After West Africa,1we begin a second series on the history of the African workers’movement with a contribution on the class struggles in South Africa. A country famous mainly for two reasons: on the one hand, its mineral wealth (gold, diamonds, etc.) due to which it is relatively well developed; and on the other, its monstrous apartheid system, the aftermath of which we still see today.At the same time, apartheid gave birth to a huge “icon”, namely Nelson Mandela, considered its principal victim but above all the product of this system of another age, who with his titles of “hero of the anti-apartheid struggle”and man of“peace and reconciliation of the peoples of South Africa”was revered throughout the capitalist world.Mandela’s media image veils everything else to the point where the history and struggles of the South African working class before and during apartheid are either completely ignored or distorted by being systematically categorised under the rubric of “anti-apartheid struggles” or “national liberation struggles”.Of course, for bourgeois propaganda, all struggles can be incarnated in Mandela, even though it is public knowledge that since coming to power, Mandela and his party, the African National Congress (ANC), have not exactly been kind to the strikes of the working class2.

The main purpose of this contribution is to restore the historical truth about the struggles between the two fundamental classes, namely the bourgeoisie (for whom apartheid was only one means of domination) and the proletariat of South Africa that, for most of the time, was left to struggle for its own demands as an exploited class, from the epoch of the Dutch-British colonial bourgeoisie and then under the Mandela/ANC regime.In other words, a South African proletariat whose struggle fits perfectly with that of the world proletariat.

A brief survey of the history of South Africa

According to some historical sources, this area was originally occupied by the Xhosa, Tswana and Sotho people who settled there between 500 and 1000AD. In this regard, the historian Henri Wesseling tells us the following:

“South Africa was not a virgin land when European ships landed for the first time in 1500 at the foot of Table Mountain. It was populated by different ethnic groups, mostly nomads. Dutch settlers divided them into Hottentots and Bushmen. They regarded them as two totally distinct peoples from a physical and cultural point of view. Bushmen were smaller than the Hottentots and they spoke a different language. Moreover, they were more ‘primitive’, practicing hunting and gathering, while the Hottentots had reached the level of pastoral peoples. This traditional dichotomy has long dominated the historiography. Today, we no longer use these terms, but those of Khoikhoi or Khoi for Hottentots and San for the Bushmen, the term Khoisan serving to designate the ethnic group they form together. In fact, currently, one emphasizes less the distinction between these people, mainly because they are both very different from neighboring ethnic groups speaking Bantu languages and formerly known as Kaffirs, from the Arabic kafir (infidel). This term has equally fallen into disuse.”3

It can be noted how the Dutch settlers considered themselves the first inhabitants of this region, as colonial ideology established rankings between “primitive” and “advanced”. Furthermore the author indicates that the term South Africa is a (recent) political concept and that many of its populations are historically from neighboring countries in southern Africa.

As far as European colonization is concerned, the Portuguese were the first to set foot in South Africa in 1488 followed by the Dutch who landed in the area in 1648.The latter decided to settle there permanently from 1652, markingthe beginning of the permanent “white”presence in South Africa.In 1795, Cape Town was occupied by the British, who 10 years later took possession of Natal, while the Boers (Dutch) led the Transvaal and Orange Free State in winning recognition of their independence from Britain in 1854. As for the various African states or groups, through prolonged warfare they resisted the presence of European settlers on their soil before finally being defeated by the dominant powers.At the end of the wars against the Afrikaners and the Zulus, the British proceeded in 1920 to unify South Africa under the name “Union of South Africa”, which it remained until 1961 when the Afrikaner regime decided to simultaneously leave the Commonwealth (the English-speaking community) and change the name of the country.

Apartheid was officially established in 1948 and abolished in 1990.We will return to this later in more detail.

Concerning imperialist rivalries, South Africa played the role of “delegated policeman”for the Western imperialist bloc in southern Africa, and it was in this role that Pretoria intervened militarily in 1975 in Angola which was supported by the Eastern imperialist bloc with Cuban troops.

South Africa is considered today as an “emerging”member of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), and is looking to make its entry into the arena of the great powers.

Since 1994, South Africa has been governed principally by the ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, in company with the Communist Party and the COSATU trade union federation.

The South African working class emerged at the end of the 19th century and constitutes today the largest and most experienced industrial proletariat on the African continent.

Finally, we think it useful to explain two related but nevertheless distinct terms, that we will use often in this contribution, namely the terms “Boer” and “Afrikaner”, which have Dutch roots.

Those called Boers (or Boertrekkers) were originally Dutch farmers (predominantly small peasants) who in 1835-1837 undertook a vast migration in South Africa due to the abolition of slavery by the British in the Cape Colony in 1834.The term is still used today for descendants, direct or not,of these farmers (including factory workers).

Concerning the definition of the term Afrikaner, we refer to the explanation given by the historian Henri Wesseling: “The white population that settled in the Cape was of different origins.It consisted of Dutch, but also many Germans and French Huguenots.This community gradually adopted a different way of life.One could even say that a national identity was formed, that of the Afrikaners, who considered the British government as a foreign authority.”4

We can therefore say that the term refers to a kind of identity claimed by a number of European migrants of the time, a notion that is still used in recent publications.

Birth of South African capitalism

The birth of capitalism in each region of the world like South Africa has been marked by specific or local characteristics. Nevertheless it developed in general in three different phases, as by described by Rosa Luxemburg:

“(In its development) we must distinguish three phases: the struggle of capital against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for theremaining conditions of accumulation.

The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata asa market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its meansof production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system.”

In South Africa, capitalism followed these three phases. In the 19th Century there was a natural economy, a market economy and a workforce sufficient to develop wage labour.

“In the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics, pure peasant economy prevailed until the sixties of the last century. For a long time the Boers had led the life of animal-tending nomads; they had killed off or driven out the Hottentots and Kaffirs with a will in order to deprive them of their most valuable pastures. In the eighteenth century they were given invaluable assistance by the plague, imported by ships of the East India Company, which frequently did away with entire Hottentot tribes whose lands then fell to the Dutch immigrants.

(…)Boer economy in general and on the whole remained patriarchal and based on natural economy until the sixties. But their patriarchal attitude did not deter the Boers from extreme brutality and harshness. It is well known that Livingstone complained much more about the Boers than about the Kaffirs.

(…)In fact, peasant economy and great capitalist colonial policy were here competing for the Hottentots and Kaffirs, that is to say for their land and their labour power. Both competitors had precisely the same aim: to subject, expel or destroy the coloured peoples, to appropriate their land and press them into service by the abolition of their social organisations. Only their methods of exploitation were fundamentally different. While the Boers stood for out-dated slavery on a petty scale, on whichtheir patriarchal peasant economy was founded, the British bourgeoisie represented modern large-scale capitalist exploitation of the land and the natives.”5

We should note the fierceness of the struggle engaged in by Boers and the British for conquest and the establishment of capitalism in this zone which emerged, as elsewhere,“mired in blood and filth”. In the end it was British imperialism that dominated the situation and concretized the advent of capitalism in South Africa, as related in her own way by the researcher Brigitte Lachartre:

“British imperialism, when it manifested itself in the south of the continent in 1875, had other aims: citizens of the leading economic power of the time, representatives of the most developed mercantile and capitalist society in Europe, the British imposed on their colony in southern Africa a much more liberal native policy than that of the Boers.Slavery was abolished in the areas they controlled, while the Dutch settlers fled into the interior of the country to escape the new social order and the administration of the British settlers.After defeating the Africans by arms (a dozen ‘Kaffir’wars in a century), the British devoted themselves to ‘liberating’ the labour force: the defeated tribes were regrouped in tribal reserves whose limits were more and more restricted; Africans were prevented from leaving without authorisation and their pass in order.But the true face of British colonization appeared with the discovery of diamonds and gold in 1870.A new era began which brought about a profound transformation of all social and economic structures of the country: mining led to industrialization, urbanization, disruption of traditional African societies, but also of the Boer communities, immigration of new waves of Europeans (...).”6

Clearly, this statement can be read as a concrete continuation of the process described by Rosa Luxemburg, by which capitalism emerged in South Africa. In its struggle against the “natural economy”, British economic power had to break the old tribal societies and violently get rid of the old forms of production such as slavery, incarnated by thethe Boers who were forced to flee to escape the modern capitalist order. This was at the root of the wars between the proponents of the old and the new economic order by which the country passed so rapidly to modern capitalism, thanks to the discovery of diamonds (1871) and gold (1886). The “gold rush” translated itself into a lightning acceleration of industrialization of the country as a result of the exploitation and commercialisation of precious materials, which hugely attracted capitalist investors from the developed countries. It was therefore necessary to recruit engineers and skilled workers,and in this way thousands of Europeans, Americans and Australians came to settle in South Africa. And the City of Johannesburg came to symbolize this emerging dynamism by its rapid development. On 17 July 1896, a census showed that the city had had 3,000 inhabitants in 1887 and 100,000 ten years later. A little over ten years later the white population had grown from 600,000 to over a million. In the same period the gross domestic product (GDP) rose from £150,000 to nearly £4 million. This is how South Africa became the first and only African country to be relatively developed on an industrial scale – something which was not slow to whet the appetites of rival economic powers:

“The economic and political center of South Africa was no longer in the Cape, but in Johannesburg and Pretoria.Germany, Europe’s biggest economic power, was established in South West Africa and had expressed an interest in South East Africa.If the Transvaal showed itself unwilling to submit to the authority of London, the future of England would be challenged in the whole of South Africa.”7

At this time you can see that behind the economic issues lurked imperialist issues between the major European powers vying for control of this region. Moreover, British power did everything to limit the presence of its German rival to the west of South Africa, which is today called Namibia (colonised in 1883), after neutralising Portugal, the other imperialist presence with far more limited means.The British Empire could therefore boast that it was the sole master in command of the booming South African economy.

But the economic development of SouthAfrica, powered by mineral discoveries, very quickly ran into a series of problems which in the first place were social and ideological:

“Economic development, stimulated by the discovery of minerals, will soon face the white settlers with a profound contradiction (...).On the one hand the introduction of the new economic order required the creation of a waged labour force; on the other, the release of the African workforce from the reserves and out of their traditional subsistence economy put in jeopardy the racial balance of the whole territory.At the end of the last century (the 19th), the African populations were therefore subject to a multitude of laws with often contradictory effects.Some aimed to make them migrate to areas of white economic activities to submit to wage labor.Others tended to keep them partly on the reserves.Among the laws intended to make manpower available, there were some which penalized vagrancy in order to ‘tear the natives away from this idleness and laziness, teach them the dignity of work, and to contribute to the prosperity of the state.’There were others to submit Africans to taxation.(…) Among other laws,those on passes were intended to filter the migrations, to steer them according to the needs of the economy or stop them in the event of a flood.”8

We see here that the British colonial authorities found themselves caught up in contradictions related to the development of the productive forces. But we can say that the strongest contradiction here was ideological, when British power decided to consider the black labour force on segregationist administrative criteria, in particular with the laws on passes and the penning of Africans. In fact, this policy was in flagrant contradiction with the liberal orientation that led to the abolition of slavery.

