bank for a small return of interest. What would they give to the Central Bank in exchange? State bonds which they had bought with the money they had got from the same Central Bank. A real conjuring trick which would soon be revealed as an absurd spectacle!

In June the “economic doctors” again cried loud and strong: the patients are slipping towards death. Radical measures were needed immediately for all the hospitals of the Eurozone. We now come to the June summit. After a whole night of negotiations, a “historic” agreement seemed to have been found. The decisions taken were:

• the financial stabilisation funds(European Funds for Financial Stability and the European Stability Mechanism) would now be able to flow into the banks, after obtaining the ECB’s agreement, as well as being used to buy up public debts in order to reduce the rates at which states would have to borrow on the financial markets;

• the Europeans would confer on the ECB the job of supervising the banking system of the Eurozone;

• an extension of the rules for controlling the public deficits of states in the zone;

• finally, to the great satisfaction of the economists and politicians of the “left”, a plan of 100 billion euros for reviving economic activity was drawn up.

For several days the same speeches rang out. The Eurozone had finally taken some good decisions. While Germany had succeeded in sticking to its “Golden Rule” in the matter of public expenditure (which demands that states adopt as a fundamental law the necessity to reduce their budget deficits), it at the same time accepted going towards the mutualisation and the monetisation of these debts, i.e. the possibility of reimbursing them by printing money.

As always in this kind of agreement, reality is hidden in the timetable and the way the decisions are put into practice. However, already on this particular morning, there was something very striking. An essential question seems to have been avoided: the financial means and their real sources. There was an unspoken agreement that Germany would end up paying for it all because it’s the only one that seems to have the means to do so. And then during the month of July, surprise surprise, everything was put into question. With the help of some legal manoeuvres, the application of the accords was put off until September at the earliest. There was a little problem. If you add up all of Germany’s commitments in terms of disguised guarantees and lines of credit, the total amount it’s being asked to hand out to its desperate European neighbours amounts to 1500 billion euros. Germany’s GDP is 2650 billion euros and this is without taking into account the contraction in its activity over the last few months. This is a dizzying sum equivalent to half its GDP. The last figures announced for the debt of the Eurozone went up to around 8000 billion, a large part of which is made up of “toxic” debts (i.e. debts where it has been recognised that they will never be repaid). It’s not hard to understand that Germany is incapable of assuring such a level of debt. Neither is it in a position, in the long term, to credibly shore up this wall of debt with its own signature alone on the financial markets. The proof of this can be seen in the paradox confronting an economy in disarray. In the short and middle term Germany is placing its debts at negative rates of interest. The buyers of this debt agree not to notice these ridiculous interests while losing capital through inflation. Germany’s sovereign debt appears to be a mountain refuge capable of withstanding all the storms, but at the same time, the price of insuring this debt is squeezing them at the same level as Greece! In the end this refuge will be shown to be rather vulnerable. The markets know very well that if Germany continues to finance the debt of the Eurozone, it will itself become insolvent and that is why all lenders are trying to get themselves insured as well as they can in case there is a brutal collapse.

There remains the temptation to use the ultimate weapon. That is, to say to the ECB that it should act like in the UK, Japan and the USA: “let’s print more and more bank notes without any regard for their value”. The central banks could indeed become “rotten” banks, that’s not the problem. The problem is to prevent everything coming to a halt. The problem is what happens tomorrow, next month, next year. This is the real advance made at the last European summit. But the ECB wasn’t listening with this ear. It’s true that this central bank doesn’t have the same autonomy as the other central banks of the world. It is linked to the different central banks of each nation in the zone, But is that the basic problem? If the ECB could operate like the central banks of Britain or the US, for example, would this do away with the insolvency of the banks and states of the Eurozone? What was going on at the same time in other countries, for example the USA?

Central banks more fragile than ever

While storm clouds gather over the American economy, why has the USA not yet come up with a third revival plan, a new phase of monetising its debt?

We should recall that the Director of the US central bank, Ben Bernanke, was nicknamed “Mr Helicopter”. In the last four years the USA has already had two plans of massive money creation, the famous “quantitative easing”. Mr Bernanke seemed to be able to fly all over the USA, doling out money wherever he went. A tidal wave of liquidities got everyone drunk. And yet it just didn’t seem to work. For the last few months a new phase of money-printing has become unavoidable. And yet it hasn’t happened. Quantitative Easing 3 is vital, indispensable, and at the same time impossible, as is the mutualisation and monetisation of the overall debt in the Eurozone. Capitalism has come to a dead-end. Even the world’s leading power can’t go on creating money out of nothing. Every debt needs to be paid for at some point or other. Like any other central bank, the US Federal Bank has two sources of finance which are at one moment or another linked and interdependent. The first consists of using up savings, the money which exists inside or outside the country, either through borrowing at tolerable rates, or through an increase in taxation. The second resides in the fabrication of money as a counterpart to the recognition of debts, notably by buying what is known as bonds representing public or state debt. The value of these bonds is in the last instance determined by the evaluation made by the financial markets. A used car is up for sale. Its price is displayed on the window-screen by the seller. Potential buyers verify the state of the vehicle. Offers are made and the seller chooses the least bad one for him. If the vehicle is too decrepit the price becomes derisory and the car is left to rot on the street. This little example shows the danger of a new money-creation in the US and elsewhere. For the last four years, hundreds of billions of dollars have been injected into the American economy without the slightest sign of recovery. Worse: the economic depression has been quietly advancing. Here we are at the heart of the problem. Assessing the real value of sovereign debt is connected to the solidity of the economy. Like the value of our car and its actual state. If a central bank (whether in the US, Japan, or the Eurozone) prints money to buy debts, or the recognition of debts, that can never be repaid (because the borrowers have become insolvent) it does nothing but inundate the market with bits of paper which don’t correspond to any real value because they have no counterpart or guarantees in terms of savings or new wealth. In other words, they are manufacturing fake money.

On the road to generalised recession

Such an assertion might still seem a bit exaggerated. And yet, this is what’s written in the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin for January 2012: “To generate another dollar’s worth of growth, the USA will now have to borrow around 8 dollars. Or, if you prefer it the other way round: each dollar borrowed only generates 0.12. dollars of growth. This illustrates the absurdity of the medium term policies of the US FED and Treasury in the last few years. It’s like a war where you have to kill more and more soldiers to win less and less ground”. The proportion is no doubt not exactly the same for all the countries of the world. But the general tendency is the same. This is why the 100 billion euros set aside by the 29 June summit to finance growth is nothing but sticking plaster on a wooden leg. The profits obtained are increasingly pitiful compared to the growth in the wall of debt.

The well known comedy "Airplane" featured a passenger aircraft left without a pilot. As far as the world economy is concerned, we’d have to add “and the engine doesn’t work either”. That’s a plane and its passengers in a very bad situation.

In the face of this general debacle of the most developed countries, some, hoping to minimise the gravity of capitalism’s situation, point to the example of China and the “emerging” countries. Only a few months ago China was sold to us as the next locomotive of the world economy, with a little help from India and Brazil. What’s the reality here? These “motors” are also having some serious problems. On 13th July China officially announced a growth rate of 7.6%, which is the lowest figure for this country since the beginning of the current phase of the crisis. The times of double-digit growth are over. And even 7% doesn’t convince the specialists. They all know that it’s false. These experts prefer to look at other figures which they feel are more reliable. This is what was said that same day by a radio that specialises in economics (BFM): “by looking at the evolution of electricity consumption, you can deduce that China’s growth is actually around 2 or 3%. Or less than half the official figure”. At the beginning of this summer all the growth figures were at half-mast. Everywhere they are diminishing. The motor is more or less running on empty. The plane is about to sink to the earth, and the world economy with it.

Capitalism is entering period of major storms

Faced with the world recession and the financial state of the banks and states, there is open economic war between different sectors of the bourgeoisie. Boosting the economy with classic Keynesian policies (which require further state debt) can no longer be really effective. In the context of recession, the money collected by the states can only diminish and, despite the generalised austerity, their sovereign debts can only continue to explode, like in Greece or now Spain. The question that is tearing the bourgeoisie apart is this: “Do we risk once again raising the ceiling of debt?” More and more, money is not going towards production, investment or consumption. It’s no longer profitable. But the interest on debt and the need to repay it don’t go away. Capital will have to create more money to put off a generalised cessation of payment. Bernanke, head of the US central bank, and his counterpart Mario Draghi in the Eurozone, like all their cohorts across the planet, are hostages to the capitalist economy. Either they do nothing, in which case depression and bankruptcy will soon take the form of a cataclysm. Or they again inject massive amounts of money and that will very soon destroy the value of money. One thing is for sure: even if it can now see the danger, the bourgeoisie, hopelessly divided over these issues, will only react in situations of absolute emergency, at the last minute, and on an increasingly inadequate level. The crisis of capitalism which we have seen so openly since 2008 is only just beginning.

Tino (30.7.12)

The press and television news around the world regularly send images of Mexico in which fighting, corruption and murder resulting from the “war against drug trafficking” are brought to the fore. But all this appears as a phenomenon alien to capitalism or abnormal, whereas in fact all the barbaric reality that goes with it is deeply rooted in the dynamics of the current system of exploitation. It is, in its full extent, the behaviour of the ruling class that is revealed, through competition and heightened political rivalries between its various fractions. Today, such a process of plunging into barbarism and the decomposition of capitalism is effectively dominant in certain regions of Mexico.

At the beginning of the 1990s, we said that “Amongst the major characteristics of capitalist society's decomposition, we should emphasise the bourgeoisie's growing difficulty in controlling the evolution of the political situation.”1 This phenomenon appeared more clearly in the last decade of the 20th century when it became a major trend.

It is not only the ruling class that is affected by decomposition; the proletariat and other exploited classes also suffer its most pernicious effects. In Mexico, mafia groups and the actual government enrol, for the war in which they are engaged, elements belonging to the most impoverished sectors of the population. The clashes between these groups, which indiscriminately hit the population, leaving hundreds of victims on the casualty list, the government and mafias call “collateral damage.” The result is a climate of fear that the ruling class has used to prevent and contain social reactions to the continuous attacks on the living conditions of the population.

Drug trafficking and the economy

In capitalism, drugs are nothing more than a commodity whose production and distribution necessarily requires labour, even if it is not always voluntary or waged. Slavery is common in this environment, which not only employs the voluntary and paid labour of a lumpen milieu for criminal activities, but also of labourers and others like carpenters (for example, for the construction of houses and shops) who are forced, in order to survive in the misery offered by capitalism, to serve the capitalist producers of illegal goods.

What is experienced today in Mexico has already existed (and still exists) in other parts of the world: the mafias profit from this misery, and their collusion with the state structures allows them to “protect their investment” and their activities in general. In Colombia, in the 1990s, the investigator H. Tovar-Pinzón gave a number of factors to explain why poor peasants became the first accomplices of the drug trafficking mafias: “A property produced, for example, ten cargoes of corn per year which permitted a gross receipt of 12,000 Colombian pesos. This same property could produce a hundred arrobas of coca, which represented for the owner a gross revenue of 350,000 pesos per year. Why not change the crop when one can gain thirty times more?”.2

What happened in Colombia has expanded across the whole of Latin America, drawing into drug trafficking, not only the peasant proprietors, but also the great mass of landless labourers who sell their labour power to them. This great mass of workers becomes easy prey to the mafia, because of the extremely low wages granted by the legal economy. In Mexico, for example, a labourer employed to cut sugar cane receives little more than two dollars per ton (27 pesos) and will see his wage increased when he produces an illegal commodity. In doing so, a large portion of workers employed in this activity loses its class condition. These workers are increasingly implicated in the world of organised crime and in direct contact with the gunmen and drug carriers with whom they share directly a daily life in a context of the trivialisation of murder and crime. Closely involved in this atmosphere, the contagion leads them progressively towards lumpenisation. This is one of the harmful effects of advanced decomposition directly affecting the working class.

There are estimates that the drug trafficking mafias in Mexico employ 25% more people than McDonald's worldwide.3 It should also be added that beyond the use of farmers, mafia activity involves racketeering and prostitution imposed on hundreds of young people. Today, drugs are an additional branch of the capitalist economy, that is to say that exploitation is present in it as in any other economic activity but, in addition, the conditions of illegality push competition and the war for markets to take much more violent forms.

The violence to gain markets and increase profits is all the fiercer with the importance of the gain. Ramón Martinez Escamilla, member of the Economic Research Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, believes that “the phenomenon of drug trafficking represents between 7 and 8 % of Mexico’s GDP”.4 These figures, compared to the 6% of Mexico’s GDP which represents the fortune of Carlos Slim, the biggest tycoon in the world, give an indication of the growing importance of the drug trade in the economy, permitting us to deduce the barbarity that it engenders. Like any capitalist, the drug trafficker has no other objective than profit. To explain this process, it is enough to recall the words of the trade unionist Thomas Dunning (1799-1873), quoted by Marx:

“With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent, positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both.”5

Based on contempt for human life and on exploitation, these vast fortunes certainly find refuge in tax havens but are also used directly by the legal capitalists who are responsible for the task of laundering them. Examples abound to illustrate this, such as the entrepreneur Zhenli Ye Gon, or more recently, the financial institution HSBC. In these two examples, it was revealed that the individual or institution was laundering the vast fortunes of the drug cartels, whether it was for the promotion of political projects (in Mexico and elsewhere) or for “honourable” investments.

