Recorded history is a succession of civilisations which have risen to their peak, fallen into decline, and disappeared. The despotic empires of Sumeria, Egypt, Mexico, China or India; the slave systems of Greece and Rome; the feudal order of mediaeval Europe�each one of these and many others went through periods of flowering when they gave the best of themselves to the world as it then was and to future generations, and through periods of decadence, where their internal contradictions pushed them into a series of catastrophes resulting in their final demise.

Modern day civilisation � the world-wide capitalist mode of production � has long been in its period of decline. The bloody history of the 20th century, with two world wars in its first half and its threat of nuclear annihilation for most of the second, provides proof enough of that.

Those who want us to believe that, despite all this, present-day civilisation is eternal, tell us that 21st century capitalism is different. That it’s no longer a class society facing insurmountable social and economic contradictions, but a post-industrial information economy which � thanks to ‘globalisation’ - has gone beyond the deadly rivalries between nation states.

And yet the catastrophes accumulate, making the future seem ever more menacing.

The Bush-Blair line, that all the principal evils in the world could be eliminated through the quick fix of military intervention, is increasingly exposed by events in the real world. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not brought prosperity, peace and democracy to the region, but famine, chaos, and new guerrilla conflicts. Far from getting rid of terrorism, the ‘war on terror’ has only served to fuel it. The continent of Africa is tormented by horrifying slaughters like the current ones in the Congo and Liberia. Further US military adventures are threatened against North Korea and Iran. The Middle East ‘road map’ to peace lies in ruins. And all these conflicts, far from showing that competition between nations is a thing of the past, are stirred up by the ambitions of imperialist nations large and small. It is no longer possible to hide the fact that America’s main challengers are not Saddam or bin Laden, but great powers like France, Germany, Russia and China. The sharpening of these rivalries is delivering more and more of the planet to the nightmare of imperialist war.

Behind the march towards war, in the last instance, is the system’s crisis of overproduction. The slump of the 30s precipitated the world into six years of carnage; and it was the post-war reconstruction that allowed capitalist production to renew itself, albeit on a diseased foundation. The end of the reconstruction in the late 60s plunged the world economy into a series of recessions which would have culminated in a new devastating slump if the ruling class had not become so adept at getting round the laws of its own system and living on a mountain of debt. This was precisely the basis for the much-touted US growth of the 90s. But capitalism’s laws always get their revenge: the note has to be paid in the end. Today nearly all the major economies are tipping into open recession. All the great hopes of a new economic revolution � above all the ‘e-economy’ and the internet � have proved to be a pathetic delusion. The poverty and bankruptcy of the ‘third world’ is remorselessly advancing towards the main industrial centres.

Ecological disaster, itself the result of capitalism’s frenzied hunt for profit in the face of a glutted world market, must now be set alongside the military and economic cataclysms. Every year brings fresh confirmation that the dire effects of global warming are already with us. Last summer Europe was hit by massive floods; this summer by the heatwave that has ruined crops and wiped out thousands of human lives.

The apologists for the system may try to offer us all kinds of false hopes of a bright tomorrow, but these are all the symptoms of a civilisation in its death agony. The proletariat holds the key

Unlike previous civilisations in decline, capitalism in its death throes will not fall into a Dark Age from which a new form of society will emerge - there is the possibility of the complete destruction of humanity. And yet the very technological capacities which could, in their present capitalist envelope, bring about this ultimate disaster, could also be used to eliminate exploitation and scarcity once and for all. The capitalist class, which lives on the basis of this exploitation, can never do this; but the exploited class, the proletariat, which is the first to suffer from capitalism’s wars and crises, has a material interest in taking charge of the forces of production and using them for human need, not profit.

This would be a utopian hope if the working class had not shown in the past that it can respond to the crisis of the system with revolutionary action, as it did during the first world imperialist war. The defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, which shook world capitalism, led many to abandon hope in the proletariat; during the reconstruction that followed the Second World War, we saw the first blossoming of theories about the disappearance of the working class, about how capitalism had bought it off with televisions and washing machines. The international wave of workers’ struggles sparked off by the events of May-June 68 in France exposed the hollowness of these theories, but they have returned in force over the past decade or so: the collapse of the eastern bloc (really the collapse of a weak link in world capitalism) was supposed to herald the end of the class struggle, and all the theories about the ‘new’ capitalism have taken it for granted that the working class itself is a thing of the past.

The apparent success of these theories was certainly reinforced by the considerable difficulties the working class has been experiencing over the last decade, a decade in which it has to a large extent lost confidence in itself and even lost a sense of identity. But capitalism cannot conjure the class struggle out of existence, and recent events have confirmed it: in France in early summer, for example, where there was a massive response to the brutal attack on pensions by the government; and, on a smaller scale, at Heathrow in the same period, where workers’ strike action had a powerful effect for the very reason that they didn’t abide by the union rule book but walked out as soon as they heard about the latest blow against their working conditions. These struggles, and many more around the globe, are only small signs and the forces arrayed against the workers � from the governments and trade unions to the insidious ideological influences of a society in decomposition � are immense. But a growing minority of proletarians is beginning to pose profound questions about the future capitalism has to offer us, about the possibility of a revival of the class war, about the best methods to use in the defence of our class interests. And this minority is the tip of the iceberg; underneath, a much wider development of consciousness is taking place.

Capitalism cannot offer any hope to humanity. But the struggle of the exploited holds out the prospect of the only realistic alternative: the destruction of capitalism and the creation of world-wide communist society.

WR, 6/9/03.

During the summer, the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly meant there was no let-up in the allegations, evasions and accompanying documentation on dossiers, intelligence and weapons of mass destruction. Usually the ruling class is quite happy to let politics take a rest during the newspapers’ ‘silly season’: it’s clearly a serious dispute that shows no sign of disappearing. What we’re witnessing is partly propaganda, and partly a very real crisis within the ranks of the bourgeoisie on the right policy for British imperialism. Lies about capitalist peace

At the level of propaganda, the campaign over the possibility of a peaceful capitalism continues unabated. Before, during, and since the end of the offensive against Iraq, a whole array of liberal and left-wing figures have criticised the government’s militarism with claims that somehow the capitalist state could adopt a non-military policy. Despite all the evidence of imperialist conflicts since the end of the nineteenth century, ‘anti-war’ arguments say that capitalism can follow a peaceful road.