Difficulties also related to the colonial wars. After suffering defeats and winning the wars against its Zulu and Afrikaner opponents between 1870 and 1902, the British Empire had to digest the extremely high cost of its victories, especially that of 1899-1902, both in human and economic terms. Indeed, the “Boer War” was a real butchery:

“The Boer War was the greatest colonial war of the modern imperialist era.It lasted more than two and a half years (11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902).The British engaged around half a million soldiers, 22,000 of whom were killed in South Africa.Their total losses, that is to say killed, wounded, and missing, rose to more than 100,000 men.The Boers, meanwhile, mobilized nearly 100,000 men.They lost more than 7,000 soldiers and nearly 30,000 died in the camps.An unknown number of Africans fought alongside one or the other side.The losses they suffered are also undetermined.Tens of thousands of them probably lost their lives.The British War Office also calculated that 400,346 horses, donkeys and mules died during the conflict, as well as millions of cattle belonging to the Boers.This war cost the British taxpayer £200 million, or ten times the annual budget of the army or 14% of national income in 1902.If the subjugation of the future British subjects of Africa cost on average fifteen pennies per head,the submission of the Boers however cost £1000 per man.”9

In other words, an open pit of warfare inaugurated the entry of British capitalism into the 20th century. Furthermore, we can see in the details of this horrible butchery that the Nazi concentration camps found a source of inspiration. British capitalism developed a total of forty four camps destined for the Boers where about 120,000 women and children were imprisoned. At the end of the war in 1902 it was found that 28,000 white detainees had been killed, including 20,000 children under the age of 16.

Yet it was without remorse that the commander of the British Army, Lord Kitchener, justified the massacres in speaking of the Boers as “a species of savages born from generations leading a barbarous and solitary existence.”10

This is rich coming from a major war criminal. Certainly we must note that in this butchery, Afrikaner troops were not to be outdone in terms of mass killings and atrocities, and that the Afrikaner leaders were later allies of the German army during the Second World War,above all to settle accounts with British power.

“Defeated by British imperialism,submitted to the capitalist system, humiliated in their culture and traditions, the Afrikaner people (...)organized from 1925 to 1930 a strong movement to rehabilitate the Afrikaner nation.Its vengeful, anti-capitalist, anti-communist and profoundly racist ideology designated Africans, mestizos, Asians and Jews as a threat to the Western civilization they claimed to represent on the African continent.Organized at all levels, school, church, union and terrorist secret societies (the best known is the Broederbond), Afrikaners later proved fervent partisans of Hitler, Nazism and its ideology.”11

The fact that the Afrikaner workers were dragged into this same movement shows the immensity of the obstacle to be crossed by the working class of this country to join the struggles of workers of other ethnicities.

This conflict permanently shaped relationships between the British and Afrikaner colonialisms on South African soil until the fall of apartheid. To divisions and ethnic hatred between British and Afrikaner whites, can be added those between on the one hand these two categories and on the other blacks (and other people of colour) that the bourgeoisie systematically used to destroy all attempts at unity in the workers’ ranks.

Birth of the working class

The birth of capitalism led to the dislocation of many traditional African societies. From the 1870s, the British Empire began a liberal colonial policy by abolishing slavery in areas it controlled, in order to “liberate” the labour force then consisting of Boer and African farm workers. We have noted that the Boer settlers themselves continued to exploit black farmers under the old form of slavery before being defeated by the British. But ultimately it was the discovery of gold which accelerated sharply the birth of capitalism and the emergence of the working class:

“There was no shortage of capital. Exchanges in London and New York willingly supplied the necessary funds.The global economy, which was growing, demanded gold.Workers streamed in too.Mining attracted crowds in the Rand.People went there not in their thousands, but tens of thousands.No city in the world knew a development as rapid as Johannesburg.”12

In the space of 20 years the European population of Johannesburg grew from a few thousand to 250,000, the majority of whom were skilled workers, engineers and other technicians. These are the ones who gave birth to the South African working class in the marxist sense of the term, that is to say, those who, under capitalism, sell their labour in exchange for a wage. Capital had a strong and urgent need for a more or less skilled labour force which it could not find on the spot whithout recourse to migrants from Europe, including the British Empire. But gradually, as economic development progressed, the industrial apparatus was driven to recruit more and more unskilled African workers from the interior of the country or from outside, including Mozambique and Zimbabwe. From then the workforce of the South African economy truly “internationalized” itself.

As a result of the massive arrival in South Africa of British-born workers, the working class was immediately organized and supervized by the British trade unions and in the early 1880s there were numerous companies and corporations which were created on the “English model” (the trade union). This meant that workers of South African origin, as groups or individuals without organisational experience, could only with difficulty organize outside of the pre-established unions13. Certainly, there were dissensions within the unions as well as in parties claiming to defend the working class, with attempts to develop an autonomous union activity on the part of radical proletarian elements who could no longer put up with the “treachery of the leaders.” But these were in a tiny minority.

Everywhere in the world where there are conflicts between the classes under capitalism, the working class always secretes revolutionary minorities defending, more or less clearly, proletarian internationalism. This was also the case in South Africa. Some elements from the working class were at the origin of struggles but also initiated the formation of proletarian organizations. We propose to introduce three figures from this generation in the form of a short summary of their trajectories.

• Andrew Dunbar (1879-1964). A Scottish immigrant, he was general secretary of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) created in South Africa in 191014. He was a railway worker in Johannesburg and actively participated in the massive strike of 1909 after which he was dismissed. In 1914 he fought against the war and participated in the creation of the International Socialist League (ISL), which belonged to the revolutionary syndicalist tendency. He also fought against the repressive and discriminatory measures against Africans which earned him the sympathy of black workers. He was also responsible for creating the first “African Union”modeled on the IWW in 1917. But his sympathy for the Russian revolution became more and more enthusiastic, so he decided with other comrades to form the “Communist Party of Africa” in October 1920 on an essentially syndicalist platform and of which he was secretary. In 1921 his organization decided to merge with the official Communist Party which had been formed. But he was expelled a few years later and in the wake of this he abandoned his union activities.
• TW Thibedi (1888-1960). Considered a prominent trade union member of the IWW (he joined in 1916). He was originally from the South African town of Vereeniging and had a teaching job in a school attached to a church in Johannesburg. As part of his trade union activities he advocated class unity and mass action against capitalism. He was part of the left wing of the African nationalist party, the South African Native National Congress (SANNC). Thibedi was also a member of the ISL and, during a strike movement led by this group in 1918, along with is comrades, he suffered harsh police repression. A member of the South African CP from its formation, he was expelled in 1928 but due to the reaction of many of his comrades he was reinstated before finally being driven from the party. He then decided to sympathize briefly with the Trotskyist movement before entering into complete anonymity. The sources we have do not give a total strength of South African Trotskyist militants at that time.15
• Bernard Le Sigamoney (1888-1963). Of Indian origin and from a farming family, he was an active member of the Indian IWW union and as with his above-mentioned comrades he was also a member of the ISL. He showed himself in favour of the unity of the industrial workers of South Africa, and along with his fellow ISL comrades he was at the head of important strike movements in 1920/1921. However, he did not join the Communist Party and decided to abandon his political and union activities, going to study in Britain in 1922. In 1927 he returned to South Africa (Johannesburg) as an Anglican missionary clergyman while resuming his trade union activities within an organization close to the IWW. He was then denounced as a “troublemaker” by the authorities and eventually became discouraged, simply working in the church and promoting civil rights for people of colour.

So here are three “portraits” of the trajectories of union and political militants which are quite similar despite being of different ethnic origin (European, African and Indian). Above all they share an essential common characteristic: proletarian class solidarity, an internationalist spirit and a great combativity against the capitalist enemy. It is they and their comrades in struggle who are the precursors of the current working class fighters in South Africa.

Other organizations, of different origins and nature, were active within the working class. These are the main parties and organizations16claiming more or less formally at their origins to be working class or to defend its “interests”, excluding the Labour Party which remained faithful to its bourgeoisie since its active participation in the first world slaughter. More precisely, we give here an overview17 of the nature and origin of the ANC and of the South African CP as part of the forces of the ideological containment of the working class since the 1920s.

– The ANC. This organization was created in 1912 by and for the indigenous petty bourgeoisie (doctors, lawyers, teachers and other functionaries, etc.), individuals who demanded democracy, racial equality and defended the British constitutional system, as illustrated in the words of Nelson Mandela:

“For 37 years, that is to say, until 1949, the African National Congress fought with scrupulous respect for the law (...) It believed that the grievances of the Africans would be considered after peaceful discussions and that we would move slowly towards full recognition of the rights of the African nation.”18

In this sense, since its birth up until the 1950s,19far from seeking to overthrow the capitalist system, the ANC led peaceful actions respectful of the established order, and was therefore very far from seeking to overthrow the capitalist system. This same Mandela boasted of his “anti-communist”struggle, as outlined in his autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom. But its Stalinist orientation, suggesting an alliance between the (“progressive”) bourgeoisie and the working class, allowed the ANC to rely on the CP to gain a foothold in the ranks of the workers, especially in the base of the unions that these two parties together control even today.

– The South African Communist Party. The CP was created by elements claiming to defend proletarian internationalism and as such a member of the Third International (1921). In its beginnings it advocated the unity of the working class and put forward the perspective of the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism. But by 1928 it became simply an executive arm of Stalinist policies in the South African colony. The Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country” was accompanied by the idea that the underdeveloped countries were required to go through “a bourgeois revolution” and that, in this vision, the proletariat could fight against colonial oppression but not establish any proletarian power in the colonies at this time.

The South African CP took this orientation to absurd lengths, becoming the faithful lapdog of the ANC in the 1950s, as this quote illustrates: “The CP made offers of service to the ANC. The Secretary General of CP explained to Mandela: “Nelson, what do you have against us? We are fighting the same enemy. We are not talking about dominating the ANC; we are working in the context of African nationalism.” And in 1950 Mandela accepted that the CP would put its militant apparatus in the service of the ANC, thus giving him control over a good part of the labour movement and a significant advantage allowing the ANC to take hegemony over the whole of the anti-apartheid movement. In exchange the ANC would provide a legal front for the prohibited CP apparatus.”20

Thus, both openly bourgeois parties have become inseparable and are now at the head of the South African government for the defence of the interests of national capital and against the working class which they oppress and massacre, as in the strike of the miners at Marikana in August 2012.

