This is the first issue of the International Review of the International Communist Current. The necessity for such a publication has been seen clearly by all the groups which make up our current during the course of long discussions which preceded and prepared the ground for the International Conference at the beginning of this year. By taking the decision to publish the Review in English, French and Spanish, the conference not only took a decisive step in the process of unifying our current, but has also blazed a trail for the regroupment of revolutionaries in general.

In this period of general crisis, pregnant with convulsions and social upheavals, one of the most urgent and arduous tasks facing revolutionaries is that of welding together the meagre revolutionary forces that are currently dispersed throughout the world. This task can only be undertaken by beginning straight away on an international level. This has always been a central pre-occupation of our current. Our Review is designed to help fulfill this need; by embarking upon its publication we intend to make it an instrument, a pole of attraction, for the international regroupment of revolutionaries.

The Review will be above all the expression of the theoretical endeavours of our current, since only this theoretical endeavour, based on a coherence of political positions and orientation, can serve as the basis for the regroupment and real intervention of revolutionaries.

While the Review will function as an organ of research and discussion indispensable for the clarification of the problems which face the workers' movement, we do not intend to make it into a review of marxology so dear to academics and professors. Rather the Review will be first and foremost a fighting weapon anchored solidly on the fundamental class frontiers, the revolutionary marxist positions, acquired through the historic struggle of the proletariat against all the species of leftism, confusionism, and 'modernism' (from Marcuse to Invariance and its heirs); tendencies which are so widespread today and which serve to seriously encumber the development of the class struggle and to obstruct the movement towards the reconstitution of the proletarian revolutionary party.

We do not claim to be the bearers of a Programme complete in all its details. We are perfectly well aware of our inadequacies which can only be overcome by the unceasing effort of revolutionaries to obtain greater coherence and a higher understanding within the development of the class struggle.

We also extend an invitation to all revolutionary groups who are not organizationally part of our current, but who display the same pre-occupations as us, to associate themselves with these efforts, by multiplying and strengthening contacts and correspondence, and by sending us critiques, texts, and discussion articles which the Review will publish to the best of its abilities.

Some people will consider that the publication of the Review is a precipitous action. It is nothing of the kind. We have nothing in common with those noisy activists whose activity is based on a voluntarism as frenzied as it is ephemeral. But it is no less important to vigorously reject any tendency towards the formation of petty study groups which content themselves with publishing from time to time little essays which have the purpose of satisfying their authors' egos rather than expressing a will to participate and intervene in the political struggle of the working class. An implacable struggle must be waged against this narrow localist spirit of family sects. Only those groups who understand and effectively assume the role of militant activity within the class can be considered revolutionary.

As for those who can do nothing but denigrate the notion of a militant, from the Situationists of yesterday to all today's varieties of Invariance, we can only oppose them with disdain and indifference. Everyone to their posts; some of us will enter the class struggle, the rest can remain on the outside. It is much better that way.

We will leave the disillusioned contestants of the decomposing petty-bourgeoisie to contemplate their navels. For we proletarian militants, the Review is an arm of criticism which will serve to prepare the passage to criticism by arms.

This first issue is entirely dedicated to the main discussion documents submitted to the International Conference. We have not been able to include all the texts in this issue, which even so is too voluminous. The discussions raised are far from being closed; they will be taken up again in future issues, which will appear every three months. For the moment it is impossible to ensure a more frequent publication. This will be partly compensated for by the pamphlets in various languages which we intend to publish.

A great step forward has been made.

We ask all revolutionaries to give us their active support.

The Editors,

International Communist Current

April, 1975

 

For several years, Revolution Internationale (France), Internationalism (USA), and World Revolution (UK) have organized international meetings and conferences in order to develop political discussion on the perspectives for the class-struggle, and to encourage a greater understanding of class positions today. This year, in addition to the groups already cited, two groups new to our current attended the international conference: Accion Proletaria (Spain) and Rivoluzione Internazionale (Italy) and we also welcomed a delegate from Internacionalismo, the group in our current in Venezuela. This conference was mainly oriented toward the necessity of organizing the intervention and will to act of revolutionaries into an international framework.

Evan though our current consisted only of one or two groups in different countries (at the end of the period of reaction and at the beginning of the new period which opened up in 1968), the nature of the proletarian struggle and the class positions that we defend forced us to an international political coherence. Today, confronted with the worsening crisis and the heightening of struggles, this fundamentally unified political orientation and the years of common work have enabled us to create an international organizational framework for our current, so that we can concentrate our efforts in several countries.
In the context of political confusions prevalent at this time, and in view of the weakness of revolutionary forces, we consider that it is very important to insist on the necessity, as in any period of heightening class struggle, to work towards a regrouprment of revolutionaries. For this reason, we invited groups whose political positions are moving towards those of the current: Pour Une Intervention Communiste (France), Revolutionary Workers Group (USA), Revolutionary Perspectives(UK), to participate at our conference. The confrontation of ideas between our current and these groups has helped to develop the analyses and orientations which the different groups defend faced with the political tasks of today.

The situation today

During the long years of the post-war reconstruction period, revolutionary marxists have said over and over again that the capitalist system, (having entered into its period of decadence since World War I), only 'prospered' provisionally thanks to the many palliatives of reconstruction: statist measures, arms economies etc; and that eventually the inherent contradictions of the system are going to clearly explode into an open crisis still deeper than that of 1929. Today the crisis is no longer a secret to anybody and the reality of the system's basic sickness has swept away the exalting bourgeoisie and the erudite ‘marxologues' such as Socialism ou Barbarie who believed we had seen ‘the end of crises', the ‘superseding’ of marxism, or as Marcuse thought, the ‘embourgeoicisement’ of the proletariat. Our current has for seven years been analysing all the characteristics of the crisis which is now accelerating so rapidly; in its general trend 1974 mark a qualitative and quantitative decline in the economic situation of capitalism (in the East and in the West) and has demonstrated the ephemeral and mistaken nature of the ‘mini-boom' of 1972. Inflation, unemployment, monetary crises and trade wars, the fall of stock market values as well as the rates of growth of the advanced economies, are signs of the general crisis of over-production and of the saturation of markets which undermine the world capitalist system at its roots.

Contrary to 1929 capitalism today has tried as much as possible to alleviate the effects of the crisis by means of statist structures. In spite of the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries (as in the continual war in Indo¬china, the confrontations in the Middle East and Cyprus) and the reinforcing of the imperialist blocs, which lead towarls war (a coarse inherent in the economic crises of decadent capitalism), generalized war will not occur as long as the combativity of the working class continues to develop. At the conference the groups in our current elaborated the perspective, defended in our writings, recognizing that the struggle of the working class will intensify as it resists the crisis and that the class struggle will again pose the historic alternative, socialism or barbarism after fifty years of reflux.

The bourgeoisie has seen a period of upheaval and deep political crises. In such a situation its aim is to adopt a 'left' mask the better to mobilize the working class behind the national interest: in Great :Britain the bourgeoisie chooses the Labour Party and 'social contract' for this task; in Germany this lot falls to the social democratic parties, and in other places the Socialist Party (SP) and Communist Party (CP) make efforts to do the same thing, as is the case now in Portugal and France and shortly will be so in Italy and Spain. One of the most dangerous weapons the capitalist class has in this crisis is its capacity to disarm the working class by means of rekindling mystifications in the ‘left’ factions of the bourgeoisie. Economically every faction of the bourgeoisie will be led to advocate statification measures, in one way or another, in order to reinforce its national capital. But politically, especially in the area where the crisis has already struck hard, it is the ‘left’ parties which the bourgeoisie needs in order to be able to appeal to 'national unity’ and for unpaid labour on Sunday. These parties have their place in the capitalist sun (whether in the government or as a loyal opposition) owing to the fact that they still can, just as the unions do, claim to be able to contain the working class and its struggle.

Faced with this analysis, the PIC seems to us to under-estimate the weight of mystifications on the working class from the left when they put forward the motion that these mystifications no longer have any effect. On the contrary we believe that a more objective understanding of the situation will show that appeals for 'anti-fascism' and 'national unity' are still far from being exhausted at this time. Although the class manifests a growing combativity, one must not under-estimate the margin of maneuver for the enemy classy In countries like Spain and Portugal, where repression by the right has been so severe, the bourgeoisie can only hold on by running to the left, which will prove the more able mystifiers and executioners of workers in these countries and elsewhere.

Intervention of revolutionaries

The class struggle today arose as a resistance to deteriorating living standards produced by the crisis and imposed on the workers. That is why our current has rejected RWG’s analysis which states that ‘revendicative' struggles are totally dead end for the class. Nothing could be less true. In a period of crisis and mounting class struggle, the so-called 'revendicative’ struggles are an integral part of the whole process towards the maturation of consciousness in the working class, of its combativity and capacity for organization. Revolutionaries must analyze the development of these struggles and contribute to their generalization and to the development of a conscious¬ness that is more aware of the historic goals of the class. While rejecting Trotskyist manoeuvres, which trap the class in partial demand struggles and mystifications about decadent capitalism, revolutionaries must not at the same time reject the potential for going beyond the immediate demands which is implicit in working class struggles today.

The analysis of the crisis and its evolution determine to a large extent the perspectives which revolutionaries see for the class struggle. At the international conference, our current defended the thesis that the present deep crisis of the system will develop relatively slowly, although with sharp spasms, a jagged development in an ever deepening process. The class struggle manifests itself in a sporadic and episodic way revealing a period of maturation of consciousness through the major confrontations between the working class and the capitalist class. This analysis was not entirely shared by the other groups present at the conference. RP, basing their analysis on other economic explanations (rejecting the Luxemburgist theory), see the crisis as long and rather far away; for them, the class struggle is strictly determined by the given economic situation and as long as the catastrophic crisis is for tomorrow, an appeal for the generalization of struggles today is just voluntaristic. The PIC on the other hand, believes that we are already seeing the economic crisis reach its finale in the immediate danger of world war, (throwing out a ‘cry of alarm’ about the recent diplomatic events in the Middle East) or in class confrontations which could even today resolve the evolution of history. We have criticized these two cases of exaggeration while putting the accent on the fact that revolutionaries must be able to analyse a contingent situation within a general period without falling into an under or over-estimation which leads to agitating in a void, or remaining on the margin of reality at a time of crisis and of class struggle.

The time has not yet come for us to throw ourselves into the work of agitation and the attempts of the PIC who propose campaigns way beyond any practical capacity have not found a great echo. On the other hand, after giving the reports on activities of the different sections of our current and of other groups, the comrades of the current stated the necessity of enlarging our intervention and publication work in all countries in a more organized and systematic way. In particular by assuming collectively the responsibility for political intervention in countries where the current has not as yet an organized group and orienting itself towards the publication of newspapers in countries where it would be possible to do so.
It is useless for us to pose the question of intervention as an abstract concept: ‘for’ or ‘against’. The will to act is the basis of all revolu¬tionary groupings. The question is not one of fine words and of crying intervention at the top of one’s voice with no concern as to the actual objective situation, and neglecting the necessity even of providing the means to intervene through a revolutionary organization on an international scale. We must rather see that the scale of intervention by revolutionaries can vary according to the situation but all the cries for intervention cannot fill the void: the absence of a revolutionary organization. The question of the level of intervention is a problem of analysis and of appreciation of the moment while the question of organization is a principle of the workers' movement, the foundation stone without which any taking up of revolutionary positions remains pure verbiage. It is for this reason that we rejected the proposal by Accion Proletaria that we pose the question of intervention as a preliminary question to the necessity of organizing.
Revolutionary organization

Militant work is by definition collective work; it is not individuals who assume a personal responsibility within the class but rather groups based on a body of ideas who are called to take on the tasks of revolutionaries: to help clarify and generalize the consciousness of the class. At the international conference, as in our .magazines, we have insisted on the necessity of really understanding the reasons for the throwing up of groups from within the class and the responsibilities which follow from this. After fifty years of counter-revolution and the complete break with any organic continuity in the workers’ movement, the question of organization remains one of the most difficult for new elements to assimilate.
A revolutionary group is based fundamentally on class positions and the only justification for groups working separately would be through a divergence of principles, Far from idealizing or wanting to perpetuate the present dispersion of efforts, revolutionaries in our period of rising class struggle must be able to distinguish secondary questions of interpretation from an analysis of questions of principle - and try with all their strength make an effort to regroup around positions of principle while surmounting any tendencies which defend ‘their own little boutique of ideas’ and 'freedom' to remain isolated.
Since the debates in the First International, it has been understood in the marxist movement that revolutionary organizations must tend towards a centralization of efforts. Faced with the Bakuninists and with the false theories of petit-bourgeois federalism, marxists have defended the necessity of the international centralization of militant work. All we have done so far today is to have re-opened the debate while breaking from deviations about centralization such as those of Leninism (democratic centralism) and Bordigism (organic centralism). We insist on the necessity for a coherent organizational framework for revolutionary work against the diverse theories about ‘anti-group’ groups, against ‘libertarian’ and other anarchist formulations in vogue at the moment. RWG was rather sceptical about the effort to organize an international current; this group, aside from the secondary divergences which separate us, seems to be traumatised by the aberrations of the counter-revolution (especially Trotskyism) on the question of organization. While wanting to set up a counter weight against the counter-revolution some militants risk falling into an idealization of the present fragmentation and confusion in the revolutionary milieu and are never able to overcome the errors and the organizational fetishism of the past in a positive way.