In the row over the Labour government’s dossiers, for example, Air Marshal Sir John Walker, Chief of Defence Intelligence from 1991 to 1994, suggested that claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were “not the reason to go to war, but the excuse to go to war”. From a military man this is probably fair comment � he knows that you don’t base an attack on another country on the basis of one dubious uncorroborated source. He therefore concluded that the decision to attack Iraq was already made last summer, and on the basis of other grounds than Iraq possessing or developing WMDs. The ‘anti-war’ argument also dismisses the stated reason for war, but also allows that there are circumstances in which there will be ‘reasons’ for war. Clare Short and Robin Cook criticised the war on Iraq, but were part of the government that bombed Belgrade and attacked Afghanistan. Others criticised war on Iraq and Afghanistan, because it meant going along with US imperialism, despite having previously advocated war in ex-Yugoslavia in defence of Bosnia or Kosovo. Wars ‘against fascism’, wars for ‘national liberation’, wars ‘against imperialism’ are all justifiable from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. And when Germany, France, Russia and China opposed the attack on Iraq it was for reasons as imperialist as those that motivated the US and Britain.

During the course of the Hutton enquiry it has been implied that while Blair, Campbell and associates were determined to manipulate everything to ensure that a solid case was made for war, there were others who were more cautious, whose influence might have convinced MPs that there was no need for an attack on Iraq. That is not the way that capitalism functions. It is not because of particular personalities or particular policies, but because of the very nature of a decadent system that war is the only means for survival of any national capital. Too close to the US?

Alongside the smokescreen of ‘anti-war’ illusions there is a very serious division within the ruling class that stems from the very limited room for manoeuvre available to British imperialism. In the period of the Cold War Britain remained loyal to the US bloc because of a discipline imposed by the potential threat of Russia and its satellites. Following the collapse of the USSR there were no longer any grounds for maintaining the ‘special relationship’ with the US and, first under Major’s Conservative government, and then under Blair, the British bourgeoisie has tried to pursue a policy independent of US imperialism. This has not always been easy, as Britain, despite boasting the world’s fourth largest economy, has many economic and military limitations, and has had to enter into temporary tactical alliances with the American superpower as much as with a European neighbour such as France. What concerns a significant section of the British ruling class is that the policy of Blair seems to involve a more than temporary alliance with the US, a loss of independence for no obvious gain. They worry that British interests are not being served in an entanglement with the US that alienates potential allies in Europe.

A typical expression of the anxiety that pervades the ruling class comes from Peter Kilfoyle, a former Labour defence minister. He appreciates that there are many who see the role of Britain, “as a ‘bridge’ between a European trading bloc and the US. Unfortunately for them, many in Europe see this as a one-way bridge for American influence and advantage, with the UK cast as a Trojan horse.” (Guardian, 18/8/03). He complains that Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon has, “acknowledged that we are to be to the US armed forces what the sepoys were to the British Indian army”, that “the gains of many decades have been frittered away by our blind obedience to the American administration’s wars”, that Britain is now “a satrapy of the new American world order”, that “we are now viewed as a rather ignoble island, subservient to the world’s super-power.” In the words of novelist Doris Lessing “the basis of this admiration of America � appears to be a love of power and the big guy. Look at Blair running around like a little rabbit � we are a colony” (Guardian, 12/8/03).

From the Conservative party, ex-Defence and Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind thinks that “Tony Blair would have us believe that the furore over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been manufactured by some improbable alliance of a machiavellian BBC, Labour malcontents and Tory opportunists” (Guardian, 19/7/03). Rifkind dismisses all the arguments about the horror of Saddam’s regime as “moral blackmail” and recalls that for 5 years Blair didn’t put any case for an invasion of Iraq. He suggested that the arrival of George W Bush in the White House was a key factor in Labour’s change of heart. “Blair recognised that in order to retain the confidence of the new president, and to ensure British influence in Washington, he would have to support regime change in Iraq and the new doctrine of pre-emptive wars.” Rifkind understands the reasons for Britain to have a close relationship with the US, but thinks it should not be unconditional. “Of course, it is sensible for Britain to continue as America’s closest ally, but this has not stopped previous prime ministers - Labour and Tory - from distancing themselves from Washington when circumstances so justified. Harold Wilson refused to send British troops to Vietnam. Margaret Thatcher did not allow her warm relationship with Ronald Reagan to prevent her bitter criticism of the US, both over the invasion of Grenada and over the American attempt to impose sanctions on European countries trading with the Soviet Union over gas pipelines in the 1980s”.

Top Tory Michael Heseltine was “appalled” last year when he heard from an American politician close to Bush that the decision to invade Iraq was already taken long before the UN or the weapons inspectors came to any conclusions. He thinks that no one should be “fooled about the case for regime change”, and that the Hutton inquiry is a way of avoiding a proper judicial inquiry into the real reasons for participating in America’s war.

The diplomatic editor of the Guardian (23/8/03) summarised the view of those most wary of US influence. “For more than 10 years, British policy was to contain Saddam by keeping him weak through sanctions, imposition of no-fly zones and diplomatic isolation. He was regarded as a potential threat but not a pressing one� By the time the [September] dossier was published, Saddam had become someone who had to be dealt with as a matter of urgency”. The mobilisation for war was underway and the only role left for Blair was to prepare British and international public opinion for the inevitable. A real political crisis

While all bourgeois politicians and commentators frame everything they say in nationalist terms you can still distinguish the stances within the British capitalist class. In the face of criticism from left, right and his own party, Blair can still count on the support of pro-US papers like the Sun and Times. Blair is not an isolated individual but a key representative of an important faction of the British bourgeoisie. The Conservative party is dominated by a pro-US faction which is in no position to criticise Blair. But among those in all parties who defend the need for an independent position, there is a difference on the degree to which it is in British interests to sustain alliances with the US. Blair’s famous speech to the US Congress could be dismissed as just so many pleasantries for a charming host, or taken as confirmation that Blair is only a mouthpiece for Bush. He said that “there never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood” and that “Europe must take on and defeat the anti-Americanism that sometimes passes for its political discourse”. He warned of the emergence of a European bloc as “there is no more dangerous theory in international politics today than that we need to balance the power of America with other competitor powers, different poles around which nations gather”.