Apartheid against the class struggle

This barbaric word is hated today worldwide even by its former supporters as symbolizing and incarnating the most despicable form of capitalist exploitation of the layers and classes belonging to the South African proletariat. But before going further, we propose one definition among others of this term: in the “Afrikaans” language spoken by the Afrikaners, apartheid more precisely means “separation.” This includes all kinds of separation (racial, social, cultural, economic, etc.). But behind this formal definition of apartheid lies a doctrine promoted by the “primitive”capitalists and colonialistswhich combines economic and ideological objectives:

“Apartheid is derived from both the colonial system and the capitalist system; in this dual capacity, it stamps on South African society divisions of racial characteristics in the first place and inherent divisions of class in the second.As in many other parts of the globe, there is almost perfect coincidence between the black races and the exploited class. At the other extreme, however, the situation is less clear. Indeed, the white population cannot be regarded as a dominant class without further ado. It is, certainly, constituted by a handful of owners of the means of production, but also from the mass of those who are dispossessed: agricultural and industrial workers, miners, service workers, etc. So there is no identity between the white race and the dominant class. (…) But, nothing like this has ever happened [the white workforce rubbing shoulders with the black workforce on an equal footing] or will ever happen in South Africa as long as apartheid is in effect. Because this system is designed to avoid any possibility of the creation of a multiracial working class.This is where the anachronistic system of South African power, its mechanisms dating from another era,come to the aid of the capitalist system which generally tends to simplify relationships within society. Apartheid - in its most comprehensive form- came to consolidate the colonial edifice, at the moment when capitalism was at risk of bringing down the entire power of the Whites. The means was an ideology and legislation aiming to annihilate class antagonisms within the white population, to extirpate the germs, to erase the contours and replace them with racial antagonisms.

By replacing the contradictions of a terrain difficult to control (division of society into antagonistic classes) with ones more easily manageable, the non- antagonistic division of society between races, white power has almost achieved the desired result: to constitute a homogeneous and united block on the basis of white ethnicity- a bloc all the more solid because it feels historically menaced by black power and communism - and on the other side, to divide the black population within itself, by different tribes or by social groups with different interests.

Dissonances, class antagonisms that are minimized, ignored or erased on the white side are encouraged, emphasized and provoked on the black side. This enterprise of division - facilitated by the presence on South African soil of populations of diverse origins- has routinely been conducted since colonization: detribalization of one part of the African population, the retention in traditional structures of another; evangelization and training of some, denial of any possibility of education of others, establishing small elites of leaders and officials, pauperisation of the great masses; and finally, the putting in place, to great fanfares,of an African, Mestizo, Indian, petty bourgeoisie - a buffer ready to interpose itself between their racial brothers and their class allies.”21

We generally agree with this author’s framework for defining and analyzingthe system of apartheid. We are particularly in agreement when it states that apartheid is above all an ideological instrument in the service of capital against the unity (in struggle) of different members of the exploited class; in this case the workers of all colours. In other words, the apartheid system is primarily a weapon against the class struggle as the motor of history, the only one capable of overthrowing capitalism. Also, if apartheid was theorized and fully applied from 1948 by the most backward Afrikaner fraction of the South African colonial bourgeoisie, it was the British, bearers of the “most modern civilization”, who laid the foundations of this despicable system.

“Indeed, it is from the early nineteenth century that the British invaders took legislative and military measures to group part of the African population in ‘reserves’, allowing or forcing the other part to leave them to be employed across the country in diverse economic sectors. The area of these tribal reserves was fixed in 1913 and slightly enlarged in 1936 to offer the (black) population only 13% of the national territory. These tribal reserves,fabricated in every way by white power (...) were named Bantustans (...),’national homelands for the Bantus’, each theoretically to regroup members of the same ethnicity.”22

Thus, the idea of separate races and populations was initiated by the British colonialism which methodically applied its famous strategy of “divide and rule” by implementing ethnic separation, not only between blacks and whites but even more cynically between black ethnic groups.

However, the proponents of the system could never prevent the breakdown of their own contradictions, inevitably generating the confrontation between the two antagonistic classes. Clearly under this barbaric system, many workers’ struggles were conducted by white workers as well as black workers (or mestizo and Indian).

Certainly the South African bourgeoisie was remarkably successful in rendering workers’ struggles powerless by permanently poisoning the class consciousness of the South African proletariat. This was reflected in the fact that some groups of workers often fought at the same time against their exploiters but also against their comrades of a different ethnic group, and fell into the deadly trap set by the class enemy. In sum, rare were the struggles uniting workers of different ethnic origins. We also know that many so-called “workers’” organizations, namely unions and parties, facilitated the task of capital by endorsing this policy of the “racial division “of the South African working class. For example, the unions of European origin along with the South African Labour Party, defended first (or exclusively) the “interests” of white workers. Similarly, the various black movements (parties and unions) struggled first of all against the system of exclusion of the blacks by claiming equality and independence. This orientation was incarnated principally by the ANC. We should note the particular case of the South African CP which, at first (in the early 1920s), tried to unite the working class without distinction in the fight against capitalism but was soon to abandon the terrain of internationalism by deciding to focus on “the black cause.” This was the beginning of its definitive “Stalinization”.

Strike movements and other social struggles between 1884/2013

First workers’struggle in Kimberley

By coincidence the diamond that symbolically gave birth to South African capitalism was also the origin of the first movement of proletarian struggle. The first workers’ strike broke out in Kimberley, the “Diamond Capital”, in 1884, when British-born miners decided to fight against the decision of the mining companies to impose the so-called “compound” system (ie. forced labour camps) reserved up until then for black workers. In this struggle the miners organized strike pickets to impose a balance of power enabling them to win their demands, while to break the strike the employers on the one hand engaged “scabs” and on the other troops armed to the teeth who were not slow to fire on the workers.There were 4 deaths among the strikers,who nevertheless continued the struggle with a vigour which forced the employers to meet their demands. This was the first movement of the struggle between the two historical forces in South African capitalism that ended in blood but also victory for the proletariat. Therefore we can say that it was here that the real class struggle began in capitalist South Africa, laying the foundations for future confrontations.

Strike against wage cuts in 1907

Not content with the work rates which they imposed on the workers to improve performance, the Rand employers23 decided in 1907 to reduce salaries by 15%, in particular those of British-born miners who were considered to be “privileged.” As in the Kimberley strike, employers recruited strike breakers(very poor Afrikaners) who, without being in solidarity with the strikers, nevertheless refused to do the dirty work they were ordered to. Despite this the employers were eventually able to wear the strikers down. We should note that the sources we have to hand talk about the strike’s extent but do not give a total for the number of participants in the movement.

Strikes and demonstrations in 1913

Faced with massive wage cuts and deteriorating working conditions, miners entered massively into struggle. During 1913 a strike was launched by mine workers against the additional hours the company wanted to impose on them. And it did not take much to generalise the movement to all sectors, with mass demonstrations which nevertheless were violently broken up by the forces of order. In the end twenty dead and a hundred wounded were counted (officially).

Railway and coal miners’strike in 1914

At the beginning of the year a series of strikes broke out among both coal miners and railway workers against the degradation of working conditions. But this movement of struggle was in a particular context; that of the preparations for the first generalized imperialist slaughter. In this movement we can see the presence of the Afrikaner fraction, but set apart from the British fraction. Although both were well supervised by their respective unions, each defending its own “ethnic clients.”

Accordingly the government hastened to impose martial law to physically break the strike and its initiators, imprisoning or deporting a large number of strikers, the exact number of whom is still unknown. In addition, we want to emphasize here the particular role of unions in this strike movement. It was in this same context of the repression of the struggles that the union and Labour Party leaders voted for “war credits” by supporting the entry of the Union of South Africa into the war against Germany.

Labour unrest against the war in 1914 and attempts to organize

If the working class was generally muzzled during the 1914-1918 war, some proletarian elements did however try to oppose it by advocating internationalism against capitalism. Thus:

“(...)In 1917, a poster appears on the walls of Johannesburg, convening a meeting for July 19: ‘Come and discuss issues of common interest between white and indigenous workers.’ This text is published by the International Socialist League (ISL), a revolutionary syndicalist organization influenced by the American IWW (...) and formed in 1915 in opposition to the First World War and the racist and conservative policies of the South African Labour Party and craft unions. Comprising at the beginning mostly white activists, the ISL moves very quickly towards black workers, calling in its weekly newspaper International, to build ‘a new union that overcomes the limitations of trades, skin colors, races and of sex to destroy capitalism by a blockade of the capitalist class.’”24

By 1917, the ISL was organizing coloured workers. In March 1917, it founded an Indian workers’ union in Durban. In 1918, it founded a textile workers’ union (also later formed in Johannesburg) and a horse drivers’ union in Kimberley, the diamond mining town. In the Cape, a sister organization, the Industrial Socialist League, founded in the same year a sweets and confectionery workers’ union.

The July 19 meeting was a success and formed the basis of weekly meetings of study groups led by members of the ISL (including Andrew Dubar, founder of the IWW in South Africa in 1910). These meetings discussed capitalism, the class struggle and the need for African workers to unionize in order to obtain wage increases and to abolish the pass system. On 27 September, the study groups were transformed into a union, the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), modelled on the IWW. Its organizing committee was composed entirely of Africans. The demands of the new unions were simple and uncompromising in a slogan: SifunaZonke! (“We want everything!”).

Finally, here is the expression of the birth of proletarian internationalism. An internationalism taken up by a minority of workers but of great importance at the time, because it was the moment when many proletarians were bound and dragged into the first world imperialist slaughter by the traitor Labour Party in the company of the official unions. Another aspect that illustrates the strength and dynamic of these small internationalist groups is the fact that elements (including the International Socialist League and others) were able to emerge from them in order to form the South African Communist Party in 1920. It was these groups, seemingly dominated by supporters of revolutionary syndicalism, which could actively promote the emergence of radical unions especially among black and coloured workers.

A wave of strikes in 1918

Despite the harshness of the time with martial law suppressing any reaction or protest, strikes could occur:

“In 1918, an unprecedented wave of strikes against the cost of living and for salary increases, bringing together white and coloured workers, overwhelms the country. When the judge McFie imprisons 152 African municipal workers in June 1918, urging them to continue to “do the same job as before” but now from prison under the supervision of an armed escort, progressive whites and Africans are outraged. The TNT (Transvaal Native Congress, forerunner of the ANC) called for a mass rally of African workers in Johannesburg on June 10.”25

An important or symbolic fact should be noted here: this is the only (known) involvement of the ANC in a movement of the class struggle in the first sense of the term. This is certainly one of the reasons explaining the fact that this nationalist fraction as a result had an influence within the black working class.

Massive strikes in 1919/1920 drowned in blood

During 1919 a radical union (the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union), consisting of black and mixed race employees but without white workers, launched a massive strike especially among the dockworkers of Port Elizabeth. But once again this movement was crushed militarily by the police backed by armed white groups, causing over 20 deaths among the strikers. Here again the strikers were isolated which ensured the defeat of the working class in an unequal battle on a military terrain.

In 1920, this time it was African miners who sparked one of the biggest strikes in the country affecting some 70,000 workers. The movement lasted a week before being crushed by the forces of order who, armed with guns, liquidated a large number of strikers. Despite its massiveness, this movement of African workers could not count on any support from the white unions, which refused to call a strike or aid the victims of the bullets of the colonial bourgeoisie. Unfortunately this lack of solidarity promoted by the unions became systematic in each sturggle.