Edgar Buscaglia6 states that companies of all kinds have been “designated as dubious by intelligence agencies in Europe and the United States, including the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury Department, but nobody has wanted to undermine Mexico, basically because many of them fund election campaigns.”7

There are other marginal processes (but no less significant) that enable the integration of the mafia in the economy, such as the violent depopulation of properties and of vast territories, to the extent that some areas of the country are now “ghost towns”. Some figures suggest the displacement, in recent years, of a million and a half people fleeing “the war between the army and the narcos.”8

It is essential to point out the impossibility, for the plans of the drug mafias, of existing outside the realm of the states. These are the structures that protect and help them move their money towards the financial giants, but are also the seat of the government teams of the bourgeoisie who mix their interests with those of drug cartels. It is obvious that the mafia could hardly have as much business if they did not receive the support of sectors of the bourgeoisie involved in the governments. As we have argued in the “Theses on Decomposition”, “it is more and more difficult to distinguish the government apparatus from gangland.”9

Mexico, an example of advanced capitalist decomposition

Since 2006, almost sixty thousand people have been killed, either by the bullets of the mafia units or those of the official army; a majority of those killed were victims of the war between drug cartels, but this does not diminish the responsibility of the state, whatever the government says. It is impossible to blame one or the other, because of the links between the mafia groups and the state itself. If difficulties have been growing at this level, it is precisely because the fractures and divisions within the bourgeoisie are amplified and, at any time, any place, can become a battleground between fractions of the bourgeoisie; of course, the state structure itself is also a place to where these conflicts are expressed. Each mafia group emerges under the leadership of a fraction of the bourgeoisie, and so the economic competition that these political quarrels create makes these conflicts grow and multiply day by day.

In the 19th century, during the ascendant period of capitalism, the drugs trade (opium for example) was already the cause of political difficulties leading to wars, revealing the barbaric essence of this system in the states’ direct involvement in the production and distribution of goods such as drugs. However, such a situation was still inseparable from the strict vigilance and the maintenance of a framework of firm discipline on this business by the state and the dominant class, allowing it to reach political agreements and avoiding anything that that would weaken the cohesion of the bourgeoisie.10 Thus, even if the “Opium War” - declared principally by the British state - illustrated a behavioural trait of capital, we can understand why the drug trade was not, however, a dominant phenomenon of the 19th century.

The importance of drugs and the formation of mafia groups become increasingly important during the decadent phase of capitalism. While the bourgeoisie tried to limit and adjust by laws and regulations the cultivation, preparation and trafficking of certain drugs during the first decades of the 20th century, this was only in order to properly control the trade of this commodity.

The historical evidence shows that “drug industry” is not an activity divorced from the bourgeoisie and its state. Rather, it is this same class that is responsible for expanding its use and profiting from the benefits it provides, and at the same time expanding its devastating effects in humans. States in the 20th century, have massively distributed drugs to armies. The United States gives the best example of such use to “stimulate” the soldiers during the war: Vietnam was a huge laboratory and it is not surprising that it was effectively Uncle Sam who encouraged the demand for drugs in the 1970s, and responded by boosting their production in the countries of the periphery.

At the beginning of the second half of the 20th century in Mexico, the importance of the production and distribution of drugs was still far from being significant and remained under the strict control of government authorities. The market was also tightly controlled by the army and the police. From the 1980s, the American government encouraged the development of the production and consumption of drugs in Mexico and throughout Latin America.

The “Iran-Contra” affair (1986) revealed that the government of Ronald Reagan, to overcome reductions in the budget to support armed bands opposed to the Nicaraguan government (the “contras”), used funds from the sale of arms to Iran and, especially, from drug trafficking via the CIA and the DEA. The government of the United States pushed the Colombian mafias to increase production, even deploying, to this end, military and logistical support to the governments of Panama, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala, to facilitate the passage of this coveted commodity. To “expand the market”, the American bourgeoisie began to produce cocaine derivatives much more cheaply and therefore easier to sell massively, despite being more devastating.

These same practices, used by the American ‘godfather’ to raise funds to enable it to carry out its putchist adventures, have also been used in Latin America to fight against the guerrillas. In Mexico, the so-called “dirty war” waged by the state in the 1970s and 80s against the guerrillas was financed by the money coming from drugs. The army and paramilitary groups (such as the White Brigade or the Jaguar Group) then had carte blanche to murder, kidnap and torture. Some military projects like “Operation Condor” (which supposedly targeted drug production), were actually directed against the guerrillas and served at the same time to protect poppy and marijuana crops.

At that time, the discipline and cohesion of the Mexican bourgeoisie permitted it to keep the drug market under control. Recent journalistic enquiries say that there was absolutely no drug shipment that was beyond the control and supervision of the army and federal police.11 The state assured, under a cloak of steel, the unity of all sectors of the bourgeoisie, and when a group or individual capitalist showed disagreements, it was settled peacefully through privileges or power sharing. Thus was unity maintained in the so-called “revolutionary family.”12

With the collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc the unity of the opposing bloc led by the United States also disappeared, which in turn provoked a growth of “every man for himself” among the different national fractions of certain countries. In Mexico, this breakdown showed itself in the dispute in broad daylight between fractions of the bourgeoisie at all levels: parties, clergy, regional governments, federal governments... Each fraction was trying to gain a greater share of power, without any of them taking the risk of putting into question the historic discipline behind the United States.

In the context of this general brawl, opposing bourgeois forces have fought over the distribution of power. These internal pressures have led to attempts to replace the ruling party and “decentralise” the responsibilities of law enforcement. Thus local authorities, represented by the state governments and the municipal presidents have declared their regional control. This, in turn, has added to the chaos: the federal government and each municipality or region, in order to reinforce its political and economic control, has associated itself with a particular mafia band. Each ruling fraction protects and strengthens this or that cartel according to its interests, thus ensuring impunity, which explains the violent arrogance of the mafias.

The magnitude of this conflict can be seen in the settling of accounts between political figures. It is estimated for example that in the last five years, twenty-three mayors and eight municipal presidents have been assassinated, and the threats made to secretaries of state and candidates are innumerable. The bourgeois press tries to pass off the people murdered as victims who, in the majority of cases, have been the subjects of a settling of scores between rival gangs or within these bands, for treachery.

By analysing these events we can understand that the drug problem cannot be resolved within capitalism. To limit the excesses of barbarism, the only solution for the bourgeoisie is to unify its interests and to regroup around a single mafia band, thus isolating the other bands to keep them in a marginal existence.

The peaceful resolution of this situation is very unlikely, especially because of the acute division between bourgeois factions in Mexico, making it difficult and unlikely to achieve even a temporary cohesion permitting a pacification. The dominant trend seems to be the advance of barbarism... In an interview dated June 2011, Buscaglia estimated the magnitude of drug trafficking in the life of the bourgeoisie: “Nearly 65% of electoral campaigns in Mexico are contaminated by money from organised crime, mainly drug trafficking”.13

Workers are the direct victims of the advance of capitalist decomposition expressed through phenomena such as “the war against drugs” and they are also the target of the economic attacks imposed by the bourgeoisie faced with the deepening of the crisis; this is undoubtedly a class that suffers from great poverty, but it is not a contemplative class, it is a body capable of reflecting, of becoming conscious of its historical condition and reacting collectively.

Decay and crisis ... capitalism is a system in putrefaction

Drugs and murder are major news items both inside and outside the country, and if the bourgeoisie gives them such importance it is also because this allows it to disguise the effects of the economic crisis.

The crisis of capitalism did not originate in the financial sector, as claimed by the bourgeois “experts”. It is a profound and general crisis of the system that spares no country. The active presence of mafias in Mexico, although it weighs heavily on the exploited, does not erase the effects on them of the crisis; quite the contrary, it makes them worse.

The main cause of the tendencies towards recession affecting global capitalism is widespread insolvency, but it would be a mistake to believe that the weight of sovereign debt is the only indicator to measure the advance of the crisis. In some countries, such as Mexico, the weight of indebtedness does not create major problems yet, though in the last decade, according to the Bank of Mexico, sovereign debt has increased by 60% to reach 36.4% of GDP at the end 2012 according to forecasts. This amount is obviously modest when compared to the level of debt of countries like Greece (where it has reached 170% of GDP), but does this imply that Mexico is not exposed to the deepening crisis? The answer of course is no.

Firstly, the fact that indebtedness is not as important in Mexico than in other countries does not mean that it will not become so.

The difficulties of the Mexican bourgeoisie in reviving capital accumulation are illustrated particularly in the stagnation of economic activity. GDP is not even able to reach its 2006 levels (see Figure 1) and, moreover, the recent fleeting embellishment has concerned the service sector, especially trade (as explained by the state institution in charge of statistics, the INEGI). Furthermore, it must also be taken into consideration that if this sector boosts domestic trade (and permits GDP to grow), this is because consumer credit has increased (at the end of 2011 the use of credit cards increased by 20 % compared to the previous year).

The mechanisms used by the ruling class to confront the crisis are neither new nor unique to Mexico: increasing levels of exploitation and boosting the economy through credit. The application of such measures helped the United States in the 1990s to give the illusion of growth. Anwar Shaikh, a specialist in the American economy, explains: “The main impetus for the boom came the dramatic fall in the rate of interest and the spectacular collapse of real wages in relation to productivity (growth of the rate of exploitation), which together raised significantly the rate of profit of the company. Both variables played different roles in different places...”14

Such measures are repeated at the pace of the advance of the crisis, even though their effects are more and more limited, because there is no alternative but to continue to use them, further attacking the living conditions of the workers. Official figures, for what they’re worth, attest to the precariousness of these solutions. It is not surprising that the health of Mexican workers is based on the cheapest available calories in sugar (the country is the second largest consumer of soft drinks after the United States, every Mexican consuming some 150 litres on average per year) or cereals.

It is therefore not surprising that Mexico is a country whose adult population is more prone to problems of obesity which culminate in chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. Degradation of living conditions has reached such extremes that more children between 12 and 17 are forced to work (according to CEPALC, 25% in rural areas and 15% in the city). By compressing wages, the bourgeoisie has managed to claw back financial resources destined for consumption by the workers, seeking to increase the mass of surplus value appropriated by the capital. This situation is even more serious for the living conditions of the working class, as shown in Figure 2, because food prices are rising faster than the general price index used by the state to assert that the problem of inflation is under control.

Spokespersons for Latin American governments start from the principle that if economic conflicts affect the central countries (the United States and Europe), the rest of the world is untouched by this dynamic, especially as the IMF and the ECB are supplied with liquidity by the governments of these regions, including Mexico. But this does not mean at all that these economies are not threatened by the crisis. These same insolvency processes that spread throughout Europe today were the lot of Latin America during the 1980s and, with them, the severe measures arising from draconian austerity plans (which gave rise to what was called the Washington Consensus).

The depth and breadth of the crisis can be manifested differently in different countries, but the bourgeoisie uses the same strategies in all countries, even those who are not strangled by increasing sovereign debt.

The plans to reduce costs that the bourgeoisie applies less and less discreetly, the layoffs and increased exploitation, cannot in any way promote any recovery.

The rates of unemployment and impoverishment achieved by Mexico help us to understand how the crisis extends and deepens elsewhere. Coparmex, the employers' organisation, recognises that in Mexico 48% of the economically active population is in “underemployment”,15 which in more straightforward language means in a precarious situation: low wages, temporary contracts, days getting longer and longer without any medical insurance. This mass of the unemployed and precarious is the product of “labour flexibility” imposed by the bourgeoisie to increase exploitation and to push the main effects of the crisis onto our shoulders.

Poverty and exploitation are the drivers of discontent

Many regions, mainly in rural areas, which are subject to curfew and constant supervision by armed patrols, whether military, police or mafia (if not both), and who murder under the slightest pretext, make life a nightmare for the exploited. To this are added the permanent attacks on the economic level. In early 2012, the Mexican bourgeoisie announced a “labour reform” which, as elsewhere in the world, will bring the cost of the labour force down to a more attractive level for capital, thus reducing production costs and further increasing the rate of exploitation.

The “labour reform” aims to increase the rates and hours of work, but also to lower wages (reduction of direct wages and elimination of substantial parts of the indirect wage), the project also providing for increases in the number of years of service required to qualify for retirement.

This threat began to materialise in the education sector. The state has chosen this area to make an initial attack that will be a warning to others elsewhere. It can afford to do this because although the workers are numerous and have a great tradition of militancy, they are very tightly controlled by the trade union structure, both formal (National Union of Education Workers – SNTE) and “democratic” (National Coordination of Education Workers – CNTE). Thus the government was able to deploy the following strategy: first causing discontent by announcing a “universal assessment”16, and then staging a series of manoeuvres (interminable demonstrations, negotiations separated by region...), relying on the unions to exhaust, isolate and thus defeat the strikers, convincing them of the futility of the “struggle “and so demoralising and intimidating all workers.

Although teachers have been the subject of special treatment, the “reforms” apply nevertheless gradually and unobtrusively to all workers. The miners, for example, are already experiencing these attacks which reduce the cost of the labour force and make their working conditions more precarious. The bourgeoisie considers it normal that, for a pittance (the maximum salary a miner can claim is $455 per month), workers spend in the pits and galleries long and intensive working days which often well exceed eight hours, in unspeakable safety conditions worthy of those that prevailed in the 19th century. It is this that explains, on the one hand, why the profit rate of mining companies in Mexico is among the highest, and on the other, the dramatic increase in “accidents” in the mines, with their growing tally of wounded and dead. Since 2000, in the one state of Coahuila, the most active mining area in the country, more than 207 workers have died as a result of collapsing galleries or firedamp explosions.

This misery, to which is added the criminal activities of the governments and the mafias, provokes a growing discontent among the exploited and oppressed which begins to express itself, even if it is still with great difficulties. In other countries such as Spain, Britain, Chile, Canada, the streets have been overrun with demonstrations expressing the courage to fight against the reality of capitalism, even though this was not yet clearly the force of a class in society, the working class.

