But when the Chancellor presented his November pre-Budget report it was against the backdrop of some apparently impressive economic indicators. Unemployment was at a 20 year low of 4.2%; the public spending budget showed a surplus of £9.5bn. The OECD produced a glowing report on the health of the British economy, holding out the prospect of higher economic growth of 2.7% coupled with lower unemployment and inflation despite strong increases in household wealth and pay. Indeed, "The forecasts paint a golden scenario for the Labour government moving towards the next election" (Financial Times, 17/11/99).

Just like the USA, Britain is heading towards a 'Goldilocks' economy, wards a 'Goldilocks' economy, a land of free porridge for all. For some people in Britain this is already true! Figures released at the end of October on chief executive pay showed that, "nearly a third of chief executives in the FTSE 350 secured remuneration package increases of more than 20%." (FT, 27/10/99, p4). This is five times the national average. The highest paid bosses are in the pharmaceutical sector where on average they 'earn' £3.64m each a year. Contrast this with the news that next year the state pension is going up by 75 pence a week and you get some idea of the state of capitalist society in Britain today.

So was all the talk of a new recession misguided? Is capitalism now out of the woods? Is Britain following the USA down the road of growth without inflation? This is what the bourgeoisie would like workers to think, that with the 'death of communism' capitalism is triumphant. Once again we are being treated to a new sleight of hand. The claims of renewed growth and stability hide profound underlying contradictions. As we note in the latest International Review,

"These growth rates hide this fragility, just as they mask a new historical aberration - from the economic standpoint: the fact that today, the rate of savings in the USA is negative, in other words American households overall have merican households overall have more debts than savings!"

This has not escaped the 'specialists'.

"American industry is on the verge of bankruptcy. This is incompatible with the rise in share values on Wall Street, whose valuation is at its highest since 1926: expected profit is higher than at any time since the war. All this is untenable, but vital in maintaining the confidence of households and the impression of wealth which encourages them to consume more and more on credit. The savings rate has become negative, a phenomenon not seen since the Great Depression. How can the (inevitable) touchdown be made a soft one?" (L'Expansion, October '99).

"The official indicator of recession - the negative growth of production - has once again been hidden, the recession has been pushed back with the same palliatives: debt, a headlong flight into credit and speculation...The situation of the world economy is thus more fragile and pregnant with the next 'purges' which will once again leave masses of workers on the streets." (IR99 "Economic Crisis: The abyss behind 'uninterrupted growth'").

Growing exploitation of the working class

At the same time we are being told that the unlikely driving force behind the British 'recovery' is the manufacturing sectecovery' is the manufacturing sector. A report released by the Institute of Manufacturing is given as further evidence that this sector, hit hard by the strength of the pound, is turning around, and goes on to explain how.

"Wage growth in manufacturing in the year to July was almost entirely paid for out of productivity increases. Annual growth in manufacturing productivity has risen above 3% this year. This has helped to drive the annual growth of unit labour costs - the cost of labour per item of output - below 1% from 4% in 1998" (FT, 15/1/99, p5).

Another set of figures from the Office of National Statistics has revealed that in the year to September the manufacturing sector shed 156,000 jobs with the AEEU engineering union predicting another 50,000 to go next year. Taken together these two facts show another way the bourgeoisie has been able to avoid open recession, by making less workers work harder. Once again the proletariat is being forced to pay for the crisis through higher rates of exploitation.

For those workers thrown onto the dole things are about to get even worse. The Labour government are proud of their record in reducing unemployment, and especially of the New Deal scheme where 18-24 year old claimants are offered the 'choice' of work experience, training, education - or having t training, education - or having their benefits stopped. In his pre-Budget report Gordon Brown announced the extension of the New Deal to all long-term unemployed from April 2001. The aim is to fill the "...one million vacancies spread around the country. We want better matching of the unemployed to these jobs and we want people to take up the opportunities available." (FT, 10/11/99).

But the government's own figures for the New Deal show that only 43% of people leaving the scheme find "sustained, unsubsidised jobs", 17% leave early due to legitimate reasons and 13% are transferred to other schemes. Meanwhile the remaining 28% "disappear". No wonder unemployment is falling - it’s the old trick of calling the unemployed "job-seekers", of taking the long term unemployed off the official lists, of counting people with short-term, part-time, precarious jobs as part of the active workforce. In short, of making the unemployed disappear.