In 1922 an insurrectionary strike crushed by a well-equipped army

At the end of December 1921, the coal mine bosses announced massive wage cuts and layoffs aimed at replacing 5000 European miners with indigenous workers. In January 1922, 30,000 miners decided to fight against the attacks of the mining employers. Faced with the procrastination of the unions, a group of workers took the initiative by establishing a committee to fight and declaring a general strike. In this way the miners forced the union leaders to follow the movement, but this strike was not quite “general” because it concerned only the “whites”.

Faced with the pugnacity of the workers, the united state and employers then decided to use the utmost military means to defeat the movement. In order to deal with the strike the government declared martial law and mobilised some 60,000 thousand men with machine guns, cannons, tanks and even airplanes.

For their part, seeing the extent of their enemy’s forces, the strikers began to arm themselves by purchasing weapons (guns, etc.) and organizing themselves into commandos. We therefore witnessed a veritable military battle as in a conventional war. At the end of the fight on the workers’ side there were more than 200 dead, 500 injured, 4,750 arrests, 18 death sentences. Clearly, this was a real war, as if South African imperialism,which took active part in the first world butchery,wished to extend its activity by bombing the miners as if it was facing German troops. By this gesture the British colonial bourgeoisie was demonstrating its absolute hatred of the South African proletariat, but also its fear of it.

In terms of lessons learned from this movement, it must be said that despite its military character, the bloody confrontation was above all a real class war, of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, with, however, unequal means. This only underlines the fact that the main power of the working class is not military but resides above all in its greatest possible unity. But instead of seeking the support of all the exploited, the miners (whites) fell into the trap set by the bourgeoisie with its plan to replace the 5,000 European workers by indigenous workers. This was shown tragically by the fact that throughout the battle between the European miners and the armed forces of capital, other workers (black, coloured and Indian), some 200,000 of them, were working or idle. It is also clear that, from the outset, the bourgeoisie was clearly aware of the weakness of the workers who went into battle deeply divided. The abject recipe of “divide and rule”was applied here with success well before the formal establishment of apartheid (whose main purpose as we recall was to contain the class struggle). But above all the bourgeoisie took advantage of its military victory over the South African proletarians to reinforce its grip on the working class. It organized elections in 1924 from which emerged victorious the populist parties defending“white interests”, namely the National Party (Boer) and the Labour Party, which formed a coalition government. It was this coalition government that passed the laws establishing racial divisions, as far as considering a breach of work contract by a black worker as a crime; or again imposing a system of passes for blacks and establishing compulsory residence zones for natives. Similarly there was a “colour bar”aimed at reserving skilled jobs for whites, providing them with a much higher salary than blacks or Indians. To this were added other segregationist laws including one entitled “The Industrial Conciliation Act” to ban non-white organizations. It was on the basis of this ultra repressive apartheid system that the Afrikaner government legally established apartheid in 1948.

In this way the bourgeoisie succeeded in permanently paralyzing all expressions of proletarian class struggle and it was not until the eve of the Second World War that we see the working class get its head above water by taking the path of the class struggle. In fact, between late 1920 and 1937, the field of struggle was occupied by nationalism: on the one hand, by the South African CP, the ANC and their unions, and on the other, by the Afrikaner National Party and its satellites.

Lassou (To be continued)

Introduction and early history

The creation of the world market is capitalism’s great historical achievement. For the first time in history, the whole of humanity has been brought together in a single network of commerce and industry; for the first time in history also, the revolutionary class is a worldwide class. This means that the historical evolution of any country is no longer determined by local or even by regional conditions, but fundamentally by the overall development of world capitalism.

That said, the local and national forms that this development takes are always strongly influenced by the specific history that predates capitalism, and by geography. The case of the Philippines is no exception to this general rule, and to understand the development of Filipino unionism we must therefore understand something of Filipino history.

Geographically, the Philippines is a vast archipelago of over 7000 islands, of which some 2000 are inhabited.1 Prior to the beginning of colonization by Spain from 1521 onwards, the archipelago – unsurprisingly – was not united in a single political or even cultural entity. To this day, some 150 languages and dialects are spoken in the Philippines and at least 20% of the population does not speak the national language (Filipino, a derivative of Tagalog which is spoken by 29% of the population).

Situated on the eastern flank of the South China Sea, with China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Indonesia as its immediate maritime neighbors, the archipelago was integrated as much as 2000 years ago into a vast trading network which brought Indian, Chinese, and even Persian influences to the islands: Islam in particular made its appearance from 1200 CE onwards and remains dominant in the southern island of Mindanao.

Despite the emergence of various kingdoms (whose rulers often took the Indian title of "rajah") and sultanates, the majority of the archipelago was divided into fiefdoms of varying sizes known as barangays: the word continues to designate the Philippines' smallest administrative unit. The barangays' rulers – the datus – owed their position in part to their membership of an aristocratic caste, but also and largely to their own personal power. Rulers could lose power or prestige, or even be overthrown if they failed to live up to their promises.

Spanish colonialism profoundly modified this traditional social structure: the fluid system of barangays and power based on personal prestige and tribute was transformed into one based on land ownership and debt servitude. Power was divided between Spanish overlords placed in authority over encomiendas (settlements created for the purposes of tax collection), local chiefs whose authority was guaranteed by the Spanish in exchange for cooperation with the colonial power, and the Catholic Church, which became a major landowner in its own right: "dependency and indebtedness characterized this multifaceted relationship [between rulers and ruled]. At best it gave way to a paternalistic relationship, at worst it created an exploitative set up".2 It could be argued that this form of political domination based on a mixture of wealth, family connections, personal prestige and the ability to mobilize groups of supporters, has simply mutated with the arrival of capitalism and survives to this day in the form of domination of the Filipino bourgeoisie, strongly marked by clientelism.

Spanish colonization during the 16th century was by no means a mere extension to the Philippines of the feudal social structure which still largely dominated Spain itself. On the contrary, the driving force behind Spanish and Portuguese expansion to the Far East was the desire of the merchant classes, and of the crown which stood to profit from the undertaking, to break into the immensely lucrative spice trade with the East, and to shatter the monopoly exercised by Ottoman, Arab, and to an extent Venetian merchants. By tying the Philippines into a Spanish imperial economy that already existed on the other side of the Pacific, colonization extended the world market of an emerging capitalism from Europe all the way to China, where an embryonic monetary and capitalist economy was already developing under the Ming dynasty. By the beginning of the 17th century, Manila was thus – together with Macao under Portuguese rule – one of the main points of contact between Europe and Asia, and the lynch-pin of trade between Asia and the Americas. Silver was in huge demand by Chinese merchants, and "When the Manila galleon established the link across the Pacific with New Spain, Chinese junks rushed to meet it. Goods were traded in Manila solely for Mexican silver, to a volume of around a million pesos every year".3 From the outset, Filipino workers were involved in this worldwide commercial network: "European ships of the 'country trade' were worked, even in the early days of the Portuguese, by mixed crews with a majority of local sailors. Even ships from the Philippines employed 'few Spaniards, many Malays, Hindus, and Filipino mestizos'".4

Another important factor in Filipino history is the role of religion, and especially of the Catholic Church, introduced by the Spanish colonizers as a justification of their rule and a means of eliminating rival religions which could serve as a rallying point for opposition to the colonial power.

In Europe, ever since its establishment as an official state religion by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine in the 4th century CE, the Catholic Church in particular has had to accommodate a constant contradiction between the biblical ideal of poverty and service to the poor,5 and the material reality of the Church's enormous wealth and social position as temporal overlord. In general, the Catholic Church tried to incorporate the ideal of poverty into its own structures of power and wealth, for example through the creation of monastic orders like the Cistercians or the Franciscans. In the Philippines, this contradiction was given an added twist by the fact that "It was not even until the 19th century that select members of the Chinese mestizo ["mixed blood"] and Filipino illustrado [ie educated] class were for the first time admitted into the priesthood".6 As a result of these material and ideological contradictions, the Church in the Philippines included both corrupt and ruthless exploiters of Filipino labor (especially on the monastic estates, which by the end of the 19th century owned some 171,000 hectares of prime agricultural land7), and courageous and dedicated defenders of the rights of the labouring population (after the 1872 Cavite revolt, for example, three priests – Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora – were garrotted to death for their supposed part in the conspiracy).

Conflict within the Catholic Church between Filipino nationalism and attempts to defend the poor on the one hand, and the Church's role as landlord and defender of the colonial power on the other, led in 1902 to the creation of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente with the Catholic priest Gregorio Aglipay as its first "Obispo Maximo" (see below). Paradoxically, this came just as the Catholic Church's role as defender of the colonial power ended with Spain's eviction from the Philippines by the United States.

Our very brief consideration of some important features of the history of the Philippines prior to the 20th century would be incomplete without a look at its geography. The Philippines' position in the South China Sea has always been, and continues to be, crucial, both commercially and militarily. For the Spaniards, as we have seen, the Philippines were the commercial gateway to China, and this was even more true for the USA. In the first decades of the 20th century, the increasing importance of China as a region of competition and conflict between rival imperialist powers, and the rise of Japan as a formidable industrial power in its own right,8 increased the military significance of the Philippines: their defense played an important part in slowing the Japanese advance towards Australia in World War II, and their reconquest by the American army was a key moment in Japan's military defeat. Following World War II, the Philippines served as a rear base for the American military effort in Vietnam, and the US naval base at Subic Bay remained one of the US' key military installations throughout the Cold War,9 until its closure in 1992 by the Filipino government. The closure was of short duration: increasing fears of Chinese expansionism led to the signature in 1999 of a "Visiting Forces Agreement" which allowed US ships to use Subic Bay during the joint US-Filipino Balikatan military exercises, and to a reported 2012 agreement for a permanent US military presence in the base.

The 19th century: capitalism, nationalism, and the workers' movement

Despite the backwardness of the Spanish economy, and the weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie, the 19th century saw an ever-tighter integration of the Filipino economy into the world capitalist market. The low-volume, high-value trade of the Manila galleon with the Americas was replaced by farming for cash crops, notably logging, tobacco and sugar. Simultaneously, and as a direct consequence, there emerged a new ruling stratum of wealthy landowners and merchants including in particular Chinese mestizos linked to the trading families of Fukien and Kwantung, and members of what became known as the principalia: leading Filipino or Spanish mestizo families who had successfully accumulated landed wealth, but who were also often linked to their share-cropping tenants by family or tribal ties. These wealthy families often sent their children to Spain for their education, thus encouraging the development of a Spanish language but specifically Filipino culture borne by Filipino intellectuals known as illustrados. The development of this intellectual class, linked to an emerging bourgeoisie and strongly imbued with radical democratic ideals, found expression in 1888 with the creation of the journal La Solidaridad and what became known as the Propaganda Movement. It is striking that La Solidaridad was founded only forty years after the national revolutions of 1848 in Europe, and that its nationalist democratic program is broadly similar to that of Hungarian, Polish, and even Irish nationalists of the same epoch: far from being hopelessly mired in feudal backwardness, the Filipino bourgeoisie followed the same path trodden by its European counterparts only a few decades earlier.