If we look at the development of the proletarian movement in history, it can be said that the formation of the working class party follows periods of rising class struggle. Today in our epoch when the class struggle is developing through resistance to the economic crisis, the formation of the nuclei of the future party follows a path of slow maturation. The effort of our current to constitute itself as a pole of regroupment around class positions is a part of that process towards the formation of the party at a time of intense and generalized struggles. We do not claim to be a ‘party’, and we guard against over-estimating the weight of our efforts at organization at the present time. However, the party of tomorrow will not arise one beautiful day from nothing; on the contrary, experience shows us that political coherence serves as a pole of regroupment essential for the revolutionary elements of the proletariat in a time of decisive uprisings.

The regroupment of revolutionaries takes place around class lines and basic revolutionary perspectives; secondary political questions should not hamper a general process towards a concentration of forces faced with the demands of the situation at this time and in time to come. Those who are for regroupment ‘in theory’ and in words but leave its practical realization for some time in the future - (while raising secondary questions to the same level as class lines in order to justify their reticence and confusions) - only retard this process and put obstacles in the way of the development of consciousness. We think it is essential that today we take the first steps towards a larger international organization of revolutionaries, to translate our internationalism into organizational terms in order to strengthen our work. This is what the conference made its principal task. The international conference this year distinguishes itself from the others to the extent that we wanted to make ourselves more conscious of the necessary means to assure the continuity of work. The preceding conferences served as a base for the discussion on organization and the situation at the present time while strengthening political ties and the fundamental theories of our current.

We were not able to tackle the question of the period of transition, which is now being discussed in the current, through lack of time. But we thought it important to publish here the documents prepared for the conference on this subject. The reader can take it that this theoretical question is far from being settled either in the current or in the workers' movement in general. However, this debate, though incomplete, is of great interest for revolution¬aries who are trying to work out the basic lines for the orientation of the movement of tomorrow.

The conference ended its work with the formation of the International Communist Current (which comprises to Revolution Internationale, World Revolution, Internationalism, Internacionalismo, Accion Proletaria and Rivoluzione Internazionale); and through the decision to publish an international magazine in English, French and Spanish the positions of our current will be better diffused and developed.

J.A.
for the International Communist Current

*****

The texts we have published here are some of the documents presented at the international conference. The first three are reports prepared for the con¬ference, the others are contributions written for discussion. We did not have time to present the report, nor even to discuss the period of transition at the conference but we decided to publish these texts immediately in order to con¬tinue the open debate on this subject. Our current has not reached a homogene¬ous position on this complex question, and, in any case, we believe, contrary to other groups(such as Revolutionary Perspectives), that it is not up to revolutionaries to create class lines when the experience of the class itself has not yet settled them.

Even though certain revolutionary elements reveal themselves as being incapable of taking up their tasks at this time, they already are on the way to rushing into making absolute pronouncements on a question as complex as that of the period of transition. We think it is preferable to publish these texts so as to contribute to clarification, without claiming to resolve all the problems. We have also published a contribution from Revolutionary Perspectives on the period of transition - extracts chosen by them from a longer text - which shows their divergences with some of our comrades on this subject.

One of the aims of the January Conference will be to give ourselves the means to organize and centralize the activity of the different groups of the current at an international level.

This act is a conscious step towards the formation of a fully international organization.

In order to understand the significance of this, we must deal with three main questions:

I. Why an international political organization?

II. Why engage in such a process now?

III. What is the role of the ICC in the process which leads to the forma­tion of the world party of the proletariat?

I. Why an international political organization?

1. The political organization is an organ of the class, engendered by the class in order for it to fulfill a specific function: to help develop the consciousness of the class. The political organization does not bring this consciousness from ‘outside’; neither does it create the process of this appropriation of consciousness. It is on the contrary a product of this pro­cess just as it is an indispensable instrument of its development. From a certain standpoint one could say that the political organization is as neces­sary for the collective elaboration of the consciousness of the class, as written and oral expression is for the development of individual thought.

In the general functioning of the political organization of the proletariat, two main tasks can be distinguished:

a. Permanent analysis of social reality, aimed at making more precise the historic interests of the proletariat.(the appropriation of the lessons of the historic experience of the class and the defining of the proletarian position vis-a-vis each concrete situation). This is the task of constant elaboration of the communist programme, that is to say, the definition of the goals and the methods of the historic struggle of the working class.

b. Intervention within the class in order to aid in the conscious carrying out of its historic programme and so that it can appropriate for itself the means for its revolutionary task.

2. The working class is not the only class to exist internationally. The bourgeoisie and the various peasant strata are to be found in all countries. But the proletariat is the only class that can organize itself and act collectively at an international level because it is the only class which has no national interests. Its emancipation is only possible on a world scale.

That is why its political organization inevitably tends to be centralized and international. The proletariat creates its political organization in its own image.

Whether it is a question of political analysis or of intervention, the prole­tarian political organization is dealing with a world-wide reality. Its centralized and international character is not the result of any moral or ethical demand, but a necessary condition for its effectiveness and therefore for its very existence.

3. The international character of the proletarian political organization has been affirmed throughout the history of the workers' movement. Already in 1847, the Communist League, through its watchword, "Workers of the world, unite, the workers have no fatherland," proclaimed its international charac­ter. After 1864, political, organizations took the form of ‘Internationals’. Up until the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution and of ‘socialism in one country’ only the failure of the IInd International really broke this internationalist continuity.

The internationalism of the IInd International, which existed in the period of stability of the major industrial powers, inevitably suffered from the confinement of proletarian struggles to the framework of reforms: the horizon of the proletarian struggle objectively submitted to nationalist restric­tions. Thus the treason of the IInd International was not an isolated, unex­pected phenomenon. It was the worst outcome of thirty years of confinement of workers' struggles within national frameworks. In fact, right from its inception, the IInd International represented a regression in relation to the International Workingmen’s Association. Parliamentarism, trade unionism, the establishment of mass parties, in sum, the orientation of the workers' move­ment towards the reformist struggle, contributed to the fragmentation of the world workers' movement along national lines. The revolutionary task of the proletariat can only be conceived and realised on an international scale. Otherwise it is nothing but utopia. But from the very fact that capital is divided into nations, the .struggles for the acquisition of reforms (when they were possible) did not require an international arena to be successful. It was not world capital which decided to concede this or that amelioration to the proletariat of this or that nation. It was in each country and in a struggle against their own national bourgeoisie that the workers pressed home their demands.

Proletarian internationalism is not a pious hope, nor an abstract ideal, but a necessity imposed by the nature of the proletariat’s historic task.

That is why the first world war, by decisively demonstrating the historic unviability of the national framework and by putting the proletarian revolu­tion as the order of the day, had to .lead, after the collapse of the IInd International, to the most energetic re-affirmation of proletarian internatio­nalism within the workers’ movement. This was the task imposed on Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and which then demanded the constitution of a new International, the Communist International.

The IIIrd International was founded at the very beginning of the ‘era of the socialist revolution’ and its most important characteristic inevitably had to be its intransigent internationalism. Its demise came when it became unable to maintain this internationalism. This was the theory of socialism in one country.

Since then it has not been by chance that the word internationalist has been part of the name of many of the main organized reactions against the Stalinist counter-revolution. Capitalist decadence is synonymous with the necessity of the proletarian revolution and proletarian revolution is synonymous with internationalism.

4. If at all times proletarian political organizations have affirmed their international character, today this affirmation is more than ever the indis­pensable precondition for a proletarian organization.

It is because of this that we must understand the importance, the profound significance, of the internationalist effort of our current.

II. Why engage in such a process now?

1. When one looks at the development of our international current one can’t but be struck by the weakness of its numerical weight. In the past, even in particularly unfavourable circumstances, international organizations were in one way or another the end product, the crowning of various national activi­ties. With our current the process has been quite the opposite: international existence appeared much more as a point of departure for national activities than as a result of the latter. All the groups in the current were conceived as an integral part of the international current even before they published the first issue of their national journal.

One could pick out two main reasons for this state of affairs:

a. The organic rupture resulting from fifty years of counter-revolution which, because of the weakness it has caused in the revolutionary movement, has for­ced revolutionaries, right from the beginning of the resurgence of class struggles, to concentrate their weak forces in order to carry out their tasks.

b. The definite disappearance, after fifty years of capitalist decadence, of all illusions about the possibility of any real action on a national scale.

If the point of departure for our current was international activity it is thus because above all it is the concrete expression of a particular historic situation.

2. In fact with the creation of an international bureau we are not suddenly embarking upon the process of formation of the international organization. This process has existed since the beginning of the different groups of the current. All we are really doing is consciously recognizing this process by going beyond the stage of a certain passive, anarchic spontaneity with regard to the objective conditions for revolutionary work, to a stage of conscious organization which creates, by its own volition, the best conditions for the development of this process.

There is at the basis of all collective activity a degree of spontaneity (action which is unpremeditated as regards objective conditions). The develop­ment towards organization is itself a spontaneous product of this activity. But organization is nevertheless a supercession (not a negation) of spontan­eity. Just as in the collective activity of the whole class, so in the acti­vity of revolutionaries, organization creates the conditions for:

a. consciousness to arise out of the conditions which have been engendered by spontaneity.

b. the means to be provided for acting consciously and willingly upon the development of this process.

This is what we are doing in creating this international bureau and orienta­ting ourselves towards the creation of a full international organization.

3. The organic rupture which the revolutionary movement has suffered since the revolutionary wave of the twenties weighs heavily on revolutionaries today, not only because of the difficulties which they encounter in trying to reappro­priate the gains of past struggles but also because of the undue influence of petty-bourgeois student ideology within their ranks. The student movement, which was such a spectacular sign that capitalism was once again entering into crisis and into a new phase of proletarian struggle, inevitably served to infect the young revolutionary groups with its world-view. (It could hardly have been otherwise.)

One of the main manifestations of this weakness was concretized in the problems of organization. All the habits of the university milieu constituted an enor­mous burden which the revolutionary movement had to carry on its shoulders: the difficulty of conceiving theoretical work as a reflection of the real world divided into antagonistic classes, (which took the form of a jealous protection of ‘one’s own' little thoughts ‘in themselves’, in the same way as academics sit on their own college theses), a difficulty in grasping theoretical activity as a moment of general activity and an instrument of the latter, a difficulty in understanding the importance of practical will, of consciously organized activity, in sum, the inability to carry out, in all its depth and with all its implications, the old marxist motto “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.”

It is this incomprehension which expressed itself in the criticisms of our current made by elements such as the ‘Ex-Lutte Ouvriere Tendance’ in Revolution Internationale,

For these elements, our international current would be an artificial invention and the organizational effort to create it would be pure voluntarism. Arguments of this sort are based on two main ideas:

a. It would be ‘voluntarism’ because there exists a volition to ‘build’ an organization, whereas the latter can only be a natural product of an objective process independent of the will of the few individuals of the current.

b. It would be ‘artificial’ because the class struggle has not yet made that “qualitative leap” which will transform economic struggles into “revolutionary”, “communist” struggles.

Behind these pseudo-marxist ideas there lurks a total inability to grasp the essential foundation-stone of marxism: the will to act consciously for the revolutionary transformation of the world.

Against all idealist tendencies, marxism affirms the insufficiency of human will: man does not transform the world when he wants and how he wants. The concretization of all subjective volition depends on the existence of favour­able objective conditions, effectively independent of this volition. But nothing could be more alien to Marxism than to transform the insufficiency of will into a complete negation of will. That would be to confuse marxism with its principal philosophic antagonist - empiricist, fatalistic positivism. Marxism makes a critique of voluntarism in order to affirm all the more strongly the importance of will. In affirming the necessity of objective conditions for the concretization of human will, marxism underlines above all the necessary character of this will.

The idea that revolutionary organization builds itself voluntarily, consciously, with premeditation far from being a voluntarist idea is on the contrary one of the concrete results of all Marxist praxis.

Understanding the necessity of objective conditions for beginning the cons­truction of the revolutionary party does not mean that this organization is an automatic product of these conditions. This means in reality that it is necessary to understand' the importance of subjective will at the moment when these conditions are historically present.

Let us now examine this accusation of artificiality.

According to the anti-organizationists, the objective conditions which must subsist at the beginning of a process of building the party are none other than the openly revolutionary struggle of the proletariat - the destruction of the capitalist state, and even the installation of communist relations of production.

The revolutionary party is not a decorative organ whose task is to embellish the dish served up by the spontaneous outburst of revolutionary struggle. It is on the contrary a vital, powerful element of this struggle, an indispensable instrument of the class. If the Russian Revolution is the proof positive of the indispensable character of this instrument, the German Revolution is the negative proof of this. The inability of Luxemburg’s tendency to under­stand the necessity for beginning the construction of the party before the first outbreak of revolutionary struggle was to weigh heavily on the course of events in Germany.

To understand the party as an indispensable instrument for the revolutionary struggle is to understand the necessity to actively aid its construction as soon as the conditions for a revolutionary confrontation have ripened.

In fact, a failure to grasp the importance of the construction of the world political organization of the proletariat when the conditions for a revolu­tionary confrontation are ripening means an inability to understand the importance of the role of this organization.

There is no infallible index for measuring the rising wave of class struggle. In certain circumstances even a dimunition of hours lost through strikes can hide a maturation of revolutionary consciousness. Today, however, we do possess two indices which enable us to be certain that since 1968 we have been moving in a revolutionary direction:

a. The deepening and increasing acceleration of the crisis.

b. The existence of a level of combativity in the world working class which demonstrates the fact that just as the bourgeoisie can “less and less conti­nue to govern as before”, the proletariat “can and will less and less put up with lining as before”. That is to say that the conditions of a revolu­tionary situation are ripening irreversibly.

In these conditions, the work of building the political organization is not an artificial wish but an imperious necessity.

4. For revolutionaries today the danger is not to be in advance of the revolu­tionary process but to be caught up behind it.