It has not escaped the attention of bourgeois commentators that

"...it is clear that a revolution has taken place during the past two years. Britain now operates workfare...It's a huge cultural - and economic - change; and one that successive Conservative governments never dared attempt." (FT, 10/11/99).

New Labour have been able to continue and escalate the attacks on the living and working conditions of the working class. This is why they were put in power and it shows that they are the faithful servants of capital and the enemy of the proletariat.

Finally, the Chancellor announced increased incentives for investment in new technology sectors such as the internet and telecommunications. This is touted as one of the most dynamic and growing sectors of the economy, one that fits the vision of a modern Britain leading the way into the new millennium. The computer company ICL has announced the creation of 1,000 new jobs in the e-commerce sector. In Liverpool a new technology park promises to create 4,000 jobs. The Bank of Scotland has a call centre there already, employing 1,300 workers. In fact, call centres now employ nationally some 400,000 workers.

But the very growth of such a sector is symbolic of capitalism’s real plight: increasingly, capitalist trade is based on selling air, whether in the form of speculation on the future or the development of largely unproductive ‘service’ industries. This does not alter the fact that those who work in these industries experience all the realities of the proletarian condition. The strike by 4,000 BT call centre staff at the end of November - the first national strike at BT for 12 ynational strike at BT for 12 years - was proof of that. The strikers complained of the management culture of intimidation, bullying, threats of disciplinary action if targets are not met, understaffing and increased use of contract agency staff.

The BT strike is also part of a more general increase in combativity amongst workers. In the last few months we have seen a number of strikes involving postal workers, electricians, the Ford car workers, bus drivers in West London etc. A number of these struggles have begun as spontaneous movements, not as tame affairs manipulated by the trade unions. They come as a timely reminder that the class struggle is the workers’ only means of defence. Illusions in the well-being of the capitalist economy can only paralyse the struggle. The perspective facing workers everywhere is the intensification of attacks on their living and working conditions; the only valid response can be to intensify their own class resistance.

Trevor

Reality has demonstrated again and again that the end of the old bloc system in no way meant an end to war and that the "new world order" promised by president Bush was nothing but a lie. Today the whole planet is militarised and armed to the teeth; there are around fifty bloody conflicts going on at the same time, conflicts in which imperialist powers large and small slug it out, while whole populations are subject to the threat of extermination and mass exodus.

The cynicism of the great powers

Since October 1, the new war in Chechnya perpetrated by the Russian army has proved to be even worse than the first intervention in the region in 1994-6, and the region in 1994-6, and that one resulted in 100,000 deaths. The frontiers have been closed; the civilian population, isolated and encircled, has been massacred blindly by missiles, fragmentation bombs and, according to Brzezinski, former adviser to president Carter (Le Monde 18 November), the "fuel air" bombs which were used to such murderous effect in the Gulf war. At the beginning of this new intervention, Russia justified this butchery with the claim that it was seeking to wipe out the bases of "Chechen terrorism". Today, backed by a Sacred Union of the bourgeoisie which goes from Stalinists like Zuganov to the champions of 'democracy' like the major of Moscow, Louijkov, Russia is openly proclaiming that its aim is to reconquer Chechnya and bring it back into its fold.

The western bourgeoisie pretends to be concerned about the fate of the local population and has remonstrated with Russia at the recent summit of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) held in Istanbul. The sending of a few OSCE observers to Chechnya (which Russia accepted without difficulty) was in fact no more than a humanitarian pretext and has changed nothing. This was a summit of hypocrisy.

The Moscow government promised a 10% reduction in non-nuclear weapons, therenon-nuclear weapons, there was a charter proclaiming a general de-escalation of military spending, and in the meantime the summit closed its eyes to the intensification of the bombing of Chechnya. And above all, as with East Timor, we had the vague disapproval of the bourgeois 'community' two months after the massacres began. Why? Here, in contrast to Kosovo, the 'right to interfere' or the principle of 'humanitarian intervention' have never been invoked, even though it's patently obvious that Yeltsin and his prime minister Putin are using the same methods as Milosevic.