It is therefore unsurprising that the birth of the Filipino labor movement should have many features in common with the movement in Europe, although a lack of documentation makes its beginnings difficult to follow.

The earliest seeds of the labor movement were formed in the 1850s. These were secret organizations for mutual aid and benefits of workers, similar in aim to the Friendly Societies formed by workers in Britain. Among the earliest were the Gremio de Obrero de Sampaloc, the Gremio de Escultores del Barrio Sta.Cruz, the Gremio de Carpinteros and the Gremio de Impresores y Litograficos. The Filipino labor movement can even claim to be one of the oldest in Asia.

The working class in the Philippines appeared at a time of the zenith of world capitalism, the stage of expanding imperialism. Furthermore, it appeared at a time of the victorious bourgeois revolution in Spain itself. In other words, it appeared on the ruins of feudalism on a world scale and in Spain in particular. The feudal remnants are only remnants, nothing more.

The first recorded mass working class action was conducted by members of the Gremios de Impresores in 1872 when they walked out of a government printing press in San Fernando, Pampanga on account of abuse and maltreatment by Spanish foremen and to demand better terms and conditions of work and higher wages.

The emerging Filipino workers' movement suffered not only from the relatively less developed condition of Filipino industry, but perhaps still more from their geographical isolation from the proletariat's European core. Marx in the Manifesto describes the ease with which, thanks to the railways, European workers could organize, travel, and develop their political culture. But the enormous distances involved made this less an option for Filipino workers, and this inevitably meant that the 19th century workers' movement was strongly influenced by an illustrado leadership.

These first mass actions coincided with the proletarian struggles in Europe that culminated in the first attempt of the class to seize power in Paris, France in 1871, although there is no evidence that the Filipino movement was directly aware of the momentous events of the Commune.

Since at that time the Philippine proletariat was still regrouping and learning to struggle as a class, the early workers' struggles were closely connected to Filipino nationalism, to the struggle for independent nationhood, and against colonialism. And one of the prime movers of this sense of nationalism was the Filipino clergy who were discriminated against by the Spanish-controlled Catholic Church. This is why both religion and nationalism had great influence on the early proletarian movement – an influence which survives to this day. This is an expression of the way that the consciousness of the revolutionary class lags behind the changes of objective conditions.

The close ties between unionism, nationalism, and religion, which have severely handicapped the ability of the Filipino workers to develop a revolutionary class consciousness, are exemplified by Isabelo delos Reyes, often considered the founding father of Filipino unionism. Born in 1864, delos Reyes was an illustrado nationalist journalist (in 1889 he founded El Ilocano, said to be the first newspaper written solely in a Filipino language) who was exiled to Spain in 1897 for his nationalist activities. While in Spain – such are the strange contradictions to which capitalism could give rise in those days – he was employed as Consejero del Ministerio del Ultramar (Counsellor of the Ministry for the Colonies) while at the same time taking in the influence of the radical and revolutionary thinkers of the age: on his return to the Philippines he brought with him books by Marx, Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin and other European anarchists and socialists, as well as literary works. While in Spain he wrote articles attacking the United States and its war to strip Spain of its colonies (see below), which is doubtless one of the reasons that the Spanish government allowed him to return to the Philippines in 1901.10

In February 1902, delos Reyes, together with the print union leader Herminigildo Cruz, Dominador Gomez and Lope Santos brought together more than 85 unions to found the Union Obrera Democratica (UOD), the first labor federation in the country. Its members included unions of printers, lithographers, cigar makers, tailors, mechanics, and others in various trades and occupations. At least some of these unions were apparently organized along industrial lines similar to the International Workers of the World (IWW).

In the same year, delos Reyes played a key role in founding the Philippine Independent Church11 together with the Catholic priest Gregorio Aglipay, who became the church’s first “Obispo Maximo”.12

1896-1901: nationalist revolution and imperialist war

In 1892, the rise of Filipino nationalism led to the formation of the gradualist Liga Filipina by the novelist Jose Rizal, and of the Katipunan ("The worshipful association of the sons of the people") by Andres Bonifacio, an admirer of Rizal who hoped to draw the latter into an active involvement in agitation for independence. By 1896, the Katipunan had grown to be a substantial force with between 100,000 and 400,000 members, and was strong enough to launch a nationalist revolt against Spain under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo. This first attempt ended in a negotiated stalemate which left Spain in control, but Aguinaldo and his cadres free to continue organising from their exile in Hong Kong.

It was in this context that in 1898 the United States declared war on Spain following the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor (Cuba belonging to Spain at the time).13 This war allowed the US to carry off a land grab on the Philippines, which had obviously been prepared in advance and which combined brutality and hypocrisy to a truly startling degree.14

At the beginning of the war, the US presented itself as the champion of Filipino independence. The American naval commander Commodore Dewey organised Aguinaldo's return to the Philippines: the war with Spain came to an end in 1898 with American troops in Manila, while the Filipino nationalists controlled most of the rest of the country and had already declared a Filipino Republic with its provisional capital in Malolos and Aguinaldo as President. The peace was of short duration: in February 1899, US troops in Manila provoked the outbreak of a new war, this time against the fledgling Filipino Republic, which was to end in 1902 after the defeat of the Filipino army by a vastly superior American force, and a protracted and brutal guerilla campaign that left 22,000 Filipino soldiers and more than 500,000 civilians dead. The Philippines was thus given a taste of the delights of "civilisation" and "democracy": in just three years, the USA killed more Filipinos that the Spaniards had done in 300.15

All the more remarkable, in this context, is the third recorded strike of March 1899 by the printers union led by Herminigildo Cruz, demanding increased wages and an end to the abuses of a press superintendent. The mass action was directed at the management of the nationalist government’s printing press in Malolos, Bulacan, where the La Independencia was printed. Editor and General Antonio Luna intervened and arranged for a 25% pay raise to workers.

We can appreciate the symbolism of this strike, at the turn of the century, being directed not against the old or new colonial power but against the rising national democratic bourgeoisie that was supposed to be a "reliable ally" of the workers' movement. Filipino labor was confronted from the outset by national government, nationalist movements, and brutal repression by the colonial power.

1898-1930s: Under US colonial power

Given its own anti-imperialist ideology (which for America meant the opposition to the fully colonial structures set up by the old European empires, especially the British), the USA could hardly transform the Philippines into a colony in the old style. Hence alongside US military occupation under the authority of an American Governor-General, the 1902 Philippine Bill adopted by the US Congress provided for the creation of an elected legislature: the first elections were held in 1907 and led to a resounding victory for the Nacionalista Party.16

The American ruling class was united in its desire to preserve its commercial, industrial, and military strategic interests in the Philippines, but was divided on how best to do so: by continual direct rule and military occupation, or through nominal independence, with client status ensured by treaties and the maintenance of US military bases in the country. By 1934, following the election of Roosevelt's Democrat "New Deal" administration in 1933, the second option was chosen and the Tidings-McDuffie Act of that year created the Philippine Commonwealth, which was to become fully independent after a ten-year transition period. Manuel Quezon was elected as the first President of the Philippines under the Act, in 1935.

Returning to August 1902 and the beginning of the American occupation, when Isabelo delos Reyes was arrested and imprisoned for charges of sedition and rebellion, Dominador Gomez took over and changed the name of UOD to Union Obrera Democratica de Filipinas (UODF). But Gomez was also arrested for sedition and illegal association in 1903 after thousands of workers marched on May 1, 1903 demanding national independence.

Gomez articulated the orientation of Philippine unionism in a speech delivered as leader of the Union Obrera Democratica:

“The banner of UOD is dynamic nationalism against any form of imperialism, against oppression.”

And on May 1, 1903, in a workers rally of Union Obrera Democratica de Filipinas Gomez declared:

“We are not against capitalists (…) What we are against is the practice of the capitalists robbing the workers of the product of their sweat by not giving what is due to them…”17

If the nationalist unions were not against capitalism, then neither was the American colonial regime against trades unions as such, provided that they were tightly controlled by the state, and inspired by the most conservative forces of the workers’ movement in the United States. This two-pronged strategy led to the entry of the American Federation of Labor led by Samuel Gompers into the Philippines, where it gave support to the Union del Trabajo de Filipinas (UTF), set up by Lope K. Santos.18

At the same time, the Bureau of Labor (BOL) was set up (June 10, 1908) to organize the legalization and regulation of trade unionism throughout the country. The Bureau, under the Department of Commerce and Police, was tasked to regulate and provide information on the labor force and market, and to settle disputes between labor and employers. The US also gave the go-ahead for the Philippine Assembly to recognize May 1st as a national holiday, to appease the class anger of the workers.

The US attempt to control the union movement was not completely successful, and some unions continued to have close ties to the nationalist cause. This was notably the case with the Union de Impresores de Filipinas (UIF) which participated in the UODF; when the UODF was dissolved in 1903 and reorganised as the Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (COF), the UIF's president Crisanto Evangelista went on to play a leading role in the new federation. As a leader of COF, he was included in the Independence Mission sent to the USA in 1919 along with the then rising leader of the Nacionalista Party, Manuel Quezon. While in the US, Evangelista was ignored by the AFL, but did attend a convention of the International Workers of the World.19

The Philippines thus entered the last phase of capitalism’s ascendant period with a development of workers’ struggles taking the union form, but with the first signs of the unions’ integration into the state apparatus. Given the Philippines' relative isolation from the heart of world capitalism, it does not seem to have been immediately affected either by World War I, or by the betrayal of the Social Democracy (which had no presence in the country) and its consequences.

The labor movement continued to gain strength and experience in the legal battle and strikes became common. There were stoppages in many cigarette factories, at the harbor in Iloilo, in Negros logging companies and in the sugar mills of Negros, Pampanga and Laguna. There were also strikes on the railroads, at the copra factory of Franklin Baker, at the Manila Gas Company, in the rice mills of Nueva Ecija, and in the embroidery firms of Manila. In addition, Filipino workers who were working abroad at this time also participated in workers’ struggles in their country of emigration, thus showing that they are part of an international class.20

Despite its growing strength and militancy, the Filipino labor movement remained unable to establish its own political identity distinct and separate from the bourgeois forces of colonial politics. As we have just seen, the union movement remained politically dominated either by radical anti-American nationalism, or by US imperialism in the form of the AFL. One can perhaps draw an analogy with the situation in Britain at the turn of the 20th century where, in different circumstances and for different reasons, the workers' movement had no distinct mass political expression of its own, and remained substantially under the influence of the Liberal Party.

Whereas in Europe and the US, the union question was posed starkly in 1914 by the unions' betrayal of the workers in war,21 in the Philippines it was only posed gradually and as a result of the unions' inability to disentangle themselves either from bourgeois nationalism or from imperialism.