The pressure put on Blair over Kelly and the dossiers is a way for important factions of the bourgeoisie to remind him that Britain has an established imperialist orientation based on its historical experience. Blair’s Congress speech insisted that “a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day”, where in fact the bourgeoisie is painfully aware of the loss of its dominant imperialist position to the US, of how it suffered at US hands in the Second World War, of how the US frustrated its attempts to become a nuclear power, at Suez etc., and how, throughout the period of the Cold War, the Foreign Office fought against becoming just a branch office of the State Department. The reason the pressure has been so insistent on the Blair faction is because the Tories are no alternative, and because in other respects the bourgeoisie is satisfied with the way that Labour has functioned for British capital over the last 6 years.

The seriousness of the arguments within the British bourgeoisie should not be underestimated. The most intelligent bourgeoisie in the world is showing in this unfolding political crisis a tendency to lose control of the situation. That it should be openly carrying on its internal conflicts in the glare of publicity, including all the revelations that would normally be kept secret for at least 30 years, shows the depth of the problems it faces. In the Hutton inquiry opponents have taken the opportunity to criticise government policy, while Blair and his supporters have counter attacked with diversions, indignation and attempts to muddy the water. There is a danger that these battles will undermine the bourgeoisie’s ability to function coherently as a class on the imperialist level. The bourgeoisie can’t act effectively if it is seriously divided on how it should operate.

A comparison with the crisis before the Second World War shows a further decline in Britain’s position. In the 1930s the policy of ‘appeasement’ was generally accepted by the ruling class, not least because it allowed for a longer period of re-armament. Against this Churchill argued for a ‘grand alliance’ that would include the US and Russia. This was not feasible for years as the US would hold off for as long as possible, and Russia was initially to be in alliance with Germany. The 1930s crisis was ultimately based on the reality that Britain could no longer function as a dominant global power, and had to work out what that meant for imperialist policy. In the early 21st century the British bourgeoisie is arguing about what it means to be a second-rate power with a diminishing room for manoeuvre, losing control in the face of a global offensive by US imperialism. For significant sections of the bourgeoisie, the likes of Blair and Hoon seem to be sacrificing British independence in their enthusiasm for participation in the American project. This argument is not going to go away as the quandary that British imperialism finds itself in can only intensify.

Barrow, 4/9/03.

In World Revolution 365 we republished an article [4]that showed how, when the imperialist war of 1914 broke out, the Labour party and the trade unions offered their services to the ruling class by mobilising the workers for war. But there were numerous voices within the workers’ movement in Britain who, like their counterparts in other countries (like the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Spartacists in Germany) remained loyal to their internationalist principles and raised their voices against the ideological orgy of patriotism and the hideous carnage in the trenches. This article, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC, was originally published in two parts (in World Revolution 267 and 268 in September and October of 2003) which we have now consolidated into one article.

An additional article, on the minority in the UK who maintained internationalist positions in the face of the Second World War, was published in WR 270 and is available here [5].

The first duty of revolutionaries in the face of capitalist war is to defend the interests of the whole working class, as expressed in the historic slogan of the workers’ movement: “Workers of the world unite!”

The defence of internationalism for revolutionaries has never been an abstract principle; it is an intensely practical struggle, involving a fight for clarity inside the political organisations of the working class, and more widely through intervention in its defensive struggles, often in difficult conditions of state repression and patriotic frenzy.

This article examines the struggle of the revolutionary left in Britain against the first world war, looking firstly at the development of clarity at the theoretical level about the entry of capitalism into its imperialist phase, and then at the organisational struggle for an active anti-war position inside the main ostensibly Marxist organisation, the British Socialist Party.

This struggle for internationalism demanded not only a ruthless fight against the jingoism and nationalism of the enemy class, but also against all signs of opportunism and centrism within the working class. (The history of the different socialist organisations in Britain and their responses to the First World War are dealt with in more detail in the series on the struggle for the class party in Britain - see WR 237, September 2000).

Understanding the new imperialist epoch

The understanding that capitalism had entered into its imperialist phase was the product of a pre-war political struggle waged by the left - in particular the Bolsheviks, the left-wing in the German Socialist Party and the Dutch Tribunists - against the revisionist theories of Bernstein and others on the right-wing of the Second International, who began to argue that capitalism was in fact capable of overcoming its own inner contradictions and that the struggle for gradual reforms alone could result in a peaceful transformation into socialism.

The left in Britain not only participated in this political struggle as an integral part of European social democracy, but also made its own contribution to the Marxist understanding of the changing conditions for the class struggle in the most advanced capitalist countries; as early as the 1880s William Morris identified the rise of imperialism as a response to capitalism’s increasingly desperate need for new markets:

“...the one thing for which our thrice accursed civilisation craves, as the stifling man for fresh air, is new markets; fresh countries must be conquered by it which are not manufacturing and are producers of raw material, so that ‘civilised’ manufactures can be forced on them. All wars now waged, under whatever pretences, are really wars for the great prizes in the world market.”[1]

The British left fought vigorously against local variants of revisionism, making an explicit link between the tendencies towards state capitalism at home and imperialism abroad: “Imperialism...is in its essence nothing but the application outside the British Isles of that socio-political principle which, when applied at home, leads to ‘state socialism’. That principle is the organisation and the consolidation by the power of the state of...the interests of the capitalist classes.” [2]

The Socialist Labour Party in particular developed quite a sophisticated analysis of state capitalism, arguing that even the Liberal government’s welfare measures - despite offering some minimal improvements in the conditions of the working class - were fundamentally “a preliminary measure towards the bureaucratic enslavement of the people.”[3] For the SLP, the final outbreak of the imperialist world war and the insatiable demands of the war economy greatly intensified this tendency and confirmed the reactionary consequences of any further support for nationalisation or state control:

“Nationalisation or ‘state socialism’ so far from being a method of working class progress to socialism, has become the very life blood and method of the most militant and aggressive imperialism... State control means the highest form of capitalism, and will create the industrial warfare of whole empires and groups of empires... Thus, along the road of nationalisation or state ownership, instead of meeting socialism, freedom and peace, we find competition intensified, wage slavery, militarism, and, in the distance, the bloodstained fields of future battlefields.”[4]

Three years of bloodstained battlefields enabled the clearest elements the SLP to conclude that capitalism, like the social systems which preceded it, had now definitely entered into its period of decadence.[5] Although this conclusion was coloured by a mechanistic vision of the system’s ‘inevitable’ dissolution, it was still based on the solid Marxist position that the war was essentially the product of capitalism’s historic crisis of overproduction. Echoing Rosa Luxemburg, William Paul of the SLP argued that in order to avert this crisis the capitalist class had been forced to divert the productive forces into waste production - in particular of armaments - and finally to go to war in order to re-divide a saturated world market[6]. 