In Mexico, the mass protests called by students of the “#yo soy 132” (“I am 132”) movement, although they have been framed from the outset by the electoral campaign of the bourgeoisie for the presidential elections, are nevertheless the product of a social unrest which is smouldering. It is not to console ourselves that we affirm this; we don’t delude ourselves with the illusion of a working class advancing unabated in a process of struggle and clarification, we are just trying to understand reality. We need to take into account that the development of mobilisations throughout the world is not homogeneous and that within them, the working class as such does not assume a dominant position. Because of its difficulty to recognise itself as a class in society with the capacity to constitute a force within it, the working class lacks confidence in itself, is afraid to launch itself in the struggle and to lead that struggle. Such a situation promotes, within these movements, the influence of bourgeois mystifications which put forward reformist “solutions” as possible alternatives to the crisis of the system. This general trend is also present in Mexico.

It is only by recognising the difficulties faced by the working class that we can understand that the movement animating the creation of the group “# yo soy 132” also expresses the disgust with governments and parties of the ruling class. The latter was able to react very quickly to the threat by linking the group to the false hopes raised by the elections and democracy, and converting it into a hollow organ, useless to the struggle of the exploited (who were coming closer to this group believing that it had found a way to fight), but very useful to the bourgeoisie which continues to use “#yo soy 132” to divert the combativity of young workers outraged by the reality of capitalism.

The ruling class knows perfectly well that increasing attacks will inevitably provoke a response from the exploited. José A Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD, expressed this in these terms on February 24: “What can happen when you mix the decline in growth, high unemployment and growing inequality? The result can only be the Arab Spring, the Indignants of Puerta del Sol and those in Wall Street”. That is why, faced with this latent discontent, the Mexican bourgeoisie promotes the campaign protesting the election of Pena Nieto1718 to the presidency of the republic, a unifying slogan that sterilises any combativity, along with the more radical statements of Lopez Obrador181819 and of “# yo soy 132” ensuring that nothing will go further than the defence of democracy and its institutions.

Accentuated by the adverse effects of decomposition, the capitalist crisis has generalised the impoverishment of the proletariat and other oppressed but has thereby shown the naked reality, in all its cruelty: capitalism can offer us nothing but unemployment, poverty, violence and death.

The profound crisis of capitalism and the destructive advance of decomposition announces the dangers that represent the survival of capitalism, affirming the imperative necessity of its destruction by the only class capable of confronting it, the proletariat.

Rojo, March 2012

Our response to the group Oposição Operária (Workers’ Opposition) - Brazil

We are publishing below our response to the article “Workers’ councils, proletarian state, dictatorship of the proletariat” by the group Oposição Operária (OPOP)1 in Brazil, which appeared in the International Review n° 148.2

The position developed in the article by OPOP essentially takes up the work of Lenin’s The State and Revolution, and it’s from this point of view that the group rejects a central idea of the ICC’s position. This position, while recognising the fundamental contribution of The State and Revolution to the understanding of the question of the state during the period of transition, uses the experience of the Russian revolution, reflections by Lenin himself during this period, and the fundamental writings of Marx and Engels, in order to draw lessons which lead us to call into question the identity between the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat classically accepted up to now by the marxist currents.

In its article, OPOP also develops another position of its own regarding what it calls the “pre-state”, that’s to say the organisation of the councils before the revolution called upon to overthrow the bourgeoisie and its state. We will return later to this question, because we think that the priority is first of all to make our divergences with the OPOP clear concerning the question of the state and the period of transition.

The main aspects of OPOP's thesis

So as to avoid the reader going backwards and forwards to OPOP’s article in International Review n° 148 we are going to reproduce the passages that we consider the most significant.

For the OPOP, the “paradoxical separation between the system of councils and the post-revolutionary state” “distances itself from the conception of Marx, Engels and Lenin and reflects a certain influence of the anarchist conception of the state” thus amounting to “breaking the unity that should exist and exists under the dictatorship of the proletariat”. In fact, “such a separation places, on the one hand, the state as a complex administrative structure and managed by a body of officials – a nonsense in the simplified design of the state according to Marx, Engels and Lenin – and, on the other, a political structure in which the councils exert pressure on the state as such”.

It is an error which, according to the OPOP, is explained by the following incomprehensions in relation to the Commune-State and its relations with the proletariat:

• “an accommodation to a vision influenced by anarchism that identifies the Commune-State with the bureaucratic (bourgeois) state”. This puts “the proletariat outside of the post-revolutionary state while actually creating a dichotomy that, itself, is the germ of a new caste reproducing itself in the administrative body separated organically from the workers’ councils”;

• “the identification between the state that emerged in post-revolutionary Soviet Union – a necessarily bureaucratic state – with the conception of the Commune-State of Marx, Engels and Lenin himself”;

• “the non-perception that the real simplification of the Commune-State, as described by Lenin in the words reported earlier, implies a minimum of administrative structure and that this structure is so small and in the process of simplification /extinction, that it can be assumed directly by the council system”.

Finally, according to OPOP, another factor intervenes in order to explain the erroneous lessons drawn by the ICC from the Russian revolution as to the nature of the state in the period of transition: it’s a question of our organisation not taking into account the unfavourable conditions with which the revolution was confronted: “a misunderstanding of the ambiguities that resulted from the specific historical and social circumstances that blocked not only the transition but also the beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR. Here, one ceases to understand that the dynamic taken by the Russian Revolution – unless you opt for the easy but very inconsistent interpretation in which deviations in the revolutionary process were the result of the policies of Stalin and his entourage – did not obey the conception of the revolution, the state and of socialism that Lenin had, but resulted from the restrictions of the social and political terrain from which the power of the USSR emerged, characterised among others, to recall, by the impossibility of the revolution in Europe, by civil war and the counter-revolution within the USSR. The resulting dynamic was foreign to the will of Lenin. He himself thought about this problem, but repeatedly came up with the ambiguous formulations present in this later thinking and just before his death”.

The inevitability of a transitional period and a state's existence within it

The difference between marxists and anarchists doesn’t reside in the fact that the former conceive of communism with a state and the latter as it being a society without a state. On this point, there is total agreement: communism can only be a society without a state. It was thus rather with the pseudo-marxists of social democracy, the successors of Lassalle, that such a fundamental difference existed, given that for them the state was the motor force of the socialist transformation of society. Engels wrote against them in the following passage of Anti-Duhring: “As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’. It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase ‘a free people’s state’,3 both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the state out of hand.”4 The real debate with the anarchists is about their total misunderstanding of an inevitable period of transition and on the fact that they see history as an immediate and direct two-footed jump from capitalism into a communist society.

On this question of the necessity of the state during the period of transition, we are thus perfectly in agreement with OPOP. That’s why we are astonished that this organisation reproaches us for “distancing ourselves from the conception of Marx, Engels and Lenin by reflecting a certain influence of the anarchist conception of the state”. In what way can our position appear to approach that of the anarchists, according to whom “it is possible to abolish the state out of hand”?

If we base ourselves on what Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution regarding the marxist critique of anarchism on the question of the state, it appears that this is far from confirming OPOP’s point of view: “To prevent the true meaning of his struggle against anarchism from being distorted, Marx expressly emphasised the ‘revolutionary and transient form’ of the state which the proletariat needs. The proletariat needs the state only temporarily. We do not after all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources, and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes.”5 In a word, the ICC accepts this formulation as its own. It’s a question of Lenin’s qualification of the “revolutionary” transitory nature of the state. Can this difference be connected to a variant of anarchist ideas, as OPOP thinks, or on the contrary does it refer to a much more profound question of the state?

What is the real debate?

On the question of the state, our position effectively differs from that of The State and Revolution and of the Critique of the Gotha Programme according to which, during the period of transition, “the state will be nothing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat.”6 This is the basis of the debate between us: why can’t there be an identity between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition that arises after the revolution? This is the idea, which has struck many marxists, who have asked the question: “Where does the ICC get its position from on the state in the period of transition?” We can respond: “Not from its imagination but rather from history, from the lessons drawn by generations of revolutionaries, from the reflections and theoretical elaborations of the workers’ movement”. In particular:

• successive improvements in the understanding of the question of the state coming from the workers’ movement up to the Russian revolution, of which Lenin’s The State and Revolution gives a masterly account;

• taking into account all of the theoretical considerations of Marx and Engels on the question of the state which in fact contradict the idea that the state in the period of transition could constitute the bearer of the socialist transformation of society;

• the degeneration of the Russian revolution which shows that the state constituted the main carrier of the development of the counter-revolution within the proletarian bastion;

• within this process, certain critical positions of Lenin in 1920-21 which demonstrated that the proletariat had to be able to defend itself against the state and which, while remaining imprisoned by the limitations of the dynamic of degeneration which led to the counter-revolution, bring an essential illumination on the nature and role of the transitional state.

It’s with this approach that a work of weighing up the world revolutionary wave was made by the Communist Left in Italy.7 According to the latter, if the state subsists after the taking of power by the proletariat given that social classes still exist, the former is fundamentally an instrument of the conservation of the status quo but in no way the instrument of the transformation of relations of production towards communism. In this sense, the organisation of the proletariat as a class, through its workers’ councils, must impose its hegemony on the state but never identify with it. It must be able, if necessary, to oppose the state, as Lenin partially understood in 1920-21. It is exactly because, with the extinction of the life of the soviets (inevitable from the fact of the failure of the world revolution), the proletariat had lost this capacity for acting and imposing itself on the state that the latter was able to develop its own conservative tendencies to the point of becoming the gravedigger of the revolution in Russia at the same time as it absorbed the Bolshevik Party itself, turning it into an instrument of the counter-revolution.

The contribution of history to the understanding of the state in the period of transition

Lenin’s The State and Revolution constituted, in its time, the best synthesis of what the workers’ movement had elaborated concerning the question of the state and the exercise of power by the working class.8 In fact this work offers an excellent illustration of the way that light is thrown on the question of the state through historical experience. By basing ourselves on its content we take up here the successive clarifications of the workers’ movement on these questions:

• The Communist Manifesto of 1848 shows the necessity for the proletariat to take political power, to constitute itself as the dominant class, and sees this power as being exercised by means of the bourgeois state which will have been conquered by the proletariat: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”9

• In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851), the formulation was already becoming more “precise” and “concise” (according to Lenin’s own terms) than that in the Communist Manifesto. In fact, for the first time the question arises of the necessity to destroy the state: “All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.”10

• Through the experience of the Paris Commune (1871), Marx saw, as did Lenin, “a real step much more important than a hundred programmes and arguments”,11 which justified, in his eyes and those of Engels, that the programme of the Communist Manifesto, becoming“ antiquated in some details”,12 is modified through a new preface. The Commune has notably demonstrated, they continued, that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.”13

The 1917 revolution did not leave time for Lenin to write in The State and Revolution chapters dedicated to the contributions of 1905 and February 1917. Lenin limited himself to identifying the soviets as the natural successors of the Paris Commune. One could add that even if these two revolutions did not allow the proletariat to take political power, they did however furnish supplementary lessons in relation to the experience of the Paris Commune concerning the power of the working class: the soviets of workers’ deputies based upon assemblies held in the place of work turned out to be the most apt expression of proletarian class autonomy rather than the territorial units of the Commune.

Beyond constituting a synthesis of the best of what the workers’ movement had written on these questions, State and Revolution contained Lenin’s own developments which, in their turn, constituted advances. In effect, whereas they drew essential lessons from the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels had left an ambiguity as to the possibility that the proletariat would come to power peacefully through the electoral process in certain countries, ie. those that provided the most developed parliamentary institutions and the least important military apparatuses. Lenin wasn’t afraid to correct Marx by using the marxist method and put the question into the new historic context: “Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperialist war, this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid. [...]. Today, in Britain and America, too, ‘the precondition for every real people’s revolution’ is the smashing, the destruction of the ‘ready-made state machinery.’”14

Only a dogmatic vision could accommodate itself to the idea that The State and Revolution constituted the last and supreme stage in the clarification of the notion of the state in the workers’ movement. If there’s a work that’s the antithesis of such a vision it’s that of Lenin. OPOP itself is not afraid to distance itself from what Lenin literally said in The State and Revolution by pushing to its conclusion the idea of the preceding quote: “Today, the task of establishing the councils as a form of state organisation is not only situated in the perspective of a single country but at the international level and it’s here that the principal challenge is posed to the working class.”15

Written in August/September 1917, at the outbreak of the October revolution, The State and Revolution very quickly served as a theoretical weapon for revolutionary action for the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the setting up of the Commune-State. The lessons drawn from the Paris Commune up to then were thus put to the test of history through events of a much more considerable weight – the Russian revolution and its degeneration.

Can lessons be learnt from the world revolutionary wave of 1917?

OPOP responds negatively to this question when it tells us that the conditions were so unfavourable that they didn’t allow the setting up of a workers’ state such as Lenin described in The State and Revolution. Thus they reproach us for identifying “the state that emerged in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union – a necessarily bureaucratic state – with the conception of the Commune-State of Marx, Engels and Lenin himself” and adds “Here, one ceases to understand that the dynamic taken by the Russian revolution […] did not obey the conception of the revolution, the state and of socialism that Lenin had, but resulted from the restrictions of the social and political terrain from which the power of the USSR emerged.”

We are in agreement with OPOP in saying that the first lesson to be drawn from the degeneration of the Russian revolution concerns the effects of the international isolation of the proletarian bastion following the defeat of other revolutionary attempts in Europe; Germany in particular. In fact, not only can there be no transformation of relations of production towards socialism in a single country, but furthermore it is not possible that a proletarian power can maintain itself indefinitely in a capitalist world. But are there other lessons of great importance that can be drawn from this experience?