The fact is that Russia has enjoyed the total complicity of the big western powers who have coldly, cynically stood by while the Chechen population has been murdered en masse. This is one more proof that humanitarian arguments are just excuses for the use of armed force. As for the so-called Non-Governmental Organisations, which have always served as the bridgeheads for military intervention by the great powers, they have been almost totally absent, even Medecins Sans Frontieres which has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but which seems to have looked the other way as far as Chechnya is concerned. Behind their statements of indignation, all the western leaders have wanted, covered, and supported the Russian offensive in the northern Caucasus. There has beerthern Caucasus. There has been a wide consensus among the western bourgeoisie not to cause problems for Russia and to allow it to carry on with its methodical slaughter. The western powers want at all cost to avoid the disintegration of what remains of the Russian Federation, which is still the biggest country in the world, stretches across two continents and is stuffed with nuclear arsenals. This is why the French spokesman Fabius declared that

"France supports the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation and condemns terrorism, operations of destabilisation and fundamentalism, which are threats to democracy" (Le Monde 7.10.99).

The present threat of the disintegration of Russia is a consequence of the collapse of the USSR. It represents a new step in the aggravation of world-wide chaos and the decomposition of capitalist society. It also points more clearly than before to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which is a product of this decomposition and has manifested itself in numerous countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, etc; and, within the Russian Federation, through the Islamic troops of the Chechen Bassaev and of Khattab in Dagestan).

However, compared to their reaction at the beginning of the Russian he beginning of the Russian intervention, we have seen a harder tone coming from the western powers, an increasing pressure on Russia. But this has nothing to do with any concern about the fate of the local populations and everything to do with their sordid imperialist interests.

The big imperialist powers continue to aggravate barbarism and chaos

Through the war in Chechnya, Russia is also trying to recuperate its imperialist interests in the southern Caucasus, and it's here that it is coming up against the majority of the other big imperialist powers who have been trying to eject it from this eminently strategic region. If today certain European states like Germany and France are beginning to have 'disagreements' with Russia and to make gestures towards the Chechen leaders, it's solely in order to advance their own imperialist ambitions in this region.

The big powers are, as a matter of fact, being confronted with their own contradictions. They all have an interest in preventing a new explosion of what's left of Russia, in stopping it from sliding into uncontrollable chaos. But at the same time they have an interest in drawing the maximum profit from the weakening of Russia and in limiting its imperialist influence in this zone. This is notably the case wit. This is notably the case with the USA. The director of the Institute for Strategic Studies in Kazakhstan has declared that

"The USA is trying to exploit the myth of vast oil reserves around the Caspian sea in order to eliminate Russian influence from central Asia and the Caucasus" (Financial Times, 10.11.99).

As for France, it's fear of being left out of the game and its need to find a foothold in the Caucasus has led it to more and more espouse the "Chechen cause", complete with increased TV coverage about the effects of war on the Chechen population.

Today, more than ever, the control of this strategic region made up of the Caucasian countries of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea has become a crucial prize. The USA and its oil companies have a controlling hand on all the big energy extraction projects from central Asia to Turkey and including the southern Caucasus. Whether we're talking about the export of gas from Turkmenistan or the oil pipelines, the policy of the US is to create for itself the widest possible network, incorporating a number of points of access. One of the two main oil pipelines is the one that links the oil of the Caspian to the Turkish terminal at Ceyhan.

The other, which was only completed in May 1999, goes through the Georgian port of Soupsa. The USA's main aim is to undermine rival Russian projects. To carry though this enterprise, the other main beneficiary of which will be Turkey (and behind Turkey, Germany), the USA has also supervised the settlement of the conflict in High Karabakh, a zone situated close to the pipeline. This has resulted in a reconciliation between Armenia and Azerbaijan, involving concessions towards Armenian claims on this territory, which was the object of a very bloody war between 1992 and 94. This agreement will also make it possible to detach Armenia from its alliance with the Kremlin.

