On several occasions, we have welcomed the emergence of revolutionary groups and elements in Eastern Europe, and in particular in Russia. They are clearly appearing within an international context. On every continent, the proletarian political groups that represent the tradition of the communist left have in the last few years been making contact with this kind of element. We should therefore understand this as a characteristic medium-term tendency of the present period. Ever since the collapse of the USSR and its imperialist bloc, the bourgeoisie has been triumphantly proclaiming the bankruptcy of communism and the end of the class struggle. Already unsettled by these events, the working class could not but retreat under the hammer blows of the bourgeoisie's ideologica the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns. But outside period of counter-revolution, a historic class cannot help reacting against attacks which call so deeply into question its own being and perspective. If it is unable to defend itself through the generalisation of its economic demands, then it will do so by strengthening its political vanguard. The isolated elements, discussion circles, nuclei and little groups should not look to themselves or to coincidence to find the reason for their existence. They are a product of the international working class, and a heavy responsibility lies on their shoulders. They must first recognise the historic process of which they are a product, and fight to the utmost for their consciousness and their political clarity, without being put off by the difficulty of the task.
In the countries at the periphery of the great capitalist powers, these small minorities are confronted with innumerable difficulties: geographical dispersal, language problems, economic backwardness. To these material difficulties are added political ones, resulting from the weakness of the workers' movement and the absence of a solid tradition of revolutionary marxism. In Russia, the “land of the great lie” as Anton Ciliga put it (in his book Au pays du grand mensonge, published in 1938), where the Stalinist counter-rhe Stalinist counter-revolution was at its most terrible, the destruction and distortion of the communist programme was pushed to the limit. The potential contained in these new revolutionary energies can be measured by the way in which they strive to overcome these difficulties:
by the assertion of proletarian internationalism, as we can see in their denunciation of the war and all the imperialist camps in the wars in Chechnya and ex-Yugoslavia,
in their search for international contacts,
This has always been the terrain for the development of revolutionary marxism: international, internationalist, and developing a historical viewpoint.
This approach reveals the truly proletarian nature of these groups, which were rapidly confronted with the need to set themselves apart from present-day Trotskyism - which can always find good reasons to invite the workers to take part in imperialist war - and Maoism, that pure offspring of Stalinist “national-communism”. This is a class frontier sepa class frontier separating the internationalist communist left from “leftism” [i].
Obviously, all these proletarian elements, produced by the same situation, are very heterogeneous. To refuse to accept the identification of Stalinism and communism, to denounce the most outrageous assertions of the enemy's propaganda, is not the most difficult, since their bourgeois nature comes quickly to the surface. “It was Lenin that laid the foundations for the regime which was later to be called 'Stalinist'”. For the less subtle journalists, the proof “is that Lenin was the founder of the Communist International, whose aim was 'world socialist revolution'. By his own confession, Lenin only undertook the October revolution because he was convinced of the inevitability of a European revolution, starting with Germany” (from L'Histoire, n°250, p.19). But the bourgeoisie's offensive is not limited to this caricature. We still have to identify and defend the fundamental significance of the Russian revolution and Lenin's work. Here we come up against, not just the subtle degradation of marxist theory by leftism, but also a series of dangerous confusions, or programmatic points which remain th which remain the object of fierce discussion within the proletarian political movement.
There is thus a whole process of clarification to be undergone, which all these elements have not necessarily taken to its conclusion. In order to understand Stalinism, it is necessary to confront the Trotskyist theory of a “degenerated workers' state”, the anarchist idea that this is nothing but the inevitable product of an “authoritarian socialism”, or the perfectly mechanistic marxism of the councilists, which sees Bolshevism as an instrument adapted to the needs of capitalism in Russia. Behind these questions, lies the problem of the communist programme's historic descent and coherence. The rejection of activist impatience, and confrontation with this problem, is a condition for joining the ranks of those anonymous militants, who today continue the struggle for the same communism that Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto presented to the proletariat 150 years ago.
But what is the thread linking the proletarian struggle yesterday, today, and tomorrow? To pick it up, we must always start from the proletariat's last revolutionary experience. Today, this means starting from the revolution of October 1917. It is not a matter of religious respect for the past, but a critical evaluation of the revolution, it of the revolution, its magnificent steps forward but also its errors and its defeat. The Russian revolution itself would have been impossible without the lessons drawn from the Paris Commune. Without the critical balance-sheet of the Commune, drawn up in the “Addresses” to the General Council of the IWA, and Lenin's superb synthesis in State and Revolution, the Russian proletariat could not have conquered. Here lies the profound unity of theory and practice, of the communist programme and action. And it was the Fractions of the Communist Left which undertook the heavy task of drawing up a balance-sheet of the Russian revolution. A balance-sheet which will be every bit as vital for the next revolution as it was in the past.
This is why we warmly welcome, and support with all our strength the efforts aimed at reappropriating this balance-sheet. On our side, we have tried not only to make available all the documents of the communist left that these comrades need, but also to make known their own most important positions when the problems of translation could be overcome, to take part, in a militant spirit, in the controversies on the most important political questions, with that openness and solidarity which characterises discussion among communists.
We have already given an account of the evolution of the he evolution of the proletarian political milieu in Russia, in the International Review n°s 92 and 101, and in our territorial press. In this article, we intend to make public our correspondence with the Southern Bureau of the Marxist Labour Party. The MLP places itself within the continuity of the workers' movement, and in this sense the term “Labour” refers directly to the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this correspondence, the comrades are writing in the name of the Southern Bureau, since they cannot commit the whole MLP to all the details of their positions, given that the discussion is still continuing within the MLP itself. But let us leave them to present, themselves, their political struggles since their first congress in March 1990, which decided on the formation of the “MLP - The party of the dictatorship of the proletariat”[ii].
“A general good humour presided at the creation of a new communist party, which clearly distinguished it from Gorbachev's CPSU, which still existed in the USSR at the time. But the ideological make-up of the participants at this first congress was as varied as it was unstable,as it was unstable, and a first split took place, with a small group of 12 people (who thought that Russia was a “feudal state” with a large-scale developed industry, and that the USSR would therefore have to go through a bourgeois revolution before arriving at the socialist revolution); immediately after the split, they met in an adjacent room and set up a committee for the formation of a 'democratic (marxist) labour party'. But they came to nothing and dissolved” (letter of 10/07/1999).
“There were no Trotskyists as this first congress, but there remained a few Stalinists and supporters of the 'industrial feudalism' idea who, unlike the splitters, did not think that a bourgeois revolution was necessary. Nonetheless, all the participants united around the slogans: 'The working class must organise itself' and 'The power of the soviets is the workers' power'. The second congress also took place in Moscow in September 1990. It adopted several texts of the party, including the programme. The idea of the state capitalist nature of the USSR was adopted. It goes without saying that the remaining defenders of “industrial feudalism in the USSR' left the party during this congress, and formed their own 'Party of the dictatorship of the proletariat (Bolshevik)'. The Stalinists, of whom there were very few, there were very few, also left the party” (idem).
“The MLP's first conference in February 1991 dropped the term 'The party of the proletarian dictatorship' from the group's name. In 1994-95, a little fraction formed inside the party, which thought that the mode of production in the USSR had been neo-asiatic. In early January 1996, this fraction split and joined the (Argentine) Morenist Trotskyists of the International Workers' Party, who are quite active in Russia and the Ukraine” (idem).
The programme adopted at the Second Congress included in particular, the following basic principles:
more precisely, the dictatorship of the urban working class is necessary, but not of the party of the proletarian dictatorship or that of 'all the workers', still less of 'all the people';
the ruin of the Russian party of the proletariat in the 1920s, and the necessity for its creation today;
And the comrades end by saying that: “Although the 1990 programme did not contain a criticism of the theory of 'socialism in one country', or the necessity for the world revolution, these ideas for us are a commonplace, and were understood as being self-evident” (idem).
We can see how bitter was the struggle in Russia, how vital it was to break with the defrocked Stalinists who still took themselves for revolutionaries. We can also see the pressure exerted by a whole panoply of Trotskyist sects, each trying to sell its own patented revolutionary recipe. In 1980, the Western trades unions (CFDT in France, AFL-CIO in the USA) hastened to contribute their logistic support to Solidarnosc, against the struggle of the Polish workers. Today, it is the Trotskyists who are rushing eastwards, with their good advice and their subsidies, to prevent the rebirth of a proletarian political milieu. For the moment, this rebirth can only concern a minority, faced with a multitude of expressions of a ruling ideology which is, by definition, omnipresent.
In their letters of the 15th March and 20th March 2000, the comrades took position on our polemic with the IBRP published in International Review n°100, on the class struggle in the countries ofle in the countries of the capitalist periphery, but above all they developed a series of official positions of the MLP's Southern Bureau.
The author of the two letters is explicit: “The other members of the SB of the MLP agree with the main positions of this commentary. You can therefore consider the above as our joint position” (20/03).
Let us explain first of all that the comrades were somewhat disconcerted by the polemic between the ICC and the IBRP, simply because they had not yet had the possibility of examining closely the fundamental positions of each organisation. This is why they had some difficulty in identifying the real disagreements, and saw them as mere squabbles, emphasising one aspect of reality rather than another, “since they are very often two sides of the same dialectical unity”, as they say. In the end, “You are all right”, depending on one's viewpoint. We think that experience and discussion will allow them to get a clearer view of what the proletarian camp has in common, and where the disagreements lie. The comrades write: “We think that the weakness of the Communist Left in Western Europe is this: instead of co-operating successfully as equals, either you ignore each other, or else you 'unmask' the others by 'pulling the blanket to youing the blanket to your side of the bed', as the Russians say (...) For us, the SB of the MLP, all the Left Communists, the 'statecapists' [ie those who recognise the state capitalist nature of the USSR], should work together as scientific collaborators in the same research institute!” (15/03).
We are not afraid of irony, which all the great revolutionaries enjoyed, for our purpose in putting forward the real positions of our adversaries is to show where they lead, and to defend firmly what we consider to be marxism's untouchable principles. Our attack is not directed at any particular person or group, but an opportunist approach or a theoretical error which we will pay for dearly tomorrow. This is why revolutionary intransigence never contradicts the need for solidarity among communists.
On the basis of this first impression, the comrades conclude that the whole Communist Left is weak, as a historic current. And it is above all this idea that we want to criticise. Seeing that the IBRP and the ICC disagree on the questions of imperialism and the decadence of capitalism, the comrades consider that this is an error of method, that it is not a matter of “either ... or”, but of “both ... and”. Indeed, the same reproach is often made of the communist left. It is obvious that we havevious that we have not adopted all the positions of the Communist Left as it began to emerge from the Communist International. By contrast, it has been wrongly accused of being anti-party, characterised by an activist impatience, a facile radicalism unable to make concessions, and leanings towards anarchism, leading in the end to a sterile purism which was unable to see questions other than in terms of black and white: one thing or the other. All the leading members of the Communist Left were profoundly marxist and deeply attached to the idea of the party. Their aim was precisely to defend the party against opportunism. This was the job at hand. “Comrade”, wrote Gorter in his Reply to comrade Lenin, “the formation of the Third International has by no means done away with opportunism in our own ranks. We can see it here and now in all the communist parties, in every country. Moreover, it would have been a miracle, and contrary to all the laws of development, if the disease of which the Second International died had not survived it inside the Third International!”. Bordiga took up the same idea: “It would be absurd, sterile, and extremely dangerous to claim that the party and the International are mysteriously safe from any relapse into opportunism or any tendency to return to it!” (Dn to it!” (Draft Theses of the Left, Congress of Lyon, 1926). This was a sign that it was necessary to work as a fraction, not simply as an opposition, which was to lead Trotsky's current to a dead-end, then to complete bankruptcy. The Left thereby asserted itself as the true heir to the marxist current in the history of the workers' movement. It returned to the task that Lenin had begun in 1903 against opportunism within the 2nd International, which had allowed the Bolsheviks to denounce both imperialist camps in 1914, to remain faithful to the principles of communism, and so allow the party to play its part to the full in the insurrection of October. It was a work for the party, not against the party. They had to fight to the end despite the exclusions, and all the barriers put in their way by the formal discipline of the leadership. This was the true spirit of Lenin, which inspired the left. In 1911, Lenin gave systematic expression to the notion of the fraction, using the experience that the Bolsheviks had gained since the formation of their fraction at the Geneva conference of 1904: “A fraction is an organisation within the party, which is united not by the workplace, nor by language or any other objective condition, but by a system of common conceptions on the problems posed to the party” (On the new fraction of conciliators, the virtuous). Revolutionary intransigence is absolutely not opposed to realism, it alone can really take account of the concrete situation. What could be more realistic than the Italian Left's rejection of Trotsky's position, that 1936 saw the opening of a new revolutionary period?
The fraction is central to the question of a historical heritage. It is the fraction that ensures the link between the old party and the new, provided that it is able to draw the lessons of the working class' experience, and translate them into a new enrichment of the programme. For example, revolutionaries had seen, since the First World War, that the role of the bourgeois parliament had been completely transformed. But it was the communist left which drew the consequences on the level of principles: the rejection of revolutionary parliamentarism and any participation in the elections of bourgeois democracy. It was the Italian Communist Left which worked out the role of the fraction in greatest depth:
The comrades of the MLP remind us that for dialectical materialism, the movement of reality is a complex phenomenon where a multitude of factors enter into motion. But they forget that the system of contradictions that produces reality opens at certain moments onto a clear-cut alternative. Then it is either one thing, or another, either socialism or barbarism, either a proletarian policy or a bourgeois policy. The centrist drift of the leadership of the International, from the slogan of “conquering the masses” onwards, lies entirely in the search for immediatist short-cuts which profoundly altered its class policy; both the councils and the unions, both the extra-parliamentary struggle and revolutionary parliamentarism, both internationalism and nationalism... And it was a disaster. Each political innovation was a step further into defeat. Far from strengthening the parties anning the parties and communist nuclei, the alliances with Social-Democracy did nothing but drain the forces which could only develop on the basis of a clearly communist programme. Lenin's book, Left-wing communism: an infantile disorder, symbolises this centrist turn. He set out to criticise what he considered the inevitable and passing errors of an authentically revolutionary current: “Obviously, the error represented by left doctrinairism in the workers' movement is, at the present moment, a thousand times less dangerous and less serious than the error represented by right doctrinairism...”. But he ends up mixing the positions of the Left with those of anarchism, while at the same time he raises the prestige of the right on the grounds that it still dominates large sections of the proletariat. That is centrism. And the right made extensive use of the authority thus conferred on it to isolate the Left.
The comrades write: “We consider that the 21st century will witness new battles for national independence. Despite capitalism's power (and even decadence, according to you), in the highly developed countries, capitalism in the backward countries continues to develop, to grow at its own pace, so to say. And this is not a question of principles, it's objective reality!” (15/03).
This is indeed an important point of disagreement within the proletarian political milieu. As the comrades know, we think that Lenin was mistaken when he answered Rosa Luxemburg: “National wars in the colonies and semi-colonies are not only likely, they are inevitable in the epoch of imperialism” (On the Junius pamphlet, October 1916). but it is important to insist that this does not lead the comrades to abandon proletarian internationalism, even if - in our opinion - it weakens it. Their concern is to define under what conditions the unity of the international proletariat is possible, not to hide behind Lenin to support one or other imperialist power as the leftists do.
“You have doubtless remarked how little Leninist we are. Nonetheless, we think that Lenin's position was the best on this question. Each nation (attention! Nation, not nationality or national or ethnic group, etc...) has a complete right to self-determination within the framework of its ethnico-historic territory, to the point of a separation and creation of an independent state (...) What interests marxists is the question of the proletariat's free disposal of its self-determination within this or that nation, in o or that nation, in other words the possibility to dispose freely of itself, if it exists already as class for itself, or else the possibility for the pre-proletarian elements to form themselves as a class within the framework of the new bourgeois national state. This is the case in Chechnya. Chechnya-Ingushetia was industrialised under the Soviet power, but more than 90% of the workers were of Russian origin; the Chechens were petty-bourgeois peasants, intellectuals, state functionaries etc. Let the new Chechen bourgeoisie create the national Chechen proletariat, let it begin to exploit its national proletariat, its peasants, its indigenous population (the Russian workers won't come back now to be decapitated by the nationalists), and then we'll see what will become of the 'solid unity of the Chechen nation'! The unity of Russian and Chechen proletarians will become an objective possibility then, and not before” (15/03).
Nonetheless, this position leads to a series of contradictions which the comrades fail to solve simply by declaring that “For us, the recognition of the objectivity of the national struggle does not mean to 'justify' it (and by the way, what does the term 'justify' mean?), or even to call for an alliance with fractions of the national bourgeoisie!” (20/03).
The whole problem is to know what is this objective reality that the comrades are talking about. In fact, it corresponds to a past epoch, the epoch of the formation of bourgeois nations against feudalism. Have the comrades really analysed the nationalist motivation of the Chechen bourgeoisie? If they had, then they would have realised that these national demands no longer have the same content as they did at a previous stage of social development. Rosa Luxemburg sums it up thus: “During the great revolution, the French bourgeoisie had the right to speak as the Third Estate in the name of the 'French people', and even the German bourgeoisie could consider itself, up to a certain point in 1848, as the representative of the German 'people' (...) In both cases, that meant that the revolutionary cause of the bourgeois class, at that stage of social development, coincided with that of the people as a whole, since the latter was still, in relation to the bourgeoisie, an undifferentiated mass opposed to feudal domination” (The national question and autonomy). What the comrades fail to see is that the stage of social development is not determined by the local Chechen situation, but by the social environment, the general situation. Caught up in the bloody game of imperialism, completely depe, completely dependent on the world market, Chechnya has long since shed the main characteristics of a feudal society.
According to the comrades, a progressive bourgeoisie exists in a certain number of countries: “because national capitalism continues to arise spontaneously from the traditional sectors, in conformity with the general laws of the development of peoples in the epoch of the second social super-formation, that of private property. There are three of these formations: the formation of the primitive community (n°1); then the formation of private property - including the slavery of antiquity, feudalism, and capitalism (n°2) - and finally the formation of an authentic communism (n°3). This is the triad according to Marx (see the drafts of his reply to Vera Zassoulitch, 1881). But there are few countries - and there will be fewer and fewer - where a self-developing national capitalism predominates. Where this does happen, the progressive bourgeoisie can come to power with the support of the people (including the workers, especially since they are at a pre-proletarian stage!). But all that is very temporary, since more and more depends on the world imperialist bourgeoisie, as the case of Afghanistan shows us (...) Capitalism can be compared to a wave in the 'sea' ave in the 'sea' of the second super-formation (see above) and not to a wave but to the process of waves! The second super-formation (Marx also called it 'economic') engenders these waves itself from within! But the limits, the boundaries of this 'sea' of the 'economic super-formation' are at the same time the limits of capitalism, they are the coast on which capitalism's undulation 'breaks'.
The essential characteristic of this 'sea' of the economic social formation (the second in the triad) is the law of value. But the 'wave process' begins, is excited by and receives its impetus from... the small owner-producer! He was, is, and will be the active agent of the law of value over the whole extent of the economic social formation (the 'second', that of private capital). This is why capitalism cannot destroy the small producer! And this is why state monopolism cannot be either complete or long-lasting. The wave will ebb! If the Left Communists had analysed things from this point of view, they would have avoided many problems, including in their own relationships! And the place and the role of the world social proletarian revolution would have been much more comprehensible” (20/03).
How are we to explain this perspective of n this perspective of a regression in state capitalism that the comrades defend? Every day confirms the tendency towards the management of the economy by a single collective capitalist, as Engels anticipated in his Anti-Dühring. Everywhere, it is the state that regulates the mergers of the great multinational corporations and imposes on them its orientations. Any state that abandoned such a control would immediately find itself in a position of weakness in the trade war. Their position is doubtless to be explained by the collapse of the USSR. In this case, the comrades are generalising from a specific situation. The USSR was marked by its economic weakness, and what collapsed was not state capitalism, but its most caricatural form, where the vast majority of the economy was nationalised. Direct state ownership of its enterprises is always a sign of weakness. In the most developed countries, state capitalism is just as real, but it is far more flexible since the state only has part ownership in some companies, or else satisfies itself with laying down the economic regulation which every company must obey.
One can understand why the comrades present state capitalism as a passing phenomenon, since for them it is the small independent producer who best symbolises private property and the law of value. It is true thatvalue. It is true that capitalism took off within a society characterised by private property and commodity exchange; indeed capitalism is its logical conclusion, its high point, when commodities are transformed into capital. It is also true that capitalism will never be able to eradicate completely the small producer. But it is equally true that the small producer is constantly under attack from competition. Today, when overproduction has become generalised and permanent, a part of the bourgeoisie is ejected into the petty-bourgeoisie, but at the same time innumerable small proprietors are ruined and become unemployed, or survive with a small business which is often at the limit of legality. The small producer is therefore not characteristic of capitalism, but rather a survival of pre-capitalist societies, or of the first stage of capitalism's development. In bourgeois mythology, the capitalist is always presented as a small producer who has become a big producer thanks to his own efforts. The small artisan of the Middle Ages has become the great industrialist. Historical reality is quite different. In decomposing feudalism, it was not the urban artisans who emerged as the capitalist class, but rather the merchants. Moreover, the first proletarians were often none other than these same artisans subjected to the formal domination of capitmination of capital. The comrades forget that before being a producer, the capitalist is first and foremost a merchant, a trader. He is a merchant who trades mainly in labour power.
It seems that the comrades have drawn their inspiration from a passage in Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder. Lenin explains that the bourgeoisie's power “lies, not only in the strength of international capital, the strength and durability of their international connections, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small-scale production. Unfortunately, small-scale production is still widespread in the world, and small-scale production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale” (published on https://www.marxists.org [1]). Let us remember the context. We are in 1920, and since 1918 a controversy has been developing within the Bolshevik party between Lenin and the Left Communists who published the paper Kommunist. The Left's leading figure, Bukharin, soon rejoined the majority of the party, after finding himself in the minority over the Brest-Litovsk treaty. But the group continued the controversy over the question of state uestion of state capitalism, which Lenin presented as a stage on the way to socialism, and therefore to a step forward. It is true that the victorious proletariat was confronted not just with the fury of the old ruling classes, but also with the dead weight of the vast peasant masses, who had their own reasons for resisting any further advance of the revolutionary process. But these social strata weighed on the proletariat above all through the state which, with its natural tendency to defend the social status quo, tended to become an autonomous power in its own right. All the revolutionaries knew that isolation would be fatal to the Russian revolution. The problem was whether bourgeois power would be re-established through a military victory of the White armies, or under the enormous pressure of the petty-bourgeoisie. From this standpoint, the party was unable to see the process that was to lead to a rebirth of the Russian bourgeoisie through the formation of a state bureaucracy. The Left's criticisms contained many weaknesses (how indeed could it be otherwise in the heat of events?), and Lenin often rightly put his finger on them. But the Communist Left demonstrated its full strength when it denounced the danger of state capitalism. We find the same approach later on, in the German Left which was the first to analyse Stalinist Ruyse Stalinist Russia as state capitalist. In the passage quoted above, Lenin expresses profound confusions on capitalism's nature, which were already present in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. On this point as on others, today it is possible to synthesise the contributions of all the Communist Left, despite its diversity and sometimes contradictory positions, because it remained fundamentally faithful to the marxist method and communist principles: “State capitalism is not an organic step towards socialism. In fact it represents capitalism’s last form of defence against the collapse of its system and the emergence of communism. The communist revolution is the dialectical negation of state capitalism” (International Review n°99).
In our opinion, it is a mistake to present the small independent producer as the agent of the law of value. More generally, it is not the capitalists who make capitalism, but the reverse: capitalism engenders capitalists. Applying this marxist approach to Russia, we can understand why “the state did not function as we intended”, to use Lenin's words. The power that imposed its direction on the Russian state was far greater than the NEP-men, or private capitalism, or small property: it was the vast impersonal power of wimpersonal power of world capital which inexorably determined the course of the Russian economy and the Soviet state. If the comrades have difficulty in grasping the fundamental nature of capitalism, or of state capitalism as an expression of a decadent system, it is doubtless also because they are looking at things in the very long term, at the same level as Marx in his letter to Vera Zassoulitch when he divides humanity's history into three periods: the archaic social formation (primitive communism), the secondary social formation (class society), and modern communism, which re-establishes collective production and appropriation at a higher level. For Marx, the examples of primitive societies were one more proof that the family, private property, and the state are not inherent to human nature. These texts are also a denunciation of a fatalistic interpretation of economic evolution, and of the bourgeois vision of a linear progress, without contradictions. But if we remain on this terrain, then it becomes impossible to examine precisely what is specific about capitalism, and above all to see that capitalism itself has a history, that it changes from being a progressive system to become a serious barrier to the development of the productive forces. Not that the foundations of such an analysis are not already present in the Communist Manifesto, as in other texts by Marx. After the Paris Commune and the end of the great national struggles of the 19th century, Marx was able to see that the bourgeoisie in the major capitalist countries no longer played a revolutionary role on the historical stage, even if capitalism still had a vast field of expansion before it. A new period, of colonial conquest and imperialism, was opening up. This approach made it possible for marxism to anticipate historical evolution, and to foresee capitalism's entry into its period of decadence. This is very clear in this passage in the second draft: “The capitalist system is past its apogee in the West, approaching the point where it will no longer be anything but a regressive social system” (quoted in Tedor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian road, January 1985)
Marx's reflections on the Russian rural commune were to be travestied by certain leftists. The American Shanin, for example, sees them as the proof that socialism could be achieved through peasant revolutions on capitalism's periphery. Without sharing his admiration for Ho Chi Minh and Mao, Raya Dunayevskaya and the News and Letters group have taken the same approach. They consider that the Marx of the 1880s is looking for a new revolutionary subject, other than the workinother than the working class. A part of leftism thus presents the working class as one revolutionary subject amongst others: primitive tribes, women, gays, blacks, youth, the peoples of the “Third World”.
Such aberrations have nothing in common with the ideas of the Russian comrades. But as we will see, their defence of the possibility of national wars today leads them to an original analysis of the October 1917 revolution.
“As for ourselves [the SB of the MLP], we think that history has already refuted this cornerstone Leninist conception of the 'weak link'! But attention, in a very original manner: it has sown that it was possible to break 'the chain of imperialism' and even to 'build socialism' in backward countries (or 'retarded' as you call them, although I would make a distinction here: socialism began to be 'built' not only in capitalistically retarded countries, in Russia for example, but also in Mongolia, Vietnam, etc, which are really backward). And we see: yes, it is possible to break the chain, to make a 'socialist revolution', it is even possible to build socialism in separate countries and to set it up (in other words, 'finish building it')... But! But all this does not in any way lead to communism! Never and in no way>! Never and in no way [in English in the original]! Why, from a theoretical point of view, were the Bolsheviks able to take this path, why were they able to deceive themselves and many others, including the Left Communists? The cause of all that lies in... just one word (and the question, the problem is not my subjectivism: under this word is hidden a whole incorrect, fundamentally anti-marxist conception!), this word (this 'order' of the day!) is 'the socialist revolution'! When Marx, and above all Engels, accepted such a travesty of the concept of 'the social revolution of the proletariat', of the world communist revolution! As for the 'socialist revolution', it ends sooner or later in 'building socialism', and then it turns out that this 'socialism', whether 'state' or 'market' or 'national', etc, in reality does not break with capitalism!” (15/03).
“Where the exogenous capitalist sector exists, the progressive bourgeoisie plays a role and has an influence inversely proportional to the sector's degree of maturity: the bourgeoisie of the imported capitalist sector weighs on the progressive national bourgeoisie and corrupts it, without speaking of the world (transnational) imperialist bourgeoisie. These two sectors were present in Russia at the beginning oia at the beginning of the 20th century, and Russian marxism was the expression of relationships within the exogenous capitalist sector. But then the Bolsheviks decided to speak for all the exploited: in the sector of imported developed capitalism, in that of national capitalism (and even in the agricultural sector with its surviving rural community). And so, they became 'social-jacobins' and proclaimed the 'socialist revolution'” (20/03).
“You deal with the problem of the objective and the subjective in the world proletarian revolution, and this is correct. But why do you not have the slightest doubt that 'objectively the revolution has been possible since the world imperialist war of 1914', etc? Did not Marx and Engles also, in their time, think that 'the revolution was objectively possible'? Remember the categories of the dialectic: possibility and reality, necessity and eventuality! As we know, it is necessary to distinguish abstract (formal) from practical (concrete) possibility. Abstract possibility is characterised by the absence of the main obstacles to the object's becoming, nonetheless not all the necessary conditions are present for its realisation. Practical possibility possesses all the conditions necese conditions necessary for its realisation: latent in reality, it becomes a new reality under certain conditions. The change in these conditions as a whole determine the transition from abstract to practical possibility, and this latter is transformed into reality. The numerical measure of the possibility is expressed in the notion of probability. Necessity, as we know, is the mode of (the) transformation of possibility into reality, for which there is only one possibility in a certain object, that which is transformed into reality. And, on the contrary, eventuality is the mode of (the) transformation of possibility into a reality for which there are several different possibilities within a certain object (under certain circumstances, of course), which can be transformed into reality, but only one of which will actually be realised” (15/03).
We do not understand why we should say that the construction of socialism in one country is both possible and impossible because it does not break in any way with capitalism. We prefer to stick to the assertion that socialism in one country was a mystification which had no relationship with reality, a weapon of the counter-revolution. What the comrades seem to be saying is that at some point the Bolsheviks ceased to defend the interests of the proletariat. That the proletariat. That was indeed the Stalinist counter-revolution. The whole difficulty of the problem, which many revolutionaries have struggled with since the 1930s, is that the counter-revolution only comes at the end of a whole process of degeneration and opportunist drift. In such a long, and sometimes imperceptible process, we have in some sense a transformation of quantity into quality. What was at first no more than a problem within the workers' movement has become the bourgeois counter-revolution. But the break in the nature of the Soviet regime is no less clear for all that: it takes place through Stalin's elimination of the Bolshevik old guard, the replacement of the perspective of world revolution by the defence of Russian national capital. The weakening of the power of the workers' councils, and of a Bolshevik party undermined by opportunism, followed parallel paths until the establishment of the power of the Russian state bourgeoisie. The memory of the real movement of class confrontations at the end of the 1920s in Russia arms us not only against bourgeois propaganda, but also against any weakening of revolutionary theory such that it might see a continuity, whether objective or subjective, between Lenin and Stalin.
The comrades end up with just such a weakening when they lose sight of the Stalinist counter-revolutiinist counter-revolution, and introduce the idea that “ the Bolsheviks decided to speak for all the exploited”. When and why such a decision? Do the terms “all the exploited” mean all the workers, in other words several classes including non-exploiting classes like the peasantry and the rest of the petty bourgeoisie, which are exploited classes under capitalism, as well as the proletariat? If that is the case, then they are accepting as a reality the talk of Stalin, and Mao in particular, on the “bloc of four classes”. At all events, we cannot follow them in their assertion that Marx and Engels accepted (?) the concept of a socialist revolution which “does not break in reality with capitalism”. It is true that some of Marx and Engels' formulations can lead to a confusion between the nationalisation of capitalism and socialism. This is readily understood, at an epoch when the proletariat could still, under certain circumstances, support the progressive bourgeoisie against the remnants of feudalism. Consciousness and programme are the result of a constant battle against the ideology of the ruling class. When revolutionaries sharpen, make more precise, the letter of the programme, they thus remain, and must remain, faithful to the spirit of the previous generation of marxists. Thation of marxists. The definitive correction of the surviving “state capitalist” errors in marxist doctrine was made possible by the experience of the 1917 Russian revolution. But its premises are already present in Marx, through his definition of capital as a social relationship, and of capitalism as a system founded on wage labour, the extraction and realisation of surplus value. Seen like this, the transformation of individual capital property into collective state property in no way changes the nature of society. Moreover, the germ of their critique of the progressive nature of collective state property is already contained in Marx and Engels' struggle against Lassalle's state socialism, which wanted the workers to use the state against the capitalists, and against the Liebknecht/Bebel current within the German social-democracy, who allowed Lassallean formulations to pass through into the Gotha programme.
We might summarise the comrades' thinking as follows. Bolshevism was at first a marxist current expressing the interests of the proletariat in the framework of developed capitalist relationships. But these were foreign in origin, while there existed within Russia a less developed young capitalism which needed an anti-feudal revolution. Thus, the Bolsheviks did not succumb to the Stalinist counter-revolution: they haer-revolution: they had already succumbed to the charm of national capital, and had decided to become “social-jacobins”. Here we see the difference between their vision and that of councilism. For the latter, the Russian revolution could only end in state capitalism, and the Bolsheviks were a reflection of this destiny from the outset. This discovery came late, since it dates from the 1930s when Pannekoek, who by this time had become a councilist, managed the tour de force of revealing Bolshevism's original sin in Lenin's book Materialism and empirio-criticism, written in 1908: “He is clearly and exclusively in the image of the Russian revolution, for which he exerted all his strength. This book is so far in conformity with bourgeois materialism that, had it been known and correctly interpreted in Western Europe... it would have been possible to foresee that in one way or another the Russian revolution could only finish in a kind of capitalism founded on the workers' struggle” (Lenin as philosopher).
The marxist method is based on the concept of the whole, whence it “rises” to comprehend more concrete situations. By starting from the small independent producer, or from a local situation, the comrades are moving away from the marxist method and end up by mistaking a few vesti mistaking a few vestiges of feudalism for a general characteristic. It is useful to remember that in 1917, Russia was the world's fifth industrial power and inasmuch as capitalism's development had largely by-passed the development of artisan production and manufacture, Russian capitalism had already adopted the most modern and concentrated forms: the Putilov factory for example, with more than 40,000 workers, was the world's largest. It is this tendency which gives the key to the situation in Russia, not the opposition between an exogenous and an endogenous capitalism. The development of economic relationships had arrived at a point which had nothing in common with the epoch of the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. “Since the Crimean war, and its modernisation through reform, the Russian state apparatus survives largely thanks to foreign, mostly French, capital (...) For the last two decades, French capital has served essentially two aims: railway construction thanks to state guarantees, and military spending. To meet these two needs, a powerful large-scale industry has been born in Russia since the 1870s, sheltered by a system of reinforced customs duties. French capital has given rise in Russia to a young capitalism which in turn needs to be constantly supported by substantial imports of machines and other means of production from the leading industrial nations, Britain and Germany” (Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to political economy). The example of Poland is equally significant. “The great majority of the Polish bourgeoisie is foreign in origin (it settled in Poland at the beginning of the 19th century), and has always been hostile to the idea of national independence. All the more so in that during the 1820s and 30s, Polish industry was focused on exports, even before the creation of a domestic market. The kingdom's bourgeoisie, instead of seeking a national reunification with Galicia and the Principality, always looked to the East for support, since the massive export of textiles to Russia was the foundation of Polish capitalism's growth” (Rosa Luxemburg: The national question and autonomy). The formation of the world market is a major feature of the capitalist mode of production, it is this process that destroys pre-capitalist relationships. It is this dynamic process that creates the conditions for the unity of the international proletariat, not the autonomous development of a national capital. The 1905 revolution gave the first practical demonstration of this process. By contrast, the slogan of the “right of peoples to self-determinationelf-determination”, which the Bolsheviks tragically supported, has only reinforced the division of the proletariat. Has this not been confirmed in practice during the 1920s?
Neither the Bolsheviks, nor any modern bourgeoisie, can be compared with the Jacobins. The end of the formation of the world market, and the crisis of overproduction, have eliminated the possibility of any real development. The Chechen bourgeoisie will never create a national proletariat. Where would it find an outlet for its commodities? Only the proletarian revolution can lay the foundations for an industrialisation of the backward countries. The Communist Manifesto describes very well how the bourgeoisie creates a world in its own image, by exporting cheap commodities and expanding its commercial relationships. But it reaches its limits long before industrialising the whole planet. Marx and Engels had already shown how the insoluble contradictions springing from the relations of wage labour could only lead capitalism to its decadence. Charles Fourier's penetrating critique had already sketched an outline of this idea: “Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against the talk about illimitable hbout illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race” (https://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877-ad/p3.htm#c1 [2]). Marx explains this phenomenon. At a certain moment in capitalism's development, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall can no longer be compensated by an increase in the mass of surplus value, due to the saturation of the world market. “Now, [the capitalist] has all the more need to find outlets in that his production has increased. Indeed, the more powerful and costly means of production that he has set in motion allow him to sell his commodities more cheaply, but they also force him to sell more, to conquer an incomparably greater market for his commodities (...) Finally, in the same measure in which the capitalists are compelled, by the movement described above, to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on an ever-increasing scale, and for this purpose to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit, in the same measure do they increase the industrial earthquakes, in the midst of which the commercial world can preserve itself only by sacrificing a portion of its wealth, its products, and even its forces of production, to the gods of the lowe gods of the lower world -- in short, the crises increase. They become more frequent and more violent, if for no other reason, than for this alone, that in the same measure in which the mass of products grows, and there the needs for extensive markets, in the same measure does the world market shrink ever more, and ever fewer markets remain to be exploited, since every previous crisis has subjected to the commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but superficially exploited market” (Marx, Wage labour and capital, https://www.marxists.org [1]). It remained for the Left Fractions, with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in the lead, to show how the outbreak of the first imperialist world war was the sign that capitalism had entered into its declining phase. The communist revolution was no longer only necessary, it had at last become possible.
At the end of this first response to the comrades of the MLP, while we regret that we have been unable to translate their texts[iii] from the Russian, we call for the development of the debate and reflection.
We hope that the discussion, and mutual criticism, will continue. But we also urge that this debate should not be limited to ourselves: it should be opened to include be opened to include other comrades in Russia, as well as to the other groups of the proletarian political milieu throughout the world.
Pal
iSince May 1968, the term “leftism” has passed into common usage to describe, not the oppositions within the Communist International which Lenin criticised fraternally and which were expressions of the Communist Left, but all those extra-parliamentary currents which, like the Trotskyists and the Maoists (here we should distinguish the “Maoists” of the western countries which we describe as “leftists” from Mao himself who, in theorising a sort of “peasant national communism” never had anything to do with the workers' movement. His was more an “oriental” version of Stalinism), betrayed internationalism, and critically supported the parties of the bourgeois left (socialists and Stalinists) and the unions. It is therefore a term to describe a political tendency which belongs clearly to the bourgeoisie's political apparatus.
iiThis correspondence was originally written in French. The translations are ours, and we have of course done our best not to distort the comrades' meaning, as we understand it.
iiiMost of the texts that we possess, in English or in French, are letters.
There is not one international organisation of the bourgeoisie World Trade Organisation, World Bank, OECD, IMF which doesnt proclaim its intention to do everything it can for sustainable development, so concerned are they for the future generations. Theres not one state which doesnt proclaim its deep respect for the environment. Theres not one ecologically-oriented Non-Government Organisation (NGO) which hasnt organised all sorts of demonstrations, petitions or memorandums. Theres not one bourgeois newspaper which hasnt featured a pseudo-scientific article on global warming. All these fine people, with all their fine intentions, had their representatives at the conference in The Hague from the 13 to the 25 November 2000, which had the aim of defining the ways in which the Kyoto protocol (1) would be put into effect. No less than 2000 delegates, representing 180 countries, surrounded by 4000 observers and journalists, had the job of concocting the miracle recipe for putting an end to climatic abnormalities. Result: Nothing. Strictly zero. Or rather, there was one result: one more proof that for the bourgeoisie, considerations about the survival of humanity fall a very long way behind the defence of the national capital.
Ten years ago, in our article Ecology: Its capitalism thats poisoning the Earth (International Review n°63), the ICC declared: The ecological disaster is now tangibly threatening the very life-support system of the planet. Today we have to say that capitalism is carrying out this threat. Throughout the 90s, the plundering of the planet has continued at a frenzied rhythm: deforestation, soil erosion, toxic pollution of the air, water tables and oceaables and oceans, pillage of natural fossil resources, dissemination of chemical or nuclear substances, destruction of animal or plant species, explosion of infectious diseases, and finally the steady increase in average temperatures over the surface of the planet (seven of the hottest years for millennia were in the 90s). Ecological disasters are becoming more combined, more global, often taking on an irreversible character, with long term consequences that are hard to predict.
And while the bourgeoisie has proved itself incapable of doing the slightest thing even to slow down this destructive folly, it has done a great deal to hide its own responsibility for it behind a multitude of ideological covers. What the ruling class has to do is present ecological calamities when it cannot purely and simply ignore them as outside the sphere of capitalist social relations, outside the class struggle. It thus produces all the false alternatives, from government measures to the anti-globalisation speeches of the NGOs, to obscure the only real perspective for taking humanity out of this nightmare: the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production by the working class.
For revolutionaries, the real issue here is capitalism's own productionist logic, as Marx analysed in Capital: sed in Capital: Accumulation for accumulations sake, production for productions sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. But what avails lamentations in the face of historical necessity? (Vol 1. Chapter XXIV). Here lies the logical and the unlimited cynicism of capitalism: the accumulation of capital and not the satisfaction of human needs is the real goal of capitalist production, and therefore the fate of the working class, or of the environment, is of little import. With the saturation of markets which became evident in 1914, capitalism entered into decadence. In other words, the accumulation of capital increasingly became a source of conflict and convulsions. During this period, capital's ruthless destruction of the environment takes on a different scale and quality This is the epoch in which all the capitalist nations are forced to compete with each other over a saturated world market; an epoch, therefore, of a permanent war economy, with a disproportionate growth of heavy industry; an epoch characterised by the irrational, wasteful duplication of industrial complexes in each national unit, the rise of the megacities the development of forms of agriculture that have been no less ecologically damaging than most forms of industry (International Review n°63). This tendency has taken a further step in the final phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of decomposition, in which the system has been rotting on its feet for two decades because neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie has been able to impose their solution to the crisis: proletarian revolution or generalised war.
Capitalism has put chaos and destruction on the agenda of history. The consequences for the environment are catastrophic. This what we are going to illustrate (in a very partial way, because there are so many examples of the damage being done), while also showing how at every stage the bourgeoisie sets up ideological firebreaks to head off all those who are legitimately asking the question of whether this barbaric cycle of destruction can be stopped.
Capitalism throws the ecosystem out of joint
Because of its global character and implications, the question of climate change is of primary importance. Its no accident that the bourgeoisie has made it one of the major axes of its media campaigns. The pedants may claim that in matters of meteorology and climatology, man has a decidatology, man has a decidedly short memory (Le Monde 10.9.2000), or talk about classic millenarian fears, but such an attitude which the bourgeoisie itself doesnt wholly share anyway is an implicit defence of the status quo, of a dominant position in which one feels oneself to be well-protected. The proletariat cant afford such a luxury. Physically, its always the workers and the poorest sections of the world population who are hit the hardest by the apocalyptic consequences of the disruption in the cycles of terrestrial life which the capitalist apprentice sorcerer has brought about.
The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which is in charge of synthesising scientific work on climatic change, in its Report to the Decision-makers dated 22 October 2000, summarised the basic elements which had been observed, all of which show a qualitative rupture in the evolution of the climate: Average surface temperature has increased by 0.6% since 1860 New analyses indicate that the 20th century has probably seen the most significant warming in all the centuries for the last thousand years in the northern hemisphere The area of snow cover has diminished by about 10% since the end of the 1960s and the period in which lakes and rivers are under ice inrivers are under ice in the northern hemisphere has diminished by about two weeks in the 20th century ..the thickness of the Arctic ice has diminished by 40% .Average sea levels have risen by between 10 and 20 cm during the 20th century the rhythm of these rising sea levels during the 20th century has been about 10 times higher than in the previous three thousand years Precipitation has increased by between 0.5 and 1% by decade during the 20th century on most continents in the middle and higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Rain has diminished in most of the inter-tropical regions
This rupture is even clearer when we look at the concentration of so-called greenhouse gases (2), seeing that since the beginning of the industrial era, the chemical composition of the planet has been through an unprecedented evolution (3), a point that the IPCC doesnt deny: Since 1750, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has grown by a third. The present concentration has never been superseded for 420,000 years and probably not for 20 million years The level of concentration of methane in the atmosphere has multiplied by 2.5 since 1750 and continues to grow. s to grow. In fact its essentially in the 20th century, especially in the last few decades, and not since 1750, that these changes have been observed.
The simple fact that you can place in one column the period of the decadence of capitalism, and in the other column periods lasting hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, is in itself the most striking condemnation of the insane irresponsibility of capitalism as a mode of production. It is an undeniable fact that these mutations are the direct result of the savage and anarchic activity of industries and transport systems based on the burning of fossil fuels. It goes without saying that although in the same period capitalism has considerably developed its productive capacities, the working class and the majority of the planets population has not reaped the fruits. From this point of view, the overall human and social balance-sheet of capitalist decadence, with all its accompanying war and poverty, is far more sombre than the climatic balance-sheet in itself, and therefore cannot provide any attenuating circumstances (4).
Furthermore, the IPCC report points out that the proofs of human influence on the global climate are stronger today than at the time of the second report in d report in 1995. This is further evidence against the bourgeoisie, which has not ceased manipulating scientific discourse throughout the 90s, always trying to pose the wrong questions. Thus, once global warming was admitted (still very late in relation to the scientific studies), the bourgeoisies question has been: what is the formal proof that global warming is linked to industrial activity and not to a natural cycle? Posed in this direct manner, it is difficult to respond scientifically. On the other hand, what has always been particularly flagrant is that we have this qualitative rupture in the observed evolution of the climate as described above, at a time when the cyclical tendencies in the climate (which are well known and can be easily modelled because they are determined by astronomical parameters such as the variations in the terrestrial orbit, the inclination of the Earths axis, etc.) place us in a period of relative glaciation over the last 1000 years and for the next 5000 years. And if that werent enough, two other parameters would also point towards things getting colder: the cycle of solar activity and the increased amount of particles in the atmosphere an increase also due to industrial pollution (but also to volcanic eruptions). This says quite enough about the hypocrisy of the bourgeois of the bourgeoisie waiting for proof! Now that it is difficult to deny the capitalist origin of global warming, the new question occupying the media is: can it be demonstrated formally that there is a link between global warming and the extreme climatic phenomena we have seen recently (cyclones Mitch and Eline, storms in France, floods in Venezuela, Britain, etc)? Again, the scientific community is hard placed to answer this not very scientific question, whose sole aim is to instil the idea that perhaps global warming wont have very tangible consequences. Official organisms like Météo-France have come up with some delectably Jesuitical formulations: It has not been shown that the recent extreme events are signs of climatic change, but when this climatic change is fully perceptible, there is no doubt that it will be accompanied by extreme events!
And between now and 2100 the expected climatic change are extremely grave. Again according to the IPCC: the average rise in surface temperature is estimated to be between 1.5 and 6% such an increase is without precedent in the last ten thousand years; meanwhile the rise in sea levels will be an average of 0.47 meters, which is two to four times the rate observed during the 20th century
century. Again, these predictions dont take into account the real rhythm of deforestation (at its present rate, all the forests will have gone in 600 years). The probable consequences of these climatic variations and will be terrible and murderous: floods and cyclones in some regions and drought in others; scarcity of drinking water, the disappearance of animal species, and more. But for Dominique Frommel, the research director at INSERM, the main danger is not there. It resides in mans dependence on the environment. Migrations, the over-concentration of human beings in the urban milieu, the diminution in water supplies, pollution and poverty have always [but capitalism has developed mega-cities, poverty and pollution far more than any other system!] created conditions which facilitate the diffusion of infectious micro-organisms. We know that the reproductive and infectious capacities of insects and rodents, the vectors of parasites or viruses, is connected to the temperature and humidity of their surroundings. In other words, a rise in temperature, even a modest one, gives the green light to the expansion of numerous agents which are pathogenic to man and animals. This is why parasitic diseases such as malaria, schistosomiasis) and sleeping sickness, or viral infections like dengue ions like dengue fever, certain forms of encephalitis or haemorrhaging fevers have gained ground in recent years. Either they are reappearing in areas from where they had previously disappeared, or they are now hitting regions which had previously been spared The projections for the year 2050 show that malaria will menace 3 billion human beings In the same way, the number of diseases transmitted by water is also spiralling. The warming of fresh waters facilitates the proliferation of bacteria. The warming of salt waters particularly when they are enriched by human effluent - allows phytoplanctons, which are the real breeding grounds for the cholera bacillus, to reproduce at an accelerating rate. After virtually disappearing from Latin America around 1960, cholera claimed 1,368, 053 victims between 1991 and 1996. Meanwhile, new infections are appearing or have begun to advance beyond the ecological niches in which they had previously been confined Medicine remains disarmed, despite the progress that has been made, faced with this explosion of so many unexpected pathologies. The epidemiology of infectious diseases .could in the 21st century take on a new visage, notably with the expansion of zoonoses, those infections which can be passed from vertebrate animals to humans, and vice versad vice versa (Manière de Voir, no.50, p77).
At this level of historical responsibility, the ideological response of he bourgeoisie has been to organise gigantic media rodeos, from the Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 to The Hague via Kyoto and Berlin, aimed at making us believe that the ruling class has finally become aware of the dangers menacing the planet. The mystification operates at several levels.
First it aims to give the impression that if the objectives fixed at Kyoto had been attained, that would be a significant first step. But by all the evidence, not only have these objectives not been attained, but, even if they had, the targets were quite derisory and would not have much effect on global warming. All the NGOs and all the ecological parties who take part in the discussions about how to apply the Kyoto protocol are thus part of this mystification. Not even a step sideways has been achieved, let alone a step forwards.
Secondly, to make us believe that if the states still dont understand each other, its because they have a different vision of the way to reach the common goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, each state knows quite well what its doing when it defends its natwhen it defends its national interests and thus uses the negotiations to impose production norms which best suit its own levels of production, technological capacities, energy sources, etc. For example, neither France nor the USA have kept to the Kyoto agreements (since 1990 carbon emissions have gone up by 11% in the US and 6.5% for France), but when president Chirac declared that it is above all to America that we look for hope for an effective limitation on greenhouse gases ( Le Monde 20.11.2000), we should translate this as: in the trade war between us, we would really like to put a ball and chain around your feet. Its the same when it comes to setting up an observation system as demanded by the European Union, involving taxes on those who exceed their pollution quotas (here again, its not a question of preventing pollution). You might as well ask the USA to finance the European Airbus and to limit the production of Boeings! For the countries of the third world, its even more simple: the weight of the crisis, of debt and of poverty result in the systematic pillage of natural resources and a laissez-faire attitude to the big western companies, who feed local corruption. All this is the unavoidable reality of capitalism. In this framework, any support for one measure against another boils down to plther boils down to playing the game of one or several states.
Finally, the last mystification, one dear to reformists of all stripes: the idea that we should struggle for a clean capitalism that respects the environment, a capitalism without competition an imaginary capitalism. This holy crusade is being carried on today in the name of anti-globalisation and addresses its humble supplications to the state, asking it to legislate against, tax, and otherwise reign in the nasty multinationals. But just as labour legislation does not in any way limit capitalist exploitation, unemployment and poverty, and above all does not prevent such legislation being bypassed when needs must, so any legislation, fiscal constraint or other measure which claims to have an ecological value can only do things which are perfectly acceptable to capitalism, in fact which are favourable to the modernisation of the productive apparatus. Either this, or its purely and simply a disguised form of protectionism or a convenient justification for anti-working class measures (lay-offs when you close polluting factories, wage cuts to absorb the cost of anti-pollution measures, etc). From this point of view, eco-taxes (I pollute, but I pay for it .a bit) and the market in greenhouse gas emission permits, whose principle has beenose principle has been accepted, show the way forward for capitalist realism when it comes to fighting pollution and global warming!
Its for this reason that the most coherent ideologues of political ecology always try to justify the measures they advocate in terms of capitalist profitability; and thats why you often see them working as consultants in the centres of bourgeois decision making. This is clear with the Green parties which participate in a number of governments (France, Germany) but also for the NGOs like the World Conservation Monitoring Centre which has become an antenna of the UN and argues that policies and measures concerning climate change must have a relationship with efficiency and cost so that they ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost. In the same way, the main peddler of anti-globalisation (concretely, anti-US) ideology in France, Le Monde Diplomatique, is outraged that the combined impact of the social cost of automobile transport noise, air pollution, traffic congestion, use of space and lack of safety could represent up to 5% of Gross National Product (Maniere de Voir no. 50, p70). This conversion to ecological realism can also take the form of an effective aid to the state, as we saw when Greenpeace offew when Greenpeace offered its services after the sinking of the chemical transport ship Levoli-Sun off the French coast in November 2000.
Its characteristic of all the ecological currents, parties or NGOs to make the capitalist state the guarantor of common interests. Their mode of activity is fundamentally a-classist (since we are all concerned) and democratic (they are in particular champions of local democracy, and insist that through popular pressure, citizens action, we can oblige the state, which is imagined to be sincerely moved by such demonstrations, to take measures in favour of the environment). It goes without saying that such a form of protest, which puts into question neither the foundations of the capitalist mode of production nor the power of the ruling class, can be totally assimilated by the bourgeoisie. And for those who dont believe in such fairytales, their demoralisation is also a victory for the bourgeoisie.
We have seen that its quite illusory to think that there can be mechanisms within capitalism that would enable us to put an end to ecological disasters (5), since the latter are the result of the most basic functioning of capitalism. It is therefore the social relations of capital which have to be wiped out if we are to estabout if we are to establish a society in which the satisfaction of human needs, which would become the motive of production, is not achieved at the expense of the natural environment, since the two are intimately connected. Such a society, communism, can only be brought about by the proletariat, the only social force that can develop a consciousness and a practise that can revolutionise the existing world, practically transform the present state of affairs (Marx, The German Ideology).
Since its appearance as the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, marxism affirmed itself against bourgeois ideology, including its most advanced materialist conceptions, which saw nature as an object external to man, and not as a historical nature. The mastery of nature , for the proletariat, has thus never meant the pillage of nature: At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all the other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly (Engels, Dialectics of Natls, Dialectics of Nature).
It remains the case that the development of an awareness about the gravity of the ecological situation cannot in itself be a factor for mobilising the struggles which the working class has to wage between now and the communist revolution. As we said in IR 63, and as has been confirmed over the past 10 years: the issue as such doesnt allow the proletariat to affirm itself as a distinct social force. Indeed it provides an ideal pretext for the bourgeoisies inter-classist campaigns The working class will only be able to deal with the ecological issue as a whole when it has conquered political power on a world scale. But the aberrations of this decomposing capitalist system also directly touch the workers (health, food, housing, etc) and at this level can serve to radicalise future economic struggles.
As for all the elements from outside the proletariat who are sincerely rebelling against the horrible spectacle of the massacre of the planet, the only constructive way forward for their indignation is to make a critique of ecologist ideology, and, as the Communist Manifesto invites them, to raise themselves to a general understanding of the history of the class struggle and to join the combat of the proletariat in its revolutionary organisations. organisations.
The destruction of the environment is not a technical problem, but a political one: more than ever, capitalism is a mortal danger for the survival of humanity; more than ever the future of humanity is in the hands of the proletariat. This is in no way a mechanical or abstract vision. Its a necessity which has its roots in the reality of the capitalist mode of production. To cut the knot between communist revolution or a plunge into barbarism, the proletariat must act quickly. The more time passes, the more the accelerating decomposition of capitalist society will leave an apocalyptic inheritance to the communist society of the future.
BT
Notes
1. The Kyoto protocol (December 97) is the list of principles agreed by the states which signed the convention of climate change at Rio in 1992, committing themselves to a 5.2% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2010
2. The greenhouse effect is a process which brings about a considerable role to gases which are a minority in the atmosphere (water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, ozone): by preventing infrared radiation from leaving the planet freely, they retain enough of the suns heat to make the planet habitable (otherwise it would have an average temperature of 18 e temperature of 18 degrees centigrade) (Herve Le Treut, research director at the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique in Paris Le Monde 7.8.00
3. Herve Le Treut, ibid
4. See the article The most barbaric century in history in IR 101
5. We don't have the space here to develop on the other facets of the ecological disaster: uncontrolled desertification and deforestation, disappearance of animal species with the potential medicinal losses that this implies (between now and 2010 20% of known species will have disappeared, a third of them domestic species), poisoning of food as in the dioxin scandal, massive use of toxic pesticides, scarcity of drinking water (a child dies every 8 seconds because of lack of water or because of poor quality water), military and civil nuclear contamination, pillage of entire regions for oil exploitation, exhaustion of marine resources, all the damage created by local wars, etc. As for global warming, the solutions of the bourgeoisie are aimed at hiding reality, while things continue to worsen.
The article by Josep Rebull on “The May Days of 1937”, which we are publishing here, is a contribution to reflection about the war in Spain1. In particular, it contains important elements of clarification about the political attitude of the anarchists and the POUM2 during these tragic events.
The 1937 May Days were a new and dramatic experience for the working class. They provided the opportunity for the Stalinists and “official” anarchists to carry out an anti-working class policy and showed that they had become ardent defenders of the interests of capitalism.
During these struggles, only a few Trotskyists around G Munis and the anarchist group The Friends of Durruti clearly placed themselves on the side of the workers of Catalonia.
Rebull’s article shows a lot of foresight about the result of the May Days and on the general course of the class struggle. It is to be saluted above all because of its political courage, especially considering that the violent criticisms of the POUM leadership are made from the inside, by a militant of the party.
Josep Rebull3 was a member of the POUM during the 1930s. We should recall that this party was created in 1935 on the basis of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc4 led by Joaquin Maurin5, in conjunction with elements like Andres Nin6. The latter had broken with the International Left Opposition, and thus with Trotsky, in 1934. In the POUM, Maurin held the post of general secretary while Nin became the political secretary7. During the war in Spain, while Maurin festered in Franco’s jails, Nin was Minister of Justice in the Generalidad government in Catalonia along with the CNT and the parties of the Republican and Catalan nationalist bourgeoisie, such as Josep Tarradella’s Esquerra Catalana.
Despite profound disagreements with the policies of the POUM during the war in Spain, and although afterwards he had a certain rapprochement with the positions of the communist left, Josep Rebull was never able to make a formal break with this party.
During the period between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1940s, revolutionary energies were particularly reduced and isolated from the working class. Among these was the Italian Left, which had the huge merit of understanding the real dynamic of the situation. In doing so, they found themselves at odds with other revolutionary political tendencies. The Italian Left had a marxist, historical grasp of the real balance of forces between the classes and its evolution; this was at the core of its analysis of the historic course. It saw that the course was not favourable to the working class, that it had definitively changed at the end of the 1920s and that, since that point, the international political situation had been determined by the triumph of the counter-revolution and the march towards a generalised imperialist war.
This general vision is the main lack in Rebull’s approach, and it means that his article has serious political limitations. The most important of these is his illusion that the proletarian revolution was possible in Spain in 1936 and even in 1937. In effect he defends the view that if there had been a real revolutionary leadership during the May Days of 1937, the situation could have gone in a different direction. But these political confusions aside, we want to salute Rebull’s article and point to a number of elements of political clarification which go well beyond the simple understanding of the Barcelona events in May 1937.
In May 1937, the Spanish and international bourgeoisie definitively succeeded in putting down the last vestiges of proletarian resistance in Spain. After May 1937 the repression really got underway and crushed the Spanish working class before the outbreak of the Second World War. Rebull shows that the May Days had ended in a grave defeat for the working class and “a triumph for the pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie”.
Rebull moves towards a historic vision of flux and retreat in the class struggle. Like Marx at the time of the Paris Commune8, like Lenin during the Russian revolution9, or Rosa Luxemburg during the German revolution10, he analyses the actual situation of the class struggle. He is one of the only elements in the POUM, but also among other Spanish revolutionaries, to warn about the imperious necessity to pass into clandestinity after the 1937 May Days. The appreciation of “where is the class struggle”, which is always the most complex for a revolutionary to diagnose, is something that only marxists can develop. It is their role and function to understand the rhythm of the class struggle and to explain it to their class. No one else can do it in their place, and if they don’t do it, they lose all usefulness.
Rebull criticises not only the Spanish Communist Party but also the CNT which acted as a support for the Republican power dominated by the Stalinists and the ‘left’ fraction of the Republican bourgeoisie. On the CNT leadership, he writes that “the May movement has shown the real role of the anarcho-syndicalist leaders. Like reformists in any era, they have been – consciously or unconsciously – instruments of the enemy class in the workers’ ranks”.
He draws the lessons about the real function of the Popular Fronts: “In the future, the working class will not be able to have any doubts about the function reserved for the Popular Fronts in every country”.
Rebull shows a way forward in the new situation created by the failure of the May Days. Unlike the POUM, which saw in these events a victory for the working class, he sees the reality of the defeat and thus the necessity for revolutionaries to take measures of clandestinity in order to survive.
Rol.
Once the second power had disappeared in its organised form, that is to say, once the organs born in July in opposition to the bourgeois government had disappeared, the counter-revolution - presently represented by the petty-bourgeois and reformist parties - attacked the proletariat’s revolutionary positions one by one, principally in Catalonia, because it is the region which has given the most momentum to the revolution. This was done cautiously at first and then aggressively.
The power of the working class had partly been neutralised before these attacks, on the one hand by the counter-revolutionary dictatorship of the leaders of the UGT12 in Catalonia and, on the other, by the CNT’s collaboration in the governments in Valencia and Barcelona.
In spite of this handicap13, the proletariat was convinced bit by bit – separating itself from the reformist leaders, collaborators of the bourgeoisie - that only its energetic action in the street could hold back the advances of the counter-revolution. The armed clashes that took place in various parts of Catalonia during the month of April, were in fact the prelude to the May events in Barcelona.
The struggle was posed (and continues to be posed) in general terms, between the revolution and the counter-revolution, in the following conditions, as regards Catalonia.
Since July the revolutionary sectors of CNT-FAI and the POUM had the support of most of the armed proletariat, but they lacked concrete objectives and an effective tactic. The revolution therefore lost its initiative.
The counter-revolutionary forces of the PSUC-Esquerra, which had an almost non-existent developed base in July – have followed clearly defined objectives since the beginning and thus been able to carry out a consistent tactic. Whilst the CNT – the numerically most decisive force - has become embroiled in the labyrinth of bourgeois institutions; all the time talking about nobility and loyalty in its relationships [with the other component parts of these institutions – translators’ note], its enemies and collaborators have step-by-step carefully prepared and carried out a plan of provocation and denigration, whose first phase was the elimination of the POUM. The POUM as much as the leadership of the CNT have found themselves on the defensive faced with these at first sly and then brazen attacks. They have thus allowed the counter-revolution to go onto the offensive.
It was in these conditions that the May events took place.
The struggle that began on (Monday) the 3rd May was provoked, in the immediate, by the reactionary forces of the PSUC-Esquerra, who tried to capture the Barcelona telephone exchange. The most revolutionary part of the proletariat responded to this provocation by taking hold of the streets, thus increasing its strength. The strike spread like wild fire and was total.
Despite its headless birth, this movement can in no way be seen as a “putsch”. All the armed workers were on the barricades. The movement was sympathetically received, during its first two days, by the working class in general – this is proved by the extent, rapidity and unanimity of the strike – and it threw the middle class, which was of course terrified, into an attitude of expectant neutrality.