Yes, of course! And OPOP recognises one of them amongst others, although this explicitly contradicts the following passage in The State and Revolution in relation to the first phase of communism: “the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because it will be impossible to seize the means of production - the factories, machines, land, etc.- and make them private property”16. In fact what the Russian revolution and above all the Stalinist counter-revolution shows is that the simple transformation of the productive apparatus into state property doesn’t suppress the exploitation of man by man.

In fact, the Russian revolution and its degeneration constitute historic events of such significance that one cannot fail to draw lessons from them. For the first time in history the proletariat of a country took political power as the most advanced expression of a world revolutionary wave, with the appearance of a state that was called proletarian! And then something happened that was equally unknown in the workers’ movement; the defeat of a revolution, not clearly and openly beaten down by the savage repression of the bourgeoisie as was the case of the Paris Commune, but as the consequence of a process of internal degeneration which took on the hideous face of Stalinism.

In the weeks following the October insurrection, the Commune-State is already something other than the “armed workers” described in The State and Revolution.17 Above all, with the growing isolation of the revolution, the new state was more and more infested with the gangrene of the bureaucracy, responding less and less to the organs elected by the proletariat and the poor peasants. Far from beginning to wither away, the new state was about to invade the whole of society. Far from bending to the will of the revolutionary class, it became the central point of a process of degeneration and internal counter-revolution. At the same time, the soviets were emptied of their life. The workers’ soviets were transformed into appendages of the unions in the management of production. Thus the force that made the revolution, and needed to maintain its control over it, lost its political and organised autonomy. The carrier of the counter-revolution was nothing more or less than the state and, the more that the revolution encountered difficulties, the more the power of the working class became weakened and the more the Commune-State manifested its non-proletarian nature, its conservative – even reactionary – side. We will explain this characterisation.

From Marx and Engels to the Russian experience: convergence towards the same characterisation of the state in the period of transition

It would be an error to definitively stop at the formulation of Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme concerning the characterisation of the state in the period of transition, identified as the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact other characterisations of the state were made by Marx and Engels themselves, later by Lenin and then by the Communist Left, which fundamentally contradict the formulae Commune-State=dictatorship of the proletariat, in order to converge towards an idea of a state conservative by nature, including here the Commune-State in the period of transition.

The transitional state is the emanation of society and not of the proletariat

How does one explain the appearance of the state? In this regard Engels left no ambiguity: “The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without; just as little is it ‘the reality of the moral idea,’ ‘the image and the reality of reason,’ as Hegel maintains.18 Rather, it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state”.19 Lenin took this passage of Engels into account, quoting it in The State and Revolution. Despite all the arrangements put in place by the proletariat for the transitional Commune-State, the latter had in common with the states of all previous past societies the fact of being a conservative organ at the service of the maintenance of the dominant order, that is to say, of the economically dominant classes. This has implications at both the theoretical and practical levels concerning the following questions: Who exercises power during the society of transition, the state or the proletariat organised in workers’ councils? Which is the economically dominant class of the society of transition? What is the motor force for the social transformation of society and of the dying out of the state?

The state cannot by nature express the sole interests of the proletariat

Where the political power of the bourgeoisie has been overturned, relations of production remain capitalist relations even if the bourgeoisie is no longer there to appropriate the surplus value produced by the working class. The point of departure of a communist transformation is based upon the military defeat of the bourgeoisie in a sufficient number of decisive countries to give a political advantage to the working class at a global level. This is the period during which the bases of a new mode of production slowly develop to the detriment of the old, up to the point where they supplant it and constitute the new mode of production.

After the revolution and as long as the world human community has not yet been realised, ie. as long as the immense majority of the world population has not been integrated into free and associated production, the proletariat remains an exploited class. Thus, contrary to revolutionary classes of the past, the proletariat is not destined to become the economically dominant class. For this reason, even if the established order after the revolution is no longer that of the economic and political dominance of the bourgeoisie, the state, which rises up during this period as the guarantor of the new economic order, cannot intrinsically be at the service of the proletariat. On the contrary, it is up to the latter to constrain it in the direction of its own class interests.

The role of the transitional state: the integration of the non-exploited population into the management of society and the struggle against the bourgeoisie

In The State and Revolution, Lenin himself said that the proletariat needed the state to suppress the resistance of the bourgeoisie, but also to lead the non-exploited population in the socialist direction: “The proletariat needs state power, a centralised organisation of force, an organisation of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population — the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians — in the work of organising a socialist economy.”20

We support Lenin’s point of view here, according to which, in order to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the proletariat must be able to bring behind it the immense majority of the poor and the oppressed, among which it can itself be a minority. Any alternative to such a policy doesn’t exist. How was this concretised in the Russian revolution? Two types of soviets emerged: on the one hand, soviets based essentially on the centres of production and regrouping the working class, called workers’ councils; on the other, soviets based on territorial units (territorial soviets) in which all the layers of the non-exploited actively participated in the local management of that society. The workers’ councils organised the whole of the working class, that is to say, the revolutionary class. The territorial soviets,21 meanwhile, based on revocable delegates, were intended to be part of the Commune-State,22 the latter having the function of managing society as a whole. In the revolutionary period, all of the non-exploited layers, while being for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and against the restoration of its domination, have not necessarily accepted the idea of the socialist transformation of society. They could even be hostile to it. In fact, within these layers, the proletariat can be in a small minority. That’s the reason why, in Russia, measures were taken in the means of electing delegates so that the weight of the working class within the Commune-State could be strengthened: 1 delegate for 125,000 peasants, 1 delegate for 25,000 workers of the towns. But this did not take away the necessity to mobilise the largely peasant population against the bourgeoisie and to integrate it into the process of the running of society, giving birth, in Russia, to a state which was made up not only of delegates of workers’ soviets, but also delegates of soldiers and poor peasants.

Marxism warns of the danger from the state during the period of transition

In his 1891 introduction to The Civil War in France, and written on the twentieth anniversary of the Paris Commune, Engels wasn’t afraid to put forward common traits of all states, whether classical bourgeois states or the Commune-State of the period of transition: “In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.”23 Considering the state as “an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy”24 is an idea perfectly logical with the notion that the state is an emanation of society and not of the revolutionary proletariat. And this has heavy implications regarding the necessary relations between the state and the revolutionary class. Even if these were not able to be completely clarified before the Russian revolution, Lenin was inspired by it in his strong insistence, in The State and Revolution, on the need for the workers to submit all the members of the state to constant supervision and control, particularly the elements of the state which most evidently embodied a certain continuity with the old regime, such as technical and military “experts” that the soviets will be forced to use.

Lenin also elaborated a theoretical basis for this necessity for a healthy distrust of the proletariat towards the new state. In the chapter entitled “The economic bases of the extinction of the state”, he explained that given its role of looking after the situation of “bourgeois right”, in certain regards one could define the transitional state as “the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”!25 Even if this formulation is more of a call for reflection than a clear definition of the class nature of the transitional state, Lenin hit on the essential: since the task of the state is to protect a state of things which are not yet communist, the Commune-State reveals its fundamentally conservative nature and that is what makes it particularly vulnerable to a counter-revolutionary dynamic.

Lenin in 1920-21: the workers must be able to defend themselves against the state

These theoretical perceptions certainly made it possible for Lenin to demonstrate a certain lucidity about the nature of the state in Russia in the debate on the unions,26 where he particularly opposed Trotsky, then a partisan of the militarisation of labour and for whom the proletariat should identify itself with “the proletarian state” and even subordinate itself to it. Although he himself was caught up by the process of the degeneration of the revolution, Lenin was then arguing in favour of the necessity for the workers to maintain organs defending their interests,27 even against the transitional state, at the same time as he repeated his warnings about the growth of state bureaucracy. At a speech to communist delegates in a meeting at the end of 1920, Lenin posed the question in the following terms:

“[...], Comrade Trotsky [...] seems to say that in a workers’ state it is not the business of the trade unions to stand up for the material and spiritual interests of the working class. That is a mistake. Comrade Trotsky speaks of a ‘workers’ state’. May I say that this is an abstraction. It was natural for us to write about a workers’ state in 1917; but it is now a patent error to say: ‘Since this is a workers’ state without any bourgeoisie, against whom then is the working class to be protected, and for what purpose?’ The whole point is that it is not quite a workers’ state. That is where Comrade Trotsky makes one of his main mistakes. We have got down from general principles to practical discussion and decrees, and here we are being dragged back and prevented from tackling the business at hand. This will not do. For one thing, ours is not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state. And a lot depends on that. (Bukharin: ‘What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?’) Comrade Bukharin back there may well shout ‘What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?’ I shall not stop to answer him. Anyone who has a mind to should recall the recent Congress of Soviets, and that will be answer enough.

“But that is not all. Our Party Programme – a document which the author of the ABC of Communism knows very well – shows that ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist to it. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition. Well, is it right to say that in a state that has taken this shape in practice the trade unions have nothing to protect, or that we can do without them in protecting the material and spiritual interests of the massively organised proletariat? No, this reasoning is theoretically quite wrong […] We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers’ organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state.”28

We consider this reflection luminous and of the greatest importance. Himself caught up in the dynamic of the counter-revolution, Lenin, unfortunately wasn’t up to carrying on with the deepening that he made (on the contrary he went back on his characterisation of the state as a ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’). Moreover this intervention didn’t even give rise (above all from Lenin himself) to reflection or common work with the Workers’ Opposition led by Kollontai and Shliapnikov, which expressed at the time a proletarian reaction both against the bureaucratic theorisations of Trotsky and against the real bureaucratic distortions which were eating away at proletarian power. Nevertheless, this precious reflection has not been lost to the proletariat. If fact as we previously noted, it constituted the point of departure for a more profound reflection on the nature of the state of the period of transition led by the Communist Left of Italy, which was later transmitted to following generations of revolutionaries.

The proletariat and not the state is the force of revolutionary social transformation

One of the fundamental ideas of Marxism is that the class struggle constitutes the motor of history. It is not by chance that this idea is expressed in the first phrase, just after the preamble, of the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”29). It is not the state which can play this role of motor when its historical function is precisely “to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’”.30 This characterisation of the state in class societies still applies to the society of transition where it is the working class, which remains the revolutionary force. Already, regarding the Paris Commune, Marx had clearly distinguished the revolutionary force of the proletariat on one hand, and the Commune-State on the other: “the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and therefore of a general regeneration of mankind, but the organised means of action. The Commune does not [do] away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive to [read for] the abolition of all classes and, therefore, of all classes [class rule] [...] but it affords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and humane way.”31

The characterisation of the proletariat after the revolution as both the dominant political class and one still exploited on the economic level means that, both on the economic and political levels, the Commune-State and the dictatorship of the proletariat are essentially antagonistic:

• as an exploited class the proletariat must defend its “material and spiritual interests” (as Lenin said) against the economic logic of the Commune-State representing society as a whole at a given moment;

• it is as a revolutionary class that the proletariat must defend its political and practical orientations with the aim of transforming society against the social conservatism of the state and its tendency to self-preservation as an organ which, according to Engels “places itself above (society) and becomes more and more alien to it.”32

So as to be able to assume its historic mission of transforming society in order to finish with all economic domination of one class or another, the working class must assume its political domination over the whole of society through the international power of the workers’ councils, the monopoly on the control of arms and the fact that it is the sole class of society that is permanently armed. Its political domination is also exercised over the state. The workers’ class power is moreover inseparable from the effective and unlimited participation of the immense mass of the class, from their activity and organisation, and it finishes when their political power becomes superfluous, when classes have disappeared.

Conclusion

We hope that we have responded to the criticisms of the OPOP on our position on the state in the most well argued way possible. We are quite conscious of not having responded specifically to a certain number of concrete and explicit objections (for example, “the organisational and administrative tasks that the revolution puts on the agenda from the beginning are essentially political tasks, whose implementation must be carried out directly by the victorious proletariat”). If we haven’t done so at this time it’s because it seemed a priority for us to present the greater historical and theoretical lines of our framework of analysis and because, very often, this constitutes an implicit response to the objections of OPOP. If necessary, we will return to them in a further article.

Finally, we essentially think that this question of the state in the period of transition is not the only one whose theoretical and practical clarification has been advanced considerably by the experience of the Russian revolution; it’s the same for the role and place of the proletarian party. Is its role to exercise power? Is its place within the state in the name of the working class? No for us, these remain errors that contributed to the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party. We also hope to be able to return to this question in another debate with the OPOP.

Sylvio (9/8/2012)

Why write about primitive communism today? The sudden plunge into catastrophic economic crisis and the development of struggles around the world are raising new problems for the working class, dark clouds are gathering over capitalism’s future, and all the while the hope of a better world seems unable to break through. Is this really the time to study our species’ social history in the period from its emergence some 200,000 years ago to the beginning of the Neolithic (about 10,000 years ago)?1 For ourselves, we are convinced that the question is every bit as important for communists today as it was for Marx and Engels in the 19th century, both in general for its scientific interest and as an element in our understanding of humanity and its history, and for our understanding of the perspective and possibility of a future communist society able to replace moribund capitalism.