III. What is the role of the International Current in the process which leads to the formation of the world party of the proletariat?

1. In order to understand the importance and the significance of what we are doing in setting up an international bureau, we must pose the problem of the relationship between our international current and any group which may arise defending class positions.

We have often asserted that it was the task of revolutionaries to constitute a pole of regroupment of the proletarian vanguard. Today we must understand that we must constitute the pivot, the ‘skeleton’ of the future world party of the proletariat.

2. From the theoretical point of view, the current’s platform, because it gathers together the essence of the historic experience of the proletariat, constitutes the rallying point in any group which situates itself on the terrain of the historic struggle of the proletariat.

Contrary to what the EX-L.O. Tendance asserted in one of its texts, there are not “several possible coherences” which can encompass class positions. In the last instance, theoretical coherence is not a question of syllogisms, or of pure logical reasoning. It is the expression of an objective, material coherence which is unique: that of the practice of the class.

It is because it synthesises this practical experience that our platform is the only possible framework for the activity of a revolutionary organization.

3. From the organizational point of view, could there exist a group which had the same positions as the international current but which did not integrate itself organizationally? Bordiga emphasized - quite rightly - that the party, far from being simply one programme was also one will. This will does not consist of pious vows or ‘sincere’ wishes. It’s persevering determination for revolutionary intervention. And as we have seen, this intervention is synony­mous with organization and thus with organizational experience.

There exist organizational gains just as there are theoretical gains, and the one conditions the other in a permanent way. Organized activity is not an immediate phenomenon, given right from the start, spontaneously. It is the result of an experience and a consciousness which is not to be confused with that of one or several ‘individuals’. It results uniquely from a collective praxis all the more rich because it is collective.

That is why at times when a great revolutionary organization was in existence a split was something which one hesitated about for a long time. The orga­nic continuity which links revolutionary organizations since 1847 is not a mere ‘tradition’ or a product of luck. It expresses, as a reflection of the continuity of the proletarian struggle, the necessity to conserve the organizational gains which the proletarian political organizations have bequeathed.

That is why the international organizations of the proletariat have always been constituted around a pivot, around a current which not only defended in a more coherent fashion the theoretical gains of the proletariat, but which also possessed a practical organizational experience which was ade­quate to the task of acting as a pillar of the new organization.

This role was played by the current of Marx and Engels for the Ist International, by Social Democracy for the IInd, and by the Bolshevik Party for the IIIrd.

If the workers movement had not gone through the 50 yr. break which separates the Communist International from today, it is without doubt the ‘left’ of the latter (German left, Italian left) which would have assumed the task this time. From the standpoint of political positions there is no doubt that the
next international will be a continuity of the ‘left’; but from the organizational point of view this pivot has still to be built.

Since the recent resurgence of the class struggle, our international current has taken on an organizational practice based on the proletariat’s class posi­tions. That is to say that its praxis has become, with all its weaknesses and errors, the heritage of the proletarian struggle. The current has thus recreated a new source of organic continuity, by being the only organization to have assured a continuity in its practice within the framework of class positions.

4. The international current which today is taking a step towards centrali­zation must therefore, and can effectively consider that its essential task is to constitute itself as this pivot, which is indispensable to the constitution of the next international, the world party of the proletariat.

Those who see in this affirmation pure megalomania are not being modest but irresponsible. The international current would commit suicide if it was incapable of fully taking responsibility for what it objectively is.

R. Victor

Revolution Internationale

"A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dis­solution of capitalism of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat."

(Platform of the Communist International, March, 1919)

Nearly fifty years after their being uttered, these ringing words have again gained the power to haunt world capitalism. Decadent capitalism, sweating muck and gore from every pore stands once again on the dock of humanity. The accusers? Mil­lions of proletarians slaughtered by capital over the last two generations, plus all those who perished from capitalism's in­ception; they all stand, stern and silent, behind the executioner - the international working class. The sentence? It has been passed since the first proletarians rose up against capitalist exploitation, it has existed in the attempts of Babeuf, Kangui and the Communist League to harangue the pro­letariat to a final onslaught, it existed in the work of the First, Second, and Third Internationals and in the heritage of the ultra-left. The accused has indeed been sentenced - its death penalty has been merely postponed; humanity itself can no longer tolerate any further delays!

The Crisis

The last few years have seen a vindication of the analysis our tendency began to make in 1967/68, both as to basis of the historic-crisis and to the present unfolding crisis. But, almost uncannily, the last twelve months have seen an irrefutable vindication of the perspectives presented by our American comrades at this conference a year ago. The perspectives outlined for our tendency by Internationalism included three basic alternatives open to capitalism in crisis, all of which were likely to be tried to a greater or lesser extent simultaneously. These were: the attempt to deflect the crisis onto another capitalist state, onto weaker sections of capital (including the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry) and onto the proletariat.

We shall not go here into great detail about the specific manifestations of the crisis (which would demand a systematic nation­-by-nation account; the brilliant set of articles appearing in the last issue of Revolution Internationale are an example of how these questions should be dealt with by us). We wish here to pick out the main aspects of the present conjunctural crisis in a historical perspective integrally connected to the level of international class struggle.

With the saturation of markets which condemns world capitalism to cycles of ever-increasing barbarism, the perspective of the communist revolution is open to humanity in a material and objective way. But this has been so since the last sixty years, and the failure of the past communist attempts to overthrow capital has meant that capitalism's continuation has been pos­sible only through the cycles of crises, wars and reconstruction.

The greatest ‘boom' of capitalism, the reconstruction which re­sulted from the depths of destruction and self-cannibalization achieved by capitalism during 1939-45, lasted for more than twenty years. But the 'boom' in decadence is really the bloating of a corpse. Between 1948 and 1973, world industrial production increased by 3-1/2 times; the average annual rate of G.N.P. growth amounted to 5% (some, like Japan, doubled it). World inflation, however, was never checked and the UK prices are now roughly 7-1/2 times higher than in 1945. Moreover, the third world countries saw only an aggravation of their economic condition and this huge sector of world capital sunk every year into a worst state of debt, unemployment, militarism, despotism and poverty.

But since the late sixties, the crisis has beer manifesting itself through monetary dislocations, and the recent appearance galloping inflation (two digit figures for almost all industrialized countries). The monetary system developed after the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which was based on fixed exchange rates to the dollar linked to the gold standard, is now in shambles. The main druids of the IMF gather together today only to make sure that no epidemics follow from the inevitable deaths of the coming period. A hopeless task! No such net would ever resist the weight of a collapsing capitalist colossus. Inevitably leads to recession, to close downs, bankruptcies, lay-offs and profit squeezes. Both are inevitable aspects of the capitalist system of production today, and both are simply moments in the permanent onslaught which decadent capitalism unleashes against the working class. But the continuation of the inflationary spiral can only end the paralysis of the entire world market, an international slump which would have frightening consequences for the bourgeoisie.

Though 1972/73 seemed to mark a period of relative adjustment in the world economy, that period was merely a short lull achieved by the strongest capitalist powers (the US, Germany, Japan) at the expense of their weaker competitors. The intensification of covert trade wars, currency devaluation and the slow disintegration of customs unions in this period to be attempts, within the advanced capitalist sectors, to achieve some degree of equilibrium to a further international deterioration. 1974 and now 1975 are harbingers of a worsening, and more catastrophic relapse, announcing that the breathing spell achieved by some national capitals in the previous two years is over.

Nowadays, the world economy is in a deep recession. In 1974 there was hardly any growth and world trade has been slackening. The US G.N.P. is down on 1973 and is still falling; Britain is stagnant and Japan has had a 3% G.N.P. fall. In many countries there's a growing panic arising from the collapse of many small and medium size firms. In Britain, this is a chronic occurrence, hitting large companies as well, even multinationals (travel firms, shipbuilding companies, auto, etc). Key industries such as building and construction, cars and aircraft, electronics, textiles, machine tools and steel are facing increasing difficulties in the coming period. The rise in the oil price has added to the insoluble problems faced by recession-ridden capi­talism, adding a global $60 billion a year balance of payments deficit. Through the tottering mechanisms of the IMF, the druids of capital are madly attempting to ‘recycle' some of these profits accruing to the. oil-producing countries, as if these and similar ‘reflatioary' .measures would do anything except add a twist to the inflationary spiral. The debts of industrial companies have doubled since 1965, and since 1970 the rates of growth of all capitalist countries have steadily declined or shown glaringly to be nothing but artificial creations of deficit spending. The 1975 forecasts do not go beyond a paltry annual growth rate of 1,9% for the OECD countries including the US.

Though the situation is critical for world capitalism, various mechanisms of state intervention have helped alleviate the crisis by spreading out the worst immediate consequences (such as massive lay-offs); this is done by selective, sometimes massive, subsidies and deficit financing channeled through the banking system. These mechanisms are entirely unable to help realize the surplus value global-capital needs for its accumulation. The real source for such revenues originates from vicious austerity programmes (wage controls, reduction of social services, taxation, etc). All these procedures, which are but stop-gap measures, actually accelerate the crisis either by erupting onto the political arena (ie, class struggle) or by inevitably adding to inflationary surge which is nowadays irresistible. All the mec­hanisms of capitalism uses to ‘phase out' the crisis constitute the logical extension of the desperate struggle capitalism in decay has waged throughout this century against its own decomposition. As we .have said before, "... the underlying causes of the present crisis reside in the historical impasse in which the capitalist mode of production has found itself since the first world war: the great capitalist powers have completely divided up the world and there are no longer enough markets to allow the expansion of capital: henceforth in the absence of a victorious proletar­ian revolution, the system has only been able to survive thanks to the mechanism crisis, war, reconstruction, new crisis, etc." (‘Overproduction and Inflation', in RI 6, new series and WR 2).

When the present American Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, recently described the crisis of American agriculture, he admitted: "The only way we can have a fully producing agriculture in this country is to have a vigorous healthy export market. We simply can't consume at home all that American agriculture can produce." This faithful watch-dog was, in this case, barking honestly, and in unison with all his German, Japanese, British, Russian and French colleagues. Every national capital in the world is going all-out to penetrate each other's markets. Like Midas, saturated with gold but unable to devour even a bread crumb, the insatiable thirst for the realization of surplus value just cannot be quenched. So, for example, the Russian rulers have sought most-favored nation status to penetrate the US markets and to gain much needed US capital (technology, cre­dits, etc) so as to expand their own productive capacity and competitiveness on the world market. Equally those circles in American capital which most understand the plight of US capital seek desperately to penetrate the Russian markets. These attempts occur all the time, from all quarters, with an impressive cast of insatiable Midases - nay, that poor wretch was merely greedy slaveholder these capitalists are truly vampires! Having drained the blood of their victims to the marrow of the bone, they pounce on each other's victims just to discover that somebody else got there first!

The present conjunctural crisis partakes from an important factor inherent in decadent capitalism: the tendency towards state capitalism. The stock exchange crash/crisis of 1929 was sudden catastrophic collapse arising after years of stagnation and unsuccessful attempts by the advanced capitalisms at catching up even with the pre-1914 growth figures. The trend to­wards state capitalism, already present in 1929, was nonetheless still insufficiently attuned to serve as a temporary cushion for world crises.

After the second imperialist war, the tendency towards state capitalism received conscious and deliberate sanction by many capitalist governments and unofficial recognition by all. A perma­nent waste economy (armaments, etc), financed largely through inflationary spending, was seen and felt to be an answer to many of the problems of stagnation and over-production. The structur­al production of waste, or more precisely, the burning-up of surplus value, became an undeniable economic factor since 1945, and it is this factor which fundamentally accounts for the so-called ‘prosperity' of the postwar period. Those countries which were demolished by the war achieved ‘miraculous' recoveries (Germany, Italy, Japan), a fact that enabled the victors to re-divide and reconstruct a war-torn and pulverized world market. World capital was thus given a lease of life - at the cost of 55 million victims. Another, not so vital, loss was the complete debase­ment of the ‘marxism' of many Cardans who, believing in miracles proclaimed the ‘end' of economic crises. In fact, such a ‘loss' was a gain for bourgeois sociology, so all is well that ends well. But very few miracles seem to be surviving the first ripples of the impending crisis.

The tempo and scale of the present crisis confirms the analysis our tendency began to make nine years ago; the ‘boom' of the postwar years had ended, we said, and the world capitalist sys­tem had entered a long, drawn-out conjunctural crisis which still has some unfolding to do. The inter-related indicators we have been using to appraise the tempo of the crisis will be showing themselves up with increasing intensity and simultaneity:

1. Massive fall-off of international trade.

2. Trade wars (‘dumpings', etc) between national capitals

3. Adoption of protectionist measures and collapse of customs unions

4. Return to autarky

5. Decline of production

6. Massive growth in unemployment

7. Drop in workers' real wages and living standards

At given moments, the confluence of some of these indicators could trigger a massive slump in a given national capital such as Britain, Italy, Portugal, or Spain. This is a possibility that we don't dismiss. However, although such a collapse would give an irreparable blow to the world economy (British assets and investments abroad alone amount to £20 billion), the world capitalist system could still drag on as long as a modicum of production were maintained in some advanced countries such as the US, Germany, Japan and the Eastern European countries. All such events of course tend to engulf the whole system, and cri­ses are inevitably world crises today. But for the reasons we have sketched above, we have reason to believe that the crisis will be drawn-out - extremely convulsive and with jagged curves, but more like a snowballing effect than a steep sudden fall. Even the disintegration of national economy will not necessarily send all the bankrupt capitalist to hang themselves, as Rosa Luxemburg remarked in n slightly different context. For this to happen, the personification of national capital, the state, must he strangled by none other than the revolutionary proletariat.