As for Russia, for whom the Caspian oil reserves remain of vital economic importance, its two ways of access have been blocked. The first, which went right through the middle of Chechnya, was ruined last year by mysterious acts of sabotage. Russia then built a new section going round Chechnya and through Dagestan, leading to the Russian port of Novosiisk on the Black Sea. The incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan in August cut off this route.

Just as it launched its offensive in Chechnya, Russia also increased its threats towards the independent countries of the southern Caucasus. Azerbaijan, which hascasus. Azerbaijan, which has close links with Turkey, has for months been accused by Moscow of backing the Chechen and Dagestan terrorists. Since 1991 Russia has also been supporting the Abkhari and Ossetian separatists in Shevardnaze's Georgia. Gorbachev's ex-foreign minister Shevardnaze has himself escaped several assassination attempts carried out on Moscow's orders, notably in February 1998. Georgia has borders with Chechnya, and has a potential ally in Turkey.

Above all, pressure has been stepped up on Armenia, which has been accused of treason. At the very moment when an agreement on oil was signed under US tutelage between the three Caucasian states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the Armenian prime minister and six other political figures, including the parliament's chairman, were assassinated in a full session of the national assembly by a commando group which was probably acting on behalf of the Kremlin. Finally, Russia has found another way of exerting pressure on Georgia. Despite the difficulties of passing its mountainous frontiers, Georgia is the only port in the storm for Chechen refugees who have found that neighbouring Ingusetia is already saturated.

It could therefore also be a haven for Chechen rebels. Russia could easily use this as a pretext for threatening military interven threatening military intervention against Georgia. This has upped the stakes of the whole situation. Far from backing off, the Americans have rushed to confirm the oil agreement between the Caucasian states, Kazakhstan and Turkey, an agreement which clearly excludes Russia from the region, and which was publicly ratified at the OSCE summit. There are other definite signs of a sharpening of tensions. Under US pressure, the head of the IMF, the Frenchman Camdessus, who symbolised the policy of generosity towards Russia even after the scandal of the misappropriation of IMF funds by the Yeltsin clan, suddenly announced his intention to retire.

Parallel to this, the Pope's visit to Georgia was very coldly received by the orthodox church which is under Russian tutelage (a communiqué from the patriarch of Tbilisi forbade its faithful from taking part in a mass presided over by Jean-Paul).

Today, the whole Caucasus region is threatened by a conflagration involving rival imperialist powers. But the future of Russia itself is also directly linked to this. Russia is caught in a real dilemma:

• either, and this is not very likely, it accepts a new humiliation by withdrawing from Chechnya, which would encourage other territories to break away from Russia. Thisk away from Russia. This would open the door to chaos and the disintegration of Russia;
• or it carries on with its headlong flight towards war in the southern Caucasus, where it will more and more find itself up against the immediate interests of the USA and Turkey. This would set alight an equally dangerous powder-keg that could drag in the former Soviet republics of central Asia.

CB 19.11.99

A century ago we heard much the same message. In 1898 Ivan Bloch published The War of the Future in St Petersburg. He said that war was bound to become obsolete, as it was too costly, too murderous and so complicated that it was impossible to win. However, such views did not stand uncorrected. In 1901, in exile in Siberia, the revolutionary Leon Trotsky had a more accurate view of what capitalism was, and what it had in store.

"Hatred and murder, famine and blood... It seems as if the new century, this gigantic newcomer, were bent at thetic newcomer, were bent at the very moment of its appearance to drive the optimist into absolute pessimism [...]

- Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope! thunders the twentieth century in salvoes of fire and in the rumbling of guns." (from an article on 'Optimism and pessimism', cited in Deutscher's The prophet armed)

Trotsky was right. Starting with war in South Africa and finishing with the bombardments of Iraq, Serbia and Chechnya, by any standard the twentieth century has been the most disastrous in history. Its imagery is dominated by the gulag and the concentration camp, by warfare from the trenches to the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

In fact, war has become the very means of survival for capitalist states in the twentieth century, despite the fact that it is so costly, murderous and so often results in military stalemates. The First World War, the 'war to end all wars' was seen as an unparalleled catastrophe with the death of 20 million. Yet twenty years later more than 60 million died in the Second World War, 1 in 40 of the world's population were victims of the bourgeoisie's massacre. As for the times of 'peace' tens of millions more have been sacrificed by capitalism in its imperialist conflicts. Just to take the period of the Just to take the period of the 'Cold War' one calculation has given a figure of some 160 armed conflicts throughout the world between 1945 and 89. Korea, Nigeria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iran/Iraq head the long list that condemns the capitalist system. The period since the end of the Cold War has been even more rife with genocide and butchery: Iraq, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Congo, Algeria, East Timor...