Formation of the Communist Party and integration into the Communist International

The Russian revolution of 1917 aroused immense hope and enthusiasm amongst workers all over the world: the Philippines was no exception.

In 1922, with Evangelista and Antonio Ora at the helm, the Progressive Workers' Party (also known as the Partido Obrero) was formed. Contacts with labor movements of other countries were intensive. The classic works of Marx and Engels found their way to the Philippines. Through the Workers’ Party, the COF became a member of the Pacific Secretariat of Trade Unions set up by the Red International of Labor Unions,22 and in 1924, Crisanto Evangelista was elected its president. The RILU invited the radical union leaders of the Philippines to its Pacific Conferences held in Canton, China on June 18-24, 1924, and in 1928 Evangelista represented the COF at both the 4th RILU Congress and the 6th Comintern Congress in Moscow.

After the Canton Conference, the American and Chinese communists were in regular communication with the radical nationalist unions in the Philippines.

Conflict between pro- and anti-Moscow tendencies within the COF led to a split in 1929 when Evangelista's grouping left, to form the following year the Proletarian Congress of the Philippines: Katipunan ng mga Anak-Pawis ng Pilipinas, or KAP. The KAP also formed the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines (Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, or PKP), founded in 193023 and whose existence was announced publicly to a mass meeting of some 6000 workers in Tondo, Manila.24

While there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Evangelista and his comrades, the impetus of the movement in the Philippines towards proletarian internationalism was derailed by two factors: first, neither the movement as a whole nor its key leaders had really broken with the national perspective with which they had entered political activity; second, and perhaps more importantly, the Communist International even in 1922 had begun the process of degeneration which was to transform it from the centre of world revolution to a mere tool in the service of the Russian state's imperialist interests. As we have already shown in relation to Turkey,25 the isolation of the revolution and the increasing consolidation of the capitalist powers led the Russian state to subject the political activity of the communist parties in Eastern countries to the demands of the USSR's alliances with bourgeois nationalist movements or even bourgeois governments.26 Significantly, 1922 – the year the Partido Obrero was founded – was also the year of the Congress of the Toilers of the East, held in Moscow and attended by representatives of both the Chinese CP and Sun Yat-sen's bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang, which was followed by the CI's insistance that the CCP should enter the Kuomintang. The massacre of the Shanghai workers by the Kuomintang in 1927 was the last gasp of the revolutionary upsurge that had begun ten years earlier in Russia, and by 1928 the counter-revolutionary process was completed with the adoption of Stalin's slogan of "Socialism in one country".

As the Comintern degenerated, the tendency was increasingly to put responsibility for the activity of the Communist parties in the colonies under the authority of the parties in the corresponding imperialist power, so that for example Algeria came under the responsibility of the French CP. This fitted perfectly with the general movement towards integration of the USSR – and therefore of the Comintern – into the system of imperialist alliances, since it meant that the orientation of the activity of militants in the colonies would be determined above all by the USSR's alliances or rivalry with the colonial power rather than by the needs or the possibilities of the class struggle internationally or locally. The Philippines was no exception: in April 1925, the Comintern's first resolution on the Philippines gave the American CP the responsibility of supporting both the national liberation movement, and the formation of a Communist Party.27 This corresponded to Russian policy in the Far East, which was to work with the local bourgeoisie (China being the classic case) in order to weaken the encirclement of Russia by other imperialist powers.28 This position was to change, as we shall see, with the rise of Japan to threaten Russia.

The formation of the PKP thus created, not an independent working class party, but on the contrary a basically nationalist organization under the domination of Russian imperialism.

In May 1, 1931, The Quezon government tried to suppress the organized forces of PKP. The military dispersed the marching workers in Caloocan with water cannons and attacked a worker’s meeting held by the laborers. Evangelista was arrested and accused of sedition, rebellion and illegal assembly.

American military authorities raided the KAP (Association of the Toilers) Congress. Several KAP leaders were arrested and the Court of First Instance declared the PKP and the KAP illegal. The Supreme Court upheld the decision.

The nationalist Filipino bourgeoisie once again showed its fangs against the working class. The “anti-American” Quezon allied with its “enemy” to suppress the working class. While the US ruling class still feared the USSR as an expression of a “communist threat”, the USSR was already integrated into the world wide system of imperialist conflicts and alliances: in reality, the repression of the PKP thus had nothing to do with socialism but on the contrary, the intensification of the rivalry between two imperialist powers – the USA and the Stalinist USSR.

Hand in hand with the iron fist of the bourgeoisie went regulation and control of the unions. In December 1933, the Department of Labor (DOL) was established. In succeeding years, many laws were enacted to integrate the unions to the state.

During the 1930s, three federations – influencing over 300 affiliated and independent unions – dominated the labor scene with the launching of the President Quezon’s Social Justice Program. There were the Collective Labor Movement (CLM), Confederated Workers Alliance (CWA), and National Federation of Labor (NFL); the CWA and the NFL were right-wing organizations which had emerged after the 1929 split in the COF, the NFL in particular being led by Ruperto Cristobal, the private secretary of the Secretary of Labor in the Quezon government. The CLM's leaders,29 on the contrary were all identified with pro-USSR "socialism".30 The CLM was the biggest labor center uniting 76 unions, but it did not prosper as a formal organization because personal and ideological conflicts prevented its transformation into a coherent organization.

In a period when it is no longer possible for workers to gain meaningful reforms within the capitalist system, and where every mass movement of the class immediately comes up against the repressive forces of the state, trade unions are inevitably integrated into the capitalist state apparatus and take on the characteristics of bourgeois organizations.31

Like the Filipino bourgeoisie, trade unionism in the Philippines in the decadent stage of capitalism is riddled with internal rivalries. It has no capacity to unify even its organized forces because unions are divided between imperialist rivalries. This is the lesson of 20th century history which so many obstinately refuse to learn.

In every workers' struggle the unions tied the class struggle into union and nationalist struggles. Thus, workers’ demands become demands to defend the unions and the “right to organize unions” and for national independence from US imperialism.

The “Popular Front” and World War II

By the mid-1930s, the world situation was changing: the rise of Nazi Germany and militaristic Japanese imperialism led the USSR to seek an accommodation with the "democratic" powers against the emerging fascist bloc. As a result, the policy of the American CP towards Roosevelt changed from opposition to support in the 1936 US elections, and the PKP was now urged to support the "democratic camp". The first step was the formation of a "popular front": “On September 20, 1936 the PKP Central Committee issued a manifesto entitled, “Forward for the Formation of the Popular Front”. It called for an alliance of all labor, peasant and middle class organizations and political and social groups who were in opposition to the policies of the Commonwealth government, particularly the Quezon-Osmeña coalition and were willing to work for better social conditions and absolute national independence. It announced as the aim of the Popular Front “to save the Filipino people from the danger of imperialist war, dictatorship and fascism, to improve the conditions of the masses and obtain independence””.32

As James Allen, the American CP's emissary to the Philippines, wrote "By June of 1937, I was conveying to my correspondents anxiety over the ominous state of affairs and particularly concern about Japan's aggressive intentions in Southeast Asia. To safeguard the cause of independence, I suggested, the Philippines would need to place itself on the anti-fascist side and also recognize that the United States was the major power in the Pacific able to confront the Japanese military-fascists".33 The American CP also advocated a switch to supporting the government of Manuel Quezon.

As a result, when Allen made a second visit to the Philippines in 1938 it was with the blessing of Roosevelt's New Deal government. He encountered a changed political situation. Evangelista, who had lived in semi-clandestinity since the banning of the PKP, was allowed to go to Moscow for medical treatment and received by Quezon in Malacanang (the presidential palace) before his departure. Allen was given an official invitation by Quezon, and the PKP was once again legalised. A 1938 PKP convention was held in public, with invited representatives from the Quezon government and the Kuomintang: the PKP could hardly hope for more official endorsement from the nationalist ruling class!

Together with his changed attitude to the PKP, Quezon also relaxed restrictions on workers' demonstrations, and in June 3, 1939, Commonwealth Act. No. 444 or the Eight-Hour Workday Law was enacted. What in the 19th century had been an object of workers' struggle, was offered as a gift on the eve of World War II, not as a result of a strong independent workers movement but to dragoon the Filipino workers for the 2nd imperialist war. As we know, the Philippine Commonwealth Government was allied with American imperialism.

World War II and Japanese occupation

The policy of bringing the PKP into the "democratic camp" of US imperialism was to pay off as soon as the war began. The Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor was quickly followed by that of the Philippines in December 1941. The PKP immediately decided to begin organising a guerilla movement, and informed the Quezon government and US administration of its "pledge of all-out support to national unity around an anti-Japanese United Front and of loyalty to the existing government, declaring that 'All people and all strata of the population must organize, secretly if necessary, to assist the Philippine and American government to resist Japan' (…) Over 50,000 workers and peasants were organized by the PKP and put at the disposal of the US Corps of Engineers".34 This United Front policy was the same as that followed by Stalin in Europe, and by Mao in China.

Despite this the speed of the Japanese invasion caught the PKP by surprise and its entire top leadership was captured in January 1942 when the Japanese troops entered Manila. This included Crisanto Evangelista, who was tortured and killed. This led, in March, the formation of a fullscale guerilla movement, the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon ("People's army against Japan"), better known as the Hukbalahap or just "the Huks".35

We do not propose here to go into the history of the Japanese occupation, during which the Hubalahap was undoubtedly the most effective fighting force on the American side in the occupied areas.

After World War II

Even before the end of World War II in Asia, the USA “used nuclear weapons against Japan in August 1945, even as that country sent out feelers for a negotiated surrender”36 principally as a warning to Russian imperialism that the US had both the will and the means to prevent any extension of Russian influence in the East.

With the end of the war, US imperialism was the world's dominant imperialist power,37 and immediately began to prepare for a confrontation with the other major victor of the war and new imperialist superpower – Russia.

Naturally, the USSR resisted this policy of "containment". As a result, the years following the war were marked by a whole series of proxy wars as the USA (sometimes with its allies Britain and France) and the USSR tested each other's positions: in Greece, in Vietnam, in Korea, in Malaysia – and in the Philippines. This is why – predictably – the USA and its Filipino puppets set out to destroy the (pro-USSR) Hukbalahap immediately after the war.

The PKP's betrayal of proletarian internationalism by supporting the American war effort was paid for in blood by the Filipino workers and peasants. Its cadres and mass sympathizers were suppressed and arrested (many were killed) by the forces led by the democratic USA following the defeat of Japanese imperialism in the Philippines.38

Thus began the intense and armed rivalries between the two imperialist powers in Philippine soil using national liberation in post-war confrontations. In March 1945, the labor movement under the influence of Russian imperialism was reconstituted as the Committee of Labor Organizations and later organized as the Congress of Labor Organizations (CLO), the first national labor center.39 The CLO fought for the rights of the working class within the legal framework of Filipino capitalism, but was essentially a nationalist organization aiming at “genuine” national independence on the “socialist” (ie state capitalist) model as the way of the future.