The workers brought all of their combativity and enthusiasm into play, until due to a lack of coordination and final objectives for the movement, vacillation and demoralisation spread amongst the various sectors of combatants. Only these psychological factors can explain why these same workers, against the orders of their leaders, stopped with within a few meters of the Palacio de la Generalidad.
On the government side was to be found only a part of the forces of Public Order, the Stalinists, Estat Català, Esquerra – these latter forces were hardly combative. Some Public Order companies declared themselves neutral, refusing to repress the workers, whilst others allowed themselves to be disarmed. The Control Patrols were overwhelmingly on the side of the proletariat.
The revolutionary organisations did not createa coordinating and directing centre. However, the city was in the hands of the proletariat, to the point where by Tuesday the different concentrations of workers were perfectly able to link up. Only some of these remained isolated, but overall there was enough force to carry out an offensive concentrating on the official centres for the city to fall, without great effort, completely into the workers’ hands14.
In general, on both sides of the struggle, the attitude was one of “wait and see”. The government forces had not the forces necessary to take the initiative. The workers’ forces lacked leadership and objectives.
As for forces outside of the city and which could at one moment or the other be incorporated into the struggle, there were the forces at the front, willing to march on the capital – the forces of the revolutionary sectors had already begun to cut the road against the Karl Marx Division – and the forces sent by the government in Valencia, were not certain to arrive. By Wednesday various French and English boats appeared off Barcelona, probably ready to intervene.
The proletarian forces controlled the streets for four and a half days: from Monday afternoon to Friday. The organs of the CNT participated in the movement for one day – the Tuesday. The organs of the POUM participated for three days. Each considered the movement over as soon as they gave the order to withdraw. But in reality it was only WELL AFTER these orders were issued, that the workers withdrew, due to a lack of a leadership capable of ordering a progressive withdrawal and, above all, faced with the treason of the leaders of the CNT: some of whom made pathetic statements over the radio whilst other collaborated with Companys, according to whose own statement “In the face of this indescribable attack on the government, the latter found itself with small means of defence; very small, not because it had not foreseen this development, but because of the impossibility of forestalling it. In spite of this the government put down the subversive movement without hesitation, utilising the small forces at its disposal, aided by popular fervour, and by conversations held in the Generalitat with different trade union representatives, and with the assistance of several delegates from Valencia, commencing thus the return to normality” (Hoja Oficial 17th May).
Such were the general lines of the May insurrection.
The proletariat spontaneously and instinctively launched this movement, without firm leadership, without a positive concrete aim for decisively advancing it. The CNT-FAI had already decapitated the movement before it was born, because it had not explained clearly to the working class the meaning of the April events.
At first not all the CNT leaders were against the movement. The Barcelona committees not only supported it, but also tried to coordinate it at the military level. But without having already agreed realisable political aims, they could not do this. Caught between the will of the base and the capitulation of the higher committees, the doubts and vacillations of these committees led in practice to a series of ambiguous and equivocal instructions.
The only thing the National and Regional Committees expressed firmly was the decision to withdraw. This retreat, ordered unconditionally, without gaining control of Public Order, without obtaining the guarantee of the Security Battalions, without practical organs of the workers’ front, and without a satisfactory explanation to the working class, putting all those involved in the struggle – revolutionary and counter-revolutionary - into the same sack, remains one of the greatest capitulations to the bourgeoisie and treasons against the workers’ movement.
The leaders and the led were not long in suffering the grave consequences of the Revolutionary Workers’ Front not becoming reality15 .
Faithful to its line of action since July 19th, the leadership of the POUM went along with events. At the same time as these events were unfolding, our leaders were endorsing them, despite not having anything whatsoever to do with either with the declaration of the movement or its subsequent dynamic. It cannot present itself as putting forewards (late and in bad conditions for distributing it) the demand for defence committees, since it did not say a single word about the antagonistic role of these committees faced with the bourgeois governments.
From the practical point of view, all of the merit for the action belongs to the lower committees and the base of the party. The leadership did not edit a single manifesto or leaflet in order to orientate the armed proletariat.
When our leading comrades understood – as did those struggling on the barricades - that concretely the movement was not going to achieve any final objective,they gave the order to retreat16. Given the course of events, without the decision to lead it from the beginning and faced with the capitulation of the CNT leaders, the order to retreat was clearly necessary in order to avoid a massacre.
In spite of the lack of orientation on the part of our leaders, reaction presents them as directors and initiators of the movement. This of course is an honour they do not deserve, even though they reject it and call it a slander17.
For all those who believed that the Popular Front was the salvation of the working class, this movement has been very enlightening. This movement was deliberately provoked by components of the Popular Front (PF) and has been used to strengthen the bourgeoisie’s repressive apparatus. It is also convincing proof that the PF is a counter-revolutionary front which, when it stopped the overthrow of capitalism – the cause of fascism - prepared the way for the latter. It has also repressed all efforts to take the revolution forwards.
The CNT which was a-political until 19th July, fell into the trap of the Popular Front when it entered the political arena. The cost of this unfortunate experience has been a new blood-letting in the proletarian ranks.
As for the political positions of the POUM before 19th July, this violent evolution of the Popular Front was clearly a theoretical victory, since they had forecast and warned against it.
As for Stalinism, for the first time it was unmasked as an open enemy of the proletarian revolution, placing itself on the other side of the barricades, struggling against the revolutionary workers and in favour of the bourgeois Popular Front, of which Stalinism is the creator and main defender.
{In the} future the working class cannot have any doubts about the role of the Popular Front in any country.
The fear amongst certain sectors during the May events concerning the danger of armed intervention by England and France, shows a lack of understanding of the role played by these powers up until now.
Anglo-French intervention against the Spanish proletarian revolution has been going on, more or less openly, for months, This intervention is carried out by means of the domination exercised by these imperialisms, through Stalinism, over the governments in Barcelona and Valencia. This was seen in the recent struggle – as always involving the Stalinists - within the government in Valencia which ended with the elimination of Largo Caballero18 and the CNT. It can also be seen in the “non intervention” agreements which have only been observed and carried out in order to weaken the Spanish proletariat. The open intervention of war ships and occupying troops will only change the form of the intervention. This open or hidden intervention will have to be defeated or it will defeat us.
Like any workers’ revolution, our’s will have to eliminate our national exploiters, but it will also have to wage the inevitable struggle to defeat all the interventionist efforts of international capitalism. No revolution can be victorious without confronting and overcoming this aspect of the war. Trying to avoid this, amounts to renouncing victory, because the imperialists will never willingly stop trying to intervene in our revolution.
A correct international policy on the part of revolutionary Spain could arouse in our favour the proletariat of those countries which want to mobilise against the Spanish proletariat, and even turn them against their own government, as in the example of the 1917 Russian revolution.
Faced with the spontaneous movement, there were two principle positions that can be taken (we exclude inhibition):
Consider it as a protest movement, in which case it was necessary to rapidly show its short term nature and take the necessary measures to avoid useless sacrifices. In July 1917, the Bolshevik leaders exerted themselves to stop the premature movement of the proletariat of the capital and this didn’t lessen their prestige, since they knew how to justify their decision.
Consider the movement as decisive for the conquest of power, in that case the POUM, since it was the only revolutionary Marxist party, should have firmly, resolutely, and unswervingly taken the leadership of the movement in order to lead and coordinate it. Naturally, in this case it was not enough to hope to become the revolution’s leadership by accident: it was necessary to act quickly, extending the struggle, spreading it to the whole of Catalonia, unhesitatingly proclaiming that the movement was to be directed against the Reformist government, making it clear from the outset that Defence Committees and their Central Committee had to be formed without delay, organising them so that at all costs they became organs of power against the government of the Generalitat, and attacking the strategic places without delay taking full advantage of the long hours of disorder and panic that afflicted our adversaries.
However, the POUM leadership’s fear of confronting the CNT leaders from the beginning - afterwards it was too late - was a surrender to the detriment of the Party, that is to say, it went against the initial measures taken up when the movement broke out and against the political independence of the POUM. The possible excuse that the party was not in a condition to take up the leadership, is no less against the interests of the party, since the POUM could only play the role of a real Bolshevik party, taking up the leadership and precisely not declining the resolute orientation of the working class movement out of "modesty". It is not enough for the party which calls itself revolutionary to be on the side of the workers in struggle, rather it must be in the vanguard.
The POUM would have come out of the battle enormously strengthened if it had not vacillated and waited, once again, for the opinion of the “Trentist” (the openly reformist – translator’s note) elements of the CNT’s leadership, even in the case of defeat, persecution and illegality.
The only group that tried to take a vanguard role was the Friends of Durruti, which without adopting totally Marxist slogans, had and has the indisputable merit of having proclaimed that they were struggling - and calling on others to struggle - against the government of the Generalitat.
The immediate results of this workers' insurrection represent a defeat for the working class and a new victory for the pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie19.
Nevertheless, if the leadership of our party had carried out a more effective and practical activity, this could have led to at least a partial workers' victory. In the worst case, it could have organised a Central Defence Committee, based on representatives from the barricades. For this it would have been enough to first have held an assembly of delegates from the POUM and some of CNT-FAI barricades, in order to elect a provisional Central Committee. This Central Committee, through a short manifesto could have called a second meeting inviting delegations from the groups not represented at the first assembly, and so establish a central defence organ. In a situation where it was thought there was a need to call a retreat, it would have been possible to conserve this Central Defence Committee as an embryonic organ of dual power, that is to say, as a provisional committee of the Revolutionary Workers' Front, which through its democratisation by means of the creation of Defence Committees in the work place and the barracks, could have continued the struggle with better advantage than now against the bourgeois governments20.
But we cannot exclude an infinitely more favourable situation. Once a Central Defence Committee had been constituted, in the manner indicated, it could have perhaps taken political power. The forces of the bourgeoisie - demoralised and surrounded in the centre of Barcelona - could have been defeated through a rapid and organised offensive.
Naturally, this proletarian power in Barcelona, would have repercussions throughout Catalonia and many places in Spain. All the forces of national and international capital would have been used to defeat it. Its destruction would have been inevitable, however, if the following measures to strengthen it were not carried out: a) the unhesitating determination of the POUM to act as a revolutionary Marxist vanguard, capable of orientating and leading the new power in collaboration with the other active sectors of the insurrection; b) the organisation of the new power on the basis of worker's, peasants' and soldiers' councils, or at a minimum, based on the democratically and properly centralised Defence Committees; c) the extension of the revolution throughout Spain, by means of a rapid offensive in Aragón; d) the solidarity of workers in other countries. Without these measures the Catalonian working class would not be able to maintain themselves in power for long.
In order to finish this part, we want to say that the hypothesis put forward here are a contribution to the general discussion that May Days are going to cause in the revolutionary milieu for a long time to come.
1. The working class is still in a defensive situation but is now in worse conditions than before the May insurrection. It could have begun its offensive in May, if it had not been for the partial defeat caused by the betrayal and capitulation, though this is not [yet] a definitive defeat for the present revolution. The workers now have more arms than before May, and if they can avoid being pulled into a premature struggle caused by provocation, they could once again be in a condition, within a few months, to could take the offensive.
2. The class didn't know how to take power in July 1936, in May 1937 it undertook a second insurrection. The defeat suffered now, has made a new armed struggle inevitable and we have to prepare for this. As long as the bourgeois state has not been overthrown, against which we have to direct our revolutionary struggle, the armed proletarian insurrection remains something for the future.
3. The May movement demonstrated the real role of the Anarcho-syndicalist leaders. Like all the other reformists, in all epochs, they are - consciously or unconsciously - tools within the workers’ ranks of the enemy class. The revolution in our country can only triumph through a simultaneous struggle against the bourgeoisie and the reformist leaders of all colours, including the CNT-FAI.
4. We have seen that a real vanguard Marxist party doesn't exist in our revolution and that this indispensable instrument for the definitive victory still remains to be forged. The party of the revolution cannot have a vacillating and continually waiting leadership; it has to have a firmly convinced leadership which will go to the head of the working class, orientating it, impulsing it, conquering with it21. It cannot base itself only on accomplished facts, but has to have a revolutionary political line that will act as the basis for its activity and stop opportunist and capitulatory tendencies22. It cannot base its activity on empiricism and improvisation, but has to use to its advantage modern principles of organisation and technique. It cannot allow the slightest shallowness at the top, because this will spread painfully throughout the base, leading to indiscipline, a lack of abnegation and a loss of faith amongst the least strong, in the triumph of the proletarian revolution.
5. Once more the inevitable necessity of the Revolutionary Workers' Front has been demonstrated; this can only be formed on the basis of a profound struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state, and against Fascism on the fronts. If the leaderships of the workers' revolutionary organisations don't accept these bases23 - which would certainly clash with their actions since July - it will be necessary to push for its formation through pressure from below.
6. None of the lessons that have been learnt will be of any use, if the proletariat and above all the marxist revolutionary party, do not enter into an intense practical work of agitation and organisation. It is the same for the struggle against the threats and restrictions of clandestinity, this requires an untiring activity, if we don’t want to be hopelessly defeated. The idea that the party must not be plunged into clandestinity, this can only be understood as the expression of the intention once again to adapt and renounce the revolutionary struggle in these moments24, an intention which may prove decisive.
J. Rebull
1 Cf the book the ICC has brought out in Spanish: Espana 1936: Franco y la republica masacran a los trabajadores, Valencia, April 2000, 159 pages.
2 See for example Histoire du POUM, Victor Alba, editions Champ Libre, Paris, 1975. A history written by an old member of the POUM.
3 See for example the work on Rebull done by A. Guillamon in Balances no. 19 and 20, October 2000.
4 El Bloque Obrero y Campesino was founded in March 1931 in Terrassa, a town in the industrial outskirts of Barcelona.
5 Born in 1896 in Bonanza, in the province of Huesca, Maurin was influenced by the Russian revolution and by anarcho-synicalism. In 1919 he was a member of the CNT. He participated in the second congress of the CNT where he met Andres Nin and along with him pronounced in favour of joining the Communist International. The congress approved this position. Maurin was then a member of the Spanish Communist Party and one of its leaders until his expulsion in 1930 together with the Catalan-Belearan Communist Federation, which represented about a third of the party.
6 Nin was born in 1892 in Vendrell in Catalonia. He followed the same political trajectory as Maurin. He became one of the secretaries of the Red Trade Union International in Moscow until 1928. Having expressed sympathy for Trotsky, he was relieved of his post. When he succeeded in leaving the USSR and getting back to Spain in 1930, he became part of the International Left Opposition. After his break with the Opposition, he was part of the group which called itself the Communist Left. Nin’s proposal to fuse with the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc was rejected by the latter in 1934, but on 29 September 1935 it went ahead and the new party called itself the POUM. Nin was assassinated in 1937 by agents of Stalin’s NKVD.
7 Nin did not assume the post of general secretary in order to make it clear that Maurin still had this position.
8 Marx was able to salute the Commune but he also recognised that because of its isolation it could only end in a bloody defeat. For Marx, the workers had “stormed the heavens”.
9 During the July Days in 1917, Lenin was able to say that the moment was not favourable for the working class; from September however he pushed for the preparation of the insurrection.
10 In “Order reigns in Berlin”, Luxemburg recognised that after the failure of the uprising in Berlin, the bourgeoisie would unleash repression. She was not able to draw all the conclusions from this, and the error cost her dear because she was murdered along with Karl Liebknecht.
11 There are two versions of this text by Josep Rebull. The first was published in the Bulletin of the Local Committee of the POUM, and was dated 29th May 1937. The second was published in the Discussion Bulletin edited by the Defence Committee of the Congress (of the POUM), Paris, 1st of July 1939. The parts of the text that correspond to the 1939 text appear within brackets: ( ). The most relevant modifications are indicated in footnotes. The rare remarks by the editor of this text are indicated by: {}
12 The UGT was the second trade union in Spain, after the anarchist CNT. It was under the leadership of the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Party, but in Catalonia it was under the control of the Stalinist PSUC.
13 In the 1939 text the English word “handicap” is substituted for the Spanish word “desventaja”
14 {Rebull’s first note was suppressed in the version published in 1939}: Cell 72 has a plan of Barcelona with the barricades and positions of both sides during the struggle. It is very interesting to examine this. It is at the disposal of all comrades.
15 {The distinction that Josep Rebull makes between the local Committees of Barcelona and the higher national and regional committees should be noted. Within the CNT, in Barcelona, there was an informal organisation of factory and neighbourhood defence committees, coordinated by Manuel Escorza. Cf in agreement with Abel Paz: Viaje al pasado (1936-39). Ed. Autor, Barcelona, 1995.}
16 {“Since the workers struggling in the streets had neither concrete aims nor a responsible leadership, the POUM could do nothing else than order and coordinate a strategic retreat…” (Resolution of the CC on the May days, point 3) }. {This note did not appear in the 1937 version}
17 [“Part of the national and foreign press have made the most extraordinary efforts – and they needed to be extraordinary- to present us as the ’agent provocaters’ of the events that unfolded in Barcelona last week… If we had given the order to begin the movement of 3rd May we would not have hidden it. We are always responsible for our words and our actions… What our party did – we have already said this on several occasions and we repeat it clearly today – was to take part in it. The workers were in the street and our party had to be alongside the workers…” (Editorial of La Batalla, 11th May 1937. The emphasis is ours)]. {This not was not published in 1937}.
18 Left wing socialist leader, described by some as “the Spanish Lenin”
19 {Note added by Rebull in 1939}: [The POUM leadership, on the contrary, understood the order to retreat as a workers’ victory. The epilogue to this "workers' victory"was bloody repression]
20 {A note that already existed in the first text published in 1937}: [During the Tuesday evening the L(ocal) C(ommittee) of Barcelona worked for this coordination, but the leadership’s lack of enthusiasm meant they were not able to carry it out]
21 {Josep Rebull argued that the POUM was not a revolutionary party, nor could it become so with the political strategy of the then EC}
22 {This is a direct criticism of the then EC of the POUM}
23 {Note added by Rebull in 1939} : (Bases that form part of the political counter-theses which we mentioned at the beginning)
24 {Note added by Rebull in 1939}. (In fact, the leadership didn’t take the necessary measures in order to work illegally and organise clandestinely. Unfortunately, the same leaders, as we have seen, were the first victims of their mistake.) {This is the first warning issued by one of the leaders of the POUM on the imminence of repression against revolutionaries and therefore the urgent necessity to prepare for clandestinity, which began on the 16th June with the banning of the POUM, the arrest of its leaders, the kidnap and killing of Nin, and the persecution of its militants}
Whether for or against "globalisation", whether reassuring or alarming, all the commentaries on the international situation and its perspectives are unanimous on one point: democracy is the only system which will allow society to progress and prosper, and capitalism is the final form of humanity's social, political, and economic organisation. "2000 was not really the first year of the 21st century. In substantive terms, the 21st century began in 1991 with the fall of Soviet communism, the collapse of the bipolar order and the rise of global capitalism as the uncontested ideology of our age" ("Ideas: No, Economics Isn't King", F. Zakaria, Newsweek Jan. 2001).
But what about the spread of local wars and massacres? What about the undeniable spread of poverty throughout the world? Why the rise in unemployment and the degradation of the proletariat's living conditions? How are we to understand the famines, the reappearance of epidemics, the growing corruption and insecurity? Why the so-called "natural disasters", and what about the threat hanging over the planet's environment? Where do all these catastrophes come from, if not from the survival of capitalism, of those social and production relations which care not a jot for human needs, and have only one aim: the pursuit of profit: "not just the pursuit of tangible profit, but of ever-growing profit" (Rosa Luxemburg, "Critique of the critiques: what the epigones have done to marxist theory", published with L'accumulation du capital, Maspéro).
There are a whole series of attempts to explain this situation
From liberal capitalism's supporters, the usual answer is that all this is nothing but the exaggerations of a few Cassandras, refusing to recognise the benefits of the present system. The disastrous consequences of capitalism's survival are the normal price the normal price to pay in this social system, the inevitable result of a law of nature which determines the elimination of the weak, and salvation only for the strong.
For the left wing of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus - the social-democrats, the one-time Stalinists, the ecologists - all these scourges of the modern world at the dawn of the 21st century are real enough, but seen above all as excesses or imperfections, the consequences of errors committed by rulers too eager for gain, too unconcerned for the general welfare of all. They are the result of "uncontrolled" capitalism. What is needed, then, is control: well thought out regulations, organised by the appropriate governments, states, local, national, or international bodies (by the famous NGOs - non-governmental organisations - for example). This would be enough to eradicate the system's devastating effects, to make it a real organisation of "citizens", a haven of peace and prosperity for all. This is the conception of the "anti-globalisation" movement, where we also find leftist currents who tone down their traditional revolutionary phrase-mongering to make a radical contribution to the concert in defence of democracy. It is the case with all kinds of Trotskyists, ex-Maoists, anarchists or libertarians: all the more or: all the more or less defrocked currents of the socialist, communist, and libertarian leftism of the 1970s and 80s. Irrespective of their differences, everybody today, from the extreme right to the extreme left, defends democracy.
Those who once contested the parliamentary circus have revealed their true nature as ardent defenders of the bourgeois democracy they used to decry. Indeed, many are now at the helm of state, in positions of responsibility in honourable institutions, organisms, and enterprises, thoroughly integrated into the system. Those who have kept up a more or less radical opposition to the governments and institutions[i], denounce the system's errors and excesses, but fundamentally they never pose the question of its real nature.
One of the best examples of this ideology is regularly offered us by the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. In its January 2001 issue, we are told that "The new century is beginning in Porto Alegre [the town in Brazil where the 1st World Social Forum is being held at the end of January, in a sort of answer to the Davos meeting]. All those who, in one way or another, contest or criticise neo-liberal globalisation will meet there (...) Not to prhere (...) Not to protest, as at Seattle, Washington, Prague or elsewhere, against the injustice, inequality, and disasters that the excesses of neo-liberalism are causing around the world. But to try, this time in a positive and constructive spirit, to propose a theoretical and practical framework which would make it possible to envisage a new kind of globalisation, and to declare that another world, with more solidarity and less inhumanity, is possible[ii].
In the same issue, we find an article by Toni Negri, the leading light of Potere Operaio[iii], who develops the idea that today there is no longer any imperialism, but rather a capitalist "Empire"!? The words seem faithful to the "class struggle" and "the battle of the exploited against the power of capital". But this is only in appearance. Above all, the article claims to invent a sort of new perspective for the class struggle. This leads it straight onto the tired old theme of the necessary defence of democracy, instead of "revolution"; the identification of citizens instead of the class entity of the proletariathe proletariat. "These struggles demand, apart from a guaranteed wage, a new expression of democracy in the control of the political conditions of the reproduction of life (...) most of these ideas were born during the Parisian demonstrations of the winter of 1995, the 'Paris Commune in the snow' [sic!!] which exalted (...) the subversive self-recognition of the citizens of the great towns".
Whatever the subjective intentions of these protagonists of the contestation of the capitalist system, these defenders of the democratic perspective, all this serves objectively, first and foremost, to maintain illusions in the possibility of reforming this system, or of transforming it gradually.
What the working class needs to understand, against these old reformist ideas dressed up in more fashionable guise, is that imperialism, this "highest stage of capitalism" as Lenin said, still reigns supreme. That it affects "every state, from the greatest to the smallest", as Rosa Luxemburg said. That it underlies the proliferation of local wars and massacres all over the world. Faced with a multitude of questions as to the insanity and absurdity of the world today, with the absence of any perspective which colours the whole society, faced with the individaced with the individualist attitude of "look after number one", the decomposition of the social fabric, the disintegration of collective solidarity, the working class needs to understand that capitalism's perspective is not a world of citizens living in peace, abundance, and prosperity under a good democracy. It needs to understand that the present society is and will remain a class society, a system of exploitation, whose motive force is profit and whose functioning obeys the dictates of capital accumulation. That democracy is bourgeois democracy, the most developed form of the dictatorship of the capitalist class.
What has changed since 1991 is not that capitalism has triumphed and imposed itself as the only viable system possible. What has changed is that the capitalist and imperialist regime in the Soviet bloc has collapsed under the blows of the economic crisis, and faced with the military pressure of its enemy, the Western bloc. What has changed is the imperialist configuration which has dominated the planet since World War II. It was not communism that collapsed in the East, or even a system in transition towards communism. Real communism, which has never yet existed, remains on the historical agenda. It can only be created by the revolutionary overhe revolutionary overthrow of capitalist rule by the international working class. This is the only alternative to what capitalism's survival promises us: a plunge into indescribable chaos, which could eventually lead to humanity's definitive destruction.
The Year 2000 celebrations were held under the auspices of "new economy" euphoria. The year 2001 starts with a serious concern for world capitalism's economic health. The new and prodigious profits we were promised never turned up. On the contrary, after a year of trip-ups and disillusionment, the champions of "e-business" and the "net-economy" have produced nothing but bankruptcies and unemployment, in a context of widespread gloom. A few examples: "As the new economy has cooled, there has been a steady drumbeat of layoff announcements. More than 36,000 dotcom employees were cut in the second half of last year, including some 10,000 last month" (Time, January 10, 2001, "This Time It's Different").
We have already analysed the situation of the economic crisis several times in these columns[iv]. We will not return in detail to theurn in detail to these analyses, whose conclusions are once again being confirmed today. Last December, two major reviews of the international press were headlined "Chaos"[v] and "A hard landing?"[vi]. Whatever its reassuring, grandiloquent talk, the bourgeoisie needs to the truth about the profit it can expect from investment. And there is no getting away from the fact that the "new economy" is nothing but an avatar of the "old economy", in other words a product not of growth, but of the capitalist economy's crisis. The development of telecommunications via the Internet is not the "revolution" we have been promised. The widespread use of the Internet, both for commerce and financial transactions, as well as inside companies and administrations, changes nothing in the laws of capital accumulation, which demand profitability, net profit, and market competitiveness.
As with any other technical innovation, the competitive advantage gained from the use of the Internet disappears very quickly as soon as its use becomes generalised. Moreover, in the domain of electronic transactions ronic transactions and telecommunications, for the technique to work it is necessary for every company to be connected, so that the innovation of the Internet itself puts an end to the advantage that it is supposed to confer!
At first, the great Internet "technology revolution" was supposed to allow a colossal development of the "B2C" (ie "Business to Consumer" - shopping on the Internet) model. In fact, this is nothing but looking up electronic catalogues and placing orders over the Internet rather than by post. Some revolution! B2C was soon abandoned in favour of "B2B" ("Business to Business" - electronic transactions between companies). The first "model" counted on the profits to be made from catalogue shopping by e-mail, whose profitability is limited because it is essentially directed towards household consumption. The second was supposed to put companies directly in touch with each other, and the gains were supposed to come from two "outlets". On the one hand, companies could make profits - or rather reduce their costs - by eliminating intermediaries from their relationships. Already, this is not a real outlet but merely a reduction in costs! On the other hand, this was supposed to open a fabulous "market", made up of the need to provide all the neco provide all the necessary services over the Internet (directories, lists, catalogues, computer software, payment processing, etc); which in fact meant that... the intermediaries who had just been kicked out the door came straight back in through the window. Thank you Internet! There again, there is no getting away from the facts that the profits simply didn't turn up. These economic "models" were quickly abandoned: 98% of the last three years' start-ups, these companies of the new economy supposed to exemplify the glorious future of capitalist development, have gone bust. In those that have survived, there is disenchantment among the workers, who were once so euphoric at their (virtual!) enrichment by generous stock options that they worked round the clock. Significantly, the trade unions, which until lately ignored this sector of the work force, are now arriving in force. Not that they have suddenly become defenders of the working class[vii]. Rather it is because it would be dangerous to allow any reflection to develop amongst workers so abruptly disenchanted.
This ideology of the "net-economy" is a clear illustration of the dead end in which the bourgeois economy finds itself, of the historic decline in capioric decline in capitalist relations of production. According to this ideology, profit was henceforth supposed to be driven by the development of trade, and no longer directly by the development of production. In a sense, the merchant had become more important than the producer. But this ideology is nothing but an aspiration to return to the mercantile capitalism which existed at the end... of the Middle Ages. At that time, capitalism was beginning to develop thanks to the blossoming of commerce, which broke down the barriers of feudal relations of production that restricted the productive forces within the straitjacket of serfdom. Today, it is more than a century since capitalism completely conquered the world market, and world production is gorged with a generalised overproduction unable to find adequate outlets. Capitalism's salvation will not come from a new blossoming of trade, which is completely impossible in today's historic conditions.
In this article, we have only considered the "net-economy", because its collapse during 2000 was the aspect of the capitalist crisis to receive the greatest media attention. But as the article in Time goes on to say "the firings went well beyond dotcomland. There were more than 480,000 layoffs through November. General Motors is laying off 15,000 workers with the corkers with the closing of Oldsmobile. Whirlpool is trimming 6,300 workers; Aetna is letting go 5,000". Indeed, 2001 has begun with a considerable acceleration in the crisis. In the USA, Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, has had to adopt emergency measures to try to banish the spectre of recession. The "new economy" is long gone, and the crisis of the "old economy" continues its inexorable advance. Gigantic debts at every level, ever-increasing attacks on working class living conditions internationally, inability to integrate the growing masses of unemployed into capitalist relations of production, etc: these are the fundamental consequences of the capitalist economy. States, central banks, stock exchanges, the IMF, all the financial and banking institutions and all the "actors" of world politics in general are try to regulate the chaotic functioning of this casino economy[viii], but facts are stubborn and capitalism's laws always end up imposing their rule.
Just as in the economic domain, where differences of language only serve to hide capitalism's historic decline and the depth of the crisis, in the imperialist domain, so all the talk about peace only hides a growing chaos ans a growing chaos and antagonisms proliferating at every level. The present situation in the Middle East is a clear illustration.
By the time this International Review is published, the plan that Clinton has been trying to push through at any cost will have remained a dead letter, as forecast.
The protagonists of the “peace process” do not themselves know how to deal with the situation. Each is trying to defend his positions without any of them being capable of proposing a stable and viable way out of the endemic warfare dragging on in the region. The Israeli state is determined to give up as little as possible of its prerogatives, while the Palestinian Authority under Arafat cannot accept anything that would look as if it were abandoning its ambitions.
Israel is defending a position of strength gained since its foundation in 1947, through several wars against its Arab neighbours (Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt), and with the unfailing support of the United States. Thanks to its role as bastion of the Western imperialist bloc's resistance to the 1950s offensive by the Russian imperialist bloc, via the Arab states that had declared allegiance to the USSR, Israel has won a position as regional policeman which it is not ready to give up in a hurry.
But since the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc ten years ago, the situation has changed. The United States has modified the orientation of its policy towards the Middle East. The 1991 Gulf War aimed to impose the recognition of the USA's world super-power status, to discourage its allies in the Western bloc - Britain, France, but above all Germany - from leaving the orbit of their overbearing godfather. The discipline of the bloc was no longer so easily tolerated once the threat of the opposing bloc had disappeared. But the Gulf War's second objective was to impose a total US control on the Middle East.
When the world was divided into two great imperialist blocs, the US could tolerate its allies occupying influential positions on the imperialist scene in certain regions of the world. It could even delegate to some of them a foreign policy which, though it sometimes opposed American interests, was always obliged to remain within the orbit of the Western bloc. In the Middle East, Britain could thus have a preponderant influence in Kuwait and certain Gulf Emirates, France in Lebanon and Syria, Germany and France in Iraq, etc. In 1991, the Gulf War gave the signal that the US intended to take complete control of the enforcement of the pax Americana. The Madrid conference in 1991, then the Oslo ne991, then the Oslo negotiations at the beginning of 1993 were to lead to the signature of the Israeli-Palestinian declaration of principles in Washington in September 1993, under the sole authority of the US, without any help from its old allies. In Cairo in May 1994, Arafat and Rabin signed the agreement on the autonomy of Gaza and Jericho, and the Israeli army began its withdrawal, to allow Yasser Arafat's triumphant arrival in Gaza in July 1994.
But this turn of events caused a significant fraction of the Israeli bourgeoisie to break with US policy, for the first time in the country's short history. In November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish “extremist”. The elections that followed brought the Likud party led by Benjamin Netanyahu to power, and the new government began to be a serious hindrance to the plans of American diplomacy. The US took things in hand with the return to power of the Labour Party, with Ehud Barak as Prime Minister, and this led to the Sharm-el-Sheikh agreement between Arafat and Barak in September 1999. Nonetheless, the July 2000 Camp David summit, which was supposed to crown the USA's ability to impose a peace settlement on the Middle East, fell apart and ended without agreement. During this episode, French policy was an open attempt to sabotage the policy of its American ex-ally - whican ex-ally - which the latter moreover openly denounced as such. In Israel itself, resistance to the peace process returned to the fore in September 2000, with the provocative visit to the esplanade of the el-Aqsa mosque by Ariel Sharon, a long-standing hawk of the Likud party; this was to be the signal for new and violent confrontations, which spread rapidly through the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In October, a new summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh was supposed to put an end to the violence, create a commission of enquiry, and restart the negotiations. It had no effect on the ground, where the Intifada and the repression continued.
The situation today is thus not the same as it was during the Six Day war of 1967, or the Yom Kippur war of 1973, when the Israeli army directly confronted the armies of the Arab states, within which were included units of the various Palestinian liberation movements. Nor is it the same as during the 1982 war, when Israel invaded the south Lebanon and encouraged the massacres (more than 20,000 dead in a few days) perpetrated by its allies in the Christian militias. Then, the situation was still dominated by the fundamental division between the two great imperialist blocs, whatever the secondary divisions that might exist within each one. And even if Yasser Arafat, ever since his first appearance at the tst appearance at the tribune of the United Nations in 1976, had been trying to attract American diplomatic support, in US eyes he remained forever suspect of conniving with the USSR.
Today, there is division everywhere. The Israeli bourgeoisie is no longer unswervingly loyal to the US. During the 1991 Gulf War, a significant fraction, especially in the army, protested at the Americans' ban on Israeli counter-attacks against Iraqi missiles. For the Israeli army, the most operationally effective in the region, the humiliation of being forced to remain passive and rely on the US High Command for its defence, was a bitter pill to swallow. The “peace process”, which virtually put Israel and the Palestinians on an equal footing, forced the Israeli army to withdraw from the south Lebanon, and envisaged the abandonment of the Golan Heights, was not at all to the taste of the most “radical” fraction of the Israeli bourgeoisie. Nor was this “peace process” easy for Barak's Labour Party to accept. The Labour Party is closer than Likud to the United States, and above all has a more realistic long-term view of the Middle East situation; it is nonetheless the war party, the party which has led the army and conducted the main military campaigns. It is even the Labour Party which has presided over the greatest extener the greatest extension of Jewish colonies in the Occupied Territories! Contrary to what is commonly supposed, the Labour Party is not more in favour of “peace” than the Likud right. There may be differences of opinion, but there is no fundamental disagreement between the two fractions of the Israeli bourgeoisie. National unity has always been maintained in both war and “peace” (it was the right that signed the peace agreements with Egypt at the end of the 1970s).
Israel is not the only country tempted to play its own game, and free itself from American tutelage. Syria was able to lay hands on Lebanon in exchange for its “neutrality” during the Gulf War in 1991. Nonetheless, it is not prepared to accept Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, conquered in 1967. Here too there is cause for friction. Within the Palestinian bourgeoisie itself, Arafat's Fatah and the more radical organisations are far from being in agreement amongst themselves. Like the rest of the world, the whole region is prey to a rise in unbridled self-interest. The wholly dominant influence of American diplomacy is in fact thoroughly superficial, since it is trying to keep a lid down on a whole series of powder kegs just waiting to explode, in a region whose protagonists are all heavily armed.
As for the other great As for the other great imperialist powers, they cannot openly sabotage the US initiatives if they are not to be completely excluded from the game - as is the case currently with France's diplomacy. Officially, they are all toeing the line in support of the “peace process”. However, this does not exclude the possibility of them acting underhand to sabotage the Clinton plan, or any other American plan. Arafat himself sometimes calls for the European Union's involvement in the negotiations, since he would like to avoid a complete dependence on the US for his political survival. That being said, it is not with the EU that he is discussing, but with the US administration.
In today's world where each is “looking after number one”, only two of the great powers are capable of a long-term vision: the United States, which is doing its utmost to maintain its status as the planet's only military super-power; and Germany, which is pursuing in the background a discreet imperialist policy aimed at increasing its influence, completely straitjacketed ever since the end of World War II. The less powerful states are less capable of long-term vision. Each tries to defend its national interests, to defend itself when it is attacked, in particular by undermining its adversaries and sowing disorder in their camp. None today are capable of aoday are capable of a constructive, long-term policy. The Middle East situation is not likely to stabilise. Even the kind of “armed peace” that Eastern Europe experienced during the Cold War is no longer possible today.
As for the possibility of creating a Palestinian state, the fantastic absurdity of its proposed frontiers almost makes the South African Bantustans look like a rational project! There are territories under exclusive Palestinian control - the Gaza Strip, and a few big blots on the map of the West Bank; then there territories under joint control - a few more blots on the West Bank - where Israel is responsible for security. And the whole thing is situated within the environment of the West Bank Territories under exclusive Israeli control, with special roads to protect the Jewish settlements... How could anybody believe that such an aberration contains an ounce of progress, an iota of satisfaction of the needs of the population, anything whatever to do with any kind of “right of peoples to self-determination”?
The whole history of capitalism's decadence has shown that the national states which failed to reach maturity during capitalism's ascendant phase have been unable to constitute a solid and viable political and economic framework in the long term; the disintegration of the USSR andgration of the USSR and Yugoslavia is a demonstration. In Africa, the states inherited from the period of decolonisation are in tatters. War rages in Indonesia (Aceh...). Terrorism is rife in southern India and Ceylon is riven by civil war. There is extreme tension on the frontier between India and Pakistan, between Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. In South America, Columbia suffers from permanent destabilisation. War is endemic between Peru and Ecuador. Frontiers everywhere are in dispute, since they have never really been recognised and accepted since the 19th century.
In this context, not only will “the Palestinian state never be anything but a bourgeois state in the service of the exploiting class, oppressing the same masses with its cops and prisons”[ix], it will never be anything but an aberration, a rump state, the symbol not of a nation but of the decomposition caused by capitalism's survival in the present historic period. Sharing out sovereignty over an indescribable entanglement of zones, towns, villages, roads attributed to one or the other is not a “peace process”, but a minefield for today and tomorrow, where any incident can at any moment provoke a new conflict. It is the irratiot is the irrationality of the world today pushed to the extreme.
The 21st century is beginning with a new acceleration of the dramatic consequences for humanity of the capitalist system's continued survival. Neither the promised prosperity of the “new economy”, nor the promised peace in the Middle East have put in an appearance. Nor could they, for capitalism is a decadent system, a sick body politic whose decomposition can only bring chaos, poverty, and barbarism in its wake.
MG
iThough in reality, they are mostly in "unofficial" positions (en France for example, Krivine is leader of the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, while Aguiton is one of the founders of the rank-and-file union SUD in the Post Office), or even occupied as discreet advisers in the bourgeoisie's left-wing administrations.
iiLe Monde Diplomatique of January 2001, the article being written by its editor Ignacio Ramonet.
iiiItalian far-left extra-parliamentary group during the 1960s-70s.
ivSee the articles "The new economy: a new justification for capitalism" (no.102), "Capitalism's fake good health" (no.100), "The abyss that hides behind 'uninterrupted growth'" (no.99), and the series of articles on "Thirty years of capitalism's open crisis" (nos.96-98).
vNewsweek, 18th December 2000.
viThe Economist, 9th December 2000.
viiSee our pamphlet Unions against the working class
viiiSee "A casino economy" in International Review no.87
ix“Neither Israel, nor Palestine: the workers have no country”, position adopted by the ICC and published in World Revolution (Britain) and Internationalism (USA), as well as on https://www.internationalism.org [15]
Eighty years ago in March 1921, four years after the successful seizure of power by the working class in the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, the Bolshevik Party forcibly suppressed an insurrection at the Kronstadt garrison of the Baltic Fleet on the small island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland 30 kilometres from Petrograd.
The Bolshevik Party had had several years’ experience in fighting a bloody civil war against the counter revolutionary armies of the Russian and foreign bourgeoisies. But the revolt of the Kronstadt garrison was new and different: it was a revolt from within by the working class supporters of the soviet regime, who had been in the vanguard of the October Revolution, and were now raising class demands to correct various intolerable deformations and abuses of the new power.
The violent crushing of this struggle has ever since provided a reference point for understanding the meaning of the revolutionary project. Never more so than today when the bourgeoisie is doing all it can to prove to the working class that there is an unbreakable thread linking Marx and Lenin to Stalin and the Gulag.
Our intention is not to go over all the historical details. Previous articles in the International Review have already encompassed the event in detail (International Review n°3 “The lessons of Kronstadt” and International Review n°100 “1921: The proletariat and the transitional state”).
By contrast, we will take the opportunity of this anniversary to concentrate polemically on two kinds of argument about the Kronstadt revolt:firstly the anarchist use of the events to prove the authoritarian counter-revolutionary nature of Marxism and the parties that act in its name; secondly the idea, that still exists in the proletarian camp today, that the crushing of the rebellion was a “tragic necessity” to defend the gains of October.
According to the anarchist historian Voline:
"Lenin understood nothing - or rather, did not want to
understand anything - about the Kronstadt movement. The essential
thing for him and his party was to maintain themselves in power at
all costs. (...)
As Marxists, authoritarians and statists, the Bolsheviks could not permit any freedom or independent action of the masses. They had no confidence in the free masses. They were convinced that the fall of their dictatorship would mean the destruction of all the work that had been done, and the endangering of the Revolution, which they confused with themselves. (...)
Kronstadt was the first entirely independent attempt of the people to liberate itself from all yokes and achieve the Social Revolution, an attempt made directly, resolutely, and boldly by the working masses themselves without political shepherds, without leaders or tutors. It was the first step towards the third and social revolution.
Kronstadt fell. But it had accomplished a task and that was the important thing. In the complex and shadowy labyrinth which opens out to the masses in revolt, Kronstadt is a bright beacon that lights up the right road. It matters little that in the circumstances in which they found themselves the rebels still spoke of power (the power of the Soviets) instead of he Soviets) instead of getting rid of the word and the idea altogether and speaking instead of co-ordination, organisation, administration. It was a last tribute paid to the past. Once full freedom of discussion, organisation and action have been completely won by the working masses themselves, once the true road of in independent popular activity is found the rest will come automatically and inevitably” (p534-538 The Unknown Revolution, Black Rose Books, 1975).
For the anarchists then, whose views Voline expresses succinctly, the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt was the natural, logical consequence of the Marxist conceptions of the Bolsheviks. The substitutionism of the Party, its identification of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the party and the creation of a transitional state was the expression of a overriding lust for power, authority, over the masses in whom they had no confidence. Bolshevism, according to Voline, meant the replacement of one form of oppression by another.
But for him, Kronstadt was not merely a revolt but a model for the future. If the Kronstadt soviet had restricted itself to economic and social tasks (co-ordination, organisation, administration) and forgot about political tasks (its talk of the powets talk of the power of the soviets) it would have completed a picture of what the true social revolution should be: a society without leaders, without parties, without a state, without power of any kind, a society of immediate and complete freedom.
Unfortunately, for the anarchists, the first of the lessons coincides very closely with the prevailing ideology of the world bourgeoisie, that a communist revolution can only lead to a new form of tyranny.
This coincidence of views between the anarchists and the bourgeoisie isn't accidental. Both measure history according to the abstractions of equality, solidarity and fraternity against hierarchy, tyranny and dictatorship. The bourgeoisie used these moral principles cynically and hypocritically against the October Revolution to justify the brutality of the counter-revolutionary forces between 1918 and 1920 when it led armed interventions against Russia and blockaded it economically. The anarchists' practical alternative to Bolshevism on the other hand is a naive utopia where the historical difficulties that the proletarian revolution had to confront have mysteriously melted away.
But as the events of Spain in 1936 confirm, anarchist naivety, after rejecting the Marxist historical conception of revolution, is obliged to capitulate before the bourgeoisie's practical counter-revolution.
If the Bolsheviks were fundamentally motivated by a mania for complete power, as Voline claims, anarchism by contrast is incapable of answering a whole series questions that emerge from the historical reality. If the Bolsheviks’ ultimate objective was power why - unlike the majority of Social Democracy - did it condemn itself to a period of ostracism between 1914 and 1917 by denouncing the imperialist war and demanding that it be turned into a civil war? Why did it refuse to join, unlike the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the provisional government with the Russian liberal bourgeoisie after the February 1917 revolution, and call for all power to the soviets instead?
Why did it trust in the capacities of the Russian working class to begin a world proletarian revolution in October, unlike most of the rest of international Social Democracy who deemed it too backward and small in numbers to overthrow the bourgeoisie ?
Why did it trust in, win, and retain the support of, the working class to make all the sacrifices necessary to survive the allied blockade and resist arms in hand the counter-revolutionary armies?
Why did it inspire the world working class to follow the Russian lead in revolutionary attempts throughout Europe and the rest of the world? How could the Bolshevik Party take the initiative in the creation of a new Communist International on a world scale?
Finally why did the process of the integration of the party into the state machine, and its usurpation of the mass organs of workers’ power - the soviets and the factory committees - and finally the use of force against the class struggle, not occur overnight, but only after a protracted period?
The theory of the Bolsheviks’ inherent nastiness does not explain the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in general nor the Kronstadt episode in particular.
By 1921 the revolution in Russia, and the Bolshevik Party which led it, was confronted by a very difficult situation. The spread of the revolution to Germany and other countries looked much less likely than it had in 1919. The world economic situation had stabilised relatively and the pivotal Spartacist uprising in Germany had failed. Inside Russia, despite victory in the civil war, the situation was dramatic, due to the repeated assaults by counter-revolutionary armies, and the economic strangulation consciously organised by the international bourgeoisie. The industrial infrastructure was in ruins and the working class was decimated by its sacrifices on the battlefields first of the world and then of the civil war, or because it had been forced to leave the cities in droves for the countryside, in order to survive. The Bolsheviks were also faced with the growing unpopularity of the regime not only amongst the peasantry who launched a series of insurrections in the provinces, but above all within the working class that unleashed a strike wave in Petrograd in mid-February 1921. And then came Kronstadt.
How could Russia remain a bastion of the world revolution, survive the working class disaffection and economic disintegration, while waiting for the delayed help from working class revolution in other countries, and especially in Europe? The anarchists have no explanation for the degeneration of the revolution, except to close their eyes to the problem of the political supremacy of the proletariat, the centralisation of its power, the international extension of the revolution, and of the transitional period to a communist society. This does not alter the fact that the Bolsheviks made a catastrophic error by giving a military answer to the Kronstadt revolt, and treating working class resistance to them as an act of treachery and counter-revolution. But the Bolshevik Party did not have the benefit of hindsight as revolutionaries need to have today. It could only make use of the acquisitions of the workers' movement of the time: a movement that had never before had to confront the immensely difficult task of holding onto power in a hostile capitalist world. The relationship of the soviets to the party of the working class after the successful seizure of power was not understood, nor was the relationship of both these class organs to the transitional state that would inevitably succeed the smashing of the bourgeois state.
In taking the helm of the state, and gradually incorporating into it the workers’ councils and factory committees, the Bolshevik Party was stumbling in the dark. And, according to prevailing opinion within the workers’ movement at the time, the main danger to the revolution came from outside the new state apparatus: from the international bourgeoisie and from the peasantry and the Russian bourgeoisie in exile. None of the tendencies in the communist movement at the time, not even the left wing, had an alternative perspective, although there were those, including inside the Bolshevik Party who warned against the bureaucratisation of the regime. But their prescriptions were limited and contained other dangers. The Workers' Opposition of Kollontai and Shliapnikov called for the trade unions to defend the workers against the excesses of the state, forgetting that the workers’ councils had transcended them as mass organs of the revolutionary proletariat.
There were some inside the Bolshevik Party who opposed the crushing of the revolt: the Party members in Kronstadt who joined the movement and elements like Gavriil Miasnikov who would later form the Workers’ Group and opposed the military solution. But the existing left tendencies in the party, and in the Communist International, despite their critiques of the Bolshevik regime, nevertheless supported the use of violence. The Workers’ Opposition even volunteered for the assault force. The German Communist Workers Party, the KAPD, which opposed the dictatorship of the party, nevertheless agreed with the military action against the Kronstadt rebellion (this does not prevent some anarchists today, like the Anarchist Federation in Britain, from trying to claim the KAPD for their ancestry!).
Finally the demands of the Kronstadt Soviet, contrary to Voline's opinion, did not provide a coherent alternative perspective either, since they are framed mainly within an immediate and local context and don't take up the wider implications of the proletarian bastion and the world situation. In particular they don't give an answer to what the role of the vanguard party should be (1)
It was only later, much later, that revolutionaries, trying to draw all the lessons from the defeat of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary wave that it initiated, could point to the real lessons of this tragic episode.
"It may be that in certain circumstances the proletariat - and we will even concede that they may be the unconscious victims of manoeuvres by the enemy - enters into struggle against the proletarian state. What is to be done in such a situation? We must start from the principle that socialism cannot be imposed on the proletariat by violence and force. It would have been better to have lost Kronstadt than to have kept it from the geographical point of view, since substantially this victory could only have one result: that of altering the very bases, the substance of the action carried out by the proletariat." (Octobre, 1938, published by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left).
The Communist Left had put its finger on the essential problem: the Bolshevik Party, in using the violence of the state against the working class was putting itself at the head of the counter-revolution. The victory at Kronstadt accelerated the tendency for the Bolshevik Party to become an instrument of the Russian state against the working class. From this insight, the communist left was able to draw another daring conclusion. The communist party, in order to remain a vanguard of the proletariat, must protect its autonomy from the post-revolutionary state that reflects an inevitable tendency to preserve the status quo and prevent the advance of the revolutionary process.
However, in today's communist left, this conclusion is far from universally held. In fact, some parts of it, especially the Bordigist current, have returned to the justifications of Lenin and Trotsky for the repression of Kronstadt, in complete contradiction to the position of the Italian fraction in 1938:
"It would be pointless to discuss the terrible circumstances that obliged the Bolsheviks to crush Kronstadt with someone who refused on principle that a proletarian power in the process of birth or consolidation can fire on the workers. The examination of the terrible problem the proletarian state must confront reinforces the critique of a vision of the revolution through rose tinted glasses and the understanding that the crushing of this rebellion was, according to Trotsky, 'a tragic necessity', but a necessity and even a duty" (“Kronstadt: a tragic necessity”, Programme Communiste n°88, theoretical organ of the International Communist Party, May 1982).
Bypassing the tradition that they claim to belong to, the Bordigist current may defend the intransigent internationalism of the Bolshevik Party, but it also defends, just as vehemently, its mistakes, and so is left unable to learn from all the reasons for the degeneration of the party and the revolution (2).
According to them the relationship of the party to the class and to the post-revolutionary state in the revolutionary process doesn't pose a problem of principles but only of expediency, of how best in each situation the revolutionary vanguard carries out its function:
“This titanic struggle can only provoke within the proletariat itself terrible tensions. In effect, it is obvious that the party cannot make the revolution nor direct the dictatorship against nor even without the masses, the revolutionary will of the proletariat is not manifested by electoral consultations or opinion polls to find a 'numerical majority' or, even more absurd, a unanimity. It expresses itself by a rise and ever more precise orientation of the struggles where the most determined fractions draw along the hesitant and undecided, and sweep aside its opponents if necessary. In the course of the vicissitudes of the civil war and the dictatorship, the positions and relationships of the different layers may change. And far from recognising by virtue of some 'soviet democracy' the same weight and the same importance to all the layers of workers, semi-workers or petit-bourgeoisie, explains Trotsky in Terrorism or Communism, their right even to participate in the soviets, that is the organs of the proletarian state, depends on their attitude in the struggle.
No 'constitutional rule' no 'democratic principle' can harmonise relations within the proletariat. No recipe can resolve the contradictions between the local needs and the demands of the international revolution, between the immediate needs and the demands of the historic struggle of the class, contradictions which find their expression in the opposition of various fractions of the proletariat. No formalism can codify the relations between the party, the most advanced fraction of the class and organ of its revolutionary struggle, and the masses who are affected to different degrees by the pressure of local and immediate conditions. Even the best party, that which can 'observe the spirit of the mass and influence it' as Lenin said, must sometimes demand the impossible from the masses. More exactly, it only finds the ‘limit’ to what is possible by trying to go forward.” (ibid.).
In 1921 the Bolshevik Party chose the wrong path without any previous experience or parameters to guide them. Today, the Bordigists, absurdly, make a virtue out of Bolsheviks' mistakes and declare: “there are no principles”. The Bordigists conjure away the problem of the exercising of proletarian power by deriding formalistic and abstract methods for arriving at a common position of the whole class. While it is very true there can never be a perfect means for establishing a consensus in an extremely fluid situation the workers’ councils or soviets have been shown to be the most adequate means of reflecting and carrying out the evolving revolutionary will of the proletariat as a whole, even though the experience of Germany in 1918 and elsewhere shows that they can be vulnerable to recuperation by the bourgeoisie. Although the Bordigists are generous enough to admit that the party cannot make the revolution without the masses, the masses then have no means of expressing their revolutionary will as an entire class, except through the party and with the permission of the party. And the party can, if necessary, correct the proletariat with machine guns, as at Kronstadt. According to this logic the proletarian revolution has two contradictory slogans: before the revolution “All power to the soviets”; after the revolution: “All power to the party”.
The Bordigists, unlike Octobre, have forgotten that, contrary to the bourgeois revolution, the tasks of the proletarian revolution cannot be delegated to a minority, but must be carried out by the self-conscious majority. The emancipation of the workers is the task of the working class itself.
The Bordigists reject both bourgeois democracy and workers democracy as though they were the same fraud. But the soviets or workers' councils - the means by which the proletariat mobilises itself for the overthrow of capitalism - must be the organs of the proletarian dictatorship that reflect and regulate the tensions and differences within the proletariat and retains its armed power over the transitional state. The party, the indispensable vanguard, however clear and in advance of the rest of the proletariat at a particular time, cannot substitute itself for this power
However, having demonstrated the right of the party - in practice, if not “in principle” - to shoot down workers, the Bordigists, as if shrinking from the horror of this conclusion, then proceed to deny that the Kronstadt revolt had a proletarian character anyway. Following one of Lenin's definitions of the time, the Kronstadt was a ”petty-bourgeois counter-revolution” that opened the door to white guard reaction.
It was certainly true that all sorts of confused and even reactionary ideas were expressed by the rebels of Kronstadt, and some were reflected in its platform. It is also true that the organised forces of the counter-revolution were trying to use the rebellion for their own ends. But the workers of Kronstadt continued to consider themselves in continuity with the revolution of 1917 and as an integral part of the proletarian movement on a world scale:
“Let the workers of the entire world know that we, the defenders of the power of the soviets, protect the conquests of the social revolution. We will win or perish on the ruins of Kronstadt, fighting for the just cause of the proletarian masses” (the Kronstadt Pravda , p82).
Whatever confusions were expressed by the Kronstadt rebels, it is absolutely undeniable that their demands also reflected the interests of the proletariat faced with terrible living conditions, the growing oppression of a state bureaucracy and the loss of its political power in the atrophied soviets. The attempt at the time by the Bolsheviks to brand them as petty-bourgeois and potential agents of the counter revolution was of course a pretext to solve a situation of terrible danger and complexity within the proletariat by force.
With the advantage of historical hindsight and the theoretical work of the communist left, we can see the basic error of their reasoning: the Bolsheviks crushed the Kronstadt revolt and nevertheless an anti-proletarian dictatorship still massacred the communists - Stalinism, the absolute power of the capitalist bureaucracy. In fact, in crushing the efforts of the workers of Kronstadt to regenerate the soviets, in identifying themselves with the state, the Bolsheviks were paving the way for Stalinism without knowing it. They helped the acceleration of a counter-revolutionary process which was to have far more terrible and tragic consequences for the working class than the restoration of the Whites. In Russia the counter-revolution won, proclaiming itself communist. The idea that Stalinist Russia was the living embodiment of socialism, and in direct continuity with the October revolution sowed a terrible confusion and an incalculable demoralisation in the ranks of the working class all over the world. We are still living with the consequences of this distortion of reality as the bourgeoisie since 1989 continues to equate the death of Stalinism with the death of communism.
But the Bordigists, despite this experience, are still identifying with the tragic mistake of 1921. It is hardly a “tragic” necessity for them but a communist duty that will have to be repeated !
Like the anarchists, the Bordigists don't see any contradiction between the Bolshevik Party in 1917, that led but also deferred to and depended on, the armed will of the revolutionary proletariat organised in the soviets, and the Bolshevik Party of 1921, that had reduced the soviets to a shadow of their former power and turned the violence of the state against the working class. But while the anarchists help the bourgeoisie in their present campaigns by portraying the Bolsheviks as machiavellian tyrants, the Bordigists celebrate this fraudulent image as the very acme of revolutionary intransigence.
But a Communist Left, worthy of the name, while identifying with the Bolshevik heritage must be also able to criticise its mistakes. The crushing of the Kronstadt revolt was one of the most harmful and terrible of these.
Como 8.1.2001
1) See International Review n°3, p51, for the platform of the Kronstadt revolt.
2) The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party , another branch of the Communist Left has an ambiguous position on Kronstadt. An article published in Revolutionary Perspectives No 23 (1986) reaffirms the proletarian character of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik Party that led it, and rejects the anarchist idealisations of the Kronstadt revolt, underlining that the revolt reflected profoundly unfavourable conditions for the proletarian revolution and that it contained many confused and reactionary elements. At the same time the article criticises the Bordigist idea that the assault on Kronstadt was a necessity to preserve the dictatorship of the party. It affirms that one of the basic lessons of Kronstadt is that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be exercised by the class itself, through its workers' councils, and not by the party. It also shows that the errors of the Bolsheviks concerning the relation between the party and the class, in the overall context of the isolation of the proletarian bastion, accelerated the internal degeneration of the both the party and the soviet state. Nevertheless the article doesn't characterise the revolt as proletarian and doesn't answer the fundamental question: is it possible that a proletarian dictatorship uses violence against the discontent of the working class? They even say that as a result of the manipulation of the counter-revolution - even if it opened up a chapter of slow agony in the workers movement - the repression of the revolt was more than justified.
The coming century will be decisive for human history. If capitalism continues to rule the planet, then before 2100 society will be plunged into such barbarism that it will make the 20th century look like a minor headache and either reduce human-kind to the stone-age, or destroy it altogether. If humanity does have a future, then it is wholly in the hands of the world proletariat, whose worldwide revolution alone can overthrow the domination of the capitalist mode of production whose historic crisis is responsible for today's barbarity. But to do so, the proletariat must find in the future the strength to carry out its task, which has been lacking up to now.
In the first part of this article, we tried to understand why the proletariat's past revolutionary endeavours failed, and above all its greatest, the revolution that began in Russia in 1917. We showed that the terrible defeat it suffered at the end of this attempt caused it to miss the appointment with history that followed: capitalism's great crisis in the 1930s, and World War II. In particular, we showed that at the end of the last war, "The proletariat had reached rock bottom. What it was told, what it thought, was its greatest victory - the triumph of democracy over fascism - was in fact its most utter historic defeat. Capitalist order was guaranteed by the workers' euphoric belief in their "victory", and their resulting belief in the "sacred virtues" of bourgeois democracy: the same democracy which had led them twice into imperialist butchery and crushed their revolution in 1920".
In Europe, the main battleground of both the war and the revolution, the Allied victory paralysed the class struggle for several years. The workers' bellies were empty, but their heads filled with the euphoria of "victory". Moreover, the state capitalist policies of every government in Europe provided a further means of mystification. These policies corresponded to the fundamental needs of European capital with its economy laid to waste by the war. Nationalisations, and a certain number of "social" measures (such as the state's taking charge of the health system), were all completely capitalist measures. They allowed the state better to plan and co-ordinate the reconstruction of a productive potential in ruins. At the same time, they allowed a more efficient management of labour power. For example, the capitalists had every interest in the good health of the workforce, especially when the workers were being asked to make an exceptional effort, in difficult conditions and with a shortage of labour power. But these capitalist measures were presented as "workers' victories", not only by the Stalinist parties whose programmes included the complete nationalisation of the economy, but also by the social-democrats, in particular the British Labour Party. This explains why throughout Europe, the left parties, including the Stalinists, were to be found in government after the war, either in coalitions with parties of the democratic Right (such as the Christian Democracy in Italy), or alone (in Britain, the Labour leader Attlee replaced Churchill as prime minister, despite the latter's immense popularity and his inestimable services to the British bourgeoisie).
Two years after the war, the promises of a better future, with which the socialist and Stalinist parties had persuaded the workers to accept the most terrible sacrifices, had been broken. The workers undertook a series of struggles. In the spring of 1947, a strike at Renault, the biggest factory in France, forced the Stalinist party (whose leader Maurice Thorez constantly called on the workers throughout industry to "work first, make demands afterwards") to leave the government. The party, through the CGT union which it controlled, then launched a series of strikes both to allow the workers to "let off steam" before they got out of hand, but also to put pressure on the other fractions of the bourgeoisie in order to force their way back into the government. But the other bourgeois parties turned a deaf ear. They had no doubts about the Stalinists' loyalty in defence of the national capital - but the Cold War had begun, and the bourgeoisie's ruling fractions throughout Europe had lined up behind the United States. Wherever the Stalinists took part in government, they either seized power completely if they were in the Russian zone, or were thrown out altogether in the Western zone.
From this time on, workers' conditions in the Western zone slowly began to improve. Needless to say, this had nothing to do with any bourgeois generosity. The billions of dollars of the Marshall Plan, which had just begun to arrive, were designed to tie the West European bourgeoisie firmly to the US bloc, and to undermine the influence of the Stalinist parties, which were henceforth at the head of the workers' struggles.
In Eastern Europe, the Stalinist parties under Moscow's orders refused the American manna, and the situation took longer to improve slightly. However, the workers' anger could not be expressed in the same way. At first, the workers were called to support the communist parties, which promised them the moon, all the more so because the communists not only took part in the governments set up after the "Liberation" (as in most of the Western countries), but also took the lead in these governments thanks to the support of the Red Army, and eliminated the "bourgeois parties". The workers were presented with the mystification of the "construction of socialism". This mystification had a certain success, as for example in Czechoslovakia, where the February 1948 "Prague coup" - in other words the Stalinists' seizure of government power - was carried out with the support of many workers.
Nonetheless, in the "people's democracies" the main instrument of control over the working class soon became brute force and repression. The workers' uprising of June 1953 in East Berlin and many other towns in the Soviet occupation zone was bloodily crushed by Russian tanks[1]. In Poland, the workers' anger, which first found expression in the great Poznan strike of June 1956, was defused by the return to power on 21st October of Gomulka (a Stalinist leader expelled from the party in 1949 for "Titoism", and imprisoned between 1951 and 1955). In Hungary, however, the workers' rising which began a few days later was savagely put down by the Russians from 4th November onwards, leaving 25,000 dead and 160,000 refugees[2].