There was also an understanding amongst the clearest revolutionaries that the war could not solve this crisis and that unless the working class was able to destroy capitalism the perspective would be one of further imperialist bloodbaths. On the revolutionary left wing of the BSP, John Maclean was probably the clearest in drawing the lessons of the economic struggle between capitalist states in the new period to ominously predict a second, even more destructive round of butchery, which threw into question the whole basis of any future struggle for reforms:

“The increased output of commodities…will necessitate larger markets abroad, and hence a larger empire. The same will apply to other capitalist countries. This must develop a more intense economic war than led up to the present war, and so precipitate the world into a bloodier business than we are steeped in just now. The temporary advantage the workers may get in shorter hours and higher wages with higher purchasing power will then be swept away in the destruction of millions of good lives and fabulous masses of wealth.”[7]

These were vital insights by small minorities of the British working class into the roots of the First World War and its profound significance for the struggle for socialism, which gave strength to the left’s organisational struggle for internationalism. 

The organisational struggle for internationalism

In Britain, the earliest and most consistent defender of a revolutionary position against the war was the group around John Maclean and the Glasgow District Council of the British Socialist Party. The BSP led by Hyndman, a notorious pro-imperialist, had declared its wholehearted support for Britain’s entry into the war and called for an allied victory; a position endorsed by representatives of the left and centre in the party.

But even as the BSP was proclaiming its support for King and Country, Maclean and his supporters were carrying out anti-war propaganda at factory gates on Clydeside, where mass meetings of workers passed resolutions calling for an end to the war and sent fraternal greetings to workers of all nations[8]. In September 1914, Maclean argued that: “Our first business is to hate the British capitalist system that, with ‘business as usual’, means the continued robbery of the workers... It is our business as socialists to develop ‘class patriotism’, refusing to murder one another for a sordid world capitalism.”[9] In the first issue of his own paper the Vanguard - started as a riposte to Hyndman’s pro-war Justice – Maclean set out his belief that the only alternative to war now was revolution: “Nothing but world socialism will do. This monstrous war shows that the day of social pottering or reform is past... We do not think national wars are of benefit to the workers so we shall oppose all national wars as we oppose this one. The only war that is worth fighting is the class war...”[10] Unless this war ended in revolution, further world imperialist wars were inevitable.

Maclean’s clear internationalist tendency, however, co-existed in a party still controlled by a rabidly chauvinist leadership. A determined struggle for the organisation was necessary, in order to exclude those who had betrayed internationalism and to win over the whole party to a revolutionary position against the war.

In the decade before the war, the left wing of the BSP had waged a bitter internal struggle against the growing chauvinism of the party leadership. In particular, the left fought to disassociate the party from Hyndman’s public advocacy of a big navy and to obtain its adherence to the official position of the Second International against war. The left was strongest in East London, and in Scotland where Maclean and the Glasgow branches carried out anti-militarist propaganda. In both areas, émigré Marxists with invaluable experience of the organisational struggles in Russian and East European social democracy played a leading role. The left was successful in gaining representation on the party’s executive, and in late 1912 narrowly won endorsement for its own clear rejection of militarism and imperialism.[11] But, in the face of a counter-attack by the right, the opposition revealed a fatal tendency to vacillate; two of its representatives failed to attend the next executive meeting in February 1913, giving the leadership a majority of one in voting to suspend the resolution and to allow the party to decide on the question of maintaining a British Navy. At the 1913 party conference, the centre in the party did all it could to prevent a split on such a ‘non-essential point’, proposing that members should be “free to hold any opinion they like on subjects apart from socialism”! As one delegate bluntly put it: “first and foremost they must have socialist unity.” In the end, the left’s anti-militarist resolution was never voted on and Hyndman, while still airing his ‘strong conviction’ that a very powerful navy was ‘indispensable’ to Britain, agreed to keep quiet for the sake of the party. In a display of phoney unity, a resolution was then adopted, pledging the BSP to oppose the growth of militarism as an integral part of the Second International. For the left this proved a Pyrrhic victory. The right, in danger of losing its grip on the party, had been rescued by centrist conciliation.[12]  The working class paid heavily for this failure; at the outbreak of the first imperialist world war one of the very few Marxist organisations in Britain - so painfully built up during the preceding period of capitalist prosperity - remained in the hands of a right-wing chauvinist clique which proceeded to offer its enthusiastic support to the slaughter, dragging the whole notion of proletarian internationalism down into the mud with it.

II. The organisational struggle for an internationalist position - the dangers of centrism

The BSP leadership’s first tentative efforts to mobilise the party behind the bourgeoisie’s war effort provoked a swift reaction from the internationalists in the party, who found growing support among the membership. The right was forced to prevent this opposition unifying by avoiding a national conference in 1915; at the six regional conferences held instead, the mass of the party rejected both social chauvinist and revolutionary positions, narrowly adopting an ‘india rubber’ resolution which in fact justified the British war effort.[13] Again the leadership survived by allowing the ‘expression of opinion’, but there was a running battle over the party’s press which continued to present the views of the chauvinists, and in 1916 the arch-jingoist Hyndman and his supporters set up a ‘Socialist National Defence Committee’ which effectively operated as an arm of the government in the party; the organisational struggle turned violent and anti-war militants found themselves being set up for state repression by their own leadership.

A split was clearly inevitable, but the opposition - which included both the left and the centre of the party - still hesitated to take the initiative despite gaining a majority on the executive. Within the opposition, there appeared a more clearly defined centrist current, which resolutely avoided any call for action against the war and restricted itself to calls for peace. The Vanguard group around John Maclean called on the party to choose its camp: either the revolutionary left, or Hyndman and the old International. However, with Maclean’s imprisonment and the closure of the Vanguardin 1916 political leadership of the opposition passed by default to the centrist current, which urged peace and called on the Second International to ‘act’. At the 1916 conference, the Hyndmanites were finally isolated and walked out, but even now they were not excluded, and the debates at the conference clearly revealed the centrist confusions of the majority. Essentially the new BSP leadership deeply feared a British military defeat and did all it could to avoid any action that might jeopardise an allied victory.