The decadence of capitalism

While capitalism in its period of expansion was always marked by its brutality, its characteristics since the First World War are those of a mode of production in its period of decadence - a decadence much more calamitous than that of previous systems. As we wrote in the ICC Manifesto of 1975:

"In the past, humanity has known periods of decadence in which there were many calamities and unspeakable suffering. But these were nothing compared to what humanity has suffered these past sixty years. The decadence of other societies was the development of shortages and famines but in a totally different context than today, when so much human misery exists alongside such enormous squandering of wealth. At a time when man has made himself the master of marvellous technologies that make it possible for him to subdue nature, he remains subject tdue nature, he remains subject to its whims. In today's conditions 'natural' climatic or agricultural catastrophes are even more tragic than they were in the past. Worse still, capitalist society is the first society in history whose very survival in the period of decline depends upon a massive cyclical destruction of an ever growing part of itself. To be sure, other periods of decadence saw confrontations between factions of the dominant class, but the period of decadence in which we are living today is locked in an unabating and devilish cycle of crisis - world war - reconstruction - crisis; making the human race pay a terrible tribute in death and suffering."

The continuation of capitalism is a disaster for humanity. And the most tragic thing about this is that all the horrors of the 20th century, the wars, the death camps, the obliteration of culture, are all the direct result of the defeat of the first attempt by the international working class to do away with this system and replace it with a higher form of production.

The first revolutionary wave and its defeat

The First World War did not come to an end because of a clear victory for one of the protagonists. It was the struggle of the working class that put an end to the conflict. This was not just in Russia, where the Keret just in Russia, where the Kerensky regime had been overthrown, not just in Germany where the bourgeoisie called for an armistice as an insurrectionary movement reached Berlin, but as part of a growing international wave of workers' struggles.

"At the highest point of its struggle between 1917 and 1923, the proletariat took power in Russia, engaged in mass insurrections in Germany, and shook Italy, Hungary, and Austria to their foundations. Although less strongly, the revolutionary wave also manifested itself in bitter struggles in, for example, Spain, Great Britain, North and South America. The tragic failure of the revolutionary wave was finally marked in 1927 by the crushing of the proletarian insurrection in Shanghai and Canton in China after a long series of defeats for the working class internationally" (ICC Platform).

On the political level, this movement found its highest expression in the foundation of the Communist international in 1919.

The repression of the bourgeoisie took many forms, from the invasion of Russia by the armies of the Entente, to the butchery of the Freikorps unleashed by German Social Democracy. The working class had long been in a position to appreciate the counter-attack that the ruling class would mount when it was threatened - most cnt when it was threatened - most clearly from the repression of the Paris Commune some fifty years previously. What was new in the 20s and 30s was that the working class was also subjected to the counter-revolutionary actions of those who called themselves 'socialists' or even 'communists'.

To take a typical example: in Italy the militancy of the working class was wasted in massive factory occupations which diverted the movement from frontally attacking the capitalist state. In 1924 Trotsky wrote that:

"In Italy there was a sabotaged revolution. The proletariat hurled itself with all its weight against the bourgeoisie, seizing factories, mines, and mills, but the Socialist Party, frightened by the proletariat's pressure on the bourgeoisie, stabbed it in the back, disorganised it, paralysed its efforts, and handed it over to fascism" ('On the Road to European Revolution').

In a sense this was the experience of the whole working class. The revolutionary wave had been met with force of arms, but it had also been sabotaged by the unions and Social Democracy. The coming to power of Hitler in 1933 was the final demonstration of the defeat of the working class. The balance of forces had changed and the path was open to war. The Communist International had become an instrument of the Russiacome an instrument of the Russian state, and the acceptance of Russia into the League of Nations in 1934 was further confirmation of the defeat of the working class and the international preparations for war.