The workers' risings in the "socialist countries" between 1953 and 1956 were clear proof that these countries had nothing "working class" about them. But every sector of the bourgeoisie spoke the same language to prevent the workers from drawing the real lessons from events.
In the Eastern bloc, the "communist" propaganda, and the Stalinist leaders' constant references to "marxism" and "proletarian internationalism" were the best means to turn the workers' anger away from a class perspective and increase their illusions in bourgeois democracy and nationalism. On 17th June 1953, an immense procession of East Berlin workers headed down the great avenue Unter den Linden towards the West. Their aim was to seek the solidarity of the West Berlin workers, but they were also under the illusion that the Western authorities would help workers in the East. These same authorities closed off their sector, and with their usual cynicism changed the name of Unter den Linden to the Avenue of 17th June. Similarly, while the Polish workers' demands in June 1956 obviously included many class economic demands, they were also strongly coloured with democratic, and above all nationalist and religious illusions. This is why Gomulka, who presented himself as a patriot who had stood up to the Russians, and who freed Cardinal Wyszynski (interned in a monastery since 1953) immediately after his return to power, was able to regain control of the situation by the end of 1956. The workers' insurrection in Hungary, despite organising in workers' councils, remained strongly marked by democratic and nationalist illusions. Indeed, the insurrection itself had been sparked off by the bloody repression of a students' demonstration demanding that Hungary adopt the "Polish way". The measures decided by Imre Nagy (an old Stalinist sacked from his post as party leader by the hard-liners in April 1955) were intended to exploit these illusions in order to regain control of the situation: he announced the formation of a coalition government and Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. This last measure was unacceptable for the USSR, and it intervened with tanks.
The intervention of Russian troops gave nationalism a further impetus in the East European countries. At the same time, it was abundantly exploited by the "democratic" and pro-American fractions of the West European bourgeoisies, while their Stalinist parties used this very propaganda to portray the Hungarian workers' insurrection as a chauvinist, even a fascist, movement, in the pay of US imperialism.
Throughout the Cold War, even when it was tempered by the policy of "peaceful co-existence" after 1956, the division of the world into two opposing blocs was thus a primary mystification of the working class. As we saw in the first part of this article, during the 1930s the identification of the Stalinist USSR with communism provoked a profound demoralisation in some sectors of the working class, who wanted nothing to do with a "Soviet-style" society and turned back to the social-democrats. At the same time, most workers continued to hope for a proletarian revolution and followed the Stalinist parties in their claims to defend the "socialist fatherland" and the "anti-fascist struggle", thus making it possible for the latter to enrol them in World War II. During the 1950s, the same kind of policy continued to divide and disorientate the working class. A part of the class wanted to hear no more of communism (identified with the USSR), while the rest remained under the ideological domination of the Stalinist parties and trade unions. Thus, during the Korean War the confrontation between East and West was used to set different sectors of the class against each other, and to enrol millions of workers behind the Soviet camp in the name of the "anti-imperialist struggle". For example, on 28th May 1952, the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Peace Movement which it controlled organised a great demonstration in Paris against a visit by the American general Ridgway, commanding US forces in Korea. Ridgway was accused (wrongly as it turned out) of using bacterial weapons, and was greeted by a demonstration of tens of thousands of workers (mostly PCF militants) denouncing "Plague Ridgway" and demanding France's withdrawal from NATO. There were violent confrontations with the police, and the PCF's number two, Jacques Duclos, was arrested. The PCF's determination in confronting the police, and the arrest of its "historic" leader renewed the "revolutionary" image of a party which only five years earlier had occupied the palaces and ministerial positions of the bourgeois Republic. At the same time, the colonial wars provided a further opportunity to turn the workers away from their class terrain, once again in the name of the struggle against imperialism (not capitalism), against which the USSR was presented as the champion of "the peoples' rights and freedom".
This kind of campaign continued in many countries throughout the 1950s and 60s, especially with the USA's growing commitment to the war in Vietnam from 1961 onwards.
If there was one country where the world's division into two opposing blocs weighed especially heavily, and where the counter-revolution had been particularly crushing, it was Germany. For decades, the German proletariat had been the vanguard of the world working class. Workers all over the world knew that the fate of the revolution would be determined in Germany. And this was proved true between 1919 and 1923. The German proletariat's defeat determined the defeat of the world proletariat. And the terrible counter-revolution that followed, in the hideous guise of Nazism, was, with Stalinism, the clearest expression of the counter-revolution that battened on the working class in every country.
After World War II, Germany's division between the two great imperialist blocs made possible, on both sides of the iron curtain, a thorough destruction of consciousness within the working masses, leaving the German proletariat, no longer the vanguard but the rearguard of the European working class, in terms both of its combativeness and its consciousness.
However, what really paralysed the working class throughout this period, and maintained its ideological submission to capitalism, was the system's apparent prosperity as a result of the reconstruction of Europe's war-shattered economies.
Bourgeois economists and politicians call the period between 1945 and the serious world recession of 1975 the "glorious thirty years", since they ignore the difficulties that the world economy was already undergoing in 1967 and 1971.
We will not go into the causes here, either of the rapid economic growth during this period, or of its end; we have already dealt with both at length in the International Review[3]. What is important is that the open crisis which began to develop from 1967 onwards (with a slowdown in the world economy, recession in Germany, devaluation of sterling, rise in unemployment) was a new confirmation of marxism, which has always:
- declared that capitalism is unable to overcome definitively its economic contradictions, which in the final analysis are responsible for the convulsions of the 20th century (and in particular for the two World Wars);
- considered that capitalism is at its strongest politically and socially during its periods of prosperity[4];
- based the perspective of a proletarian revolution on the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production[5].
In this sense, the working class' ideological subjection to capitalism, and all the mystifications which kept the workers from any idea of putting capitalism into question, could only be overcome with the end of the post-war boom.
This is precisely what happened in 1968.
The end of the counter-revolution
In 1967, the bourgeoisie's ideologues were still singing the praises of the capitalist economy; some, who claimed to be revolutionaries and even marxists, talked of nothing but bourgeois society's ability to "integrate" the working class[6]; even the groups of the Communist Left which had emerged from the degenerating Third International could see no light at the end of the tunnel. Yet that year, a small review called Internacionalismo (later to become the ICC's publication in Venezuela) published an article entitled "1968, a new convulsion of capitalism is beginning", which ended thus:
"We are not prophets, and we do not claim to guess when and how future events will unfold. But we are certain and conscious that the process in which capitalism is engaged today cannot be stopped with reforms, devaluations, or any other kind of capitalist measures, and that this process is leading directly to the crisis. And we are equally sure that the inverse process of developing class combativeness, which can be seen all around us today, will the lead the working class to a direct and bloody struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state".
The one great merit of our comrades who published this article, was to have remained faithful to the teachings of marxism which were to be strikingly verified a few months later. May 1968 in France saw the outbreak of the biggest strike in history, involving the largest ever number of workers (almost 10 million) stopping work at the same time.
An event of such size was the sign of a fundamental change in society: the terrible counter-revolution which had fastened on the working class at the end of the 1920s, and continued for two decades after World War II, had come to an end. And this was soon to be confirmed throughout the world by a series of struggles such as had not been seen for decades:
- the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969 saw massive struggles in all the main industrial centres, and an explicit questioning of trade union control;
- the uprising, during the same year, of the workers of Cordoba in Argentina;
- the massive strikes by the workers of the Baltic coast in Poland during the winter of 1970-71;
- a series of other struggles in the years that followed in virtually all the European countries, and especially in Britain (the world's oldest capitalist country), Germany (the most powerful country in Europe and the leading light of the workers' movement since the second half of the 19th century), and even Spain (still at the time in the grip of the ferocious Francoist dictatorship).
At the same time as this awakening of the workers' struggle, the idea of revolution returned in strength. It was discussed by many workers in struggle, particularly in France and Italy where the struggles had involved the greatest numbers. This proletarian reawakening was also expressed by a growing interest in revolutionary thought, for the writings of Marx and Engels, and of other marxists such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, but also of the militants of the Communist Left like Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. This interest was concretised in the emergence of a whole series of little groups trying to renew the links with the Communist Left, and drawing their inspiration from its experience.
We will not deal here, either with the evolution of the workers' struggles since 1968, nor of the groups which claim the heritage of the Communist Left[7]. What we will try to do, is to show why the 1967 forecast by our comrades in Venezuela has still not come to fruition, three decades later, in "the direct and bloody struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state".
Our organisation has highlighted the obstacles encountered by the proletariat throughout the last thirty years. What follows is thus essentially no more than a summary of what we have said on other occasions.
The first cause of the length of the road that leads today to the communist revolution is an objective one. The revolutionary wave, which began in 1917, and spread to many other countries, was a response to a sudden and terrible drop in working class living conditions: the world war. It took only three years for the proletariat, which had gone to war with a light heart and completely blinded by the bourgeoisie's lies, to open its eyes and raise its head against the barbarism confronting it in the trenches and the terrible exploitation on the home front.
The objective reason for the development of workers' struggles after 1968 was the aggravation of capitalism's economic situation, bringing workers' living conditions increasingly under attack. But contrary to the 1930s, when the bourgeoisie had completely lost control of the situation, the present open crisis did not develop over a period of a few years, but in a process covering several decades. The slow rhythm of the crisis' development was a result of the ruling class' ability to learn the lessons of its past experience, and systematically put into operation a whole series of measures which have allowed it to "manage" the descent into the abyss[8]. This does not alter the insoluble nature of the crisis, but it has allowed the ruling class to spread out over a whole period, both geographically and temporally, its attacks on the working class, and so to hide even from itself the fact that the crisis has no way out.
The second factor that explains the length of the road to proletarian revolution, is the ruling class' deployment of a whole series of political manoeuvres aimed at exhausting the struggle, and preventing the development of working class consciousness.
We can summarise the main features of the bourgeoisie's different strategies since 1968 as follows:
- faced with the first upsurge of workers' struggles, which took it by surprise, the bourgeoisie played the card of the "left alternative", calling on the workers to end their struggles in order to allow the left-wing parties to put in place a different economic policy which was supposed to put an end to the crisis;
- this policy paralysed the workers' combativeness for a while, until a new wave of struggles that began in 1978 (in 1979, for example, Britain went through the highest period of workers' struggle since the General Strike of 1926, with 29 million strike days lost); the bourgeoisie in the most advanced countries (particularly Germany, Britain, the USA, Italy) played the card of the left in opposition: the so-called workers' parties and the unions under their control adopted a more radical language aimed at sabotaging the workers' struggles from within;
- this policy largely explains the ebb in workers' struggles from 1981, but failed to prevent a renewal of large-scale combats that began in the autumn of 1983 (strikes in the public sector in Belgium, then in Holland, the British miners strike of 1984, the Danish general strike of 1985, massive strikes in Belgium in 1986, a series of strikes in Italy during 1987, notably in the education sector, etc).
The most striking characteristic of these movements, which expressed a profound development in working class consciousness, was the growing difficulty that the classic union apparatus had in controlling the struggle, which led to the more and more frequent use of organs that presented themselves as outside, or even against, the unions (such as the "coordinations" in France and Italy during 1986-88), but which in fact were nothing other than "rank-and-file" union structures.
Throughout this period, the bourgeoisie used a whole series of manoeuvres designed to contain workers' combativeness, and retard the development of their consciousness. But this anti-proletarian policy was given a powerful boost by the development of the decomposition of capitalist society. This was the result of the fact that although the proletariat's historic resurgence at the end of the 1960s had prevented the bourgeoisie from answering its systemic crisis in its own way - by world war, just as the crisis of 1929 had been the prelude to World War II - the working class could not prevent the continued development of the characteristics of capitalism's decadence without overthrowing the whole of capitalism itself.
"The world situation may be in a temporary stalemate, this does not mean that history has come to an end. For two decades, society has continued to suffer the accumulation of all the characteristics of decadence, exacerbated by a plunge into the economic crisis which the ruling class shows every day it is unable to overcome. The bourgeoisie's only project for society is to resist, on a day-to-day basis and with no hope of success, the irretrievable collapse of the capitalist mode of production.
Deprived of the slightest historic project capable of mobilising its strength, even the suicidal project of world war, capitalist society can only rot on its feet, plunging ever further into an advanced social decomposition and generalised despair"[9].
Capitalism's entry into decomposition, the final phase of its decadence, weighed more and more heavily on the working class throughout the 1980s:
"At the outset, ideological decomposition obviously affected first and foremost the capitalist class itself, and by rebound the petty-bourgeois strata which have no real autonomy. We can even say that the latter identify particularly well with this decomposition, inasmuch as their specific situation - the absence of any historic future - echoes the major cause of ideological decomposition: the absence of any immediate perspective for society as a whole. Only the proletariat bears within itself a perspective for humanity, and in this sense it is within the ranks of the proletariat that the greatest capacity for resistance to decomposition lies. However, the proletariat itself is not immune from decomposition, all the more so in that the workers live in close proximity to the petty-bourgeoisie, which is decomposition's main vehicle. The elements which constitute the proletariat's strength are in direct opposition to the various aspects of ideological decomposition:
- collective action, solidarity, confront atomisation, ‘"every man for himself', and the search for individual solutions;
- the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the destruction of the relationships which form the basis of life within society;
- the proletariat's confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly undermined by the general despair invading society, of nihilism and 'no future';
- consciousness, lucidity, coherence and unity of thought, the taste for theory, have to make their way with difficulty through the mirages of drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection of reflection and the destruction of thought characteristic of our epoch.
An aggravating factor in this situation is obviously the fact that a growing proportion of the young generations of the working class suffer the devastating effects of unemployment even before they have had the opportunity to experience the collective life of the class, in the workplace and in the company of their comrades in work and struggle. Unemployment, is a direct result of the economic crisis, and not in itself an expression of decomposition. Nonetheless, its effects in this phase of decadence make it a major element of decomposition. Although in general it helps to unmask capitalism's inability to offer a future to the proletariat, it is also today a powerful factor that tends to "lumpenise" certain sectors of the class, particularly amongst the young workers, which weakens correspondingly its present and future political capacities. Throughout the 1980s, which saw a sharp rise in unemployment, this situation was expressed in the absence of significant movements or attempts at organisation by unemployed workers. The contrast with the proletariat's ability during the 1930s, notably in the US, to organise the unemployed, illustrates only too well decomposition's effect in preventing unemployment becoming a factor in the development of proletarian consciousness"[10].
In 1989, in a situation where the working class was finding great difficulty in developing its consciousness, came an immense historical event, itself a sign of capitalism's decomposition: the disintegration of the East European Stalinist regimes, which the entire bourgeoisie had always presented as "socialist":
"The events presently shaking the so-called ‘socialist' countries, the de facto disappearance of the Russian bloc, the patent and definitive bankruptcy of Stalinism on the economic, political and ideological level, constitute along with the international resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the sixties, the most important historic facts since the end of the Second World War. An event on such a scale cannot fail to have its repercussions, and indeed is already doing so, on the consciousness of the working class, all the more so because it involves an ideology and a political system that was presented for more than half a century by all sectors of the bourgeoisie as ‘socialist' or ‘working class'.
The disappearance of Stalinism is the disappearance of the symbol and spearhead of the most terrible counter-revolution in history.
But this does not mean that the development of the consciousness of the world proletariat will be facilitated by it. On the contrary. Even in its death throes, Stalinism is rendering a last service to the domination of capital: in decomposing, its cadaver continues to pollute the atmosphere that the proletariat breathes. For the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie, the final collapse of Stalinist ideology, the ‘democratic', ‘liberal' and nationalist movements which are sweeping the Eastern countries, provide a golden opportunity to unleash and intensify their campaigns of mystification.
The identification which is systematically established between Stalinism and communism, the lie repeated a thousand times, and today being wielded more than ever, according to which the proletarian revolution can only end in disaster, will for a whole period gain an added impact within the ranks of the working class. We thus have to expect a momentary retreat in the consciousness of the proletariat; the signs of this can already be seen in the unions' return to strength. While the incessant and increasingly brutal attacks which capitalism cannot help but mount on the proletariat will oblige the workers to enter the struggle, in an initial period this will not result in a greater capacity in the class to develop its consciousness. In particular, reformist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the period ahead, greatly facilitating the action of the unions"[11].
Our forecast in 1989 was wholly confirmed during the 1990s. The ebb in consciousness within the working class could be seen in a loss of confidence in its own strength, provoking a general ebb in its combativeness whose effects can still be felt today.
In 1989, we defined the conditions which would make it possible for the working class to recover:
"Given the historic importance of the events that are determining it, the present retreat of the proletariat - although it doesn't call into question the historic course, the general perspective of class confrontations - is going to be much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland. Having said this, we cannot foresee in advance its breadth or its length. In particular, the rhythm of the collapse of Western capitalism - which at present we can see accelerating, with the perspective of a new and open recession - will constitute a decisive factor in establishing the moment when the proletariat will be able to resume its march towards revolutionary consciousness.
By sweeping away the illusions about the ‘revival' of the world economy, by exposing the lie which presents ‘liberal' capitalism as a solution to the historic bankruptcy of the whole capitalist mode of production - and not only of its Stalinist incarnation - the intensification of the capitalist crisis will eventually push the proletariat to turn again towards the perspective of a new society, to more and more inscribe this perspective into its struggles"[12].
And indeed, the 1990s were marked by the ability of the world bourgeoisie, especially its most important fraction in the United States, to slow the rhythm of the crisis and even to create the illusion of "light at the end of the tunnel". One of the fundamental causes of the low level of combativeness in the working class today, as well as its difficulty in developing its self-confidence and consciousness, lies in the illusions that capitalism has succeeded in fostering as to its economic "prosperity".
This being said, there is another, more general element which explains the difficulties in the proletariat's politicisation, which would allow it to understand, even embryonically, what is at stake in its struggles, in order to increase their extent:
"To understand all the data of the present period, and the period to come, we must also take account of the characteristics of the proletariat which is in struggle today:
- it is made up of workers' generations which have not suffered defeat, unlike those which grew up in the 1930s and during World War II; consequently, unless they suffer a decisive defeat, which the bourgeoisie has not yet succeeded in inflicting on them, they will keep their reserves of combativeness intact;
- these generations benefit from the irretrievable exhaustion of those great themes of mystification (the fatherland, democracy, anti-fascism, the defence of the USSR), which were used in the past to enrol the proletariat in imperialist war.
It is these essential characteristics which explain why today's historic course is towards class confrontations and not imperialist war. However, the proletariat's present strength is also its weakness: precisely because only undefeated generations have proved capable of finding the road to class struggle once again, an enormous rift lies between this generation and the one that fought the decisive battles of the 1920s, for which the proletariat is paying a heavy price:
- a great ignorance about its own past and the lessons of that past;
- backwardness in the formation of the revolutionary party.
These characteristics explain the extremely uneven nature of the present course of workers' struggles. They allow us to understand the moments of the proletariat's lack of self-confidence, because it is unaware of its potential strength against the bourgeoisie. They also show the long road that stretches before the proletariat, which will only be able to make the revolution if it has concretely integrated the experience of the past, and created its class party.
The proletariat's historic resurgence at the end of the 1960s put the formation of the party on the agenda. It did not happen, because:
- of the half-century gap that separates us from the old revolutionary parties;
- of the disappearance, or the more or less pronounced atrophy of the left fractions which emerged from them;
- of many workers' distrust towards any political organisation (whether bourgeois or proletarian) ... an expression of the proletariat's historic weakness faced with the need to politicise its struggle"[13].
We can see, then, just how long is the proletariat's road to communist revolution. The length and depth of the counter-revolution, the almost total disappearance of the communist organisations, capitalism's decomposition, the collapse of Stalinism, the ruling class' ability to control the collapse of its economy, and to sow illusions in it: it would seem that during the last thirty years, indeed since the 1920s, nothing has been spared the proletariat on its road to revolution.
The fundamental nature of the proletariat's difficulties on the road to revolution
At the end of the first part of this article, we mentioned the different appointments with history that the proletariat has missed during the 20th century: the revolutionary wave which put an end to World War I, but which ended in defeat, the collapse of the world economy in 1929, the Second World War. We have seen that the proletariat did not miss its appointment with history at the end of the 1960s, but at the same time we have measured how many obstacles it has encountered since, which have slowed down its road towards proletarian revolution.
The revolutionaries of the last century, Marx and Engels first among them, thought that the revolution would take place during their century. They were mistaken, and were the first to recognise their mistake. In reality, the conditions for proletarian revolution only came together at the beginning of the 20th century, to be confirmed by the first worldwide imperialist slaughter. In their turn, the revolutionaries of the early 20th century thought that, now the objective conditions for communist revolution were met, the revolution would take place during their century. They too were mistaken. When we go back over all the historic events which have prevented the revolution from taking place to date, we might be left with the impression that the proletariat has suffered from "bad luck", that it has been confronted with a series of catastrophes and unfavourable circumstances, none of which were inevitable. It is true that history was not written in advance, and that it could have evolved differently. The Russian revolution, for example, could have been crushed by the White armies, which would have prevented the development of Stalinism, the proletariat's greatest enemy during the 20th century, the spearhead of history's most terrible counter-revolution, whose negative effects are still with us, thirty years after it came to an end. Nor was it inevitable at first sight that the Allies would win World War II, thus relaunching for a long time to come the ideology of democracy which, in the developed countries, has been one of the most effective poisons against the development of working class consciousness. Similarly, another outcome to the Second World War could have been the disappearance of the Stalinist regime, which would have avoided the antagonism between two blocs being presented as a struggle between capitalism and socialism. We would never have experienced the collapse of the "socialist" bloc, whose negative ideological consequences weigh so heavily on the working class today.
That being said, the accumulation of obstacles that have confronted the proletariat during the 20th century cannot on the whole be considered as a mere succession of "misfortunes". Fundamentally they are an expression of the enormous difficulty of the proletarian revolution.
An aspect of this difficulty is the bourgeoisie's ability to make use of the different situations it finds itself in, and to turn them systematically against the working class. This is the proof that the bourgeoisie - despite the long death agony of its mode of production, despite the barbarism whose development all over the world it is quite unable to prevent, despite the rot eating away at its society and despite its ideological decomposition - remains vigilant and capable of great intelligence when it comes to preventing the proletariat's advance towards revolution. One reason that the predictions of past revolutionaries as to the timing of the revolution failed to come about, is that they under-estimated the strength of the ruling class, and particularly its political intelligence. Revolutionaries today will only really be able to contribute to the proletarian struggle for revolution if they are able to appreciate this political strength of the bourgeoisie - and notably the Machiavellianism it is capable of when necessary - and warn the workers against the traps laid by the enemy class.
But there is another, still more fundamental reason for the proletariat's immense difficulty in carrying out the revolution. It has already been pointed out in this oft-quoted passage from Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Proletarian revolutions (...) constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course (...) they shrink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals, until the situation is created in which any retreat is impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here!"[14].
And indeed, one reason for the great difficulty for the vast majority of workers in turning towards the revolution lies in the vertigo that seizes them when they think that the task is so enormous as to be impossible. The task of overthrowing the most powerful class that history has ever known, the system which has allowed humanity to take gigantic steps forward in its material production and mastery of nature does indeed seem to be impossible. But what makes the working class dizzier still is the immensity of the task of building a radically new society, liberated at last from the woes which have crushed human society ever since it existed, from scarcity, exploitation, oppression, and war.
When prisoners and slaves constantly wore shackles on their feet, they sometimes became used to the constraint to the point where they felt as if they would be unable to walk without their chains, and sometimes even refused to have them removed. What has happened to the proletariat is not dissimilar. It bears within itself the ability to free humanity, and yet it lacks the self-confidence to march consciously towards that goal.
But the time is coming when "the conditions themselves [will] cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!". If it remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie, human society will never reach the next century, other than in shreds, nothing human any longer left in it. As long as this extreme has not been reached, as long as a capitalist system survives, there will necessarily be its exploited class, the proletariat. And there will therefore remain the possibility that the proletariat, spurred on by capitalism's total economic bankruptcy, will at last overcome its hesitations and take on the enormous task that history has confided to it: the communist revolution.
Fabienne
[1] See our article on the 1953 insurrection published in the International Review no.15
[2] See our article on the class struggle in Eastern Europe between 1920 and 1970, in the International Review no.27.
[3] See also our pamphlet on The Decadence of Capitalism
[4] "Thereby what he had hitherto deduced, half a priori, from gappy material, became absolutely clear to him from the facts themselves, namely, that the world trade crisis of 1847 had been the true mother of the February [Paris] and March [Vienna and Berlin] revolutions, and that the industrial prosperity, which had been returning gradually since the middle of 1848 and attained full bloom in 1849 and 1850, was the revitalising force of the European reaction" (Engels, Introduction to Marx's ‘The Class Struggles in France', 1895, in Marx-Engels, Lawrence and Wishart, p.643).
[5] "A new revolution is only possible as the result of a new crisis; but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself" (Marx, The class struggles in France, in Surveys from exile, Pelican, p.131).
[6] This was particularly the case with Herbert Marcuse, ideologue of the 1960s student revolts, who considered that the working class could no longer constitute a revolutionary force, and that the only hope for the overthrow of capitalism lay in the marginal sectors such as the blacks and students in the US, or the poor peasants in the Third World.
[7] We have already done so in many articles in the International Review. See in particular the report on the class struggle to the ICC's 13th Congress, published in International Review no.99.
[8] See our series of articles "Thirty years of capitalism's open crisis", in International Review nos.96 and 98.
[9] Communist revolution or the destruction of humanity, Manifesto of the 9th ICC Congress. On this question, see in particular our article "Decomposition, the final phase of capitalist decadence", in International Review no.62
[10] ibid.
[11] "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the Eastern countries", in International Review no.60
[12] Ibid.
[13] Resolution on the international situation at the ICC's 6th Congress, published in International Review no.44.
[14] In Marx, Surveys from Exile, Pelican. The Latin phrase comes from one of Aesop's fables. It is the reply made to a boaster who claimed he had once made an immense leap in Rhodes: "Here is Rhodes: leap here and now". But the German phrase, "Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!" (here is the rose, dance here) is Hegel's variant, in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right. The Greek Rhodos can mean both Rhodes and rose.
Eight years after his father, George W Bush has begun his term as president of the USA. His father promised us "peace and prosperity" after the disintegration first of the Eastern bloc, then of the USSR. The son inherits a situation of widespread war and poverty, which has proliferated and deepened throughout the 1990s. The state of the world is truly catastrophic, and this is not merely a temporary transition before the promised land prophesied by Bush Senior. All the signs are that capitalism is dragging humanity down into a vicious circle of bloody military conflicts on every continent, of increasing imperialist antagonisms especially between the great powers, a new and brutal aggravation of economic crisis and poverty, and a series of disasters of every kind. These three elements - war, economic decline, and the destruction of the planet - are making conditions ever more intolerable for today's generations, and are endangering the very survival of the generations to come. It is becoming ever clearer that capitalism is leading the human species to extinction.
The illusion of peace collapsed quickly enough, following the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 and then the interminable slaughter in the Balkans. The illusion of prosperity, on the other hand, has been given several new leases of life thanks to America's positive growth rates during the 1990s, the increasing value of stocks and shares, and the mirage of the "new economy" linked to the Internet. American growth rates and the rising stock market have not prevented a dramatic increase in world poverty and hunger - indeed quite the contrary. As for the "new economy", it is long gone, and the illusion of a coming prosperity for all lies shattered.
An economy in virtual bankruptcy
In this Review we have already denounced many times the lies about the "good health" of the capitalist economy based on positive growth rates. The bourgeoisie has established criteria for defining a recession, which is only considered to exist after two consecutive quarters of negative growth. By these criteria of bourgeois propaganda - let us note in passing - Japan has been "officially" in recession for the last ten years. Nonetheless, and quite apart from all the cheating with the figures and the ways of calculating the recession, the reality of a positive "official" growth rate does not mean that the economy is in good health. The increasing poverty in the US itself under the Clinton presidency, despite "exceptional" growth rates, is an illustration of this.
In order to define a catastrophic economic crisis, and to show that everything today is going well by comparison, economists, historians, and the media generally always refer to the great crisis of 1929. But the experience of 1929 itself gives the lie to this assertion: "In the lives of most men and women, although the central economic experience of the time was certainly cataclysmic, and crowned by the Great Crisis of 1929-1933, economic growth did not stop during these decades. It simply slowed down. In the biggest and richest economy of the day, the USA, the average growth in GNP per person between 1913 and 1938 did not exceed a modest 0.8% per annum. At the same time, world industrial production grew by slightly more than 80%, in other words about half the growth rate of the previous quarter-century (WW Rostov, 1978, p662). (...) The fact is that had a Martian observed a graph of economic movement from far enough away not to see ups and downs that earth-bound humans have suffered, he would undoubtedly have concluded that the world economy had undergone a continuous expansion" (EJ Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes).
Our rulers and their economists are not Martians, but defenders of capitalist order, which is why they spend so much effort in trying to conceal the reality of the economic disaster. Only rarely, and in more confidential publications, does a partial recognition of this reality confirm what we are saying: "Nonetheless, economic growth will remain insufficient to reduce the level of poverty or improve the well-being of the population", admits The Economist with regard to Latin America (The World in 2001). But of course the same is true for the rest of the world's population. And what will it be like if Fred Hickey's forecast, cited by The Wall Street Journal, comes true, of a coming recession?
Since the collapse of the world's stock markets at the beginning of 2001, it is hard to make believe that all is well in the realm of finance and the "new Internet economy". "Since their historic high point of 5132 points on 10th March 2000, technology values have fallen by almost 65%. A sorry anniversary, since in the same period some $4.5 trillion have evaporated from US stock markets" (Le Monde, 17/03/01).
It is not just Internet values, but the whole stocks and shares market which is affected by the decline in values. For the moment, contrary to the market crises of the 1980s and 1990s in America, Russia, and Asia, the decline seems to be under control, although it is certainly a major crash. One question remains posed however: the Japanese financial and banking system, seriously undermined by bad debts, is on the verge of bankruptcy. According to Le Monde of 27th March, "The rout of the Japanese banking system threatens the rest of the world". If Japan withdraws its money from the US, then the whole credit financing of the US economy will be at risk: "If foreign investors no longer want to supply the necessary capital, then the impact on growth, the stock market, and the dollar, could be substantial" (The World in 2001). All the more so in that US household savings are nil, while individual and company debt for stock market speculation has reached impressive heights. As we have shown many times, the world capitalist economy is based on a mountain of debt which will never be repaid. After deferring the consequences of the crisis in space and time, by pushing them onto the "emerging" countries, these debts are now coming home to roost, to deepen and accelerate these same consequences. The world's largest economy, the USA, is also its most endebted, and its growth rates are being paid for by "a colossal trade deficit, and massive foreign debt" (idem). Even the experts have their doubts. "In short, the US economy in 2001 will need intelligent management and above all, a good dose of luck" (idem). Who would travel by plane if they were warned in advance that the pilot would need intelligence, "and above all, a good dose of luck"?
At the same time, after the different financial crises which have shaken Russia, Asia, and Latin America on several occasions, each time due to an inability to meet debt repayment deadlines, it is now Turkey's turn to go virtually bankrupt, and to see the IMF run to its sickbed. Unable to meet a $3 billion repayment deadline on 21st March, Turkey has received $6 billion in aid from the IMF, in exchange for a drastic plan of economic attacks on the population. The Argentine economy has suffered another relapse. This winter, it had to be propped up in extremis "by an exceptional financial package of $39.7 billion, intended above all to prevent it defaulting on its foreign debt of $122 billion (42% of GNP)" (Le Monde economic supplement, 20/03/01). These local crises might appear in themselves to express merely the fragility of the countries concerned. In fact, they express the fragility of the world economy, since in each case - and there have been many of them since the Latin American crisis of 1982 - where an "emerging" country is unable to meet its debt repayments, it has immediately endangered the whole world financial system. Whence the hurried interventions by the governments of the great powers and by the IMF, bearing new and ever greater credits.
In this situation, what is at stake - and has been for several years - for the world bourgeoisie, is to keep the inevitable decline in the North American economy under control. "The excess of demand over supply symbolises the other side of this miracle [of US growth]. This is also a danger, since it is accompanied by a colossal trade deficit, and massive foreign debt. If this deficit and debt were to continue, then the collapse would become inevitable. But this will not happen. In 2001, American growth will return to a more modest rhythm, no longer miraculous but merely impressive, and the foreign trade and balance of payments deficits should diminish" (The World in 2001). The first journalist we quoted counts on good luck. This one counts on a miracle (in an article entitled "The golden age of the world economy"). But for the different sectors of the world bourgeoisie - leaving aside their antagonistic imperialist, political, and commercial interests - the crucial question remains the success or otherwise of the "soft landing" of the US economy. In other words, one that avoids any excessive crises which would run the risk of revealing to the world population, and especially to the international working class, the irreversible bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. The perspective for the world's population, North America and industrialised Europe included, is one of growing poverty.
In the industrialised countries, the crisis of agricultural overproduction will lead to the ruin of thousands of small and medium farmers and an accelerated concentration in this branch of the capitalist economy. "Mad cow" disease, and the foot-and-mouth epidemic, are not natural, but social disasters caused by the capitalist mode of production. They are the consequence of sharpening economic competition and the race for productivity. In short, they are an expression of worldwide agricultural overproduction. At the same time, they provide the opportunity to "solve" this overproduction temporarily by the mass slaughter of livestock... when a large part of the world's population does not get enough to eat. And when it would suffice... to vaccinate the animals. "The agricultural crisis emphasises yet again that hunger in the South can perfectly well exist alongside waste and excess of supply in the North" (Sylvie Brunel of "Action contre la faim", in Le Monde, 10/03/01). This crisis will also have serious consequences for the peasants in the countries of the capitalist periphery, in other words for a large part of the world's population. "Another disastrous consequence for the Third World of the collapse of the meat trade is looming: an overproduction of cereals" (idem). What clearer expression of the irrationality of the capitalist world, of the absurdity of its survival, than these healthy animals condemned to slaughter and destruction when millions of human beings have not enough to eat? "The world's food problem lies not in its production, which is amply suffiicient for all, but in its distribution: those who suffer from under-nourishment are too poor to nourish themselves" (idem). This is why capitalism cannot even offer itself the "luxury" of vaccinating cows and sheep: prices would collapse, all the more so if the animals destined for slaughter were offered free to the world's hungry populations.
As long as capitalism's economic laws, and especially the law of value, survive, it will be impossible to give away the animals that are to be slaughtered. The same is true of agricultural overproduction as it is of any other kind, whence the land lying fallow in the industrialised countries, and their unsold stocks of milk and butter. Only a society where the law of value, and so wage labour and social classes, have disappeared, will be able to resolve these questions, because it will be able to give rather than destroy.
But it is not only the population involved in agricultural production, whether small farmer, day-labourer, or farm worker, that will be hit by the brutal deceleration of the world economy.
Redundancies are being announced in every branch of industry. In the USA, "new economy" companies like Intel, Dell, Delphi, Nortel, Cisco, Lucent, Xerox, and Compaq are laying off by the tens of thousands, but so are traditional industries such as General Motors and Coca-Cola. In Europe, lay-offs and shop and factory closures have abruptly taken off: Marks & Spencer and Danone, in the armaments industry at EADS and Giat Industries (builders of Leclerc tanks). Job reductions are hitting major companies and state employees.
In these industrialised countries, the national bourgeoisie is aware of the danger of a reaction from a concentrated working class with a strong historical experience of struggle, and so takes a maximum of political precautions to carry out its attacks. In countries where the working class is younger, less experienced, or more dispersed, the attacks are far more brutal. Amongst many other examples, it is clear that the working class will suffer particularly in Argentina and Turkey.
These massive attacks in every country and every branch of industry are dealing a serious blow to the lie of the "healthy economy", and above all to the idea that lay-offs in a particular company are exceptional, because elsewhere, everything is going fine. The whole international working class is affected, every branch of industry is undergoing redundancies, wage cuts, job insecurity and precariousness, speed-ups and longer working hours, a deterioration in living conditions, etc.
Bush Senior, accompanied by a chorus of states, governments, politicians, ideologists, journalists, and intellectuals, spoke of prosperity. Instead we have had, we have now, and all the signs are that we will continue to have more, and more widespread, poverty.
Humanity is faced with a historic log-jam. On the one hand, capitalism has nothing to offer but crisis, war, destruction, poverty, and increasing barbarism. On the other, the international working class, the only social force able to offer a perspective of an end to capitalism and a different society, remains unable to assert this perspective openly. In this situation, capitalist society is decomposing, rotting on its feet. Apart from the wars, the urban violence, the generalised insecurity, the most dramatic consequences threaten humanity's future and its very survival as a result of the destruction of the environment and the proliferation of all kinds of disasters.
Holes in the ozone layer, the pollution of seas, rivers, the soil, the cities and the countryside, adulteration of foodstuffs, epidemics amongst human beings and livestock: this non-exhaustive list is a demonstration that the planet is becoming less and less livable, and that its very equilibrium is in danger.
Up till now, catastrophes and the deterioration of the environment appeared as simply the "mechanical" results of the deepening economic crisis, of capitalist competition and the frantic search for maximum productivity. Today, environmental questions have become stakes in the imperialist confrontations between the great powers. The US' breaking of the Kyoto agreements on the emission of greenhouse gases has been an opportunity for the other powers, especially the Europeans, to denounce American irresponsibility. "The European Union sees no solution to the climate problem outside the Kyoto protocol, and remains determined to apply it, with or without the United States" (Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, Le Monde, 6th April 2001). Like "humanitarian" causes and the "defence of human rights", the environment and environmental disasters have become an area of competition between states. The "humanitarian interference" in Bosnia was a terrain for confrontations between the powers, just as it was during the intervention in Somalia. Humanitarian aid is in the same situation: whenever there is an earthquake, American and European teams compete to pull the most corpses from the ruins.
More and more, the link is becoming clear between capitalism's economic impasse, the exacerbation of imperialist tensions provoked on the historic level by the economic crisis, and all the consequences for the whole of social life, which in their turn sharpen imperialist rivalries and conflicts, and weigh still more heavily on the economic crisis. The capitalist world is dragging humanity and the planet down in an infernal spiral.
"Not the least tragic aspect of this catastrophe, is that humanity has learnt to live in a world where massacre, tortures, and mass exile have become daily experiences that we no longer even notice" (EJ Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes).
The world today presents a terrifying panorama. The world is bloody with a multitude of interminable military conflicts, on every continent: the ex-USSR, especially its one-time Asian republics and the Caucasus; the Middle East from Palestine to Pakistan, via Iraq and Afghanistan; Africa; Latin America, especially Colombia; and the Balkans. Today, those countries or regions which are still untouched in one way or another by open or latent conflict, are islands of "peace" in an ocean of warfare.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the situation in the Lebanon was the clearest expression of the capitalist world's entry into its phase of decomposition. "Lebanisation" became an expression to describe countries prey to the dislocation caused by interminable war. Today, whole continents are "Lebanised". How many African countries? It is hard to count them all, but most have become new Lebanons. Afghanistan is doubtless one of the most extreme examples, after 20 years of continuous fighting.
And let there be no mistake, the primary responsibility in the aggravation of all these wars lies with imperialism in general, and with the great powers in particular. The wars have been started and stoked by the rivalries among the great imperialist powers: this is the case in Afghanistan since its invasion by Russia in 1980, and America's subsequent support for the Islamic guerrillas, including the Taliban, in the days of imperialist blocs. It is obviously the case in the Balkans, where Germany supported Croat and Slovene independence in 1991, and today supports the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia, while Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Spain and the USA - to name only the major powers - have intervened actively to counter Germany. The same is true in Africa. The great powers continue to stoke the flames even when the conflicts no longer represent any great interest for them, as is the case today for Africa and Afghanistan.
In general, the direct imperialist rivalries between the powers have been more discreet, especially since the end of the blocs in 1989. Today, however, tensions are rising. The USA has adopted a particularly aggressive attitude towards China, as in the case of the collision between the Chinese fighter and the American spy plane on 1st April 2001, towards Russia with the expulsion of 50 Russian diplomats at the end of March 2001, and towards Europe with the American rejection of the Kyoto accords on reducing greenhouse gases and with the proposed national missile defence system.
Bush Senior, accompanied by a chorus of states, governments, politicians, ideologists, journalists, and intellectuals, spoke of peace. Instead we have had, we have now, and all the signs are that we will continue to have more, and more widespread, war.
Capitalism seems to be irrational from a historic standpoint. It is leading the human species to destruction, and no longer has any economic or historical "rationality".
"During the 20th Century, more human beings have been killed or left to die than ever before in history (?) It has undoubtedly been the most murderous century for which records exist, both by the scale, the frequency, and the duration of the wars which have filled it (and which barely paused for an instant during the 1920s), but also by the incomparable extent of the disasters which it has produced - from history's greatest famines to systematic genocide. Unlike the 19th century, which seemed to be, and indeed was, a period of almost uninterrupted material, intellectual, and moral progress (that is to say, progress in civilised values), since 1914 we have seen a marked regression in those values once considered as normal in the developed countries and the bourgeois milieu, which it was once thought would spread to the most backward regions of the planet and the least enlightened strata of the population" (Hobsbawm, op. cit.).
It is true that capitalism has a history which allows us to understand its present dynamic. There are historical reasons for its irrationality. The most important is its entry into its period of historic decline, of decadence, at the beginning of the 20th Century - the 1914-18 war being the proof, the product, and an active factor in this decadence. It is with the period of decadence that wars ceased to be national or colonial wars - in other words with rational aims such as the conquest of new markets, or the formation and consolidation of new nations, aims which moreover were globally part of a process of historical development - to become imperialist wars caused by the lack of markets and the search for a new imperialist division of the world, objectives which could not contribute to historical progress. Imperialist wars have become ever more barbarous, bloody, and destructive. In the period of decadence, wars are no longer at the service of the economy: the economy is at the service of war, whether in war or in "peace". The whole period from 1945 to today thoroughly illustrates the phenomenon.
"During the 20th Century, warfare has increasingly targeted states' economy and infrastructure, as well as the civilian population. Ever since World War I, the number of civilian war victims has greatly exceeded the military in all the belligerent countries, with the exception of the United States (?) Under these conditions, why did the ruling powers conduct World War I as if it could only be totally won or totally lost? (?) In fact, the only war aim that counted was total victory, with what was called in World War II 'unconditional surrender' as the only fate for the enemy. This was an absurd and self-destructive objective, which ruined both victors and vanquished. It dragged the latter into revolution, the former to bankruptcy and physical exhaustion" Hobsbawm, op.cit.).
These specific characteristics of 20th Century warfare have been dramatically confirmed in all the conflicts from World War II onwards. Since 1989, and the disappearance of the imperialist blocs formed around the USA and the USSR, the threat of a world war has disappeared. But the disappearance of the bloc system and the discipline that went with it has opened the way to the explosion of a multitude of military conflicts provoked, stoked, and exacerbated by the great powers, even though the latter have difficulty controlling them once they are started. The characteristics of warfare in decadence have not disappeared with the disappearance of imperialist blocs, quite the reverse. They have been aggravated still further by the development of an attitude of "every man for himself" unbridled by bloc discipline, with every imperialist power, great or small, playing a lone suite against all the others. The capitalist world has entered into a particular phase of its historic decadence: a phase which we have defined as being its phase of decomposition. But whatever one's analysis, or the name one gives it, "there can be no serious doubt that a world historical era closed at the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, and that a new one began (?) The last part of the century has been a new era of decomposition, uncertainty and crisis - and for much of the world, such as Africa, the ex-USSR, and the old socialist Europe, it has been one of catastrophe" (idem).
Today's imperialist tensions must be understood within this unprecedented historical situation.
"In the period of capitalist decadence, all states are imperialist and take measures in consequence: war economy, armaments, etc. This is why the aggravation of the world economy's convulsions can only sharpen the antagonisms between different states including, increasingly, on the military level. The difference with the period that has just come to a close is that these antagonisms, which previously were contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs, are now going to come to the fore. The disappearance of the Russian imperialist cop, and the resulting disappearance of its American counterpart as far as the latter's main 'partners' of yesteryear are concerned, will unleash a whole series of more local rivalries. At the present time, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into world war (even supposing that the proletariat were unable to oppose it). By contrast, given the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the existence of the blocs, they are likely to be more frequent and more violent, especially in those areas where the proletariat is weakest" (International Review n°61, 10th February 1990).
As long as capitalism exists, the Balkans and the Middle East will continue to be subject to endless war and conflict. In recent weeks, however, we have seen a proliferation of direct inter-imperialist tensions among the great powers. The attitude of the US has been particularly aggressive: "The motive remains mysterious for what seems gratuitous brutality in the Bush administration's approach not only to Russia and China, but also to South Korea and the Europeans" (W. Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, 28/03/01). It would be simplistic to blame this new aggressiveness solely on Bush Junior. True, a change in president and in the governing team provides an opportunity for a change in policy. But the underlying tendencies of US policy remain the same. The policy of "muscle-flexing" and "hold me back or I'll do something I'll regret" has nothing to do with the intellectual failings of the Bush family, as the European and even sometimes the US media try to tell us. It is a fundamental tendency imposed by the historic situation.
"With the disappearance of the Russian threat, the 'obedience' of the other great powers was no longer guaranteed (this is why the Western bloc fell apart). To obtain obedience, the US has had to adopt a systematically offensive stance on the military level" ("Report on the international situation, 9th ICC Congress, 1991", International Review n°67). This fundamental characteristic of US imperialist policy has remained unchanged ever since, for "Faced with this irresistible rise of 'every man for himself', the USA has had no choice but to wage a constantly offensive military policy" ("Report on imperialist conflicts, 13th ICC Congress, 1999", International Review n°98).
Increasing imperialist antagonisms
The US has all the more need to show its muscles when it finds itself in diplomatic difficulty. The Balkan wars' spread to Macedonia is an expression of the US' difficulty in controlling the situation there. The US has no real power base in the region, unlike the French, British and Russians traditionally allied to Serbia, or the Germans with the Croats and Albanians, and is therefore forced to adapt its policies to events. It is therefore no accident that "NATO has permitted a partial return by the Yugoslav army to the 'security zone' around Kosovo (?) There is clearly a desire to associate Belgrade to the effort to prevent a new conflict in the region" (Le Monde, 10th March 2001). As Serbia's ally, the US is interested in maintaining the stability of Macedonia "which has always been considered a weak link which must be preserved, if the whole of south-east Europe is not to be destabilised" (idem). The only power to profit from the extension of war to Macedonia, and the only power not interested in the maintenance of the status quo, is Germany. With an independent Croatia, a Croat province in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a greater Albania created at the expense of Macedonia and Montenegro, Germany would have achieved its historical geo-strategic goal of a direct opening to the Mediterranean. Obviously, this perspective would give new life to Greece and Bulgaria's temporarily stifled appetites in Macedonia. And indeed, the Macedonian president is under no illusions as to who is really responsible for the Albanian guerrilla offensive. This was before the change in US policy. "Nobody in Macedonia today believes that the US and German governments don't know who are the terrorist leaders, and could not put a stop to their activity if they wanted" (Le Monde, 20th March 2001).
As in Afghanistan, in Africa, as in all the other regions of the world subjected to wars and conflicts typical of decomposing capitalism, there will be no peace in the Balkans until capitalism is overthrown.
The same is true of the Middle East. As we said in the previous issue of this Review, "the plan that Clinton has been trying to push through at any cost will have remained a dead letter, as forecast". The new Bush administration seems to be trying to take account of the US' inability to impose its pax americana. In fact, it seems to have come to terms with the idea that the region will always be subject to war, or at least that there will be no end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Colin Powell, the new US Secretary of the State Department and ex-Chief of General Staff during the Gulf War, recognises that there is no "magic formula", especially since Israel no longer hesitates to formulate its own policy, expressing the reign of "every man for himself" characteristic of the present period, even when this goes against US policy. As for Palestine, where the population is economically strangulated, poverty-stricken and oppressed, the bourgeoisie there can only express its despair in a suicidal anti-Israeli nationalism, supported by the European powers. France in particular has no hesitation in encouraging anything that counters US policy in the region.
America responded to its own impotence with the bloody bombardment of Baghdad as soon as Bush took office. The message is aimed at the Arab states, as well as the other powers: the US may not be able to impose its peace, but it will strike militarily whenever necessary, whenever it thinks that "the line has been crossed". Not only will there be no peace between Palestinians and Israeli, there is the danger that war, at least in latent form, will spread throughout the region.
The capitalist world's own laws inevitably exacerbate imperialist rivalries, spread military conflict on every continent; equally inevitable is the aggravation of the economic crisis. Capitalism in its death throes cannot offer peace and prosperity. It can only offer endless war and poverty.
Only marxist theory was able, in 1989, after the collapse of the Eastern bloc and even before the disintegration of the USSR, to understand the significance of these events and foresee their consequences for the capitalist world and the international working class. This is not the result of the superiority of a few individuals, nor of blind and mechanistic faith in some Bible. If marxism is farsighted, it is because it is the theory of the international proletariat, the expression of its revolutionary being. It is because the proletariat is the revolutionary class that marxism exists and is able to apprehend the main lines of historical development, and in particular capitalism's inability to resolve the dramatic problems that its continued existence causes.
Even if the bourgeoisie tries to minimise its consequences and the attacks against the international working class, the avowed deterioration of the world economy can only help to awaken workers to the myth of capitalism's present prosperity and bright future. Already, there is a certain tendency towards a development of workers' militancy which the trade unions are doing everything to channel, to contain, and to derail. However slow their development, however timid the international working class' response to the present situation, these struggles bear the seeds of the overcoming of this daily barbarism, and of humanity's survival. The overthrow of capitalism demands the working class' refusal to accept economic attacks, and its refusal of all participation in imperialist war through the assertion of proletarian internationalism. It demands the widest possible development and extension, whenever possible, of workers' struggles. This is the only possible road towards a revolutionary perspective and the possibility for the whole human species to create a society without war, without poverty. There is no other solution. There is no other alternative.
RL, 7th April 2001
IR105, 2nd Quarter 2001
We are publishing below a letter that we have received from one of our close contacts, in disagreement with our position on the economic foundations of capitalism’s decadence. The letter is followed by our reply, and we will publish the second part of this correspondence in the next issue.
a) General Considerations
One of the supposedly most telling criticisms Luxemburg makes about Capital is that, since it is an incomplete work, it is necessarily a flawed one. Though it is true that Capital is unfinished insofar as Marx clearly intended to extend it further, what he did write is, with Engels’ assistance, in its essentials, a unified, coherent and consistent analysis. [1] [28] This becomes apparent if you grasp that Marx’s theory of crisis is based uniquely on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. What critics such as Luxemburg fail to grasp is that Marx had already worked out the contradictions of capitalist accumulation prior to writing Capital in the collection later known as the Theories of Surplus Value.
In fact, to argue that Capital has such serious deficiencies as Luxemburg does is to reduce Marx’s analysis to a mere description rather than a critique of capitalist political economy, that is, to fall into an empiricist perspective.[2] [29] It means that Luxemburg does not understand the nature of the method of presentation Marx uses in Capital. This is borne out by her inability to heed Marx’s warning that “it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth (1976), p102). She cannot grasp that Marx chose the particular method of presentation he did for Capital so as to enable the proletariat to pierce through the world of appearances, of commodity fetishism that the capitalist relations of production necessarily create; so that the basic contradictions, the “real movement can be appropriately presented” (ibid.).
This method “abstracts from all the less essential and continuously changing surface phenomena of the market economy” (Paul Mattick, ‘Value and Capital’, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie, Merlin Press, London (c.1983), p74). Capital is therefore not intended to “tell the whole story of capitalistic development” (ibid., p.75) or “to predict the actual course of capitalist development” (ibid., p.94), but to “lay bare the dynamics of that development” (ibid., p.74); that is, it reveals the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation from the perspective of the revolutionary transformation of society, from the point of view of the totality.
Capital does NOT consist of a series of progressively detailed descriptions of concrete capitalist reality, analogous to a series of photographs of successively greater magnification. Although explanations in Capital proceed from those of a more abstract and general nature to those of a more concrete and particular one, this is not a simple linear progression; rather at each stage, on the basis of simplified conditions, a provisional analysis is made. At a subsequent stage this provisional analysis is extended and concretised. The levels therefore do not contradict either each other or empirical capitalist reality, as they might seem if simply compared [3] [30], as Luxemburg mistakenly does. Marx removes the apparent contradictions between the different levels in the following way. First, he draws all the logical conclusions that follow on the basis of the assumptions of the lower level. By then showing that “these conclusions lead to a logical absurdity” (I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Black Rose Books, Montreal (1975) p.248) he thereby demonstrates that the “analysis is not yet finished and has to be continued further” (ibid.); that is, the previous assumptions need to be modified to remove the contradictions. These modified assumptions define the next level. Examples of this in Capital are the transition from the value of commodities to the value of labour-power in Chapter 4 of vol.1, and the transition from different rates of profit in different spheres of production to the formation of the average rate of profit in Chapter 8 in vol.3.
“The impossibility of surplus value in Chapter 4 of Volume 1, and the possibility of different profit rates in Chapter 8 of Volume III, do not serve as necessary links for his constructions, but as proofs of the opposite. The fact that these conclusions lead to a logical absurdity shows that the analysis is not yet finished and has to be continued further. Marx does not determine the existence of different profit rates, but on the contrary, the inadequacy of any theory which is based on such a premise” (ibid.).
Fundamental to an understanding of Marx’s method is the distinction between the ‘inner’ or ‘general’ nature of capital [4] [31] and its empirical and historical reality; the “general and necessary tendencies” (Marx, op.cit. p.433) as distinct from the “forms of their appearance” (ibid.). To fail to grasp this crucial difference risks a headlong flight into empiricism, an acceptance of mere appearances for the truth. Conversely, ignoring the “necessary links” between this inner nature and the forms of appearance turns Capital into a mere abstract ideal divorced from reality.
There is nothing mystical or scholastic about this distinction; Marx clearly regarded it as vital to an understanding of capitalist accumulation.
“ …a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses” (ibid.).
In his reproduction schemes Marx merely intends to show the reproduction of total capital in its fundamental form; they lay “no claim to presenting a picture of concrete capitalist reality” (H. Grossmann, quoted in Paul Mattick, ‘Luxemburg versus Lenin’, Anti-Bolshevik Communism, Merlin Press, London (1978), p.37).
“But the essential, important point is seen clearly from these reproduction schemes: for production to expand and steadily progress given proportions must exist between the productive sectors; in practice these proportions are approximately realised; they depend on the following factors: the organic composition of capital, the rate of exploitation, and the proportion of surplus value which is accumulated” (Anton Pannekoek, ‘The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism’, Capital and Class 1, London (Spring 1977), p.64).
They are NOT intended to reveal the cause of the crisis. The real cause of the crisis is investigated at a later stage in Marx’s analysis.
“Neither the possibility of overproduction nor the impossibility of overproduction follows from the schemas themselves. What must be remembered is that these schemas are only a particular stage, represent a certain level of abstraction, in the development of Marx’s theory. The production process and the circulation process, the problem of production and realisation, have to be seen within the total process of capitalist production as a whole...” (David S. Yaffe, ‘The Marxian theory of crisis, capital and the state’, Economy and Society, vol.2 no.2, p.210).
Marx explains the falling rate of profit as a consequence of the unity of the production, circulation and distribution of capital, i.e., the “capitalist accumulation process has three distinct but inter-related moments: extraction of surplus value; realisation of surplus value; capitalisation of surplus value” (‘Correspondence: Saturated Markets & Decadence’, Internationalism 20, p.19). He explains the capitalist crisis uniquely in terms of the falling rate of profit because this embodies the whole process of capitalist accumulation. He shows that, eventually, this causes a crisis because of the overproduction of capital. Moreover, this overproduction of capital is not absolute or permanent, but relative to a given rate of profit and recurrent.
“Periodically, however, too much is produced in the way of means of labour and means of subsistence, too much to function as means for exploiting the workers at a given rate of profit. Too many commodities are produced for the value contained in them, and the surplus-value included in this value, to be realised under the conditions of distribution given by capitalist production, and to be transformed back into new capital, i.e. it is impossible to accomplish this process without ever-recurrent explosions” (Karl Marx, Capital vol.3, p.367, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth (1981).
c) Capital and the Historical Evolution of Capitalism
To understand how the unfinished and abstract analysis of Capital can be applied to the historical evolution you need to grasp the following. First, that the abstract analysis of Capital is applicable to all phases of capitalism:
“Marx’s formulas deal with a chemically pure capitalism which never existed and does not exist anywhere now. Precisely because of this, they revealed the basic tendency of every capitalism but precisely of capitalism and only of capitalism” (Leon Trotsky, quoted in Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today, Pluto Press (1975), p.132).[5] [32]
Secondly, that:
“Although the actual crisis has to be explained out of the real movement of capitalist production, credit and competition, it is the general tendencies of the accumulation process itself and the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall that form the basis of that explanation” (D.S. Yaffe, op. cit., p.204).
Lastly, that this “real movement of capitalist production, credit and competition” cannot be reduced to pure economics, but needs to be seen from the viewpoint of the evolution of capitalism as a whole.
“Moreover, the crisis cannot be reduced to ‘purely economic’ events, although it arises ‘purely economically’, that is, from the social relations of production clothed in economic forms. The international competitive struggle, fought also by political and military means, influences economic development, just as this in turn gives rise to the various forms of competition. Thus every real crisis can only be understood in connection with social development as a whole” (Paul Mattick, ‘Marx’s Crisis Theory’, Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, Merlin Press, London (1981), p.76).
Herein lies the great contribution of Luxemburg to the Marxism. Even though her economic theory is seriously flawed, by proceeding from the viewpoint of the totality, Luxemburg arrives at the insight that:
“Imperialism is not the creation of one or any group of states, but is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will” (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, quoted in Nation or Class? International Communist Current, (autumn 1979), p.25).
The nature of capitalist decadence and the crisis theories of Marx, Luxemburg and Grossmann
The lynchpin to understanding the decadence of capitalism is, as Bukharin stresses in Imperialism and World Economy[6] [33], the formation of the world economy. Thus the decadence of capitalism is synonymous with the creation of the world economy.
“The existence of a world economy, implies the intensification of the international division of labour and commodity exchange to the point where whatever happens at one point in the economic chain directly influences all the other points. International competition levels prices and conditions of production, and tends towards the equalisation of the rate of profit at the international level, (though of course this is always modified by the existence of capitalism in its nation-state form). The industrialised countries are now so inter-dependent in terms of trade and investments, that crises are a phenomenon that spreads like wildfire from one to another. As for the under developed areas, they have no internal dynamic, and are totally circumscribed by the formal domination imposed on them by capitalism. The existence of the world economy doesn’t mitigate, rather it intensifies imperialist antagonisms, and its consequences are world economic crises and world wars.” (‘The Meaning of Decadence’, Revolutionary Perspectives 10 (Old Series), p.12).
Even though the creation of the world economy results in the “hellish cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction-new crisis” (‘The Platform of the ICC’, in Platform and Manifesto, International Communist Current, Winter (1980), p.3), this does not mean that decadence is characterised by a total halt to the growth of the productive forces. Rather, “Since the beginning of the century we have witnessed a massive arrestation of the growth of the productive forces, compared with what is objectively possible, given the level of scientific knowledge, technical progress and level of proletarianisation in society” (Revolutionary Perspectives 10 (Old Series), op. cit., p.7).
This is of course in keeping with the outline of the decadence of class societies in Marx’s famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
During the reconstruction period after World War II, many workers, mainly those in the Western countries of course, did experience substantial improvements in their material conditions. But in no way could these improvements in living conditions be considered real reforms because of the material costs associated with them. That is, these improvements occurred because of the massive destruction of the productive forces during World War II, and their profound shackling during the ‘Cold War’. During reconstruction capitalism was destroying humanity’s future in advance at the same time as it was preparing for even greater destruction in the future.
The material reality of decadence therefore gives the lie to the idea of a final, death crisis. And Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories are unquestionably those of the death crisis as they both set an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation; that is, they predict that, eventually, capitalism must breakdown because accumulation becomes literally impossible. (Specifically, Luxemburg argues that capitalism is prone to crisis because it is impossible to realise surplus value within capitalism [7] [34]; Grossmann that crises occur because capitalist accumulation inevitably leads to an absolute lack of surplus value [8] [35].)
It is true that Luxemburg and Grossmann believe that well before capitalist accumulation becomes impossible, the intensification of the class struggle resulting from growing economic difficulties would have disrupted capitalist accumulation anyway[9] [36]. Nonetheless, as they still see an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation, they argue that capitalism would eventually breakdown regardless of the class struggle.
The virtual zero growth of capitalism between the World War I and World War II at the time seemed to vindicate both Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s theories as they both tend to identify the decadence of capitalism with a permanent economic crisis. However, the expansion of capitalism after World War II is the strongest possible refutation of these theories. According to Luxemburg, solvent pre-capitalist markets, without which capitalist accumulation is impossible, were exhausted globally by World War I. And it is clear that there has since been an ongoing destruction of these markets. Logically, capitalist growth CANNOT thereafter attain let alone surpass that reached prior to World War I. Seen in the light of her theory, it is therefore inexplicable that capitalist growth after World War II reached substantially greater levels than that before World War I, even taking into account unproductive capitalist production, as the ICC themselves admit. As Grossmann shares Luxemburg’s mechanistic idea of an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation, logically his theory can account for the expansion of capitalism after World War II ONLY if capitalism was still a progressive system, that is, it was NOT yet decadent.
The impossibility of real reforms and national self-determination, the imperialist nature of all nations, the rise of state capitalism, the reactionary nature of all factions of the bourgeois and the world-wide nature of the communist revolution; in short, the decadence of capitalism, CANNOT be reduced to the impossibility of capitalist development as Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories imply, but “can only be understood in connection with social development as a whole” (Paul Mattick, ‘Marx’s Crisis Theory’, Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, Merlin Press (1981), p.76).
Thus the permanent crisis DOES NOT mean a permanent economic crisis, that it is only in relation to “social development as a whole” that one can talk about a permanent crisis; but this is exactly what Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories imply.
The actual course of capitalist development contradicts the crisis theories of Luxemburg and Grossmann. The attempt to reconcile these theories with the actual evolution of capitalism can but lead to explanations that are ad hoc, inconsistent and contradictory. In particular, it is a flagrant error to argue that the view that there is an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation is a non sequitur to these theories. The Marxist view of decadence as a fetter on the productive forces and the notion of an absolute economic limit to capitalism are totally incompatible; you cannot coherently subscribe to both ideas at the same time.
Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s distortion of Capital
Because the world economic crisis coincides with the geographical division of the whole world, it could appear that a lack of external markets is the cause of this crisis. Luxemburg accepts this appearance for reality and proceeds to revise [10] [37] Capital in the light of her empiricist vision. In particular, after examining Marx’s schema of expanded reproduction, she concludes that capitalist accumulation inevitably gives rise to an absolute excess of surplus value. [11] [38]
“The problem which seemed to have been left open was who was to buy the products in which surplus value was contained. If Departments I [means of production] and II [means of consumption] buy from each other more and more means of production and means of subsistence this would be a pointless circular movement from which nothing would result. The solution would lie in the appearance of buyers situated outside capitalism…” (Pannekoek, op.cit., p.64).