Zimmerwald: a first step in the regroupment of the internationalists

After the initial shock of the war and the betrayal of social democracy, the question for revolutionaries was whether the old International could be rebuilt or if a new one was now necessary. In practice, with the old International’s leaders now fully backing their respective imperialisms, its central organ, the ‘International Socialist Bureau’ (ISB), was completely impotent. It was eventually on the initiative of the Italian Socialist Party that a first, unofficial international socialist conference was held at Zimmerwald in September 1915. This brought together some of the most important currents of the revolutionary left, including the Bolsheviks, along with representatives of the pacifist centre. The left’s own draft resolutions and anti-war manifesto, which called for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, were rejected by the majority which restricted itself to a call for peace, but the conference acted as an important moment in the regroupment of revolutionaries against the war, enabling the left to establish itself as an organised fraction which later, following a second conference at Kienthal in April 1916, became the nucleus of the Third International.

The BSP executive platonically greeted Zimmerwald but remained opposed to any move to form a new international organisation in opposition to the ISB, while the centre of the party was hesitant in its support, repeating its demand that the ISB ‘act’.[14] In contrast, John Maclean enthusiastically welcomed the Zimmerwald manifesto as a call for “the class war for social democracy” and denounced the ISB’s efforts to keep the sides apart. His émigré collaborator Peter Petroff, with closer links to the movement abroad, was better placed to analyse the political character of the conference, giving it his support while pointing out that its manifesto stopped short of calling for revolutionary action against the war.[15]

The Socialist Labour Party had also been kept informed of the anti-war movement abroad through émigré contacts and supported Zimmerwald as laying the foundations for a new International, denouncing the pro-war socialists with whom all common action was now impossible: “We are at the parting of the ways. Every day the cleavage between the socialists remaining true to the International and the pro-war socialists is becoming more and more marked...”[16]

Sylvia Pankhurst also gave support to Zimmerwald in her paper the Women’s Dreadnought, which was in the process of evolving towards a revolutionary position on the war; its transition to class politics would be marked by the newspaper changing its name to the Workers’ Dreadnought in 1917.

So from their initial isolation, by late 1915 at least some of the scattered revolutionary forces in Britain had taken their first steps towards regroupment at an international level based on a clear political break with the social chauvinists, but also by differentiating themselves - more or less explicitly - from the pacifist centre.

The need for a clear internationalist perspective for the workers’ struggles

The collapse of the Second International and the definitive betrayal of its opportunist right wing, while disarming the working class and temporarily putting a brake on its struggles, did not constitute a decisive blow, and the genuine euphoria with which thousands of workers greeted the war quickly began to evaporate as the bourgeoisie demanded ever greater sacrifices in the name of the war effort.

As early as February 1915, workers’ struggles re-emerged, when engineering workers on the Clyde struck for higher wages against the advice of their union executive and formed their own unofficial strike committee. Rent strikes also began. In July, 200,000 South Wales miners struck in defiance of the Munitions Act and forced concessions from the government, while in November 1915 transport workers in Dublin paralysed the docks. Unofficial shop stewards’ committees grew up all over country. The introduction of conscription in 1916 provoked further strikes by Clydeside engineering workers, which were only cut short by the wholesale arrest and imprisonment of the strike leaders (including John Maclean). The centre of resistance now moved to England with a strike by engineering workers in Sheffield in November 1916, and in the following March further repressive government measures led to renewed unrest which spread throughout England, eventually involving over 200,000 workers; the largest strike movement of the war.

In the midst of the slaughter, these struggles - which were echoed abroad - began to open up revolutionary opportunities, and despite their initial isolation, those few revolutionaries who had remained faithful to the cause of the proletariat in 1914 now found opportunities to win a hearing in the workers’ struggles. The group around John Maclean was particularly active in the unofficial strike movements on Clydeside; against the prevalent disdain of British socialists for the class’s immediate struggles, Maclean saw every determined struggle of the workers as a preparation for socialism, and the Vanguard group put its efforts into connecting all the different struggles on immediate issues - wages, rent rises, the ‘dilution’ of skilled labour - into a class-wide offensive to end the war, calling on the Clyde workers to adopt the tactic of the political strike along the lines of the pre-war European mass strikes:

“We rest assured that our comrades in the various works will incessantly urge this aspect on their shopmates, and so prepare the ground for the next great counter-move of our class in the raging class warfare - raging more than even during the Great Unrest period of three or four years ago...the only way to fight the class war is by accepting every challenge of the master class and throwing down more challenges ourselves. Every determined fight binds the workers together more and more, and so prepares for the final conflict. Every battle lifts the curtain more and more, and clears the heads of our class to their robbed and enslaved conditions, and so prepares them for the acceptance of our full gospel of socialism, and the full development of the class struggle to the end of establishing socialism.”[17]

The Vanguard group also intervened in Clyde Workers’ Committee - the body set up by the militant shop stewards to co-ordinate their struggle against the Munitions Act - to urge it to organise mass action against the threat of conscription, but was expelled from its meetings after attacking the leadership’s refusal to deal with the issue of the war, which led Maclean to question its ability to respond to the needs of the class struggle, calling on the workers if necessary to ‘take the initiative into their own hands’.[18] Only the revolutionary left around Maclean consistently intervened in the workers’ struggles to call for a class struggle against the war. 

The Socialist Labour Party also had a strong presence on Clydeside, where some of its militants played a leading role in the Clyde Workers’ Committee, but it failed to raise the question of the war or to attempt to give the struggles a revolutionary perspective, pandering instead to the syndicalist ideas of the majority and restricting its intervention to a call for nationalisation and workers’ self-management of the munitions industry. From its initial focus on the fight for women’s suffrage, the small group in the East End of London around Sylvia Pankhurst also moved closer to the workers’ struggles to defend their conditions, actively denouncing the imperialist war at mass demonstrations and leading protests to the government against repression and the hunger and misery imposed on the working class.