This is why we can only welcome the publication in 2009 of a book titled Le communisme primitif n’est plus ce qu’il était (“Primitive communism is not what it was”) by Christophe Darmangeat; and indeed it is even more encouraging that the book is already in its second edition, which clearly indicates a public interest in the subject.2 This article will try, through a critical review, to return to the problems posed by the question of the first human societies; we will profit from the opportunity to explore the ideas put forward some twenty years ago by Chris Knight,3 in his book Blood Relations.4

Before we get into the meat of the subject, one thing should be clear: the question of primitive communism, and of humanity’s “species being”, are scientific questions, not political ones. In this sense, it is out of the question for a political organisation to adopt a “position” on human nature, for example. We are convinced that a communist organisation should stimulate debate and a thirst for scientific knowledge amongst its militants, and more generally in the working class, but the aim here is to encourage the development of a materialist and scientific view of the world, based on an awareness of modern scientific theory, at least as far as this is possible for non-scientists, as most of us are. The ideas presented cannot therefore be considered the “positions” of the ICC: they are the responsibility of the author alone.5

Why is the question of our origins important?

Why then is the question of the origin of our species, and of the first human societies, an important one for communists? The terms of the problem have changed considerably since the 19th century when Marx and Engels discovered with enthusiasm the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Morgan. In 1884, when Engels published The origins of the family, private property, and the state, science had barely escaped the clutches of an epoch where the estimates of the age of the planet, or of human society, were based on Bishop Ussher’s biblical calculations.6 As Engels wrote in his 1891 preface: “Before the beginning of the ’sixties, one cannot speak of a history of the family. In this field, the science of history was still completely under the influence of the five books of Moses. The patriarchal form of the family, which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified – minus its polygamy – with the bourgeois family of today, so that the family had really experienced no historical development at all”.7 The same was true of notions of property, and the bourgeoisie could still object to the working class’ communist programme that “private property” was intrinsic to human society itself. The idea of the existence of a social condition of primitive communism was so unknown that in 1847 the Communist Manifesto could open with the words “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (a declaration that Engels thought it necessary to correct with a note in 1884).

Morgan’s book Ancient Society greatly helped in dismantling the ahistorical view of a human society eternally based on private property, even though his contribution was often hidden or passed over in silence by official anthropology, especially in Britain. As Engels notes, again in his Preface: “Morgan filled the measure to overflowing by not merely criticizing civilization, the society of commodity production, the basic form of present-day society, in a manner reminiscent of Fourier, but also by speaking of a future transformation of this society in words which Karl Marx might have used.”

Today, in 2012, the situation is very different. A succession of discoveries have pushed man’s origins further and further back in time, so that today we know not only that private property is not society’s eternal foundation, but on the contrary that it is a relatively recent invention, since agriculture and so private property and the division of society into classes only date back some 10,000 years. Certainly, as Alain Testart has shown in his work Les chasseurs-cueilleurs ou l'origine des inégalités, the formation of wealth and classes did not take place overnight; a long period must have elapsed before the emergence of fully fledged agriculture, during which the development of storage techniques encouraged the emergence of an unequal distribution of accumulated wealth. Nonetheless, it is clear today that by far the longest period of human history is not that of class struggle, but of a society without classes: a society that we are justified in calling primitive communism.

The objection to the idea of a communist society that we hear most today is no longer that it violates the eternal principles of private property, but that it is supposedly contrary to “human nature”. “You can’t change human nature”, we are told, and by that is meant the supposedly violent, competitive and egocentric nature of man. Capitalist order is thus no longer eternal, but merely the logical and inevitable result of unchanging nature. Nor is this argument limited to right-wing ideologues. Humanist scientists, following as they believe the same logic of a genetically determined human nature, reach similar conclusions. The New York Review of Books (a left leaning intellectual journal) gives us an example of this reasoning in its October 2011 edition: “Humans compete for resources, living space, mates, social status, and almost everything else. Each living human is at the apex of a lineage of successful competitors that extends back to the origin of life. We are nothing if not fine-tuned competitors. The compulsion to compete enters into nearly everything we do, whether we recognize it or not. And the best competitors among us are often the best rewarded. One needs to look no further than Wall Street for a flagrant example [...] The human predicament of overpopulation and overexploitation of resources is fundamentally driven by the primordial impulses that drove our ancestors to achieve above-average reproductive success.”8

This argument appears unanswerable at first sight: one hardly need look far to find endless examples of cupidity, violence, cruelty and egoism in today’s society, and in history. But does it follow that these defects are determined – as we would say today – genetically? Nothing could be more uncertain. If we can risk an analogy, a tree growing on a windswept cliff will grow twisted and stunted. Yet this is not wholly inscribed in its genes: under better conditions the tree would grow straight and tall.

Could we say the same of human beings?

It is a truism that features often enough in our articles, to say that the world proletariat’s resistance to capitalism’s crisis does not correspond to the violence of the attacks to which it is subjected. Communist revolution has perhaps never seemed so necessary, and yet at the same time so difficult. One of the reasons for this is certainly – in our view – because the workers not only lack confidence in their own strength but in the very possibility of communism. “It’s a nice idea”, people say to us, “but you know, human nature...”.

To regain its self-confidence, the proletariat must not only confront the immediate problems of the struggle; it must also confront the greater historical problems posed by its potential revolutionary confrontation with the ruling class. Amongst these problems there is precisely that of “human nature”, and this problem can only be investigated in the spirit of science. we have no interest in “proving” that man is “good”. We hope to arrive at a better understanding of precisely what man is, in order to integrate this knowledge into communist political project. The communist goal does not depend on man’s “natural goodness”: the need for communism is set in the given of capitalist society as the only solution to the social logjam which will undoubtedly lead us to a catastrophic future if capitalism does not give way before a communist revolution.

Scientific method

Before continuing, we want to turn aside briefly to consider the question of scientific method, especially as it applies to the study of human history and behaviour. A passage at the beginning of Knight’s book seems to us to pose the problem of anthropology’s place among the sciences very well: “More than any other field of knowledge, anthropology taken as a whole spans the chasm which has traditionally divided the natural from the human sciences. Potentially if not always in practice, it therefore occupies a central position among the sciences as a whole. The crucial threads which – if joined – might bind the natural sciences to the humanities would have to run through anthropology more than through any other field. It is here that the ends join – here that the study of nature ends and that of culture begins. At which point on the scale of evolution did biological principles cease to predominate while other, more complex, principles began prevailing in their place? Where exactly is the dividing line between animal and human social life? Is the distinction here one of kind, or merely one of degree? And, in the light of this question, is it really possible to study human phenomena scientifically – with the same detached objectivity as an astronomer can show towards galaxies or a physicist towards subatomic particles?

If this area of relationships between the sciences seems to many to be confused, it is only in part because of the real difficulties involved. Science may be rooted at one end in objective reality, but at the other end it is rooted in society and ourselves. It is for ultimately social and ideological reasons that modern science, fragmented and distorted under immense yet largely unacknowledged political pressures, has stumbled upon its greatest problem and its greatest theoretical challenge – to incorporate the humanities and the natural sciences into a single unified science on the basis of an understanding of humanity’s evolution and place within the rest of the universe.”9

The question of the “dividing line” between the animal world, whose behaviour is determined above all by its genetic heritage, and the human world where behaviour depends to a far greater extent both on genes and on our cultural evolution, does indeed seem to us crucial to an understanding of “human nature”. Other primates are capable of learning, and up to a point of inventing and transmitting new behaviour, but this does not mean that they possess a “culture” in the human sense. These learned behaviours remain “marginal to the maintenance of social-structural continuity”.10 What made it possible for culture to gain the upper hand, in a “creative explosion”,11 is the development of communication amongst human groups, the development of symbolic culture based on language and ritual. Knight indeed makes the comparison between symbolic culture and language, which allowed human beings to communicate and so transmit ideas, and therefore culture, universally, and science, which is also founded on a common symbolism based on a planet-wide accord between all scientists, and potentially at least between all human beings. The practice of science is inseparable from debate, and the ability of each to verify the conclusions at which science arrives: it is therefore the sworn enemy of any form of esotericism which lives through secret knowledge, closed to non initiates.

Because it is a universal form of knowledge, and because since the industrial revolution it has been a productive force in its own right dependent on the associated labour, in both time and space, of scientists,12 science is internationalist by nature, and in this sense the proletariat and science are natural allies.13 This absolutely does not mean that there can be such a thing as “proletarian science”. In his article on “Marxism and science”, Knight quotes these words of Engels: “.... the more ruthlessly and disinterestedly science proceeds, the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests of the workers.”14 Knight continues: “Science, as humanity's only universal, international, species-unifying form of knowledge, had to come first. If it had to be rooted in the interests of the working class, this was only in the sense that all science has to be rooted in the interests of the human species as a whole, the international working class embodying these interests in the modern epoch just as the requirements of production have always embodied these interests in previous periods.”.

There are two other aspects of scientific thought, highlighted in Carlo Rovelli’s book on the Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletos,15 which we want to take up here because they seem to us fundamental: respect for one’s predecessors, and doubt.

Rovelli shows that Anaximander’s attitude towards his master Thales broke with the attitudes that characterised his epoch: either a total rejection in order to establish oneself as the new master, or a slavish devotion to the words of the “master” whose thought is maintained in a state of mummification. The scientific attitude on the contrary, consists in basing ourselves on the work of the “masters” who have gone before, while at the same time criticising their mistakes and trying to take knowledge further. This the attitude we find in Knight’s book with regard to Lévi-Strauss, and in Darmangeat with regard to Morgan.

Doubt is fundamental to science, the very opposite of religion which always seeks certainty and consolation in the invariance of eternally established truth. As Rovelli says, “Science offers the best answers precisely because it does not consider its answers to be absolute truths; this is why it is always able to learn, and to take in new ideas”.16 This is especially true of anthropology and paleo-anthropology, whose data is often scattered and uncertain, and whose best theories can be upended overnight by new discoveries.

Is it even possible to have a scientific vision of history? Karl Popper,17 who is a reference for most scientists, thought not. He considered history as a “unique event” which is therefore non-reproducible, and since the verification of a scientific hypothesis depends on reproducible experiment, historical theory cannot be considered scientific. For the same reasons, Popper rejected the theory of evolution as non-scientific, and yet it is obvious today that the scientific method has proved itself capable of laying bare the fundamental mechanisms of the evolutionary process to the point where humanity can now manipulate evolution through genetic engineering. Without going as far as Popper, it is nonetheless clear that to apply the scientific method to the study of history, to the point we can make predictions about its evolution, is an extremely hazardous exercise. On the one hand human history – like meteorology for example – incorporates an incalculable number of independent variables, on the other, and above all, because – as Marx said – “men make their own history”; history is therefore determined by laws, but also by the ability or otherwise of human beings to base their acts on conscious thought and on the knowledge of these laws. Historical evolution is always subject to constraints: at any given moment, certain developments are possible, others are not. But the manner in which a given situation will evolve is also determined by men’s ability to become conscious of these constraints and to act on the basis of this awareness.

It is thus particularly bold on Knight’s part to accept the full rigour of the scientific method and to subject his theory to experimental test. Obviously, it is impossible to “reproduce” history experimentally. Knight therefore makes predictions on the basis of his hypotheses (in 1991, the date when Blood Relations was published) as to future archaeological discoveries: in particular, that the earliest traces of human symbolic culture would reveal an extensive use of red ochre. In 2006, 15 years later, it would seem that these predictions have been confirmed by the discoveries in the Blombos caves (South Africa) of the first known vestiges of human culture;18 these include engraved red ochre, pierced sea-shells apparently used for body decoration, and even the world’s first paint-pot, all of which fits into the evolutionary model that Knight proposes (to which we will return later). Obviously, this is not a “proof” of his theory, but it seems to us undeniable that it strengthens the hypothesis.

This scientific method is very different from that followed by Darmangeat who remains, or so it seems to us, restricted to the inductivist method which brings together known facts to try to extract from these some common factors. This method is not without value in scientific historical study: after all, any theory must conform to known reality. But Darmangeat seems to be very reticent about any attempt to go further and this seems to us an empirical rather than a scientific approach: science does not advance through induction from observed fact, but through hypothesis, which must certainly be in conformity with observation but must also propose an approach (experimental if possible), which would make it possible to go further towards new discoveries and new observations. String theory in quantum mechanics gives us a striking example of this method: although it is in accord, as far as possible, with observed fact, it cannot today be verified experimentally, since the particles (or “strings”) whose existence it postulates are too small to be measured with existing technology. String theory thus remains a speculative hypothesis – but without this kind of bold speculation, science would be unable to advance.

Another problem with the inductivist method is that it must, inevitably, pre-select its observations from the immensity of known reality. This is how Darmangeat proceeds, when he bases himself solely on ethnographic observation and leaves aside any consideration of the role of evolution and genetics – which seems to us an impossibility in a work which aims to lay bare “the origin of the oppression of women” (as Darmangeat’s book is sub-titled).

Morgan, Engels, and the scientific method

After these very modest considerations on the question of methodology, let us now return to Darmangeat’s book, which is this article’s starting-point.

The book is divided into two parts: the first examines the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Morgan on which Engels based his Origins of the family, private property and the state, while the second takes up Engels’ question as to the origins of the oppression of women. In this second part, Darmangeat concentrates on attacking the idea that there once existed a primitive communism based on matriarchy.