However, this is a “pointless circular movement” to Luxemburg only because of her profound misunderstanding of the process of capitalist accumulation; she constructs her ‘proof’ upon some of the most elementary theoretical errors ever made by a revolutionary Marxist. (This criticism is made by Left-wing Social Democrats such as Lenin and Pannekoek in their contemporary reviews of Luxemburg’s, The Accumulation of Capital.)
“Luxemburg’s basic mistake is that she takes the total capitalist as an individual capitalist. She underrates this total capitalist. Therefore she does not understand that the process of realisation occurs gradually. For the same reason she portrays the accumulation of capital as an accumulation of money capital.” (Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, p.201-202).
Luxemburg confuses the total capitalist with the individual capitalist because she carries over to Marx’s scheme of expanded reproduction the assumption from his scheme of simple reproduction that the “total amount of variable capital, and hence the also the consumption of the workers, must remain fixed and constant” (Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy, Monthly Review Press, New York (1964), p.204).
“But to except such an assumption means to exclude expanded reproduction from the very beginning. If, however, one has excluded expanded reproduction from the start in one’s logical proof, it naturally becomes easy to let it disappear at the end of it, for here one is dealing with the simple reproduction of a simple logical error.” (Bukharin, op.cit., p.166).
Luxemburg makes the incredible argument that the total surplus value to be accumulated has to be matched by an equal amount of money for its realisation to occur. [12] [39]
“In each given moment, the total surplus value destined for accumulation appears in various forms: in the form of commodity, money, functioning means of production and labour-power. Therefore, the surplus value in money form should never be identified with the total surplus value.” (Bukharin, op.cit., p.180).
“From this - as we believe - results the manner in which she explains imperialism. Indeed, if the total capitalist is equated with the typical individual capitalist, the first of course cannot be his own consumer. Furthermore, if the amount of gold is equivalent to the value of the additional number of commodities, this gold can only come from abroad (as it is obvious nonsense to assume a corresponding production of gold). Finally, if all capitalists have to realise their surplus value at once (without it wandering from one pocket to another, which is strictly forbidden), they need ‘third persons’, etc” (ibid. p.202).
However, even if she did succeed in showing that an excess of surplus value arose on the basis of this schema, she would prove NOTHING because she would be drawing conclusions that were “derived from a schema having no objective validity” (Paul Mattick, ‘Luxemburg versus Lenin’, Anti-Bolshevik Communism, Merlin Press (1978), p.38). That is, Luxemburg’s principal mistake is to think that Marx’s schema of expanded reproduction is supposed to portray concrete capitalism (ibid. p37).
“In a reproduction scheme built on values, different rates of profit must arise in each department of the schema. There is in reality, however, a tendency for the different rates of profit to be equalised to average rates, a circumstance which is already embraced in the concept of production prices. So that if one wants to take the schema as a basis for criticising or granting the possibility of realising surplus value, it would first have to transformed into a [production] price schema.” (Henryk Grossmann, quoted in Paul Mattick, op. cit., p.37).
And this has the following consequences: “If one takes into account this average rate of profit, Rosa Luxemburg’s disproportionality argument loses all value, since one department sells above and the other under value and on the basis of production price the undisposable part of the surplus value may vanish.” (Paul Mattick, op.cit. p.38).
Superficially, Grossmann would seem to follow Marx’s falling rate of profit theory because he uses Otto Bauer’s schema, which has a rising organic composition of capital in both departments of social reproduction. However, the schema also assumes a fixed and constant rate of surplus value for the two departments; hence we have “two conditions which completely contradict and neutralise one another” (Rosa Luxemburg, op. cit. p.99), “an impossibility, nay an absurdity” (Paul Mattick, ‘The Permanent Crisis’, Council Correspondence, Nov. 1934, No.2, New Essays, vol.1, 1934-1935, Greenwood Reprint Corporation, Westport, Connecticut (1970), p.6). (Though these assumptions were adequate for showing the falseness of Luxemburg’s so-called realisation problem.)
Under these assumptions, eventually, “there will reach a point where the organic composition of total composition is so large and the rate of profit so small, that to enlarge on the existing constant capital would absorb the whole of the surplus value produced” (The Economic Foundations of Capitalist Decadence’, Revolutionary Perspectives 2 (Old Series), p.27). Thus the crisis results from an absolute lack of surplus value.
In Grossmann’s analysis, therefore, the fall in the rate of profit is only an accompanying factor, not the cause of the crisis.
“How could a percentage, a pure number such as the rate of profit produce the breakdown of the real system? - A falling rate of profit is thus only an index that reveals the relative fall in the mass of profit.” (Grossmann, op.cit. p.103).
Though his argument is logically impeccable, it proceeds from false premises. Grossmann is unaware that, in using Bauer’s schema, he is committing the same fundamental error that he and Paul Mattick correctly criticise Luxemburg for: he derives conclusions from a schema that has no objective validity. For if one wants to take Bauer’s scheme as a basis for criticising or granting the possibility of an under-accumulation of capital, one would have to transform it into a production price schema. Grossmann fails to realise the importance of the fact that, in volume III of Capital, Marx analyses the fall in the rate of profit after he investigates the transformation of values into prices of production; namely that as the latter is responsible for the formation of the average rate of profit, capitalism’s tendency towards crisis cannot therefore be deduced independently of this process. What Grossmann overlooks is that Bauer’s schema, by virtue of its two contradictory assumptions, thereby excludes the average rate of profit; and that this consequently negates any conclusions he draws.
In addition, not only does Grossmann depart from Marx in ignoring the consequences of the average rate of profit, he also does so through his view that the capitalists are compelled to increase constant capital owing to the “growth of capital demanded by technology” (Pannekoek, op.cit. p.69). Grossmann argues that, “when the rate of profit becomes less than the rate of growth demanded by technical progress then capitalism must break down” (ibid., p.69). This concept, which is foreign to both Capital and Marxism in general, furnishes Grossmann with the principal reason why capitalist accumulation advances inevitably towards its collapse. In his theory, therefore, the falling rate of profit is not the cause of the crisis, merely an accompanying factor. He draws the logical conclusion that capital is exported because it is impossible to use it at home rather than because of higher profits abroad (ibid., p.73).
Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s conclusions about the cause of the capitalist crisis and the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation are therefore meaningless since they are derived from schemas that have no objective validity. These schemes are worthless for an analysis of these matters since they are based on assumptions that are historically and logically absurd for their resolution.
These erroneous crisis theories stem from fragmented and one-sided views of capitalist accumulation. Whereas Marx explains that the crisis arises from the unity of the production, circulation and distribution of capital, Luxemburg and Grossmann separate, respectively, the circulation of capital, and the production of capital from the capitalist production process as a whole.
Luxemburg’s revision of Marx’s economics is cruder and more extreme than Grossmann’s. It is cruder because of the elementary mistakes she makes about capitalist accumulation; it is more extreme because she sees the fundamental barrier to capitalist accumulation being outside the capitalist economy whereas he at least agrees with Marx that the “true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself” (Karl Marx, Capital vol. III, p.358). Though Luxemburg succumbs to empiricism in her explanation of the contradictions of capitalist accumulation, she follows the Marxist method in analysing the historical development of capitalism from the viewpoint of the capitalist system as a whole. Rather than empiricism, Grossmann’s interpretation of the capitalist crisis reflects an idealist perspective. He argues that the real cause of the capitalist crisis is the mirror image of what it appears to be: the crisis appears as an overproduction of commodities, i.e., an absolute excess of surplus value, therefore the crisis is actually due to an absolute lack of surplus value. It is true that Grossmann has some insight into the method of Capital, but this insight is used to justify his idealist vision of capitalism.
Only Marx’s Capital explains the fundamental contradictions of capitalist accumulation, which underpin the historical evolution of capitalism. Luxemburg’s and Grossmann’s crisis theories explain neither.
Only Marx’s analysis explains the fundamental contradictions of capitalist accumulation and thus the economic foundations of capitalist ascendance and decadence.
Political Consequences
“We would say that any errors on the level of economics tend to reinforce errors deriving from the totality of a group’s politics. Any incoherence in a group’s analysis can open the door to confusions of a more general kind; but we are not dealing with irrevocable fatalities - an analysis of the economic foundations of decadence is part of a more global proletarian standpoint, a standpoint which demands an active commitment to ‘change the world’ - the political conclusions defended by revolutionaries do not derive in a mechanical way from a particular analysis of economics” (‘Marxism and Crisis Theory’, International Review 13, p.35).
In the light of this, I draw the following conclusions.
The principal strength of the analyses of imperialism of Bukharin [13] [40], Luxemburg, Bilan, Paul Mattick [14] [41], the FFCL and the ICC is their recognition of the global nature of capitalist decadence. Conversely, the principal weakness of Pannekoek’s, Lenin’s, the Bordigist’s and the IBRP’s analyses of imperialism is their tendency, in varying degrees, to view capitalist development from the point of view of each nation taken in isolation, to view the world economy as a mere sum of separate national economies. In other words, their analyses of imperialism are partially influenced by the erroneous mechanical stages theory of Social Democracy.
Luxemburg’s flawed economics encourages a tendency to see an absolute as opposed to a qualitative difference between ascendant and decadent capitalism. This is because in her theory the exhaustion of pre-capitalist markets is logically an impassable barrier to capitalist accumulation. The ICC, for example, sometimes finds it difficult to “see that the tendencies which brought about capitalist decadence don’t just conveniently stop at the beginning of the First World War” (‘The Material Basis of Imperialist War: A Brief Reply to the ICC’, Internationalist Communist Review 13, p.13).
Grossmann’s crisis theory agrees with Luxemburg’s that there is an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation. But as his theory argues that this absolute limit is entirely due to internal capitalist factors, then what the expansion of capitalism after World War II logically implies is that capitalism was still in its ascendant period. Hence his theory encourages a tendency to see mere quantitative differences between ascendant and decadent capitalism.
However, above all else it is the rigour and coherence of a current’s political program that is the determining influence on the clarity and insight of its analyses. Thus the ICC’s flawed economics has a much less adverse effect on the clarity of their analysis than it otherwise would owing to the strength of their political program, a program that draws out all the consequences of capitalist decadence.
Conversely, it is the political programs of the IBRP and, to a greater degree, the Bordigists, which embody incoherence, ambiguity and error. These weaknesses reflect the inability of the former current to draw out all the consequences of decadence [15] [42] and that of the latter to recognise that capitalism as a global system is decadent at all [16] [43]. These currents, particularly the Bordigists, therefore tend to see mere quantitative differences between ascendant and decadent capitalism.
CA.
[1] [44] Marx did hold contradictory views about when decadence would occur. One finds some statements that suggest he believed the crises in his time were the mortal crises of capitalism. Others that suggest he believed it would be decades away. He also thought that the workers could peacefully come to power in a few countries. But this does not diminish the validity of his method; Marx’s method transcends the limitations of Marx the nineteenth century revolutionary.
[2] [45] Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Questions At Issue’, The Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-Critique, published with Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, trans. Rudolph Wichmann, Monthly Review Press, New York (1972).
[3] [46] Henryk Grossmann, The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system: being also a theory of crisis, translated and abridged by Jairus Banaji, Pluto Press, London (1992) and I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Black Rose Books, Montreal (1975).
[4] [47] Roman Rosdolsky, ‘Appendix II: Methodological comments on Rosa Luxemburg’, The Making of Marx’s Capital, Pluto Press, London (1980), pp. 61-72.
[5] [48] Though Trotsky is referring specifically to the reproduction schemes in Volume II of Capital, the point that is made can be applied to Capital as a whole.
[6] [49] Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, Merlin Press, London (1972).
[7] [50] Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Imperialism’, The Accumulation of Capita: An Anti-Critique, p.145.
[8] [51] Henryk Grossmann, op. cit., p.74-8.
[9] [52] Rosa Luxemburg, op. cit., p.146-7. Henryk Grossmann, quoted in Introduction by Tony Kennedy, Henryk Grossmann, op. cit., p.20.
[10] [53] Rosa Luxemburg remained a revolutionary Marxist despite her distortions of Marx’s economics.
[11] [54] ‘The Accumulation of Contradictions (or The Economic Consequences of Rosa Luxemburg)’, Revolutionary Perspectives 6 (Old Series), pp.5-27.
[12] [55] Revolutionary Perspectives 6 (Old Series), op. cit., p.15.
[13] [56] Prior to his political degeneration in the early 1920’s, as is already evident in Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital.
[14] [57] During the Cold War, Mattick’s analysis becomes clouded with ambiguities and inconsistencies.
[15] [58] The IBRP attempt to justify this through their argument about the ‘autonomy’ of tactics from the political program as per the Preamble in ‘Theses on Communist Tactics for the Periphery of Capitalism’, International Communist 16.
[16] [59] The dogma of the ‘Invariance of the Program’.
IR105, 2nd Quarter 2001
The economic convulsions and avalanche of job losses that are sweeping over workers throughout the world and principally in the most industrialised countries are casting a clear shadow of doubt over the endless propaganda about the “good health” and “bright future” of this social system and generating a justified concern about the future.
Given this situation, it is of great importance to discuss the theories that exist in the revolutionary movement and to see which gives the most coherent explanation of the present state of things and the perspectives. The correspondence that we are publishing here is part of this process. The comrade does not have any doubts about the decadence of capitalism. The starting point for the comrade is the fundamental position put forward by the 1st Congress of the Communist International: “A new system has been born. Ours is the epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the Communist revolution of the proletariat…the present period is that of the decomposition and collapse of the whole of the world capitalist system and this will mean the collapse of European civilisation in general if capitalism and its insoluble contradictions are not destroyed”. The comrade also shares the political positions derived from this historical analysis: “The impossibility of authentic reforms and national self-determination, the imperialist nature of all nations, the reactionary nature of all the fractions of the bourgeoisie, the worldwide nature of the proletarian revolution”. The comrade is also very clear that “ The principle strength of Bukharin’s, Luxemburg’s, Bilan’s, Paul Mattick’s, the Communist Left of France and the ICC is that they recognise the global nature of capitalist decadence”. The comrade insists that it is essential to see capitalism in its totality and not partially or abstractly and makes clear that despite the critique he directs at us: “above all else it is the rigour and the coherence of the political programme of the Current that has the determinant influence on the clarity and insight of its analysis”.
It is within this framework that the comrade rejects Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis concerning the theoretical explanation of the capitalist crisis, the comrade believes that the ICC falls into dogmatism about this question and asserts that Marx: “explained the capitalist crisis only in terms of the fall in the rate of profit because this encompasses the total process of capitalist accumulation”.
Our reply will not take up all the questions that are posed. We will limit ourselves to taking up the concrete problems responded to by the two main theories that have developed within the Marxist movement in order to explain the historic crisis of capitalism (the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and the tendency towards overproduction). We will try to demonstrate that they are not contradictory and that from the global and historic point of view it is precisely the second, which emerges from the work of Marx and was later developed by Rosa Luxemburg [1] [64], that provides a clearer explanation, which moreover coherently integrates the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. In the same way, we intend to deal with a series of misunderstandings that exist about Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis.
Capitalism has led to the prodigious development of the productivity of human labour in every domain of social activity. For example transport, which under feudalism was limited to the slow and uncertain methods of horse, cart and sail, has been increased to once unthinkable speeds by capitalism; successively by the railways, steam ships, aeroplanes or high-speed trains. The Communist Manifesto takes note of this enormous dynamism of the capitalist system: “It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all the former exoduses of nations and crusades (…) The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood (…) 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. Therefore, whilst “the conservation of the old modes of production was the prime conditions of existence of all the proceeding classes”, the bourgeoisie on the contrary “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and, thereby, the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society” (idem)
The adorers of capital unilaterally highlight this feature of the system attributing it to the “enterprise spirit”, to the impetuous “innovator”, which “freedom of trade” has supposedly liberated in the individual. Marx clearly recognised the historic contribution of capitalism, but he also exposed these siren songs.
Firstly, he showed the material base of these prodigious transformations. Capitalism contains a permanent tendency for Constant Capital (machines, buildings, installations, raw materials etc.) to grow proportionately much more than Variable Capital (workers’ labour). The first is constituted by the coagulation of previously realised labour, that is to say, dead labour, whilst the second sets in motion the means for creating new products, that is living labour. Under capitalism the weight of dead labour tends to progressively increase to the detriment of living labour. That is, Constant Capital (dead labour) increases proportionately much more than Variable Capital (living labour). This is the dominant tendency in the growth of the organic composition of Capital.
What are the social and historical consequences of this tendency? Marx exposed the dark and destructive side of what the propagandists of capital unilaterally present as Progress, with a capital “P”. In the first place, it engendered a permanent tendency towards unemployment, which in the decadence of capitalism has tended to become chronic [2] [65]. But furthermore, he demonstrates that the increase in the organic composition of capital means that globally the mass of exploited living labour tends to diminish and with it the capitalists’ source of surplus value also diminishes: the surplus value extracted from workers thus, as Mitchell showed in the above cited work, “ONE CONSUMPTION ALONE excites its interest and passion, stimulates its energy and its will, gives it reason to exist: the CONSUMPTION OF LABOUR POWER!” (International Review no102, page 10).
In the words of Marx: “this gradual growth in the constant capital, in relation to the variable, must necessarily result in a gradual fall in the general rate of profit, given that the rate of surplus-value, or the level of exploitation of labour by capital remain the same” (Capital Vol. 3, Part 3, Chapter 13: “The Law Itself”, emphasis in the original, page 318, Penguin Books, 1981). That is to say, the development of the productivity of labour which is translated into an increase in the organic composition of capital has as it counterpart the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Therefore, Mitchell affirms that “ the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall generates cyclical crisis and will be a potent ferment of the decomposition of the decadent capitalist economy” [3] [66].
In the historic epoch of the expansion and apogee of capitalism (the 19th century), where humanity underwent an amazing succession of endless inventions and developments that transformed every aspect of social life, Marx was able to see in this progress, in a rigorously scientific way, the factors of the historic crisis and decomposition of a system which was then at its peak. He was the first to discover this law and systemise its possible historical consequences. But it was precisely his rigour and meticulousness that led him to also see its limitations, the factors that counter-acted it and its own contradictions: “If we consider the enormous development in the productive powers of social labour over the last 30 years (…) then instead of the problem that occupied previous economists, the problem of explaining the fall in the rate of profit, we have the opposite problem of explaining why this fall is not greater or faster. Counteracting influences must be at work, checking and cancelling the effect of the general law and giving it simply the character of a tendency” (Capital vol. 3, Part 3, chapter 14: “The counteracting factors”, page 338).
This question heads up Chapter XIV of Part 3 of Vol. 3 of Capital, which is titled “Counteracting Factors”. In this chapter Marx enumerates six “counteracting factors”:
a) more intense exploitation of labour
b) reduction of wages below their value
c) cheapening of the elements of constant capital
d) the relative surplus population
e) foreign trade
f) the increase in share capital.
Within the limited framework of this reply we cannot make a profound analysis of these counteracting factors, their range and validity. But we must highlight the most important: while the rate of profits falls, the mass of surplus-value tends to increase [4] [67] that is, the capitalists try to compensate for the fall in the rate of profit by increasing workers’ exploitation. In response to the self-interested thesis of the bourgeoisie, trade-unionists and economists according to which the technical progress and productivity diminish exploitation, Marx showed that “The tendential fall in the rate of profit is linked with a tendential rise in the rate of surplus-value, i.e. in the level of exploitation of labour. Nothing is more absurd, then, than to explain the fall in the rate of profit in terms of a rise in wage rates, even though this too may be an exceptional case. Only when the relationships that form the rate of profit have been understood will statistics be able to put forward genuine analyses of wage-rates in different periods. The rate of profit does not fall because labour becomes less productive but rather because it becomes more productive”. (page 347, idem).
This is the reality of the whole of the 20th century where capitalism has intensified the exploitation of the working class in an incredible manner: “It is necessary to note that, despite a certain fall in relation to the last century, the present rate of profit has remained at around 10% - a level that is essentially due to the formidable increase in the rate of exploitation suffered by the workers: for the same working day of 10 hours; if the workers of the 19th century worked 5 hours for himself and 5 for the capitalist (figures frequently reported by Marx) today the worker works 1 hour for himself and 9 for the boss [5] [68]”( “The crisis, are we heading for a new 1929?”, which appeared in Révolution Internationale old series n°6 and 7).
Thus “this theory of crisis [i.e. which explains them by the tendency for the rate of profit to fall] seeks to put forwards the transitory character of the capitalist mode of production and the growing seriousness of the crisis shaking bourgeois society. With this vision one can thus partially interpret the qualitative change that has taken place between the 19th and 20th centuries in the nature of the crisis: the growing gravity of this crisis would be explained by the aggravation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. However this vision is not enough, in our opinion, to explain everything and particularly to provide a satisfactory answer to two questions:
- Why do crises take the form of market crises?
- Why, once a certain point has been reached, do crises lead to war, when previously they could be resolved peacefully?”.
Capitalism is not only characterised by its capacity for increasing the productivity of labour. In reality its essential feature is the generalisation of commodity production: “Although commodities have existed in nearly all societies, the capitalist economy is the first to be fundamentally based on the production of commodities. Thus the existence of an ever-increasing market is one of the essential conditions for the development of capitalism. In particular the realisation of surplus-value which comes from the exploitation of the working class is indispensable for the accumulation of capital which is the essential motor-force of the system” (Point 3 of the ICC Platform). Capitalism was not born from the artisan’s intelligence, nor from the inventor’s genius, but from the merchant class. The bourgeoisie arose as a class of traders and throughout its history it has resorted, and continues to resort, to forms of labour of very low productivity:
- until well into the 19th century slavery was still used;
- today there is massive use of forced labour by prisoners, for example in the main industrial concentration in the world: the USA6;
- the continuing exploitation of domestic labour;
- throughout large epochs diverse forms of forced labour have been used;
- today child labour is increasingly widespread;
Capitalism’s driving force is to maximise profit and this finds its global framework in the market. However, when we talk about the “market” and “commodity production” it is necessary to be precise. Bourgeois economists present the market as a world of “producers and consumers”, as if capitalism were a regime of simple interchange of commodities where each sells in order to buy the necessities of life. The basis of capitalism is wage labour, i.e. the exploitation of a special commodity, labour power, with the aim of obtaining the largest profit. This determines a specific form of exchange characterised by the following features:
- the wide scale breaking up of the narrow local or even national framework;
- the losing of all links with barter or the simple exchange of the commodities of more or less self-sufficient small local communities, in order to take a universal form based on money;
- it is at the service of the formation and accumulation of capital;
- it needs, as a condition of its existence, to constantly expand, without ever reaching a point of equilibrium.
It is certain that the market is not the aim of capitalist production. Manufacture is not carried out to satisfy the needs of solvent buyers but rather, in order to obtain surplus-value on an ever-increasing scale. However, surplus-value can only be materialised through the market and there is no other means of obtaining ever growing surplus value apart from through the expansion of the market.
Within the revolutionary movement those who explain the crisis exclusively by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as is the case with the comrade, tend to play down or purely and simply deny the role of the market in the crisis of capitalism. They claim that the market is nothing but the reflection of what takes place in the sphere of production. According to them, the proportional relations between the distinct departments of capitalist production (essentially, department 1 is the means of production and department 2 is the means of consumption) are expressed by an equilibrium or disequilibrium in the market.
This abstract schema totally bypasses the historical conditions in which capitalism has grown and developed. If the market could be compared to a medieval fair where the producers offer their crops or their craft production to consumers who are seeking to obtain or barter for what they need to sustain themselves, then indeed, “the market is a reflection of what happens in the sphere of production”. However, the capitalist market is nothing like this deformed image. Its main foundation is the expropriation of the producers by separating them from their means of livelihood and production, transforming them into proletarians and progressively subjecting them on this basis to the regime of commodity exchange. This struggle against pre-capitalist forms was carried out in the market and for the market and could expand itself without meeting decisive obstacles whilst existing within territories of sufficient size that had not been fully subjected to capitalist production.
Those who support the “falling rate of profit” explanation usually say that Marx did not consider the question of the market when analysing the cause of the crisis of capitalism. A brief analysis of what Marx really said in Capital and other works shows that this is not the case.
1. He begins by asserting the necessity for commodities to be sold in order for surplus value to be realised and capital valorised. “With the development of this process as expressed in the fall in the profit rate, the mass of surplus-labour thus produced swells to monstrous proportions. Now comes the second act in the process. The total mass of commodities, the total product, must be sold, both the portion which replaces constant and variable capital and that which represents surplus-value” (Capital, Vol. 3, Chapter 15 “The development of the law’s internal contradictions”, page 352, our emphasis). He went on to say that: “If this does not happen, or happens only partly, or only at prices that are less than the price of production, then although the worker is certainly exploited, his exploitation is not realised as such for the capitalist and may even not involve any realisation of the surplus-value extracted, or only a partial realisation; indeed, it may even mean a partial or complete loss of his capital” (idem).
The extraction of surplus value does not finish the process of capitalist production; commodities have to be sold in order to realise the surplus value and to be able to valorise capital. This second part Marx called “The somersault of commodities”, in Volume 1. The extraction of surplus-value (which determines the average rate of profit on the basis of the organic composition of capital) forms a unity with the realisation of surplus-value whose determinant is the general situation of the world market.
2. He defines the market as the global framework for the realisation of surplus value. What are the conditions of this market? Is it merely an external manifestation, a superficial form of an internal structure determined by the proportionality between the different branches of production and general organic composition? This is the idea defended by those who talk of “Marx’s abstract method” and who brand as “empiricism” any efforts to talk about the “market” and such prosaic things as “selling” commodities. But Marx’s response does not go in that direction: “The conditions for immediate exploitation and for the realisation of that exploitation are not identical. Not only are they separate in time and space, they are also separated in theory. The former is restricted only by society’s productive forces, the latter by the proportionality between the different branches of production and by society’s power of consumption” (idem).
3. He made it clear that the capitalist relations of production, based on wage labour, determine the historical limits of the capitalist market. What determines ‘society’s power of consumption’? “This is determined neither by the absolute power of production nor by the absolute power of consumption but rather by the power of consumption within a given framework of antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the vast majority of society to a minimum level, only capable of varying within more or less narrow limits” (idem).
Capitalism is a society of commodity production based on wage labour. This determines a certain limit to the capacity of consumption of the great majority of society – the wage earners: wages have to oscillate more or less around the cost of the social reproduction of labour power. Therefore Marx affirmed clearly in Capital that “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them” (Capital Vol. 3, part 5, Chapter 30 “Money capital and real capital: 1”, page 615). The masses’ capacity to consume is “further restricted by the drive for accumulation, the drive to expand capital and produce surplus-value on a larger scale. This is the law governing capitalist production, arising from the constant revolutions in methods of production themselves, from the devaluation of the existing capital which is always associated with this, and from the general competitive struggle and the need to improve production and extend its scale, merely as a means of self-preservation, and on the pain of going under” (Capital Vol. 3, part 3, Chapter 15, “The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit”, page 352).
4. He understood the necessity for the constant expansion of the market within the perspective of the formation of the world market. Marx saw the constant expansion of the market as inevitable, and as an essential condition of capitalist accumulation: “The market, therefore, must be continually extended, so that its relationships and the conditions governing them assume ever more the form of a natural law independent of the producers and becomes ever more uncontrollable. The internal contradiction seeks resolution by extending the external field of production. But the more productivity develops, the more it comes into conflict with the narrow basis on which the relations of consumption rest. It is in no way a contradiction, on this contradictory basis, that excess capital coexists with a growing surplus population; for although the mass of surplus-value produced would rise if these were brought together, yet this would equally heighten the contradiction between the conditions in which this surplus-value was produced and the conditions in which it was realised” (idem page 353).
He saw the formation of the world market as the fundamental historical task of capitalism: “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” (Communist Manifesto). In the same sense, Lenin said that: “What is important is that capitalism cannot exist and develop without constantly expanding the sphere of its domination, without colonising new countries and drawing old non-capitalist countries into the whirlpool of the world economy” (“The Development of Capitalism in Russia”. Collected Works Vol. 3, page 594).
5. He gave great importance to the market in the development of the crisis. Due to its own relations of production based on wage labour this tendency leads to the aggravation of its contradictions at the same time: “If the capitalist mode of production is therefore a historical means for developing the material powers of production and for creating a corresponding world market, it is at the same time the constant contradiction between this historical task and the social relations of production corresponding to it” (Marx, Capital Vol. 3, page 359).
Therefore, the evolution of the market is central to the explosion of the crisis: “However, the mere admission that the market must expand with production, is, on the other hand, again an admission of the possibility of over-production, for the market is limited externally in the geographical sense (…) For it is then possible – since the market and production are two independent factors - that the expansion of one does not correspond with the expansion of the other; that the limits of the market are not extended rapidly enough for production, or that new markets – new extensions of the market – may be rapidly outpaced by production, so that the expanded market becomes just as much a barrier as the narrower market was formerly” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 2, pages 524-25. Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1969).
In the Communist Manifesto he puts the question: “In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. How does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented” (The Revolutions of 1848, The Pelican Marx Library, 1978, page 73).
The latter element is very important for understanding the causes of the historic crisis of capitalism, its irreversible decadence. Whereas in previous modes of production the crises were due to under-production (starvation, droughts, epidemics) the crises of capitalism, for the first time in history, have the character of crises of overproduction. The poverty of the majority is not born from the lack of the means of consumption but from their excess. Unemployment and factory closures are not due to the lack of stores or the lack of machinery, but from their abundance. Destruction, stagnation and the threat of the collapse of humanity into barbarity, arise from over-production. This shows us the basis of communism, the task of the new society: to direct the forces of production towards the full satisfaction of human needs freed from the yoke of wage labour and the market.
Marx analysed the two sides of the coin of the capitalist system as a totality. On one side is the production of surplus value, this determines the rate of profit, the development of productivity of labour and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The other side is the realisation of surplus value and it is on this side of the scales that the market intervenes: the limits of production imposed by capitalism’s relations based on wage labour and the necessity to conquer new markets in order as much to realise surplus value as to obtain new sources of labour (the separation of the producers from their means of production and life and their incorporation into wage labour).
These two sides or to put it more precisely these two contradictions, contain the premises for the convulsions that led capitalism to its decadence and the necessity for the working class to destroy it and to establish communism. Overall, Marx developed a more elaborate formulation of the first “side” but, as we have seen, he did give the second great importance.
One can easily understand this imbalance if one analyses the historical conditions in which Marx lived and struggled. Between 1840 and 1880, the period in which Marx developed his militant activity, the dominant feature of capitalist production was the prodigious acceleration of its technical discoveries, the increasingly vast development of industry. After the exaggerations of 1848 when the Manifesto foresaw a practically definitive crisis, Marx and Engels developed a more circumspect analysis, taking into consideration all factors and beginning a large-scale investigation of the social structure.
On the one hand, the main political battle against the economists and ideologues of the bourgeoisie had two axes: to demonstrate the material bases of production – the exploitation of the workers, the extraction of surplus value - and to demonstrate the historical limits to capitalist production. In relation to the latter aspect, they concentrated on demonstrating that the tendency that the supporters of capitalism praised most – the progress of the productive force of labour- contained within it the germ of the crisis and the decisive convulsions of the system – the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
On the other hand, the problem of the realisation of surplus value, although it raised its head during the cyclical crises, was not directly presented as the decisive historical problem. In 1850 only 10% of the world population lived under the capitalist regime, the system’s capacity for expansion appeared infinite and vast and each cyclical crisis unleashed a new extension of the capitalist terrain. Despite this, Marx understood the gravity of the dynamic contained within these conditions and he highlighted the underlying contradiction between capitalism’s tendency to unlimited production and the inherent necessity of its own social structure to confine the consumption of the great majority of the population within narrow limits.
The situation changed radically at the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. The phenomenon of imperialism and worsening imperialist wars appeared and led to the terrible slaughter of 1914. With this, the fundamental theoretical question for understanding the historical crisis of capitalism became the realisation of surplus-value and not simply its production: “it is certain that the overwhelming tendency of capitalist production to penetrate into the non-capitalist countries has acted, since it first set foot on the historical stage, as an incessant spur throughout its development, increasingly gaining in importance, until finally in the phase of imperialism, it has become the predominant and decisive factor in social life for the last quarter of a century” (Rosa Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital, an Anti-critique).
Rosa Luxemburg used an historical method to elaborate this problem. She did not pose it – as her critics say - as a circumstantial question – how to find “third persons” distinct from capitalists and workers in order to find markets for the commodities they could not sell – but as a global question: what are the historical conditions for capitalist accumulation? Her answer was that: “Capitalism arises and develops historically amidst a non-capitalist society. In Western Europe it is found at first in a feudal environment from which it in fact sprang - the system of bondage in rural areas and the guild system in the towns - and later, after having swallowed up the feudal system, it exists mainly in an environment of peasants and artisans, that is to say in a system of simple commodity production both in agriculture and trade. European capitalism is further surrounded by vast territories of non-European civilisation ranging over all levels of development, from the primitive communist hordes of nomad herdsmen, hunters and gatherers to commodity production by peasants and artisans. This is the setting for the accumulation of capital” (Rosa Luxemburg The Accumulation of Capital, page 368, Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968).
She distinguishes three parts to this process: “the struggle against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for the remaining conditions of accumulation” (idem, page 368). Although these three parts are present throughout the life of capitalism, nevertheless one of them has more preponderance in each of its historical phases. Thus in the phase of primitive accumulation – the genesis of English capital between the 16th and 17th centuries so brilliantly studied by Marx – the dominant feature was the struggle against the natural economy. The period from the 17th century to the first third of the 19th century was generally dominated by the second aspect – the struggle against commodity economy. In the last thirty years of the 19th century the crucial factor was the third aspect: the worsening competition over the division of the planet.
With this analysis she underlined that: “The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system” (idem).
From this historical and global point of view she put forwards a critique of the schemas of expanded reproduction that Marx had used in order to represent the regular process of capitalist production. She did not question their validity in relation to the concrete and immediate aim that Marx had given them. Marx demonstrated against Adam Smith and the classical bourgeois economists that expanded reproduction was possible and exposed the error that they committed in denying the existence of constant capital. In effect, not recognising the existence of constant capital makes it impossible to understand the continuity of production and the role of accumulated labour in this and consequently the accumulation of capital.
Neither did she criticise Marx’s schemas because they do not represent immediate reality – in contrast to what the comrade thinks when he attributes a “basic error” to Rosa Luxemburg. She understood perfectly well the legitimacy of the abstract model that Marx developed with the concrete aim of demonstrating that expanded reproduction was possible.
What Luxemburg criticises is the assumption that all the extracted surplus value is consumed within the ambit formed by the capitalists and workers. This assumption could be valid if you only wanted to explain that the accumulation of capital is possible in a general way, but it does not help if you are trying to understand the process of historical development and consequently the general crisis of the capitalist system.
Therefore, Rosa Luxemburg argued that there was a fraction of the total surplus-value extracted from the workers that is not consumed by the capitalists and explained that its realisation took place through the struggle to incorporate pre-capitalist territories into the commodity system and capitalist wage labour. In this way she was trying to respond to a very concrete reality of capitalism in its climactic period (1873-1914): “If capitalist production constituted a sufficient market for itself and allowed the expansion of the total of accumulated value, it would mean that another phenomenon of modern development – the struggle for distant markets and for the exportation of capital, that are such significant expressions of imperialism – are totally incomprehensible. Why so much ruin? Why conquer the colonies and why the present struggles for the swamps of the Congo and the deserts of Mesopotamia? It would be much more convenient for capital to stay at home and lead the good life. Krupp could produce happily for Thyssen, Thyssen for Krupp, they would not have to worry about anything but investing capital at one time or another in their operations and mutually expanding indefinitely. The result is that the historical movement of capital is simply incomprehensible and with it, present-day imperialism” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Anti-critique).
Marx posed exactly the same problem when he wrote: “to say that only the capitalists can exchange and consume their commodities amongst themselves is to completely forget the character of capitalist production and to forget that it is a question of the valorisation of capital, not consuming it” (op cit).
It is necessary to make it clear that Rosa Luxemburg did not see the pre-capitalist territories as the “third persons” that the capitalists need in order to get rid of their surplus commodities as some of her critics reproach her for:
“In detail, capital in its struggle against societies with a natural economy pursues the following ends:
1. to gain immediate possession of important resources of productive forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc
2. to ‘liberate’ labour power and to coerce it into service.
3. to introduce a commodity economy.
4. to separate trade and agriculture” (The Accumulation of Capital, page 369)
The apologists for the capitalist system pretend that it is a system based on the regular exchange of commodities, which depends on a gradual equilibrium of sale and demand that develops with the growing economy. In response to this Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that: “…capitalist accumulation as a whole, as an actual historical process, has two different aspects. One concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced – the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate. Regarded in this light, accumulation is a purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction between the capitalist and wage labourer. In both its phases, however, it is confined to the exchange of equivalents and remains within the limits of commodity exchange. Here, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail, and the keen dialects of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership of other people’s property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes class-rule” (op cit chapter XXXI, page 452).
The exposing of this ultimate aspect – to reveal the world of violence and destruction that the simple regular exchange of commodities contained - was Marx’s aim in Capital, but faced with the imperialist epoch and the entry of the system into its decadence it was essential to polarise around: “The other aspect of the accumulation of capital [that] concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loans system – a policy of spheres of interest - and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed” (idem).
In the second part of this correspondence, we will publish a further letter that we have received from the comrade, containing his explanation of the reconstruction periods and his criticism of the ICC’s dogmatism on economic questions. Our reply will further develop our defence of Luxemburg’s analyses, and respond to these criticisms.
Adalen 2.4.2001
[1] [69] The contribution made by Mitchell in Bilan “Crisis and cycles in the economy of dying capitalism” International Review, n°102 and 103, is also important.
[2] [70] See International Review no 93 and our supplement Manifesto on Unemployment.
[3] [71] See “Crises and cycles in the economy of dying capitalism” International Review, numbers 102 and 103
[4] [72] The distinction between the rate of surplus-value and the rate of profit that Marx makes is very important from the point of view of the evolution of capitalism:
· Rate of surplus-value = p / v (p = surplus-value and v = variable capital or the total mass of wages)
· Rate of profit = p/ (c + v) (c = constant capital),
[5] [73] It is not the aim of this article to rebut the idea according to which the ”modern” worker is much less exploited than his predecessor in the 19th century. This mystification which is repeated daily in order to falsify the reality of exploitation. For a response to this see amongst other articles “Who can change the world?” International Review numbers 73 and 74 and the series “Reply to doubts about the working class” which has appeared in various territorial publications of the ICC.
The Franco-German public TV channel Arte recently ran a long documentary with the eloquent title: "Les dessous de la guerre du Golfe" (which translates something like "The truth behind the Gulf War). At the same time as the documentary, a number of articles appeared in various weeklies full of "revelations" about the preparation and execution of the war. The title of the French weekly Marianne (22/28 January 2001) was even more explicit: "The lies about the Gulf War". Why are these "revelations" coming out now, ten years after the event? Why, after the tons of lies during the war, that accompanied the tons of bombs, are some fractions of the bourgeoisie bringing into the open the criminal manoeuvring by the elder Bush's administration in the preparation, setting up, and conduct of the war, from the outset in the summer of 1990 until February 1991 and even to this very day?
The official version
"The Gulf War was a military operation carried out during January and February 1991 by the United States and their Allies, acting under the authority of the United Nations, against Iraq, with the aim of ending the occupation of Kuwait by the troops of Saddam Hussein's army, which had invaded the country on 2nd August 1990. The United Nations Security Council demanded the withdrawal of Iraqi troops immediately, on 2nd August, then declared an economic, financial, and military embargo ("Operation Desert Shield"), which then became a blockade. On 29th November, a further resolution by the Security Council authorised member states to use force, if Iraqi troops had not withdrawn from Kuwait by 15th January 1991. On 17th January, the anti-Iraqi coalition, based in Saudi Arabia under American command and made up of troops from the USA, Britain, France, and some twenty other allied countries, began Operation Desert Storm, bombing Iraqi and Kuwaiti military targets. From the 24th to 28th February a victorious ground offensive towards Kuwait City put an end to the war on the front. Iraq lost several tens of thousands of troops and civilians killed, against less than 200 casualties for the coalition. Two thirds of Iraqi military capacity were destroyed. The war ended officially on 11th April, 1991, with Saddam Hussein's acceptance of the conditions laid down by the Security Council, in particular the destruction of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, and its long and medium range missiles"1.
This is the kind of account that we can see flourishing in the school text books. Everything is there to make us think that so-called historical "objectivity" is being respected. This is more or less what we were told ten years ago (except for the casualty figures).
The war was justified by the defence of sacrosanct international law, trampled underfoot by the "evil" Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. This happened at the very moment when the collapse of the Eastern bloc was supposed to have opened up for humanity a radiant future of "peace and prosperity". At any rate, this is what we were promised, and this is what the US president of the day expressed in the phrase "a new world order". The warmonger and his refusal to respect international law had to be stopped by whatever means necessary. The UN, international forum of "peace", became the scene on which, from embargo to blockade, a sinister diplomatic farce was staged to condition the world's population (in other words the proletariat) to accept the coming war. Finally, the war itself, supposed to be a "clean" surgical war, where the only people killed were the "bad guys". Officially, the war came to an end in April 1991, but in reality its epilogue has not yet been written, since for ten years the American bourgeoisie has played the Lone Ranger (sometimes accompanied by its British acolyte), regularly using Saddam (or rather the Iraqi population) as a punching ball to flex its muscles, in a world which since the war has plunged ever deeper into barbarism2.
Today, some parts of the bourgeois press recognise the truth of what the ICC was saying ten years ago. We are not "proud" of the fact - this is not what interests us. But what does interest us, is more than ever to put forward the need for revolutionaries to ground their analyses in the marxist method, to remain vigilant in the face of events, to subject our analyses to the test of reality, to be critical, and not to change our orientations like weather-cocks, with every shift in the wind. This is a precondition for the advance of the class struggle, and one of the main functions of the revolutionary organisation. We are also interested in understanding why the bourgeoisie has decided today to reveal what was previously hidden: to understand the workings of what one might call the "democratic Goebbels"3.
Washington's trap
This is what the Arte documentary, and the review Marianne, say: "Washington's trap: Washington barely reacted when Saddam spoke of invading his one-time province", the US insisted on the fact that it "had no defence agreement with the Kuwaitis". "It was a manoeuvre to trick him", and "'We can say that after the invasion, the US did not want a diplomatic solution', concludes Dr Halliday of the UN".
And this is what we said in early September 1990, one month after the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam's troops and well before the outbreak of war: "But this is not the end of their hypocrisy and cynicism. It appears that the US, discreetly but deliberately, allowed Iraq to embark on this military adventure. True or false - and it is doubtless true - this enlightens us as to the habits and practices of the bourgeoisie, its lies and manipulation, the use it makes of events". "Iraq had no choice. The country was driven to carry out this policy. And the USA let it do so, encouraging and exploiting Saddam Hussein's military adventure, conscious of the growing chaos in the world situation, conscious of the need to make an example". In the summer of 1990, the bourgeois press itself had very discreetly revealed this information. And here we can see very well how the propaganda machine works under the democratic dictatorship: even after some papers had given a veiled account of the trap that the US had laid for Saddam Hussein, they then echoed the anti-Iraqi coalition's military propaganda almost to a man. These hypocrites recognise this today: "This time, the US Army ensured that the journalists would remain 'loyal'. 'The government succeeded in keeping the press at arm's length. In fact, you never knew what was going on', says Paul Sullivan, president of the help centre for Gulf War veterans (?) For four months, they played at frightening themselves with the idea that the Iraqi army, 'the world's fourth largest', remained a dangerous adversary?" (Marianne). "This gross blindness [sic] did not keep Western journalists from writing reams about [Saddam's] diabolical talents for manoeuvre? The Western press went on endlessly about the occupying army's real or supposed outrages. For example, it published the story of a 'young woman of the people', witness to unmentionable horrors. This 'survivor' was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington?". And so, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2nd August, everything was done to "condition" public opinion and make it accept what was to follow. And the journalists, whether with their agreement or more or less unbeknownst to them, played their part to the full.
But what the journalists, with their claims to be "honest" today, don't say, is that the US trap was laid above all for their "allies" of the day, in other words for the other great powers.
In an article in our International Review4 dated November 1990, we took position at greater length on the situation created by the Gulf crisis, before it turned to war. Our analysis was based on positions we had adopted previously, where we put forward the fact that the collapse of the Eastern bloc had brought about the disappearance of the Western bloc, and the development within it of centrifugal tendencies, a tendency of each of the major powers to "look after number one". The so-called "new international order" was thus nothing but a sinister farce. In laying its trap for Iraq, US policy was principally aimed not at Iraq, nor at the Middle East region, nor even at oil, but at the other major powers, above all at France - which was forced to confront its long-time Iraqi ally - while Germany and Japan were forced to cough up financial support for the war effort. The USSR was already in a state of disintegration, and a few diplomatic crumbs were enough to give it its orders. But at the end of 1990, "The US succeeded in creating a facade of unity among the 'international community' in August 1990 by provoking the 'Gulf Crisis' against the 'madman Saddam'. But barely two months later, every member of the 'international community' is openly out to defend their own interests" (International Review n°64). By the end of October, Saddam may have begun to understand the trap that the US government had drawn him into; at all events, perhaps "because he was aware of the rifts between the different countries" (International Review no.64), he played on the obvious disagreements within the Western coalition: at the end of October 1990, he freed all the French hostages, and around the same time received the visit of Germany's ex-chancellor Willy Brandt (also followed by the release of the German hostages).
In fact, the US used Iraq, at a moment when its status as the world's only super-power was bound to be called into question to "demonstrate its power and determination to the other developed countries" (ibid) by inflicting a brutal and bloody punishment on Iraq. In the same article, under the heading "The opposition between the US, seconded by Britain, and the others", we wrote: "With the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc, the planet's entire political-military and geo-strategic balance of forces has been overthrown. And this situation has not only opened a period of complete chaos in the countries and regions of the old Eastern bloc, it has also accelerated everywhere the tendencies to chaos, threatening the world capitalist 'order' whose main beneficiaries are the United States. The latter have been the first to react. They (?) provoked the 'Gulf crisis' in August 1990, not only in order to gain a definitive foothold in the region, but above all (?) to make an example intended to serve as a warning to any who might be tempted to oppose their position as the dominant super-power in the world capitalist arena" (idem).
By January 1991, the USA had succeeded in establishing its mastery of the UN coalition. A deluge of bombs rained down on Iraq. The cynicism of the gangsters running the coalition went so far as to call this a "clean war". "According to the Pentagon, these raids were extremely precise. That is completely untrue. In the space of 41 days, 85,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq, equivalent to 7½ Hiroshimas! Between 150,000 and 200,000 people were killed, mostly civilians" (Ramsey Clark, ex-US Attorney General, in Marianne and the Arte documentary). "In fact, the coalition did far more than wipe out the Iraqi war machine: it methodically destroyed its economic infrastructure".
The press collaborated, almost without hesitation, with the governments of the different countries at war. It was not enough for the press to accuse the Iraqi regime and its bloodstained dictator5: they put themselves under the command of the coalition's military. We should remember the TV documentaries, with their civilian and military experts and their erudite speeches on the "highly dangerous" Iraqi army, supposedly the world's fourth most powerful. These same journalists inundated us with details of Baghdad's terrifying weapons, capable of delivery throughout the "civilised" world. We were told how the bloodthirsty Saddam's armies were killing babies in the crèches of Kuwait. On the Western side, by contrast, our nice pilots would take care only to destroy the strategic targets of the hated power. Today the weekly review Marianne confirms the media's contemptible subjection and complicity: "For four months, they played at frightening themselves with the idea that the Iraqi army remained a dangerous adversary. They talked of converted pesticide factories, of purchases of enriched uranium, the range of the 'super-cannon'. Nobody, it seemed, dared to put forward the most obvious hypothesis: that this swaggering braggart [Saddam] was simply as stupid as he was stubborn. The real specialist military historians were not duped by all this conditioning: 'exposed in the open desert, the Iraqi army will not hold out for one hour against the coalition's firepower'. (?) Thoroughly conditioned, Western opinion swallowed the fiction of the 'smart bombs', and bombardments reduced to the strict minimum" (Marianne). Nor did the manipulation stop there. the US encouraged the Kurds in Northern Iraq, and the Shiites in the south, to rebel against Saddam. "On 3rd March, General Schwarzkopf accepted the Iraqi surrender, allowing them to keep their helicopters [in order to put down the rebellion]6. For weeks, the CIA radio had been calling for an insurrection, and yet the Allies didn't budge when Saddam attacked the rebels with the best units of the Republican Guard, miraculously spared by the bombers" (ibid).
Why are the media "revealing all" today?
In these quotes, Marianne speaks of "conditioning". This task fell to the media in general, and to the television in particular. We have been able to judge what the "democratic" bourgeoisie means by "freedom of the press", above all in vital moments like the Gulf War. All those defenders of "press freedom" unhesitatingly put themselves under military censorship for the duration. And should one of them be tempted to play at Tintin in search of the truth or a fabulous scoop, the army was always there to call him to order. As Marianne says in its own way: "Nobody, it seemed, dared to put forward the most obvious hypothesis".
We can clearly see the workings of the propaganda services in the democratic states. When events require silence, then nothing important filters out. Instead we are fed all kinds of lies, half-truths, manipulations, all tarted up with the opinions of "independent" experts, university specialists and the like, and made all the more credible by the free "tone" of the press in the democratic countries. After the events, little by little, "everything can be brought into the open", or almost. The most popular media (the TV) is inundated by an avalanche of dis-information. Ten years later, the "truth" can only be found in reviews of limited circulation, or on the low-audience TV channels. We have seen the same mechanism at work in 1995 during the genocide in Rwanda, and above all during the last war in ex-Yugoslavia (Kosovo), where the Gulf media model struck again.
Following the Gulf War, and after handing the Kurd and Shiite populations over to Saddam Hussein's hired killers, the "great democracies" had the incredible cynicism to launch their famous "humanitarian interventions", "flying to the rescue of innocent populations". We have been served up the "duty of humanitarian interference" ad nauseam. The Gulf War has been a kind of template for all the imperialist campaigns that have succeeded it around the world.
If a part of the truth is published today, it is essentially because the ruling class needs to justify its system. We are supposed to believe that such openness is only possible in "democratic" capitalism. The ability to "say everything in a democracy" is used to justify those occasions when everything must be manipulated, deformed, or hidden.
But there is another reason why certain media are publishing such facts today. All these articles and documentaries have one thing in common: the US state appears in them as the sole guilty party. Although all the great powers share the responsibility for the massacres caused by the war, it is true that it was the US that led the "crusade", that prepared the trap and sprang it, and that provided most of the coalition's armed power. Certain European powers - especially France and Germany, for whom the USA is the main rival on the world imperialist scene - have every interest today in minimising their own responsibility and exposing the savagery and cynicism of "American imperialism" (which of course are real enough).
Obviously, we also get our information from the bourgeois press. Even in 1990 some papers gave a limited coverage to the manipulation. Thereafter, the deluge of lies was such that what we said in our press made some people (including those in good faith, even including some militants of the Communist Left) think that we had gone completely off the rails, that we were obsessed with machiavellian plots.
But the news in itself is not the most important thing. What is important is the method used to analyse events, and we use the marxist method. If we were able to understand what was going on in the Middle East during 1990-91, it is because we had worked to analyse the consequences of the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and the decomposition of capitalism. Revolutionaries are not, and cannot have, "secret informers". Our strength lies in our attachment to our class, the proletariat, to its history, and to the marxist method which it has forged.
Nor should we be under any illusions. Revolutionaries today only publish under surveillance. Our only protection is not the "freedom of the press", but the strength and the struggle of our class.
During the events themselves, only revolutionaries were able to show what was at stake, and so to denounce the barbarity of the war and the ruling class' manipulation of the truth. Some fractions of the bourgeoisie denounced the barbarism visited on Iraq, but for nationalist (anti-American), or even frankly pro-Iraqi reasons (as was the case with certain leftist groups). Only the groups of the Communist Left defended the internationalist proletarian position during the war. And among these groups, only the ICC was able to highlight what was really at stake in the situation. The trap set for Iraq was pointless if all that was at stake was oil. But its purpose becomes clear when we consider that what was really at stake, was US leadership in the situation following the collapse of the bloc system7. And it is only in this context that the question of oil gains its full importance, as an element in overall imperialist policy.
In terms of its propaganda and "news" the bourgeoisie does everything it can to prevent the working class - which alone can put an end to the bourgeoisie and its system - from becoming aware of what is at stake. Its efforts are redoubled whenever the mortal economic crisis affecting the system for the last thirty years, or events like the Gulf War are involved. As far as their ideological capacities are concerned, their ability to lie, hide, and deform reality, the democratic bourgeoisie has nothing to learn from the propaganda specialists of totalitarian regimes. Revolutionaries have a duty to denounce, not only imperialist barbarism, but also the mechanisms whereby the bourgeoisie tries to anaesthetise the proletariat by stultifying it with mendacious propaganda.
PA, 30/03/2001
1 This quote is taken from the Encyclopaedia Universalis. Its articles are written by eminent historians, and we can suppose that the chapters in the school text books used to indoctrinate the young generations will be written in the same way.
2 This account does not mention the extras who served to complete the scenario: the so-called "anti-imperialists" and pacifists. Some fractions of the European bourgeoisie (from the extreme right to the extreme left, including in France the "national-republicans" and other "defenders of national sovereignty) stirred up anti-American feeling to express their disagreement with the policy of the right or left wing governments in power in Europe at the time. In general, all these bourgeois fractions that criticised the anti-Iraqi coalition pointed to oil as the main cause of the war.
France was then under President Mitterrand's socialist government. The only member of the government to express any reticence at the anti-Iraq coalition was the left national-republican Chevènement. In Spain, Felipe Gonzales' socialist government also took part in the anti-Iraqi coalition, despite the whining of certain socialists. It is worth noting that in Germany, the Greens were out-and-out pacifists. Today, they are in government. during the last war in Yugoslavia (1999), they were unhesitatingly in favour of the bombing of Serbia. One good thing about the German Greens, is that they save us the need for lengthy analyses of the real nature of pacifism. It is enough to look at their actions.
3 Dr Goebbels was the German Nazi regime's minister for propaganda and information. If we use this expression, it is because Goebbels has since become the archetypal mastermind of the bourgeois state's propaganda indoctrination and manipulation. But, as this article aims to show, there is no shortage of similar examples in Stalinist or democratic regimes.
4 "Against the spiral of military barbarism, there is only one solution: the development of the class struggle", in International Review no.64, 1st Quarter 1991.
5 Indeed, right up until the moment of the Gulf crisis, the Western press had sung Saddam's praises, depicting him as a "modern" ruler, and above all as someone who should be supported against the ambitions of the Iranian ayatollahs during the Iran-Iraq war. In 1988, Western governments supported Saddam's suppression of the Kurds using chemical weapons, because at the time he was a key element against Iran.
6 Marianne goes on to say that it was "a bit as if the Allies, in the winter of 1945, had stopped at the Rhine, leaving Hitler enough weapons to deal with any eventual uprisings". But it is not "a bit as if"; this is exactly what the Allies did in Italy in 1944: they stopped their northward advance, in order to leave the fascist regime's hands free to crush the workers' strikes and insurrection that had broken out there.
7 Read "The proletarian political milieu confronted with the Gulf War" (01/11/90), in International Review no.64, and our "Appeal to the proletarian political milieu" in no.67 (July 1991).
The Dutch communist left is one of the major components of the revolutionary current which broke away from the degenerating Communist International in the 1920s. Well before Trotsky's Left Opposition, and in a more profound way, the communist left had been able to expose the opportunist dangers which threatened the International and its parties and which eventually led to their demise. In the struggle for the intransigent defence of revolutionary principles, this current, represented in particular by the KAPD in Germany, the KAPN in Holland, and the left of the Communist Party of Italy animated by Bordiga, came out against the International's policies on questions like participation in elections and trade unions, the formation of 'united fronts' with social democracy, and support for national liberation struggles. It was against the positions of the communist left that Lenin wrote his pamphlet Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder; and this text drew a response in Reply to Lenin, written by one of the main figures of the Dutch left, Herman Gorter.
In fact, the Dutch left, like the Italian left, had been formed well before the first world war, as part of the same struggle waged by Luxemburg and Lenin against the opportunism and reformism which was gaining hold of the parties of the Second International. It was no accident that Lenin himself, before reverting to centrist positions at the head of the Communist International, had, in his book State and Revolution, leaned heavily on the analyses of Anton Pannekoek, who was the main theoretician of the Dutch left. The continuity and experience of the Dutch left in the combat for the defence of revolutionary positions led it to become the main theoretical inspiration for the German left (KAPD and AAU), which it survived in the 1930s in the shape of the GIK (Group of Internationalist Communists) animated by Pannekoek and Canne-Meijer. After the disappearance of the GIK in 1940, the 'council communist' (or 'councilist') current - a name which the German-Dutch left gave itself in opposition to 'party communism' or 'state communism' - had a certain renaissance with the formation of the Spartacusbond and to some extent of the group Daad en Gedachte. Spartacusbond disappeared at the end of the 1970s, while Daad and Gedachte suspended publication in 1998.
Despite its weaknesses, in particular its underestimation of the role of communist organisations which was to play a big role in the gradual disappearance of this current, the Dutch left made a vital contribution to the revolutionary movement during the terrible counter-revolution which descended on the working class after the revolutionary wave of 197-23. This contribution was taken up in the most complete way after the second world war by the Gauche Communiste de France, whose positions were the basis for those of the International Communist Current. The GCF emerged from the Italian left, which had achieved a high level of clarity thanks to its correct conception of the role of communist fractions in a period of counter-revolution. This is why this document is an indispensable complement to The Communist Left of Italy, already published by the ICC, for all those who want to know the real history of the communist movement behind all the falsifications which Stalinism and Trotskyism have erected around it.
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In the last article in this series (‘1924-28: The Thermidor of Stalinist state capitalism’, International Review 102) we looked at the attempts of the various currents on the left wing of the Bolshevik party to understand and combat the degeneration and demise of the October revolution. As these groups gradually succumbed to the merciless terror of the Stalinist counter-revolution, the focus of this political and theoretical struggle shifted to the international arena, particularly to western Europe. The next two articles will concentrate on the attempts of the international communist left to provide a clear marxist analysis of the regime which had arisen in the USSR on the ashes of the proletarian revolution.
Understanding the nature of the Stalinist system is a key aspect of the communist programme: without such an understanding, it would be impossible for communists to outline clearly what kind of society they are fighting for, to describe what socialism is and what it is not. But the clarity that communists have today about the nature of the USSR was not easily attained: it took many years of intensive debate and reflection within the proletarian political movement before a truly coherent synthesis could be achieved. Never before had revolutionaries been compelled to analyse a proletarian revolution that had perished from within. As a result, for a long time, the USSR appeared as a kind of enigma1, a problem unforeseen in the annals of marxism. Our aim in the following articles will therefore be to chronicle the main stages by which the groups of the marxist vanguard, in the dark years of the counter-revolution, gradually succeeded in unravelling the enigma and bequeathing the analysis of Stalinist state capitalism to their present-day heirs
We take up the story in 1926. The Communist Party of Germany, the KPD, is being ‘Bolshevised’, ostensibly to bring all the Communist parties outside Russia into synch with the intransigent and disciplined methods of the Russian party. But the campaign of Bolshevisation launched by the Communist International in 1924-5 is in truth part of the process of the destruction of Bolshevism. The party which had led the revolution in 1917 is being turned into a mere annex of the Russian state; and the Russian state has become the axial point of the capitalist counter-revolution. Stalin’s theory of ‘socialism in one country’, first announced in 1924, is a declaration of war against the real internationalist traditions of the Russian party. By 1926, all the remaining Bolsheviks – including Zinoviev, under whose auspices the Bolshevisation campaign had been imposed on the International – have gone over to the opposition and shortly afterwards will be expelled from the party.
In Germany too there is widespread resistance to the increasing opportunism and bureaucratism of the KPD, to the attempt to silence all serious questioning about the internal situation within Russia and the foreign policy of the CI. The inability of the KPD apparatus to tolerate any real debate has resulted in the mass expulsion of nearly all of the most revolutionary elements within the party, of a whole series of groups influenced not only by the (today) better known opposition around Trotsky, but also by the German communist left. The KAPD, although far weaker than in its hey-day during the revolutionary wave, still exists and has carried out consistent work towards the KPD, which it defines as a centrist organisation still capable of giving rise to revolutionary minorities.
Our book on the German-Dutch left contains precise evidence of the scale and importance of this split, which involved the following groups:
“the group around Schwarz and Korsch, the ‘Entschiedene Linke’ or Intransigent Left, which regrouped about 7000 members;
The Iwan Katz group, which together with Pfemfert’s group formed an organisation of 6000 members, close to the AAUE. It operated in the name of a cartel of left communist organisations and published the journal Spartakus. This became the organ of the Spartakusbund mark II;
the Fischer-Maslow group, which had 6000 militants;
the Urbahns group, the future Leninbund, which regrouped 5000 members;
the Wedding opposition, excluded in 1927-28 was later, with part of Urbahn’s Leninbund, to create the German Trotskyist opposition” (The Dutch and German Communist Left, chapter 6).
The Korsch group is the one which is most strongly influenced by the KAPD – later on a rather hasty and short-lived fusion will take place between them. The platform of this group is not widely known or available – a measure of the degree to which the German left has disappeared from history. Better known is the letter to Korsch, commenting on the platform, by Amadeo Bordiga, at that point the most important figure of the Italian communist left, which has been conducting a particularly powerful polemic against the growing opportunism of the CI. Our attention thus moves on to this correspondence because it gives us a valuable insight into the different approaches adopted by the German and Italian left communists towards the fundamental problems that confronted them at that time – understanding the nature of the regime in the USSR and defining a coherent policy towards the International and its component parties.
The first noticeable thing about Bordiga’s reply (dated 28th October 1926) is that there is no trace of the sectarianism which led him to consider himself the sole repository of truth, nor of the slightest refusal to discuss with other currents on the left. In short, we are very far away from the ‘Bordigism’ of today, which claims to be the true heir of the Italian left communist tradition, and which has theorised a refusal to hold any kind of debate with groups who do not fit into a very restricted definition of this tradition. It is certainly true that the Bordiga of 1926 does not consider that there is as yet sufficient political homogeneity for a regroupment or even for the publication of a common international declaration. But his whole emphasis is on the necessity for discussion and for a work of clarification in which the various currents of the international left will have a role to play: “I think in general that the priority today, rather than manoeuvring and forming organisations, is the preliminary work of elaborating a political ideology of the international left based on the eloquent experiences undergone by the Comintern” Later on he adds that parallel declarations about the situation in Russia and the Comintern by the different left groupings will contribute to this work, even if he is anxious to avoid “going as far as a fractionist ‘plot’”
Bordiga’s argument is founded on the conviction that “we are not yet at the moment of definite clarification”: ie, it is too early to write off the Communist Parties or the International. Revolutionaries must carry on the struggle within the Communist Parties as long as possible, in spite of the increasingly artificial and mechanical discipline which reigns within them: “we have to respect this discipline in all its procedural absurdities, without ever renouncing positions of political and ideological criticism and without ever solidarising with the dominant orientation”. Defending the decision of the Russian left opposition to submit to discipline and so avoid a split, he argues that “the objective and external situation is still such that, not only in Russia, the fact of being chased out of the Comintern leaves one with still less chance of influencing the course of the working class struggle than one could have from within the party”.