Class Struggle

On the political level, the consequences of the crisis are far-reaching and explosive. As the crisis deepens, the world capitalist class will begin to fan the flames of war. The unending, virulent ‘small' wars of the last 25 years will continue and worsen (Vietnam, Cambodia, Cyprus, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, etc). In periods of crisis, however, when the chronic decomposition of the third world advances towards the centres of capitalism, the cry for war fuses with the two other battle cries of the bourgeoisie: austerity and export! This three-prong attack on the working class means that the bourgeoisie is trying to force the proletariat to pay for the crisis totally, in sweat and blood. Under such conditions, the standards of living of the working class, already brutally reduced by inflation, will plummet even further in the austerity and export drives of the bourgeoisie. The psychologically demoralizing prospect of .war also helps to fragment sections of the proletariat, and prepare them to accept a war economy, with all the consequences that carries for the future proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie senses that the only real solution to its crisis is a defeated proletariat, a proletariat unable to resist the infernal cycles of decayed capitalism. Thus the systematic increa­se in the rate of exploitation, the huge escalation of unemploy­ment in the US, Britain, Germany, etc. Other ruthless measures are being tried, such as ‘voluntary' wage reductions, three-day weeks, whole weeks of layoffs, expulsion .of ‘foreign' workers, speed-ups, cuts in social services. Needless to say, all these measures find daily sanctification in the cesspools of the bourgeois media (press, TV, magazines, etc).

But in spite of their severity, these attacks are nothing com­pared to what the bourgeoisie can really dish out. There is no crime, no monstrosity, no lie and deceit the capitalists will shrink from in their campaign against their mortal enemy, the proletariat. If the bourgeoisie doesn't dare to massacre the world proletariat at this stage, it is because it is frightened and hesitant. The proletariat, that awakening giant, emerges from the reconstruction period an undefeated warrior, a class with nothing to lose and a world to win. It will take a lot of beating on a worldwide scale before the bourgeoisie can impose capitalism's ultimate solution to the crisis: a new world war.

This accounts for the hesitancy displayed by sections of the bourgeoisie in their dealings with the working class. Some, worried by the dangers of massive unemployment resulting from the growing recession, are attempting to ‘boost' consumer demand by reducing personal taxation (Ford's proposed $16 billion tax ­cut) or by trimming obsolete war production. But all these ‘reflationary' tricks end up aggravating inflationary pressures and thus in the end only accelerate the tendency towards slump. Faced with the decline in production which accompanies galloping inflation, and unable to reduce its falling rate of profit because of the non-existence of markets, the bourgeoisie will have to finally confront the proletariat in a death-struggle.

But the bourgeoisie also developed confidence in itself during the postwar ‘boom'. The self-satisfied platitudes of the Daniel Bells, Marcuses, Bookchins and Cardans about a ‘modern' crises-free capitalism have their roots in the material soil of the past period of growth and. reconstruction. Rallying around the state, the apparatus which directly supervised the reconstruction period and whose techniques of intervention have matured over sixty years of capitalist decay, the bourgeoisie may be losing the complacency of the reconstruction period, may sometim­es veer towards panic and despair, but it is not yet finally defeated. As long as the bourgeoisie can count on the mystifications of ‘national unity', its self-confidence can remain unbroken. The relations between classes in periods of crises tend to sharpen and assume an irreconcilable character. In such conditions, the actions of the state must appear to be ‘impartial' so as to better mystify the working class. State interventions during such moments, therefore, tend to alleviate the insoluble political and social contradictions confronted by the bourgeoisie. The state must give the impression that it is acting in the name of ‘everyone', bosses, petty-bourgeois and workers alike. It must appear to possess the noble attributes of an arbiter, and as such, obtain the legitimacy needed to crush the working class in order to maintain the existing relations of production.

The leftist factions of the capitalist class (Stalinists, Social Democrats, trade union and their Trotskyist/Maoist/anarchist ‘critical' pimps) are raising themselves to this task, that is, of custodians of the state. Only they can attempt to pose as representatives of the working class, of ‘the little guy', of ‘the poor'. Because an undefeated working class has to be cajoled into accepting wage-gouging and other such measures, the leftists alone can now appear as the most effective channel for the introduction of further state centralization, nationalizations and despotism, as the examples of Chile under Allende and Portugal today, show.

The tendency of capitalism in decay is towards crisis and war, and no force society except the proletariat can put an end to this murderous cycle of barbarism. At first sight, it would seem that the road to war is the only one .open in the immedi­ate sense to the bourgeoisie. The fact that the proletariat has no permanent mass organizations could imply that it is defenceless against the chauvinist storm preceding a new world war. But the bourgeoisie knows better. Through the medium of its trade unions, capitalism knows that the proletariat remains a revolutionary class in spite of the absence of mass prole­tarian organization. The trade unions have recognized this elementary fact long since and their whole function revolves around the need to destroy from within any autonomous workers' movement. In every self-mobilization of the proletariat lurks the hydra of revolution. Therein lies the chief obstacle to the bourgeoisie's criminal designs! Before the bourgeoisie can successfully mobilize for war, it needs a globally defeated working class. Until then it must tread carefully. In fact, the bourgeoisie is finding it very difficult now to mobilize the proletariat under the rantings of ‘austerity' and ‘let's all pull together'. Politically, the fascist anti-fascists haven't fared any better than the economic policemen of capital. Every new filthy ideology capitalism excretes on the working class immediately seems to find a stable repository in the atomized and frenetic hordes of the petty-bourgeoisie, not in the working class. It is not accidental that all the reactionary ideologies of zero-growth, xenophobia, sexual libbings and their counterparts (such as advocates of stronger marriages and ‘less sex'), plus the usual idiots spouting the Second Coming, are to be confined mainly to petty-bourgeois sects. Today, there's simply no way of rationally justifying to the proletariat the continuance of capitalist social relations.

The fact that the working class today has no permanent mass organizations has many .implications. Firstly, the working class is not encumbered by huge reformist organizations from its immediate past, as it was in1914-23. The lessons of today's period can thus be absorbed faster than they were during and immediately after the first world war. The consciousness that only .communist solutions can give any meaning to the struggles for wages and conditions can unfold sharply and clearly, since any economic ‘victory' is immediately eroded by the crisis. As Marx said, humanity doesn't pose itself tasks which it cannot solve. If the proletariat faces the crisis this century without permanent reformist organizations, this has inevitable positive corollaries.

As long as the crisis doesn't deepen in a way that would irresis­tibly provoke the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, as long as the proletariat as a whole doesn't pose its revolution on the immediate agenda, then all the temporary institutions thrown up by class struggle (strike committees, mass assemblies, etc) are inevitably integrated or recaptured by capital if they attempt to remain permanent. This is an inevitable objective process, and one of the features of capitalist decadence. If every strike committee, if every ‘workers' commission' and such like like tend to become capitalist organs today, the working class will sooner or later confront this fact. Already the workers in Barcelona and the north of Spain seem to be becoming deeply aware of this. In England, thousands of workers almost instinctively distrust any shop-steward dominated strike committee. In the US, the workers tolerate leftist and ‘radical' trade union leaders, but only imbeciles would call this toleration a permanent loyalty to trade-unionism, or a ‘consequence' of wages struggles. The workers struggle every day, and even more so in moments of cris­is, because as class the proletariat can never be integrated by capitalism, This is so because the global proletariat is an exploited class, the only productive class in capitalist society. As a result, the proletariat can only fight to assert itself against the intolerable conditions capital forces it to endure. It doesn't matter in the short term what the proletariat thinks of itself, what matters is what it is. And it is this latter objective being precedes the communist consciousness of the working class. Let the ex-leftist modernist scoff at this. For its part the proletariat has no other path to travel, no other way of learning, than that provided by the Golgotha of bourgeois society.

The proletariat needs the time offered by the protracted nature of the crisis to be able to struggle and understand its position in world society. This understanding cannot come suddenly for the class as a whole. The working class comes against the wall many times in the next period, and many times too it will recede, seemingly defeated. But in the end no wall can stand the continuous battering of the proletarian waves, even less when the wall is disintegrating its own accord. But just as the proletariat will make use of the protracted nature of the crisis, so will the bourgeoisie use all its cards to deflect, confuse and defeat the efforts of the working class. The destiny of humanity depends on the outcome of this final confrontation. But as the bourgeoisie will do everything under the sun (and the moon!) to weaken the proletariat's tendency towards world regroupment, so will the proletariat be able to establish direct continuity in its struggle, in spite of all the divisions and mystifications of the leftists, trade unions, governments, etc. No capitalist organization can withstand an almost continuous wave of strikes and proletarian self-activity without becoming demoralized. Thus the class as a whole will begin to re-appropriate the communist struggle and deepen its global consciousness in real confrontations. The time lags be­tween mass class actions will shorten, and growing memory and lessons will be placed at the disposal of the working class. This could not be otherwise since the only weapons in the prole­tariat's arsenal are its consciousness and its ability to org­anize itself autonomously.

The Task Facing our Tendency

The deepening of the crisis can only be welcomed by communists. On the conjunctural level, the possibility of the communist revolution appears once again as an expression of the historical decay of bourgeois society. Our tasks will of necessity, become enlarged .and more complex, and the process towards the formation of the party will be accelerated directly by our present activities. The essentially gradual development of the crisis in this period will also allow us time to regroup better, to temper and galvanize our forces internationally. The unmis­takable trend in communist groups today is to first and fore­most seek international regroupment of forces; ‘national' regroupments are not a formal ‘stage' prior to the international one. To formalize the sequence of regroupment into such a sterile and localistic scheme would mean to revert to old Social Democratic conceptions about ‘national sections' and similar leftist gradualism. Only globally can we carry out our pre­paratory work, deepen our overall theoretical understanding and defend our platform within the struggles of the working class.

Our tendency will begin to confront in a more systematic way an immense amount of actual organizational work, such as the contribution to the formation and strengthening of future communist groups. Integrally connected to this, our tendency will be able to intervene on a more cohesive and international plane in the many events which will erupt in the coming period. But our specific function is not to ‘technically organize' strikes or any similar actions of sectors of the class, but to patien­tly and vehemently point out in the clearest possible way the implications of autonomous class activities and the needs of the communist revolution. We exist to defend the programmatic acquisitions of the whole working class movement, and this task can only be deepened through a militant and committed activity whenever and whenever the working class mobilizes itself for its own interests, or when such interests are directly threatened by capitalist attacks.

The perspectives for our tendency presented by Revolution Internationale at the January 1974 conference are flawed in this main respect, in that the author was unable to stress our organizational needs and actually minimized their impor­tance. This can be attributed to our tendency's relative im­maturity at the time concerning the very concrete implications our activities carried, for the class as a whole and for us. Today we can see the question of regroupment and the party on much firmer grounds. To us a programmatic agreement means also an organizational commitment, a tendency towards action within the framework of world regroupment. Woe to those activists who want to ‘intervene' without a clear understanding of what global regroupment means! The building of an international communist tendency is the acid test for any such activists. This commitment must be proven in deeds and attitude, not in words alone. Our tendency has already encountered many such sectarians who, like the centrists of yesterday, are always ‘in principle' for communist regroupment (a nice sentiment indeed, just like being ‘in principle' for the Brotherhood of Man or for eternal justice!). But in practice such sectarians sabotage any principled and significant move towards regroupment, alluding to trivialities or secondary points of ‘difference'. Just as our tendency has no need for modernists who ascribe to the working class their own integration into capitalism, we have no need for confusionists who in practice advocate demoralization and parochialism. It is a measure of our development that this conference did not attract such people. The process of regroupment began in the early 70's by our tendency has already polarized many tendencies and groups which in their majority have decomposed organizationally and theoretically. Among these are included the rump groups coming from Socialism ou Barbarie, including dilettantes like Barrot and similar luminaries of modernism. Our tendency today has a long road to travel, and we can be sure that the road will become in many respects more arduous and difficult. But concerning the past period of essentially basic theoretical clarification, we can safely conclude that it is a period drawing to an end.

World Revolution,

For the International Communist Current

January, 1975.

The Specific Nature of the Proletarian Revolution

The urgent necessity for communists to fight for maximum clarity and coherence concerning the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat derives from the unique nature of the proletarian revolution. Whereas the bourgeois revolution (England, France etc.) was fundamentally a political confirmation of the bourgeoisie's economic domination of society, which grew steadily and progressively out of declining feudal society, the proletariat has no economic power under capitalism, and in the period of capitalist decadence has no permanent organisations of its own. The only weapons available to the proletariat are its class consciousness and its ability to organise its own revolutionary activity; having wrested power from the bourgeoisie it has the immense task of consciously constructing a new social order.

Capitalist society, as all class societies, grew up independent of men's wills, as a long drawn out unconscious process, regulated by laws and forces not subject to human control. The bourgeois revolution merely swept away the feudal superstructure which prevented those laws from generalising themselves in an unfettered way. Today it is the very nature of those laws, their blind, anarchic, commodity character, which is threatening to lead human civilisation to ruin. But despite the apparently immutable character of these laws, they are, in the end, only the expression of a social relationship which men themselves have created. The proletarian revolution is a systematic onslaught against the social relationships which give rise to the remorseless laws of capital. It can only be a conscious onslaught, because it is precisely the unconscious and uncontrolled character of capital which the revolution is attempting to destroy; and the social system which the proletariat will construct on the ruins of capitalism is the first society in which mankind exerts a rational and conscious control over the productive forces, of the whole of human life-activity.