In this way, despite all their confusions, through active intervention in the growing struggles against the war revolutionaries gained a small but significant hearing for internationalist positions within the working class, and constituted part of an international movement against the war. The outbreak of revolution in Russia in February 1917 - only three years after capitalism had plunged the world into the massacre - spectacularly confirmed the revolutionary perspective of this movement, and when in November 1918 the bourgeoisie was forced to hurriedly declare an armistice in order to be able to deal with the proletarian threat, the SLP rightly observed that: “For the first time in history a great world war had been ended by the action of the workers.” The imperialist war was turned into a civil war.[19]

Conclusions

War and revolution are vital tests for revolutionaries. By supporting national defence in the imperialist war, the right wing of the workers’ movement - including in Britain the Labour Party and the trade union leadership - passed over to the camp of the bourgeoisie. The centre and the left proved by their continued defence of the basic internationalist interests of the working class that they remained within the proletarian camp, but only the left defended the need for a real struggle against the war.

By breaking with the social chauvinists and identifying with the Zimmerwald movement the left had taken the first necessary steps towards the regroupment of revolutionaries at an international level. However, a political struggle against the centre and the influence of centrism within the ranks of the workers’ movement was still an essential condition for the creation of a new party and a new International.

An equally important condition for this was the presence of revolutionaries within the working class, to intervene in the workers’ struggles and give them a revolutionary direction. It was the workers’ own efforts to defend themselves against the attacks on their conditions that laid the ground for a revolutionary struggle against the war and strengthened the left in its struggle against both chauvinism and social pacifism.

 MH (contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)

The ICC has taken the decision to bar from its public forums and contact meetings members of the so-called ‘Internal Fraction’ of the ICC [1]. This is the first time that our organisation has taken such a decision and it is necessary to explain publicly the reasons for it to the groups and elements of the proletarian political milieu and the working class in general.

This decision follows the exclusion of the same members of the IFICC at our 15th International Congress in the spring of 2003 [2] and is based on the same motives as their exclusion: the fact that these elements have behaved like snitches against our organisation.

To make things perfectly clear: it’s not because these elements were expelled from the ICC that they can’t take part in our meetings. If for example the ICC was compelled to expel a member because their mode of life was incompatible with belonging to a communist organisation (as for example in the case of drug addiction), this wouldn’t prevent that element from coming to our public meetings afterwards.

It’s because these elements decided to behave like informers that we can’t tolerate their presence at our meetings. This decision would apply to anyone who devoted themselves to making public information that could facilitate the work of the bourgeois state’s organs of repression.

Our decision is by no means exceptional in the history of the organisations of the workers’ movement. The latter have always had the principle of keeping informers at arm’s length in order to protect the security of revolutionary organisations and their militants [3].

Although we have already dealt with this question in our press (in particular in the article in WR 262, ‘The police-like methods of the IFICC’), we cannot avoid briefly going over the facts which led the 15th Congress to expel the members of the ‘Fraction’.

1. The publication on the internet of the date of a conference of the section of the ICC in Mexico (no. 14 of the IFICC Bulletin), a week before the conference was held. This meant that the entire world’s police could strengthen their surveillance at airports and frontiers, and make it much more precise (since our press has always said that international delegations participate in such conferences). What’s more, the members of the IFICC know very well that certain of our comrades have been direct victims of repression or been forced to leave their country of origin.

Following our denunciation of their behaviour, the members of the ‘Fraction’ replied that the date was only published on the day of the conference and that we had other fish to fry in all this. This response was a shameful lie and anyone can verify this by going to the IFICC website. Their bulletin no.14 is dated 24 November 2002, i.e. 6 days before the date of our internal meeting. The ICC itself became aware of the publication of the date on 26 November and it posed the question of whether it was advisable to send certain of our delegates to this conference [4].

2. The publication of the real initials of one of our militants, attached to his present pseudonym. The ‘Fraction’, unable to deny these facts, has tried to get round the accusation: “let’s recall simply that the initials CG were the signature on several articles in Revolution Internationale and the International Review throughout the 70s. It is under the initials CG that the militant Peter of today is widely known in the proletarian camp” (IFICC Bulletin no. 18). What does this last phrase mean? That the IFICC wanted the groups of the proletarian political milieu to know exactly WHO is this Peter that the Fraction’s texts talk about at such great length. We can already ask how this information helps these groups to better understand the political questions at stake. But even supposing that this was the case, the IFICC knows very well that of all these groups, only the IBRP knew CG, the same IBRP which had been informed seven months previously of the real identity of Peter at a meeting with the IFICC (see no. 9 of their Bulletin). As far as other revolutionary groups are concerned (such as the PCI), unlike the police, they simply don’t know who CG was. As for the fact that during the 70s numerous articles were signed CG, that’s quite true, but why have these initials disappeared from our press over the last 20 years? The IFICC members know quite well: because the ICC had judged that to publish the real initials of a militant only makes the work of the police easier. If the IFICC had decided that it was politically crucial to say how the militant Peter signed his articles, they could have used some more recent signatures and not the oldest ones. But this wasn’t its aim. What mattered was to give a little warning to CG so that other ICC militants would get the point and understand the price of combating the IFICC. The fallacious arguments it puts forward to justify its actions only highlights the mentality of informers and blackmailers which has more and more seized hold of its members.

When you look at its Bulletins, it’s evident that rumour-mongering and informing on members of the ICC has become the main business of the ‘Fraction’:

• in Bulletin no. 13, we read that the ICC hired a “luxurious room” for a public meeting;
• in no. 18, we find a detailed report of a public meeting of the PCI-Le Proletaire where all the deeds and gestures of “Peter alias CG” are set down in detail;
• in no. 19, once again there’s a sally against Peter who was “distributing alone” at this or that demonstration and this led them to raise a “highly political question”: “Finally, and you will understand that we are also posing this question to you: where is Louise? Absent from the demonstrations, absent from the public meetings, is she once again ‘ill’?”

In fact, the main concern of the members of the IFICC when they participate at demonstrations and at ICC public meetings is to know WHO is present. WHO is absent, WHO says what and WHO does what, so that they can later make public all sorts of ‘facts’ about our militants. This is work worthy of the agents of the Renseignements Generales (French security forces)! We can’t forbid the members of the IFICC to follow street demonstrations in order to track us. But we can prevent them doing their dirty work at our public meetings. At the latter, they have not had the possibility of speaking, since we demanded as a precondition that they first give back the money they stole from the ICC. The only reason for coming to our meetings has been this kind of police surveillance, as expressed for example in no. 14 of their Bulletin where we read “It is first of all necessary to know that this text (our article ‘The International Communist Party trails after the ‘Internal Fraction’ of the ICC’, published in WR 260 and 261) was written by CG, alias Peter, as can be seen by its style”. (our emphasis).