In hindsight we can take issue with some of Bordiga’s conclusions: while it was certainly true that struggle for the ‘soul’ of the Communist parties was far from over in 1926, his reluctance to recognise the necessity for forming organised fractions – including, when possible, an international fraction – goes some way to explaining why he was unable to play a part in the next phase in the history of the Italian left: the phase initiated precisely by the formation of the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy in 1928. But what is important here is Bordiga’s method, which was without doubt handed on to those who did participate in the work of the Fraction. The priority he accords to the work of clarification in an unfavourable objective situation, the insistence on the necessity to fight to the end to save organisations which the proletariat has created with such difficulty – this was the hallmark of the Italian left and provides a key to understanding why it was destined to play the central role in “elaborating a political ideology of the international left” during the bleakest years of the counter-revolution. By contrast, the German left’s premature dismissal of the Communist Parties and the CI had been one of the weightiest causes of its rapid organisational disintegration.
The same can be said when Bordiga takes up the question of the nature of the regime in Russia, which is in fact the first issue addressed in the reply to Korsch. The ‘Intransigent Left’, like previous currents of the German communist left (Rühle as early as 1920, the KAPD from around 1922 onwards) had already declared that capitalism had triumphed over the revolution in Russia. But in both cases this conclusion, arrived at impressionistically and without a through-going theoretical inquiry, had resulted in the proletarian nature of the revolution being put into question, and in a de facto regression to the positions of the Mensheviks or the anarchists, many of whom had from the start denounced the October insurrection as a coup d’Etat by the Bolsheviks, installing a new variety of capitalism in place of the old. The KAPD, on the whole, did not go this far, but it did develop the theory of the “double revolution”, proletarian in the cities, bourgeois in the countryside, and it had tended to see the New Economic Policy introduced in 1921 as the point where a kind of “peasant capitalism” had gained supremacy over the remains of proletarian power.
Another irony for latter-day Bordigism: Bordiga’s reply to Korsch contains no hint of the “double revolution” theory which he elaborated after the second world war, and which defined the bourgeois economy of the USSR as the product of a “transition towards capitalism” which had taken place under the auspices of the Stalinist apparat. On the contrary: Bordiga’s overriding concern is to defend the proletarian character of October, no matter what subsequent degeneration has taken place:
“…your ‘way of expressing yourself’ on the subject of Russia does not seem right to me. One cannot say that the Russian revolution was a bourgeois revolution. The 1917 revolution was a proletarian revolution even if it was an error to generalise its ‘tactical’ lessons; now the problem is posed as to what happens to the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country, if the revolution does not carry on in other countries. There can be counter-revolution, there can be a process of degeneration whose symptoms and reflections within the Communist Party have to be discovered and defined. One cannot simply say that Russia is a country tending towards capitalism. The thing is much more complex: it’s a question of new forms of the class struggle which have no precedent in history. It is a question of showing how the Stalinist conception of relations with the middle classes is equivalent to renouncing the communist programme. It would seem that you exclude the possibility of a policy by the Russian Communist Party which would not lead to the restoration of capitalism. This would end up justifying Stalin or supporting the unacceptable policy of ‘resigning from power’. On the contrary we must say that a correct class policy would have been possible in Russia, avoiding the series of grave errors in international policy committed by ‘The Leninist old guard in its entirety’”.
Again, with the benefit of hindsight it is possible for us to answer some of Bordiga’s conclusions: at the time of writing, capitalism – not based on concessions to the middle classes, but on the very state that had emerged out of the revolution – was indeed becoming the master of Russia, not only economically (since it had never been vanquished at this level) but also politically, and the longer the Communist Party tried to hang on to political power, the more it was separating itself from the proletariat and becoming subsumed to the interests of capital. But here again the essential thing is the method, the theoretical starting point: the revolution was proletarian, but it was isolated; now it is a question of understanding something that has never happened in history: the degeneration of a proletarian revolution from within. And here again, even if Bordiga’s heirs in the Fraction took a long time coming to the correct conclusions about the nature of the regime in the USSR, the solidity of their analytical method was to ensure that they did so with much greater depth and seriousness than those who had proclaimed the capitalist nature of the USSR much earlier on, but only by breaking solidarity with the October revolution. The German left was to pay heavily for this: cutting the roots that connected it to October and Bolshevism also meant cutting its own roots, and without roots a tree cannot survive. To this day it is evident that it is virtually impossible to maintain any organised proletarian political activity that is not grounded in the lessons both of the October victory and of its subsequent defeat.
We move on to 1933. The defeat of the German proletariat has been sealed by Hitler’s assumption of power. The workers of the two other main centres of the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23 – Russia and Italy – have also been crushed. The defeats result in the disappearance or dispersal of the revolutionary vanguard. The political life of the working class no longer takes place in the Communist parties, which have been thoroughly Stalinised and are on the verge of capitulating to the ideology of national defence. It survives nonetheless in a very much reduced milieu of opposition groupings and fractions. By now the crux of this oppositional activity has shifted to France, and in particular to Paris, the traditional city of European revolutions.
By 1933 some of these groups have already come and gone. Such had been the fate of one ‘wing’ of the Italian left in exile, the Reveil Communiste group around Pappalardi. Formed in 1927, this group had attempted a bold synthesis between the Italian and German lefts. Without rejecting the proletarian character of the October revolution, it had come to the conclusion that a bourgeois counter-revolution had taken place in Russia. And yet the group’s tendency towards impatience and sectarianism soon led it to lose its connection with the thorough-going methodology of the Italian left. By 1929 its synthesis had mutated into a wholesale conversion to the tradition of the German left, to its weaknesses as well as its strengths. This mutation was marked by the appearance of the paper L’Ouvrier Communiste, which worked closely with the Russian left communist exiled in Paris, Gavril Miasnikov2. Very quickly the new group had succumbed to anarchist influences and ceased publication in 1931.
In 1933, the majority of the ‘native’ oppositional groups are influenced by Trotsky, although the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy, formed in the Paris suburb of Pantin in 1928, is extremely active within this milieu. The official section of the International Left Opposition is the Communist League, formed in 1929 on a very heterogeneous basis strongly criticised by the Italian Fraction. Already ‘Trotskyism’ has begun to adopt an unprincipled, activist approach to regroupment which is not founded on any solid programmatic agreement. Such approaches can only result in splits, especially because it is combined with an increasingly opportunist approach to such key questions as relations with the Communist and Socialist parties and the defence of democracy against fascism. The League has already been through a number of splits. The first, fuelled by but not limited to personal antagonisms and clan loyalties, had taken place after the feud between the Molinier group and the Rosmer-Naville group. Trotsky’s intervention in the situation from exile in Prinkipo had been unfortunate to say the least, since he was already growing impatient to form new mass organisations and had been taken in by the activist schemes of Molinier, who was in essence a political adventurer. Rosmer’s tendency had at least been more concerned with the need to reflect and develop a clearer understanding of the conditions facing the class, but Trotsky’s ‘Prinkipo peace’ led to Rosmer’s virtual withdrawal from militant life. But the split also gave rise to an organised current – the Gauche Communiste group around Collinet and Naville’s brother. It was followed in 1932 by another split, resulting in the formation of the Fraction de Gauche animated by the former Zinovievist Albert Treint, and by Marc, later of the Gauche Communiste de France and the ICC. The cause of the split was the group’s rejection of a growing tendency within the League towards conciliation with Stalinism. By the beginning of 1933, the League is on the verge of another and even more damaging split, as a growing minority reacts against the politics of conciliation towards social democracy which will culminate in the ‘French turn’ of 1934 – the policy of ‘entrism’ into the social democratic parties, once denounced by the Communist International as instruments of the bourgeoisie.
It is at this point that another oppositional group known as the ‘15th Rayon group’, whose best-known militant is Gaston Davoust (Chaze) issue an invitation to all the oppositional currents to hold a series of meetings aimed at programmatic clarification and eventual regroupment. This initiative is warmly welcomed by the Italian Fraction, which had been manoeuvred out of the International Left Opposition by 1932, but which sees these meetings as the possible basis for the formation of a Left Fraction of the Communist Party of France, to use its terminology of the time. There is a positive response as well from virtually all the French groups, while some groups outside France also participate or send their support (Ligue Communiste Internationaliste in Belgium, the Austrian opposition group, etc). Over the next few months there is a series of meetings which involve an impressive list of groups: the Fraction de Gauche and the Gauche Communiste, Davoust’s group, the Communist League as well as a separate delegation of its latest minority; the Italian Left Fraction; a number of small (and ephemeral) groups such as Pour une Renaissance Communiste, made up of three elements who have split from the Italian Fraction over the Russian question, considering the USSR to be state capitalist; Treint’s new group Effort Communiste, which had left the Fraction de Gauche because it too no longer saw anything proletarian in the ‘Soviet’ regime, and had begun developing the theory that Russia was now under the sway of a new exploiting class; and a number of individuals such as Simone Weil and Kurt Landau.
The nature of the regime in the Soviet Union is one of the key issues on the agenda. At this point, the majority of the invited groups formally defend the view, enshrined in the 1927 platform of the Russian opposition and still vigorously advocated by Trotsky, that the USSR is a proletarian state, albeit in a condition of severe bureaucratic degeneration, because it has not done away with the state ownership of the principal means of production. But what is particularly interesting about the discussions at this conference is the way they provide us with an illustration of the evolution taking place on this question within the opposition milieu.
Thus for example the report on the Russian question is made by the Gauche Communiste group. This text is highly critical of Trotsky’s arguments: “Comrade Trotsky, in order to explain the bureaucracy’s offensive against the peasantry and Stalinism’s conversion to a policy of industrialisation, despite the ‘liquidation of the party as a party’, is led to argue that while the economic infrastructure of the proletarian dictatorship has got stronger, its political superstructure has continued to weaken and degenerate. A proposition that is hard to make sense of when you take into account the marxist thesis that ‘politics is only concentrated economics’, especially when we are talking about a regime where the essential political issue is the direction of the economy”. It concludes that the bureaucracy has indeed constituted itself into new class, neither proletarian nor bourgeois. But unlike Treint, and without any apparent consistency, the text also argues that this bureaucratic state still contains some proletarian vestiges and thus still needs to be defended by revolutionaries against any attack by imperialism. A resolution drawn up by the Chaze group expresses equally contradictory conclusions – the USSR remains a workers’ state, but the bureaucracy is “playing the role of a real class, whose interests are more and more opposed to those of the working class” More important, perhaps, than the actual content of these texts is the approach adopted by the conference, its open attitude to the question. Thus, when the ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist group, the Communist League, proposes a resolution excluding all those who deny the proletarian nature of the USSR, it is almost unanimously rejected.
The conference does not succeed in unifying all the groups that had taken part, nor in creating a French Fraction: in a period of defeat, the dominant tendency is inevitably towards dispersal and isolation. But a partial regroupment does take place and this too is significant: the Fraction de Gauche, Davoust’s group, and later on the minority of the Communist League – a minority of 35 members whose departure virtually crippled the League – unite to form the Union Communiste group which continued up until the war. Although it begins with a heavy baggage of Trotskyism, and is later found wanting when it comes to the ordeal of the Spanish civil war, a process of evolution does take place in this group: it calls the ideology of anti-fascism into question and by 1935 has concluded that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a new bourgeoisie. A similar position is adopted by the LCI in Belgium.
When we consider as well that the Italian Fraction, though still talking about the USSR as a proletarian state, also moves rapidly towards rejecting any defence of the USSR during this period, we can see that by the mid 1930s Trotsky’s position on the USSR has already been challenged or abandoned by an important component of the Trotskyist movement, just as it had been within the Russian opposition itself. And the importance of this component is both quantitative and qualitative: quantitative because by the mid-30s it is actually larger than the ‘official’ Trotskyist group in the country which is the ‘heartland’ of the International Left Opposition; and qualitative because it is generally the most intransigent and consistent elements, many of them formed during the revolutionary wave or soon afterwards, who have rejected the defence of the USSR and begin to grasp, albeit in an incomplete and often contradictory manner, that a capitalist counter-revolution has taken place in the ‘Land of the Soviets’. Small wonder that the history of these currents is systematically ignored by the Trotskyist historians.
In order to understand the evolution of Trotsky’s position on the USSR, it is necessary to recognise these pressures on him from the left. If we look briefly at Trotsky’s most important statement on the nature of the USSR during this period – his book The Revolution Betrayed, written during his exile in Norway and published in 1936 – we can readily grasp that he was engaging in a polemic on two fronts: on the one hand, against the Stalinist deception that the USSR was a paradise for the workers, and on the other hand, against all those currents on the left who were converging towards the view that the Soviet Union had lost all connection with the proletarian power of 1917.
Let us state first of all that contrary to conclusions that have been put forward within the communist left, and even by the Italian Fraction at the time, the Trotsky of 1936 had not ceased to be a marxist, and The Revolution Betrayed contains ample proof of this. The main thrust of the book is aimed at refuting Stalin’s absurd claim that the USSR had already achieved full ‘socialism’ (though not yet ‘communism’) by 1936. Against this monstrous lie, Trotsky marshals the full force of his statistical knowledge, his acerbic wit and his political clarity to expose the absolutely miserable conditions of the working class and the peasantry, the deplorably shoddy character of the goods produced for mass consumption, the growing privileges of the bureaucratic elite, the increasingly reactionary, nationalistic, and hierarchical trends in the spheres of art and literature, education, the army, family life, and so on. Indeed Trotsky’s depiction of the mentality and practices of the bureaucracy is so sharp that he all but proves that we are in the presence of an exploiting class. In the article ‘The unidentified class: Soviet bureaucracy as seen by Leon Trotsky’, written for International Review n°92 by one of the comrades involved in the emerging proletarian milieu in Russia today, this point is made very clearly: “Trotsky is in fact describing the following picture [in The Revolution Betrayed]: there exists a fairly numerous social stratum which controls production, and therefore its produce, in a monopolistic manner, and which appropriates a large part of production (in other words, exercises a function of exploitation), which is united around an understanding of its common material interests, and is opposed to the producing class. What do marxists call a social stratum that displays all these characteristics? There is only one answer: this is the ruling social class in every sense of the term. Trotsky leads his reader to the same conclusion. But he does not come to it himself…Trotsky starts with ‘a’, but after describing the exploiting ruling class, Trotsky hesitates at the last moment, and refuses to go on to ‘b’”.
Trotsky’s book also poses an extremely important question about the nature of the transitional state, and why it is particularly vulnerable to the pressures of the old social order. Taking up Lenin’s suggestive phrase from State and Revolution that the transitional state is in a certain sense a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”, Trotsky adds: “This highly significant conclusion, completely ignored by the present official theoreticians, has a decisive significance for the understanding of the nature of the Soviet state – or more accurately, for a first approach to such understanding. In so far as the state which assumes the task of socialist transformation is compelled to defend inequality – that is, the material privileges of a minority – by methods of compulsion, insofar does it also remain a bourgeois state, even though without a bourgeoisie…The bourgeois norms of distribution, by hastening the growth of material power, ought to serve socialist aims – but only in the last analysis. The state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character: socialist in so far as it defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois, in so far as the distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing therefrom. Such a contradictory characterisation may horrify the dogmatists and scholastics; we can only offer them our condolences” (Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder press, p 53-4). This line of questioning about the nature of the transitional state could, if properly developed have led Trotsky to understand how the state established after the October revolution had become the guardian of the statified capital; but again, Trotsky was unable to pursue the question to its final daring conclusions.
The more directly political conclusions embodied in the book – although Trotsky had already reached some of these by 1933 – also represent a certain advance on his previous thinking. In 1927, as we saw in the last article in this series, Trotsky had issued a warning about the danger of a Thermidor, a “counter–revolution on the instalment plan”, within the USSR. But he had as yet not accepted that this was already an accomplished fact. By the time he writes The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky has revised his view and concluded that Thermidor had already taken place under the aegis of the bureaucracy; as a result “the old Bolshevik party is dead, and no force will resurrect it” ibid, p100). And he concludes that the bureaucracy which had strangled Bolshevism can no longer be reformed – it must be forcefully overthrown in what he calls a “political revolution” by the working class. By this time he has also decided that the Communist International had also breathed its last and that the formation of new parties is on the agenda in all countries.
Finally, it is important to remember that Trotsky’s book does not completely close the question of the nature of the USSR. He considers that history has yet to determine this question, insisting that the reign of the bureaucracy cannot be a stable one: either it will be overthrown by the workers, or by an overtly bourgeois counter-revolution, or it will transform itself into a possessing class in the fullest sense. And as the world lurched towards a new world war, it became more evident to Trotsky in his final years that the role that the USSR played in the war would be a decisive factor in finally fixing its class nature.
Despite all these positive aspects, the book is also a vigorous defence of the thesis that the USSR remains a workers’ state because it has carried through the integral nationalisation of the means of production, thus “abolishing” the bourgeoisie. When his book talks about Thermidor, it is not used in quite the same sense as Trotsky had used it in 1927. Then Thermidor had meant a bourgeois counter-revolution. Now it leans more heavily on the ambiguity of this comparison with the French revolution. In France, Thermidor had not meant a feudal restoration, but the coming to power of a more conservative fraction of the bourgeoisie. By the same token, Trotsky argues that the Soviet Thermidor has not restored capitalism but installed a kind of “proletarian Bonapartism”, in which a parasitic bureaucratic stratum defends its privileges at the expense of the proletariat, but is still dependent for its survival on the continuation of the “proletarian property forms” ushered in by the October revolution. This is why he calls not for a complete social revolution in the USSR, but merely a political revolution which will eliminate the bureaucracy while retaining the basic economic form. And this too is why Trotsky remains entirely devoted to the “defence of the Soviet Union” against the hostile intentions of world capitalism, which, he argues, still sees the USSR as an alien body within its midst.
Here we come to the reactionary side of Trotsky’s work – and it is a thesis directed against the left. This becomes explicit in the latter part of the book when Trotsky poses, and dismisses, the question of whether the USSR could be seen as state capitalist or the bureaucracy as a ruling class. With regard to state capitalism, Trotsky is aware of the general trend towards state intervention in the economy within capitalism, and sees it as an expression of the historic decline of the system. He even accepts the theoretical possibility that the entire ruling class of a given country could constitute itself into a single trust via the state, and goes on to say that “the economic laws of such a regime would present no mysteries. A single capitalist, as is well known, receives in the form of profit, not that part of the surplus value which is directly created by the workers of his own enterprise, but a share of the combined surplus value created throughout the country proportionate to the amount of his own capital. Under an integral ‘state capitalism’, this law of the equal rate of profit would be realised, not by devious routes – that is, competition among different capitals – but immediately and directly through state bookkeeping”. But having described in a nutshell the operation of the law of value in the USSR, he quickly adds the disclaimer that “such a regime never existed, however, and, because of profound contradictions among the proprietors themselves, never will exist – the more so since, in its quality of universal repository of capitalist property, the state would be too tempting an object for social revolution” (Revolution Betrayed, p245). We could add that the most advanced bourgeoisies have also shunned the model of integral state capitalism because, as in the collapse of the ex-Stalinist countries confirmed, it has proved to disastrously inefficient. But what Trotsky entirely fails to do in this chapter is to ask this obvious question: could an integral state capitalism arise out of a unique situation where the proletarian revolution has expropriated the old bourgeoisie, and then degenerated due its international isolation?
As for Trotsky’s argument that the bureaucracy cannot be a ruling class, due to the fact that it has no stocks and shares or any right of inheritance enabling it to pass on property to its heirs, our Russian comrade AG writes a very lucid rejoinder: “In Revolution Betrayed Trotsky tries to refute theoretically the thesis of the bureaucracy’s bourgeois class nature with arguments as weak as the fact that ‘it has neither stocks nor bonds’ (p249). But why should the ruling class necessarily possess them? For it is obvious that the possession of stocks and bonds is of no importance in itself: the important thing is whether this or that class appropriates to itself a surplus product of the direct producers. If yes, then the function of exploitation exists whether the distribution of the appropriated product is done via dividends on shares, or through a salary and privileges attached to a job. The author of Revolution Betrayed is just as unconvincing when he says that the representatives of the leading stratum cannot bequeath their privileged status (…) it is highly unlikely that Trotsky thought that the children of the elite could become workers or peasants”. By attributing this decisive significance to the law of inheritance, Trotsky clearly deviates from the fundamental marxist axiom that juridical relations are only the superstructural expression of the underlying social relationships; equally, by insisting on finding such proof of personal membership of a ruling class, Trotsky forgets that marxists define capital as a wholly impersonal power; it is capitalism which creates capitalists, not the other way round.
Equally, behind Trotsky’s notion that the class nature of the Soviet state is determined in the last instance by its economic structure there is a deep confusion about the nature of the proletarian revolution. As an exploited class, the one and only way the working class can transform society towards socialism is by establishing and holding political power. It has no ‘property’ of its own, no economic laws functioning in its favour: its method of struggle against the laws of the capitalist economy is based entirely on its ability to impose conscious control and planning against the anarchy of the market, human needs against the needs of profit. But this ability can only derive from its organised strength and its political consciousness – from its ability to assert its programme at every level of social and economic life. There is no guarantee whatever that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the collectivisation of the means of production will automatically lead in the direction of new social relations. They are a mere starting point: the work of creating these new social relations can only be carried out through the mass social movement of the working class. Actually, Trotsky comes close to recognising this when he writes “The predominance of socialist over petty bourgeois tendencies is guaranteed, not by the automatism of the economy – we are still far from that – but by political measures taken by the dictatorship. The character of the economy as a whole thus depends upon the character of the state power” But, as with the rest of his thesis, Trotsky is unable to draw the essential conclusion – that if the proletariat no longer exerts the slightest control over the state power, then the economy will automatically go in one direction: towards capitalism. In sum, the existence of a ‘workers state’, or proletarian dictatorship to be more precise, depends not on whether the state formally owns the economy, but on whether the proletariat really holds political power.
The most serious result of Trotsky’s failure to recognise that the October revolution had indeed been definitively defeated is that it leads him to “theoretically” justify the radical apology for Stalinism, which was to be the ultimate function of the movement he founded. In The Revolution Betrayed this apologia is already explicit, in spite of all the criticisms of the real conditions facing the Russian working class: “With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface – not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity” (p 8). Thus, Trotsky insists that despite all the bureaucratic deformations, Stalinism’s “development of the productive forces” is progressive because it is laying the basis for a true socialist society; indeed, Trotsky could never escape from the idea that Stalin’s turn towards rapid industrialisation at the end of the 20s was a victory of sorts for the economic programme of the Left Opposition. But the real character of the industrialisation of the USSR must be judged within the context of the world-wide development of the productive forces. The Russian revolution of 1917 had been made on the premise that the world was already ripe for communism. The development that took place under Stalin was founded on the defeat of the first world wide attempt to create a communist society; it was predicated on the necessity to build up a war economy to prepare for the resulting imperialist re-division of the world. Seen in this light, the triumphs of Soviet industrialisation are in no way a factor of human progress, but an expression of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production; and Trotsky’s hymns to the production of concrete and steel are a justification for the ruthless exploitation of the working class.
Worse: the defence of the Soviet Union against world capitalism led to a policy of support for the imperialist appetites of Russian capital, a policy already put in practice in 1929 when Trotsky supported Russia’s dispute with China over possession of the Manchurian railway. As the world moved rapidly towards another war, and as the USSR increasingly took its part in the global imperialist arena, the official Trotskyist position of ‘defending the workers’ state’ would lead the movement closer and closer to the bourgeois camp.
As we pointed out in the article on Trotsky’s death in International Review n°103, the slide towards war led Trotsky himself to pose some very fundamental questions. Within the Trotskyist movement, he was to face further challenges to his notion of the degenerated workers’ state. This time it came not so much from the left but from the likes of Bruno Rizzi in Italy, and in particular Burnham and Schachtman in the US, all of whom developed different versions of the idea that the USSR represented an exploiting society of a new type, unforeseen by marxism. Trotsky was opposed to this conclusion, but his later writings show that he was quite strongly influenced by it, even though – because he was a marxist, and above all a far better marxist than the likes of Schachtman – he understood quite clearly that if a new system of exploitation could arise from the entrails of capitalist society, the whole marxist perspective, and above all the revolutionary potential of the working class, had to be put into question. “Taken to its historic conclusion, the historical alternative appears thus: either the Stalinist regime is an awful setback in the process of the transformation of bourgeois society into a socialist society. Or else the Stalinist regime is the first step towards a new society of exploitation. If the second forecast proved correct, then of course the bureaucracy would become a new exploiting class. However dire this second perspective may appear, should the world proletariat indeed prove itself unable to carry out the mission entrusted to it by the course of historical development, then we would be forced to recognise that the socialist programme, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, has finally turned out to be a utopia. It goes without saying that we would need a new ‘minimum programme;’ to defend the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society” (‘The USSR in the war’, 1939).
For Trotsky the outcome of the impending war would be decisive: if the bureaucracy revealed itself to be stable enough to survive the war, it would be necessary to conclude that it had indeed crystallised into a new ruling class; and if the proletariat failed to end the war by making the revolution, then this would prove that the socialist programme was indeed a utopia. Here we can see how Trotsky’s refusal to accept the capitalist nature of the USSR had led him to doubting the convictions that had inspired his whole life.
By the same token, the definition of the USSR as capitalist proved to be the only firm basis for the defence of internationalism during the second world war and its aftermath. The defence of the ‘degenerated workers’ state, coupled with the ideology of supporting democracy against fascism, led the official Trotskyist movement to capitulate directly to chauvinism and to integrate itself into the allied imperialist camp; after the war, it placed Trotskyism in the position of propagandists for the Russian imperialist bloc against its American rival. Those who put forward the theory of a new bureaucratic society soon concluded that western democracy was more progressive than the barbaric regime in Russia - or they simply ceased pretending that marxism had any further validity. By contrast, all the groups or elements which broke from Trotskyism in the 1940s because of its abandonment of internationalism had become convinced that Russia was a capitalist and imperialist state – the group around Munis, the German RKD, Agis Stinas in Greece…and of course Natalia Trotsky, who followed her husband’s political advice and had the courage to re-examine ‘Trotskyist’ orthodoxy in the light of the second world war and the preparations for a third that followed immediately afterwards.
***
The next article in this series will focus on the position of the Italian left on the Russian question, and will show why it was this current which provided the best framework for finally solving the “Russian enigma”.
1 We have adapted, for our own title, the title of an article written by the French oppositionist Albert Treint in 1933 (‘To unravel the Russian enigma: comrade Treint’s theses on the Russian question’, which was written for the 1933 conference. However, it must be said that Treint’s theory of a new exploiting system, which featured state capitalism, but no capitalist class, only succeeded in creating new mysteries.
2 It is worth noting here Miasnikov’s final statement on the question of the USSR. In 1929, Miasnikov was exiled to Turkey and began a correspondence with Trotsky: despite their deep differences, he recognised Trotsky’s importance for the whole international opposition against Stalinism. He wrote a pamphlet on the Soviet bureaucracy and sent a copy to Trotsky, asking him to contribute a preface. Trotsky declined, because the text argued that Russia was a system of state capitalism and that the bureaucracy was a ruling class. According to Avrich in his essay ‘Bolshevik opposition to Lenin: G.T. Miasnikov and the Workers’ Group’, published in The Russian Review, vol. 43, 1984, Miasnikov’s text shed little light on the process whereby the proletariat lost power and through which the Stalinist bureaucracy consolidated its rule. Avrich also says that “Insofar as state capitalism organised the economy more efficiently than private capitalism, Miasnikov considered it historically progressive”; in a footnote, he adds that Tiunov, another member of the Workers’ Group who was in jail with Ciliga, considered state capitalism to be regressive. Miasnikov’s pamphlet was eventually published in France in 1931, in the Russian language, under the title Ocherednoi obman (The Current Deception). To our knowledge it has not yet been translated into any other language, a task which could perhaps be taken up by the newly emerging proletarian milieu in Russia. The ICC can make a copy of the Russian text available if there are offers to translate it.
A question of method in the discussion
A recent article of ours 1 was devoted "to replying to the thesis of the IBRP that organisations such as ours are 'estranged from the method and perspectives of the work that leads to the formation of the future party'. In order to do so we have taken into consideration the two levels at which the organisational problem is posed: 1) how the future International should be conceived; 2) what policy should be followed for the construction of the organisation and the regroupment of revolutionaries, and in terms of both we have shown that it is the IBRP, not the ICC, that has abandoned the tradition of the Italian and the international Communist Left. In fact the eclecticism that guides the IBRP's policy of regroupment is similar to that of Trotsky when he was taken up with building the IVth International; the vision of the ICC on the other hand is that of the Italian Fraction, which always fought for regroupment with clarity and on a basis that would make it possible to salvage elements of the centre and those with hesitations".
These conclusions, which came at the end of a seven page article, are not the fruit of irrational mind-games, but are rather the expression of an attempt to defend our method of working, and to criticise firmly but fraternally a political group that we consider to be definitely on the same side of the class line as us. In criticising the IBRP our starting point has always been the texts of the IBRP itself, which we have made a great effort to reproduce as far as possible in our article, and our arguments have been based on a confrontation with the common tradition of the Communist Left, to check the validity of the one hypothesis or the other in the difficult work of building a revolutionary vanguard.
In reply, Battaglia Comunista (BC), one of the two political components of the IBRP, has published an article 2 that raises a number of problems. In fact the article is a reply to the ICC, which however is named only when it's absolutely necessary; the whole article is superficial, completely devoid of quotations from our positions, which are instead synthesised by BC in a way that clearly distorts the meaning of some of them (we want to believe that this is due to a failure of understanding and not bad faith). There is also a tendency to develop the article more in the spirit of trying to catch the sympathy of the reader with jokes intended to have a certain effect, rather than openly confronting the questions at issue. But above all, in this article BC refuses to situate itself on the only level possible, the one on which our reply was based, that is on the historical level. It rather limits itself to giving an impromptu and elusive reply which in fact remains inconclusive. The view put forward that our article is "bilious" and that it contains "attacks and slanders" against the IBRP is symptomatic of this attitude 3 and we think that it confirms our criticism in the previous article of the IBRP's opportunism since, historically, opportunism has always tended to avoid political confrontation because this would obviously show it up for what it is. Of course we can do no more than refer all our readers to our previous article for them to judge to what extent this position of BC is false, if not actually in bad faith 4. But at the same time we don't want to follow BC's contortions in this article or in future ones because we don't want to get bogged down in sterile and endless polemics. However with this article we will try to further elaborate our view of the building of the revolutionary organisation, developing two points in particular:
a ) a reply to the argumentation given by BC in its article,
b ) a reply to the IBRP's critiques on our supposed idealism, which is the IBRP's pretext for declaring us unable to build a force worthy of participating in the construction of the world party.
Once more on building the party
The second part of BC's article tries to defend their own opportunist policy on building the international party, in contrast to our way of working. So let's recall the fundamental elements previously developed. This is the IBRP's criticism of how to create national sections of an international organisation:
"We reject, on principle, as well as on the basis of different congress resolutions, the idea of creating national sections as clones of one already existing organisation, even ours. National sections of the international party of the proletariat cannot be built in a largely artificial way in a country by creating a centre for translating publications edited elsewhere and, moreover, outside the real political and social struggles of the country itself" (our emphasis) 5.
To this we replied as follows:
"Our strategy for international regroupment is of course ridiculed by referring to it as 'creating a centre for translating publications edited elsewhere' ? so as to induce in the reader an automatic distaste for the strategy of the ICC. (...) For the IBRP, if a new group of comrades appears, let's say in Canada, who are moving towards internationalist positions, this group can benefit from critical fraternal contributions, even polemics, but it must grow and develop from the political context of its own country, inside 'the real political and social struggles of the country itself'. This means that for the IBRP the current and local context of a given country is more important than the international and historical framework furnished by the experience of the workers' movement. What, on the other hand, is the strategy for the construction of the organisation at an international level (...)? Whether there are one or one hundred aspiring militants in a new country, our strategy is not to create a local group that evolves locally, through the "real political and social battle of the country itself" but to integrate these new militants immediately into the international work of the organisation, one aspect of which is centralised intervention in the country in which these comrades live. This is why, even if our resources are small, our organisation makes the effort to be present immediately with a local publication under the responsibility of the new group of comrades because we hold that this is the most direct and effective way, on the one hand to extend our influence and, on the other to proceed directly to the construction of the revolutionary organisation. What is artificial about that, what sense does it make to talk about 'clones of one already existing organisation'? This has yet to be explained".
The really surprising thing is that BC is unable to oppose a minimum of political argument to this reasoning of ours except that... they don't believe it. This in fact is their position:
"Can a stronger and representative multi-national 'expansion' of the organisations be conceived? No.
Because revolutionary politics is a serious thing: you can't imagine that a 'section' of a few comrades in a country other than the 'mother' one can concretely constitute an element of real organisation [Why not?, we would like to know].
We must have the courage to recognise the difficulty in making an organisation really function on a national scale; the co-ordination of a 'campaign' on a national scale isn't always complete; the distribution of the press, given our organisational conditions of being 'few in number' reflects the smallest variation in the availability of militants and we could give other concrete organisational examples".
So that's the truth of the matter! BC doesn't believe in the possibility of putting together an international organisation simply because it's not even able to control its own organisation at a national level! But the fact that BC can't do it doesn't mean that it can't be done. The existence of the ICC clearly gives the lie to this way of arguing. BC talks of the difficulty distributing the press at a national level but doesn't take into account - just to give one example - that the English and Spanish language press of the ICC (the International Review in particular) is distributed in about twenty countries in the world. It doesn't take into account either that, when necessary, our organisation is able, and has demonstrated this whenever it has been necessary, to distribute the same leaflet immediately and simultaneously in every country in which it has a presence and also in others! Once more BC doesn't take into account a reality that is in front of its eyes, if only it made the effort to keep them open, which shows that the ICC really is a single international organisation, whatever the size of the sections existing in this or that country.
All this gives rather the impression that BC's argument that "We must have the courage to recognise the difficulty making an organisation really function" is developed merely to deny the possibility of constructing an international organisation today, without any scientific basis. But unfortunately there's more. In BC's article another unhealthy idea emerges of how a revolutionary organisation must be developed in a country:
"Moreover, a mini-section parachuted into a country doesn't have the possibility of implanting itself within that country's political scene, as does an organisation which - however small - arises from the political scene itself, orienting itself around revolutionary positions. (...) He who doesn't understand, or pretends not to understand, that political identity isn't enough to form a revolutionary organisation, either has no sense of organisation or is so lacking in organisational experience that he thinks that the topic is irrelevant. (...) You're not qualified for this task if you don't carry out the primordial task of putting down roots within the class, even if today they're unfortunately limited" 6.
The meaning of this passage is frankly worrying. What emerges from BC's exposition is that it's better to have a group that "arises from the political scene itself [ie locally, ed.), orienting itself around revolutionary positions", no matter how confused it is at the beginning, than to have in the same locality "a mini-section parachuted into a country". But the real "roots" of an organisation in the class are not to be judged on the basis of the momentary popularity of their positions among the workers. That is the immediatist and opportunist approach. The real laying down of roots is to be judged at an historic level (related to the past experience of the class and to its becoming). The main criteria for "putting down roots" is clarity at the level of the programme and the analyses, which makes it possible:
- to make a real contribution in the face of whatever confusions may exist among the workers,
- to build solidly for the future.
This was the whole point of the debate between Lenin and the Mensheviks, who wanted to have a bigger impact by opening the door of the party to confused and hesitant elements. It is also the point of the debate between the Italian Left and the majority of the Communist International (CI) on the constitution of the Communist Parties (on a "tight" or "loose" basis, since the CI wanted to have "roots" in the working masses as rapidly as possible). The Fraction argued the same position against the Trotskyists in the 1930s. The organisation can never root itself in the class by balancing its principles and watering them down. This is one of the great lessons of the Left's fight that the IBRP has forgotten today, just as the PCInt forgot it in 1945.
The inconsistency of BC's argumentation is a consequence of the fact that the group refuses to reply to the questions raised in our previous article, which are:
a) Does BC think that the position on the organisational question elaborated by the workers' movement is wrong, and why?
b) Or does it think that in relation to the period of Lenin, of Bilan, the historic period has changed and so requires a different type of organisation? And if so, why?
We're still waiting for a reply!
On our supposed idealism
It is well known that BC accuses us of being idealist and of having an analysis of the current situation that reflects this vision. Just recently, during a public meeting held by Battaglia Comunista in Naples, in reply to a request to explain our presumed idealism, BC replied thus:
"There are three points that characterise the idealism of the ICC.
The first is the concept of decadence: this is a concept that we too employ but it isn't possible to explain the economic concept of decadence on the basis of sociological factors alone. The question is that decadence can be explained by starting from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. We say that capitalism undergoes decadence not because of the existence of the crisis (there have always been cyclical crises) but because there is a particularly serious crisis. We say that the ICC is idealist because the concept of decadence is abstract, idealist.
The second is on the analysis of imperialism: when the USSR existed we were used to seeing imperialism with two faces: the USSR and the USA. With the diminishing of one of the two imperialist poles, the other dominates on the military, economic level etc. But within this new situation there's an attempt at an imperialist regroupment in Europe. How can the ICC explain this new phase by speaking only of chaos? The ICC confuses the lucid intention to dominate on the imperialist scene with chaos.
The third reason is in relation to the question of consciousness, and it is the most important one. We've heard some incredible things, such as that the working class has a level of consciousness that can prevent the 3rd World War".
We suppose that by criticising us for idealism BC intends to accuse our organisation of not following the real problems and of giving way to fantasies, to idealism in fact. We hold that on the contrary, as we will try to demonstrate, this critique on the part of BC is founded on a lazy and incorrect understanding of our political analyses that can be justified only by an uncontrollable desire to demarcate themselves from our organisation.
So we will try to give some elements in reply even if we obviously can't develop such broad topics in depth.
The decadence of capitalism: it is true that the ICC's analysis is different from that of BC but it's absolutely false to say that for us the "economic concept of decadence" can be explained "on the basis of sociological factors alone" The comrades of BC know quite well that, whereas their framework is based on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the ICC makes reference to the later theoretical developments of Luxemburg 7 on the saturation of extra-capitalist markets, which doesn't however exclude the variable of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. So our framework too has an economic basis and certainly not a sociological one and anyway, over and above the two different economic explanations, the fundamental aspect is that both analyses attempt to explain the same situation, that of the decadence of capitalism, on which we're completely agreed. So where is the idealism?
Imperialism and chaos: if the ICC did indeed defend the position described by BC, then it would not be very credible. But the question of chaos is not a phenomenon in itself: it is a consequence of the collapse of the two imperialist blocs in 1989 and the weakening of the discipline that they managed to impose on their member countries, which during the period of the cold war guaranteed on the whole and in spite of the danger of world war, a certain "pacification" within each individual bloc and on the international scene itself. "The ICC confuses the lucid intention to dominate on the imperialist scene with chaos"? Not at all! By starting from the lucid intention not only of the great, but also of the smaller powers to dominate on the world imperialist scene, the ICC sees in the present situation a tendency to increasingly diffuse and multi-directional conflicts, a tendency in which each one tends to come into conflict with all the others, in which there are no longer, or at least not for the moment, new imperialist blocs that could cohere and orient the imperialist ambitions of the individual countries; indeed, we have difficulty envisaging the prospect of their formation in the short term 8.
In this new situation, in which the aforesaid discipline diminishes, the individual countries leap into imperialist adventures coming increasingly into conflict with one another: this is what gives rise to chaos, that is, a situation without the previous control and discipline but whose basic dynamic is very clear. Is this position of ours really so foolish and ? idealist?
Lastly on the working class preventing war: we repeat yet again that when we say that the historic resurgence of the class struggle has prevented the bourgeoisie from imposing its outcome to the capitalist crisis, that is the Third World War, we certainly don't mean that the working class is aware of the danger of war and so consciously opposes it. If this were the case we would certainly be in a pre-revolutionary situation and the evidence shows that this isn't so. What we do say however, is that the resurgence of the struggle has made the class more sensitive and less malleable than it was in the 1940s and 50s. The fact that they can't count on the complete control and support of the proletariat raises problems for the bourgeoisie and inhibits them from launching an imperialist conflict.
In fact, in the present period, even if the class' combativeness and consciousness are at a low level, the bourgeoisie does not have the capacity to mobilise the workers of the developed countries behind a war ideology (whether this be the nation, anti-fascism or anti-imperialism, etc). In order to wage war it's not enough to have workers who aren't very combative, it needs workers who are ready to risk their lives for some bourgeois ideal.
Although the IBRP now pretend to be very wise, they themselves have had (and have!) difficulties analysing the international situation. For example, at the time of the fall of the Eastern bloc, BC didn't have very clear ideas at the beginning and attributed the "collapse" to a process that had been piloted by Gorbatchev in order to re-shuffle the cards between the blocs and score points against American imperialism.
"What is exploding, or has already exploded, is the Yalta accord. The cards are being re-shuffled at the scene of a crisis which, although it's shattering the rouble zone dramatically, certainly hasn't hesitated to insinuate itself into the dollar zone (...). Gorbatchev is playing competently on both European tables and in his dealings with the other super power. The steps towards the rapprochement of Eastern and Western Europe isn't a phenomenon that contributes to the tranquillity of the US and Gorby knows it" (from "The cards between the blocs are re-shuffled: the illusions in existing socialism collapse" in Battaglia Comunista n°12, December 1989) 9.
At the same time, they talked of the opening up of new markets in the eastern countries which would be able to give a puff of oxygen to these countries.
"The collapse of the markets on the periphery of capitalism, Latin America for example, has created new problems of insolvency for the payment of capital? The new opportunities opened up in Eastern Europe could represent a safety valve for investment needs? If this great process of East-West collaboration is concretised it will act as a whiff of oxygen for international capital" (from "The western bourgeoisie applauds the opening up of the eastern countries" in Battaglia Comunista of October 1989) 10. When at the beginning of 1990, the Rumanian bourgeoisie decided to get rid of the dictator Ceaucescu, putting on an incredible drama to whet the appetite of the people for democracy (the worst form of bourgeois dictatorship) BC went so far as to speak of Rumania as a country in which there were "all the objective and almost all the subjective conditions to enable the insurrection to develop into a real social revolution but the absence of an authentic class force has left the terrain free for those forces that stand for the maintenance of bourgeois relations of production" (Battaglia Comunista n°1, January 1990) .
Finally, what are we to say about the article of the sympathisers in Colombia, which Battaglia publishes on its front page without so much as a comment or a criticism and which presents that country as being almost in a state of insurrection:
"In recent years the social movement in Colombia (...) has acquired a particular radicality and breadth. (...) Today the strikes are transformed into tumult; the cities are paralysed by revolt, the protest of the urban masses end in violent clashes on the streets. (...) To sum up: in Colombia there's an insurrectionary process taking place that is sparked off by capitalist mechanisms and by the exacerbation and extension of the conflict between the two bourgeois military fronts" (from Battaglia Comunista n°9, September 2000, our emphasis).
At this point we might ask where the idealism is really to be found, in our articles or in the fanciful analyses of the IBRP 11?
Unfortunately there's more. For some time now, despite their contemptuous judgements on a proletarian political camp that has failed to come up to the needs of the period, it's actually BC that has more and more been questioning its (and our) basic analysis of the historic period. Their evaluation of reality is increasingly dependent on the impromptu interpretation of whoever happens to draft the article. Just recently we have criticised BC to correct a serious slip on the role of the unions in the present period 12 which is in contradiction with the BC's own historic position. But in the same article in Prometeo n°2 we find a series of passages which go back to the question (we won't quote our previous polemic) and which cast doubt on the concept of the decadence of capitalism itself, a position that unites the two organisations, the IBRP and the ICC, and which is a legacy of the workers' movement, from Marx and Engels, from the IIIrd International, to Rosa Luxemburg AND LENIN! (whom they follow), and to the Communist Left that emerged from the International after its degeneration following the revolutionary wave of the 1920s. The article in fact characterises the current situation by means of "ascending phases in the accumulation cycle" and "phases of decadence in the cycle" of accumulation rather than treating it as the historic period of the irreversible decadence of capitalism in contrast to a preceding historic phase which is generally one of development even though accompanied by crises.
"There (...) is a schema, that is, the division of capitalism's history into two main epochs: its ascendance and its decadence. Almost everything that was valid for communists during the former, is no longer so during the latter for the simple reason that there is no longer growth but rather decadence. An example? The unions: they were useful and it was right for revolutionaries to work inside them and try to control them previously but it's no longer valid. Not even the hint of reference to the unions' historic, institutional role of mediation; nor of the relationship between this role and the different phases of capitalism or of the objective relationship between the rate of profit and the room to bargain. (...) In the ascending phase of the accumulation cycle, the union, as 'lawyer' can get concessions on wages and conditions (which are however immediately reabsorbed by capital); in the decadent phase of the cycle the room for mediation is reduced to zero and the unions, continuing their historic function, are reduced to mediating indeed but in favour of conservation, functioning as agents of capitalist interests within the working class.
The ICC on the other hand divides history into two parts: when the unions are positive for the working class - without specifying how and on what ground - and when they become negative.
We see similar schematism on the question of wars of national liberation.
So the formal proposal of positions that are indubitable and so apparently shared, is accompanied by a substantial divergence, if not alienation, from historical materialism and an inability to examine the objective situation" 13.
As this part of the article is explicitly developed as a reply to the ICC, we must point out that BC really has a very short memory if it doesn't even remember the basic positions of the ICC on the unions developed in dozens and dozens of articles and in particular in a pamphlet specifically dedicated to the union question 14 which makes extensive "reference to the unions' historic, institutional role of mediation" and to "the relationship between this role and the different phases of capitalism". We invite comrades to read or re-read our pamphlet to check the inaccuracy of BC's assertions.
But we think it's useful to bear in mind what Marx and Engels said one and a half centuries ago: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution" (Marx-Engels, Introduction to A contribution to the critique of political economy, Progress Publishers, pg 21.).
We want to believe that BC simply made a slip of the pen, that it used terms that are inappropriate in trying to reply to our arguments. Because if this isn't the case we have to ask what BC means by these phrases. Perhaps that, after a phase of recession and with the recovery of an accumulation cycle, the working class can go back to trusting in the unions to "get concessions on wages and conditions"? If this is the case we want BC to tell us what were, in its opinion, "the ascendant phases of the accumulation cycle" in recent decades and what have been the corresponding "concessions on wages and conditions" on the part of the unions to the working class.
Moreover, on national liberation struggles, on which the ICC expresses "similar schematism", what do the comrades of BC mean, that in this case too we can support Arafat or his like because the accumulation cycle of capital is assured and it's not in recession? If this isn't the correct interpretation, what does BC mean?
In conclusion
In this article we have shown that it isn't the ICC that has an idealist vision of reality but rather BC that lives in theoretic confusion and has an opportunist approach in its intervention. We have the strong impression that all the arguments developed by BC in polemic with "a proletarian political camp that is no longer up to its tasks and so has been superseded by the times" are no more than a smoke screen to hide its own opportunist slidings and also a certain deviation on a programmatic level, that is beginning to worry us. In particular, given the current tendency of the IBRP to see itself as "alone in the world" in the face of a proletarian political camp that is no longer up to its tasks, it would be opportune for the comrades to go back to the brochure and to the numerous texts that they've written in polemics against the Bordigists, where they rightly criticise the fact that each Bordigist group considers itself to be THE PARTY and rejects the others as worthless. For this reason we invite BC (and the IBRP) to take our criticisms seriously and not to hide themselves behind ridiculous accusations of biliousness or dishonesty. Let's try to be up to our tasks.
9th March 2001 Ezechiele
1 "The marxist and opportunist visions in the policy of building the party", International Review no.103, 4th quarter 2000.
2 "The New International will be the international party of the Proletariat" in Prometeo n°2, December 2000.
3 We should note that in the workers' movement accusations of "slander", "biliousness", etc were typically used by centrist and opportunist elements against the polemics directed at them by left currents (Lenin was seen as a "wicked slanderer" when he took up the fight against the Mensheviks, Rosa too was accused of being "hysterical" when she fought against Bernstein and later against Kautsky on the question of the mass strike). Rather than making this type of accusation, the IBRP should explain why our criticisms are false and even "slanderous". It's not enough to assert it as a fact, it must be demonstrated. On the other hand the IBRP is ill placed to level this kind of reproach at us as they're not backward in the use of such descriptions themselves, in particular the assertion, without any proof, that we are not part of the proletarian camp. This is a case of seeing the straw in your neighbour's eye while not seeing the beam in your own.
4 It's important to note that the comrades of BC reacted with particular rancour to our first reply in as far as they identified the description "opportunist" with that of "counter-revolutionary". This identification can be seen to be wrong and unfounded to anyone who knows the history of the workers' movement. Opportunism has always been understood as a deformation of revolutionary positions existing within the workers' movement. It's only the ambiguity and the lack of clarity of Bordigism (and of BC itself) that has allowed them to go on denoting as opportunist, political formations that have already gone over to the counter-revolution, such as the various Stalinist CPs, and so to identify opportunism with the counter-revolution.
5 IBRP; "Towards the new International"
6 From "The New International will be ?", pg 10.
7 See in particular the two main works of Rosa Luxemburg in which this theory is developed: The accumulation of capital and The accumulation of capital - an anti-critique, published by Monthly Review Press.
8 One of the main reasons why the reconstitution of the blocs isn't on the agenda today is that there is no country even remotely capable of challenging the United States in military terms. A country like Germany needs many long years (certainly more than a dozen) before it can possess a credible military potential.
9 For more details on this "swerve" see our aticle "The wind from the Eastern and the response of revolutionaries" in International Review n°61.
10 Idem.
11 We will mention again that, at the time of the strikes in Poland in August '80, the CWO raised the slogan "Revolution now!" in its paper, when the situation wasn't in fact a revolutionary one. The comrades of the CWO have told us that this was an accident, that the title and the article was produced by one militant, who hadn't got the agreement of the other members and that the paper was immediately withdrawn from circulation. We accept the explanation but even so it must be admitted that there wasn't great political or organisational clarity at the time if one of its members could think and write such a stupid thing and the organisation couldn't prevent it from being published. The militant concerned probably wasn't just anyone as the CWO gave him the responsibility to publish the paper without it first being controlled by the organisation or by a publications committee. It's only in anarchist circles that this type of serious individual error is possible or else in the Italian Socialist Party in 1914-15, when Mussolini published an article in Avanti calling for participation in the war, without informing anyone beforehand. But at the time Benito was at least the director of the paper (and had been bought secretly by Cachin with money from the French government). Anyway the internal organisation of the CWO at the time left a lot to be desired. We hope that it has improved since then.
12 See the article "I sindacati hanno cambiato ruolo con la decadenza del capitalismo?" in Rivoluzione Internazionale n°116
13 From "The New International will be?", pg 8-9.
14 Unions against the working class, now published in all the major European languages.
IR106, 3rd Quarter 2001
We are publishing below the second part of the correspondence begun in the previous issue of the Review [90], sent to us by one of our contacts in disagreement with our position on the economic explanation for capitalism’s decadence.
Following the letter, we publish the second part of our reply begun in the previous issue, and which is concerned above all with the method for coming to grips with this debate. In fact, we do not deal directly with the questions and criticisms that the comrade addresses to us. We will return to this in a future article, in particular to respond on the question of the post-war reconstruction during the 1950s and 60s. This cannot be explained purely by the devalorisation of constant capital and the increase in variable capital’s share in the organic composition of capital, despite what the comrade and the CWO (Communist Workers Organisation) may think. We agree that this is an important question to discuss and to clarify.
We will also return to the comrade’s view of our vision of the “economic interest” of imperialist war. We are far from rejecting the existence of an economic factor in imperialist wars during capitalist decadence. The question is: at what level does this factor operate? At the immediate level of the conquest of territories and markets, or in more general and historical terms? Above all, what is its role in exacerbating and unleashing imperialist antagonisms? And what is the determining factor in the dynamic of these rivalries? To be more concrete, why is it for example that imperialist and economic rivalries did not match during the period between 1945 and 1989 when the US imperialist bloc – which regrouped the world’s main economic powers and rivals – confronted the Russian imperialist bloc?
Apart from their theoretical aspects, the answers to these questions determine different analyses of the concrete situation, different approaches, and above all different interventions by revolutionaries, as we saw during the wars in Chechnya and Kosovo. Hence the importance of these debates that we present for discussion and criticism.
How Marx’s falling rate of profit analysis explains the reconstruction period was convincingly shown by the CWO in its essay ‘War and Accumulation’ in Revolutionary Perspectives n°16 (Old Series), pp.15-17. (N.B. The CWO’s crisis theory eclectically combines Marx’s analysis of the falling rate of profit with that of Grossmann-Mattick. In this discussion, however, the CWO exclusively follows Marx’s analysis).
“During a war - we speak here of 20th century total wars - the existing mass of capital is devalued simply by being run into the ground and not replaced by new capital; in volume terms the productive apparatus is the same as that prior to the war, but in value terms it is not, due to age and over use. The direction of all production to the war effort ensures this; the production of Department I factories is switched from, e.g. machine tools, to armaments, and ageing machinery which is technically obsolete before all its value C is used up, is run into the ground, at a great saving for capital. In peacetime, capitalists who don’t keep raising this composition of their capital are driven to the wall, but NOT in wartime. State control of the economy and the war effort introduce such a limitation on competition, and such a system of guaranteed orders, that the capitalist has no incentive, and no obligation to constantly re-equip and improve his productive apparatus…
But not only was the existing mass of capital of less value in 1949 than it had been in 1939 (mainly due to devaluation than destruction), but the composition of capital had also fallen in the war years, due to the introduction of the reserve army of labour (unemployed, women) into production, usually on the basis of the widespread introduction of three shift working and the six day week; the composition of capital fell since the same C was utilised by a larger labour force, i.e. V rose…
On the basis of this high rate and mass of profit, the gradual re-equipment of the productive forces took place after World War 2 (…) In a situation where a mass of devalued capital existed, any re-equipment of the productive forces (even with similar machinery of no increased value) would lead to phenomenal increases in productivity. If this rises faster than the composition of capital, then the rate of profit will NOT fall, instead, it will rise (…) Therefore, the bourgeoisie didn’t have the problem of wondering why they should bother to accumulate in the 1950’s; the war had solved that problem for them by re-establishing the basis for profitable production”.
This clear explanation by the CWO demolishes the ICC’s muddled critique of the falling rate of profit as an explanation of capitalist reconstruction.
“The problem is that it’s never been proven that during the recoveries that have followed world wars, the organic composition of capital is lower than what it was before the war. In fact the contrary is the case. If you look at the Second World War, for example, it is clear that, in the countries affected by the destructions of the war, the average productivity of labour and thus the relationship between constant and variable capital very quickly (i.e. by the beginning of the 50’s), reached what it had been in 1939. Indeed, the productive potential that was reconstituted was much more modern than the one that had been destroyed. However, the period of ‘prosperity’ which accompanied the reconstruction went on long after that (in fact up to the mid-60’s), i.e. well after the point where the pre-war productive capacity had been reconstituted, taking the organic composition to its previous level” (“Rejecting the notion of Decadence demobilises the Proletariat in the face of War”, International Review n°77, pp.20.)
The real ‘problem’ is that the ICC, like its mentor Rosa Luxemburg, does not understand Marx’s analysis of falling rate of profit.
The ICC finds itself in a quandary because, on the one hand, it defends the Marxist position that decadence does not mean a total halt to the growth of the productive forces, but on the other, defends a crisis theory whose logical and inescapable conclusion is just this result. (In Rosa Luxemburg’s crisis theory pre-capitalist markets are the sine qua non of capitalist accumulation. Therefore, when these markets are exhausted capitalist accumulation has reached its absolute economic limit. Indeed, the ongoing destruction of pre-capitalist markets means that the total capital not only cannot exceed this limit but also must necessarily diminish.)
The ICC, however, ignores the blatant contradiction between the actual development of capitalism and the logical outcome of her economic analysis that there is a ceiling on capitalist growth, that there is an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation. (This is also the logical conclusion to Henryk Grossmann’s analysis.)
This contradiction forces the ICC into a ludicrous conclusion about the nature of imperialist war; it believes that imperialist war does not have an economic function for decadent capitalism [1] [91]. The sheer absurdity of this idea is bewildering, on a par with the Bordigists’ ‘Invariance of the Programme’.
In other words, the ICC is saying that the Marxist position that in decadence capitalism ceases to fulfil a progressive function (economic, or otherwise) for humanity is identical with the position with that imperialist war does not have an economic function for capitalism. The ICC further confuses matters by also equating the latter view with the false notion of the IBRP that every war in decadence has an immediate economic motive [2] [92].
(The view that imperialist war does not have an economic function for capitalism is consistent with the ICC’s Luxemburgist pre-capitalist markets crisis theory. After all, in this theory, once pre-capitalist markets are exhausted, further accumulation at the level of total capital becomes impossible. And if capitalist accumulation has reached its absolute limit, then nothing, not even imperialist war can reverse the situation. Hence imperialist war cannot have an economic function.)
The ICC argues that imperialist war does not have an economic function. But if imperialist war does not have an economic function, what accounts for the reconstruction periods of capital, which the ICC believes happened, and which, in the case of that after World War II, it recognises as having led to an economic expansion that greatly exceeded that of pre-World War II capitalism?
Why is it that the ICC, which has the most coherent political program and practice of all the groups in the Communist Left, which is free of the sectarianism, opportunism and centrism that marks the IBRP and the Bordigists, descends into such profound confusion in the realm of economics? The answer is its Luxemburgist economics. Contrary to the illusions of the ICC, Rosa Luxemburg developed her alternative crisis theory because she misunderstood the method of Capital; in particular, she mistakenly thought that the reproduction schemes in vol. II of Capital were intended as a direct picture of concrete capitalist reality. The apparent contradiction between the schemes and historical reality led her to believe that the schemes were faulty. But what was at fault was the partial empiricism of her viewpoint; for her ‘discovery’ that capitalism could not accumulate without pre-capitalist markets derives from her mistakenly adopting the viewpoint of the individual capitalist. Her concessions to empiricism prevented her from grasping the validity of Marx’s falling rate of profit analysis, and caused her to arrive at a mechanistic, death crisis interpretation of capitalist accumulation.
I regard Rosa Luxemburg’s and Henryk Grossmann’s specific economic explanations of capitalist decadence as revisionist economics because they are based on a flawed understanding of the method of Capital:
“Orthodoxy in questions of Marxism relates rather exclusively to the method. It is only in the sense of its founder that this method can be expanded, extended and deepened. And this conviction rests on the observation that all attempts to overcome or ‘improve’ that method have led, and necessarily so, only to triteness, platitudinizing and eclecticism…”[3] [93].
Of course, despite their revisionist economics there was a class line separating Rosa Luxemburg and Henryk Grossmann: the former was a revolutionary Marxist owing to her political positions; Henryk Grossmann was a Stalinist reactionary.
“There can be no dogmatism where the supreme and sole criterion of a doctrine is its conformity to the actual process of social and economic development” [4] [94].
The ICC refuses to acknowledge that because pre-capitalist markets are the sine qua non of capitalist accumulation in Luxemburg’s economics, this has specific and unavoidable consequences for the development of capitalism were it true. In other words, her crisis theory makes specific predictions about capitalist development. However, the “actual process of social and economic development” has shown unequivocally the falsity of these predictions and thus the falsity of her economics. Yet the ICC continues to defend the validity of these economics. This is DOGMATISM.
Furthermore, what else but dogmatism explains why the ICC continues to treat Henryk Grossmann’s analysis of the falling rate of profit as identical to that of Marx in Capital, when it has long been familiar with the critique of Henryk Grossmann in Anton Pannekoek’s The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism [5] [95], which clearly shows the fundamental differences between the two. Moreover, this article and the writings of the IBRP, particularly those of the CWO, should have made it clear to the ICC that the IBRP eclectically combines Grossmann’s crisis theory with that of Marx.
The ICC refers to the numerous articles it has written on economic theory as a sign of its commitment to clarity on this issue [6] [96]. However, in practice this has meant that the ICC merely repeats the same faulty arguments over and over again, ignoring and evading the cogent criticisms against its economics by other communist currents. It is true that the ICC responds with criticisms of these currents that are often correct per se, but are irrelevant to the validity of the specific criticisms that these currents raised in the first place. (For example, the ICC correctly observes that the IBRP and especially the Bordigists have a tendency to analyse capitalism from the point of view of each nation taken in isolation.)
That the ICC still defends its manifestly flawed Luxemburgist economics 25 years after its formation suggests that it has an internal political climate that discourages, or at least does not encourage, a theoretical deepening on the economic foundations of decadence. Its one thing to assert, as does the ICC, and rightly so, that differences over economic theory should not be a barrier to political unity and regroupment. However, for the ICC this has meant in practice avoiding maximum clarity on this issue; it has meant theoretical stagnation.
Quite frankly, the ICC, in defending its Luxemburgist economics, displays the same disregard for accuracy and rigour that the IBRP and the Bordigists do to justify their sectarian, centrist and opportunist political practice. Needless to say, the ICC’s impoverished economics lends credence to the attacks on its political program by the IBRP and the Bordigists, as many of the criticisms these currents make against the ICC’s economics are valid.
The ICC’s dogmatic devotion to Rosa Luxemburg’s economics, which I find reminiscent of the Bordigists’ idolatrous attitude to Lenin, blinds the organisation to the disparity between her political insights into imperialism and her revisionist economics [7] [97].
If the ICC wishes to have a coherent Marxist economic foundation for its political program, then it MUST abandon Rosa Luxemburg’s fatally flawed crisis theory and replace it with that of the analysis of the falling rate of profit in Capital.
As the CWO observed on the eclectic approach of the ICC to economics:
“Like Luxemburg, their references to the falling rate of profit are merely to explain away the facts (such as why capitalism sought markets further away from the metropoles during the period of primitive accumulation) or to explain elements of the development of capitalism which a purely markets approach cannot (e.g. why capital concentration preceded the rush for colonies or that the vast bulk of trade was carried on in this period between the advanced capitalist powers)” [8] [98].