What forces the proletariat to confront and destroy the social relations of capital: wage-labour, generalized commodity production - is the fact that the latter have entered into violent conflict with the productive forces, both with the material needs of the proletariat and the productive forces of human society as a whole. The decadence of the social relations which dominate the proletariat implies that the primary task of the proletariat in this epoch is to destroy them and initiate new ones. Its task then is not to govern, reform or organize capital but to liquidate it forever. Decadence means that the productive forces simply cannot be developed in the interests of humanity as long as they remain under the dominion of capital, that real development can now only take place under communist relations of production. Historical materialism leaves no room for a transitional mode of production between capitalism and communism.

"What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges". (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme).

Here we have a transition period in which communism emerges with violent birth pangs out of capitalist society, a communism in constant struggle against the remnants of the old society and continually striving to "develop on its own foundations" towards the reign of freedom, the classless society.

The Revolutionary Civil War

But the movement towards the abolition of classes is a consciously directed one, and the consciousness which guides the movement towards its final goal is that of the only communist class, the proletariat. Communism is not simply an unconscious urge to negate commodity relations, which discovers as if by accident that these relations, are guarded by the capitalist state and that to realize communism the state must be smashed. Communism is a movement of the proletariat which throws up a political programme, a programme which clearly recognizes in advance that capitalist social relations are defended by the bourgeois state and which systematically advocates the destruction of bourgeois political power as a precondition for the communist transformation. Thus the proletarian revolution is opposite in pattern to the bourgeois revolution in that the social revolution undertaken by the proletariat can only take flight after the political conquest of power by the working class. Because capital is a world-wide relation, the communist revolution can only unfold on a world scale. The global nature of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat implies that the seizure of power by the workers in one country initiates a world civil war against the bourgeoisie. Until this world civil war has been won, until the proletariat has conquered power on a world scale, we cannot really speak of a period of transition or a communist transformation. In the period of the world civil war, production, even when directed by the proletariat, is not primarily production for human needs (which is the hallmark of communist production). In this period, production, as every-thing else, is subordinated to the demands of the civil war, to the iron necessity to extend and deepen the international revolution. Even though the proletariat may dispense with many of the formal characteristics of capitalist relations while it is arming itself and feeding itself for the civil war, one cannot call an economy which is orientated towards war a communist mode of production pure and simple. As long as capitalism exists anywhere in the world its laws will continue to determine the real content of productive relations everywhere. Thus if the proletariat of one country rid themselves of the form of wage labour and begin to ration all they produce without any kind of monetary intermediary, the rhythm of production and distribution in that proletarian bastion still remains under the merciless domination of global capital, of the global law of value. At the least reflux of the revolutionary tide these formal measures would quickly be undermined and begin to revert back to capitalist wage relations in all their naked brutality, without at any time the workers having ceased being part of an exploited class. To pretend that it is possible to establish islands of communism while the bourgeoisie still holds power on a world scale, is to try to mystify the working class and to divert it from its fundamental task - the total elimination of bourgeois power.

This does not mean that in its struggle for political power the proletariat abstains from taking economic measures aimed at undermining the power of capital; still less does it mean that the proletariat can simply take hold of the capitalist economy and wield it for its own purposes. Just as the Paris Commune showed that the proletariat cannot take hold of the capitalist state machine and use it for its own ends, the Russian Revolution revealed the impossibility of the working class indefinitely maintaining power on top of a capitalist economy. In the final analysis this means that the working class must engage in a process of destroying global capital if it is to retain power anywhere, but this process begins straight away: the working class has to be aware that the struggle against capital takes place at all levels (even though not uniformly) because capital is a total social relation.

As soon as the proletariat takes power in one area it will be forced to begin the attack on capitalist relations of production, firstly to strike a blow at the global organisation of capital, secondly to facilitate its political direction of the area it controls, and thirdly, to lay the basis for the far more developed social transformation which will follow the civil war. The expropriation of the bourgeoisie in one area will have a profoundly disintegratory effect on the organisation of world capital if it takes place in an important centre of capitalism, and will therefore deepen the world-wide class struggle; the proletariat will have to make use of all the economic weapons it has at its disposal. With regard to the second reason (which is of no lesser importance), it is impossible to imagine the political unification and, hegemony of the proletariat if it does not begin a radical assault on all the divisions and complexities imposed by the capitalist division of labour. The political power of the workers will depend to no mean degree on their ability to simplify and rationalise the process of production and distribution, and this rationalisation is impossible in an economy totally dominated by commodity relations. One of the main impulses pushing the proletariat towards the production of use, values is that such a method of production is far more suited to the tasks facing the proletariat in a revolutionary crisis - tasks such as the general arming of the workers, the emergency rationing of supplies the central direction of the productive apparatus, and. so on. Finally, provided the revolution is victorious on a world scale, these crude measures of socialisation could, under certain specific conditions, establish a continuity with the real, positive reorganisation of production which takes place after that victory, in so far as they help to neutralize and undermine the domination of commodity relations, thus lessening the 'negative' tasks of the proletariat in the period of transition.

The depth and extent of these measures will depend on the balance of forces in any given situation, but we can foresee that they will go the furthest where capitalism has already advanced, in its brutal, decadent and blind way, the process of material socialisation. Thus the collectivisation of the means of production will surely be effected the quickest in those sectors where the proletariat is most concentrated - in the big factories, mines, docks, etc. The socialisation of consumption will likewise proceed most easily in those areas which are already partly socialised: transport, housing, gas, electricity and other services, could be supplied free of charge almost immediately, subject only to the total reserves controlled by the workers. The collectivisation of these services would make deep inroads on the wage system. As for the direct distribution of individual articles of consumption, the total suppression of monetary forms, it is difficult to say how far this process could proceed as long as the revolution remains in one region. But we can say that we are for the maximum possible assault on the wage form, and no doubt the revolutionary workers will not be well disposed towards paying themselves wages once they have seized power. To be more concrete, we are in favour of measures which tend to regulate labour and distribution in social, collective terms (measures such as rationing combined with a universal obligation to work subject to the demands of the workers' councils) - rather than measures which involve a calculation of each individual contribution to social labour. The system of labour-time vouchers, advocated by Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme and by communists after Marx, by which individuals are given goods in return for a definite amount of labour performed, has a number of disadvantages and dangers, precisely because it does not really go beyond the capitalist notion of labour as an 'exchange' between the individual, atomised worker and 'society'. The system of labour-time vouchers would tend to divide those proletarians who are able to work from those who are not (a situation which may well be intensified in a period of international revolutionary crisis), and would furthermore drive a wedge between proletarians and other strata, inhibiting the process of social integration. Such a system would demand an immense bureaucratic supervision of each workers' labour, and would most easily degenerate into a form of money-wages at a downturn of the revolution (these drawbacks apply both to the period of the civil war and to the transition period itself).

A system of rationing under the control of the workers' councils would more easily lend itself to democratic regulation of the total resources of a proletarian bastion and to the encouragement of feelings of solidarity among all members of the class. But we have no illusions that this or any other system will represent a 'guarantee' against the return of wage slavery in its, most naked form. At root, the subjection to time and scarcity and to the pressure of global commodity relations still exists - it is simply borne by the whole proletarian bastion, as a kind of collective wage. Any temporary system of distribution is open to the dangers of bureaucratisation and degeneration as long as commodity relations exist - and commodity relations (including labour power as a commodity) cannot entirely disappear until classes have ceased to exist, because the perpetuation of classes means the perpetuation of exchange. There can be no pretence that any such method of distribution, either in the early stages of the revolution or the period of transition itself, represents "to each according to his needs", which can only be achieved in the higher stage of communism.

The assault on the wage form goes hand in hand with the assault on the capitalist division of labour. First and foremost the divisions imposed by capital within the ranks of the proletariat itself must be ruthlessly criticized and opposed. Divisions between skilled and unskilled, men and women, between proletarian sectors, employed and unemployed, must be confronted within the mass organs of the class as the only way of cementing the fighting unity of the workers.

Similarly, the proletariat, right from the beginning, embarks upon a process of integrating other social strata into its ranks, beginning with those semi-proletarian strata who will have demonstrated their capacity to support the revolutionary movement of the workers: one can envisage a rapid integration of certain layers who have already shown an ability to fight collectively against their exploitation, for example, large sectors of nurses and of white collar employees.

But it must be re-emphasised that all these inroads on commodity relations and the capitalist division of labour are in fact only a means to an end, to which they must be strictly subordinated: to the extension of the world revolution. While it does not shirk from attacking commodity relations from the start, the proletariat must regard as a snare and a delusion the idea of creating exemplary models of communism this or that region. While beginning the integration of non-exploiting classes into its ranks, the proletariat must constantly be on its guard against diluting itself with strata who cannot as a whole share the communist goals of the working class and who, after having been ostensibly integrated into the proletariat, would constitute a dangerous fifth column in its ranks at the first signs of a recession in the world revolutionary wave. The unification of all the workers of the world must take precedence over all attempts to begin the creation of the human community. All these advances towards socialisation are really stop-gap measures, emergency contingencies. They may be part of an attack on commodity relations but they in no way represent the abolition of fundamental capitalist laws. The real, positive supercession of commodity relations can only be achieved after the world-wide destruction of the bourgeoisie, after the construction of the international proletarian dictatorship. Here the period of transition proper begins.

The Period of transition

We cannot discuss here at great length the tasks of the proletariat during this period. We can only outline them briefly in order to emphasise the immensity of the proletariat's project. While liberating the productive forces from the fetters of capital, while liquidating the system of wage labour, national frontiers and the world market, the proletariat will have to establish a world-wide system of production and distribution geared solely to the satisfaction of human needs; it will have to direct the new productive system towards the restoration and revival of a world ravaged by decades of capitalist decadence and also the revolutionary civil war. The feeding and clothing of the poverty-stricken, the elimination of pollution and waste production together with the wholesale reorganisation of the global industrial infrastructure, the battle against the innumerable psychological alienations left-over from capitalism in work and social life as a whole - these are merely the preliminary tasks. They are simply the preconditions for the construction of a new civilisation, a new culture, a new humanity, the marvels of which can scarcely be imagined this side of capitalism, and which can mainly be grappled with in negative terms: the elimination of the antimony between economy and society, between work and leisure, between individual and society man and nature, and so on. And all the while the proletariat is laying the foundations of this new way of life it must be progressively integrating the whole of humanity into the ranks of associated labour and so creating the classless human community - but not without guarding against abolishing itself too rapidly, without ensuring, that there is not the slightest possibility of a return, to generalised commodity relations and thus to capitalism. The transition period will be the background of a gigantic struggle to maintain an irreversible movement towards the human community and against all the vestiges of the old society.

Those who portray this period as presenting no problems to the proletariat, as a stage which can quickly be superseded, are deceiving both themselves and the working class as a whole. We do not know how long this period will last but we do know that it will pose problems of a kind and magnitude unknown in the whole of human history, that the proletariat's task has no precedent in any other epoch, and that to think that this task can be carried out overnight is at best utopian and at worst a reactionary mystification. All we can be sure of is that the period of transition will not allow the proletariat or the social transformation to stand still. Any let up in the constant revolutionising of the social fabric will signify an immediate danger of a return to capitalism, and thus ultimately to barbarism. At no time will the proletariat be able to rest on its laurels and wait for communism to arrive on its own; either the proletariat struggles towards the higher stage of communism in a constant state of movement which is it self based on a conscious generalisation of communist relations, or it will find itself once again an exploited class being mobilised for some final catastrophe. There is no third way.

The Form of the Proletarian Dictatorship

It is a truism that the precise organisational forms through which the proletariat will carry out the communist transformation cannot be spelled out in advance by revolutionaries. It is impossible to foresee all the various organisational arid practical problems which will confront the working class all over the world, problems which will only finally be resolved by the class itself in its revolutionary struggle. The creativity of the class will almost certainly go beyond its own past achievements and. supersede many of the speculative formulations which revolutionaries can put forward at the present time.

Nevertheless, revolutionaries can in no way avoid discussing the question of the form and structure of the proletarian dictatorship. To do so would be to deny the whole experience of the revolutionary working class in this epoch, experience which has given rise to certain lessons which the proletariat simply cannot afford to ignore. To dismiss these lessons, especially those of Russia, is to leave the way open for a repetition of past defeats. It is no accident that the capitalist 'left' (Stalinists, Trotskyists, etc), is incapable of either appraising the past mistakes of the workers' movement or of clearly spelling out its own 'programme' for what they call the revolution. Behind this ambivalence, this reluctance to 'draw up blueprints', there lurks a class standpoint utterly opposed to the revolutionary self-activity of the working class.

These 'practical', 'realistic' leftists often hide behind Marx's own reluctance to speculate on the organisational form of the proletarian dictatorship. But the reluctance evinced by Marx was a necessary reflection of his own epoch, a period in which the material preconditions for the communist revolution did not yet exist. Any statements made by Marx and Engels on the form of the dictatorship were determined by the maturity of the class, by the degree to which it could present itself as a force capable of taking the leadership of society. But in the ascendant period of capitalism, with the proletariat still small and unformed, the possibility of its seizing power was extremely limited, and. in any case it could not have maintaineed power in that epoch at all.