The first part seems to us especially interesting,19 and we can only agree wholeheartedly with Darmangeat when he rounds on a supposedly “marxist” position which raises the work of Morgan (and a fortiori Engels) to the status of untouchable religious texts. Nothing could be further from the scientific spirit of marxism. While we should expect marxists to have a historical view of the emergence and development of materialist social theory, and so to take account of previous theories, it is absolutely obvious that we cannot take 19th century texts as the last word, and ignore the immense accumulation of ethnographic knowledge since then. Certainly, it is necessary to maintain a critical view in this respect: Darmangeat, like Knight, rightly insists on the fact that the struggle against Morgan’s theories was far from being waged on the basis of “pure”, “disinterested” science. When Morgan’s contemporary and later adversaries pointed out his mistakes, or when they highlighted discoveries that did not fit his theory, their aim was not in general neutral. By attacking Morgan, they attacked the evolutionary view of human society, and tried to re-establish bourgeois society’s patriarchal family and private property as the “eternal” categories of all human society, past present and future. This was perfectly explicit for Malinowski, one of the early 20th century’s greatest ethnographers, who said in a 1931 radio interview: “I believe that the most disruptive element in the modern revolutionary tendencies is the idea that parenthood can be made collective. If once we come to the point of doing away with the individual family as the pivotal element of our society, we should be faced with a social catastrophe compared with which the political upheaval of the French revolution and the economic changes of Bolshevism are insignificant. The question, therefore, as to whether group motherhood is an institution which ever existed, whether it is an arrangement which is compatible with human nature and social order, is of considerable practical interest”.18 We are a long way, here, from scientific objectivity...

Let us move on to Darmangeat’s critique of Morgan. This is of great interest in our view, if only because it begins with a fairly detailed summary of Morgan’s theories, making them readily accessible for the non expert reader. We especially appreciate the table which aligns the different stages of social evolution used by Morgan and the anthropology of his epoch (“savagery”, “barbarism”, etc.) and those in use today (Palaeolithic, Neolithic, etc.), which makes it easier to place oneself in historical time, and the explanatory diagrams of different kinship systems. The whole section abounds in clear, didactic explanations.

The foundation of Morgan’s theory is to bring together the type of family, kinship systems, and technical development, in a series of evolutionary steps which lead from “the state of savagery” (the first stage of human social evolution, which corresponds to the Palaeolithic), to “barbarism” (the Neolithic and the age of metals), and finally to civilisation. This evolution is supposedly determined by technical development, and the apparent contradictions that Morgan noted among many peoples (the Iroquois in particular) between the systems of family and kinship, represented for him the intermediary stages between a more primitive and a more advanced economy and technology. Sadly for the theory, when we look more closely this turns out not to be the case. To take only one of Darmangeat’s many examples, according to Morgan the “punaluan” kinship system is supposed to represent one of the most primitive technical and social stages, and yet it is to be found in Hawaii, in a society which contains wealth, social inequality, an aristocratic social stratum, and which is on the point of evolving into a full-blown state and class society. Family and kinship systems are thus determined by social needs, but not in a straight line from the most primitive to the most modern.

Does this mean that the marxist view of social evolution should be thrown into the bin? Not in the least, says Darmangeat. However, we need to dissociate what Morgan, and Marx and Engels after him, tried to bring together: the evolution of technology (and therefore of productivity) and family systems. “... Although modes of production are all qualitatively different, they all possess a common quantity, productivity, which makes it possible to order them in a rising series, which moreover roughly corresponds to their chronological order [...] [For the family] there is no common quantity which could be used to establish a rising series of different forms”.20 It is obvious that the economy is the determining factor “in the last instance”, to use Engels term: if there were no economy (ie the reproduction of everything necessary to human life), then there would be no social life either. But this “last instance” leaves a great deal of space for other influences, be they geographical, historical, cultural, or other. Ideas, culture – in its broadest sense – are also determining factors in society. At the end of his life, Engels himself regretted that the pressing need, for Marx and himself, to set historical materialism on a sure footing, and to fight for its defence, left them too little time to analyse other historically determining factors.21

The critique of anthropology

In the second part of his book, Darmangeat puts forward his own thoughts. We find here two basic themes, so to speak: on the one hand a historical critique of anthropological theory on the position of women in primitive societies, on the other we have the exposition of his own conclusions on the subject. This historical critique is focused on the evolution of what, for Darmangeat, is the marxist – or at least marxist-influenced – vision of primitive communism from the standpoint of women’s place in primitive society, and is a vigorous denunciation of “feminist” attempts to defend the idea of a primeval matriarchy in the first human societies.

This choice is not unreasonable, nonetheless in our view it is not always a happy one, leading the author to ignore some marxist theoreticians who belong in such a study, and to include others who have no business there at all. To take just a few examples, Darmangeat criticises Alexandra Kollontai22 over several pages, yet says almost nothing about Rosa Luxemburg. Now, whatever Kollontai’s role in the Russian revolution and in the resistance to its degeneration (she played a leading role in the “Workers’ Opposition”), Kollontai never played a great part in the development of marxist theory, and still less in that of anthropology. Luxemburg on the other hand, was not only a leading marxist theoretician, she was also the author of an Introduction to political economy, which devotes an important part to the question of primitive communism, on the basis of the most up to date research of the day. The only justification for this imbalance is that Kollontai played an important part, first in the socialist movement, then in early Soviet Russia, in the struggle for women’s rights, whereas Luxemburg never took a close interest in feminism. Two other marxist authors who have written on the theme of primitive communism are not even mentioned: Karl Kautsky (Ethics and the materialist conception of history) and Anton Pannekoek (Anthropogenesis).

Amongst the unfortunate “inclusions” we find, for example, Evelyn Reed: this member of the American Socialist Workers’ Party (a Trotskyist organisation which gave its “critical” support to participation in World War II), is included for having written in 1975 Feminism and anthropology, a work which enjoyed a certain success in left-wing circles at the time. But as Darmangeat says, the book was almost completely ignored by anthropologists largely because of the poverty of its arguments, which were pointed out even by sympathetic critics.

We find the same absences amongst the anthropologists: Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the most important figures in 20th century anthropology and whose theory of the passage from nature to culture is founded on the idea of the exchange of women between men, only gets a walk-on part, while Bronislaw Malinowski does not appear at all.

Perhaps the most surprising absence is that of Chris Knight. Darmangeat’s book is focused especially on the situation of women in primitive communist societies, and on the critique of theories which belong to a certain marxist, or marxist-influenced tradition. In 1991, the British anthropologist Chris Knight, who considers his work to lie explicitly within the marxist tradition, published a work – Blood Relations – which deals with precisely the issue that concerns Darmangeat. One would expect that Darmangeat would pay it the closest attention, all the more so since he himself recognises the work’s “great erudition”. Yet nothing of the sort is to be found in Darmangeat’s book, quite the reverse. He devotes barely a page (p321) to Knight’s thesis, where he tells us that it “reiterates the serious methodological errors of Reed and Briffault (Knight says nothing about the former, but quotes the latter abundantly)”, which could leave the francophone reader with no access to a book available only in English, with the impression that Knight does no more than follow behind people who Darmangeat has already demonstrated are not to be taken seriously.23 Yet a mere glance at Knight’s bibliography is enough to show that while he does indeed cite Briffault, he gives a good deal more space to Marx, Engels, Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins... and many more. And if one takes the trouble to consult his references to Briffault, one finds immediately that Knight considers the latter’s work (published in 1927), whatever its merits, to be “outdated in its sources and methodology” 24

In short, our feeling is that Darmangeat leaves us rather “sitting on the fence”: we end up with a critical narrative which is neither a real critique of the positions defended by marxists, nor a real critique of anthropological theory, and this sometimes gives us the impression of witnessing Don Quixote’s joust with the windmills. This choice of structure seems to us to obscure more than anything else, an argument which in other respects is of considerable interest.

Jens (to be continued)

The previous article1 provided an overview of the efforts of the revolutionary syndicalist current in Germany to defend an internationalist position against the war of 1914-18. The Free Union of German Trade Unions (Freie Vereinigung Deutscher Gewerkschaften - FVDG) had survived the war with only a few hundred members in hiding who, under conditions of brutal repression, were, like other revolutionaries, most of the time condemned to silence. But late in 1918 events came to a head in Germany. When the struggles broke out in November 1918, the spark from the Russian revolution of October 1917 ignited the mass action of the proletariat in Germany.

The reorganisation of the FVDG in 1918

During the first week of November 1918, the revolt of the sailors of the Kiel fleet brought German militarism to its knees. On November 11th Germany signed the armistice. The FVDG wrote: “The imperial government has been overthrown, not by parliamentary or legal means, but through direct action, not by the ballot box, but by force of arms by striking workers and mutinying soldiers. Without waiting on orders of leaders, workers and soldiers councils have been formed spontaneously and have immediately begun to dismiss the old authorities. All power to the workers and soldiers councils! This is now the watchword.”2

With the outbreak of the revolutionary wave, a turbulent era with a rapid influx of militants opened up for the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany. Membership increased from about 60,000 at the time of the revolution of November 1918 until mid-1919 to over 111,000 by the end of 1919. The political radicalisation of the working class at the end of the war drove many workers who had left the main social democratic unions because of the open support of the latter for the war policy, into the revolutionary syndicalist movement. The revolutionary syndicalist movement was clearly a place for honest and militant workers to come together.

With the publication of its new newspaper, Der Syndikalist, from December 14th 1918, the FVDG again made its voice heard: “From early August [1914], our press has been banned, our most prominent comrades taken into “custody”, any attempt by anyone, or any local unions to engage in political agitation has been outlawed. Yet the weapons of revolutionary syndicalism are in use today in every corner of the German Empire, and the masses instinctively feel the time has passed for formulating demands and that we now have to start to take action.”3 On December 26th and 27th Fritz Kater organised a conference in Berlin attended by 43 local unions of the FVDG and so it restarted its organised activity following the clandestinity of the war.

It was in the industrial and mining towns of the Ruhr that the FVDG experienced its most significant numerical growth. The influence of revolutionary syndicalists was particularly strong in Mülheim and forced the social democratic unions to withdraw from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils on December 13th 1918; it clearly opposed them as representatives of the workers and took this role into its own hands. Massive strikes of miners from the Hamborn region led by the revolutionary syndicalist movement took place from November 1918 to February 1919.4

Workers’ councils or unions?

Faced with the war of 1914, the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany had passed the historic test of defending internationalism against the war, and had not, like the vast majority of unions, rallied behind the war aims of the ruling class. The outbreak of the revolution of 1918 posed a huge new challenge: how is the working class going to organise to overthrow the bourgeoisie and make the revolution?

As was the case in Russia in 1905, then in 1917, in Germany in November 1918 the working class created workers’ councils that marked the emergence of a revolutionary situation. The whole period since the establishment of the “Localists” in 1892 and the formal foundation of the FVDG in 1901 had not given rise to any revolutionary upheaval. Unlike Russia, where, in 1905, the first workers’ councils appeared, reflection on the councils remained very abstract in Germany until 1918. During the brief but exciting “Winter of the Councils” from 1918 to 1919 in Germany, the FVDG still clearly saw its form of organisation as a union and it was as a union that it reappeared on the scene. The FVDG responded to the unique situation of the emergence of workers’ councils with great enthusiasm. The core of the revolutionary majority of the FVDG supported workers’ councils, so that Der Syndikalist n°2 of December 21st 1918 clearly proclaimed: “All power to the revolutionary workers and soldiers’ councils.”

However, theoretical consciousness often follows proletarian intuition. Despite the emergence of workers’ councils, and as if nothing new had happened, Der Syndikalist n°4 wrote that the FVDG was the only workers’ organisation “whose representatives and organs don’t need changing”, an expression that sums up the arrogance of the Reorganisation Conference of the FVDG in December 1918 and which became the motto of the revolutionary syndicalist current in Germany. But for the workers’ movement an era of great upheaval had opened up, where precisely a great deal had to change, particularly as regards the forms of organisation!

To explain the shameful policies of support for the war and opposition to the workers’ councils of the main unions, the FVDG tended to settle for a half-truth, and to ignore the other half. Only “social democratic education” was challenged. The question of the fundamental differences between the union form and that of the workers’ councils was completely neglected.

Undoubtedly the FVDG, and the organisation that came after, the FAUD, were revolutionary organisations. But they did not see that their organisation came from the same seeds as the workers’ councils: spontaneity, the desire to extend the movement and the revolutionary spirit – all characteristics that went well beyond union practices.

In the FVDG’s publications in 1919, it is almost impossible to find an attempt to address the fundamental contradiction between union practices and those of the workers’ councils, instruments of the revolution. Quite the contrary, it saw the “revolutionary unions” as the basis for the councils’ movement. “The revolutionary unions must expropriate the expropriators.... The workers’ councils and factory councils should direct production along socialist lines. The power to the workers’ councils; the means of production and goods produced to satisfy social needs. Such is the goal of proletarian revolution: the revolutionary syndicalist movement is the means to achieve it.” But did the revolutionary councils’ movement in Germany actually arise from the union movement? “It was the workers inside the ‘factory committees’ who had acted just like they had in the factory committees of the large enterprises in Petrograd in 1905, without knowing about this activity. In July 1916, the political struggle could not be conducted with support of the political parties and unions. The leaders of these organisations were the opponents of such a struggle; after the struggle, they also helped to deliver the leaders of this political strike to the scourge of repression of the military authorities. These ‘factory committees’, the term is not quite accurate, can be considered the precursors of the revolutionary workers’ councils in Germany today. ...These struggles were not supported and led by the existing parties and unions. This was the beginnings of a third type of organisation, the workers’ councils.”5 This was how Richard Müller, member of Revolutionäre Obleute (Revolutionary “men of confidence”) described the “way it was achieved”.