However, the IBRP themselves arrive at an eclectic and confused theory as they combine Henryk Grossmann’s crisis theory with that of Marx. Indeed, they believe that Grossmann’s “contribution was to show the significance that the mass of surplus value played in determining the exact nature of the crisis” [9] [99]. The IBRP fails to grasp that this so-called insight of Grossmann is inextricably linked to his mechanistic and one-sided conception of capitalist accumulation. In contrast to Marx, he examines the falling rate of profit solely in terms of the production of surplus value, ignoring the role of the circulation and distribution of surplus value. As a result, he reaches the erroneous conclusion that capital is exported to foreign nations not, as Marx argued, for the maximisation of surplus value, but because of the “lack of investment opportunities at home” [10] [100] (which is the false view that capital is exported “because it absolutely could not be applied at home” [11] [101] that Marx criticised in vol. III of Capital), and thus to his mechanistic conception of a death crisis of capitalism.
The eclectic approach of both currents allows them to pick and choose from their crisis theories as if from a smorgasbord. However plausible this may seem, in reality they are defending two diametrically opposed perspectives: the mechanistic viewpoint of the bourgeoisie and the dialectical viewpoint of the proletariat. (It is true that the ICC and the IBRP criticise certain features of the crisis theories of Rosa Luxemburg and Grossmann-Mattick, respectively. But as they continue to defend the core economic analyses of these theories they therefore continue to defend the mechanistic conceptions on which they are based).
CA.
[1] [102] “The function of imperialist war”, in “The Nature of Imperialist War”, International Review n°82, pp. 21-23.
[2] [103] Ibid.
[3] [104] Georg Lucazs [sic], Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein, quoted in Paul Mattick, The Inevitability of Communism: A Critique of Sidney Hook’s Interpretation of Marx, Polemic Publishers, New York, 1935, p.35.
[4] [105] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, vol.1, p.298, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1960.
[5] [106] Anton Pannekoek in Capital and Class 1, London (Spring 1977).
[6] [107] For a comprehensive list see International Review n°83.
[7] [108] The ICC assumes that Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of the political consequences of capitalist decadence, namely that the global nature of imperialism destroys the material basis for national self-determination, guarantees the validity of her specific economic explanation of decadence.
[8] [109] “Imperialism - The Decadent Stage of Capitalism”, Revolutionary Perspectives n°17 (Old Series), p.16.
[9] [110] Private correspondence from CWO to author.
[10] [111] Quoted in Anton Pannekoek, Grossmann versus Marx, ibid., p.73.
[11] [112] Quoted in Anton Pannekoek, ibid.
IR106, 3rd Quarter 2001
Bukharin, Raya Dunayeskavya and other critics of Rosa Luxemburg cited by the comrade, say that she was wrong to look for external reasons for the crisis of capitalism. [1] [113] However, the world market and the pre-capitalist economies are not external to the system: they are the environment for its development and confrontations. To claim that capitalism can realise its accumulation within its own limits, is to say that it is a system without historical limits and that it develops through the simple exchange of commodities alone. In the first volume of Capital and also in The Results of British Rule of India Marx demonstrated exactly the opposite: the genesis of capital, its progressive accumulation, took place by means of the battle to separate the producers from their means of livelihood, transforming them into the principle productive commodity – labour power – and, around this axis, through immeasurable suffering, constructing “peaceful” and “regular” commodity exchange. Using the same method, Rosa Luxemburg asks whether what was true of primitive accumulation is not also true in the later phases of capitalist development. Her critics believe that primitive accumulation is one thing, but that capitalist development is quite another, where there is no longer any role for the “external market” and the “struggle against the natural economy”. However, this is utterly refuted by capitalism’s evolution in the 19th century especially, in its imperialist phase.
“At the time of primitive accumulation, i.e. at the end of the Middle Ages, when the history of capitalism in Europe began, and right into the 19th century, dispossessing the peasants in England and on the Continent was the most striking weapon in the large-scale transformation of means of production and labour power into capital. Yet capital in power performs the same task even today, and on an even more important scale – by modern colonial policy (…) Any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital exclusively to ‘peaceful competition’, i.e. to regular commodity exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer-countries, rests on the pious belief that capital can accumulate without mediation of the productive forces and without the demand of more primitive organisations, and that it can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating natural economy (…) The method of violence, then, is the immediate consequence of the clash between capitalism and the organisations of a natural economy which would restrict accumulation. Their means of production and their labour power no less than their demand for surplus products is necessary for capitalism” (The Accumulation of Capital, pages 369-71, Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968).
Those within the revolutionary movement who want to explain the historic crisis of capitalism exclusively by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall only see one part - exchange within the already constructed capitalist market - but miss the other, the most dynamic historically and whose progressive limitation from the end of the 19th century has caused the growing chaos and convulsions that humanity has suffered since 1914.
This puts them in a very uncomfortable position faced with that central dogma of capitalist economic ideology – the idea that “production creates its own market”, that all supply eventually encounters a demand – which was criticised so severely by Marx who denounced: “The conception (…) adopted by Ricardo from the tedious Say (…) that over-production is not possible or at least that no general glut of the market is possible, based on the proposition that products are exchanged against products, or as Mill put it, on the ‘metaphysical equilibrium of sellers and buyers’, and this led to [the conclusion] that demand is determined only by production” (Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 2, page 493).
In the same way he combated the conceptions that limited the disturbances of capitalism to mere disproportions between sectors of production.
If they exclude the pre-capitalist territories from the field of capitalist accumulation, if they think that capitalism can develop from its own social relations, how can the thesis that production creates its own market be avoided? The tendency for the rate of profit to fall is not a sufficient explanation since it operates within such an accumulation of counter-acting factors and over such a long period that it cannot explain the historical events that have unfolded since the last third of the 19th century and accumulated during the 20th: imperialism, world wars, the great depression, state capitalism, the reappearance of the open crisis from the end of the 1960s and the increasingly serious collapse of large parts of the world economy over the last 30 years.
But precisely because the tendential fall operates “in the long term”, is it not necessary to avoid ‘empiricism’ and ‘impatience’ and avoid being ‘misled’ by all these immediate catastrophes? This appears to be the method that the comrade proposes when he stresses the “apparent” coincidence of the “division of the world” with the “world crisis” or when he points out that the great depression appeared to confirm the theses of Grossman and Luxemburg but that these have since been disproved by the large scale growth after World War II or the growth in the 1990s.
We will return to this aspect later. What we want to highlight now is that behind the accusations of “empiricism” levelled at Rosa Luxemburg there is an important question of “method” which we think has escaped the comrade. The Revisionists in the Social Democratic movement began a crusade against Marx’s “underconsumptionism”. Bernstein was the first to put Marx’s analysis of the crisis on the same level as the pathetic Rodbertus. Tugan-Baranowsky calmly returned to Say’s theses about “production creating its own markets”, explaining with “Marxist” reasoning that the crisis arises from disproportions between the two departments of production. The Revisionist critiques of Rosa Luxemburg – Bauer, Eckstein, Hilferding etc – said with all the authority of “Marxist orthodoxy” - that the tables of expanded reproduction explained perfectly that there was not a problem of realisation. Bukharin – in the service of the Stalinisation of the Communist Parties – attacked Luxemburg’s work in order to “demonstrate” that capitalism does not have an “external” problem.
Why did the opportunists have this aversion to Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis? Simply because she put her finger on a tender spot, by showing the global and historical root of capitalism’s entry into its decadence. Fifty years previously the method of analysing the contradiction between the advance of the productivity and the necessity to maximise profit had proved very fruitful. However, now it was the question of the struggle of capitalism against the preceding social order in order to form the world market and the contradictions that arose from this (the growing poverty of the pre-capitalist territories) that provided a clearer and more systematic framework that integrated into a higher synthesis both the original contradiction, and the phenomena of imperialism, world war and the progressive decomposition of the capitalist economy.
Later on, following in the footsteps of the Revisionists but on a frankly bourgeois terrain, a whole gaggle of university “Marxologists” dedicated themselves to developing the idea of the “abstract” Marx. Cleverly separating his reflections on expanded reproduction, the rate of profit, etc., from those on the question of the market and the realisation of surplus value. By means of this fragmentation – in reality an adulteration - of Marx’s thought they conjured up the ghost of his “abstract method”, turning it into a explanatory “model” of the contractual functioning of capitalist economy: the regular exchange of commodities which Rosa Luxemburg talks of. Any attempt to confront this “model” with the realities of capitalism is seen as “empiricism” and expresses a lack of understanding of the fact that it is a question of an “abstract model”, etc. etc.
This enterprise, which turned Marx into an “inoffensive icon” – as Lenin would have said – aimed to eliminate the revolutionary thread of his work and to make it say what he never meant. The most shameless bourgeois economists who don’t adopt a “Marxist” façade also have this “long-term vision”. Are they not forever telling us not to be empiricists or immediatists: that we should look beyond the unemployment, the stock market cataclysms and instead understand the “general tendency” based upon “good fundamentals”. The Marxologists conveniently select and take out of context parts of Capital in order to achieve the same ends.
The comrade holds clearly revolutionary positions and in no way, shape or form shares in this business of confusion. However, in drawing on many of Bukharin’s “arguments”, and on those of various academics, instead of undertaking an examination of Rosa Luxemburg’s positions, [2] [114] he closes his eyes to those aspects of the question we have tried to draw out here.
The comrade says that Rosa Luxemburg poses an “absolute limit” to the development of capitalism. First of all we will look at exactly what she said: “The more ruthlessly capitalism sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodic economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer. But even before this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital” (op. cit chapter XXXII, page 466-467).
If the comrade is referring to “this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating”, it is clear that if interpreted literally it does give the impression of an absolute limit. Nevertheless, the same conclusion could be drawn from Marx’s assertion that: “In the way that the development of labour productivity involves a law, in the form of the falling rate of profit, that at a certain point confronts this development itself” (Capital Vol. 3, page 367). This formulation contrasts with others – which we have quoted above - where it is emphasised that this law is only a tendency.
Clearly we have to be careful not to use formulations that can lead to ambiguity or to take isolated phrases out of context. What is important to see is an analysis, dynamic and global orientation. At this level Luxemburg – like Marx – is very clear: what is most important is her assertion that the accumulation of capital “becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions”. This does not express an absolute limit but a general tendency that is going to get worse with the rotting of the situation.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx says that “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted” (Surveys From Exile, The Pelican Marx Library, page 146, 1977). The method that revolutionaries use consists, in accord with this argument, in understanding and putting forward the fundamental tendencies that mark “the circumstances with which [men] are directly confronted”. In the years before the explosion of war in 1914 Rosa Luxemburg correctly declared that there was a historical tendency that was going to mark - and how! - “men’s actions”
The conclusion to the first edition of The Accumulation of Capital clears up, in our opinion, any doubts about whether she was formulating an “absolute” tendency: “Capitalism is the first mode of economy with the weapon of propaganda, a mode which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy that is unable to live by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and soil. Although it strives to become universal, and indeed, on account of this its tendency, it must break down - because it is immanently incapable of becoming a universal form of production. In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. At a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles. The aim of socialism is not accumulation but the satisfaction of toiling humanity’s wants by developing the productive forces of the entire globe”.
What is our conception of the decadence of capitalism? Have we ever mentioned a complete blockage in the development of the productive forces, or an absolute limit to capitalist production, a kind of definitive and mortal crisis?
The comrade recognises that we reject the idea formulated by Trotsky concerning an absolute blockage of the productive forces. In the same way, our conception is alien to certain conceptions which arose in the 20’s within tendencies of the KAPD which talked about the “mortal crisis of capitalism”, which they understood to mean an absolute stoppage of production and capitalist growth.
Our pamphlet on decadence responds to Trotsky’s position: “All social changes are the result of the deepening and prolonged collision of the relations of production with the development of the productive forces. If we defended the hypothesis of the definitive and permanent halt in this development, the deepening of this contradiction could only be demonstrated if the other bounds of the existing property relations were ‘absolutely’ receding. However, it happens that the characteristic movement of the different periods of decadence in history (including the capitalist system) tends rather in the direction of expanding these frontiers up to their final limits than towards their restriction.
Under the aegis of the state and under the pressure of economic and social necessities, the system’s carcass swells while casting off everything that proves superfluous to the relations of production, everything not strictly necessary to the system’s survival. The system is reinforced but at its last limits” (page 19-20 in the English edition).
Understanding how capitalism can “manage the crisis” through a policy of survival aimed at reducing its effects on the central countries falls entirely within the Marxist analysis of the decadence of modes of production. Did the Roman Empire not do the same when it withdrew to Byzantium and abandoned vast areas to the pressure of the invading barbarians? Was not the enlightened despotism of the ancien régime monarchies a response to the advancing capitalist relations of production?
“The freeing of the slaves under the Late Roman Empire; the freeing of the serfs at the end of the Middle Ages; the partial liberties which the declining monarchy had to grant to the new bourgeois cities; the reinforcing of the central power of the crown, and the elimination of the ‘nobility of the robe’ completely dominated by the King; and likewise, in the capitalist framework, the attempts at economic planning; the efforts to try to relieve the burden of national, economic frontiers; the tendency to replace bourgeois parasites with efficient salaried ‘managers’ of capital; policies such as the New Deal and the continued manipulation of certain mechanisms of the law of value – all are evidence of this tendency to expand the juridical framework by laying bare the relations of production. There is no halt in the dialectical movement after a society has reached its apogee. This movement is qualitatively transformed but it does not end. The intensification of the contradictions inherent in the old society necessarily continues and for this reason the development of the imprisoned productive forces must continue even if it is at the slowest rate” (idem).
In the period of capitalism’s decadence we have seen an aggravation of its contradictions at all levels. There has been development of the productive forces, there have also been phases of economic growth, but this has taken place within a global framework that has become increasingly contradictory, convulsed and destructive. The tendency towards barbarism has not appeared in a linear procession of catastrophes and unending collapse, but rather disguised by phases of growth, by the increase in the productivity of labour, by greater or smaller periods of growth. State capitalism – especially in the central countries – has all the means at hand in order to control a potentially explosive situation, to attenuate and smooth over the most serious contradictions and, above all else, to maintain the appearance of “healthy functioning” and even “progress”. The system “is being stretched to its very limits”.
Between the 1st and 3rd century AD, the system of slavery was characterised by increasingly serious contradictions. Rome and Byzantium were being filled with the finest monuments in the history of Empire, the most advanced technologies of the time flourished in this period to the point that the principle of electrical energy was discovered during the 2nd century. But these dazzling developments took place within an increasingly degraded framework, the exacerbation of social struggles, the abandoning of territories to barbarian pressure, the massive deterioration of the transport infrastructure. [3] [115]
Are we not witnessing the same evolution today but of even greater magnitude due to the specific characteristics of decadent capitalism? [4] [116]
The comrade says that our theory is refuted by the growth after World War II and the growth that took place in the 1990s. We cannot develop a detailed argument [5] [117] here: however, in relation to the growth between 1945 and 1967, it is necessary to understand, over and above its statistical volume:
- the powerful impact of armaments and the war economy, as the comrade recognises.
- the importance of the Marshall Plan, the most gigantic expansion of debt ever known up to then.
- the consequences that this has had (and the comrade also appears to recognise this): a substantial part of this growth has evaporated in a dramatic process of dismantling – which in the central countries has particularly affected heavy industry – or of implosion as in the case of the Russian bloc.
As for the growth of the 90s: a minuscule level of growth, [6] [118] based on historically unprecedented levels of debt and speculation, was limited to the United States – and a few other countries – within the context of unprecedented setbacks for numerous countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. [7] [119] Moreover, the present collapse of the “New Economy” and the turbulence on the stock markets is revealing the reality of this growth.
When talking about the “growth figures” the comrade should reflect about their nature and composition. [8] [120] Growth that expresses the expansion of the system is not the same thing as growth that reflects a policy of survival and crisis management. Generally, for a Marxist, it is not possible to identify the growth of production with the development of capitalist production. They are two distinct ideas. The practice in Stalinist Russia of using recording breaking statistics for steel, cotton and cement to hide defective or non-existent production, was only the most extreme and grotesque illustration of a general tendency of decadent capitalism, stimulated by state capitalism, to increase the production figures of a system whose bases of reproduction are being slowly and progressively eroded. Rosa Luxemburg reminds us that: “the accumulation of capital is not about piling up increasingly large heaps of commodities, but of turning increasingly large volumes of products into money-capital. Between the accumulation of surplus-value in the form of commodities and the application of surplus-value for the development of production there is a decisive and difficult step, what Marx called the perilous leap of commodity production from the production of commodities to their sale for money. Perhaps this problem only exists for individual capitalists and does not affect the class or society as a whole? Nothing of the kind: ‘In speaking of the social point of view’, Marx said, ‘it is necessary to avoid falling into the habits of bourgeois economists, as imitated by Proudhon, i.e. to avoid looking at things as if a society based on the capitalist mode of production lost its specific historical and economic character when considered en bloc, as a totality. This is not the case at all. What we have to deal with is the collective capitalist’” (Rosa Luxemburg, Anti-critique, the quote from Marx is from Vol. 2 of Capital).
The nature of the growth in production during capitalism’s decadence – and above all during the last 50 years – has been marked by the tendency for it to be mediated through debt and state intervention. An intervention which at times has amassed enormous stores of commodities, only to destroy them years later since the problem is that they are not the products of a real development of the capitalist relations of production, an authentic expansion of the mass of wage earners and markets.
But, in any case, beyond their nature and particular composition the phases of relative and drugged growth have hidden a historical slowdown in the growth of production. This is the primary characteristic of the decadence of capitalism. Thus, there is no question of an absolute stoppage of growth, but this observation cannot obscure the fundamental tendency.
The same goes for other aspects of economic and social life. The fantastic discoveries in fields such as the human genome, telecommunications or transport, hide a profound deterioration in living conditions, health and the infrastructure of production. The restoration of facades in the great cities of Europe or America, the frantic building of useless glass monuments, illuminated skyscrapers, gives the illusory sensation that “all is well” obscuring an enormous, systematic and irreversible degradation of workers’ and the whole of humanity’s living conditions. It is the same with the functioning and maintaining of these dazzling cities: behind the bright shining lights we see the repeated power cuts in prosperous California and the proliferation of food, transport and ecological catastrophes etc.
It is essential to take the point of view of the totality, as the comrade himself emphasises. We cannot look at robotics and the genome, nor the phases of more or less sustained growth in themselves: it is necessary to see the contradictory and destructive framework within which they occur. The gravity of the system’s crisis is not measured by the volume of rises and falls in production but from a historical and global standpoint, by the worsening of its contradictions, the progressive reduction in its room for manoeuvre and above all by the deterioration in the living conditions of the working class.
In China at the same time as they constructed a dazzling artificial island of skyscrapers adjoining Shanghai, they forced school children to work in order to keep them open. Whilst a totally robotized factory was being opened in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the number of street children continued to grow, and more than 50% of the population still lives below the vital minimum. In Great Britain at the same time as Pharaonic works are being carried out in London’s old docklands, livestock in their hundreds of thousands are being sacrificed. Which of these two sets of facts reflect capitalism’s real situation? We don’t have any doubts about the answer. We hope that we have contributed to dissipating any doubts that the comrade, or our readers in general, may feel on the matter.
Adalen 2.4.2001
[1] [121] See International Review, numbers 29 and 30 for a critique of these accusations by Bukharin and Duyaneskaya against Rosa Luxemburg.
[2] [122] He rarely quotes Rosa Luxemburg directly, the criticisms that he mentions are taken word for word from the Bukharin of “Bolshevisation” (Stalinisation in reality) and from a whole series of “academics” who may occasionally have something interesting to say, but who generally hold positions alien to Marxism. The quotes from Mattick and Pannekoek are a different matter. We do not agree with them, but they demand a more detailed answer.
[3] [123] For an analysis of the decadence of modes of production before capitalism, see the article in the series “Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism” in International Review n°55.
[4] [124] See the “Decomposition of Capitalism” in International Review n°62.
[5] [125] We refer the reader to the pamphlet on The decadence of capitalism, to the articles in International Review numbers 54 and 56, part of the series “Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism” and to the polemics with the IBRP in the International Review numbers 79 and 83.
[6] [126] The level of growth in the decade of the 90’s has been less than that in the previous 5 decades.
[7] [127] See the series “30 years of capitalist crisis” in International Review numbers 96 to 98.
[8] [128] See the “Presentation of the VIIIth Congress”, International Review n°59, for some reflections about this.
14th Congress of the ICC
The alternative facing humanity at the beginning of the 21st century is the same as the one which faced it at the beginning of the 20th: the descent into barbarism or the renewal of society through the communist revolution. The revolutionary marxists who insisted on this inescapable dilemma in the turbulent period 1914-23 could hardly have imagined that their political descendants would still be obliged to insist on it again at the start of the new millennium. Indeed, even the 'post-68' generation of revolutionaries, who emerged from the revival of proletarian struggles after the long counter-revolution that set in during the 1920s, did not really expect that a declining capitalism could be quite so adept at living with its own contradictions as it has proved to be since the 1960s.
For the bourgeoisie, all this is further proof that capitalism is the last and now the only possible form of human society, that the communist project was never more than a utopian dream. This notion, a necessary cornerstone of all bourgeois ideology, was granted an apparent historical verification by the collapse of the 'Communist' bloc in 1989-91. Ably presenting the downfall of a part of the world capitalist system as the final demise of marxism and communism, the bourgeoisie from this moment on concluded from this false premise that capitalism had entered a new and exciting phase in its life. According to this view:
- capitalism, for the first time, was a global system; the free operation of the laws of the market would no longer be fettered by the unwieldy 'socialist' obstacles raised by the Stalinist regimes and their imitators;
- computerisation and the Internet signalled not only a vast technological revolution but also an unlimited new market
- national competition and wars would become a thing of the past
- class conflict would also disappear because classes themselves were being superseded; above all, the working class was a thing of the past.
In this new dynamic capitalism peace and prosperity would be the order of the day. Barbarism would be banished and socialism would become a total irrelevance.
2. In reality, the decade since 1991 has systematically refuted all these fables. Every new ideological gimmick used to prove that capitalism could offer mankind a bright future has proved to be faulty, a cheaply made toy that breaks down almost as soon as you play with it. Future generations will surely look at the bourgeois rationalisations of this decade with the utmost contempt; they will certainly see this period as one of unprecedented blindness, stupidity, horror and suffering. The marxist prognosis that capitalism has outlived its usefulness to humanity - already confirmed by the world wars and world crises of the first half of the 20th century - is being further proven by the prolongation of this senile system into its phase of decomposition, which is the real 'new' period whose entry was marked by the events of 1989-91. Humanity today does not merely face the prospect of barbarism in the future: the descent has already begun and it bears with it the danger of gradually eating away at the very premises of any future social regeneration. But contrary to the propaganda campaigns of the ruling class, the counter-force to the tendency towards barbarism - the communist revolution, logical culmination of the struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation - is no utopia, but remains a necessity demanded by the death agony of the present mode of production, and at the same time a concrete possibility given that the working class has neither disappeared nor been decisively defeated.
3. All the promises made by the ruling class about the new age of prosperity inaugurated by the 'victory of capitalism over socialism' have one by one been exposed as insubstantial bubbles:
- first we were told that world capitalism would receive an immense boost from the collapse of 'Communism' and the opening up of vast new markets in the former Eastern bloc countries. In fact, these countries were not outside the capitalist system but merely backward capitalist states unable to compete with the countries of the western bloc in a saturated world market. The fact that there was no more room for any major new capitalist economies compelled these countries to shut themselves off behind protectionist barriers, while their bloc leader, the USSR, could only compete with its western rival at the military level. The 'opening up' of these economies to the capital of the more industrialised countries has only highlighted their inherent weaknesses and has served to plunge their populations into an even deeper misery than they experienced under the Stalinist regimes: collapse of whole sectors of production, massive unemployment, shortages of consumer goods, inflation, endemic corruption, wages unpaid for months on end, break-down of social services, growing financial convulsions and the repeated failure of all the western-imposed packages of economic 'reforms'. Far from being a boon to the western economies, the ex-Eastern bloc threatens to be a huge burden. This is evident in Germany where the eastern side is a sheer drag on the economy as a whole; but it also applies more broadly, given the gigantic amounts of capital that has been thrown into the bottomless pit of these economies with no tangible reward, and now the growing flood of refugees fleeing from economic or military chaos in the Balkans or the ex-USSR;
- then it was the turn of the far-eastern tigers and dragons who were going to show the way forward for the rest of the world with their phenomenal growth figures. These economies proved very quickly to be another mirage. They had initially been artificially built up by US capitalism in the period of the blocs as a firebreak against the spread of 'Communism'; their spectacular rise in the 80s and 90s was based on the same marshy ground as the rest of the world economy: the massive resort to credit, itself a product of a an insufficiency of new markets for global capital. The equally spectacular crisis of 1997 was proof of this: it only required the debts to be called in for the whole house of cards to come crashing down. And while a series of sticking-plaster measures, led by the US, have kept this crisis within certain bounds in the Far East and prevented it from provoking an open recession in the West, the long-drawn out stagnation of the once unbeatable Japanese economy is proof that there will be no new 'locomotive' provided by the Far East. Japan's economic condition is so dangerous that it periodically sends waves of panic across the world, as when the Japanese finance minister recently declared the country to be bankrupt. And despite the appearance of new versions of the old 'Yellow Peril' mythology of the early 20th century, there is even less chance that China can become a new beacon of economic development. Whatever economic development has taken place in China is also based on the massive resort to debt; moreover, this has not prevented millions of workers from languishing in unemployment while further millions of workers go with wages unpaid for long period;
- the most recent Great White Hope of capitalism has been the performance of the US economy, with its 'ten years of uninterrupted growth' and in particular with its leading role in the 'new economy' based on the Internet. But the 'Internet-driven economy' has proved to be such a short-lived promise that bourgeois commentators themselves scoff openly at it. 'dot.com' companies are going to the wall at a tremendous rate, many of them exposed as being no more than speculative frauds, symbolically summarising the real fraud: that capitalism could save itself simply by operating as a huge electronic department store. Furthermore, the downfall of the 'new economy' is itself a reflection of deeper problems now openly affecting the entire US economy. It is no longer any secret that the US 'boom' was based also on a flight into astronomical debts which are directly raised by enterprises and individuals, and which resulted in a negative savings rate for the first time in decades; the gigantic growth rates which the bourgeoisie has boasted about are based in reality on a financial system which has been made increasingly fragile by the madness of speculation, and on an accentuation of attacks against workers' living conditions, i.e. increase in precarious jobs, the cutting of the social wage, the diversion of a growing portion of workers' income into the casino of the stock exchange;
- in any case, the boom is now over and there is now increasing talk of the US tilting over into recession. Not only the dot.com companies, but key manufacturing sectors are also in deep trouble.
Despite these alarming signs, the bourgeoisie continues to prate about particular booms in Britain, France, Ireland? but these refrains are increasingly a form of whistling in the dark. Given the tight dependence of the other industrial countries on their investments in the US, the visible end of the 'ten years of US growth' cannot fail to have very serious effects throughout the industrialised world.
4. The capitalist mode of production entered into its historic crisis of overproduction at the beginning of the 20th century - the time when capitalism indeed became 'globalised', simultaneously reaching the limits of its outward expansion and laying the foundations for the world-wide proletarian revolution. But the failure of the working class to carry out the death sentence on the system has meant that capitalism has survived despite the growing weight of its inner contradictions. Capitalism does not simply cease to function once it is no longer a factor of historical progress. On the contrary, it continues to 'grow' and to function, but on a diseased basis which plunges mankind into a spiral of catastrophe. In particular, decadent capitalism entered into the cycle of crisis, war and reconstruction which marked the first two thirds of the 20th century. World wars permitted a redivision of the world market while the ensuing reconstruction provided a temporary stimulus for the latter. But the survival of the system has also demanded a growing political intervention by the ruling class, which has used its state apparatus to flout the 'normal' laws of the market, above all through the policies of deficit spending, of creating artificial markets through the use of credit. The crash of 1929 proved to the bourgeoisie that the war-reconstruction process in itself could only culminate in a spectacular world wide slump after a single decade; it was, in other words, no longer possible to restore capitalist production on a firm basis by returning to the 'spontaneous' operation of commercial laws. Capitalist decadence is precisely the expression of the clash between the productive forces and the commodity form; hence, in this epoch, the bourgeoisie itself is compelled to act more and more at variance with the natural laws of commodity production, even while being driven by them. Hence the reconstruction of 1945 was consciously financed by the US, using the apparently irrational mechanism of lending money to its customers so that they could constitute a market for its goods. And once the limits of this conundrum were reached in the mid-60s, the world bourgeoisie only took the interventionist line to further heights. During the period of the imperialist blocs, this intervention was in general co-ordinated by bloc-wide mechanisms; and the disappearance of the blocs, while introducing dangerous centrifugal tendencies at the economic as well as the imperialist level, still did not lead to the disappearance of these international mechanisms: in fact they were reborn and even reinvigorated as the institutions most often identified as the principle agents of 'globalisation', such as the World Trade Organisation. And even though these organisms operate as a battle ground between the main national capitals or as coalitions between particular geo-political groupings (NAFTA, EU, etc), they express the fundamental necessity for the bourgeoisie to prevent the total paralysis of the world economy. This has been concretised, for example, in the persistent efforts of the USA to bail out its principal economic rival, Japan - even though it has also meant fuelling Japan's enormous debts with even more debts.
This organised cheating of the law of value via state capitalism does not do away with the convulsions of the system; it merely postpones or displaces them. It postpones them in time, particularly for the more advanced economies, by continually avoiding the slide into recession; and it displaces them in space by pushing the worst effects onto the peripheral regions of the globe, which are more or less abandoned to their fate except as pawns in inter-imperialist games. But even in the advanced countries this postponing of open recessions or depressions still makes itself felt through inflationary pressures, financial 'mini-crashes', the dismantling of whole swathes of industry, the break-down of agriculture and the accelerating decay of the infrastructure (roads, rail, services,) etc. This process also includes official recessions, but for the most part the real depth of the crisis is deliberately masked by the conscious manipulations of the bourgeoisie. The perspective for the coming period therefore continues to be a long slow descent into the abyss, punctuated by increasingly violent, but by no means final downward plunges. But there is no absolute point of no return for capitalist production in purely economic terms: long before such a theoretical point could be reached, capitalism would have been destroyed either by the generalisation of its tendency towards barbarism, or by the proletarian revolution.
5. At the beginning of the 90s, we were told that the disappearance of aggressive 'Communism' from the face of the earth would usher in a new era of peace, since capitalism in its democratic form had long since ceased to be imperialist. This ideology was later combined with the myth of globalisation, arguing that national rivalries were a thing of the past.
It is true that the collapse of the Russian bloc and the subsequent break-up of its western counter-part removed a fundamental condition for world war, leaving aside the question of whether the social prerequisites for such a conflict existed. But this development did not alter the essential reality that national capitalist states cannot go beyond the relentless struggle to dominate the globe. Indeed, the fragmentation of the old bloc structures and disciplines unleashed national rivalries on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an increasingly chaotic struggle of each against all from the world's greatest powers to the meanest local warlords. This has taken the form of a growing number of local and regional wars around which the major powers continually jockey for advantage.
6. From the start the USA, as the world's policeman, recognised the danger of this new tendency and took immediate action to try to counter-act it. This was the essential significance of the Gulf war of 1991, which was a massive display of US military superiority aimed first and foremost not at Saddam Hussein's Iraq but at cowing the USA's great power rivals into submission. But although by obliging the other powers to take part in its anti-Saddam coalition the USA temporarily succeeded in strengthening its 'world leadership', the real success of this endeavour can be judged by the fact that ten years later, the USA is still being obliged to use the 'tactic' of bombing Iraq but each time it does so it is subjected to more and more criticism from the majority of its 'allies', and by the fact that it has been compelled to make similar displays of force in other arenas of conflict, in particular the Balkans.
The military superiority of the US has over the past decade shown itself to be completely incapable of halting the centrifugal development of imperialist rivalries. Instead of the US-run new world order promised by his father the new President Bush is confronted with a growing military disorder - with a proliferation of war all over the planet:
- in the Balkans, which, despite massive US-led intervention in 96 and 99, remains a chessboard of tension between the major powers and their local agents; in 2001, 'pacified' Kosovo is still a daily killing field and this brutal 'ethnic' bloodletting has now spilled over into Macedonia, threatening the involvement of several regional powers;
- in the Middle East where the Oslo peace agreement now lies in utter ruin. The escalation of the armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a body blow to the USA's hopes for a 'pax Americana' in the region, providing opportunities for other great powers which, however, have no ability whatever to impose an alternative order of their own;
- in Chechnya where despite enjoying the support of the other great powers, who have no desire to see the Russian Federation being split up by a plethora of nationalist movements, the Kremlin has been unable to bring the war to a close;
- in Afghanistan where different Muslim factions vie for control with the Taliban;
- in Africa where wars are not only endemic and chronic, stretching from Algeria in the north to Angola in the south, but have also widened in scope to become true regional wars dragging in the armies of a number of neighbouring states, as in the Congo;
- in the Far East where countries like Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia continue to be wracked by internal fighting, and China is more and more asserting its claim to be a major regional power;
- on the Indian subcontinent where India and Pakistan have rattled nuclear sabres at each other and where Sri Lanka is still torn apart by the war against the Tamil separatists;
- in Latin America where tension is being increased by the USA's new 'war against drugs', which is in effect another attempt to re-impose US authority in its own backyard faced with the growing interference of its European rivals (e.g. through their open support for the Zapatistas);
- in Ireland where another 'peace process' has been punctuated by the sound of exploding bombs and assassins' bullets, and in the Basque country where the 'truce' has been broken and ETA has escalated its terrorist activities.
The list could be extended but the picture is clear. Far from bringing peace and stability, the break-up of the bloc system has considerably accelerated capitalism's slide into military barbarism. The wars characteristic of the present phase of capitalist decomposition are no less imperialist wars than the wars of previous phases of decadence, but they have become more widespread, more uncontrollable, and more difficult to bring to even a temporary close.
7. In all these conflicts, the rivalry between the US and its former great power 'allies' has been more or less masked. More in the Gulf and the Balkans where the conflicts have taken the form of an 'alliance' of democratic states against local 'tyrants'; less in Africa where each country has acted more openly and more separately to protect its own national interests. Officially, the USA's main 'enemies' - those who are cited as justification for its ever-increasing military budgets - are either local 'rogue' states like North Korea or Iraq, or its former direct rival from the Cold War era, Russia, or its one time rival, then ally from the same period, China. The latter in particular is increasingly identified as the main potential rival to the USA. And in fact the recent period has seen a real build-up in tension between the US and these two powers - over the issue of NATO's extension into Eastern Europe, over the exposure of Russian spy-network based on a former FBI supervisor, and in particular over the spy plane incident in China. There also exists within the US bourgeoisie an important faction which is convinced that China is indeed the USA's main enemy. But perhaps a more significant development in the recent period is the accumulation of declarations by sections of the European bourgeoisie about the 'arrogance' of the US, in particular over its decision to repudiate the Kyoto agreement on carbon dioxide emissions, and to press ahead with its 'Son of Star Wars' anti-missile project. This latter indeed represents a formidable offensive by US imperialism to transform its technological advantage into an unprecedented planetary domination. This project represents a new stage in an increasingly aberrant arms race and can only sharpen antagonisms with its principal rivals.
These antagonisms have been further exacerbated by the decision to form a 'Euro-Army' separate from NATO. Although there is a strong tendency to blame the growing US-European rift on the new Bush administration, this 'new anti-Americanism' in Europe is only the explicit acknowledgement of a trend that has been in operation since the disappearance of the Western bloc at the beginning of the 90s. Ideologically, it reflects a tendency which, along with the trend towards every man for himself, was also unleashed by the break-up of the blocs - the tendency towards a new anti-American bloc based in Europe.
8. We are still however a long way from the formation of new imperialist blocs, for both military/strategic and social/political reasons:
- no state or even combination of states is able to measure up to the US at the level of military firepower. Germany, which has benefited most from the process of decomposition, advancing its interests into its traditional spheres like Eastern Europe, has no nuclear weapons and because of its past is obliged to take a very low key approach to its strategy of expansion. France, by far the most openly anti-American European power, is not able to pose itself as a potential bloc leader;
- 'Europe' is far from united, and the tendency towards every man for himself operates on this continent as much as any other. Though France and Germany would be the central axis of a European bloc, there are both historic and more immediate sources of tension between them. Britain meanwhile still tends to play both off against each other to prevent either becoming too powerful, and still plays the USA against both. It is important not to confuse the development of economic cooperation between European states with the immediate formation of a bloc structure, since there is no mechanical relationship between immediately economic and strategic/military interests;
- at the social level it is not possible to cohere society around a new war ideology comparable to anti-fascism in the 30s or anti-communism in the post-war period, because the working class is not mobilised behind the banners of the nation. The ideological basis for the formation of new blocs is thus not yet established even if the new anti-Americanism gives us a glimpse of what form it might take in the future.
World war thus remains off the agenda for the foreseeable future. But this in no way minimises the dangers contained in the present situation. The proliferation of local wars, the development of regional conflicts between nuclear-armed powers like India and Pakistan, the spread of these conflicts towards the heartlands of capital (as witness the Balkans war); the necessity for the USA to throw its weight around more and more to reassert its declining leadership, and the reactions this could provoke from other powers - all this could become part of a terrible spiral of destruction which could undermine the bases of a future communist society, even without the active mobilisation (behind capitalist ideology) of the proletariat in the centres of world capital.
9. The ruling class tends to reduce the global significance of these mounting tensions by looking for specific local, ideological, and economic causes of each particular conflict: 'ingrained' ethnic hatreds here, religious schisms there, oil in the Gulf or the Balkans, diamonds in Sierra Leone, etc. In this they are often echoed by the confusions of the proletarian political milieu, which easily mixes up a materialist analysis with the effort to explain each imperialist conflict in terms of the immediate economic profit that can be made from it. Although many of these economic and ideological factors are real, they cannot explain the general characteristics of the period which capitalism has entered. In decadence, war has more and more become an economic disaster for capitalism, a sheer loss. The costs involved in maintaining each particular conflict far outweigh the immediate economic benefits which can be drawn from it. Thus while severe economic pressures certainly played a key part in driving Zimbabwe to invade the Congo, or Iraq Kuwait, the ensuing military entanglements have brought these countries further towards the abyss of ruin. More generally, the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction, which gave the appearance of conferring a certain rationality on world war in the past, is now over, since after any new world war there would be no reconstruction to follow it. But none of these calculations of profit and loss enable imperialist states to abstain from the necessity to defend their imperialist presence around the globe, to sabotage the ambitions of their rivals, or to increase their arms budgets. On the contrary, they are all caught up in a logic which escapes their control and which makes less and less sense even in capitalist terms, and this is precisely what makes the situation facing mankind so dangerous and unstable. To overestimate the rationality of capital is to underestimate the real menace of war in this period.
10. The working class today thus faces the possibility that it could be engulfed by an irrational chain reaction of local and regional wars. But this is only one aspect of the threat posed by decomposing capitalism. The last decade has seen all the consequences of decomposition becoming more and more deadly:
- at the level of social life, particularly in the growing phenomenon of 'gangsterisation': corruption of state officials at the highest levels, growing involvement of the mafia and international drug cartels in the political and economic life of the bourgeoisie, the enrolment of the exploited and the oppressed in local gang structures, which in the peripheral countries have become veritable instruments of imperialist wars; connected to this is the spread of extremely retrograde ideologies selling ethnic or religious hatred and the 'banalisation' of genocide after the inter-ethnic massacres in Rwanda, East Timor, Bosnia or Borneo;
- through the break-down of the infrastructures of transport and housing, making ever-larger masses of people victims of all kinds of accidents and disasters (rail crashes, floods, earthquakes, etc); closely linked to this is the crisis in agriculture which has resulted in new outbreaks of disease that further intensify the crisis that gave rise to them;
- more generally, at the level of the planetary eco-system: more and more evidence piles up for the reality of global warming (rising sea temperatures, melting ice-caps, violent fluctuations in the weather, etc) while the repeated failure of international climate conferences demonstrate the total incapacity of the capitalist nations to do anything about it.
Capitalism today is therefore painting a clearer and clearer picture of what the descent into barbarism would look like: a civilisation in full disintegration, torn apart by storms, drought, plague, starvation, irreversible poisoning of air, land and water; society turned into a hecatomb by murderous internecine conflict and wars that leave entire countries, even continents, in ruins; wars which further poison the atmosphere and which can only be made more frequent and devastating by the desperate struggle by nations, regions, or local fiefs to preserve their cache of dwindling resources and necessities; a nightmare world where the last remaining castles of 'prosperity' clang iron gates against the encroaching hordes of refugees fleeing from war and catastrophe; in short, a world where the rot had set in so far that there would be no turning back and where capitalist civilisation finally sank beneath a quicksand of its own making. This apocalypse is not so far from what we are experiencing today; the face of barbarism is taking material shape before our eyes. The only question remaining is whether socialism, the proletarian revolution, still remains a living alternative.
The working class still holds the key to the future
11. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, the struggle of the working class in response to the resurfacing of capitalism's historic crisis was a barrier to the outbreak of a third world war - the only real barrier, because capitalism had already formed the imperialist blocs which would launch the war, and the economic crisis was already pushing the system into this 'solution'. But for a number of connected reasons, some historic, some more immediate, the working class found it extremely difficult to pass from the defensive level to an open affirmation of its own political perspective (the weight of the previous decades of counter-revolution which had decimated its organised political expressions, the long drawn-out nature of the economic crisis which made it hard to see the truly catastrophic situation facing world capitalism, and so on). The inability of the two major social classes to impose their solution to the crisis gave rise to the phenomenon of decomposition; and this in turn was greatly accelerated by its own product, the collapse of the Eastern bloc, which marked decadent capitalism's entry into a phase in which decomposition would be the centrally defining characteristic. In this new phase, the struggle of the working class, which over the course of three successive international waves had revealed visible lines of advance at the level of consciousness and self-organisation, was thrown into a profound reflux, both at the level of consciousness and of militancy.
Decomposition posed both material and ideological difficulties for the working class:
- at the economic and social level, the material processes of decomposition have tended to undermine the proletariat's sense of identity - traditional working class industrial concentrations have been broken up more and more; social life has become increasingly atomised (which further reinforces the tendency towards gangsterisation as a false 'communal' alternative); long-term unemployment, especially among the youth, reinforces this atomisation and further severs the link with traditions of collective struggle;
- these objective processes are in turn made more effective by the incessant ideological campaigns of the ruling class, selling nihilism, individualism, racism, occultism and religious fundamentalism, all of which help to obscure the reality of society whose fundamental division remains a class division; these campaigns are crowned by the brainwashing that accompanied the collapse of the Eastern bloc and has been maintained ever since: communism has failed, marxism has been refuted, the working class is finished. This theme has in turn has been boosted by all the ideologies about 'newness' which also 'explain' how capitalism has now superseded its old class divisions ('new economy'. 'globalisation', 'recomposition of the working class', etc).
The working class today is thus faced with a serious loss of confidence - not only in its capacity to change society, but even in its capacity to defend itself at the day to day level. This has allowed the trade unions, which in the 80s had been more and more exposed as instruments of bourgeois order, to renew their hold over workers' struggles; at the same time, it has increased capitalism's ability to divert the workers' efforts to defend their specific interests into a patchwork of 'popular' and 'citizens' movements for greater 'democracy'.
12. The real difficulties confronting the working class today are obviously exploited by the ruling class to intensify its message about the end of the class struggle. This message is taken up by many who are not blind to the barbaric future that capitalism is preparing for us, but who do not believe that the working class is the subject of revolutionary change, and are searching for some 'new' movement to create a better world (this is the case with many elements involved in the 'anti-capitalist' mobilisations). Communists, however, know that if the working class is truly finished, there is no other barrier to capitalism's drive towards the destruction of humanity. But they are also able to affirm that this barrier has not been removed; that the international working class has not said its last word. This confidence in the working class is not some species of religious faith. It is based:
- on a historic vision of the working class, which is not an immediate, photographic snapshot but which recognises the real link between the past, present and future struggles of the class and its organisations;
- on an analysis of the last decade in particular, which enables them to conclude that for all the difficulties it has experienced, the working class has not suffered a defeat of world-historic proportions, comparable to what it experienced at the end of the first revolutionary wave.
13. The evidence for this conclusion is provided by:
- the fact that despite undeniable difficulties in the last decade (isolation and discontinuity of struggles, and consequently the absence of class struggle on the overall social scene), the working class of the main concentrations still conserves large reserves of militancy and has not accepted the austerity plans which capitalism tries to impose on it. This militancy is set to undergo a slow, tortuous but real development in response to the degradation of proletarian living and working conditions;
- the signs of a subterranean maturation of consciousness within the working class. Contrary to idealist visions which see consciousness being brought to the class from the outside, or mechanistic theories which see consciousness developing only in the immediate, visible struggle, communists have always been keenly aware that mass strikes or revolutions do not spring from nowhere, but have their source in 'underground' processes which build up over long periods and which are often only discernible in sudden outbursts or in the appearance of combative minorities within the class. In the recent period it has been particularly clear that such a minority has been emerging, taking the form both of a considerable enlargement of the zone of political transition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and of the development of a small but important minority which is relating to the proletarian political milieu. It is especially significant that many of these 'searching' elements derive not only from those who have been politicised for a long time, but from a new generation of people who are asking questions about capitalism for the first time;
- evidence of the 'negative' weight that the working class still exerts on the ruling class. This expresses itself, among other things, in the bourgeoisie's reluctance to admit the real scope of imperialist rivalries between the major powers, to dragoon the workers of these powers directly into its military adventures; in the concern of the ruling class not to reveal the true level of the economic crisis, to avoid overt economic slumps that could provoke a massive class reaction; in the enormous amount of time and energy devoted to its ideological campaigns against the proletariat, not least those devoted to showing that the latter is a spent force.
Communists can thus continue to argue that the historic course towards massive class confrontations, opened by the international wave of struggles in 1968-72, has not been overturned. The working class has proved itself to be a barrier to world war. And while the danger remains that the more insidious process of decomposition could gradually overwhelm the class without capitalism having to inflict a frontal defeat upon it, the class still represents a historic obstacle to the full working out of capitalism's slide into military barbarism. More than this: it still retains the capacity to resist the effects of social decomposition through the development of its struggles and the consequent strengthening of its sense of identity and solidarity, which can offer a real alternative to the atomisation, the self-destructive violence and despair typical of this rotting system.
14. On this difficult path towards the working class rediscovering its fighting spirit and renewing its acquaintance with past traditions and experiences of struggle, it comes up against the anti-proletarian strategy of the bourgeoisie:
a) First, the use of the left parties in government, where they are still generally better placed than the right to:
- present the obvious signs of capitalism's downward plunge as results only of the action of particular sectors of capitalism (egoistic, irresponsible companies etc) - the only alternative being the action of the democratic state in defence of the interests of all citizens;
- present the spiral of wars and militarism as the result only of the war policy of 'hawkish' sections of capitalism (Sharon, Bush, etc.), which should be countered by 'international law' based on 'human rights';
- stagger the attacks on workers' living conditions, above all in the main industrial concentrations, in order to try to postpone and disperse the militancy of the workers, to create division in the ranks of the proletariat, between 'privileged' sectors (workers with a fixed contract, western workers, etc.) and disadvantaged ones (those on precarious contracts, immigrants, etc.);
- mask these attacks as though they were steps towards a more just society.
b) In complete coherence with this, the activities of the leftists as well as of radical unionism are aimed at neutralising the distrust of the workers towards the centre-left parties and diverting it into a radical defence of bourgeois democracy. The development of the Socialist Alliance in Britain is a clear illustration of this function.
c) Last but not least, we have the activities of the anti-globalisation movement, which is frequently presented by the media as the only possible form of anti-capitalism. The ideology of these movements, when it is not an expression of the 'no-future' of the petty bourgeoisie (defence of small-scale production, cult of desperate violence which deepens the feeling of desperation, etc.) is only a more radical version of what is put forward by its big brothers on the so-called 'traditional' left: the defence of the interest of national capital vis-à-vis its rivals.
These ideologies serve to block the evolution of new 'searching' elements within the population and the working class in particular. As we have seen, these ideologies do not contradict the more general propaganda about the death of communism - which will continue to be used in spades - but are an important complement to it.
15. The responsibilities facing the working class are immense: nothing short of the fate of humanity is in its hands. This in turn confers tremendous responsibilities on the revolutionary minority, whose essential task in the coming period will be:
- to intervene in the day to day struggles of the class, insisting on the need for solidarity and the involvement of the widest possible number of workers in any movement to resist capitalism's attacks;
- to explain with all the means available to it (press, leaflets, meetings etc), and in a manner that is both accessible and profound, why capitalism is bankrupt, why all its 'solutions' - particularly those touted by the left and extreme left - are a fraud, and what the real proletarian alternative is;
- to assist the efforts of radical minorities - struggle groups at the workplace, discussion circles, etc - to draw the lessons of recent experience, prepare for new struggles to come, while at the same time renewing the links with the proletariat's historic traditions ;
- to intervene within the proletarian political milieu, which is entering a period of significant growth, insisting that the milieu acts as a real reference point for serious debate and clarification for all the new elements coming towards it.
The historic course towards class confrontations also provides the context for the formation of the world communist party. The proletarian milieu of today provides the matrix of the future party, but there is no guarantee that it will actually engender it. Without responsible and rigorous preparation by today's revolutionaries, the party will be still-born, and the massive class conflicts we are heading for will not take the vital step from revolt to revolution.
May 2001
The "communist left" is to a very large extent the product of those sections of the world proletariat who posed the greatest threat to capitalism during the international revolutionary wave that followed the 1914-18 war: the Russian, the German, and the Italian. It was these "national" sections which made the most telling contribution to the enrichment of marxism in the context of the new epoch of capitalist decline inaugurated by the war. But those who rose the highest also fell the lowest. We saw in previous articles in this series how the left currents of the Bolshevik party, after their first heroic attempts to understand and to resist the onset of the Stalinist counter-revolution, were almost completely wiped out by the latter, leaving the left groupings outside Russia to carry on the work of analysing what had gone wrong with the revolution in Russia and of defining the nature of the regime which had usurped its name. Here again, the German and Italian fractions of the communist left played an absolutely key role, even if they were not unique (the previous article in this series, for example, looked at the emergence of a left communist current in France in the 1920s-30s, and its contribution to understanding the Russian question). But while the proletariat in both Italy and Germany had suffered important defeats, the proletariat in Germany - which had effectively held the fate of the world revolution in its hands in 1918-19 - had certainly been crushed more brutally and bloodily by the interlocking efforts of social democracy, Stalinism and Nazism. It was this tragic fact, together with certain vital theoretical and organisational weaknesses that went back to the revolutionary wave and even before, which contributed to a process of dissolution hardly less devastating than that which had befallen the communist movement in Russia.
Without entering into a discussion about why it was the Italian left which best survived the shipwreck of the counter-revolution, we want to refute a legend maintained by those who not only claim to be the exclusive heirs of the historic Italian left, but who also reduce the communist left, which was above all an international expression of the working class, to its Italian branch alone. The Bordigist groups, which most clearly express this attitude, do of course recognise that there was an important "Russian" component of the marxist movement during the revolutionary wave and its aftermath, although here they amputate many of the most significant left currents within the Bolshevik party (Ossinski, Miasnikov, Sapranov, etc) and tend to refer approvingly only to the "official" leaders like Lenin and Trotsky. But as for the German left, Bordigism merely repeats all the distortions heaped upon it by the Communist International precisely at the time when the latter first began to open the door to opportunism - that it was anarchist, syndicalist, sectarian, etc. From this logically flows the conclusion that there can be no question today of debating with any currents who derive from this tradition or who have attempted to make a synthesis of the contributions of the different lefts.
This was emphatically not the approach adopted by Bordiga, either in the early years of the revolutionary wave, when the paper Il Soviet opened its columns to articles written by those who were part of the German left or within its orbit, such as Gorter, Pannekoek and Pankhurst; or in the period of growing reflux, as in 1926, when, as we saw in the last article in this series, Bordiga responded very fraternally to the correspondence he received from the Korsch group.
This attitude was continued by the Italian Fraction during the 1930s. Bilan was highly critical of the CI's facile denigrations of the German and Dutch left, and was very willing to open its columns to contributions from this current, as it did on the question of the period of transition. Although it had very deep disagreements with the "Dutch internationalists", it respected them as a genuine expression of the revolutionary proletariat.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that on many crucial questions, the German/Dutch left arrived much faster at the correct conclusions than the Italian: for example, on the bourgeois nature of the trade unions, on the relation between the party and the workers' councils, and on the issue we are dealing with in this article - the nature of the USSR and the general tendency towards state capitalism.
In our book on the Dutch Left, for example, we point out that Otto Ruhle, one of the key figures of the German left, had reached very advanced conclusions about state capitalism by 1931.
"One of the first theoreticians of council communism to investigate the phenomenon of state capitalism in more depth was Otto Rühle. In a remarkable pioneering book, published in 1931 in Berlin under the pseudonym Carl Steuermann, Rühle showed that the tendency towards state capitalism was irreversible and that no country could escape from it, because of the world wide nature of the crisis. The path taken by capitalism was not a change of nature, but of form, aimed at ensuring its survival as a system: 'The formula of salvation for the capitalist world today is: a change of form, transformation of the managers, renewing the façade, without renouncing the goal, which is profit. It is a question of looking for a way that will allow capitalism to continue on another level, another domain of evolution'.
Rühle envisaged roughly three forms of state capitalism, corresponding to different levels of capitalist development. Because of its economic backwardness, Russia represented the extreme form of state capitalism: 'the planned economy was introduced in Russia before the free capitalist economy had reached its zenith, before its vital processes had led to its senility'. In the Russian case, the private sector was totally controlled and absorbed by the state. At the other extreme, in a more developed capitalist economy, like Germany, the opposite had happened: private capital had seized control of the state. But the result was identical - the strengthening of state capitalism: 'There is a third way of arriving at state capitalism. Not through the usurping of capital by the state, but the opposite - private capital grabs hold of the state'. The second "method", which could be called "mixed", took place through the state gradually appropriating sectors of private capital: '[The state] conquers a growing influence in entire industries: little by little it becomes master of the economy'.
However, in none of these cases was state capitalism a "solution" for capitalism. It could only be a palliative for the crisis of the system: 'State capitalism is still capitalism (...) even in the form of state capitalism, capitalism cannot hope to prolong its existence for very long. The same difficulties and the same conflicts which oblige it to go from private to state capitalism reappear on a higher level'. No state capitalist "internationalisation" could resolve the problem of the market: 'The suppression of the crisis is not a problem of rationalisation, organisation, production or credit, it is purely and simply a problem of selling'. (The Dutch and German Left (English edition), p.276-7).
Although, as our book adds, Ruhle's approach contained a contradiction in that it also saw state capitalism as in some a sense a "higher" form of capitalism that was preparing the way for socialism, his book remains "a contribution to marxism of the first order". In particular, by posing state capitalism as a universal tendency in the new epoch, the ground was laid for overcoming the illusion that the Stalinist regime in Russia represented some total exception to the rest of the world system.
And yet Ruhle embodies the weaknesses of the German left as well as its undoubted strengths. The KAPD's first delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, Ruhle saw first hand the terrible bureaucratisation which had already gripped the Soviet state. But, without pausing to consider the origins of this process in the tragic isolation of the revolution, Ruhle quit Russia without even attempting to defend the views of his party at the Congress, and quickly rejected any position of solidarity towards the beleaguered Russian bastion. Expelled from the KAPD for this transgression, he began to develop all the premises of "councilism": the Russian revolution was no more than a bourgeois revolution; the party form was appropriate only to such revolutions; all political parties being in essence bourgeois, it was now necessary to fuse the economic and political organs of the class into a single "unified" organisation. These ideas were certainly resisted by many within the German left in the 1920s, and even in the 1930s they were by no means universally accepted within the council communist movement, as can be seen from the text from Rate Korrespondenz we published in IR 105. But they certainly did wreak a great deal of havoc in the German/Dutch left and greatly accelerated its organisational collapse; at the same time, by denying the proletarian character of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik party, they blocked any possible understanding of the process of degeneration to which both succumbed. These views really did reflect the weight of anarchism on the German workers' movement, and made it far easier for the entire German left communist tradition to be tarred with the anarchist brush.
In the previous article in this series, we saw that, within the milieu around Trotsky's left opposition, including many of the groups who were moving towards the positions of the communist left, there was a great deal of confusion about the issue of the USSR in the late 20s and the 30s, not least the notion of the bureaucracy as some kind of new class unforeseen by marxism. Given the deep theoretical weaknesses which also predominated in the German and Dutch left on this question, it is hardly surprising that the Italian Fraction approached the problem with a considerable amount of caution. Compared to many proletarian groups, they were very slow in coming to recognise the real nature of Stalinist Russia. But because they were solidly anchored in the marxist method, their ultimate conclusions were more consistent and thorough going.
The Fraction approached the "Russian enigma" in the same way as they approached all the other aspects of the balance sheet that had to be drawn from the titanic revolutionary struggles in the period after the first world war - and above all, from the tragic defeats the proletariat had suffered: with patience and rigour, avoiding any hasty judgements, grounding themselves on the conclusions which the class had acquired once and for all before calling any hard-won positions into questions. With regard to the nature of the USSR, the Fraction was in direct continuity with Bordiga's reply to Korsch which we looked at in the last article: for them what was definitively established was the proletarian character of the October revolution and of the Bolshevik party which had led it. Indeed we can say that the Fraction's growing understanding of the epoch inaugurated by the war - the epoch of capitalist decadence - enabled them to see more clearly than Bordiga that only the proletarian revolution was on the agenda of history in all countries. They thus had no time for any of the speculations about the Russian revolution having been a "bourgeois" or "dual" revolution. An idea which, as we have seen, had taken an increasing hold on the German and Dutch left. For Bilan, rejecting the proletarian character of the October revolution could only result in a kind of "proletarian nihilism" - a real loss of confidence in the capacity of the working class ever to make its own revolution (the phrase is from Vercesi's article 'The Soviet state' in the series 'Party, International, State' in Bilan no. 21).
None of this meant that the Fraction was wedded to the notion of the "invariance of marxism" since 1848, which was to become an article of faith for latter-day Bordigists. On the contrary: from the start - the editorial in Bilan no. 1 in fact - they committed themselves to examining the lessons of the recent class battles "without dogmatism or ostracism"; and this soon led them to call for a fundamental revision of some of the basic theses of the Communist International, for example on the national question. With regard to the USSR, while insisting on the proletarian nature of October, they also recognised that in the intervening years a profound transformation had taken place, so that from being a factor in the defence and extension of the world revolution, the "proletarian state" had assumed a counter-revolutionary role on a world scale.
An equally crucial starting point for the Fraction was that the international needs of the proletariat always took precedence over any local or national expression, and that under no circumstances could the principle of proletarian internationalism be compromised. This is why the Communist Party of Italy had always argued that the International must consider itself as a single world party whose decisions were binding on all its sections, even those, like the Russian, which held state power in particular countries; this is also why the Italian left immediately sided with Trotsky's opposition in its combat against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country. Indeed, for the Fraction, "It is not only impossible to build socialism in one country, but even to establish its basis. In countries where the proletariat has been victorious, it cannot be a question of realising the conditions for socialism (through the free management of the economy by the workers), it can only be a matter of safeguarding the revolution, which requires the maintenance of all the proletariat's class institutions" ('Nature and evolution of the Russian revolution - response to comrade Hennaut', Bilan 35, September 1936, p 1171). Here the Fraction went further than Trotsky, who with his theory of "primitive socialist accumulation" considered that Russia had indeed begun to lay the foundations for a socialist society, even if he rejected Stalin's claim that such a society had already arrived. For the Italian left, the proletariat could only really establish its political domination in one country, and even this would inevitably be undermined by the isolation of the revolution.
And yet despite this fundamental clarity, the majority position within the Fraction was, in appearance at least, similar to that of Trotsky's: the USSR remained a proletarian state, even though profoundly degenerated, on the basis that the bourgeoisie had been expropriated and that property remained in the hands of the state which had arisen out of the October revolution. The Stalinist bureaucracy was defined as a parasitic stratum, but it was not seen as a class - whether a capitalist class or some new class unforeseen by marxism: "The Russian bureaucracy is not a class, still less a ruling class, given that there are particular rights over production outside the private ownership of the means of production, and that in Russia the essentials of collectivisation still survive. It is certainly true that the Russian bureaucracy consumes a large part of social labour, but this is the case for any social parasitism, which should not be confused with class exploitation" (, 'Problems of the period of transition, part 4' Bilan no. 37, November-December 1936).
In the early years of the Fraction's life, the question of whether to defend this regime was not fully resolved, and it remained ambiguous in the first issue of Bilan, in 1933, where the tone is one of alerting the proletariat to the possibility of a definitive betrayal: "The left fractions have the duty to alert the proletariat of the role which the USSR has already played in the workers' movement, to show right now the evolution that the proletarian state will follow under the leadership of centrism. From now on, there must be a flagrant desolidarisation with the policy centrism has imposed on the workers' state. The alarm must be sounded within the working class against the position that centrism will impose on the Russian state not in its interests, but against its interests. Tomorrow, and this must be said today, centrism will betray the interests of the proletariat.
Such a vigorous attitude has the task of focussing the attention of the proletarians, of freeing members of the party from the grip of centrism, of really defending the workers' state. It alone can mobilise energies for the struggle which will keep October 1917 for the proletariat" ('Towards the Two and Three Quarter International?' Bilan no. 1 November 1933, p.26).
At the same time, the Fraction was always keenly aware of the necessity to follow the evolution of the world situation and to judge the question of the defence of the USSR according to a simple but clear criterion: was it or was it not playing a completely counter-revolutionary role on the international level? Did any policy of defence undermine the possibility of maintaining a strictly internationalist role in all countries? If so, then this far outweighed the issue of whether there were any concrete "gains" surviving form the October revolution within the confines of Russia. And here their point of departure was radically different from that of Trotsky, for whom the "proletarian" character of the regime was in itself sufficient justification for a policy of defencism, regardless of its role on the world arena.
Bilan's approach to this problem was intimately linked to their conception of the historic course: from 1933 onwards the Fraction declared with growing certainty that the proletariat had suffered a profound defeat, and that the course was now open to a second world war. The triumph of Nazism in Germany was one proof of this; the enrolment of the proletariat of the "democratic" countries behind the flag of anti-fascism was another; but a further confirmation was precisely the "victory of centrism" - the term that Bilan still used to describe Stalinism - within the USSR and the Communist parties, and along with this, the increasing incorporation of the Soviet Union into the march towards a new imperialist re-division of the globe. This was evident to Bilan in 1933, when the USSR was first recognised by the USA (an event described as "a victory for the world wide counter-revolution" in the title of its article in Bilan 2, December 1933). A few months later, Russia was granted entry to the League of Nations. "Russia's entry into the League of Nations immediately poses the problem of its participation in one of the imperialist blocs for the next war" ('Soviet Russia enters the concert of imperialist brigands', Bilan no. 8, June 1934, p 263). The brutally anti-working class role of Stalinism was further confirmed by its role in the massacre of the workers in Spain, and by the Moscow trials, behind which an entire generation of revolutionaries was being wiped out.