Nevertheless, there were enough experiences of proletarian uprisings in that era to allow Marx and Engels to make certain vital statements about the nature of the proletarian power. Because they based their analysis on the methods of historical materialism, they were able to learn from the living experiences of the class and were thus able to revise some fundamental conceptions they had formulated with regard to the seizure of power by the working class. Thus the experience of the 1848 insurrection in Paris, and even more the Paris Commune of 1871, led them to abandon the perspective elaborated in The Communist Manifesto that the proletariat should organise to take over the bourgeois state machine. Henceforth it was clear that the proletariat could only smash this machine and set up its own organs of power, which could alone serve its communist aims. In learning this lesson Marx and Engels were carrying out the fundamental communist task of basing a proletarian political programme solely on the historical lessons discovered by the working class, and this is til1 the only way of developing the communist programme today. But today we are living in the epoch of capitalist decadence and thus of the proletarian social revolution, and we can and must apply the experience of the class in this epoch, and particularly of its great revolutionary wave of 1917-1923, to the task of elaborating the organisational elements of that programme in a way that was impossible for Marx and Engels to do.

For while Engels described the Commune itself as the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat; while Marx called it the political form for the social emancipation of labour; while certain fundamental lessons were laid down for all time by the Commune (the need to smash the bourgeois state, to arm the workers, to ensure direct control over workers delegates, etc); the Commune cannot stand by itself as the model for the proletarian dictatorship today. The Commune was the expression of a young working class which was not only not fully a world class but which even in the urban centres of capitalism was still fragmented and not yet fully distinct from other urban classes such as the petit bourgeoisie. This fact was reflected clearly in the Commune. Despite its desire for the universal social republic, the Commune could not extend itself on a world scale. The membership of the Commune's central organs was made up of Jacobins and Proudhonists as well as Communists, and its electoral bases were the geographical wards of Paris and universal suffrage, not a distinctly proletarian or industrial system of election. Above all the Commune could not have initiated a socialist transformation because the productive forces had not developed to the point at which communism was both possible and immediately necessary. As the ascendant period of capitalism cane to a close, the global extension and concentration of industrial capitalism had already rendered many features of the Commune obsolete, but none of the revolutionaries of the 1890s and early 1900s were clear as to what would supersede the Commune as the model for the dictatorship and their utterances on this question were necessarily vague.

Once again, however, it was the concrete experience of the class itself which provided an answer to this problem. Thus in Russia in 1905 and again in 1917, and throughout the whole revolutionary wave which followed in other countries, the Soviet or Workers' Council appeared as fighting organs of the revolutionary class struggle. The councils, assemblies of elected and revocable delegates from industrial units, were first and foremost expressions of the collective organisation of the proletariat united on its own class terrain and thus were a higher form of proletarian power than the Commune had been. As soon as the world union of workers' councils presented itself as the immediate goal of the proletarian revolution the slogan all power to the Soviets marked a class line between revolutionary and bourgeois organisations. No revolutionary organisation could reject the Soviet power as the form of the proletarian dictatorship. Since then every insurrectionary movement of the class from China in 1927 to Hungary in 1956 and so on has exhibited a tendency to express itself through the council form of organisation, and despite all the weaknesses of these movements nothing has fundamentally altered. in the nature of the class ,to justify the conclusion that in the next revolutionary wave the councils will not arise again as the concrete form of the proletarian dictatorship.

Today we are assailed by a host of modernists and innovators (e.g. Invariance, Negation, Kommunismen), who argue that workers' councils simply reproduce the capitalist division of labour and are therefore unsuitable instruments of a communist revolution, which they define as ±he immediate overthrow of all the categories of capitalist society. The class standpoint of these tendencies betrays the undialectical and unmarxist nature of their conception of revolution. For them the working class is no more than a faction of capitalism which can only become part of the 'revolutionary subject' or the 'communist movement' by immediately negating itself into a universal 'humanity'; whereas the marxist vision of revolution can only be that the proletariat must assert itself as the only communist class prior to integrating the whole of humanity into associated labour and so ending its own separate existence as a class. The workers councils are adequate instruments for the self-assertion of the proletariat against the rest of society, as well as for the process of integrating other social strata into the ranks of the proletariat, for the creation of the human community. Only when that community has been definitively realized will the, workers councils finally disappear. Linked city by city and across the world, the workers' councils will be responsible for the military, economic, and ideological tasks of the civil war and for the direction of the communist transformation in the transition period. In this period the councils will be under-going a continual expansion of their social base as they integrate more and more of humanity into communist relations of production.

But the affirmation of the council form by revolutionaries today in no way precludes a thorough-going critique of previous council movements and of the proletarian political tendencies which were thrown up by, or drew their inspiration from these movements. This critique is absolutely indispensable if the working class is to avoid making the same mistakes that it made in the past; and it can only base itself on the bitter lessons which the proletariat has learned through its most militant struggles in this epoch.

The most important lessons can be summarised as follows:

1. Political power is exercised through the councils themselves and not through a party. In Russia and elsewhere in the past it was assumed that the proletarian dictatorship was exercised through the communist party, the latter constituting the 'government' when it had a majority in the soviets, just as in bourgeois parliaments. Furthermore delegates to the soviets were elected on party slates rather than operating as mandated delegates to carry out the decisions of workers assemblies (often delegates did not come from factories at all, but were representatives of parties, unions, etc). This in itself was an immediate concession to bourgeois forms of representation and parliamentarianism, tending to leave power in the hands of political experts rather than in the mass of workers themselves; but more important, the idea that the party exercised power rather than the class as a whole (an idea endemic to the workers' movement at the tine) became a direct vehicle of the counter-revolution and was used by the Bolshevik Party in decay to justify their attacks on the class after the failure of the revolutionary tide. By identifying the power of the party with the dictatorship of the proletariat the Bolsheviks were provided with an ideological mantle for what quickly became the dictatorship of capital in a new guise. The old Social Democratic idea of the party which represented and organised the class was decisively refuted by the Russian experience.

In the soviets of the future, the most important decisions, those concerned with the overall direction of the revolution, must be fully discussed and arrived ,at in the general assemblies of the class at the base, in the factories and. other workplaces, so that delegates to the soviets serve primarily to centralize and carry out the decisions of those assemblies. These delegates will often be members of the party or other fractions but they are elected as workers and not as representatives of any party. It may even be that at any given time the majority of delegates are members of the communist party but this in itself is not a danger providing the proletariat as a whole is actively participating in its class wide organs and retains an overall control of them. In the last analysis this can only be safeguarded by the radicalisation and energy of the workers themselves, by the success of the revolutionary transformation which is in their hands; but certain formal measures will have to be taken to inhibit the formation of a bureaucratic elite around the party or any other body. These, will include the constant revocability of delegates, maximum rotation of administrative tasks, equal access of delegates to use values as for all other workers, and in particular the complete separation of the party from the state functions of the councils. Thus, for example, it is the workers' councils which control the arms and which supervise repression against counter-revolutionary elements, and not some military wing or special commission of the party.

The communist party of the future will have no other weapons than its theoretical clarity and its active commitment to the communist programme. It cannot seek power for itself, but must fight within the general organs of the class for the implementation of the communist programme. It can in no way force the class as a whole to put this programme into action, or implement it itself, because communism can only be created by the conscious activity of the entire working class. The party can only seek to convince the class as a whole of the correctness of its analysis through the process of discussion and active education which will go on within the assemblies and councils of the class, and it will pitilessly denounce any self-professed revolutionary tendency which abrogates gates to itself the task of organising the class and of substituting itself as the revolutionary subject.

2. The councils are not organs of self-management. In any future revolutionary situation the demand to subordinate the councils to an omnipotent party-state which will lead and educate an amorphous mass of workers and centralise capital in its own hands will come from all the various heirs of the counter-revolution in Russia: Trotskyists, Stalinists, and others. Communists will have to stand by the rest of their class and fight these conceptions tooth and nail. But the proletariat's bitter experience of state capitalism in Russia and elsewhere, and of the reactionary nature of nationalise in general, may make the class as a whole less sympathetic to calls for nationalisation than in previous revolutionary moments. But the bourgeoisie will no doubt find other rallying cries to try to tie the workers to the bourgeois state and to capitalist relations of production; one of the most pernicious of these could be the slogan of workers' self management, which could find an echo in the various corporatist, localist, and syndicalist mystifications which exist in the class. The experience of the past has given many examples of this. In Italy and Germany during the first great revolutionary wave, there was a strong tendency for the workers to simply lock themselves up in the factories and to try to manage their own enterprises on a corporate basis, to restrict the council organisation to the level of each factory rather than creating organs specifically aimed at regrouping and centralising the revolutionary efforts of all workers. Today the idea of self-management is already presenting itself as a final resort of capitalism in crisis and emasculated workers' councils are being advocated by numerous left factions of capital from the social democrats to Trotskyists and sundry libertarians. The advantage of this slogan to the bourgeoisie is that it serves to induce the proletariat to participate actively in its own exploitation and slaughter without calling into question the power of the capitalist state or capitalist commodity relations. Thus the bourgeois Republic in Spain was able to co-opt a certain amount of self-management into the war-effort against France's rival capitalist faction. (Footnote 1 [7])

The isolation of the workers into councils composed of individual, productive units simply maintains the divisions imposed by the capitalist system and leads to certain defeat for the class. (See Cardan's Sur le Contenu du Socialisme, published by Solidarity as Workers' Councils and the Economics of a Self Managed Society for a perfect model of defeat.) Such methods of organisation divert the workers from attacking the primary target - the capitalist state - and allows the state to launch its offensive against a fragmented working class. They also serve to perpetuate the idea of autonomous enterprises and of socialism as free exchange between free collectives of workers whereas the. Real socialisation of production implies the world suppression of autonomous enterprises as such, and the subordination of the whole productive apparatus to the conscious direction of society, without the medium of exchange. (Footnote 2 [7])

But the mystification of self management need not end with the idea of self managing productive units. It can also be extended to a national model, in which workers councils come together to plan a democratic accumulation of national capital; and it can even be accommodated to the ideal of a self sufficient communist bastion which attempts to formally abolish wage labour and trade in one country - an illusion held by many council communists in the twenties and thirties, which is appearing again in a different form in the ideas of the innovators of marxism, who demand the immediate creation of the human community. All these ideologies are linked by a common rejection of the need for the proletariat to destroy the bourgeois state on a world scale before actual permanent socialisation can begin. Thus, against all these confusions it must be asserted that the workers' councils are first and foremost organs of political power, which must serve to unite the workers not simply to administer the economy but to conquer power on a world scale.

3. The workers' councils are not ends in themselves. The international conquest of power by the working class is simply the beginning of the social revolution. In. the period of transition the workers councils are the means through which the proletariat implements the communist transformation of society. If the councils become ends in themselves this can only signify a halt in the process of social revolution and the beginnings of a return to capitalism. Unless the councils serve as instruments for the positive abolition of wage slavery and commodity production they will become hollow shells through which a new bourgeoisie will exploit the working class.

Neither in the transition period nor in the revolutionary uprising itself can there be any guarantee that the working class will engage in a continuous process of revolution until the final triumph of communism. The mere will or foresight of revolutionary minorities is not enough to prevent the degeneration of the revolution which itself reflects a material change in the balance of class forces. Between the period in which the councils are revolutionary and the period in. which they have become appendages of capital there is a delicate balance in which it remains possible to reform the councils from within: but this is only a relatively brief possibility. If that possibility is lost then revolutionaries must leave the councils and advocate the formation of new councils directly opposed to the old - in other words a second revolution. In this respect we already have before us the example of the small communist fractions in Russia who refused to collaborate in the dead soviets of the early twenties and. who advocated the overthrow of the Bolshevik state (e.g. Miasnikov's Workers Group in 1923); or the German left communists who left the reformist factory organisation to the putrid machinations of the KPD and the Social Democratic Parties.

The Question of the State

The problem of the state in the period of transition and its relationship to, the proletariat is so complex that we must deal with the question separately, even though it is closely connected to the -lessons gained from previous revolutions about the form of the proletarian dictatorship and the role of the workers councils.

As long as classes exist, we cannot speak of the abolition of the state. The state continues to exist during the period of transition because there remain classes whose direct interests cannot be reconciled: on the one hand the communist proletariat and on the other hand other classes left over from capitalism who can have no material interests in the communisation of society, (peasants, urban petit bourgeoisie and professionals, etc). As Engels wrote in The Origins of the Family Private Property and the State:

"The state is therefore by no means a power forced on society from without...it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to expel. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power seemingly standing above society becomes necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of order; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state."

It is important not to reduce the phenomenon of the state to a simple conspiracy of the ruling class to perpetuate its power. The state did not arise out of the mere will of any ruling class but was an emanation of class society in general and due to this it becomes an instrument of the ruling class.

"As the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but as it arose at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class and thus acquires new, means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class" (ibid).

In the period of transition to communism the, state will, inevitably arise, in order to prevent the class antagonisms of this hybrid society from pulling it apart; class struggle will not end with the destruction of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat, as the strongest, the dominant class, will use the state to maintain its power and to defend the gains of the communist transformation which it is putting into effect. To be sure this state will be unlike any other state in history. For the first time the newly dominant class will not inherit the old state machine and take it over for its own purposes, but will smash, destroy, and annihilate the bourgeois state, and set about systematically constructing its own organs of power; and this is because the proletariat is the first exploited class in history to be a revolutionary class, and it can never be an exploiting class. Consequently, it uses the state not to exploit other classes but to defend a social transformation that will end exploitation for ever, which will abolish all social antagonisms, and so lead to the disappearance of the state. The proletariat cannot be an economically dominant class. Its domination is political only.

In the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and many others, the idea is often put forward that in the period of transition the "state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat", that the state is simply the armed proletariat "organized as the ruling class", and that this 'proletarian' state is therefore no longer a state in the old sense of the word. But a deeper study of the nature of the state, itself based on the most profound critiques of the state elaborated by Marx and Engels, and on the historical experience of the class, leads us to the conclusion that the state in the revolution as a whole is something other than just the armed proletariat, that the proletariat and the state are not identical.

Let us summarize our main reasons for making this assertion.