The unionists of the FVDG were not the only ones not to question the union form of organisation. At that time, it was extremely difficult for the working class to draw out fully and clearly what was implied by the emergence of the “period of wars and revolutions”. The illusions in the union form of organisation, the bankruptcy of the latter faced with the revolution, had still to be subjected, inevitably, painfully and concretely, to practical experience. Richard Müller quoted above, wrote just a few weeks later when the workers’ councils were losing their power: “But if we recognise the necessity of the daily struggle for demands - and nobody can deny it - then we must also recognise the need to preserve the organisations that have the function of conducting this struggle, and these are the unions. (...) If we recognise the need for existing unions... then we must examine further ahead whether unions can find a place inside the council system. During the period when the council system was being established, it was necessary to unconditionally answer this question in the affirmative.”6

The social democratic unions had lost credit in the eyes of the broad masses of workers and doubts grew increasingly about whether these organisations could still represent the interests of the working class. In the logic of the FVDG, the dilemma of capitulation and the historic bankruptcy of the old form of union organisation was resolved by the prospect of “revolutionary syndicalism”.

At the beginning of the era of the decadence of capitalism, the impossibility of the struggle for reforms put forward the following alternative for the permanent mass organisations of the working class: either they were integrated by state capitalism into the state (as had usually been the case with the social democratic organisations – but also for some revolutionary syndicalist unions like the CGT in France); or it destroyed them (which was ultimately the fate of the revolutionary syndicalist FAUD). This raises the question of whether the proletarian revolution requires other forms of organisation. With the experience we have today, we know that it is not possible to put new content into old forms, such as the trade unions. The revolution is not only about content but also about form. This is the view stated quite correctly by the theoretician of the FAUD, Rudolf Rocker, in December 1919 in his critique of false visions of the “revolutionary state”: “We can’t agree with the expression the revolutionary state. The state is always reactionary and to not understand that is to not understand the depth of the revolutionary principle. Every tool is shaped in accordance with its proposed use; and this is also the case for institutions. The pincers of the farrier are not suitable for pulling teeth and the grippers used by the dentist cannot shape a horseshoe…”7 This, unfortunately, is exactly what the revolutionary syndicalist movement has failed to apply consistently to the question of the form of organisation.

Against the trap of “works councils”

So as to politically emasculate the spirit of the system of workers’ councils, the Social Democrats and their unions in the service of the bourgeoisie began to skilfully undermine from within the principles of self-organisation of the working class in the councils. This was only possible because the workers’ councils emerged from the struggles of November 1918, and these struggles had lost their strength and vitality with the first ebb of the revolution. The first Congress of the Councils from 16th to 20th December 1918, under the subtle influence of the SPD and the continued weight of illusions of the working class in democracy, had abandoned its power and proposed the election of a National Assembly, completely disarming itself.

In the spring of 1919, after the wave of strikes in the Ruhr, the SPD government took the initiative of proposing the establishment of “works councils” in the factories – representatives of the de facto workforce actually fulfilling the same function of negotiation and collaboration with the capital as the traditional unions. Under the auspices of the Social Democratic Party and trade union officials, Gustav Bauer and Alexander Schlicke, the works councils were permanently enshrined in the bourgeois Constitution of the German State in February 1920.

It was necessary to develop the illusion inside the working class that the fighting spirit expressed inside the workers’ councils would find its incarnation in this new form of direct representation of workers’ interests. “The works councils are designed to address all issues related to work and pay. It is their responsibility to ensure the continuation and increase of production in the company and seek to eliminate any obstacles that may arise... District committees in collaboration with the management regulate and supervise the standard of the work in the district, as well as the distribution of raw materials.”8 After the bloody repression of the working class, democratic integration into the state would definitely seal the work of the counter-revolution. Having even more authority in the workplace than the unions, and working hand in hand with the companies, the establishment of these councils led to a total collaboration with capital.

In the spring of 1919 the press of the FVDG took a clear and courageous position against this strategy of works councils: “Capital and the state only recognise the workers’ committees that are now called works councils. The works council does not only claim to represent the interests of workers, but also those of the company. And since these companies are owned by private capital or by the state, the workers’ interests must be subordinated to the interests of their exploiters. It follows that the works council defends the exploitation of workers and encourages them to continue working as docile wage slaves. [...] The methods of struggle of the revolutionary syndicalists are incompatible with the functions of the works council.”9

This attitude was widely shared among the revolutionary syndicalists because, on the one hand the works councils seemed so obviously a tool of social democracy and, on the other hand, the combativity of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany had not yet been broken. The illusion of having “obtained something” and “of having taken a concrete step” had very little effect in 1919 in the most determined fractions of the proletariat – the working class had not yet been defeated.10

Later, after the evident decline of the revolutionary movement from 1921, it was not surprising that heated debates broke out within the revolutionary syndicalist FAUD lasting a year about participation in elections to the works councils. A minority developed the orientation that it would be necessary, through the legalised works councils, to establish “a link with the labouring masses to launch massive struggles when the situation was ripe.”11 The FVDG as an organisation refused to engage in “the sterile works councils dedicated to neutralising the revolutionary view of the councils”, according to the comments of the militant August Beil. That at least was the position prevailing until November 1922, when, as a result of impotence produced by the defeat of the revolution, the 14th Congress of the FAUD modified its stand, granting the right to its members to participate in the elections to works councils.

The dynamic of the revolution brings together the revolutionary syndicalists and the Spartacus League

Just as in Russia in October 1917, the uprising of the working class in Germany had immediately aroused a sense of solidarity within the working class. For the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany, solidarity with the struggle of the working class in Russia had, until the end of 1919, undoubtedly constituted an important reference point shared internationally with other revolutionaries. The Russian revolution, because of revolutionary uprisings in other countries, still provided a perspective in 1918-1919 and had not yet begun to degenerate internally. To defend their class brothers in Russia and in direct opposition to the policy of the SPD and the social democratic unions, in the second issue of its paper Der Syndikalist the FVDG made this denunciation: “...no means was too disgusting for them, no weapon too vile to slander the Russian Revolution and to rail against Soviet Russia and its workers and soldiers’ councils”.12 Despite their many reservations with regard to the views of the Bolsheviks – not all of which were unfounded – the revolutionary syndicalists remained in solidarity with the Russian revolution. Even Rudolf Rocker, influential theorist of the FVDG and outspoken critic of the Bolsheviks, appealed, two years after the October revolution, in his famous speech introducing the FAUD Declaration of Principles in December 1919, for a show of solidarity: “We unanimously take sides with Soviet Russia in its heroic defence against the Allied powers and against the counter-revolutionaries, and this, not because we are Bolsheviks, but because we are revolutionaries”.

Although the revolutionary syndicalists in Germany had their traditional reservations towards “marxism” that “wanted to seize political power”, what they believed they had in common with the Spartacus League was that it clearly defended common action with all other revolutionary organisations: “Revolutionary syndicalism therefore considered the division of the workers’ movement unnecessary, it wants its forces concentrated. Right now, we recommend our members to support, on matters economic and political, the general lines of the most left-wing groups of the workers’ movement: the Independents, the Spartacus League. We do caution, however, against any participation in the circus of elections to the National Assembly.”13

The revolution of November 1918 was not the work of a specific political organisation such as the Spartacus League and the Revolutionnäre Obleute (revolutionary syndicalist delegates), even though they did adopt the clearest position and were the most eager for action during the November days. It was an uprising of the whole working class when for a short period the potential unity of this class was demonstrated. One expression of this trend towards unity has been the widespread phenomenon of double affiliation to the Spartacus League and FVDG. “In Wuppertal, the militants of the FVDG were active for the first time within the Communist Party. A list established in April 1919 by the police of Wuppertal communists contains the names of all the future key members of the FAUD.”14 In Mülheim, from December 1st 1918 there appeared the paper “Die Freiheit, the organ defending the interests of all working people, the Newspaper of the workers and soldiers’ councils”, published jointly by revolutionary syndicalists and members of the Spartacus League.

In early 1919, inside the revolutionary syndicalist movement there was a clear aspiration to unite with other organisations of the working class. “They are still not united, they are still divided, they still do not think and behave in an honest manner like true socialists and they are not always individually and inextricably connected through the marvellous chain of proletarian solidarity. They are still divided between right-wing socialists, left socialists, Spartacists, and others. The working class must finally end the gross absurdity of political particularism.”15 This attitude of great openness reflected the great political heterogeneity, even confusion, within the FVDG which had experienced rapid growth. Its internal cohesion relied less on programmatic clarification or demarcation vis-à-vis other proletarian organisations than on the link of workers’ solidarity, as shown in its undiscriminating characterisation of all “socialists”.

The attitude of solidarity with the Spartacus League was developed in the ranks of the revolutionary syndicalists following the repression against Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg during the war and continued until the autumn of 1919. But on the other hand, it failed to establish any common history with the Spartacus League. Until the time of the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915, it was much more a case of mutual distrust between the two. The main cause of their reconciliation was the political clarification that matured within the entire working class and its revolutionary organisations during the November revolution: the rejection of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism. The revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany, which had long rejected the parliamentary system, saw this position as part of its own heritage. The Spartacus League, which had a clear position against any illusions of democracy, regarded the FVDG, which followed the same path, as the organisation closest to it in Germany.

However, from the outset, Rudolf Rocker, who was to take charge of the political orientation of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany after December 1919, “did not have great sympathy with appeals to comrades to support the left wing of the socialist movement, the Independents and the Spartacists or intervention of the newspaper supporting the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’...”16 In March 1919, on his return from internment in England during the war, Rocker, anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary, strongly influenced by the ideas of Kropotkin, joined the FVDG.

Despite the differences of opinion on the Spartacus League, between Rocker and the tendency gathered around Fritz Kater, Carl Windhoff and Karl Roche, which was the most influential in the FVDG in the first months of the revolution of 1918-19, it would be wrong at this time to speak of the struggles of tendencies inside the FVDG, such as would occur later in 1920 as a symptom of the defeat of the German revolution. There was no significant tendency at the time among the revolutionary syndicalists wanting a priori to set itself apart from the KPD. Instead, the search for unity of action with the Spartacists was the product of the momentum towards the unity of workers’ struggles and the “pressure from below” on these two currents in the weeks and months where the revolution seemed to be within reach. It was the painful defeat of the premature uprising of January 1919 in Berlin, and the subsequent crushing of the strike waves in the Ruhr in April, that were supported by the revolutionary syndicalists, the KPD and the USPD, which, due to the disappointment they aroused, provoked mutual and emotional recriminations that expressed a lack of maturity on both sides.

From the summer of 1919 the “informal alliance” with Spartacus and the Communist Party would hence break apart. The responsibility for this lay less with the FVDG than the aggressive attitude the KPD had begun to adopt towards the revolutionary syndicalists.

The “provisional programme” of the revolutionary syndicalists in spring 1919

In spring 1919, the FVDG published a pamphlet written by Roche, “What do the revolutionary syndicalists want?” This was intended as a programme and orientation text for the organisation up to December 1919. It is difficult to judge the revolutionary syndicalist movement on the basis of a single text, given the coexistence within its ranks of different ideas. However, this programme constitutes a milestone, and, from several points of view, is one of the most finished positions of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Germany. Despite the painful past experiences of their own history with the social democrats and the permanent demonisation of politics17 that resulted from it, it concludes: “The working class must make itself master of the economy and of politics.”18

The strength of the positions spread by the FVDG through this programme within the working class in Germany at this time lies elsewhere: in its attitude towards the state, bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism. It specifically refers to the description Friedrich Engels made of the state as a product of a society divided into classes: “The state is a product of society at a certain stage of its development”; it is “the admission that this society is entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is divided into irreconcilable antagonisms” and is not “a force imposed on society from outside” or an instrument of the ruling class created in a purely arbitrary manner by it. The FVDG consistently called for the destruction of the bourgeois state.

With this position, in a period when social democracy was without doubt the most insidious weapon of the counter-revolution, the FVDG put its finger on a key point. Against the farce of the SPD seeking to subdue the workers’ councils by integrating them into the bourgeois parliament, its programme argued: “Social democratic ‘socialism’ definitely needs a state. And a state that would use exactly the same methods against the working class as the capitalist state. ... It will be the result of a proletarian half-revolution and the target of the total proletarian revolution. It is because we recognise the nature of the state and we know the political domination of the propertied classes is rooted in their economic power, that we have to fight not for the conquest of the state, but its elimination.”

Karl Roche also tried to formulate in the FVDG programme the basic lessons of November and December 1918, going far beyond the rebellious or individualistic rejection of the state that was wrongly attributed to the revolutionary syndicalists, and clearly unmasked in its essence the system of bourgeois democracy. “Democracy is not equality, but the demagogic use of a comedy of equality. ... The property owners always have, for as long as they confront the workers, the same interests.… The workers have no common interest with any of them, and none with the bourgeoisie. Here, democracy is a general absurdity.... Democracy is one of the most dangerous slogans in the mouth of the demagogues who rely on the laziness and ignorance of the workforce. ... Modern democracies in Switzerland, France, America are nothing but a capitalist democratic hypocrisy in the most repulsive form.” Faced with the traps of democracy this precise formulation is more relevant than ever.

We can make numerous criticisms of the FVDG’s spring 1919 programme, notably a certain number of classic revolutionary syndicalist ideas that we do not share such as “complete self-determination” and “federalism”. But on the crucial points of that time, such as the rejection of parliamentarism, the program written by Roche, remained adamant. “For parliamentarism as much as social democracy: if the working class wants to fight for socialism, it must reject the bourgeoisie as a class. It should neither grant it the right to power, nor vote with it or deal with it. Workers’ councils are the parliaments of the working class. [...] It is not bourgeois parliaments, but the dictatorship of the proletariat which implements socialism.” At this time, the Communist Party was going back on its original clear positions against parliamentarism and work within the social democratic unions, and began to regress dramatically from the positions of its founding congress.

A few months later, in December 1919, the Declaration of Principles of the FAUD focused on different points. Karl Roche who, in the early days after the war had influenced the FVDG in a decisive way on the programmatic level, rejoined the AAU in December 1919.