These developments led the Fraction to reject once and for all any policy of defence of the USSR. This in turn marked a further stage in the break between the Fraction and Trotskyism. For the latter, there existed a fundamental contradiction between the "proletarian state" and world capital. The latter had an objective interest in uniting against it, and therefore it was the duty of revolutionaries to defend it from imperialist attack. For Bilan however it was clear that world capitalism could quite easily adapt to the existence of the Soviet state and its nationalised economy, both on the economic level and, above all, on the military level. They predicted with chilling accuracy that the USSR would be fully integrated into one or other of the two imperialist blocs that would engage in the forthcoming war, even if the issue of which particular bloc it would join had not yet been decided. The Fraction thus argued very explicitly that the Trotskyist position of defencism could only lead to the abandoning of internationalism in the face of imperialist war:
"? according to the Bolshevik-Leninists, in the case of an alliance between the USSR with an imperialist state or an imperialist grouping against another grouping, the international proletariat still has to defend the USSR. The proletariat of an allied country would maintain its implacable hostility towards its imperialist government, but in practise it could not in all circumstances act like the proletariat of a country opposed to Russia. Thus, it would be for example 'absurd and criminal', in a situation of war between the USSR and Japan, for the American proletariat to sabotage the sending of American arms to the USSR.
Naturally we have nothing in common with these positions. Once it had entered into an imperialist war, Russia must be considered, not as an object in itself, but as an instrument of the imperialist war; it must be considered in relation to the struggle for the world revolution, i.e. in relation to the struggle for the proletarian insurrection in all countries.
The position of the Bolshevik Leninists is little different from that of the centrists and left socialists. You have to defend Russia, even if it allied with an imperialist state, while carrying on a pitiless struggle against the 'ally'. But this 'pitiless struggle' already commits class treason as soon as it is a question of banning strikes against the 'allied' bourgeoisie. The specific weapon of the proletarian struggle is precisely the strike and to forbid its use against a bourgeoisie can only strengthen the latter and prevent any real struggle. How can the workers of a bourgeoisie allied to Russia struggle pitilessly against the latter, if they are not able to unleash strike movements?
We consider that in case of war, the proletariat of all countries, including Russia, would have the duty to concentrate itself with a view to transforming the imperialist war into a civil war. The USSR's participation in a war of pillage would not change the essential character of the war and the proletarian state could only end up falling under the blows of the social contradictions brought to a head by such participation" ('From the Two and Three Quarter International to the Second International', Bilan 10, August 1934, p 345-6). This passage is peculiarly prophetic: for the Trotskyists in the second world war, the 'defence of the USSR' became a mere pretext for the defence of the national interests of their own countries.
Far from being a force intrinsically hostile to world capital, the Stalinist bureaucracy was seen as its agent - as the force through which the Russian working class was subjected to capitalist exploitation. In a number of articles, Bilan indeed showed very cogently that this exploitation was precisely that - a form of capitalist exploitation: "...in Russia, as in other countries, the frenzied rush to industrialise leads inexorably to making man a cog in the wheel of industrial production. The dizzying level reached by technology demands the socialist organisation of society. The incessant progress of industrialisation should harmonise with the interests of the workers, otherwise the latter become prisoners and finally slaves of economic forces. The capitalist regime is the expression of this slavery because through economic and social cataclysms, it finds in it the source of its domination over the working class. In Russia, it is under the law of capitalist accumulation that the gigantic construction of workshops is taking place, and the workers are at the mercy of the logic of this industrialisation: railway accidents here, explosions in the mines there, factor catastrophes somewhere else?" ('The Moscow Trial', Bilan No. 39, January-February 1937, p1271). Furthermore, Bilan recognised that the utterly ferocious nature of this exploitation was determined by the fact that the USSR's "building of socialism", the accelerated industrialisation of the 1930s, was in fact the building of a war economy in preparation for the next world holocaust: "The Soviet Union, like the capitalist states to which it is linked, must work towards the war which is getting closer and closer: the essential industry of the economy must therefore be the arms industry, which demands a ceaselessly growing supply of capital" ('The assassination of Kyrov, the suppression of bread vouchers in the USSR' Bilan 14, January 1935,.p 467). Or again: "the centrist bureaucracy is extracting surplus value from its workers and peasants for the preparation of imperialist war. The October revolution, which came out of the struggle against imperialist war, is being exploited by its degenerated epigones to push the new generations into the future imperialist war" ('The Moscow butchery'. Bilan 34, August-September 1936, p 1117).
Here the contrast with Trotsky's approach is patently obvious: while Trotsky could not hold back, in The Revolution Betrayed, from singing hymns to the USSR's enormous economic "achievements", which had supposedly demonstrated the "superiority of socialism". Bilan retorted that in no sense could progress towards socialism be measured by the growth of constant capital, but only by real increases in the living and working conditions of the masses. "If the bourgeoisie establishes its bible on the necessity for a continuous growth of surplus value in order to convert it into capital in the common interest of all classes (sic), the proletariat by contrast must go in the direction of a constant diminution of unpaid labour, which inevitably has the consequences of a much slower rhythm of accumulation than in the capitalist economy" ('L'Etat Sovietique' Bilan 21, July-August 1935, p720). This view was, moreover, rooted in Bilan's understanding of capitalist decadence: the refusal to acknowledge that Stalinist industrialisation was a "progressive" phenomenon was based not only on the recognition that it was based on the absolute misery of the masses, but also on an understanding of its historic function as part of the build-up towards an imperialist war, the latter being the most overt expression of the regressive nature of the capitalist system.
When we also recall that Bilan was perfectly acquainted with the passage in AntiDuhring where Engels rejects the notion that statification in itself has a socialist character, and indeed more than once used this argument to refute the claims of the Stalinist apologists, (cf 'L'Etat Sovietique', op cit; 'Problems of the period of transition' in Bilan 37), we can see how very close Bilan came to seeing the USSR under Stalin as a capitalist and imperialist regime. Finally, it was also being compelled to recognise that capitalism everywhere was more and more relying on state intervention to save it from the effects of the world economic slump and to prepare for the coming war. The best example of this analysis is contained in the articles on the De Man plan in Belgium in Bilan nos. 4 and 5. It could hardly have ignored the similarities between what was happening in Nazi Germany, the democratic countries, and the USSR.
And yet still Bilan hesitated to jettison the concept of the USSR as a proletarian state. It was perfectly well aware that the Russian proletariat was being exploited, but it tended to express this as a relation directly imposed on it by world capital without the mediation of a national bourgeoisie: the Stalinist bureaucracy was seen as an "agent of world capital" rather than as an expression of Russian national capital with its own imperialist dynamic. This emphasis on the primary role of world capital was fully in line with its internationalist vision and its profound understanding that capitalism is first and foremost a global system of domination. But global capital, the world economy, is no abstraction existing outside the clash of competing units of national capital. It was this last piece of the puzzle that the Fraction didn't succeed in fitting into place.
All the same, its later writings seem to express a growing intuition about the contradictions in its position, and its arguments in favour of the proletarian state thesis were becoming increasingly defensive and shaky:
"Despite the October revolution, the whole edifice, which from the first to the last stone is being built on the basis of the martyrdom of the Russian workers, must be swept aside because this is the only condition that makes it possible to affirm a class position in the USSR. Necessity to negate the 'building of socialism' by the proletarian revolution - this is where the involution of the last few years has led the Russian proletariat. If you object that the idea of a proletarian revolution against a proletarian state is a nonsense and that phenomena must be harmonised by calling this state a bourgeois state, we reply that those who reason in this way are simply expressing a confusion on the problem already dealt with by our masters: the relations between the proletariat and the state. It's a confusion which leads them to the other extreme: participation in the Sacred Union behind the capitalist state in Catalonia. Which proves that both with Trotsky who under the pretext of defending the conquests of October defends the Russian state, and with those who talk about a capitalist state in Russia there is an alteration of marxism which leads these people to defend the capitalist state under threat in Spain"" ('When the butchers speak', Bilan no. 41, May-June 1937, p 1339). This argument was strongly marked by Bilan's polemic with groups like Union Communiste and the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes on the war in Spain; but it fails to show the logical link between defending the imperialist war in Spain and concluding that Russia had become a capitalist state.
In fact a number of comrades within the Fraction itself began to call the thesis of the proletarian state into question, and they were by no means identical to the minority which fell under the influence of groups like the Union or the LCI on the question of Spain. But whatever discussion took place within the Fraction on this issue in the second half of the 1930s was eclipsed by another debate provoked itself by the development of the war economy on an international scale - the debate with Vercesi, who had begun to argue that capital's resort to the war economy had absorbed the crisis and eliminated the necessity for another world war. The Fraction was literally consumed by this debate, and with Vercesi's ideas influencing the majority, the Fraction was thrown into total disarray by the outbreak of the war (see our book on the Italian left for a more developed account of this debate).
It had always been axiomatic that the war would finally clarify the problem of the USSR, and so it proved. It was no accident that those who had opposed Vercesi's revisionism were also the most active in calling for the reconstitution of the Italian Fraction and the formation of a French nucleus of the communist left. It was these same comrades who led the debate on the question of the USSR. In its initial statement of principles in 1942 the French nucleus still defined the USSR as an "instrument of world imperialism". But by 1944 the majority position was perfectly clear. "The communist vanguard will be able to carry out its task as the proletariat's guide towards the revolution to the extent that it is able to free itself of the great lie of the 'proletarian nature' of the Russian state and to show it for what it is, to reveal its counter-revolutionary, capitalist and imperialist nature and function.
It is enough to note that the goal of production remains the extraction of surplus value, to affirm the capitalist character of the economy. The Russian state has participated in the course towards war, not only because of its counter-revolutionary function in crushing the proletariat, but because of its own capitalist nature, through the need to defend its sources of raw materials, through the necessity to ensure its place on the world market where it realises its surplus value, through the desire, the need, to enlarge its economic spheres of influence and to ensure its access routes" ('The non-proletarian nature of the Russian state and its counter-revolutionary function', Bulletin international de discussion, no. 6, June 1944). The USSR had its own imperialist dynamic originating in the accumulation process; driven therefore to expand because accumulation cannot take place in a closed circle; the bureaucracy was thus a ruling class in the fullest sense of the word. These insights were amply confirmed by the USSR's ruthless imperialist expansion into eastern Europe at the end of the war.
The process of clarification continued after the war, again principally with the French group which took the name Gauche Communiste de France. The discussions also went on within the newly formed Partito Comunista Internazionalista, but unfortunately they are not well known. It would appear that there was a great deal of heterogeneity. Some of the comrades of the PCInt developed positions very close to those of the GCF; others however were sunk in confusion. The GCF article 'Private Property and collective property', Internationalisme no 10, 1946 (re-published in International Review 61) criticises Vercesi, who had joined the PCInt, for holding on to the illusion that, even after the war, the USSR could still be defined as a proletarian state; Bordiga for his part, was resorting to the meaningless term "state industrialism" at this point; and although he later came to see the USSR as capitalist, he never accepted the term state capitalism or its significance as an expression of capitalist decadence. The article in Internationalisme 10, by contrast, shows that the GCF had brought together all the essential strands of the problem. In its theoretical studies in the late 40s and early 50s, the GCF drew all the strands together. State capitalism was analysed as the "the form corresponding to the decadent phase of capitalism, just as monopoly capitalism corresponded to its phase of full development"; moreover, it was not something restricted to Russia: "state capitalism isn't the speciality of a one bourgeois faction or of a particular ideological school. We've seen it installed in democratic America and Hitler's Germany, in 'Labour' Britain and 'Soviet' Russia". By going beyond the mystification that the abolition of individual 'private property' got rid of capitalism, the GCF was able to locate its analysis in the material roots of capitalist production: "The Russian experience teaches us and reminds us that it's not the capitalists who make capitalism, but the reverse; it's capitalism which engenders capitalists?.The capitalist principle of production can continue to exist after the juridical, even the material disappearance of capitalists as the beneficiaries of surplus value. In this case, surplus value, just as under private capitalism, is reinvested in the production process in order to extract a greater mass of surplus value.
Before long, the existence of surplus value gives rise to men who form the class that appropriates surplus value. The function creates the organ. Whether they are parasites, bureaucrats or technicians who participate in production, whether surplus value is redistributed in a direct manner, or indirectly through the intervention of the state, in the form of high salaries or various types of privileges (as in the case of Russia), this changes nothing about the fact that we are dealing with the rise of a new capitalist class".
The GCF, in continuity with Bilan's studies of the transition period, also drew out the necessary implications for this with regard to the proletariat's economic policy after the seizure of political power: on the one hand, the refusal to confuse statification with socialism, and the recognition that, after the disappearance of private capitalists, "the real danger of a return to capitalism will come essentially from the state sector. All the more because here capitalism attains an impersonal, almost ethereal form. Statification can serve to camouflage, for a considerable period, a process opposed to socialism". And on the other hand, the necessity for a proletarian economic policy which radically attacks the basic process of capital accumulation: "The capitalist principle of accumulated labour commanding living labour with a view to producing surplus value must be replaced by the principle of living labour commanding accumulated labour with a view to producing consumer goods to satisfy the needs of society's members". This did not mean that it was possible to abolish surplus labour as such, especially in the immediate aftermath of the revolution when a whole process of social reconstruction would be required. Nevertheless, the tendency to overturn the capitalist ratio between what the proletariat produced and what it consumed would have to serve "as an indication of which way the economy is going, as a barometer of the class nature of production".
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It was not accidental that the GCF had no fear about including the best insights of the German/Dutch left in its programmatic bases. In the post war period, the GCF devoted considerable effort to reopening discussion with this branch of the communist left (see our pamphlet La Gauche Communiste de France). Its clarity on issues such as the role of the trade unions and relationship between the party and the workers councils was certainly the fruit of this work of synthesis. But the same can also be said about its understanding of the question of state capitalism: the insights that the German left had developed some decades before were now integrated into the overall theoretical coherence of the Italian Fraction.
This did not mean that the whole problem of state capitalism had been closed once and for all: in particular, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the end of the 1980s was to demand further reflection and clarification about the way the capitalist economic crises affected these regimes and brought about their demise. But what had been settled once and for all by the end of the second imperialist holocaust was the Russian question as a class frontier: from now on, only those who recognised the capitalist and imperialist nature of the Stalinist regimes were able to remain within the proletarian camp and to defend internationalist principles in the face of imperialist war. The negative proof of this is provided by the trajectory of Trotskyism, whose defence of the USSR had contributed to their betrayal of internationalism during the war, and whose continued adherence to the thesis of the 'degenerated workers' state' turned them into apologists of the Russian imperialist bloc during the Cold War. The positive proof is provided by the groups of the communist left, whose capacity to defend and develop marxism in the period of capitalist decadence enabled them to finally resolve the Russian "enigma", and to keep the banner of authentic communism free from the stains of bourgeois propaganda.
CDW
In early May 2001, the International Communist Current held its 14th Congress.
As for any organisation in the workers' movement, its Congress is the ICC's sovereign body. This is the moment when the organisation evaluates its work since the previous Congress, and lays down its perspectives for the period to come.
This evaluation, these perspectives, are not drawn up in a vacuum. They are strictly determined by the conditions wherein the organisation is called to live up to its responsibilities, and first and foremost, of course, by the general historical context.
The Congress must therefore analyse the world as it is today, what is at stake in the events that affect social life on the economic level (which as marxists know, in the final analysis determines all the other aspects), at the level of the political life of the ruling class, and therefore of the conflicts between its different fractions, and finally at the level of the life of the only class capable of overthrowing the existing social order: the proletariat.
In examining the latter's situation, it is up to communists to examine not only the present state and the perspectives of the class struggle, the extent to which the working masses are aware of what is at stake in these struggles, but also the state and activity of the existing communist forces, which are a part of the proletariat.
Finally, and in this context, the Congress must examine the activity of our own organisation, and put forward the perspectives which will allow us to live up to our responsibilities within the class.
These are the points which this presentation of our 14th International Congress will consider.
The world today
In this same issue of the International Review, we are publishing the resolution on the international situation adopted by the Congress, which synthesises the reports presented to the Congress and the discussions based on these reports. In this sense, we need not go over every aspect of the discussions on the international situation. Suffice it to quote from the beginning of the resolution, which establishes the framework for what is at stake in the world today: "The alternative facing humanity at the beginning of the 21st century is the same as the one which faced it at the beginning of the 20th: the descent into barbarism or the renewal of society through the communist revolution. The revolutionary marxists who insisted on this inescapable dilemma in the turbulent period 1914-23 could hardly have imagined that their political descendants would still be obliged to insist on it again at the start of the new millennium. Indeed, even the 'post-68' generation of revolutionaries, who emerged from the revival of proletarian struggles after the long counter-revolution that set in during the 1920s, did not really expect that a declining capitalism could be quite so adept at living with its own contradictions as it has proved to be since the 1960s.
For the bourgeoisie, all this is further proof that capitalism is the last and now the only possible form of human society, that the communist project was never more than a utopian dream. This notion, a necessary cornerstone of all bourgeois ideology, was granted an apparent historical verification by the collapse of the 'Communist' bloc in 1989-91 (...) [Point 1]
Future generations will surely look at the bourgeois rationalisations of this decade with the utmost contempt; they will certainly see this period as one of unprecedented blindness, stupidity, horror and suffering (...) Humanity today does not merely face the prospect of barbarism in the future: the descent has already begun and it bears with it the danger of gradually eating away at the very premises of any future social regeneration. But contrary to the propaganda campaigns of the ruling class, the counter-force to the tendency towards barbarism - the communist revolution, logical culmination of the struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation - is no utopia, but remains a necessity demanded by the death agony of the present mode of production, and at the same time a concrete possibility given that the working class has neither disappeared nor been decisively defeated [Point 2]".
In fact, a major part of each of the reports presented, discussed, and adopted at the Congress1 was devoted to refuting the bourgeoisie's daily flood of lies, designed both to reassure itself and to justify its system's survival in the eyes of the exploited masses. This is because the sole aim of revolutionaries' analyses and discussions on the situation they are confronted with, is to sharpen as well as they can, the proletariat's weapons for its struggle against capitalism. The workers' movement understood long since that the proletariat's greatest strength, apart from its organisation, is its consciousness: a consciousness based on a profound understanding of the world it must transform and the enemy it must defeat. This is why the fighting nature of the Congress' documents and discussions in no way means that our organisation has succumbed to the temptation of being content with asserting mere slogans to denounce the lies of the bourgeoisie, quite the contrary. The depth with which revolutionaries examine a question is an integral part of their struggle. This has been a constant feature of the workers' movement for more than 150 years, but today its importance is still more fundamental. In a society in decadence since World War I, and which today is rotting on its feet, the ruling class is incapable of generating the slightest rational or coherent social thinking, still less any depth of thought. All it is able to do is to produce a proliferation of ideological gadgets, each one more superficial than the last but which are nonetheless presented as "profound truths" ("capitalism's definitive victory over communism", the "supreme values" of democracy, "globalisation", etc), even though they are devoid of the slightest originality, since their supposed "newness" is nothing but a lick of paint over the most shameless old platitudes. But however vacuous bourgeois "thought" may be today, thanks to the incessant din of the media it still manages to fill the workers' heads, and to colonise their minds. In this sense, the communists' efforts to get to the root of things is not just a means to understand the world today as fully as possible, it is the vital antidote to the destruction of thought, which is one expression of the decomposition into which society is plunging today. This is why our organisation decided that a major characteristic of the reports prepared for the Congress should be, not just the analysis of the three essential aspects of the world situation - the economic crisis, imperialist conflicts, and the balance of class forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat and therefore the perspectives for the proletarian struggle - but also the way in which the workers' movement posed these questions in the past.
At the turn of the century, such an approach was all the more necessary in that the last decade of the 20th century witnessed the overturning of a whole series of "givens" of the previous world situation.
At the end of 1989, the Eastern bloc collapsed like a house of cards, leading not only to the disintegration of the imperialist alignments which had emerged from the Yalta agreements of 1945, but also to a profound retreat by the working class, confronted as it was with an enormous campaign on the "end of communism". Such upheavals obviously demand that revolutionaries bring their analyses up to date, which is what our organisation has done in the course of events. Nonetheless, we thought it important to go back over the implications of these earthshaking events of 1989, and over two aspects in particular:
- how imperialist antagonisms find expression once the world is no longer divided into two blocs, as it had been since World War II;
- the notion of the historic course, in a period when because of the disappearance of the blocs, a new world war is no longer on the agenda.
Clarity on these questions is all the more important, in that they are the object of a good deal of confusion among the organisations of the Communist Left today. The Congress reports and resolutions therefore aimed to answer these confusions, which are in fact so many concessions to the ideological themes of the ruling class. In particular, these documents:
- refute the idea that there is any economic "rationality" underlying the wars that are breaking out in the present period (Point 9 of the resolution);
- insist that "the historic course towards massive class confrontations, opened by the international wave of struggles in 1968-72, has not been overturned. The working class has proved itself to be a barrier to world war. And while the danger remains that the more insidious process of decomposition could gradually overwhelm the class without capitalism having to inflict a frontal defeat upon it, the class still represents a historic obstacle to the full working out of capitalism's slide into military barbarism. More than this: it still retains the capacity to resist the effects of social decomposition through the development of its struggles and the consequent strengthening of its sense of identity and solidarity, which can offer a real alternative to the atomisation, the self-destructive violence and despair typical of this rotting system" (Point 13).
This concern to examine in detail, and eventually to criticise, the analyses of the present historic situation that exist within the proletarian political milieu, is part of our organisation's constant effort to define and clarify the responsibilities of revolutionary groups today - responsibilities which of course involve more than simply the analysis of the situation.
The responsibilities of revolutionary groups
The reports, resolution, and discussions at the Congress highlighted the existence today, after a decade of great difficulties, of a certain subterranean maturation of consciousness within the working class.
"The subterranean maturation of class consciousness, in a context where the historic course remains one towards class confrontations, expresses a process of reflection which - although it still only concerns a minority - is affecting wider sectors of the class, and is going deeper than during the period that followed 1989. The visible expressions of this maturation include:
- the numerical growth in the main organisations of the proletarian milieu, and in the environment of their sympathisers and contacts;
- the growing influence of the communist left in the swamp, including in parts of the anarchist milieu;
- the growing potential for the creation and development of proletarian discussion circles;
- certain experiments in regrouping minorities of combative workers, beginning to pose the problems of resistance to capital's attacks, but also the lessons of the struggles before 1989;
- some workers' struggles - though these remain for the moment the exception rather than the rule - where the class' self-activity and distrust for the trades unions is beginning to find expression" (Resolution on the activities of the ICC).
This situation lays new responsibilities on the groups who draw their origins from the Communist Left. An important part of the Congress work was therefore devoted to examining the evolution of these groups. This highlighted their difficulty in living up to their responsibilities. On the one hand, the cessation of the publication of Daad en Gedachte in Holland means that there is no longer any organised expression of the Dutch-German branch of the Communist Left (the "councilist" current). On the other hand, the groups which come from the tradition of the Italian Left (the various groups of the "Bordigist" tradition, each of which calls itself the International Communist Party, as well as the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) remain closed in on themselves, or are increasingly withdrawing into sectarianism, as we have already pointed out two years ago following their refusal to adopt a common position against the war in Kosovo (see International Review n°98).
And yet it is important that the new elements turning towards the Communist Left should find there the tradition of the Left in its entirety: a tradition in which were intimately connected the greatest rigour at the level of its political positions, and an attitude of openness in discussion with other groups of the Communist Left. This is a precondition for these organisations to play a real part in the emerging process of a new development of consciousness in the proletariat.
This is why our resolution on the international situation includes the specific responsibilities of our own organisation within those of today's revolutionary current as a whole:
"The responsibilities facing the working class are immense: nothing short of the fate of humanity is in its hands. This in turn confers tremendous responsibilities on the revolutionary minority, whose essential task in the coming period will be:
- to intervene in the day to day struggles of the class, insisting on the need for solidarity and the involvement of the widest possible number of workers in any movement to resist capitalism's attacks;
- to explain with all the means available to it (press, leaflets, meetings etc), and in a manner that is both a accessible and profound, why capitalism is bankrupt, why all its 'solutions' - particularly those touted by the left and extreme left - are a fraud, and what the real proletarian alternative is;
- to assist the efforts of radical minorities - struggle groups at the workplace, discussion circles, etc - to draw the lessons of recent experience, prepare for new struggles to come, while at the same time renewing the links with the proletariat's historic traditions ;
- to intervene within the proletarian political milieu, which is entering a period of significant growth, insisting that the milieu acts as a real reference point for serious debate and clarification for all the new elements coming towards it.
The historic course towards class confrontations also provides the context for the formation of the world communist party. The proletarian milieu of today provides the matrix of the future party, but there is no guarantee that it will actually engender it. Without responsible and rigorous preparation by today's revolutionaries, the party will be still-born, and the massive class conflicts we are heading for will not take the vital step from revolt to revolution" (Point 15).
The Congress considered that our organisation can evaluate positively its ability to carry out its responsibilities during the last two years. Nonetheless, it concluded that the ICC, in common with the rest of the class, is subject to the damaging pressure of society's increasing decomposition and that consequently it should remain vigilant against the different expressions of this pressure, as much in its efforts at working out its own analyses and political positions as in its organisational life. More than ever, the fight to build a communist organisation, vital instrument of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle, is a permanent and daily one.
We know now that the attack on New York has left more than 6,000 dead. Over and above the mere figure - appalling enough in itself - the destruction of the World Trade Centre marks a turning point in history whose full implications we cannot yet measure. It is the first attack on American territory since Pearl Harbour in 1941. The first bombardment of continental America in history. The first bomb attack on a major industrial country since World War II. It is a real act of war, as the media put it. And like all acts of war, it is an abominable crime visited on a defenceless civilian population. As always, the working class was the main victim of this act of war. The cleaners, secretaries, maintenance and office workers who constituted the vast majority of the dead were our people.
We deny any right to the hypocritical bourgeoisie and its hired media to weep over the murdered workers. The ruling capitalist class is already responsible for too many massacres: the awful slaughter of World War I; World War II, more terrible still, when for the first time the civilian population was the main target. Let us remember what the bourgeoisie has shown itself capable of: the bombing of London, Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the millions of dead in the concentration camps and the gulags.
Let us remember the hell visited on the civilian population and the routed Iraqi army during the Gulf War in 1991, and its hundreds of thousands of dead. Let us remember the daily bloodletting that is still going on in Chechnya, with the complicity of the Western democratic states. Let us remember the complicity of the Belgian, French, and US states in the Algerian civil war and the horrible pogroms in Rwanda.
And let us remember that the Afghan population, today living in terror of America's cruise missiles, has suffered twenty years of uninterrupted warfare which has left two million refugees in Iran, another two million in Pakistan, more than a million dead, and half the population dependent on food supplied by the UN and other NGOs.
These are just some examples among many of capitalism's filthy work, in the throes of an endless economic crisis and its own irremediable decadence. A capitalism at bay.
The attack on New York was not an "attack on civilisation". On the contrary, it was itself the expression of bourgeois "civilisation".
Now, with unspeakable hypocrisy, the ruling class of this rotting system stands before us, its hands still dripping with the blood of the workers and the wretched of the earth murdered by its bombs, and it dares to pretend to weep for the deaths for which it is responsible.
Today's campaigns against terrorism by the Western democracies are particularly hypocritical. Not only because the destruction visited on civilian populations by these democracies' state terror is a thousand times bloodier than the worst terrorist attack (the millions of dead in the wars in Korea and Vietnam, to mention only those). Not only because, on the pretext of fighting terrorism, these democracies are joining hands -amongst others - with Russia, whose acts of war against its own civilian population in Chechnya they have denounced a thousand times. Not only because they have never hesitated to use coups d'Etat and bloody military dictatorships to impose their interests (the US in Chile for example). They are hypocrites also because they have never denied themselves the right to use the terrorist weapon and to sacrifice civilian lives, if these methods could serve their interests of the moment. Let us remember just a few examples drawn from recent history:
During the 1980s, Russian aircraft shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing in Soviet Union airspace; it emerged afterwards that the aircraft's deviation from its normal route had been arranged by US military intelligence, in order to study the USSR's reaction to an incursion over its territory.
During the Iran-Iraq war, the US shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf. It was a warning to the Iranian state not to try to spread the war to the Gulf emirates.
During its nuclear weapons tests on the Pacific island of Mururoa, the French secret service sent its agents to New Zealand to mine and sink the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior.
During the 1970s, a terrorist bomb in Bologna station which killed a hundred people, was at first attributed to the Red Brigades, before it was discovered that in fact it had been planted by the Italian secret police. The latter were inextricably tied to a mafia-style movement around the Gladio network set up by the US throughout Europe, and which was also suspected of a series of bloody attacks carried out in Belgium.
During the civil war in Nicaragua, the Reagan government delivered arms and money to the Contra guerrillas. The action was illegal, and had to be hidden from the US Congress. It was paid for by arms sold illegally to Iran, and by the proceeds of CIA drug trafficking.
The very democratic Israeli state - already responsible for the slaughter of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatila - is at this very moment conducting a campaign of assassination and terrorist attacks in Palestinian territory, against the leaders of Fatah, Hamas, and others.[1]
It is impossible to say with certainty today whether Ossama Bin Laden really is responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers, as the US state accuses him of being. But if the Bin Laden theory does turn out to be true, then this is really a case of a petty warlord escaping from the control of his former masters. Bin Laden is not just some fanatical terrorist overfed on Islam. On the contrary, his career began as a link in the chain of American imperialism during the war against the USSR in Afghanistan. Scion of one the richest families in Saudi Arabia, closely linked to the Saudi royal family, Bin Laden was recruited by the CIA in Istanbul in 1979. "War had just broken out in Afghanistan, and Istanbul was the conduit chosen by the Americans for passing volunteers through to the Afghan resistance. Bin Laden was first responsible for logistics, then became the financial intermediary for the arms trade, jointly financed by the US and Saudi Arabia to the tune of about $1.2 billion every year. In 1980, he arrived in Afghanistan where he remained almost until the departure of the Russians in 1989. He was responsible for sharing out the money among the different factions of the resistance: a key and eminently political role. At the time, he enjoyed complete support of both the Americans and the Saudi regime, through his friend Prince Turki bin Faisal, the king's brother and the head of the Saudi secret service, as well as of his family. He changed 'clean' to 'dirty' money, and then the reverse" (Le Monde, 15th September). According to the same paper, Bin Laden also set up a network of opium traders, together with his friend Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami and also supported by the Americans. Those who today are denouncing each other as "the great Satan" and "number one world terrorist" as if they were irreconcilable foes, are in reality the inseparable allies of yesterday.[2]
Revolutionaries and the working class need to go beyond the disgust we feel at the murders in New York, and the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie when it denounces them. We need to understand the reasons for the massacre, if we are not to remain mere spectators terrified by the event. Against the bourgeois media, which tells us that the fault lies with fundamentalism, "pariah states", or "fanatics", we reply that it is the entire capitalist system that is really responsible.
For us[3], the beginning of the last century was marked by the entry of capitalist society world-wide into its period of decadence. By the 1900s, capitalism had completed its historic mission: the integration of the entire planet into one world market; the elimination of old power structures (feudal, tribal, etc) has laid the basis for the construction of a truly human community for the first time in history. At the same time, the productive forces' arrival at this stage of development meant that capitalist relations of production became a barrier to their further development. Capitalism could no longer be a progressive system. It had become a straitjacket for society.
The decadence of a social form never opens a historic period of mere decline or stagnation. On the contrary, the conflict between productive forces and relations of production can only be a violent one. Historically, this is what happened during the decadence of the slave economy of the Roman Empire, marked by convulsions, foreign and civil wars, and barbarian invasions, until the rise of new, feudal relations of production allowed the blossoming of a new form of society. In the same way, the decadence of the feudal mode of production was marked by two centuries of destructive war, until the bourgeois revolutions (in particular in England in the 17th century, and in France in the 18th) demolished the power of the feudal lords and absolute monarchs, opening the period of domination by the capitalist bourgeoisie.
The capitalist mode of production is the most dynamic in human history, only surviving through a continuous overthrow of existing production techniques and - still more important - through a continual expansion of its field of action. Still less than any other mode of production, could capitalism's decadence be a period of peace. Materially, capitalism's entry into decadence was marked by two gigantic and opposing events: the First World War, and the 1917 workers' revolution in Russia.
With the war of 1914, the confrontation between great imperialist powers would no longer take the form of limited wars, or conflicts in far-off countries during the rush for colonies. Henceforth, imperialist conflicts would be world-wide, incredibly bloody and destructive.
With the revolution of October 1917, the Russian proletariat succeeded for the first time in history in overthrowing a capitalist state; the working class revealed its nature as a revolutionary class, capable of putting an end to the barbarity of war and opening the way towards the formation of a new society.
In its Manifesto, the Third International - created in 1919 with the precise aim of leading the proletariat on the road to world revolution - declared that the period opened up by the war was that of capitalist decadence, the "period of wars and revolutions" when - as Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto - the choice is posed between the victory of the revolution and "the common ruin of the contending classes". The revolutionaries of the Communist International believed that the choice lay between victory, or a descent into hell for all of human civilisation.
They certainly could not imagine the horrors of World War II, the concentration camps, the atomic bomb. Still less could they imagine the unprecedented historic situation we find ourselves in today.
Just as the war of 1914 marked capitalism's entry into its period of decadence, the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 marked its entry into a new phase of that decadence: the phase of capitalism's decomposition. The Third World War, under preparation since the end of the Second in 1945, has not happened. Since May 1968 in France, and the biggest strike in history, a succession of workers' struggles shook the main capitalist countries until the end of the 1980s, showing that the world proletariat, and above all the proletariat in the heartlands of the capitalist system, was not prepared to go to war as they did in 1914, or even as in 1939. But although the working class refused the war implicitly, it was unable to raise itself to an awareness of its real place in capitalist society, and of its role as capitalism's gravedigger. One of the most striking examples of this difficulty, is the inability of today's communist groups to be anything more than tiny, scattered groups, without any significant echo inside the working class.
The menace of world war between two imperialist blocs has disappeared, but the danger for humanity remains as great as ever. Capitalism's decomposition is not just another phase, to be succeeded by others. It is the final phase of decadence, which can only have one of two outcomes: either the victory of the proletarian revolution and the passage to a new form of human society, or an ever more rapid fall into the infinite barbarity already suffered by many underdeveloped countries, and which has just struck for the first time at the very heart of bourgeois society. This is what is at stake today.
The disappearance of the Russian bloc has not put an end to imperialist rivalry, far from it. On the contrary, it has allowed the open expression of the imperialist ambitions, not just of the old European great powers, but also of secondary regional powers, right down to the smallest countries and the most petty warlords.
In 1989, President Bush announced the end of the conflict with the "Evil Empire", promising us a new era of peace and prosperity. In 2001, the USA is struck to the heart for the first time in its history and Bush's son, president in his turn, is proposing a crusade of "good against evil" which will last until "the eradication of all terrorist groups with a world reach". On 16th September Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, repeated that this will be "a long, far-reaching, and sustained effort", which will extend over "not just days or weeks, but years" (quoted in Le Monde, 18th September). We are thus faced with a war whose end not even the ruling class claims to see. Gone is the celebration of ten years of American "prosperity", its place taken by the "blood, sweat and tears" that Winston Churchill promised the British people in 1940.
The situation that we are facing today confirms word for word the resolution adopted by our 14th Congress[4] in the spring of this year: "the fragmentation of the old bloc structures and disciplines unleashed national rivalries on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an increasingly chaotic struggle of each against all from the world's greatest powers to the meanest local warlords (?) The wars characteristic of the present phase of capitalist decomposition are no less imperialist wars than the wars of previous phases of decadence, but they have become more widespread, more uncontrollable, and more difficult to bring to even a temporary close (?) [the capitalist states] are all caught up in a logic which escapes their control and which makes less and less sense even in capitalist terms, and this is precisely what makes the situation facing mankind so dangerous and unstable".
As of the time of writing, nobody - no state, no terrorist group - has admitted to the attacks. It is nonetheless evident that these demanded a lengthy preparation and significant material means. The debate among specialists remains open as to whether they could have been the sole work of a terrorist group, or whether the extent of the action required the involvement of some state's secret service. All the public declarations of the US authorities point at Ossama Bin Laden's Al Qaida organisation, but should we necessarily take these declarations at face value?[5]
Without any really concrete elements to hand, and with the limited confidence we can accord the bourgeois media, we are therefore obliged to follow the good old method of any detective worthy of the name, and look for a motive. Who profits from the crime?
Could another great power have organised the coup? Could a European state, or even Russia or China, its ambitions overshadowed by the US superpower, have tried to deal a blow at the heart of the United States and so discredit its superpower image in the world? At first sight, such a thesis seems to us unbelievable. The results have been all too predictable: a reassertion of the US' determination to strike militarily wherever they please on the planet, and of its ability to draw all the other powers in their wake, willy nilly.
Then there are the so-called "pariah states" such as Iraq, Iran, Libya etc. Here again, these seem to us unlikely culprits. Apart from the fact that these states are always less "pariahs" than we are led to believe (for example, the present Iranian government is rather favourable towards a rapprochement with the US), it is obvious that they would run an enormous risk if ever the crime were discovered. They would be threatened with complete military obliteration, for an advantage which seems highly uncertain.
In the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians accuse each other of terrorist involvement. We can eliminate straight away the Palestinian hypothesis: Arafat and his cronies know very well that only the US prevents Israel from wiping out their runt of a state, and for them the attack on New York has been an unmitigated disaster immediately discrediting in US eyes everything Arab. By the same reasoning, in reverse, we might consider the Israeli trail - an attack aimed at showing the world, and especially the US, that it is time to finish with the "terrorist" Arafat: Mossad[6] would certainly be capable of organising the crime, but it is difficult to imagine Mossad operating on this scale without the acquiescence of the United States.
Perhaps America's accusations are justified, and the attacks are the crime of a group somewhere in the enormous nebula of terrorist groups festering in the Middle East and around the world. In this case, it would be much more difficult to determine the motive, since these groups have no easily identifiable state interests. Moreover, even if the Al Qaida group turns out to be guilty, this does not necessarily clarify anything: the disintegration of the capitalist economy has for years been accompanied by the development of a huge parallel black economy based on drugs, prostitution, the arms trade and the smuggling of refugees. The austere Taliban regime has not - far from it - prevented Afghanistan from becoming the world's main supplier of opium and heroin. In Russia the entrepreneur Berezovsky, an intimate friend of the Yeltsin clique, has barely disguised his business links with the Chechen mafia. In Latin America, leftist guerrillas like the Colombian FARC finance their armies through the heroin trade. Everywhere, states manipulate these groups in their own interests. And this has been going on since at least the 1939-45 war, when the American army took the Mafia gangster Lucky Luciano out of prison to prepare the landing of Allied troops in Sicily. Nor is it to be excluded that certain secret services could act on their own initiative, independently of their governments.
Our last hypothesis might seem completely "crazy": that the American government, or a fraction within the CIA for example, might have, if not actually prepared the attacks at least have provoked them and let them come to fruition without intervening[7]. It is true that the damage done to the United State's credibility world-wide, and to the economy, seem so enormous that such a theory is barely imaginable.
Nonetheless, before putting it completely to one side, it is worth making a more detailed comparison with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (a comparison which has frequently been made in the press), and to take a short historical detour.
On 8th December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked the American base of Pearl Harbour, in Hawaii, where almost the entire US Pacific fleet was stationed. The attack took the military authorities of the base completely by surprise and caused massive damage: most of the ships at anchor were destroyed, along with more than half the aircraft, 4,500 American servicemen were killed; the Japanese lost only 30 aircraft. Before the attack, most of the US population were opposed to entering the war against the Axis powers, and the isolationist fraction of the American represented by the "America First Committee" had a powerful, if not a dominant influence. The "cowardly and hypocritical" Japanese attack silenced all reticence. President Roosevelt, who had been in favour of entering the war from the outset and had done everything possible to support the British war effort, declared: "We are forced to realise that modern war, conducted in the Nazi style, is a disgusting business. We did not want to enter the war. We are in it, and we will fight with all our strength". Henceforth, he was able to build an unfailing national unity around his policies.
After the war, the Republican Party[8] backed a far-reaching inquiry to find out why US forces had been taken so completely by surprise. From the inquiry, it emerged clearly that political authorities at the highest level had been responsible for the Japanese attack and its success. On the one hand, in the US-Japanese negotiations which were being conducted at the time of the attack, the US side had imposed unacceptable conditions on the Japanese, in particular an embargo on US oil exports on which the Japanese economy was largely dependent. On the other, although the authorities were well aware of Japanese military preparations (thanks to their possession of the Japanese military codes, and their interception of the radio messages of the Japanese high command), they never passed on this information to the commanders of the Pearl Harbour base. Roosevelt went so far as to disown Admiral Richardson, who had opposed the regroupment of the entire Pacific fleet in the same base. The only ships absent from the base were the three aircraft carriers normally stationed there, which had left port a few days earlier, and which were to prove by far the most important during the war. In fact, most serious historians today consider that the US government deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbour in order to justify the US' entry into the war, and to rally the entire population and the other sectors of its own bourgeoisie behind the war effort.
It is difficult today to say who is responsible for the attack on New York and in particular whether it is a new version of the attack on Pearl Harbour. But what we can say without any doubt, is that the United States are the first to profit from it, demonstrating an impressive ability to take advantage of their own reversals.
The Economist explains it very succinctly: The coalition that America has assembled is extraordinary. An alliance that includes Russia, the NATO countries, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states, with the tacit agreement of China and Iran, would have been inconceivable on 10th September.
For the first time in its history, NATO has invoked article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty, obliging all the member states to give assistance to any state attacked by a foreign power. Even more extraordinary, Russia's President Putin has agreed to let Russian bases be used for "humanitarian" operations (like the "humanitarian" bombing of Kosovo no doubt), and has even offered logistical help; Russia is no longer opposing the use of bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for American military strikes on Afghanistan: US and British troops are already present on the ground, giving their aid to the Northern Alliance, the only Afghan opposition with forces still in the field.
Obviously none of this is disinterested. Russia intends to profit from the situation to silence any criticism of its bloody war in Chechnya, and to cut off supplies delivered to the rebels from Afghanistan (which the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence is certainly involved in). Uzbekistan has welcomed American forces as a means to put pressure on its overbearing Russian neighbour.
As for the European states, their support for the US has been reluctant and each of them intends to preserve its freedom of action. For the moment, only the British bourgeoisie has demonstrated a total and military solidarity with the USA, with a force of 20,000 men already on exercises in the Persian Gulf (the biggest operation of its kind since the Falklands War) and the despatch of elite SAS units to Uzbekistan. Although the British bourgeoisie has distanced itself somewhat from the United States in recent years, with its support for the creation of a European rapid reaction force able to act independently of the Americans, and its naval co-operation with the French, its own history in the Middle East and its vital historic interests in the region oblige it today to line up behind the US. Like the others, Britain is playing its own game, but in this case the game demands a faithful co-operation with the Americans. As Lord Palmerston said in the 19th century: "We have neither eternal allies, nor permanent enemies. We have only eternal interests, which it is our duty to defend" (quoted in Kissinger, Diplomacy). This has not prevented Lord Robertson, the current NATO General Secretary, from insisting on the independence of each member state: "It is clear that there is a solemn moral obligation on each state to offer its assistance. That will depend both on what the state under attack decides is appropriate, and also on the way in which the member states consider that they can contribute to the operation" (Le Monde, 15th September). France is a good deal more equivocal: for the Defence Minister Alain Richard, NATO's principles "of mutual defence will be applied [but] each nation will do so with the means it judges appropriate"; while "military action may be one tool for dealing with the terrorist threat, there are others". "Solidarity does not mean blindness" adds Henri Emmanuelli, a leading figure in the governing French Socialist Party.[9] President Chirac took the opportunity of his visit to Washington to make it absolutely clear that "We can of course consider military action, but only insofar as we have decided jointly on the objectives and the methods of an action whose aim is to eliminate terrorism" (quotations drawn from Le Monde, 15th and 20th September).
There is nonetheless a difference between the situation today and that of the Gulf War in 1990-91. Eleven years ago, the Alliance brought together by the United States included the armed forces of several European and Arab states (Saudi Arabia and Syria in particular). Today by contrast, the US has indicated that it intends to act alone on the military level. This gives us some idea of how far both their diplomatic isolation and their distrust of their own "Allies" has increased since the last war. Of course, they will force the others to support them, in particular by making use of their intelligence services, but they will tolerate no hindrance to their own military action.
We can point out another way that the dominant fraction of the US bourgeoisie is taking advantage of the situation. There has always existed an "isolationist" fraction within the American bourgeoisie, which holds that the country is adequately protected by the oceans, and sufficiently wealthy, not to involve itself in the world's affairs. It was this fraction that resisted US entry into World War II, and which Roosevelt reduced to silence - as we have seen - following the attack on Pearl Harbour. It is clear that this fraction no longer has any influence: Congress has just voted an extra $40 billion for defence and the "anti-terrorist" struggle, of which $20 billion can be spent entirely at the President's discretion. In other words, this represents a formidable strengthening of the power of the Federal State.
The American police and secret services have been remarkably rapid in pointing the finger at the presumed guilty party: Ossama Bin Laden and his Taliban hosts.[10] And long before it has been able to line up the slightest concrete proof, the American state has already designated its target and declared its intentions: to do away with the Taliban state. At the time of writing (and we can obviously expect the situation to have evolved significantly before this Review comes off the press), the press has announced that five British and American aircraft carriers are in the region or on their way, that US aircraft are landing in Uzbekistan, and that an attack in planned in the next 48 hours. When we compare this with the six months of preparation before the attack on Iraq in 1991, we can only wonder if it was not planned in advance. At all events, it is obvious that the US bourgeoisie has decided to impose its order on Afghanistan. Equally obviously, this is not to conquer the economic wealth or the markets of this exhausted country. So, why Afghanistan?
While the country has never been of the slightest interest from the economic point of view, a glance at the map is enough to understand its strategic importance during the last two centuries. Since the creation of the Raj (the British Empire in India) and throughout the 19th century, Afghanistan was a flash-point for the confrontation between British and Russian imperialism, in what was called at the time "The Great Game". Britain viewed with suspicion Russian imperialism's advance into the emirates of Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bokhara, and still more so towards Britain's sphere of influence in Persia (present-day Iran). Not without reason, the British considered that the final aim of the Tsar's armies was the conquest of India, from which they drew enormous profits and a great prestige. This is why they twice sent expeditionary forces into Afghanistan (the first suffered a humiliating defeat, losing 16,000 men with only one survivor).
During the 20th century, the discovery of enormous oil reserves in the Middle East and the growing dependence on oil of the developed economies - and above all of their armies - still further increased the Middle East's strategic importance. After World War II, Afghanistan became the regional lynch-pin for the armed confrontation between the two great imperialist blocs: the US brought together Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan in CENTO (the Central Treaty Organisation), Iran was stuffed with US radar stations, and Turkey became one of the most heavily armed countries in the Middle East. Pakistan received US support as a counter-weight to an India that proved too drawn to Soviet seduction.
The Islamic "revolution" in Iran withdrew the country from the American line-up. In 1979, Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, in an attempt to profit from this moment of American weakness, was thus a dangerous threat for the whole strategic position of the US bloc not only in the Middle East, but throughout Southern Asia. Unable to attack the Russian positions directly (in part due to the spectacular resurgence of workers' struggles with the massive strikes in Poland), the US intervened by guerrilla proxy. From then on the US, with the Pakistani state and its ISI as henchmen, supported what was doubtless the world's most backward "liberation" movement with the world's most advanced weapons. And to stay in the game, the British secret service and the French DGSE hurried to give their own aid to Massoud's Northern Alliance.
On the eve of the 21st century, two new events increased still further Afghanistan's strategic importance. On the one hand, the break-up of the Russian empire and the appearance of shaky new states (the "five Stans" - Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan - Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan) whetted the imperialist appetites of the second-rate powers: Turkey tried to build alliances with the new Turkish-language states, while Pakistan played on the Taliban government to reinforce its influence and gain strategic depth in its undeclared war with India in Kashmir, not to mention Russia's attempts to re-impose their military presence in the region. On the other hand, the discovery of important new oil reserves around the Caspian sea, especially in Kazakhstan attracted the attention of the great Western oil companies.
We do not have the space here to try to unravel all the rivalries and inter-imperialist conflicts which have shaken the region since 1989.[11] But to get some idea of the powder-keg surrounding Afghanistan, we need only list a few of the current conflicts and rivalries:
The absurd geography left by the disintegration of the USSR has left the region's richest and most densely populated area - the Ferghana valley - divided between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, in such a way that none of these countries possesses a direct road from their capital to their most populous region!
After a five year civil war, the Islamists of the United Tajik Opposition have entered the government; however, it is suspected that they have not abandoned their ties to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (the largest guerrilla organisation), in particular the IMU has to pass through Tajikistan (and across its borders patrolled by Russian troops) in order to attack Uzbekistan from its bases in Afghanistan.
Uzbekistan is the only country to have refused the presence of Russian troops, and is therefore subject to all kinds of pressure from the Russians.
Pakistan has always supported the Taliban, including with the provision of 2,000 troops during the last offensive against the Northern Alliance. It hopes to gain "strategic depth" relative to Russia and India, and to continue profiting from the lucrative heroin trade, much of which passes through Pakistan and the sticky fingers of ISI generals.
China has its own problems with Uighur separatists in Xinjiang, but is also trying to extend its influence in the region through the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, regrouping the "five Stans" (except Turkmenistan, officially recognised as neutral by the UN) and Russia. At the same time, China is trying to remain on good terms with the Taliban, and has just signed an industrial and commercial agreement with their government.
Obviously, the USA is not remaining on the side-lines. They already support the unsavoury Uzbek government: "The U.S. military is familiar with Uzbekistan's military and the air base outside Tashkent. U.S. troops have participated in military training exercises with Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz troops as part of the Centrazbat exercises held under NATO's Partnership for Peace Program. Several of those exercises took place at the Chirchik military base outside Tashkent. Uzbekistan has also been active in courting U.S. support since the country became independent in 1991, often at the expense of Uzbekistan's relations with Russia (?) During a visit to the region by then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright in 2000, the U.S. pledged several million dollars in military equipment to Uzbekistan, and U.S. special forces have trained Uzbek troops in counter-terrorism methods and mountain warfare" (www.eurasianet.org) [133].
The United States are thus intervening in a veritable powder keg, supposedly to bring with them "Enduring Freedom". Obviously, we cannot today foresee what will be the end result. By contrast, the history of the Gulf War shows us that ten years after the end of the war:
the region is not at peace, since the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, between Turks and Kurds, between governments and fundamentalist guerrillas are as bitter as ever, while British and American planes are still bombing Iraq on a daily basis;
American troops are based in the region for the long term, thanks to their new bases in Saudi Arabia, and this presence has itself become a source of instability (as witness the anti-American terrorist attack in Dharhan, to mention but one).
We can therefore say with certainty that the intervention being prepared in Afghanistan will bring neither peace, nor liberty, nor justice, nor stability, but only more war and misery to stoke the fires of resentment and despair in the populations - the same despair that gripped the kamikazes of 11th September.
Only days before the attack on New York, Hewlett-Packard announced its take-over of Compaq. The merger is intended to cut 14,500 jobs. This is only one example among many of the crisis which is deepening and preparing to strike the working class more and more heavily.
A few days after the attack, United Airlines, US Air, and Boeing announced tens of thousands of redundancies. Since then, their example as been followed by airlines and aircraft manufacturers throughout the world (Bombardier Aircraft, Air Canada, Scandinavian Airlines, British Airways, and Swissair just to mention the latest).
Better still, the ruling class has the gall to use the attack on the World Trade Centre as an explanation for the new crisis that is hammering the workers.[12] The explanation has an appearance of truth, since $6.6 trillion have gone up in smoke in the stock exchange crash that followed the 11th September. But in reality, the crisis was already there; the bosses were merely jumping on the opportunity. According to Leo Mullin, CEO of Delta Airlines, "even if Congress has approved an overall financial package for the industry, the extra liquidity has been calculated according to the loss of business due solely to the events of 11th September (?) In fact, demand is falling while running costs are increasing. Delta is therefore suffering from negative cash flow" (Le Monde).
The capitalist world is already in the grip of recession, which is of course expressed first and foremost by attacks on the working class. In the United States, between January and the end of August 2001, the number of unemployed has risen by more than one million. Giants like Motorola and Lucent, the Canadian Nortel, the French Alcatel, the Swedish Ericsson, have been laying off by the tens of thousands. In Japan, unemployment has risen from 2%, to 5% this year.[13] The startling rapidity of new announcements of job cuts (57,700 between 17th and 21st September in the US) show how the bosses have leapt on the pretext to put into operation redundancy plans that were already being prepared months ago.
Not only must the working class pay for the crisis, it must also pay for the war, and not only in the US where the bill already stands at $40 billion at least. All the European governments have agreed to increase their efforts to create a rapid reaction force which will give the European powers a capacity for independent action. In Germany, DM20 billion for restructuring the armed forces have still not found their way into the budget. Doubtless, room will soon be found for them. That bill too, the workers will have to pay.
The solidarity of national unity is decidedly a one-way street: from the workers, towards the ruling class! And the cynicism of the ruling class, which uses the workers' dead as a pretext for job cuts, knows no limits.
Today, as always, the working class is the first victim of war.
Victim first of all in its being, but above all victim in its consciousness. The working class is the only force capable of putting an end to this system that is responsible for the war; the ruling class uses the war to call, ever and again, for national unity. The unity of the exploited with their exploiters. The unity of those who are the first to suffer from capitalism with those who draw from it their pleasure and their privilege.
The first reaction of the proletarians of New York, one of the greatest working class cities on the planet, was not one of gung-ho chauvinism. First, there was the spontaneous reaction of solidarity towards the victims, as we saw in the queues to give blood, in the thousands of individual gestures of help and comfort. Then in the workers' districts, where the dead were mourned though they could not be buried, posters appeared with declarations: "Hate-free zone", "To live as one world is the only way to honour the dead", "War is not the answer". Obviously, such slogans are soaked in democratic and pacifist sentiment. Without a movement of struggle capable of giving rise to a powerful resistance to capitalism's attacks, and above all without a revolutionary movement able to make itself heard in the working class, this spontaneous solidarity can only be swept away in the immense wave of patriotism broadcast by the media since the attack. Those who try to refuse the logic of war risk being absorbed by pacifism, which always becomes the first warmonger when "the nation is in danger", as witness this individual declaration on the Willamette Week Online web site (www.wweek.com): [134] "When a nation is under attack, the first decision must be whether to surrender or to fight. I believe there is no middle ground here: You either fight or you don't fight, and doing nothing amounts to surrender". For the ecologists, "Today the nation is united: we do not want to appear to be in disagreement with the government" (Alan Mettrick, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defence Council, 530,000 members, quoted in Le Monde, 28th September).
"World peace cannot be preserved by utopian or frankly reactionary plans, such as international tribunals of capitalist diplomats, diplomatic conventions on 'disarmament' (...) etc. It will be impossible to eliminate, or even to hold back imperialism, as long as the capitalist classes exercise their uncontested class domination. The only means to resist them successfully, and to preserve world peace, is the international proletariat's capacity for political action and its revolutionary will to throw its weight into the balance".
This is what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1915 ("Theses on the tasks of international Social-Democracy"), in the midst of one of the blackest periods humanity has ever known, when the proletarians of the most developed countries were slaughtering each other on the battlefields of imperialist war. Today too, the period is a terrible one, for workers and for those revolutionaries who keep flying the banner of the communist revolution, whatever the cost. But like Rosa Luxemburg, we are convinced that the alternative is socialism or barbarism, and that the world working class remains the only power able to resist barbarism and create socialism. With Rosa Luxemburg, we declare that the involvement of the workers in the war "is an assault, not on the bourgeois culture of the past, but on the socialist culture of the future, a lethal blow against that force which carries the future of humanity within itself and which alone can bear the precious treasures of the past into a better society. Here capitalism lays bear its death's head; here it betrays the fact that its historical rationale is used up; its continued domination is no longer reconcilable to the progress of humanity (...) The madness will cease and the bloody demons of hell will vanish only when workers (...) finally awake from their stupor, extend to each other a brotherly hand, and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers and the shrill cry of capitalist hyenas with labour's old and mighty battle cry: Proletarians of all lands, unite!" (Junius Pamphlet, 1915, published on www.marxists.org [135]).
Jens, 3/10/2001
1 We could add that all states maintain "dirty tricks" sections in their secret services; when they don't use their own assassins, they are always ready to pay for the services of an independent operator.
2 In fact, according to the revelations of Robert Gates (previously boss of the CIA), the US did not merely respond to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, but deliberately provoked it by aiding the anti-Soviet Afghan opposition of the day. Interviewed by Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski (ex-security adviser to President Carter) replied: "This secret operation was a great idea. It's effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you expect me to regret it? The day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter words to the effect that: 'We now have the opportunity of giving Russia its Vietnam (?) What is more important in the eyes of world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet empire?" (quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2001).
3 See our pamphlet on The Decadence of Capitalism.
4 Published in International Review n°106.
5 We can recall, for example, the trial of the Libyan secret service agents accused of perpetrating the Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am airliner. Great Britain and the US have continued to insist that the Libyans be judged, even when the evidence suggested that Syria was responsible. But then at the time, the US was trying to win over the Syrians to support the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
6 The Israeli secret service.
7 We could also envisage the possibility that, in such a case, the CIA might not have been fully aware of the scale of what was being prepared.
8 Roosevelt was a Democrat.
9 Let us note in passing that the so-called French Communist Party has expressed no such reservations: on 13th September, the PCF national council observed two minutes silence to express its "solidarity with all the American people, to all the citizens of this great country, and to the leaders they have chosen". And what can we say about the headline of the Trotskyist paper Lutte Ouvrière: "You can't support wars all over the world without them coming back to hit you one day". Translation: "Assassinated American workers, it serves you right".
10 One cannot help wondering about this rapidity: a hired car discovered barely hours after the attack, with aviation manuals written in Arabic, when the pilots had been living for months, if not years, in the US and had completed their pilot's license there; the reported discovery in the ruins of the World Trade Centre of a passport belonging to one of the terrorists, which is supposed to have avoided destruction by the explosion of several hundred tons of kerosene?
11 In particular, we will not go into the constant conflicts over the construction of new oil pipelines to carry oil from the Caspian Sea to the developed countries. Russia is trying to impose a route through Chechnya and Russia to Novorossiisk on the Russian Black Sea coast, while the American government is promoting the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan route (ie Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey) which would completely sideline the Russians. We will simply note in passing that the US government has had to impose its choice against the will of the oil majors, who considered it too expensive and unprofitable.
12 Just as they did in 1974, when the crisis was supposed to be the fault of the rise in oil prices, the same explanation that was served up again in 1980. As for the crisis of 1990-93, it was supposed to be the fault of the Gulf War?
13 We should say that while this rate may seem relatively low compared to other developed countries, it shows the success of the Japanese state not so much in limiting unemployment as in fiddling the figures.
Since the report on the class struggle to the last Congress, there have been no immediate shifts in the overall situation facing the class. The proletariat has demonstrated, through various struggles, that its combativity remains intact and that its discontent is growing (eg transport workers in New York, 'general strike' in Norway, struggles in numerous sectors in France, postal workers in Britain, movements in peripheral countries like Brazil, China, etc). But the situation continues to be much more clearly defined by the difficulties facing the class - difficulties imposed by the conditions of decomposing capitalism but continually reinforced by the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns about the 'end of the working class', the 'new economy', 'globalisation', and even 'anti-capitalism'. Within the proletarian political milieu, meanwhile, there remain fundamental disagreements about the balance of class forces, with certain groups using the ICC's 'idealist' view of the historic course as a reason for not participating in any joint initiative against the war in Kosovo. This is certainly one reason to focus this report not so much on the struggles of the recent period, but on trying to deepen our understanding of the concept of the historic course as it has developed in the workers' movement: if we are to answer these criticisms effectively, we must obviously go to the historical root of the misunderstandings that infect the proletarian milieu. Another reason is that one of the weaknesses in our own analyses of recent struggles has been a tendency towards immediatism, a tendency to concentrate on particular struggles as 'proof' of our position on the course, or on the difficulties of the struggle as a possible basis for calling our conceptions into question. What follows is very far from an exhaustive survey; it's main aim is to assist the organisation to acquaint itself more closely with the general method through which marxism has approached this question.
The concept of the "historic course", as developed above all by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, is derived from the historic alternative developed by the marxist movement in the 19th century: the alternative between socialism and barbarism. In other words, the capitalist mode of production contains within itself two contradictory tendencies and possibilities - the tendency towards self-destruction, and the tendency towards the world-wide association of labour and the emergence of a new and higher social order. It must be emphasised that for marxism, neither of these tendencies are imposed on capitalist society from the outside, as for example in the bourgeois theories which explain manifestations of barbarism like Nazism or Stalinism as alien intrusions on capitalist normality, or as in the various mystical and utopian visions of the advent of communist society. Both the possible outcomes of capital's historic trajectory are the logical culmination of its innermost life-processes. Barbarism, social collapse, and imperialist war derive from the remorseless competition which drives the system forward, from the divisions inherent in commodity production and the perpetual war of each against all; communism, from capital's necessity to unify and associate labour, thus creating its own gravedigger in the proletariat. Against all idealist errors which tried to separate the proletariat from communism, Marx defined the latter as the statement of its "real movement", and insisted that the workers "have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant" (The Civil War in France).
In the Communist Manifesto, there is a certain tendency to assume that this pregnancy would automatically result in a healthy birth - that the victory of the proletariat was inevitable. At the same time the Manifesto, in talking about previous class societies, shows that if no revolutionary outcome takes place, the result has been "the mutual ruin of the contending classes" - in short, barbarism. Although this alternative is not clearly announced for capitalism, it is the logical deduction flowing from the recognition that the proletarian revolution is anything but an automatic process, and requires the conscious self-organisation of the proletariat, the class whose mission is to create a society which for the first time allows humanity to become master of its fate. Hence the Manifesto focuses on the necessity for the proletarians to "constitute themselves into a class, and thus into a political party". Notwithstanding later clarifications about the distinction between the party and the class, the kernel of this statement remains profoundly true: the proletariat can only act as a revolutionary and self-conscious force if it confronts capitalism on the political level; and in doing so it cannot dispense with the necessity to form a political party.