1. In the period of the insurrection itself, of the revolutionary civil war, the scenarios envisaged by Marx, Engels and Lenin, can be seen to have a certain validity. At this point the main task of the working class, of the proletarian dictatorship expressed through the workers councils, is indeed a statist one: the violent suppression of the enemy class, the bourgeoisie. At the beginning of the insurrection, when the mass of workers are sweeping forward, arms in hand, and at all times when the revolutionary onslaught against the bourgeoisie is on the upsurge, delegates to the workers councils and congresses of councils will function as simple instruments of the will of the class and there will be little or no conflict between the base assemblies of the workers and the central organs they elect. Here it will be very easy to identify the armed proletariat with the state. But even at this time it is dangerous to make this identification. The moment the revolutionary tide meets with serious obstacles or set-backs the workers delegates who have been mandated to deal with the outside world (whether peasants supplying food, or even capitalist states who are prepared to barter with the workers power) (Footnote 3 [8]) would be forced to advocate certain compromises, to ask the workers to work harder, or to reduce their rations - and so these delegates would begin to appear as agents external to the workers, as functionaries of a state in the old sense of something standing above and against the workers.

There is a delicate balance reached at this point, where the workers delegates and central organs stand half way between being negotiators between the workers and world capital - and becoming definite agents of world capital and thus of capitalist counter-revolution inside the proletarian bastion, as did the Bolsheviks in Russia. This balance can only be decided in favour of the workers by a further extension of the world revolution allowing a new breathing space to the beleaguered workers and to the partially socialized sector they have created.

The existence of formal measures alone cannot prevent this degeneration from taking place, because it is a direct result of the pressures of the world market; but it is still vital that the workers are prepared for such an eventuality so that they can do all they can to fight it. That is why it is important that the proletariat is not identified with the state, either with the apparatus it sets up to mediate with non-exploiting classes within the proletarian bastion, or with the central organs which are charged with relating to the world outside that bastion, or indeed with any institution, because while any institution thrown up by the working class can become integrated into capitalism, the working class can never be integrated, can never become counter-revolutionary.

To identify the proletariat with the state, as the Bolsheviks did, leads to the monstrous situation- at a moment of reflux or defeat in which the state as the incarnation of the class is permitted to do anything to maintain its power while the class as a whole remains defenceless. Thus Trotsky argued that the workers had no right to strike against their own state, and the massacre of the Kronstadt insurgents was justified on the grounds that any rebellion against the Workers State could only be counter-revolutionary. Clearly these developments in Russia did not take place simply because the workers were identified with the state, but flowed from a material retrogression in the world revolution. Nevertheless, that ideological identification served to disarm the workers in the fare of the degeneration of the revolution. In future the autonomy and initiative of the rank and file workers vis-a-vis any central organs must be defended and backed up by positive measures, such as the renunciation of all violent methods within the proletariat, the right of all workers to strike, the possession by the base assemblies of their own means of communication and propaganda (press, etc), and above all the retention of arms by the workers in their factories and neighbourhoods, so that they will be able to resist the incursions of any emergent bureaucracy should this become necessary.

We do not advocate these precautionary measures out of any lack of conviction in the proletariat's ability to spread the revolution and to socialize production, which are the only final guarantees against degeneration, but because the proletariat must be prepared for any eventuality and not deceived by false promises that all will be well. The proletarian revolution will have far less chance of surviving temporary set-backs if the workers are not prepared in advance to deal with them.

2. Contrary to some of the expectations of Marx, the socialist revolution will not unfold in a world in which the vast majority of the population are proletarians; if that were the case one could perhaps imagine the disappearance of the state almost immediately following the destruction of the bourgeoisie. But one of the main consequences of capitalist decadence is that capital has not been able to integrate the majority of mankind directly into capitalist social relations even though it has subjected all to the tyranny of capitalist laws. The proletariat is a minority of the population on a world scale. The enormous problems posed to the proletarian revolution by this fact cannot be charmed away by the invocations of situationists and other modernists by including in the ranks of the proletariat all those who feel themselves alienated or as having no control over their lives. There are material reasons why the working class alone is the communist class: its world-wide, associative nature, its location at the heart of capitalist value production, the historical consciousness deriving from its class struggle. It is the lack of these characteristics among other classes and strata which necessitates the dictatorship of the proletariat, the assertion by the proletariat of its communist goals in distinction from all other strata of society.

In the process of conquering power itself, the proletariat will be faced with a huge mass of non-proletarian, non-bourgeois strata, who may have a part to play in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, who may even support the proletariat, but who cannot by themselves, as classes, have any interest in communism and who might equally veer towards the counter-revolution, particularly at any sign of a set-back in the proletariat's march to power. The problem of dealing with these classes will be crucial to the success of the struggle against the capitalist class; but after the defeat of the bourgeoisie it is perhaps the most central of all the proletariats tasks; indeed it is the existence of these classes which provides the necessity for a period of transition between capitalism and communism.

The idea of dispensing with the transition period by immediately integrating all other strata into the proletariat is either a hopeless fantasy or a conscious attempt to undermine the autonomy of the working, class. The task is so huge that it simply could not be done in one fell swoop; any attempt to do so would not be the diso1ution of other classes into the proletariat, but the dissolution of the proletariat into the mythical 'people' of bourgeois radicalism. Such attempts would dilute the strength of the proletariat, to the extent that any autonomy of action would become impossible. The precondition for this autonomy is that the integration of other strata takes place on the proletariat's terms and subject to the material developments of the world revolution.

Similarly, the attempt to give these strata equal representation in the workers councils, without having first destroyed them as separate strata, in other words without having made them into workers, would completely undermine the political autonomy o1 the working class. Still less can the proletariat allow these strata and classes to set up parallel organs of power equal to the workers' councils.

At the same time the working class cannot simply repress these classes and deprive them of all means of social expression. The experience of Russia, in which the proletariat during the period of War Communism was forced into a virtual civil war against the peasantry, is eloquent testimony of the impossibility of the proletariat simply imposing its will by force of arms on the rest of society. Such a project would be a terrible waste of life and revolutionary energy, and would in all probability directly help to destroy the revolution. The only civil war that cannot be avoided is the one against the bourgeoisie. Violence against other classes should be resorted to only in the most extreme circumstances. Besides, while it is re-organizing production and distribution along communist lines, the proletariat must cater for the needs not only of itself but of society as a whole, which means that there will have to be suitable social institutions for expressing everyone's needs.

The proletariat, therefore, will have to allow the rest of the population (excluding the bourgeoisie) to organize themselves and to form bodies which can represent their needs in front of the workers' councils. However, the working class will not allow these other strata to organize specifically as classes with particular economic interests. Just as these other strata are integrated into associated labour as individuals, so the proletariat only permits them to express themselves as individuals in civil society. This implies that the representative organs through which they express themselves, unlike the workers' councils, are based on territorial units and forms of organisation. Thus, for example, in the countryside, village assemblies might send delegates to rural-district and. regional councils, and in the cities neighbourhood assemblies might send representatives to urban communal councils; and these organs will, at various local and regional levels, discuss the needs of the general population with the workers' councils' delegates. It is important to note that workers (as representatives of proletarian neighbourhoods) will be present in these bodies, and indeed measures should be taken to ensure that even within these bodies a working class domination is achieved. Thus the workers' councils may insist that working class delegates have preponderant voting rights, and that working class neighbourhoods have their own militia units as well as stressing that it is the working class communal delegates who do most of the liaison and discussion with the workers' councils.

The existence of these organs in regular relation to the workers' councils constantly creates statist forms in the sense given by Engels above, whatever we call this new apparatus. For this reason, the state in the transition period is linked to, but not identical with, the workers councils and the armed proletariat as a whole. For, as Engels shows, the state is not only an instrument of violence and repression (functions which will hopefully be minimal after the defeat of the bourgeoisie), it is also an instrument of mediation between classes, an instrument which serves to keep the class struggle within the bounds of the existing society. This in no way implies that the state can ever be 'neutral' or 'above classes' (though it may often appear to be). The mediation and conciliation that is effected through the state is always in the interest of the dominant class, it always serves to perpetuate that domination. The state in the period of transition must be used as an instrument of the working class. The proletariat does not share power with any other class or strata. It will have to appropriate for itself a monopoly of political-military power, which in concrete terms will necessitate a monopoly of arms by the workers, the workers' councils' power of decision over all recommendations of any joint negotiating bodies, maximal representation of workers' delegates on all state bodies, etc. The proletariat will have to be continually vigilant so as to ensure that this state, this organ which arises to keep the transitional society together, remains an instrument of the working class and does not become the representative of alien class interests, does not become an instrument of the other classes against the proletariat. For as long as classes exist, as long as there is exchange and a social division of labour, this state will not only remain, but like all other states will, constantly threaten to, in Engels words, "increasingly alienate itself" from society, to become a power standing above society, and thus above, the proletariat.

The only way the proletariat can really prevent this from happening is for it to engage in a continuing process of social transformation, to push forward more and more measures which tend to undermine the material roots of other classes and to integrate them into communist relations of production. But until such time as there are no longer any classes the proletariat can only dominate the organisms which arise in the transition period by clearly understanding their nature and function. We use the term 'state' to describe that apparatus which serves, during the transition period, to mediate between classes in a framework of political domination by the working class. The word itself is of lesser importance; what is important is not to confuse this apparatus with the workers' councils, with the autonomous organs of the class whose function and essence is not compromise or mediation but permanent social revolution.

This brings us to our final point. By its very nature the state is a conservative force, an inheritance, from the pre-history of class society. Its very function is to preserve social relations, to maintain the balance of forces between classes - in other words to stand still. But as we have said, the proletariat in the transition period cannot afford to stand still; whatever is not part of a movement towards communism is a step backwards towards capitalism. Left to itself the state will not 'wither away' but will attempt to preserve itself, indeed to increase its domination of social life. The state only withers away to the extent that the proletariat is able to carry forward the social transformation towards the integration of all classes into the human community. The positive creation of this community undermines the social basis of the state: the "irreconcilability of class antagonisms", a social illness which has its cure only in the abolition of classes.

The proletariat alone contains within itself the seeds of communist social relations; the proletariat alone is capable of undertaking the communist transformation. The state at best helps to guard the gains of this transformation (and at worst becomes an obstacle to it) but it cannot, as a state, undertake that transformation. It is the social movement of the whole proletariat in creative self activity which actually ends the domination of commodity fetishism and builds up a new social relationship between human beings.

The workers' movement from Marx and Engels to Lenin and even the left communists has been plagued with the confusion that the taking over of the means of production by the state has something to do with communism, that statification equals socialisation. As Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring:

"The proletariat seizes the, state power and transforms the means of production in the first instance into state property. But in doing this it puts an end to itself as proletariat, it puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms; it puts an end also to the state as state".

Despite other conflicting (and more profound) insights into the inability of the proletariat to use the state in the interests of freedom, both Marx and Engels could make such statements as the one above in the ascendant epoch of capitalism because at that time, in that era of 'private' capitalism's anarchic sway, of crises of overproduction within national boundaries, the organisation of production by the state, even a national state, could appear as an infinitely superior mode of economic organisation. The founders of scientific socialism never wholly escaped the idea that the socialist transformation could take place within a national economy or that statification was a bridge to socialism, or even equivalent to socialisation itself; these illusions and confusions permeated both the Social Democracy and the communist tendencies which broke away from it after 1914, and were only finally laid to rest within the communist movement by the experience of Russia, of the global overproduction crisis of capital, of the general tendency towards state capitalism in the era of decadence. But the confusions about statification being somehow 'socialist' still remains as a dead weight of mystification within the working class as a whole and has to be rigorously combated by communists.

Today, revo1utiona±ies can affirm that state property remains private property as far as the producers are concerned, that statification of the means of production puts an end neither to the proletariat, nor to class antagonisms, nor to the state, (Engels' statement notwithstanding). Neither nationalisation nor statification by the world-wide state of the transition period would be a step towards social property which in a sense is the abolition of property itself. In expropriating the bourgeoisie the proletariat does not institute private property of any kind, not even 'proletarian' property. There is no such thing as 'workers' ownership of the means of production or a 'proletarian economy'. The proletariat on seizing power socialises production: this means that the means of production and distribution tend to become the property of society as a whole. The proletariat guards this 'property' in the transition period in the interests of the human community of the future, whose foundations the proletariat is laying. It is not 'its own' property because by definition, the proletariat is a propertyless class. The process of socialisation of property realises itself to the extent that the proletariat is integrating the rest of society into its ranks and so becoming one with the communist human community, with a social humanity which will come into existence for the first tine. Once again the proletariat will use the state to regulate the achievements of this process, but the process itself occurs not only independently of the state hut actively leads to the disappearance of the state.

We communists do not 'advocate' the state, nor do we hold it up as the incarnation of all evil as the anarchists do. In analyzing the historical origins of the state we simply recognise the inevitability of statist forms arising in the transition period, and in recognizing this we help to prepare our class for its historic mission the construction of a society without classes and thus free forever from the scourge of the state.

CDW, World Revolution, (April 1975). Supplementary note on the question of the state

This text expresses the views of World Revolution as a whole, but it is not meant as a final statement or a solution to the problems of the transition period. Within the framework of certain class lines, the question of the state and the transition period must remain open for discussion between revolutionaries and can only be concretely solved by the revolutionary activity of the working class as a whole. It follows that within this framework different conceptions and definitions of the state can be accommodated inside a coherent revolutionary tendency.