Communism remains humanity's only hope

The counter-revolution that descended on the working class in the 20s could not last forever. At the end of the 1960s the proletarian giant began to awaken from its long sleep. In 1968-74 there was an international wave of struggles which swept through France, Italy, Spain, Britain and many other countries, exposing the lie that the working class had disappeared or been bought off by the system. From 1978-81 there was a second wave that had its highest expression with the mass strike in Poland. From 1983-89 there was a movement with a greater extent than any in the history of the working class. These movements also gave new life to the political expressions of the working class, the communist minorities which had been so decimated by the years of counter-revolution.

But despite the intensity of struggles from 1968-89, the working class did not go on the offensive against the capitalist system. At the same time, despite the economic crisis demanding that capitalism should come up with the 'solution' of world war, it has not been able to do so. Th not been able to do so. The bourgeoisie has not been able to mobilise the workers of the main capitalist countries behind the ideology of national defence. There has been a social stalemate which led to the disintegration of the blocs set up to wage a third world war. Decadent capitalism entered a new and final phase - the phase of decomposition, of an accelerating slide into barbarism and chaos. While the course toward world war is not open, the worsening of decomposition leads humanity towards the same fate.

"In the end, it is all the same whether we are wiped out in a rain of thermonuclear bombs, or by pollution, epidemics and the massacres of small wars (where nuclear weapons might also be used). The only difference between these two forms of annihilation lies in that one is quick, while the other will be slower, and would consequently provoke still more suffering" ('Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism', in the ICC pamphlet The decadence of capitalism).

We have not yet reached the point of no return; but capitalism certainly doesn't have a whole millennium in front of it, and it's far more probable that the fate of humanity will be decided well inside the 21st century. The decomposition of society bears with it the growing threat of the destruction of all social the destruction of all social ties, the liquidation of rational thought, the irreparable poisoning of the natural environment, the devastation of war. And yet the fact remains that capitalism itself has created the technical, material means to put an end to poverty and hunger, to the drudgery of wage labour and the waste of unemployment, to the irrational divisions and competition that lead to war. It is only the perpetuation of capitalist social relations which prevent this vast productive potential being placed in the service of humanity. And the fact also remains that capitalism's gravedigger - the international class of wage labourers, the proletariat - has neither disappeared nor been finally defeated. Here lies the only hope for humanity's survival, and for the emergence of a truly human society. The proletarians must reject with contempt the phony optimism of the bourgeoisie's millennium celebrations - a fraud which barely masks the nihilism of a class which has been condemned by history. It is we, the exploited, the communist class, which holds the key to the coming century and the coming millennium.

WR

In the last issue of World Revolution we reported that one of the participants at our public forum on anarchism and the war in Spain in the 1930s had given out a pamphlet called When Insurrections Die by Gilles Dauve (1). A brief preface by Antagonism Press informs us that "this is a shorter, entirely reconceived version of the preface to the selection of articles on Spain 1936-39 from the Italian left magazine Bilan, published in French under the pen-name Jean Barrot and now out of print".

We want to make some comments on this text because while it contains many of the analyses and class positions elaborated by the communist left, its primary effect is to provide a theoretical justification for some of the most basic confusions surrounding the methods and goals of the communist revolution - confusions which are only too rife in the milieu which we refer to as the swamp, the ever-shifting zone of transition between bourgeois and proletarian politics.

This is by no means the first time that we have encountered Barrot's work. There is no doubt that he has been influenced by the communist left and as well as the Bilan collection has also published a book on the German left which we reviewed when it was published in the 1970s (2). This influence can still be seen in the text When Insurrections Die. But Barrot's political specificity is that he is a key figure in the development of what we have termed the ‘modernist' current.