The break with the Communist Party

During the revolution of November 1918, many common points brought together the revolutionaries of the revolutionary syndicalist FVDG with those of the Spartacus League: the reference to the uprising of the working class in Russia in 1917; the taking of all power by the workers’ councils; the rejection of democracy and of parliamentarism, as well as a clear rejection of social democracy and its unions. So how can we explain why during the summer of 1919 relations began to harden between the two currents that had previously shared so many things?

There are various factors which cause a revolution to fail: the weakness of the working class and the weight of its illusions or the isolation of the revolution. In Germany in 1918-19, it was above all its experience that allowed the German bourgeoisie, through social democracy, to sabotage the movement from within, to foment democratic illusions, to push the working class into the trap of isolated and premature uprisings in January 1919 and to deprive it, through murder, of its clearest revolutionaries and of thousands of militant workers.

The polemics between the KPD and the revolutionary syndicalists following the crushing of the strike in the Ruhr in April 1919 show on both sides the same attempt to find the reasons for the failure of the revolution in other revolutionaries. Roche had already been swept up in this trend in April at the conclusion of the FVDG programme, saying “(...) do not let the Spartacists divide the working class”, in a confused way putting them in the same bag as the “right-wing socialists.” From the summer of 1919 it became fashionable in the FVDG to talk about the “three social democratic parties”, that is to say, the SPD, USPD and KPD – a polemical attack which in the atmosphere of frustration at the failures of the class struggle no longer made any distinction between counter-revolutionary organisations and proletarian organisations.

In August the Communist Party (KPD) published a pamphlet on the revolutionary syndicalists with an equally unfortunate line of argument. It now considered the presence of revolutionary syndicalists in its ranks as a threat to the revolution: “The inveterate revolutionary syndicalists must finally realise that they do not have a common interest with us. We must no longer allow our party to provide a playground for people who spread all kinds of ideas foreign to the party.”19

The Communist Party’s critique of the revolutionary syndicalists focused on three points: the question of the state and economic organisation after the revolution, tactics and organisational forms – in fact the classic debates with the revolutionary syndicalist current Although the Communist Party was right to conclude that: “In the revolution, the importance of unions to the class struggle more and more recedes. Workers’ councils and political parties become the exclusive protagonists and leaders of the struggle”, the polemic against the revolutionary syndicalists revealed above all the weaknesses of the Communist Party under Levi’s leadership: a fixation on the conquest of the state. “We believe that we will necessarily use the state after the revolution. Revolution in the first place means precisely to take power within the state”; the mistaken belief that coercion within the proletariat could be a means for conducting the revolution: “Let us say with the Bible and the Russians: those who do not work do not eat. Those who do not work receive only what those active can spare”; flirting with the resumption of parliamentary activity: “Our attitude towards parliamentarism shows that for us the question is posed differently to the tactics of the revolutionary syndicalists. [...] And as the entire life of the people is something living, changing, a process that is constantly taking new forms, all of our strategy must also constantly adapt to new conditions”; and finally the tendency to consider continual political debate, especially on basic issues, as something that is not positive: “We must take action against people who make it difficult for us to plan the life of the party. The party is a community of united struggle and not a discussion club. We cannot continually have discussions on organisational forms and other things.”

The Communist Party thus tried to rid itself of the revolutionary syndicalists who were also members of the Communist Party. In June 1919, in its appeal To revolutionary syndicalists of the Communist Party!, it certainly presented these as “filled with honest revolutionary aspirations.” But the KPD nevertheless defined their combativity as a tendential risk of putschism and posed the following ultimatum to them: either to organise themselves in a strictly centralised party, or “The Communist Party of Germany cannot tolerate in its ranks members who, in their propaganda by speech, writing and action, violate these principles. It will be forced to exclude them.” Given the onset of confusions and the dilution of the positions of the Founding Congress of the Communist Party, this sectarian ultimatum against the revolutionary syndicalists was rather an expression of helplessness faced with the reflux of the revolutionary wave in Germany. It deprived the Communist Party of living contact with the most combative parts of the proletariat. The exchange of blows between the KPD and the revolutionary syndicalists during the summer of 1919 shows equally that the atmosphere of defeat accompanied by growing tendencies towards activism formed a combination unfavourable to political clarification.

A brief journey together with the Unions

During the summer of 1919, the atmosphere in Germany was characterised in part by a major disappointment after consecutive defeats and, secondly, by a radicalisation of certain parts of the working class. There were mass defections in the social democratic unions, and a massive influx into the FVDG, which doubled the number of its members.

In addition to the revolutionary syndicalists, a second current began to develop against the traditional trade unions, also strengthened by a large influx. In the Ruhr region the Allgemeine Arbeiter Union-Essen (AAU-E: General Union of Workers - Essen) and the Allgemeine Bergarbeiter Union (General Union of Miners) appeared under the influence of fractions of the radical left in the Communist Party of Hamburg, and supported by the active propaganda of groups close to the American International Workers of the World (IWW) around Karl Dannenberg in Brunswick. Unlike the FVDG revolutionary syndicalists, the Unions wanted to abandon the principle of trade union organisation by branches of industry to regroup the working class by entire enterprises in “combat organisations.” From their point of view, it was now the enterprises that were exercising their strength and possessed power in society and it was here, therefore, that the working class drew its strength – where it organised itself in accordance with this reality. Thus, the Unions sought a greater unity and considered the trade unions as a historically obsolete form of organisation of the working class. We can say that the Unions were in some way a response of the working class to the question it was posed concerning new forms of organisation, the very question that the revolutionary syndicalist current in Germany had sought to avoid until now.20

We cannot in this article develop our analysis on the nature of the Unions, which are neither workers’ councils, trade unions or political parties. That would require the writing of a text specifically on the subject.

It is often difficult in this period to distinguish precisely the Unionist and the revolutionary syndicalist currents. Within both currents there was scant support for “political parties”, even if the Unions were eventually more sympathetic to the Communist Party. Both tendencies were direct expressions of the most militant fractions of the working class in Germany, were opposed to social democracy and advocated, at least until the end of 1919, in favour of workers’ councils.

In an initial period up until the winter of 1919-1920, the Unionist current in the Ruhr region became a part of the revolutionary syndicalist movement, which was the stronger, at the so-called “fusion” Conference of September 15th -16th 1919 in Düsseldorf. The Unionists had taken part in the founding of the Freie Arbeiter Union (FAU) of North Rhine-Westphalia. This Conference was the first step towards the creation of the FAUD, which was to take place three months later. The FAU-North Rhine-Westphalia expressed a compromise between revolutionary syndicalism and Unionism in its positions. The guidelines adopted said that “... the economic and political struggle must be conducted consistently and steadfastly by the workers....” and that “as an economic organisation, the Freie Arbeiter Union cannot tolerate any party politics in its meetings, but leaves it to the discretion of each member to support left-wing parties and to participate in any activity that it considers necessary.”21 The Allgemeine Arbeiter Union-Essen and the Allgemeine Bergarbeiter Union would largely withdraw from the Alliance with the revolutionary syndicalists before the foundation of the FAUD in December.

The foundation of the FAUD and its Declaration of Principles

The rapid numerical growth of the FVDG during the summer and autumn of 1919, the spread of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in Thuringia, Saxony, Silesia, in southern Germany, in the coastal regions of the North and Baltic Seas, required there to be a national structure to the movement. The 12th Congress of the FVDG of December 27th to 30th in Berlin, turned into the founding congress of the FAUD, with 109 delegates present.

The Congress is often described as the “turning point” from German revolutionary syndicalism to anarcho-syndicalism or as the beginning of the era of Rudolf Rocker – a label used above all by the staunch opponents of revolutionary syndicalism believing it a “negative move”. Most of the time, they claimed that the FAUD at its foundation stood for a defence of federalism, a farewell to politics, a rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a return to pacifism. However, this analysis does not do justice to the FAUD of December 1919. “Germany is the Eldorado of political slogans. Words are uttered and people are intoxicated by the rhythmic chanting, but they don’t really understand what’s being said”, says Rocker (who we quote from below) in his speech on the Statement of Principles regarding allegations against the revolutionary syndicalists.

There is no doubt that the views of Rocker, an anarchist who remained an internationalist during the war and the editor of the new Declaration of Principles, acquired a significant influence in the FAUD, which was enhanced by his physical presence within the organisation. But the foundation of the FAUD reflected first and foremost the popularity of revolutionary syndicalist ideas within the working class in Germany and showed a clear demarcation between the Communist Party and the budding Unionism. Since the end of the war the positions of the FVDG had been very influential inside the working class: the expression of solidarity with the Russian revolution, the explicit rejection of bourgeois democracy and any form of parliamentary activity, the challenging of all “arbitrarily drawn political and national borders”, were reaffirmed in the Declaration of Principles of December 1919. The FAUD clearly defended revolutionary positions.

In comparison with the programme of the FVDG in the spring of 1919, the Congress had considerably reduced its enthusiasm for the perspective of workers’ councils. The signs that the workers’ councils in Russia were losing influence demonstrated to the Congress the scale of the inherent risk that “political parties” posed, and were proof that the Union form of organisation was the more resistant and better able to defend the idea of the councils.22 The disarming of the workers’ councils in Russia at that time was indeed a reality that the Bolsheviks had tragically contributed towards. But what the FAUD was not able to understand was the affect of the international isolation of the Russian revolution and that it would inevitably suffocate the life out of the working class.

“They fight against us, the revolutionary syndicalists, mainly because we openly advocate federalism. Federalists, we are told, divide up the workers’ struggles”, said Rocker. The aversion of the FAUD to centralism and its commitment to federalism were not based on a vision of the fragmentation of the struggle of the classes. The reality of life for the revolutionary syndicalist movement after the war provided sufficient proof of its commitment to the unity and coordination of the struggle. The excessive rejection of centralisation was rooted in the trauma of the capitulation by social democracy: “The central committees dictated from on high, the masses obeyed. Then came the war; the party and the unions were given a fait accompli: we must support the war to save the country. However, the defence of the country became a socialist duty, and the same masses who, the previous week protested against the war, were now for the war, but on the orders of their central committees. This shows the moral consequences of the system of centralisation. Centralisation is the eradication of the consciousness from the human brain, and nothing else. It is the death of a sense of independence”. For many militants of the FAUD centralism was in principle just a method inherited from the bourgeoisie in “...organising society from top to bottom so that it serves the ruling class’s interests.” We agree absolutely with the FAUD of 1919 that it’s the political life and the initiative of the working class “from below” that is the well-spring of the proletarian revolution. The struggle of the working class must be based on solidarity, and in this sense, it always generates a spontaneous dynamic unifying the movement, which leads to centralisation through elected and revocable delegates. In “the Eldorado of political slogans”, the majority of the revolutionary syndicalists of the FAUD was led in December 1919 to adopt the slogan of federalism, a standpoint that was not really associated with the FAUD at its foundation.

Did the founding congress of the FAUD actually reject the idea of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”? “If by the term the dictatorship of the proletariat is meant a party taking control of the State machine, if this only means the establishment of a new state, then the revolutionary syndicalists are sworn enemies of such a dictatorship. If, on the other hand, it means that the proletariat compels the propertied classes to renounce their privileges, if it is not a dictatorship top to bottom, but that the revolutionary impact is from the bottom up, then the revolutionary syndicalists are the supporters and representatives of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”23 Absolutely right! The crucial reflection on the dictatorship of the proletariat, which at that time was associated with the dramatic situation in Russia, was a legitimate question regarding the risk of internal degeneration of the Russian Revolution. It was not possible to make a balance sheet of the Russian revolution in December 1919. Rocker’s assertions were more a barometer of the already visible contradictions, and the beginning of a debate that would last for years in the workers’ movement on the reasons for the failure of the revolutionary wave after the war. These doubts didn’t emerge by chance in an organisation like FAUD, but reflected the highs and lows in the life of the “rank and file” working class.

Even the traditional cataloguing of the Founding Congress of the FAUD as a “move towards pacifism” which undoubtedly sabotaged the determination of the working class, does not correspond to the reality. Like the discussion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the debates on violence in the struggle between the classes were rather the sign of a real problem facing the working class internationally. How would it be possible to maintain the momentum of the stalled revolutionary wave and break the isolation of the working class in Russia? In Russia, as in Germany, it was inevitable that the working class would use arms to defend itself against the attacks of the ruling class. But the extension of the revolution by military means, even “revolutionary war”, was impossible, if not absurd. In Germany especially, the bourgeoisie constantly attempted to underhandedly provoke the proletariat militarily. “The essence of the revolution does not lie in the use of violence, but in the transformation of the economic and political institutions. Violence in itself is absolutely not revolutionary, but, on the contrary, is reactionary to the highest degree.... Revolutions are the result of a great spiritual transformation in the opinions of men. They cannot be achieved arbitrarily by force of arms... But I also recognise violence as a means of defence, when the conditions themselves leave us no other choice”, argued Rocker against Krohn, a supporter of the Communist Party. The tragic events of Kronstadt in 1921 confirmed that this critical standpoint towards the false hope that the resort to arms could save the revolution had nothing to do with pacifism. The FAUD in the aftermath of its Founding Congress, didn’t adopt a pacifist position. A large part of the Red Army of the Ruhr that responded to the Kapp Putsch in the spring of 1920 was composed of revolutionary syndicalists.

In this article, over and above our criticisms, we have also intentionally highlighted the strengths of the positions of revolutionary syndicalists in Germany during 1918-19. The next part of this article will deal with the period from the late 1920s up to the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the destruction of FAUD.

Mario 16/6/12