The class lines concerning the question of the state are as follows:

• The necessity to completely destroy the bourgeois state on a world scale.
• The necessity of the proletarian dictatorship:
  • the proletariat is the only revolutionary class;
  • proletarian autonomy is a precondition of the communist revolution;
  • the proletariat ,does not share power with any, other class; it has a monopoly of political-military power.
• Power is exercised by the proletariat as a whole organised in councils; not by a party.
• All relations of force and all violence within the ranks of the proletariat must be rejected; the whole class must have the right to strike, to carry arms, to full freedom of expression, etc.
• The world dictatorship of the proletariat must put into effect the social content of the communist revolution: the abolition of wage labour, commodity production, nations, and classes, and the construction of the world human community.

Footnotes

• 
  
1We should not however forget the bureaucratic and statist nature of most of the so-called collectivisation carried out under the auspices of the anarchist CNT, and the CNT's hostility to any independent movement of the class, as witnessed in the CNT's collaboration in the Republic's armed reclaiming of the Barcelona telephone exchange from the workers in 1937. In fact all attempts of the workers to 'manage' capital must end in the normal despotism of capitalist production at the level of the whole society and of each plant. So-called 'workers' capitalism' is impossible. Back [9]
• 2This does not mean that the revolutionary workers will tolerate foremen and despotic regimes within the factory. During the revolutionary process factory committees elected by and responsible to the general assembly of the factory will take charge of the day-to-day running of the factory. Moreover, the overall production plans adhered to by the factory committees are decided by workers' councils composed of delegates from factory assemblies, and thus are decided upon by the class as a whole. As soon as the working class begins to take over the productive apparatus (and the seizure of the factories must be seen as a moment in the insurrection) it begins the struggle to subordinate the production process to human needs. This implies profound changes in the organisation of work, so that productive activity itself tends to become a part of consumption in the broadest sense. Certain measures in this direction will have to be taken almost immediately, such as the shortening of the working day (subject to the demands of the revolution), the rotation of tasks, and the elimination of hierarohica1 relations inside the factory through the equal participation of all workers, skilled and unskilled, manual and technical, men and women, in the factory assemblies and committees. Back [10]
• 3We do not formalistically oppose any trade or compromises between the proletariat and other non-exploiting classes in the civil war, or even between the proletarian bastion and sections of the world bourgeoisie should this become unavoidable. But we must make the following points clear:
  • a. The proletariat must be able to distinguish between compromises imposed by a difficult situation, and, open capitulations amounting to class betrayals; and it must be aware of the extreme dangers inherent in all compromises, and take measures to counteract them. Any attempt to institutionalise or make permanent any deals with the bourgeoisie is a crossing of class lines, a betrayal of the civil war.
  • b. In an area controlled by the workers' councils a state will arise which has the task of mediating between the proletariat and other non-exploiting classes (of the All-Russian Congresses of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasant Soviets after 1917). But the proletariat cannot use this state to mediate with its irreconcilable class enemy, the bourgeoisie. Any tactical negotiations with sectors of the world bourgeoisie outside the proletarian bastion are directly and solely the task of the workers' councils, and must be strictly supervised by the whole working class through their general assemblies.
  Back [11]

 

Part I Political

 

The State

First, a few qualifying remarks. Historically speaking the State has appeared as an organ of class rule though, as Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Moscow, 1968, p.65), it often appeared as standing above society, as a mediator between classes:

"The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering together of it into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it vas the State of that class which itself represented for the time being, society as a whole."

Thus, as soon as the State becomes "the real representative of the whole of society" (our emphasis), as soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, then the State "renders itself unne­cessary".

However, it is an anarchist fallacy to suggest that out of the destruc­tion of the bourgeois State can communism appear automatically. The proletariat must first destroy the bourgeois State apparatus and set up its own form of class rule. In this respect alone the proletarian State will be no different from any other state in history. In other respects the dictatorship of the proletariat will be markedly different from other forms of State. Quantitatively speaking it will be the first State in his­tory to express the historical interests of a majority over a minority and qualitatively speaking the proletariat will as a class has no speci­fic form of property which they wish to defend. It is this last differ­ence which explains why the proletarian State is "no longer a State in the proper sense of the word". (Marxism and the State, Lenin, page 29). The proletarian State remains to oppress all elements who wish to res­urrect bourgeois property relations. At the moment of their dissolution and final defeat the dictatorship of the proletariat will have ceased to exist.

Thus, only the proletariat and its democratic organs, the soviets, can superintend this transformation. Nowhere, to our knowledge, in the writ­ings of Marx, Engels or Lenin, do they conceive of any other possibility. Indeed in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, and in State and Revolution they effectively deny that any alternative such as a "free people's State" or popular front is conceivable. True, Lenin (quite understandably though erroneously in the terms of' 1917) calls for an alliance between proletariat and peasantry (State and Revolution, pp. 46-47) but still concludes that the State must remain "the proletariat organized as the ruling class" (quoting the Communist Manifesto, p. 48). Nor has the experience of the proletariat in the last sixty years provided us with any reason to doubt this idea. Indeed, if anything, we have seen development which have thrown the balance even more in favour of the proletariat. Here one thinks of the peasantry, an analysis of which is wade in the next section.

The Peasantry

The question of the proletariat's relationship to the vital area of rural production has always been a particularly vexing one. The Russian Revolution (1917-21) is an example of the problem though its lessons must be placed in true historical perspective. Lenin was always looking over his shoulder at the huge masses of the Russian peasantry. In The State and Revolution, he suggests that an alliance of the peasants and workers will form the basis of the new society though under the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in fact Lenin and the Bolsheviks could not have established communist relations of production in Russia alone. The Russian workers, like any other sector of the world proletariat, needed the world revolution if they were to achieve their goal. Thus, the Land Decree of November 1917 was not a step towards communism but an attempt to capture the support of the muzhiks to aid the struggle for survival of the soviet regime. Only a perspective of world revolution could prevent this from being considered completely counter-revolutionary and with the failure of the world revolution this was fully revealed. Let us be clear on the lesson. If the same situation of any proletariat surrounded by huge mass of peasantry were to recur today the proletariat in that area would still be doomed without a world revolution. However, this need be no cause for despondency amongst revolutionaries.

With the modern techniques of capitalist food production, with the increased concentration of the bulk of the world's food production in the highly developed capitalist agriculture - with the consequent existence of a proletariat as in any other industry - in a global revolutionary situation there will be no strategic need to satisfy the land hunger of the peasant for the expropriation of the capitalist agricultural units will secure the basis of existence for the world proletariat. The rural proletariat of these areas will thus be simply part of the soviet structure like any other former wage workers under capitalism.

The question of an isolated proletarian revolution in a ‘lesser developed economy' in advance of the world revolution remains for us an unlikely ­occurrence. Our view sees the development of the crisis amongst several ‘advance' capitalist countries at approximately the same time. The proletariat in these areas will then able to assist the various proletarian salients in the lesser capitalist countries. Should one of these salients find itself in an isolated position, then we must be realistic and realize the possibilities. If the larger imperialist powers are not already experiencing a profound crisis then it will be crushed militarily. Further, in many areas the local peasantry (even if negotiations were successful) cannot produce enough of the basic food requirements of the urban areas; and we must recognize that the proletariat here will not be taking over an economy representing a significant power in the capitalist world market. Hence the further escalation of the world crisis as a result of their activity would be very remote. Thus, the world proletarian revolution may not arrive in time to save an isolated proletarian outbreak in such a country. If this means that we must conclude that the revolution can only be successful through the early collapse of the capitalist heartlands (USA, USSR, Europe) into the dictatorship of the proletariat then unfortunately we cannot shrink from it. The alternative of advocating ideological concessions to other strata in any country would lead to confusion for the world proletariat and ultimately to counter-revolution.

In the advanced capitalist countries the question of the peasantry scarcely exists for each capitalist farmer employs rural proletarians. In Britain, for example, there are 329,000 rural proletarians. With help from the soviets to which they would be affiliated they would carry out the expropriation of farmlands and begin the integration of agriculture into the socialist economy.

When a significant peasantry did exist the proletariat would obviously establish with them levels and goals of production within a framework laid down by the proletariat. But no concessions can be made to petty bourgeois forms of property. The proletariat on the other hand, would actively encourage the peasants to form their own organizations which would eventually become the basis for the collectivization of agricultural production. Here we must recognize that certain tasks of the per­iod of transition mat take longer than others and this could be one issue which ensures the maintenance of the vigilance of the dictatorship of the proletariat for at least a generation.

Part II (Economic)

The first part article on the period of transition has already dealt with the questions of the State and the political forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat; in that article only incidental comments were on the economic formulations of these forms. Now in this article we deal with their content, and only incidentally with the concrete political issues. This form of presentation is not because we feel they are two separated issues; on the contrary, as was made clear in part I, we are speaking about equally vital, interrelated aspects of a total transformation.

Economically, as well as politically, the so-called transition period is opened for the working class when one or more capitalist states are overthrown by the revolution, and is not closed until the inauguration of a global communist system of production and distribution according to needs; but as it nears communism it shares less and less residues of capitalism, but its duration is obviously no short period, but of at least a generation. Neither is it a static system, and its "defects inevitable in the first phase of communist society" (Marx) are generally overcome.

The idea that production in the proletarian bastion should be directed towards a communist ‘war economy' is confusionist. Although there is certainly armed struggle and even pitched battles during communist revolution, there is no possibility of the workers engaging and defeating capital in a global civil war; on this terrain the defeat of the proletariat would be short and the curtain-raiser for barbarism. This emphasizes all the more that the communist revolution must storm more or less simultaneously several capitalist states, including the militarily dominant imperialist powers, or else go down in defeat. Certainly workers in any one area must intervene to help adjacent communist uprisings, but the creation of the first steps of a communist economy are a more potent weapon and help than any amount of military support given by one group of workers to another.

Here the relationship of any one proletarian power to the still existent world market must be investigated, and the inseparability of the politics and economics of the transition period re-iterated. Communists must press in the mass organs of the class for the ending of all economic relationships between the isolated areas where the workers have taken power, and the bourgeois world market. Firstly this is because at a time of world crisis this move will deepen such a crisis by withdrawing markets and raw materials from still existing sections of the world bourgeoisie. The impact of the cessation of oil exports by a revolutionary Russia, or food exports by a Soviet America would be powerful impulses to the spread of the communist revolution, and help force the issue to the point of resolution on a world scale. Here economic tactics hasten the political progress of the revolution.

On the other hand only dreamers would imagine that the capitalists would accept to trade with a proletarian dictatorship without thus capitulating politically to world capital. For example, in return for trade would be demanded compensation for expropriations in the workers' bastions, taming of branches of the communist movement outside the revolutionary areas, diplomatic recognition and exchanges etc, in fact all that was seen in Russia in 1920 onwards when NEP and foreign trade went hand in glove with frontism, return to legality of the Communist Parties, suppression of the Russian proletariat as an element in the labour power of the world market, etc. the lesson of the Russian revolution is that the communist movement is a struggle for all or nothing, communism cannot be introduced by stealth or defended by compromises, or maneuvers to ‘gain time'. On this question the advocation of any other policy than that we have outlined is a class line which divides communists from those who today apologize for counter-revolution in the past, and its re-enactment in the future.

So far we have treated the question of the period of transition ‘internally' with regard to the areas where the bulk of the proletariat are concentrated and which constitute perhaps 30% of the world's population. During the course of revolutionary upheaval itself, any outbreaks which occur in the less developed areas of world capitalism must receive all material and political support from the rest of the proletariat, since the working class is an international class, and has the same interests and tasks world-wide. But we have no faith in the ‘communist' aspirations of the peasantry of these areas, in fact even where we see state capitalist agriculture in the third world, there will in all probability be a parcellation of land among the aspirant peasantry, with a return to subsistence or small commodity agriculture. And there are the additional dangers of deproletarianization of semi-proletarianized groups of workers (eg. in Africa). Any enclaves of power within these areas, created by industrial or plantation workers, must be integrated into the political and economic framework of communism, and serve as the toehold of communism within the areas of the small commodity producers.

In contradistinction to the situation in Russia in 1917-21, this sea of small producers poses no great danger to the efforts to socialize the economy; the working class will not be dependent on these areas for food production, in fact quite the reverse is the case. And these producers are in no wise able to organize themselves politically and militarily to the proletarian power, a fact resulting from their atomized class nature, and one which communists should accept gladly, not try to overcome by urging that they be ‘represented' in the State of the period of transition. But the workers must have a policy towards these sections, since they just abandoning them (apart from humanitarian consideration), would mean that a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation would start in these areas, and then within a period of time they would pose a militancy and political threat to the building of communism. These strata must be involved in the communist economy, without forcing them to collectivize, which is impossible given their huge numbers. Apart from the ideological weapon of propaganda for communism, and humanitarian aid to these areas, the main tactic which impels them into communism is economic, and another reason why the accounting of the social product must be in labour-time.

The Councils must insist that exchange, economic relations between the communized sector and the small commodity producers be taken out with the monetary framework and based on equivalent hours of labour; on this there can be no compromise. To example, if a tractor taken 100 hours of labour to produce, and a ton of jute 10 hours, then 10 tons of the latter are exchanged, or more strictly bartered for a tractor. This form of exchange will need peasant cooperative on the level of distribution, but these are not political organs. Given differences in productivity of labour such an exchange is actually very favourable to the peasants, and the form of exchange is flexible in that it allows the proletariat to further favour those peasant sectors who wish to collectivize, by for example exchanging the hypothetical tractor for only 7 tons of jute. This in turn helps these groups to raise their agricultural output and productivity, and is a clear validation of the superiority of communist agriculture. On these bases the integration of the small producers, politically and economically, into the proletariat and humanity, can take place.

Revolutionary Perspectives

January, 1975