This current, though having much older roots (3), made its real debut on the margins of the revolutionary milieu in the mid-70s; it was in essence a product of the reflux of the first international wave of workers' struggles launched by the general strike in France in May 1968. It reappeared again in another period of reflux in the early 80s, following the defeat of the mass strike movement in Poland (4). Today, with the ‘collapse of communism' and its attendant campaigns, the working class faces even greater difficulties, even doubts about its own existence as a class; it is therefore not surprising to find modernist ideas again gaining currency. In Britain, the Aufheben group, for example, borrows many of modernism's presuppositions. This is because the foremost characteristic of modernism is to put in question the revolutionary nature of the working class. In itself this is not unique - indeed a kind of ‘modernism' or ‘post-modernism' has become a dominant feature of bourgeois ideology in general today. But the modernists we are referring to also claim to be communists.

The trajectory of Jacques Camatte and the review Invariance provide the clearest illustration of modernism's underlying approach. Camatte broke from the Bordigist PCI in the 60s, having discovered that Bordigism was not the only expression of the historical communist left. But very rapidly Camatte developed profound doubts in the revolutionary potential of the working class, increasingly defining it as no more than a cog in the capitalist system. This was accompanied by a growing rejection of marxism and of revolutionary political organisations, which he characterised as ‘rackets'. Camatte's hopes turned to the eruption of a ‘universal human class' against capital; but very soon these hopes also faded and he took the logical step of retreating to a survivalist commune in the French mountains.

This ‘modern' attempt to find a revolutionary road that has ‘gone beyond' marxism and the working class thus revealed itself as a new packaging of classically anarchist themes. When Marx criticised Bakunin in the 1860s, he demonstrated that such themes were already reactionary, that the workers' movement had left them behind. It had replaced the notion of a ‘grand social liquidation' of all the oppressed by the idea of a working class struggle for political power; it had replaced organisational methods based on affinity groups, sects, or freebooting individuals with the principle of coherent political organisations of the communist vanguard. Modernism, like classical anarchism, was essentially the ideology of petty bourgeois thinkers who considered that the working class was not revolutionary enough for them and who as a result could only slip back into the conceptions of the past.

Barrot has never reached the extreme conclusions of Camatte, but from the 1970s onwards he has continued to disseminate all the underlying conceptions of modernism: its doubts about the working class; its characterisation of politics as a sphere of alienation; its rejection of militant political organisation and of the necessity for the working class to establish its political domination before it can create a communist society. When Insurrections Die shows that Barrot has not revised these views.

Barrot on Spain 36: vestiges of clarity, addition of confusion

Barrot's text is presented, as we have seen, as an "entirely reconceived" version of the introduction to the Bilan collection on Spain. Indeed it is so much revised that there is hardly any mention of Bilan in it at all. Instead, Barrot's historical references are to the positions of the Dutch communist left. This is probably no accident, since although the majority of the Dutch council communists certainly did defend revolutionary positions on the war in Spain, it was the Italian left who insisted on applying to the situation certain marxist basics which must make any self-respecting modernist feel rather uncomfortable: concepts such as the decadence of capitalism, the necessity for the class party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Add to this the text's argument that "marxism", no less than anarchism, "fetishises" the state (see p 32-33), and we can conclude that the Barrot of the ‘90s has moved farther away from marxism from the Barrot of the ‘70s, who could still write that, "The future revolution will not be a question of banal repetition; but it will take up the historic thread of the international communist left" (from The communist left in Germany, 1918-21, cited in International Review 11). Nevertheless, the text still contains many nuggets of clarity inherited from the communist left:

- in its denunciation of the fraud of anti-fascism and the Trotskyist ideology of the United Front. According to the latter, the working class could have stopped the rise of fascism in the 20s and 30s ‘if only' it had forced the different left wing parties to unite. Instead Barrot's text reaffirms that it was precisely the left factions of capital in Germany and Italy who prepared the way for fascism;

- vis-a-vis the war in Spain, the text reiterates the view defended by Bilan and other left communist fractions at the time: the proletariat had indeed defended itself from the fascist attack when it fought on its own class terrain in July 1936; but it then opened itself up to the massacre by allowing itself to be pulled onto the bourgeois terrain of defending democracy. The text also uncovers the crucial role played by the semi-Trotskyists of the POUM and the anarchists of the CNT in diverting the working class from an all-out attack on the capitalist state and in subjugating it to the authority of the bourgeoisie, above all through the medium of the ‘anti-fascist militias' and the ‘collectivisations'. Finally, it demonstrates that when the Spanish workers made one last attempt to regroup behind their own class barricades, the POUM and the CNT were again on hand to sabotage this resistance from the inside.