In his celebrated pamphlet What every revolutionary needs to know about repression, Victor Serge advises communist militants “never forget that ‘give me three lines of a man’s handwriting and I will get him hanged’ is a familiar axiom of all the police”. Today, when most texts are written directly by keyboard, analysing the “style” of writing is the policeman’s favoured means to identify the author, and the IFICC here is providing him with their good and loyal services.

We should make it clear that we have no reason to think that the members of the ‘Fraction’ are in the direct pay of the police, nor that they are in some way in its clutches. But does the fact that they are snitching gratis and for their own reasons alter the gravity of their actions?

Some people will say to us perhaps that none of this information is any use to the police. This is to understand nothing about police methods, which will make use of the smallest detail in order to compile a complete diagram of the organisations of the working class. The procedures used by the police are very well described by Victor Serge in his study of the Czarist Okhrana [5]. Can we seriously imagine that modern states are less well advanced in all this than their Czarist predecessor?

There will also perhaps be those who say that this banning of the members of the IFICC serves no purpose, because the police can always send someone we don’t know to gather information at our public meetings. This is obviously quite true. But is that a reason for being laisser faire when people who have already shown that they are ready to publish no matter what, and have already declared that they do not feel bound by any loyalty towards the ICC, nor towards its militants, of whom they have a detailed knowledge -come to our meetings and write copious notes about them? Should we open our doors to open and avowed sneaks under the pretext that we can’t detect the hidden ones?

It could, finally, be objected that the special organs of the bourgeois state couldn’t care less about the activities of a tiny organisation like ours. But the whole history of the workers’ movement shows that the special services of the bourgeois state never underestimate the potential danger represented by revolutionary groups, however small their size and influence in the working class at a given moment. Furthermore, despite the fact that for the moment the ‘democratic’ state doesn’t generally exert open repression against the groups of the communist left, the latter have already been subjected to acts of repression (as for example the raids on the International Communist Party in the 70s). The ICC itself has not been spared since certain of our militants, including in the most ‘democratic’ countries, have been subjected to raids, surveillance aimed at intimidating us, prolonged interrogation at the frontier, commando actions by elements who were probably tied up with the state. The members of the IFICC know all this very well.

One of the great weaknesses of today’s revolutionary organisations, and of their militants, is that they tend to forget all the elementary measures of security which enabled the revolutionary organisations of the past to maintain their activity faced with the repression of the bourgeois state whether democratic or ‘totalitarian’. Today, as yesterday, revolutionary organisations have to apply these elementary elements of what we may call ‘political hygiene’. And one of these measures is precisely to chase snitches out our meeting places.

Notes

1. This relates to the following elements: Aglae, Alberto, Jonas, Juan, Leonardo, Olivier, Sergio, Vicente and possibly to other members of the IFICC who have joined it recently and who support the behaviour of those mentioned.

2. see our articles ‘15th Congress of the ICC: Today the stake are high - strengthen the organisation to confront them’ in International Review 114 and ‘The police-like methods of the IFICC’ in WR 262.

3. See the article ‘The struggle of revolutionary organisations against provocation and slander’ in WR 252.

4. Before the congress which pronounced the exclusion of the members of the ‘Fraction’, we wrote twice to each of these former militants, asking them whether they personally defended the publication of this information, or whether it was an action with which they were not personally in agreement. They thus had ample opportunity to go back on it. As can be seen from their replies, published on the IFICC website, we received no response to this very precise question. It was only after the congress that we could read that “it is with good grace that we (the IFICC) recognise that we should have been more attentive in reproducing your letter and suppressed this passage”. Again, this is pure hypocrisy: in order to be published in French on the internet, our letter had to be translated from Spanish. Did the ‘Fraction’ do this in its sleep?

5. What every revolutionary needs to know about state repression.

The International Communist Current, 30/8/03.

Two years ago the attack on the Twin Towers in New York opened the way to an acceleration of military tensions unprecedented since the end of the cold war. This new step into a world of chaos was justified by the so-called ‘struggle against international terrorism’, combined with a ‘battle for the defence of democracy’. This lying propaganda can no longer mask the real worsening of inter-imperialist conflicts between the great powers, in particular between the USA and its former allies in the western bloc.

As we have argued many times in this paper, the USA is permanently forced to assert its world leadership on the military level, a leadership that is no less permanently being challenged by its former allies. The main conflicts since the collapse of the eastern bloc have all been expressions of this, but it has been stated even more openly with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both these countries, the USA has been trying to impose its order directly, but is experiencing growing difficulties in the face of an increasingly chaotic situation. The US is unable to control the situation in Iraq

In order to prevent its principal rivals from putting a spoke in its wheels in Iraq and the Middle East, the USA has attempted to act alone. This is why it denied the UN the chance of playing the slightest political role in the administration of Iraq. On the military level the US operation was a real success. And yet at the present time there is no perspective for withdrawing its 145,000-man military force from the ground; in fact it has been shown to be too small to control the situation. The whole aim of the military occupation � to give the world a convincing demonstration of US power � is being undermined by the fact that the perspective of getting Iraqi society back on its feet seems more and more distant.

Whatever the American bourgeoisie says, it does not control the situation in Iraq. This reality is reflected in all the anti-American propaganda, which uses every opportunity it can to show the harmfulness of the US presence in the country.

The living conditions of the population, which were already deplorable under Saddam, have worsened as a result of the war and of the occupying power’s inability to supply the most basic necessities or repair the essential infrastructure, particularly for water and electricity. Food shortages have provoked a number of riots.

Criminal gangs and speculators are flourishing, creating a climate of instability and insecurity. This is fuelled above all by the activities of terrorist groups, who have been carrying out almost daily attacks on US troops and forces allied to the US: the British, who boasted that they were more sensitive to the feelings of the local population, have increasingly come under fire in Basra, and the Jordanians, whose embassy was bombed. But the economic infrastructure, such as the water and oil pipelines, is also under attack.