Since in decadent capitalism national independence is impossible and the “independence” of the Philippines was just part of the American imperialist policy to contain the expansionism of Stalinist Soviet imperialism.40 To prevent the nationalist Filipino bourgeoisie to change master, US imperialism made a smart move: Grant political independence to its colony.

On the other hand, imperialist powers realized also after two world wars that the colonies are no longer beneficial to them unlike in the 19th century. These colonies “could no longer serve as the basis for the enlarged reproduction of global capital, having themselves become capitalist, that they lost their importance for the major imperialisms (in fact it was the more backward colonial powers like Portugal which clung most tenaciously to their colonies).41

On 4th July 1946, the Philippines gained its formal independence from the United States:42 the latter however continued to maintain a powerful and growing military presence, with Subic Bay and Clark Air Base becoming the US' largest installations in the Far East or indeed the world: the Philippines was now in the front line of the confrontation between the USA and the USSR in Asia. The US also maintained a substantial industrial and commercial presence in the country, certain sectors of the US bourgeoisie being closely allied to Filipino industrialists.

Quezon having died in exile during the war, a period of parliamentary rivalry began between parties whose politics were indistinguishable and who were differentiated only by personal allegiances and rivalries. Nor was collaboration with the Japanese quisling government considered an obstacle to participation in power either by the Filipino bourgeoisie or their American mentors. From the outset, the political life of the Filipino bourgeoisie has been marked by violence, fraud, and corruption.43

This characteristic of political life is not of course unique to the Philippines. It is a general feature of life under decadent capitalism, that countries which did not develop a national unity during capitalism's rise, and which moreover are economically under-developed, have great difficulty in creating a unified ruling class. In many cases, as we have pointed out elsewhere, the only really united body in the state is the army, which explains why the army or even outright military dictatorship, has been the only force able to give some political stability to the ruling class.

Apart from the Marcos dictatorship, which lasted for 21 years from 1965 to 1986, the Filipino bourgeoisie has exercised its political domination through an apparently democratic system, where power is in fact divided between ruling clans who fight for domination on an electoral battleground. To give just one particularly violent example, in the 2009 elections 21 politicians and journalists were abducted and murdered on the island of Mindanao. According to the BBC's Asia analyst "Every election period features assassinations of rivals, particularly in provincial areas where the forces of law and order are often tightly connected to local clans. Every local politician has some form of personal security which, in some areas, balloons to private armies of scores or hundreds of well-armed, unregulated gunmen".44

Given that the "labor movement" was never able to shake itself free from its roots in nationalism, it comes as no surprise that in the Philippines, it merely mirrors the clientelism and factionalism of the wealthier fractions of the ruling class. In 1986, Rolando Olalia (later murdered) declared that "about 85% of today's supposed leaders of the working class are engaged in racketeering".45 As leader himself of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, see below), Olalia presumably knew what he was talking about.

The PKP and the Huks at first thought they could make a deal with the ruling parties to participate in normal political life, and even worked in coalition with the Democratic Alliance and the Nacionalista Party.46 On the face of it this was not unreasonable, since these parties were essentially nationalist and posed no threat to the continued domination of capitalism or of the bourgeoisie. Moreover – and ironically given future events – the American OSS47 had supported not only the Huks during the war with Japan, but also Mao's regime in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Indeed the Vietminh nationalists were initially helped into power by the OSS, against the returning French colonizers. However, the independence of the Philippines was an illusion, not so much because of continued American military occupation as because the division of the world into two rival imperialist blocs meant that political life in any country was determined by its position within the system of the blocs. In 1950, General Douglas MacArthur as commander of the US occupying forces in Japan, and Dean Acheson as Secretary of State, "defined the new American 'defensive perimeter' in the Pacific as running along a line connecting the Aleutians, Japan, Okinawa, the Ryukyus, and the Philippines".48 This was a public declaration that the Philippines, like Japan, was firmly within the US sphere of interest and that for the USA, it was no more acceptable to see the PKP in power in the Philippines than it would have been to let the Italian CP into government in Italy.

The Huks therefore found themselves increasingly under aggressive military pressure, and it was decided to continue the guerilla war by reorganizing the movement as the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB, People's Liberation Army) which acted as the military arm of the Communist Party. The Americans tried to stop the rebellion and destroy the peasant organizations by developing agrarian services and support projects, alongside military aid to the government. The Americans and the government launched operations in Central Luzon and Manila. Many HMB leaders were captured while others, including Luis Taruc, surrendered. By 1955 the military defeat was complete, and Jesus Lava ordered the HMB to disband. Thousands of lives and properties had been sacrificed in these inter-imperialist armed confrontations.

At the same time, “Economic assistance was supplemented by a policy of fostering pro-Western (i.e. pro-Washington) institutions and organizations, creating anti-Communist trade unions and political organizations, with American Federation of Labor (AFL) operatives working hand in glove with the CIA”49 like the Federation of Free Workers (FFW)50 to counter the PKP-led CLO.

The militant workers organized by CLO were dragged into the “war for national liberation” waged by the HMB. Basically, the unions were used as cannon-fodder in the imperialist rivalries as they were fought out between the USSR and the USA in the post-war period. The suppression of pro-USSR unions and establishing pro-USA unions was part of the consolidation of US imperialist control in the Philippines.

On April 1951, President Quirino banned the CLO after declaring it a communist organization with ties to the Huk armed movement. Its leader, Amado Hernandez51, was arrested and charged with rebellion and murder. He was later convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but finally acquitted by the High Court.

As the workers’ resistance against the attacks of capitalism and against the suppression by the state intensified, the government tried to regulate these by enacting the Industrial Peace Act (Republic Act No. 875) in 1953. This promoted collective bargaining and guaranteed the right to organize in unions. It also introduced mediation and conciliation as new modes of dispute settlement. This act was supported and funded by US imperialism and bourgeois institutions.52

Collective bargaining imprisons the workers in the bureaucracy of union organizations and diverts their struggles into fights for government mediation and conciliation. With these maneuvers of the capitalist state, the unions from Right to Left called it a “victory” for the workers’ struggle. The result is intense rivalries between different union federations for collective bargaining rights that deepen the division within the Filipino working class: the number of unionized workers increased, and the more they were unionized the more they were divided.53

With the Philippines under the unambiguous domination of the United States, remnants of the banned communist party set up the Workers’ Party54 (Lapiang Manggagawa) in 1963 with some of the country's major labor federations.

On the other hand, unions led by the Philippine Labor Center (PLC) of Democrito Mendoza pushed the one-union-one industry system.55 Because of this, union rivalries and workers’ division further intensifies. PLC itself split into factions leading to the creation of Pinagbuklod na Manggagawang Pilipino (PMP) led by Roberto S. Oca Sr. and the Philippine Congress of Trade Unions (PHILCONTU) led by Mendoza.

Marcos and Maoism

The Marcos dictatorship

It is particularly striking that the rise and fall of the Marcos dictatorship was roughly contemporaneous with the rise of Maoism and its integration into the mechanisms of Filipino politics. These two apparently opposing currents were to a large extent determined by the broader conditions of inter-imperialist conflict in South-East Asia: the war in Vietnam, and the rivalry between the USSR and China.

We do not have the space here to give a full account of the Marcos dictatorship, however some indicators are necessary if we are to understand the evolution of Filipino unionism and politics during the 1970s and 1980s.

It is said that during the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt remarked of the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”, and this epithet perfectly summarizes the US bourgeoisie’s attitude to the plethora of vicious military dictatorships that it has supported over the years.56 American willingness to sponsor these dictatorships – not least, of course, that of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam – which did so much to discredit US claims to defend “democracy” around the world, can be explained essentially by two factors.

The first, was the context of the Cold War with the USSR. The USSR’s efforts to gain footholds within the underdeveloped countries of the American bloc by sponsoring trades unions, “leftist”, “pro-peasant” movements meant that the USA tended to supported their opponents on the right, in other words the military and the wealthy élite.

In addition, the economic interests of the wealthy élite tended to coincide with those of their American counterparts in ways that could sometimes be very explicit: the CIA coup which overthrew the Guatemalan regime in 1954, for example, also allowed the American United Fruit Co to recover land that had been nationalized by the elected government. Countries outside the capitalist heartlands in effect found themselves in an impossible contradiction. On the one hand, the fraction of the bourgeoisie which best understood and expressed the needs of an independent national capital in the decadent period necessarily tended to adopt the policies of a left-wing, nationalist state capitalism which inevitably drew them towards the “Russian model”; as the old European colonial regimes dismantled their empires during the 1950s and 1960s, these left-wing regimes were also the best placed to canalize, absorb, and profit from the accompanying rise of nationalist sentiment allied to radical social protest.57 On the other hand, the United States evidently could not permit its client states to install governments which threatened to adopt a “Soviet” model which would tend to draw them into the Russian bloc. Given the weakness of the national capitals and therefore the lack of a well-established bourgeois class, the US inevitably was forced to rely on the corrupt local elites and the army to maintain its power over its clients.

Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled as president from 1965 until he was overthrown by the “People Power Revolution” in 1986, is a perfect expression of this situation. At first sight, Marcos was nothing more than the usual corrupt politician of the Filipino elite: he had been suspected of involvement in the assassination of a political rival shortly after the war, and came to power by switching parties shortly before the presidential elections. His second term electoral victory in 1969 was achieved thanks to massive fraud and bribery.58 His third term, and continuation in office, was ensured by the equally fraudulent declaration of martial law in 1972.

But 1965 was also the year that the US Army began its direct involvement in the Vietnam war. This meant a build-up of US bases in the Philippines. To ensure stability in the country hosting these critical military installations, the US government was ready to pay handsomely, with the result that the Marcos regime was awash with cash that it could use to bribe its opponents, and to maintain a military dictatorship.

In the period prior to 1972, the rising militancy of the Filipino workers was easily dragged into inter-factional struggles of the ruling class led by the unions. The workers were hoodwinked by bourgeois nationalist slogans like those of the Maoist CPP: "Tunay, Palaban, Makabayan" (Genuine, Militant and Nationalist Trade Unionism).

Marcos thus declared martial law not against a rising independent Filipino working class movement but on the contrary because the movement had been temporarily defeated by the triumph of the counter-revolutionary ideology of Maoism within the militant workers movement in the 60’s. The bourgeois theory of “protracted people’s war” dragged the workers onto the terrain of its class enemy.

Corruption is endemic in the Filipino ruling class, but Marcos took it to new heights, using government power to take over for his own and his family’s benefit, profitable companies and land holdings. As a result, by the beginning of the 1980s Marcos not only faced the growing anger of the workers engaged in the wave of struggles that swept across the world in the wake of the massive French strike movement of May 1968, he had also forfeited the support of the wealthy elite.59

Maoism in the Philippines

When Mao Zedong's new regime came to power in China, its leaders were well aware that a ruined country in a world dominated by two great power blocs had no choice but to "lean to one side", to use Mao's expression. The US' support for the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan, and its intense suspicion of "communism" meant that China had no choice but to "lean" to the USSR. But although Stalin's USSR provided economic help and expertise to rebuild the shattered Chinese economy, including military assistance during the Korean War, the two sides never really trusted each other, especially since Stalin forced Mao to accept the "independence" (in reality a Russian tutelage) of Outer Mongolia.