The basic problem with the text is that having chased anarchism out of the front door, Barrot's modernist conceptions allow it in again through the back window. Barrot agrees with marxism that the bourgeois state has to be smashed in any real revolutionary uprising. But he is explicitly opposed to the marxist conception that the proletariat must then consolidate its own political domination if it is to take social and economic life in a communist direction. For him, this is just a formula for erecting a new power above the proletariat. What is needed instead is an immediate ‘communisation' of social relations:

"There is no revolution without the destruction of the state. But how? Beating off armed bands, getting rid of state structures and habits, setting up new modes of debate and decision - all these tasks are impossible if they do not go hand in hand with communisation. We don't want ‘power': we want the power to change all of life... If the revolution is supposed to be political first and social later, it would create an apparat whose sole function would be the struggle against the supporters of the old world, i.e. a negative function of repression, a system of control resting on no other content than its ‘programme' and its will to realise communism the day that conditions finally allow for it. This is how a revolution ideologises itself and legitimises the birth of a specialised stratum to oversee the maturation and the expectation of the ever-radiant day after tomorrow. The very stuff of politics is not being able , and not wanting, to change anything; it brings together what is separated without going any further..."(When Insurrections Die, p 38).

All this is highly ambiguous. It is perfectly true that the proletarian revolution can only triumph if it is based on the permanent self-activity of the proletarian masses in all areas of life, and that from the start this self-activity must tend in a communist direction. But to deny the primacy of politics in the first, decisive stages of the revolution is to spread the illusion that a new communist mode of life can appear from day one in any given corner - as implied by Barrot when he says that:

"communist measures (in Spain) could have undermined the social bases of the two states (republican and nationalist), if only by solving the agrarian question... A subversive force erupted, bringing to the fore the most oppressed strata, those farthest from political life (e.g. women), but it could not go all the way and eradicate the system root and branch" (p 35).

Here Barrot seems to ignore the fact that the Spanish events took place in a period of profound defeat for the working class internationally; but as the experience of the Russian revolution shows, even in a globally revolutionary period, very little can change in the sphere of social and economic relations until the working class has taken political power on a world scale. Even when many of the outward forms of value production are done away with (e.g. the virtual suppression of money during the ‘war communism' period in Russia), the content of a social relations based on scarcity will constantly re-impose itself. Communism is not the communisation of poverty in one country but a world-wide society of abundance that has dug out the roots of competition and exchange.

In conflating the social and political dimensions of the revolutionary process, and above all by equating proletarian political power with the automatic emergence of an ‘apparat', a ‘specialised stratum', the ‘modern' Barrot has only given a new theoretical gloss to Bakunin's rejection of ‘authoritarian marxism'. Small wonder that his writings should appear so attractive to those who are weary of the clichés of traditional anarchism but who cling desperately to its innermost convictions.

Amos, (6/12/99).

Notes

1) The pamphlet is being given away free; the reason being, as its distributor said at the forum , that "I am a communist". Presumably this means that communist literature should not be sold. For us this approach is not communist at all; it is a further expression of anarchist moralism and individualism. A communist organisation - as opposed to loose associations of individuals who publish things from time to time - which refused on principle to sell its press would be unable to maintain its existence for very long.

2) See International Review 11 ‘The Communist left in Germany 1918-21: a review'

3) For a study of the historical roots of modernism, see ‘Modernism: from leftism to the void' in World Revolution 3. This article, however, has an important weakness in that it presents modernism more or less as a direct emanation of the counter-revolution. Today we would define it as an expression of the swamp, though it may have strong leftist and parasitic elements within it.

4) See ‘Doubts about the working class' in International Review 34. At the time this text was written (1983), Barrot was producing La Banquise, (The Ice Barrier), which was based on an extreme pessimism about the possibilities of the class struggle. Prior to this he animated a group called Mouvement Communiste (not to be confused with the parasitic group of the same name today). Today he seems to work on a purely individual basis.