The occupying troops are paying a heavy tribute for the defence of the imperialist interests of the US bourgeoisie. At the time of writing over 60 GIs have been killed in ambushes since the end of the war. Terrorised themselves, the US troops in turn terrorise the population and are greeted with growing hostility. A further 78 GIs have died in ‘accidents’ of various kinds. The death toll is far from closed.

Despite the USA’s attempt to bind Iraqi society with ties of steel, anarchy has the upper hand. The attempt to set up an Iraqi authority and a ‘democratic’ constitution � the great beacon of American propaganda and a key justification for the war - remains stillborn. Bush may well proclaim that never before in history has a coalition government united so many different parties as the ‘Provisional Government Council’; but far from being the skeleton of a future government, this coalition is no more than a theatre of conflict between all kinds of rival gangs, all of whom show little interest in any overall ‘national’ interest. Worse still, certain Shiite factions are more and more inclined to wage a frontal combat against the US, especially after the bomb which killed the Ayatollah Hakim and almost 100 of his followers in Najaf on 29 August.

As for Blair’s promise that Iraqi oil revenues would soon pay for the reconstruction of Iraq, this has proved to be a mirage in the desert. Oil revenues are hardly sufficient to pay for the rebuilding of the oil installations, let alone the reconstruction of the entire country. This raises the question: who will pay for the growing financial burden of occupying Iraq? Who will control and pay for the Iraqi protectorate?

Thus although it succeeded in totally eliminating its rivals’ influence from Iraq, the US now finds itself caught up in a contradiction. The occupation of Iraq is a financial abyss and the loss of lives among the US troops will begin to pose serious problems for the American bourgeoisie. The US can’t think of pulling out until it has stabilised the situation to its advantage, but this is proving increasingly difficult. It is thus trying to get other powers involved in the financial and military effort, while maintaining an overall monopoly of command, with the UK playing the role of first lieutenant. So after spurning the UN for so long, the administration is now having to appeal for its help; but powers like France and Germany are reluctant to get involved if they have no say in the overall running of the operation and only play the role of bankers or suppliers of cannon fodder. This is becoming a new point of tension between the big powers.

The continual attacks on US troops and those inclined to support the occupation are increasing the pressure on the USA, and its apparent powerlessness to end them can only further encourage the numerous armed groups acting inside the country, whether Saddam loyalists, home-grown Islamist radicals or the jihadists infiltrating the country from elsewhere in the region.(note 1) [8]. The assassination of Ayatollah Hakim was a particularly hard blow against US claims that it can ensure the security of Iraq and oversee a political solution. It thus clearly plays the game of the USA’s rivals, local and global, even if they didn’t directly order it themselves.

This doesn’t mean that all terrorist actions in Iraq are necessarily directed against the US, as illustrated by the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad on 12 August, which killed over 20 people, including the UN general secretary’s special representative in Iraq, who is a great friend of France (his body guards were all French and it appears that he was specially targeted in this attack). On many levels, this attack served the interests of the USA. Although it does further demonstrate the USA’s inability to maintain order in this country, it nevertheless feeds their propaganda line that Iraq is the focus for the war against terrorism and that the latter isn’t only a threat to the USA. It is also a pretext to put pressure on the big democracies, the USA’s main rivals, to take up their responsibilities and get involved in the process of pacification and the building of a democratic Iraq. It is certainly no coincidence that this attack took place at a time when the US and Britain were already calling for the ‘international community’ to help carry the economic and military burden of controlling Iraq. Nevertheless, France and Germany were able to turn the situation to their own advantage by arguing that it is impossible for the UN to take a more active part in the on the humanitarian level without being associated to the direction of the country’s affairs, so as to ensure the security of its personnel. The week after the attack we heard the French foreign minister Villepin calling for a “political solution” in Iraq, strongly echoed by Chirac who told 200 ambassadors that there had to be a “transfer of power to the Iraqis themselves” and the establishment of “a process which can only be fully legitimised by the United Nations” � the whole thing wrapped up in a denunciation of “unilateralism” � ie the USA.

The contradictions faced by the US bourgeoisie also affect the British bourgeoisie, all the more alarmed by the fact that it has gained precious little from this alliance with the US. The scandal around the death of David Kelly, who was one of the main UN advisers on the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, expresses the fact that significant sections of the British ruling class have real disagreements with Blair’s policies. The US road map that doesn’t lead to peace

Just next to the mess in Iraq, the US also has to deal with a situation which has been getting worse and worse for decades: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. None of the US plans so far have succeeded. It is nonetheless urgent for the US to eliminate this focus of conflict, even if it means going against Israel’s wishes. The famous ‘road map’ initiated by the Bush administration showed Washington’s determination to force Israel to make serious concessions. It’s no longer a question, as it was with the Oslo accords set up during the Clinton administration, of getting Israel and the Palestinians to sit down and talk. The White House is now demanding that Israel offers no further obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state. The same authoritarian methods have been used towards the Palestinian side, to get rid of anything that might get in the way of a settlement. This is why Arafat, who previously has been a good ally of the US in getting the ‘peace process’ in motion, has been pushed aside in favour of his rival Mahmoud Abbas. And yet despite all the pressure from the US, Sharon, while making a show of accepting a cease-fire, has in reality carried on with his policy of opening up Palestinian territory to Israeli settlers, of making murderous incursions into the occupied territories and assassinating the elders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. These organisations, in their turn, simply feed off the Israeli provocations in order to carry out new terrorist attacks in Israel.

For a very short period the ‘road map’ eased tensions, but a new series of terrorist attacks and counter-attacks have already signed its death warrant. All this shows the limits of USA’s muscular diplomacy. The USA’s difficulties in Iraq are echoed and even amplified by its inability to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On the eve of the second anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers, and of the third anniversary of the Intifada in Palestine, the perspective offered by capitalism, both to the population of those regions most directly affected by war, and to the whole planet, is one of growing chaos and horror.

(1) When Bush originally said that Saddam was in league with al-Qaida - it was probably a groundless claim. An irony of the ‘war against terrorism’ in Iraq is that it may well have encouraged Saddam loyalists and Islamic radicals to ally against the US occupation. After all, this is exactly what bin Laden called for just prior to the war! Back [9]

Mulan, 6/9/03.