Again, it was clearly understood that the "constitution of the proletarians into a class" armed with an explicit programme against capitalist society was not possible at any moment. First of all, the Manifesto stressed the need for the class to have gone through a long period of apprenticeship where it could take its struggle from its initial, 'primitive' forms (such as Luddism) to more organised and conscious ones (formation of trade unions and political parties). And despite the Manifesto's 'youthful' optimism about the potential for immediate revolution, the experience of 1848-52 demonstrated that periods of counter-revolution and defeat were also part of the proletariat's apprenticeship, and that in such periods the tactics and organisation of the proletarian movement would have to adapt accordingly. This was the whole meaning of the polemic between the marxist current and the Willich-Schapper tendency, which in Marx's words "has substituted an idealist conception for a materialist one. Instead of seeing the real situation as the motor force of the revolution, it sees only mere will" (Address to the General Council of the Communist League, September 1850). This approach was the basis for the decision to dissolve the Communist League and focus on the tasks of clarification and the defence of principles - the tasks of a fraction - rather than squander energies in grandiose revolutionary adventures. In its actual practise within the ascendant period of capitalism, the marxist vanguard showed that it was vain to attempt to found a really effective class party in periods of retreat and reaction: the pattern of forming parties during phases of rising class struggle, and recognising the inevitability of their demise in phases of defeat, was followed again with the First International and with the creation of the Second.
It is true that the writings of the marxists of this period, though containing many vital insights, do not amount to a coherent theory of the role of fraction in periods of retreat; as Bilan (the publication of the Italian Left during the 1930s) pointed out, this could not be possible until the notion of the party was itself elaborated theoretically, a task which could only be fully accomplished in the period of the direct struggle for power inaugurated by the decadence of the capitalist system (see our article on the fraction-party relationship in International Review n°61). Furthermore, the conditions of decadence further sharpened the contours of this question since, whereas in ascendancy, with its long-term struggle for reforms, political parties could retain a proletarian character without being entirely composed of revolutionaries, in decadence the class party could only be composed of revolutionary militants and as such could not long sustain itself as a communist party - that is to say, as an organ having the capacity to lead the revolutionary offensive - outside phases of open class struggle.
By the same token, the conditions of ascendant capitalism did not make it possible to fully evolve the concept that, depending on the global balance of class forces, capitalist society was moving either towards world war or revolutionary upheavals. World war was not 'required' by a capitalism that could still overcome its periodic economic crises through the expansion of the world market; and because the struggle for reforms had not yet been exhausted, the world revolution remained, for the working class, an overall perspective rather than a burning necessity. The historic alternative between socialism and barbarism could not yet be distilled into a more immediate choice between war and revolution.
Nevertheless, as early as 1887, the emergence of imperialism had enabled Engels to make a startlingly clear prediction about the precise form that capitalism's tendency towards barbarism was bound to take - devastating war at the very heart of the system: "No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt-of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any storm of locusts has ever done. The devastation of the Thirty Years War compressed into three or four years, and spread over the whole Continent: famine, pestilence, general descent into barbarism, both of the armies and the mass of the people; hopeless confusion of our artificial system of trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy, collapse of the old states and their traditional elite wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens on the pavement and there will be nobody to pick them up; absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the final victory of the working class". (15 December 1887, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 26, p451). It is also noteworthy that Engels - basing himself no doubt on the very real experience of the Paris Commune a decade and a half earlier - foresaw that this European war would give birth to the proletarian revolution.
During the first decade of the 20th century, the growing threat of this war became an important preoccupation for the revolutionary wing of social democracy, those who were not fooled by the siren songs of 'perpetual progress', 'superimperialism' and other ideologies which had seized hold of large segments of the movement. At the congresses of the Second International, it was the left wing - Lenin and Luxemburg in particular - which insisted most strongly on the necessity for the International to take a clear position faced with the war-danger. The Stuttgart resolution of 1907 and the Basle resolution which reaffirmed its premises in 1912 were the fruit of their efforts. The former stipulates that "In the case of a threat of an outbreak of war, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries taking part, fortified by the unifying activity of the International Bureau, to do everything to prevent the outbreak of war by whatever means seem to them to be effective, which naturally differ with the intensification of the class war and of the general political situation.
Should war break out in spite of all this, it is their duty to intercede for its speedy end, and to strive with all their power to make use of the violent economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the people, and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule". In sum, faced with imperialism's slide towards a catastrophic war, not only was the working class to oppose this slide, but, if the war came, to respond to it with revolutionary action. These resolutions were to serve as the basis for Lenin's slogan during the First World War: 'turn the imperialist war into a civil war'.
When reflecting on this period, it is important not to project backwards as far as the consciousness of both sides of the class divide was concerned. At this stage neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie could have grasped fully what world war really meant. In particular, it could not yet have been clear that since modern imperialist war was a total war and no longer a remote combat between professional armies, it could not be waged without the total mobilisation of the proletariat - both the workers in uniform and the workers on the home front. True the bourgeoisie had understood that it could not launch a war until it was sure that social democracy was rotten enough not to oppose it, but the revolutionary events of 1917-21, directly provoked by the war, taught it many lessons that it will never forget, above all concerning the need to thoroughly prepare the social and political ground before unleashing a major war, in other words, to complete the ideological and physical destruction of proletarian opposition.
Looking at the problem from the standpoint of the proletariat, what is clearly lacking in the Stuttgart resolution is an analysis of the balance of class forces - of the real strength of the proletariat, of its capacity to resist the slide towards war. In the resolution's view, war might be prevented by the action of the class, or it might be halted after it had begun. In fact, the resolution argues that the various anti-war statements and interventions made by the unions and social democratic parties of the day "testify to the growing strength of the proletariat and to its power to ensure peace through decisive intervention". This optimistic statement represented a real underestimation of the degree to which the social democracy and the unions had already been integrated into the system and so would prove to be worse than useless as instruments for an internationalist response. This was to leave the lefts in some disarray when the war broke out - as witness, Lenin's initial belief that German High Command had forged the issue of Vorwärts which called on workers to support the war; the isolation of the Internationale group in Germany, and so on. And there is no doubt that it was the creeping betrayal of the old workers' organisations, their gradual incorporation into capitalism, which really tipped the balance of forces against the working class and opened a course towards war, and this in spite of the very high levels of combativity which the workers had displayed in many countries in the decade before the war, and even immediately before it.
This latter fact has frequently given rise to the theory that the bourgeoisie unleashed the war as a preventative measure against the looming revolution - a theory which we think is based on a failure to distinguish between combativity and consciousness, and which downplays the enormous historical significance and effect of the betrayal of the organisations which the working class had laboured so hard to build. What is true, however, is that the manner of the bourgeoisie's first crucial victory over the workers - the 'Sacred Union' proclaimed by social democracy and the unions - proved insufficient to totally break the dynamic of the mass strike which had been maturing in the European, Russian and American working class over the preceding decade. The working class proved able to recover from the mainly ideological defeat of 1914 and launch its revolutionary response three years later. Thus the proletariat, through its own action. shifted the historic course: the tide was now flowing away from imperialist world conflict and towards the communist world revolution.
During the revolutionary years that followed. the practise of the bourgeoisie provided its own 'contribution' to deepening the problem of the historic course. It proved that, faced with an openly revolutionary challenge from the working class, the drive towards war takes second place to the need to regain control of the exploited masses. This was the case not only in the heat of the revolution itself, when the uprisings in Germany obliged the ruling class to call a halt to the war and unite against its mortal enemy, but also in the years that followed, because although inter-imperialist contrasts did not disappear (the conflict between France and Germany, for example) they were to a large extent placed on a back burner while the bourgeoisie struggled to solve the social question. This is the meaning, for example, of the support given to Hitler's programme of anti-working class terror by many factions of the world bourgeoisie whose imperialist interests could only have been threatened by a resurgent German militarism. The reconstruction period that followed the war - although limited in extent and depth compared to the one after 1945 - also served to temporarily postpone the problem of redividing the imperialist spoils as far as the ruling class was concerned.
For its part, the Communist International was granted very little time to clarify such questions, although from the outset it had made it clear that if the working class failed to respond to the revolutionary challenge made by the Russian workers, the path to another world war would be open. The manifesto of the CI's first congress (March 1919) warns that if the working class were to be taken in by the sermons of the opportunists, "capitalist development would celebrate its restoration in new, more concentrated and more monstrous forms on the bones of many generations, with the prospect of a new and inevitable world war. Fortunately for mankind this is no longer possible" During this period, the question of the balance of class forces was indeed crucial, but less with regard to the danger of war than to the immediate possibilities of revolution. The last sentence in the passage just cited provides material for reflection here: in the first, heady phases of the revolutionary wave, there was a definite tendency to see the victory of the world revolution as inevitable, and thus to imagine that a new world war was not really possible. This represented a definite underestimation of the gigantic task that the working class faces in creating a society based on social solidarity and the conscious mastery of the productive forces. And in addition to this general problem, applicable to any revolutionary movement of the class, the proletariat in the years 1914-21 found itself confronted by the sudden and brutal 'outbreak' of a new historical epoch which compelled it to rid itself very quickly of ingrained habits and methods of struggle and acquire 'overnight' the methods appropriate to this new period.
As the initial impetus of the revolutionary wave subsided, the somewhat simplistic optimism of the early years proved more and more inadequate, and it became increasingly urgent to draw out a sober and realistic assessment of the real balance of class forces. In the early 20s, there was a particularly sharp polemic between the CI and the German left on this point, a debate in which truth was not exclusively on either side. The CI was quicker to see the reality of the retreat in the revolution after 1921, and thus the necessity to consolidate the organisation and to build up the confidence of the working class through participating in its defensive struggles. But, pressured by the demands of the stranded Russian state and economy to find points of support outside Russia, the CI increasingly translated this perspective into the language of opportunism (United Front, fusion with centrist parties, etc). The German left firmly rejected these opportunist conclusions; but its revolutionary impatience and its theory of the death crisis of capitalism prevented it from seeing the distinction between the overall epoch of capitalist decline, which poses the necessity for revolution in general historic terms, and the different immediate phases within that epoch, phases which do not automatically present all the conditions for a revolutionary overthrow. The German left's failure to analyse the objective balance of class forces was coupled with a key weakness on the organisational front - its inability to understand the tasks of a fraction fighting against the degeneration of the old party. These weaknesses were to have fatal consequences for the very existence of the German left as an organised current.
It is here that the Italian left truly came into its own as an international pole of clarity. In the early 1920s, having lived through the experience of fascism, it was able to see that the proletariat was being pushed back by a determined bourgeois offensive. But this realisation led it neither towards sectarianism, since it continued to participate fully in the defensive struggles of the class, nor opportunism, since it made a very lucid critique of the danger of opportunism in the International, particularly through the latter's concessions to social democracy. Having already been schooled in the tasks of a fraction in its political combat within the Italian Socialist Party before the war, the Italian left also fully appreciated the necessity to fight within the existing organs of the class as long as they retained any proletarian character. By 1927-8, however, the left had recognised that the expulsion of the left opposition from the Bolshevik party, and of other left currents internationally, signified a qualitative deepening of the counter-revolution and demanded the formal constitution of an independent Left Fraction, even though the possibility of reconquering the Communist parties was left open.
The year 1933 was the next significant date for the Italian Left: not only because the first issue of Bilan came out in that year, but also because the triumph of Nazism in Germany convinced the Fraction that the course towards a second world war was now open. Bilan's grasp of the dynamic of the balance of class forces since 1917 was summarised in the logo it placed on its publications for some time: "Lenin 1917, Noske 1919, Hitler 1933": Lenin being the personification of proletarian revolution; Noske of the repression of the revolutionary wave by social democracy, Hitler of the completion of the bourgeois counter-revolution and the preparations for a new war. From the very beginning, therefore, Bilan's position on the historic course was one of its defining characteristics.
It is true that the editorial article of Bilan n°1, while recognising the profound defeat the working class has been through, appears somewhat hesitant as to the perspective facing the proletariat, leaving the door open to the possibility that the proletariat might be able to revive its struggle and thus prevent the outbreak of war through the development of the revolution (see The Italian Communist Left, p 71). This was perhaps partly the result of an unwillingness to rule out entirely the possibility of reversing the tide of counter-revolution. But over the next few years, all of Bilan's analyses of the international situation - whether of national struggles in the peripheries, the expansion of German power in Europe, the Popular Front in France, the integration of the USSR into the imperialist chess-game, or the so-called Spanish revolution - were founded on the sober recognition that the balance of forces had turned decisively against the proletariat and that the bourgeoisie was clearing the way towards another imperialist massacre. This evolution was expressed with stark clarity in a text in Bilan n°17: "To advocate the constitution of fractions in an epoch in which the crushing of the world proletariat is accompanied by a concretisation of the conditions for the unleashing of war, is the statement of a 'fatalism' which accepts the inevitability of war being unleashed and the impossibility of mobilising the proletariat against it being unleashed" ('Draft resolution on the problems of the left fraction').
The irreconcilable opposition between a course towards war and a course towards revolution was summed up in Bilan 16: "We have already said: war and revolution are two opposite expressions of the same situation, in that they mature out of the explosion of contradictions? but they are 'opposite expressions', which means that the unleashing of war results from political conditions which exclude the revolution. It is an anarchistic simplification that considers that since the moment has arrived when capitalism has to arm the workers, the conditions are already ripe for the proletariat to use these arms for the triumph of its revolutionary cause? The opposition between war and revolution reveals its full breadth when we consider that the political conditions which allow the war to be unleashed involve not only the disappearance of all the conditions that would permit the victory of the proletariat, but of any kind of revolutionary movement up to the least statement of the consciousness of the proletariat" ('Draft resolution on the international situation')
This methodological approach was in profound contrast to the position of Trotsky, who was by the far the better known 'representative' of the left opposition to Stalinism at that time (and ever since). Trotsky, it should be said, had also seen 1933 and the victory of Nazism as a turning point. As for Bilan, this event also marked the definitive betrayal of the Communist International; vis-à-vis the regime in the USSR. Trotsky, like Bilan, continued to refer to it as the workers' state, but from this period on he no longer felt that the Stalinist regime could be reformed, but had to be forcibly overthrown in a "political revolution". But behind these apparent similarities, fundamental differences remained and were to result in a final break between the Italian Fraction and the International Left Opposition. These differences were deeply connected to the Italian left's notion of the historic course and the task of a fraction within it. For Trotsky, the bankruptcy of the old party meant the immediate proclamation of a new party; Bilan rejected this as voluntarist and idealist, and insisted that the party, as the effective political leadership of the class, could not exist in moments of profound depression of the class movement. Trotsky's efforts to cobble together a mass organisation in such a period could only result in opportunism, exemplified by the left opposition's turn towards the left wing of social democracy from 1934 onwards. For Bilan, a real party of the proletariat could only be formed when the class was on a course towards open conflict with capitalism. But the task of preparing for such a modification in the situation, of laying the basis for the future party, could only be carried out by a fraction which defined as its primary task that of drawing the 'balance sheet' of' past victories and defeats.
With regard to the USSR, Bilan's overall view of the situation facing the proletariat led it to reject Trotsky's perspective of an attack by world capital on the workers' state - and hence the need for the proletariat to defend the USSR against such an attack. Instead it saw that in a period of reaction the inevitable tendency of an isolated proletarian state was to be drawn into the system of capitalist alliances preparing the ground for a new world war. Hence the rejection of any defence of the USSR as being incompatible with internationalism.
It is true that Trotsky's writings of the time do often contain vivid insights into the profoundly reactionary tendencies dominating the world situation. But what Trotsky lacked was a rigorous method, a real conception of the historic course. Thus, despite the triumph of reaction all along the line, and despite his own recognition of the approach of war, Trotsky constantly succumbed to a false optimism which saw fascism as the bourgeoisie's last card against the danger of revolution, and anti-fascism as in some sense a statement of the radicalisation of the masses; which held that "everything was possible" at the time of the strikes under the Popular Front in France in 1936, or which accepted at face value the notion that a proletarian revolution had got underway in Spain that same year. In sum, Trotsky's failure to grasp the real nature of the period sped Trotskyism's slide towards the counter-revolution, while Bilan's clarity on the same question enabled it to hold fast in the defence of class principles, even at the price of a terrible isolation.
Certainly this isolation took its toll on the Fraction itself; its clarity was not defended without major combats within its own ranks. First, against the positions of the minority on the war in Spain: the pressure to take part in the illusory "Spanish revolution" was immense and the minority succumbed to it with its decision to fight in the militias of the POUM. The intransigence of the majority was maintained in large part because it refused to treat the events in Spain in isolation and saw them as an statement of a world-wide balance of forces. Thus, when groups like the Union Communiste or the LCI (Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes, the Belgian Hennault group), whose positions were similar to those of the minority, accused Bilan of being unable to see a class movement if it was not being led by the party, and of seeing the party as a kind of deus ex machina without which the masses could achieve nothing, Bilan's response was that the lack of a party in Spain was the product of the defeats the proletariat had suffered internationally, and while expressing its total solidarity with the Spanish workers, insisted that this lack of programmatic clarity had led to their initial spontaneous reactions being dragged off their own terrain and onto the terrain of the bourgeoisie and of inter-imperialist war.
The Fraction's view of the events in Spain were verified by reality; but no sooner had this ordeal been passed than it was plunged into a second and even more damaging one - the adoption by Vercesi, one of the main theoreticians within the fraction, of a conception which put all the Fraction's previous analysis of the historic period into question - the theory of the war economy.
This theory was a result of a flight into immediatism. Witnessing the ability of capitalism to use the state and its preparations for war to partially re-absorb the mass unemployment that had characterised the first phase of the economic crisis of the 1930s, Vercesi and his followers concluded that capitalism had somehow gone through a profound alteration which had overcome its historic crisis of overproduction. Turning to the elementary marxist axiom that the principal contradiction in society is the one between the exploiting and the exploited class, Vercesi then made the leap into concluding that imperialist world war was no longer the response of capitalism to its internal economic contradictions, but an act of inter-imperialist solidarity aimed at massacring the revolutionary working class. Thus if war was approaching, it only meant that the proletarian revolution was becoming an ever greater threat to the ruling class. In fact, the main effect of the theory of the war economy during this period was to completely play down the danger of war. Local wars and selected massacres, it was argued, could do the same job for capitalism as a world war. The result was a complete failure to prepare for the impact that the war would inevitably have on the work of the organisation, and thus the almost total disintegration of the Fraction at the beginning of the war. And Vercesi's theorisations about the meaning of the war once it had broken out completed the rout: the war signified the "social disappearance of the proletariat" and made any organised militant activity useless. The proletariat could only return to the path of struggle following the outbreak of the "crisis of the war economy" (provoked not by the operation of the law of value but by the exhaustion of the material means to carry on with war production). The consequences of this aspect of the theory at the end of the war will be examined shortly, but their initial effect was to sow disarray and demoralisation within the ranks of the fraction.
In the period after 1938, when Bilan was replaced by Octobre in the expectation of new revolutionary assaults by the working class, the original analyses of Bilan were kept alive and developed by a minority which saw no reason to question the fact that war was imminent, that it would be a new inter-imperialist conflict for the division of the world, or that revolutionaries had to maintain their activity in adverse circumstances in order to keep the flame of internationalism alive. This work was carried on above all by the militants who revived the Italian Fraction after 1941 and who were instrumental in forming the French Fraction in the next few years of war.
Those who remained loyal to the work of Bilan also maintained its interpretation of how the course would change - in the fires of war itself. This view was solidly founded on the real experience of the class - in 1871, 1905 and 1917; and the events in Italy in 1943 seemed to confirm it. Here was an authentic class movement with a clear anti-war dimension, and it was not without an echo in the other defeated European axis power, Germany itself. When the Italian movement also produced a powerful impetus towards regroupment among the scattered proletarian forces in Italy itself, the French nucleus of the communist left, along with the Italian Fraction in exile and in Italy itself concluded that "the course towards the formation of the party is now open". But while a large number of militants took this to mean the immediate formation of the party, and on bases that were not well defined programmatically, the French Fraction (in particular comrade Marco (MC), who was a member of both the Italian and French Fractions) did not abandon its rigorous approach. Opposed to the dissolution of the Italian Fraction and the precipitous formation of the party, the French Fraction also insisted on examining the Italian situation in the light of the overall world situation, and refused to be carried along by the sentimental 'Italocentrism' which had gripped many of the comrades of the Italian Fraction. The group in France (which became the Gauche Communiste de France) was also the first to recognise that the course had not changed, that the bourgeoisie had drawn the necessary lessons from the experience of 1917 and had inflicted a further decisive defeat on the proletariat.
In the text 'The task of the hour - formation of the party or formation of cadres', published in the August 1946 issue of Internationalisme (republished in International Review n°32), there is a biting polemic against the inconsistencies of the other currents of the proletarian milieu of the day. The main substance of the polemic is aimed at showing that the decision to found the PCInt in Italy was based on an erroneous estimation of the historic period and had effectively led to an abandonment of the materialist conception of the fraction in favour of a voluntarist and idealist approach that owed a great deal to Trotskyism, for whom parties must be 'built' at all times without any reference to the real historical situation confronting the working class. But - probably because the PCInt itself, caught up in an activist stampede, did not really develop any coherent conception of the historic course - the article focuses on the analyses developed by other groups in the milieu, in particular the Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left which was organisationally linked to the PCInt. In the period before the war, the Belgian Fraction, led by Mitchell[1], had been the most vigorous opponents of Vercesi's theory of the war economy; the rump that was left after the war was now its most enthusiastic proponent. The theory contained the idea that the crisis of the war economy could really only break out after the war; therefore, "it is in the post-war period that the transformation of imperialist war into civil war is realised? The present situation is thus analysed as one of the 'transformation into civil war'. With this central analysis as a starting point, the situation in Italy is declared to be particularly advanced, thus justifying the immediate constitution of the party, while the disturbances in India, Indonesia and other colonies, whose reins are firmly held by the various competing imperialisms and by the local bourgeoisies, are seen as signs of the beginning of the anti-capitalist civil war". The catastrophic consequences of totally misreading the real historic balance of class forces was evident, leading the Belgian Fraction to see local inter-imperialist conflicts as expressions of a movement towards revolution.
It is also noteworthy that the Internationalisme article criticised an alternative theory of the course put forward by the RKD (Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschlands: a group which split from Trotskyism during the war to defend internationalist positions). For Internationalisme, the RKD "more cautiously, takes refuge in the theory of a double course, ie of a simultaneous and parallel development of a course towards revolution and a course towards imperialist war. The RKD has obviously not understood that the development of a course towards war is primarily conditioned by the weakening of the proletariat and of the danger of revolution".
Internationalisme, by contrast, was able to see very clearly that the bourgeoisie had drawn its lessons from the experience of 1917 and had taken brutal preventative measures against the danger of revolutionary uprisings provoked by the misery of war; it had thus inflicted a decisive defeat on the working class, centred in Germany: "WHEN CAPITALISM 'FINISHES'AN IMPERIALIST WORLD WAR WHICH HAS LASTED SIX YEARS WITHOUT ANY REVOLUTIONARY FLARE-UPS, THIS MEANS THE DEFEAT OIF THE PROLETARIAT, AND THAT WE ARE LIVING, NOT ON THE EVE OF GREAT REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLES, BUT IN THE AFTERMATH OF A DEFEAT. This defeat took place in 1945, with the physical destruction of the revolutionary centre that was the German proletariat, and it was all the more decisive in that the world proletariat remained unaware of the defeat it had just undergone".
Thus Internationalisme emphatically rejected all voluntarist and activist schemes for founding a new party in such a period of defeat, and insisted that the task of the hour remained 'the formation of cadres' - in other words, the continuation of the work of the left fractions.
However, there was a serious weakness in the GCF's arguments - the conclusion, expressed in the above article, that "the course is open towards the third imperialist war?Under present conditions, we can see no force capable of stopping or modifying this course". A further theorisation of this position is contained in the article 'The evolution of capitalism and the new perspective', published in 1952 (Internationalisme no , reprinted in International Review n°21). This is a seminal text because it summarises the GCF's work towards understanding state capitalism as a universal tendency in decadent capitalism, and not simply as a phenomenon isolated to the Stalinist regimes. But its failing is that it does not make a sharp distinction between the integration of the old workers' organisations into state capitalism, and the integration of the proletariat itself: "The proletariat now finds itself associated to its own exploitation. It is thus mentally and politically integrated into capitalism". For Internationalisme, the permanent crisis of capitalism in the epoch of state capitalism would no longer take the forms of 'open crises' which ejected the workers from production, and thus pushed them to react against the system, but would instead reach its culminating point in war; and it was only in the war - which again, the GCF saw to be imminent - that the proletarian struggle could take on a revolutionary content. Otherwise the class "can only express itself as an economic category of capital". What Internationalisme failed to see was that the very mechanisms of state capitalism, operating in a period of reconstruction after the massive destruction of the war, would permit capitalism to enter a period of 'boom' in which inter-imperialist antagonisms, although still very acute, did not pose a new world war as an absolute necessity, and this despite the weakness of the proletariat.
Shortly after this text was written, the GCF's concern to maintain its cadres in the face of what it saw as the approaching world war (a conclusion that was far from irrational given the outbreak of the war in Korea) led to the 'exile' of its leading comrade, MC, in Venezuela, and to the rapid dissolution of the group. It thus paid a heavy price for this weakness in seeing the perspective with sufficient clarity. But the dissolution of the group also confirmed its diagnosis of the counter-revolutionary nature of the period. It is no accident that the PCInt went through its major split in the same year. The full story of this split has yet to be told to an international audience, but it seems that little clarity emerged from it. Stated very briefly, the split was between the tendency around Damen on the one hand, and the tendency inspired by Bordiga on the other. The Damen tendency was closer to the spirit of Bilan as far as its political positions were concerned - ie, it shared Bilan's willingness to put into question the positions of the Communist International in its early years (eg on unions, national liberation, party and state, etc). But it leaned heavily towards activism and lacked Bilan's theoretical rigour. This was particularly true of the question of the historic course and the conditions for the foundation of the party, since any return to Bilan's methodology would have led to the very foundations of the PCInt being called into question. This the Damen tendency, or more precisely the Battaglia Comunista group, has never been willing to do. Bordiga's current, by contrast, seems to have been more aware that period was one of reaction and that the PCInt's activist, recruitist approach had proven to be sterile. Unfortunately, Bordiga's theoretical work in the period after the split - while containing much of value at a general level - was almost totally cut off from the advances made by the Italian Fraction during the 30s. The political positions of his new 'party' were not an advance, but a regression towards the CI's weakest analyses, for example on the union and national questions. And its theory of the party and its relationship to the movement of history was based on semi-mystical speculations about 'invariance', and about the dialectic between the 'historic party' and the 'formal party'. In sum, with these starting points, neither of the groups that emerged from the split could add contribute anything of real value to the proletariat's understanding of the historic balance of forces, and this question has remained one of their principal weaknesses ever since. (To be continued)
Despite the mistakes it made in the 40s and 50s - in particular, the conclusion that a third world war was imminent - the GCF's fundamental loyalty to the method of the Italian left enabled its immediate successor, the Internacialismo group in Venezuela in the 60s, to recognise that both the post-war reconstruction boom and the long period of counter-revolution were drawing to a close. The ICC has had more than one occasion to quote the incisive words from Internacialismo no. 8 in January 1968, but it will do no harm to cite them again, since they are a fine example of the ability of marxism - without claiming prophetic powers - to be able to anticipate the general course of events:
"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".
Here the Venezuelan group expresses its understanding that not only was a new economic crisis about to surface, but that it would rendezvous with a new and undefeated proletarian generation. The events of May 68 in France, and the ensuing international wave of struggles over the next four or five years, provided a striking confirmation of this diagnosis. Of course, a component of this diagnosis was the recognition that the crisis would sharpen imperialist tensions between the two military blocs which dominated the globe; but the enormous impetus of the first international wave of struggles showed that the proletariat would not be willing to be marched off to a new world holocaust. In sum, the course of history was flowing not towards world war, but towards massive class confrontations.
A direct consequence of the revival in the class struggle was the appearance of new proletarian political forces after a long period in which revolutionary ideas had more or less been buried from view. The events of May 68 and their aftermath engendered a plethora of new political groupings, marked by a great deal of confusion, but willing to learn and eager to reappropriate the real communist traditions of the working class. The insistence on the need for the "regroupment of revolutionaries" by Internacialismo and its offspring - Révolution Internationale in France and Internationalism in the US - summarised this aspect of the new perspective. These currents thus took the lead in pushing for debate, correspondence, and international conferences. This effort gained a real echo among the clearest of the new political groupings, who found it easiest to understand that a new period had opened up. This applied in particular to the groups who aligned themselves with the 'international tendency' formed by RI and Internationalism, but it also applied to a group like Revolutionary Perspectives, whose original platform clearly recognises the historic resurgence of the class movement:
"In parallel to the renewal of the crisis, a new period of international class struggle was opened in 1968 with the mass strikes in France, followed by the upheavals in Italy, Britain, Argentina, Poland etc. Today's generation of workers is unburdened by reformism, as after World War One, or by defeat, as in the 1930s, and allows us to have hope in its future, and in that of humanity. These struggles all show, to the discomfiture of modernist dilettantes, that the proletariat has not become integrated into capitalism despite fifty years of almost total defeats: with these struggles it revives the memory of its own past history and prepares itself for its ultimate task" (Revolutionary Perspectives n°1, old series, c.1974)
Unfortunately the 'established' groups of the Italian left, the ones who had succeeded in maintaining an organisational continuity throughout the post-war reconstruction, had done so at the cost of a process of sclerosis. Neither Battaglia Comunista (publication of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista) nor Programma Comunista published in Italy by the International Communist Party) attributed much significance to the revolts of the late 1960s and early 70s, seeing mainly the student/petty bourgeois features which were undoubtedly mixed up within them. For these groups - who had started out, let us recall, by seeing a course towards revolution in a period of profound defeat - the night of the counter-revolution had not lifted, and they saw little reason to emerge from the splendid isolation which had 'protected' them for so long. The Programma current actually did go through a period of considerable growth in the 1970s; but this was a building constructed on the sand of opportunism, particularly on the national question. The disastrous consequences of this kind of growth were to become apparent with the break up of the ICP in the early 80s. For its part, Battaglia for a long time hardly peered beyond the Italian borders; it took almost a decade before it was to launch its own appeal for international conferences of the communist left, and when it did so, its reasons were entirely unclear (the "social-democratisation of the Communist Parties").
The groups who went on to form the ICC were faced with a combat on two fronts in this period. On the one hand they had to argue against the scepticism of the existing groups of the communist left, who saw nothing new under the sun. On the other hand they also had to criticise the immediatism and impatience of many of the new groups, some of whom had been convinced that May 68 had raised the spectre of immediate revolution (this was especially the case with those influenced by the Situationist International, who saw no connection between the class struggle and the state of the capitalist economy, which was only just entering a new phase of open crisis). But just as the 'spirit of 68', the influence of student, councilist and anarchist prejudices had a considerable weight on the young ICC as regards its understanding of the tasks and the functioning of the revolutionary organisation, so these influences also expressed themselves in its conception of the new historic course. The absolutely necessary proclamation of a new historic course, of the proletarian revival, tended to go together with an underestimation of the immense difficulties which lay ahead of the international working class. This expressed itself in various ways:
a tendency to forget that the development of the class struggle is by nature an uneven process that must pass through advances and retreats, and thus to expect a more or less uninterrupted advance towards revolutionary struggles - a prospect implied to some extent in the passage from Internacionalismo quoted above;
the underestimation of the bourgeoisie's capacity to phase in the economic crisis, to use various state capitalist mechanisms to reduce the ferocity of its effects, particularly on the central proletarian concentrations;
the definition of the new course as a "course towards revolution", implying that the class revival would inevitably culminate in a revolutionary confrontation with capital;
linked to this was the focus - very strong throughout the milieu of the day - on the question of the transition period from capitalism to communism. This debate was by no means irrelevant, particularly because it was part of the new milieu's effort to reappropriate the lessons and traditions of the past movement. But the passions that it generated (leading, for example, to splits between different elements of the milieu) also expressed a certain naivete about the difficulty of even reaching a period when such questions as the form of the transitional state would be a burning issue for the working class.
Over the next decade, the ICC's analyses were refined and developed. It began the work of examining the bourgeoisie's mechanisms for 'controlling' the crisis, and thus of explaining why the crisis would inevitably be a long drawn out and uneven process; similarly, after the experiences of the refluxes in the mid-70s and early 80s, it was compelled to recognise more clearly that within the context of a generally upward historical curve of the class struggle, there would certainly be important moments of retreat. Furthermore, by 1983, the ICC had explicitly recognised that there was no automatism about the historic course; at its 5th congress it thus passed a resolution which criticised the term "course towards revolution":
"The existence of a course towards class confrontations means that the bourgeoisie does not have a free hand to unleash a new world butchery: first, it must confront and beat the working class. But this does not prejudge the outcome of this confrontation, in one way or the other. This is why it is preferable to talk about a 'course towards class confrontations' rather than a 'course towards revolution'"(Resolution on the international situation, published in International Review n°35).
Within the milieu, however, the difficulties and set-backs encountered by the proletariat had strengthened the sceptical and pessimistic views which had long been espoused by the 'Italian' groups. This was expressed in particular during the international conferences at the end of the 70s, when the Communist Workers' Organisation (the descendent of the Revolutionary Perspectives group) aligned itself with the views of Battaglia, rejecting the ICC's view that the class struggle constituted a barrier to world war. The CWO shifted in its explanations for why the war had not broken out; one minute attributing it to the fact that the crisis was not deep enough, the next minute to the idea that the blocs were not formed; more recently, to the rationality of the Russian bourgeoisie in recognising that it could not win a war. In short: anything but the class struggle!
There were also echoes of this pessimism about the class struggle within the ICC itself; the future GCI tendency[2], and in particular RC[3] who adopted similar views, went through a phase of being "more like Bilan than Bilan" and argued that we were in a course towards war.
By the end of the 70s, therefore, the ICC's first major text on the historic course, adopted at the 3rd Congress and published in International Review n°18, had to define our position against the empiricism and scepticism that was beginning to dominate the milieu.
The text crossed swords with all the confusions held within the milieu:
the idea, rooted in empiricism, that it is not possible for revolutionaries to make general predictions about the course of the class struggle. Against this notion, the text reaffirms the fact that its capacity to define a perspective for the future - and not only the general alternative between socialism and barbarism - is one of marxism's defining characteristics and always has been. More specifically, the text insists that marxists have always based their work on their ability to grasp the particular balance of class forces within a given period, as we saw again in the first part of this report. By the same token, the text shows that an inability to grasp the nature of the course had led past revolutionaries into serious errors;
an extension of this agnostic view of the historic course was the concept, defended in particular by the IBRP[4], of a "parallel" course towards war and revolution. We have already seen how the approach adopted by Bilan and the GCF excluded such a notion; the text of the Third Congress goes on to argue that such a concept is the result of losing sight of the marxist method itself:
"Other theories have also arisen more recently, according to which 'with the development of the crisis of capitalism, both terms of the contradiction are reinforced at the same time: war and revolution don't exclude each other mutually but advance in a simultaneous and parallel manner, without it being possible for us to know which one will reach its culminating point before the other'. The main error in this conception is that it totally neglects the factor of class struggle in the life of society, just as the conception developed by the Italian left [the theory of the war economy] was based on an overestimation of this factor. Beginning from the phrase in the Communist Manifesto which says that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle', the Italian Left applied this mechanically to the analysis of imperialist war and saw imperialist war as a response to the class struggle; it failed to see that, on the contrary, imperialist war could only take place thanks to the absence or weakness of the class struggle. Although it was wrong, this conception began from correct premises; the mistake lay in the way these premises were applied. In contrast, the theory of a 'parallelism and simultaneity of the course towards war and the course towards revolution' plainly casts aside this basic marxist premise, because it holds that the two principal antagonistic classes in society can go on preparing their respective responses to the crisis - imperialist war for the one, revolution for the other - completely independently of each other, of the balance of forces between each other, of confrontations and clashes between each other. If it can't be applied to something which is going to determine the whole historic alternative for the life of society, the schema of the Communist Manifesto has no reason for existing and we can consign marxism to a museum alongside other outmoded productions of human imagination".
Finally, the text also takes up the arguments of those who talked openly of a course towards war - an argument which enjoyed a brief vogue but which has lost its punch since the collapse of one of the camps due to fight this war.
In many ways, the debate within the proletarian milieu about the historic course has not advanced very much since this text was written. In 1985, the ICC wrote a further critique of the concept of the parallel course which had been defended in a document emanating from the 5th Congress of Battaglia Comunista (International Review n°85 - 'The 80s are not the 30s'). In the 1990s, texts by the IBRP have reaffirmed both the 'agnostic' view which questions the capacity of marxists to make general predictions about the dynamic of capitalist society, and the closely linked notion of a parallel course. Thus in a polemic on the significance of May 68 in Revolutionary Perspectives n°12, the CWO quote an article in World Revolution n°216 which summarised a discussion that had taken place on this theme at one of our London forums. Our article points out that "the CWO's apparent rejection of the possibility of anticipating the overall course of events is also a rejection of the work carried out in this vital field by marxists throughout the history of the workers' movement". The CWO's response is extremely facetious: "If this is the case then the marxists have a poor record. Let us leave aside the usual (but irrelevant) example of Marx after the 1848 revolutions and look at the Italian left in the 1930s. Whilst they did some good work in trying to come to terms with the terrible defeat of the revolutionary wave after the First World War they basically theorised themselves out of existence just before the second imperialist slaughter". Let us 'leave aside' this unbelievably patronising attitude to the entire marxist movement: what is really striking here is the way the CWO fails to grasp that it was precisely because it abandoned its previous clarity on the historic course that a part of the Italian left "theorised itself out of existence" on the eve of the war, as we saw in the first part of this report.
As for the Bordigist groupings, it is hardly their style to take part in debates between the groups of the milieu, but in recent correspondence with a mutual contact in Australia of our two organisations, the Programma group rejected out of hand the possibility that the working class has been a barrier to world war, and their speculations about whether the economic crisis will end in war or revolution do not differ in substance from those of the IBRP.
If anything has changed in the positions put forward by the IBRP, it is in the virulence of their polemic against the ICC. Whereas in the past a pretext for breaking off discussions with the ICC was our "councilist" view of the party, in the recent period the reasons for rejecting any joint work with us have focussed much more sharply on our differences over the historic course. Our views on this question are seen as the main proof of our idealist method and our total divorce from reality; furthermore, according to the IBRP, it is the shipwreck of our historical perspectives, of our concept of the 'years of truth', which is the real cause of the recent crisis in the ICC, the whole debate on functioning being in essence a diversion from this central issue.
The impact of decomposition
Although the debate within the milieu has advanced little since the end of the 70s, reality certainly has. The entry of decadent capitalism into the phase of decomposition has profoundly modified the manner in which the question of the historic course has to be approached.
The IBRP has long admonished us for arguing that the 'years of truth' meant that the revolution would break out in the 80s. What did we actually say? In the original article 'The 80s, years of truth' (International Review n°20), we argued that, faced with a profound deepening of the crisis and an intensification of imperialist tensions concretised by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the capitalist class would be more and more compelled to jettison the language of comfort and illusion, and use the 'language of truth', the call for blood, sweat and tears; and we committed ourselves to the following prediction: "In the decade beginning today, the historical alternative will be decided: either the proletariat will continue its offensive, continue to paralyse the murderous arm of capitalism in its death throes and gather its forces to destroy the system, or else it will let itself be trapped, worn out, demoralised by speeches and repression and then the way will be open for a new holocaust which risks the elimination of all human society".
There are certain ambiguities here, in particular the suggestion that the proletarian struggle is already on the offensive, a misformulation which springs from the tendency, already identified, to underestimate the difficulties facing the working class in moving from a defensive to an offensive struggle (in other words, to a political confrontation with the capitalist state). But despite this, the notion of the years of truth does contain a profound insight. The 80s were to prove a decisive decade, but not quite in the way that the text envisages. For what this decade witnessed was not the decisive advance of one major class over another, but the social stalemate which resulted in the process of decomposition assuming a central and defining role in social evolution. Thus, the decade began with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, which provoked a real exacerbation of imperialist tensions; but this event was quickly followed by the mass strikes in Poland, which demonstrated very clearly the near-impossibility of the Russian bloc mobilising its forces for war. But the Polish struggle also highlighted the chronic political weaknesses of the working class. And although the Polish workers faced particular problems in politicising their struggle in a proletarian sense faced with the profound mystifications arising from Stalinism (and the reaction against it), the workers in the West, although making considerable advances in their struggles during the 80s, also proved unable to advance a clear political perspective. Their movement was thus 'overwhelmed' by the fall out from the collapse of Stalinism; more generally, the definitive onset of the phase of decomposition was to place tremendous difficulties in front of the class, reinforcing at almost every turn the retreat in consciousness that resulted from the events of 1989-91.
In sum, the onset of decomposition is a result of the historic course identified by the ICC since the 60s, since it is partly conditioned by the inability of the bourgeoisie to mobilise society for war. But it has also compelled us to raise the problem of the historic course in new and unforeseen ways:
first of all, the break up of the two imperialist blocs formed in 1945, and the dynamic of 'every man for himself' which it unleashed - both results and expressions of decomposition - became a new factor obstructing the possibility of world war. While exacerbating military tensions all over the world, this new dynamic has far outweighed the tendency towards the formation of new blocs. Without blocs, without a new centre of power capable of directly challenging US hegemony, a key precondition for unleashing a world war is absent;
at the same time, this development brings no solace whatever to the cause of communism, since it has created a situation in which the bases of a new society could be undermined without world war and thus without the necessity to mobilise the proletariat in favour of war. In the previous scenario, it would be world nuclear war that would have definitively compromised the possibility of communism, by destroying the planet or at least a major part of the world's productive forces, including the proletariat. The new scenario envisages the possibility of a slower but no less deadly slide into a state where the proletariat has been fragmented beyond repair and the natural and economic bases for transforming society equally ruined, through an accretion of local and regional military conflicts, ecological catastrophes and social collapse. Furthermore, whereas the proletariat can fight on its own terrain against the bourgeoisie's attempts to mobilise it for war, this is much more difficult as regards the effects of decomposition.
This is particularly clear with the 'ecological' aspect of decomposition: although capitalism's destruction of the natural environment has in itself become a real threat to the survival of humanity - one that was only partially glimpsed by the workers' movement right up until the last few decades - it is a process which the proletariat can do little to 'block' until it has assumed political power on a world scale. Struggles around issues of pollution on a class basis are possible, but they are not likely to be the main factor for stimulating the proletariat's resistance.
We can thus see that the decomposition of capitalism places the working class in a harder situation than before. In the previous situation, it would require a frontal defeat of the working class, a victory by the bourgeoisie in a class against class confrontation, before the conditions for a world war could be fully united. In the context of decomposition, the 'defeat' of the proletariat can be more gradual, more insidious, and far less easy to resist. And on top of this, the effects of decomposition, as we have analysed many times, have a profoundly negative effect on the proletariat's consciousness, on its sense of itself as a class, since in all their different aspects - the gang mentality, racism, criminality, drug addiction, etc - they serve to atomise the class, increase the divisions within its ranks, and dissolve it into the general social rat race.
Faced with this profoundly important alteration in the world situation, the response of the proletarian milieu has been totally inadequate. Although they can recognise the effects of decomposition, the groups of the milieu are unable either to see its roots - since they reject the notion of the stalemate between the classes - or its real dangers. Thus, the IBRP's dismissal of the ICC's theory of decomposition as no more than a description of "chaos" leads them in practise to look for the possibilities of capitalist stabilisation. This is apparent, for example, in their conception of "international capital" seeking peace in Northern Ireland in order to be able to peacefully enjoy the benefits of exploitation; but it is also apparent in their view that new blocs are in the process of formation around the existing poles of economic competition (USA, European Union, etc). Although this vision, with its refusal to make any long term 'predictions' can encompass the idea of imminent war, it is more often linked to a touching faith in the rationality of the bourgeoisie: since the new "blocs" are economic rather than military formations, and since we have now entered a new period of "globalisation", the door is at least half open to the notion that these blocs, acting in the interests of "international capital", could achieve a mutually beneficial stabilisation of the world for an indefinite future.
The rejection of the theory of decomposition can only result in an underestimation of the dangers facing the working class. It underestimates the level of barbarism and chaos that capitalism has already sunk into; it tends to downplay the threat that the proletariat can be progressively undermined by the disintegration of social life; and it fails to register clearly that humanity could be destroyed even without a third world war.
Where are we now?
The onset of the period of decomposition has thus altered the way in which we pose the question of the historic course. But it has not made it irrelevant, on the contrary. In fact it tends to focus even more sharply the central question: is it too late? Has the proletariat already been defeated? Is there any obstacle to the descent into total barbarism? As we have said, it is less easy to answer the question today than in a period when world war was still a more direct option for the bourgeoisie. Thus, Bilan for example was able to point not only to the bloody defeat of proletarian uprisings and the ensuing counter-revolutionary terror in the countries where the revolution rose the highest, but also to the subsequent ideological mobilisation for war, the 'positive' adherence of the working class to the war-banners of the ruling class (fascism, democracy, etc). In today's conditions, where capitalist decomposition can engulf the proletariat without a single frontal defeat, and without this kind of 'positive' mobilisation, the signs of irrecoverable defeat are by definition harder to discern. Nevertheless, the key to understanding the problem resides in the same place as it did in 1923, or, as we saw in the GCF's analysis, in 1945 - in the central concentrations of the world proletariat, and above all in Western Europe. Did these sectors of the world proletariat say their last word in the 1980s, (or as some would have it, in the 1970s), or do they retain sufficient reserves of combativity, and a sufficient potential for the development of class consciousness, to ensure that major class confrontations are still on the agenda of history?
In order to answer this question, it is necessary to establish a provisional balance sheet of the last decade - of the period since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the definitive onset of the phase of decomposition.
The problem here is that, since 1989, the 'pattern' of the class struggle has been different from what it was in the period after 1968. During that period, there were clearly identifiable waves of struggle, with their epicentre in the main capitalist centres even though the shock waves went out all across the globe. Furthermore, it was possible to analyse these movements and draw out the advances made in class consciousness within them - for example on the union question, or regarding their progress towards the mass strike.
Furthermore, it was not only the revolutionary minority that carried out this reflection. During the different waves of struggle it was evident that struggles in one country could be a direct stimulus for struggles in others (for example the connection between May 68 and Italy 69, between Poland in 1980 and subsequent movements in Italy, between the large movements in Belgium in the 80s and workers' reactions in nearby countries). At the same time workers could be seen to be drawing lessons from previous movements - for example, .in Britain, where the defeat of the miners' strike produced a reflection in the class about the need to avoid being trapped in long drawn out isolated strikes, or in France and Italy in 86 and 87, where attempts to organise outside the unions mutually reinforced each other.
The situation since 1989 has not been characterised by such easily observable advances in class consciousness. This is not to say that the movement in the 90s has been totally featureless. In the report on the class struggle to the 13th congress we drew out the principal phases the movement had been through:
the powerful impact of the collapse of the Eastern bloc, accentuated by the remorseless campaigns of the bourgeoisie about the death of communism. This historic event brought the third wave of struggles to a sudden halt and inaugurated a profound reflux both in consciousness and class militancy, the effects of which are still with us, particularly at the level of consciousness;
the tendency towards a revival of militancy after 1992, with the struggles in Italy, followed in 93 by those in Germany and Britain;
the grand manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie in France 1995, which provided the model for similar operations in Belgium and Germany. Here the ruling class felt confident enough to provoke widespread movements aimed at restoring the image of the unions. In this sense they were both a product of the disarray within the class, and of a recognition by the bourgeoisie that this disarray could not last forever, and that credible unions would be a vital instrument for controlling future outbreaks of class resistance;
the slow but real development of discontent and militancy within the working class faced with the deepening crisis was confirmed with added vigour after 1998, with the massive strikes in Denmark and Norway and a series of struggles in the USA, Britain and France, as well as peripheral countries like Korea China and Zimbabwe. This process has been further illustrated in the past year or so by the demonstrations of the transport workers in New York, the postal workers' struggles in Britain and France, and in particular by the important outburst of struggles in Belgium in the autumn of 2000, where we saw some real signs not only of general discontent, but also of discontent with the unions' 'leadership' of the struggle.
None of these movements, however, have had a scale or impact capable of providing a real riposte to the massive ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie about the end of the class struggle, or of helping workers around the world to rediscover confidence in themselves and in their own methods of struggle; nothing comparable to the events of May 68 or the mass strike in Poland, or even the sustained movements of the 1980s. Even the most important struggles seem to have very little echo within the rest of the class: the phenomenon of struggles in one country 'responding' to movements elsewhere appears to be almost non-existent. In this context it is difficult even for revolutionaries to see a clear pattern or definite signs of progress in the class struggle in the 90s. For the class in general, the fragmented and unconnected nature of the struggles does little, on the surface at least, to reinforce or rather restore the self-confidence of the proletariat, its awareness of itself as a distinct force in society, as an international class with the potential to challenge the existing order.
This tendency for a disoriented working class to lose sight of its specific class identity, and thus to feel essentially powerless in the face of an increasingly grave world situation, is the result of a number of interwoven factors. At the most basic level - and this is a factor which revolutionaries have always tended to underestimate, precisely because it is so basic - is the fundamental position of the working class as an exploited class suffering the entire weight of ruling class ideology. On top of this 'invariant' factor in the life of the working class, is the effect of the drama of the 20th century - the defeat of the revolutionary wave, the long night of the counter-revolution, and the near disappearance of the organised proletarian political movement during this period. These factors, by their very nature, remain extremely powerful during the phase of decomposition; in fact, if anything, they both reinforce, and are themselves reinforced by, its negative influence. This is especially clear with the anti-Communist campaigns: they derive historically from the experience of the Stalinist counter-revolution, which first established the great lie that Stalinism equals communism. But the collapse of Stalinism - a product of decomposition par excellence - is then used by the bourgeoisie to further drive home the message that there can be no alternative to capitalism, and that the class war is over.
However, in order to understand the particular difficulties facing the working class in this phase, it is necessary to focus on the more specific effects of decomposition on the class struggle. Without going into details, since we have written many other texts about this problem, we can say that these effects operate at two levels: the first being the real, material effects of the process of decomposition, the second being the manner in which the ruling class utilises these effects in order to accentuate the disorientation of the exploited class. Some examples:
the process of disintegration brought about by massive and sustained unemployment, especially among the young, by the break-up of traditionally militant working class concentrations in the heart of industry, all of which reinforces atomisation and competition amongst workers. This objective process, directly linked to the economic crisis, is then reinforced by the ideological campaigns about 'post industrial society' and the obsolescence of the proletariat. This latter process in particular has been described by various elements in the proletarian milieu or the swamp as the 'recomposition' of the proletariat; in fact, such terminology, like the similar tendency to see globalisation as a new stage in capitalist development, emanates from a serious underestimation of the dangers facing the class. The fragmentation of class identity that we have witnessed over the past decade in particular is not an advance in any sense, but a clear manifestation of decomposition which holds profound dangers for the working class.
the wars which proliferate on the peripheries of the system, and which have been moving closer to the heartlands of capital, are evidently a direct statement of the process of decomposition, and contain an immediate threat to the proletariat in the areas which they devastate, both because of the slaughter and destruction they bring in their wake, and because of the ideological poisoning of the workers mobilised for these conflicts: the situation in the Middle East bears ample witness to the latter in particular. But the ruling class in the main centres of capital also makes use of these conflicts - not only for furthering its imperialist interests but also for boosting its assaults on the consciousness of the central proletarian battalions, aggravating feelings of powerlessness, of dependence on the 'democratic' and 'humanitarian' state to solve the world's problems and so on.
Another important example is the process of 'gangsterisation' which has gathered pace enormously over the last decade. This process involves both the higher echelons of the ruling class - the Russian mafia being a caricature of a much wider phenomenon - and the lowest strata in society, including a considerable proportion of proletarian youth. This is true whether we look at countries like Sierra Leone, where gang rivalries are part of an inter-imperialist conflict, or at the inner cities of the more developed countries, where the street gang seems to offer the only 'community' and even the only source of livelihood for the most marginalised sectors of society. At the same time, the ruling class, as well as using these gangs to organise the 'illicit' side of its commerce (drugs, arms,etc) has not hesitated to package 'gangsta' ideology through music, film or fashion, cultivating it as a kind of false rebellion which obliterates any sense of belonging to a class by exalting the identity of the gang, whether the latter is defined in local, racial, religious or other terms.
Other examples could be given: the point is to emphasise the considerable range and impact of the forces currently acting as a counter-weight to the proletariat 'constituting itself into a class'. Nevertheless, against all these pressures, against all the forces claiming that the proletariat is dead and buried, revolutionaries must continue to affirm that the working class has not disappeared, that capitalism cannot exist without a proletariat, and that the proletariat cannot exist without struggling against capital. This is elementary for any communist. But the specificity of the ICC is that it is prepared to commit itself to an analysis of the course of history and the overall balance of forces between the classes. And here it must be affirmed that the world proletariat at the beginning of the 21st century, in spite of all the difficulties it faces, has not said its last word, still represents the only barrier to the full development of capitalist barbarism, and still has within itself the potential to unleash massive class confrontations at the core of the system.
This is not an abstract faith, nor an eternal truth; we do not shy away from the possibility that we might in the future have to revise our analysis and recognise that a fundamental shift in this balance has taken place to the detriment of the proletariat. Our arguments are based on a constant observation of the processes within bourgeois society, which have led us to conclude:
that despite the blows to its consciousness over the last decade, the working class still retains enormous reserves of combativity which have surfaced in a considerable number of movements during this period. This is of vital importance, because although combativity and consciousness are not to be confused, the development of open resistance to the attacks of capital is in today's conditions more than ever crucial in the proletariat rediscovering its identity as a class, which is a precondition for a more general evolution in class consciousness;
that a process of subterranean maturation has continued, and is demonstrated among other things by the emergence of "searching elements" all over the world, of a growing minority who are asking serious questions about the existing system and are looking for a revolutionary alternative. These elements are made up of a majority which gravitates towards the swamp, towards the various expressions of anarchism and so on. The recent growth of the "anti-capitalist" protests - although undoubtedly manipulated and exploited by the ruling class - also expresses a massive expansion of the swamp, that ever-shifting zone of transition between the politics of the bourgeoisie and the politics of the working class. But even more significant in the most recent period is the considerable expansion of the number of elements who are relating directly to the existing revolutionary groups, particularly to the ICC and the IBRP. This influx of elements who are going further than the vague questioning of the swamp and seeking a genuinely communist coherence is the 'tip of the iceberg', the statement of a deeper and more widespread process within the proletariat as a whole. Their arrival on the scene is bound to have a considerable effect on the existing proletarian milieu, altering its physiognomy and compelling it to break from long-established sectarian habits.
The continued existence of a proletarian menace can also be measured to some degree in a "negative" manner - by examining the policies and campaigns of the bourgeoisie. We can see this on various interconnected levels - ideological, economic, and military. On the ideological level, the campaign around "anti-capitalism" is a case in point. Earlier on in the decade the campaigns of the bourgeoisie were aimed at accentuating the disarray of a class which had been only recently struck by the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and their themes could be more openly bourgeois: the Dutroux campaign, for example, was entirely centred around the issue of democracy. The insistence on "anti-capitalism" today, by contrast, is an statement of the exhaustion of the mystification of the "triumph of capitalism", of capitalism's need to recuperate and distort the potential for a real questioning of capitalism within the working class. The fact that the anti-capitalist protests have only marginally mobilised workers as workers does not diminish their general ideological impact. The same could be said for the tactic of the left in government. Although much of the ideology of the left governments is inherited directly from the campaigns about the failure of socialism and the need for a new or third way into the future, these governments have to a large extent been put into place not simply to maintain the existing disorientation of the class, but as a precautionary measure, to prevent the working class from raising its head, from giving vent to all the discontent that has been building up in its ranks over the past decade.
On the economic level, we have argued elsewhere that the bourgeoisie of the major centres will continue to use every means at its disposal to keep its economy from collapsing, from 'adjusting' to its real level. The logic behind this is both economic and social. It is economic in the sense that the bourgeoisie must at all costs keep its economy grinding on and even maintain its own illusions about the prospect of expansion and prosperity. But it is also social in the sense that the ruling class still lives in fear that dramatic plunges in the economy will provoke massive reactions amongst the proletariat, which would then be able to see much more clearly the real bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production.
Perhaps most importantly, in all the major military conflicts involving the central imperialist powers this decade (Gulf conflicts, Balkans, Africa), we have witnessed the extreme caution of the ruling class, its reluctance to use anyone but professional soldiers in these operations, and even then, its hesitation to risk the lives of these soldiers for fear of provoking a reaction 'back home'.
It is certainly significant that, with the NATO bombing in Serbia, imperialist war took a new step back towards the heartlands of the system. But Serbia is not Western Europe. We see no evidence today that the working class of the major industrial countries is ready to march behind national banners, to enrol directly in major imperialist conflicts (and even within a country like Serbia, the limits of sacrifice have been seen, even if the massive discontent there has been diverted into a democratic carnival). Capitalism is still compelled to mask its imperialist divisions behind a façade of alliances for humanitarian intervention. Partly this reflects the inability of the secondary powers to openly challenge US domination, as we have seen; but it also expresses the fact that the system has no serious ideological basis for cementing new imperialist blocs - a fact totally ignored by the proletarian groups who essentially reduce such blocs to an economic function. Imperialist blocs are more military than economic in their function; but to operate at the military level, they also need to be ideological. For the moment it is impossible to see what ideological themes could be used to justify war between the main imperialist powers today - all of them espouse the same democratic ideology, and none can point the finger at an evil empire which represents the number one threat to this way of life: the anti-Americanism being encouraged in a country like France is a pale reflection of the previous ideologies of anti-fascism and anti-Communism. We have said that capitalism would still have to inflict a major and open defeat of the working class in the advanced countries before it could create the ideological conditions for mobilising them directly for world war. But there are strong grounds for arguing that this also applies to the more limited conflicts between the blocs-in-formation that would prepare the ground for a more generalised conflict. This is a real statement of the 'negative' weight of an undefeated proletariat on the evolution of capitalist society.
We have of course recognised that in the context of decomposition, the working class could be overwhelmed without such a frontal defeat and without a major war between the central powers. It could succumb to an advance of barbarism into the central countries, a process of social, economic and ecological collapse comparable to, but even more nightmarish than, what has already started to happen in countries like Rwanda and the Congo. But although more insidious, such a process could hardly be invisible, and we are still a long way from it - a fact again expressed 'negatively' in the recent campaigns about 'asylum seekers', which is to a large extent based on the recognition that western Europe and North America remain as oases of prosperity and stability in relation to those parts of Eastern Europe and the 'Third World' most directly affected by the horrors of decomposition.
It can therefore be said without hesitation that the undefeated character of the proletariat in the advanced countries remains a barrier to the full unleashing of barbarism in the centres of world capital.
Not only that: the development of the world economic crisis is slowly chipping away at the illusion that we are heading for a bright new future - a future founded on the 'new economy' where everyone is a stakeholder. This illusion will be further evaporated when the bourgeoisie is compelled to centralise and deepen its attack on working class living conditions in order to 'adjust' to the real state of its economy. Although we are still a long way from an openly political struggle against capitalism, we are unlikely to be very far away from a series of hard-fought and even wide-scale defensive struggles as the simmering discontent within the proletariat takes the form of outright combativity. And it is within these struggles that the seeds of a future politicisation can be sown. It goes without saying that the intervention of revolutionaries will be a key element in this process.
It is thus with a clear and sober recognition of the terrible difficulties and dangers facing our class that revolutionaries can continue to affirm with confidence: the course of history has not turned against us. The prospect of massive class confrontations remains ahead of us and will continue to determine our present and future activity.
December 2000
1 Mitchell died in 1945 as a result of his imprisonment in the Buchenwald concentration camp during the war.
2 This tendency left the ICC to form the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, which preached a form of anarcho-Bordigism and itself broke up into a series of smaller mini-groups.
3 An ex-militant of the ICC.
4 International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, formed by Battaglia Comunista and the CWO (see www.ibrp.org [136]).
The terrorist attacks which killed more than 6,000 people in the United States on 11th September, like the new war which has followed them, are a new and tragic illustration of the barbarism into which capitalism is plunging. As we explain in the article in this Review, “New York and the world over: capitalism spreads death”, this barbarity is an expression of the fact that capitalism, which entered its period of decadence with the outbreak of World War I, has for more than a decade suffered a further aggravation of this decadence whose main characteristic is the decomposition of society. Our organisation has highlighted this new phase of capitalism’s decadence since the end of the 1980s (see our first article on the question, “The decomposition of capitalism”, in International Review n°57, 2nd quarter 1989). In 1990, just after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, we made our analysis more systematic in the “Theses” published in International Review n°62. This is the document that we are reprinting here. We believe that it is more current than ever. In particular, it provides a framework for understanding the growing use of terrorism in inter-state conflicts around the world, and the rise of despair, nihilism, and religious obscurantism so strikingly illustrated by the attacks on the World Trade Center. It also deals with the fact that the different expressions of decomposition today are an important obstacle to the development of working class consciousness. We can see this today, in the way that the bourgeoisie, especially in the US but in other countries as well, is using the emotion and the fear provoked by the attacks in New York to muzzle the working class in the name of “national unity”.
The workers’ resistance to the effects of the crisis is no longer enough: only the communist revolution can put an end to the threat of decomposition. Similarly, in the period to come, the proletariat cannot hope to profit from the weakening that decomposition provokes within the bourgeoisie itself. During this period, it must aim to resist the noxious effects of decomposition in its own ranks, counting only on its own strength and on its ability to struggle collectively and in solidarity to defend its interests as an exploited class (although revolutionary propaganda must constantly emphasize the dangers of social decomposition). Only in the revolutionary period, when the proletariat is on the offensive, when it has directly and openly taken up arms for its own historic perspective, will it be able to use certain effects of decomposition, in particular of bourgeois ideology and of the forces of capitalist power, for leverage, and turn them against capital.
17) Understanding the serious threat that the historical phenomenon of decomposition poses for the working class and for the whole of humanity should not lead the class, and especially its revolutionary minorities, to adopt a fatalist attitude. Today, the historical perspective remains completely open. Despite the blow that the Eastern bloc’s collapse has dealt to proletarian consciousness, the class has not suffered any major defeats on the terrain of its struggle. In this sense, its combativity remains virtually intact. Moreover, and this is the element which in the final analysis will determine the outcome of the world situation, the inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis constitutes the essential stimulant for the class’ struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot. For while there is no basis for the unification of the class in the partial struggles against the effects of decomposition, nonetheless its struggle against the direct effects of the crisis constitutes the basis for the development of its class strength and unity. This is the case because:
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[101] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn11
[102] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref1
[103] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref2
[104] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref3
[105] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref4
[106] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref5
[107] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref6
[108] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref7
[109] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref8
[110] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref9
[111] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref10
[112] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref11
[113] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn1
[114] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn2
[115] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn3
[116] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn4
[117] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn5
[118] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn6
[119] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn7
[120] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn8
[121] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref1
[122] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref2
[123] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref3
[124] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref4
[125] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref5
[126] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref6
[127] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref7
[128] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref8
[129] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[130] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[131] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/26/revolutionary-wave-1917-1923
[132] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current
[133] https://eurasianet.org
[134] https://www.wweek.com/homepage/
[135] http://www.marxists.org
[136] http://www.ibrp.org
[137] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/329/historic-course