When Khruschev took over the leadership of the USSR following Stalin's death in 1953, his efforts to find some kind of stable understanding with the USA led to increasing (and not unfounded) suspicion on the Chinese side, that they were about to be abandoned by the Russians. The rift between the two countries found concrete expression in the withdrawal of Russian technical experts in 1960, and in 1969 their armies clashed bloodily along the Ussuri River.60

China therefore embarked on a policy of asserting its own claim to leadership of the "anti-imperialist" movement of "national liberation" around the world, partly as a means of building up its own prestige against the USSR's claims to be the "bastion of socialism", and partly to prevent the creation of a stable anti-Chinese bloc in South-East Asia (the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation had been formed in 1954 for precisely that purpose).

Given this orientation, it is hardly surprising that the new generation of student youth that emerged during the 1960s, radicalised by the first renewed onset of the capitalist crisis and by the Vietnam War, should turn to China and to Maoist nationalism for inspiration. Hence in the Philippines the young university professor José Maria Sison founded, in 1964, the Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth) movement to oppose the Vietnam War and in 1968 he effectively infiltrated the almost moribund PKP and set up an alternative Central Committee with his idealistic student activists. From this time on the PKP becomes the pro-China, nationalist Communist Party of the Philippines.

Thus, Maoism, the counter-revolutionary ideology of the bourgeois Left spread in the Philippines from the germs of the petty-bourgeois student activism using nationalism and anti-imperialism. Once again, with the open crisis of world capitalism following the post-World War II boom, nationalism had been used as bait to chain the new generation of Filipino revolutionaries to support for nationalism. From then on until now, national freedom and democracy and anti-US imperialism have been the battle cry of the militant Filipino workers.

Whereas in the period leading up to World War II and in its immediate aftermath, the labor movement in the Philippines had divided workers between two great rival imperialisms, with China's increasing assertion of its independence from the USSR, they were subjected to a three-way split between the two world imperialisms and the newly assertive regional power of China.61

China’s support for Sison’s CPP has to be seen in the context of China’s own imperialist interests, and it was to be shortlived. By the end of the 1960s, Mao’s rift with Moscow was already leading towards military confrontation, as Russian troops built up on China’s northern border. China badly needed new and powerful friends against the Russian threat: the way was open to Nixon’s visit in 1972, which in effect was to bring the Vietnam war to a conclusion with China switching camps from Russia to the USA.

The class struggle revives

Insofar as he had a political program, Marco aimed at strengthening his regime by entangling workers’ class action in a forest of legal restrictions which would tie the workers to the state through the unions. In May 1974, the Labor Code was enacted with the promulgation of PD 442. This overhauled the labor relations framework in the country and introduced a restructuring plan to govern the one-union-one industry system. It created the National Labor Relations Commission to replace the Court of Industrial Relations.

This did not stop a resurgence of class struggle during the 1970s.

The first great wave of strikes that hit Metro Manila after Martial Law made strikes illegal came in late 1975, and was triggered by the workers from La Tondeña, a distillery factory against capitalist attacks and against the barbarism of the state.

The workers’ defiance of the state’s ban on strikes was a combative action aimed at taking their fate into their own hands. But this was prevented by the mentality of unionism.

The strike in La Tondeña was triggered by the issue of regularization. The workers who staged the strike were contractuals working for many years in the company. However, the regular workers had a union and a collective bargaining agreement with the management. This divided the workers between regular and contractual and seasonal.

The La Tondeña struggle did not really win its demands for regularization, but instead, through the instigation of unionization, fell into the trap of union recognition and collective bargaining as contractual workers.62

Worse, the union’s “victory” further divided the workers between regulars and contractuals and so weakened workers’ unity and resistance: “Meanwhile, the regular employees’ union feels that the regularization demand is a threat to the permanency of the positions held by regulars (…) This attitude was obvious to their indifference to the KMM [contractuals'] activities, particularly during the strike…".63

Nevertheless, the La Tondeña strike served as an inspiration to other workers by popularising the idea that united, we can defy the repressive laws of the state.

During the 1980s political and economic labor unrest in the Philippines intensified. Even the export processing zones where the government had tried to suppress strikes were experiencing waves of strikes, particularly the Bataan Export Processing Zone.64 The Filipino workers again showed their solidarity with their international class, many workers following attentively and drawing inspiration from the struggles in Poland. But unfortunately, the Maoists profited from the workers' efforts in struggle to establish the Kilusang Mayo Uno65 (KMU) as a labor center under the domination of the CPP.

However, these labor alliances were mainly composed of unions from different labor federations that were united against the Marcos dictatorship. Initiated by the Maoist KMU, but supported by the “pro-Moscow” unions affiliated with the World Federation of Trade Unions. Ultimately, many of these alliances were transformed into Maoist unions. The non-unionized workers who organized themselves to struggle were later converted into unions under the KMU as part of “consolidating” the workers.

The KMU was established by Felixberto Olalia of the National Federation of Labor Unions (NAFLU), Cipriano Malonzo of NFL, and Crispin Beltran of PANALO. As a labor center on capitalism's left wing, it advocated “genuine, militant and nationalist unionism” supporting the CPP's guerilla struggle. The inter-connection between the unions, the CPP and its guerrilla war, and the "bourgeois opposition",66 is illustrated by the case of Alex Boncayao, a union leader attracted to Maoism, who ran as assemblyman under the coalition with the bourgeois opposition during 1979-80; defeated in the elections, he went to the countryside and died as a guerrilla.

The suppression of strikes was evident between 1973 and 1975, as there were no actual strikes recorded. From 1976 through 1980, the number of strikes decreased to an average of 48 per year. From 1981 to 1985, the yearly average was 245. In 1986, there were 581 recorded strikes; the highest in country’s history with 3.6 million man-days lost in which 21% of these strikes were wildcat or without legal notices as prescribed by capitalist law.

There were several factors that explained this dramatic increase: the worsening international economic condition, the resurgence of international working class movement initiated by the Polish workers, the growing dissatisfaction of the people against the Marcos administration, and other factors inside the Philippines which were under the effects of renewed crisis of decadent capitalism in 1980s.

The inability of the Marcos regime to suppress the rise in workers’ struggles coincided with a change in the international situation. From 1980 onwards, China's attitude towards its Philippine client, the Maoist CPP, also changed. Following Mao Zedong's death in 1976, a new leadership under Deng Ziaoping ousted Mao's successor Hua Guofeng and eliminated the "Gang of Four" which had opposed any opening to the West. Deng intended to open the country to foreign capital and trade in order to gain access to the foreign technology necessary for the country’s economic survival, which necessarily meant normalizing relations with its neighbors. This led to China cutting off relations with Sison's party.67

Upon the failure of the Maoist CPP to import arms from China for its protracted “people’s war”, its “communist” guru Sison called for a united front with the anti-Marcos factions of the ruling class against the dictator. Thus, the “anti-fascist” united front was formed under the leadership of the Maoist CPP with the battle cry of “overthrow the fascist dictatorship”.

In 1983, Benigno Aquino, the popular figure of the anti-Marcos bourgeois opposition was assassinated by Marcos' henchmen. Workers' resistance succumbed to the inter-classist movement led by the maoist KMU. Thousands of workers participated in inter-classist protest actions drowned in the "Filipino people oppressed by Marcos dictatorship”.

Any attempt by the Marcos regime to suppress and control the strike wave ended in futility because the militant workers did not heed to these laws.68 In October 1983, workers of the US Military Bases went on strike. Although this was led by the union it demonstrated the readiness of Filipino workers to defend their welfare and interests.

In the "People Power Revolution" in 1986 that toppled the Marcos dictatorship, the Filipino workers actively participated not as an independent class movement but as atomized citizens.

As with the “anti-fascist popular front” during World War II, the Filipino proletariat, thanks to the Stalinist tactics of the maoist CPP, was once again disarmed in 1986 and caught up in the conflict between different factions of the national capital. The democratic bourgeois faction of Corazon Aquino which had been brought to power by the "People Power Revolution" unleashed attacks against the proletariat and even against the left factions which had previously supported her. The democratic Aquino regime undertook total war against the anti-US faction of the bourgeoisie led by the Maoist CPP.

Democratic Philippines and the Counter-Revolutionary Role of Unionism

Upon Corazon Aquino's arrival in power, unions in the Philippines fragmented into many labor centers and federations each defending its own bailiwick against its rivals. One reason for this is that democracy was re-established in the country and the unifying factor of opposition to the Marcos regime no longer existed. Once again, the mystification of democracy effectively disarmed the working class.69

After the fall of Marcos the Filipino workers continued to struggle against the attacks of capital.70 But these struggles were imprisoned in the framework of leftism, and legal trade unionism.

In August 1987, Filipino workers launched a general strike against an oil price hike. Unions under the Labor Advisory Coordination Council (LACC) and TUCP led this general strike asking the Aquino government to take control of the oil industry. In 1988, Filipino workers were again in the forefront of struggles asking for a legislated Php10.00 – Php 15.00 wage increase and demanded a Php1.00 – Php1.50 oil price reduction. In March 29, more than 500,000 workers joined the general strike led by LACC to demand a Php30.00 wage increase. The wave of protest and the sensation of workers' strength even led to a strike by women working in bars serving US troops from Subic Bay, who were being forced into degrading "boxing displays" by the bars owners.

In September 17-21, 1988 thousands of school teachers led by ACT71 and MPSTA72 went on strike due to unpaid allowances. Classes were completely paralyzed, prompting Education Secretary Cariño to dismiss and suspend 3,000 teachers. This struggle was “led” by the CPP. Instead of generalizing the struggle of the teachers, CPP isolated it, leading to its failure. This took place as the workers’ movement in general was on the wane.

These struggles led by the unions ended in defeat. Prices of oil products were only decreased by 0.50 centavos and the government did not heed the legislated wage increase but instead created a law R.A. No. 6727, or Wage Rationalization Act. This law contained the last legislated wage increase under the Aquino administration and created the Regional Tripartite Wage and Productivity Boards (RTWPB), which divided the workers by region in their struggles for wage increases, leaving them at the mercy of government, management and union representatives to decide any wage increase.

The years 1987-1988 were the last expression of the generalization of workers’ struggles. Attempts of the militant workers to generalize their struggles were marred by union sabotage of sectoral and industry by industry struggles of the unions.

Since the government successfully integrated the unions into its structure, it created more laws to appease and control the labor movement through the unions. As the union leaders were committed to participating in elections73, the workers' participation in militant struggles waned. The numbers taking part in “people’s strikes” spearheaded by the Maoists dwindled considerably. They were launched in some regions where the Maoists still had a considerable mass base.

As the militant mobilizations led by the ultra-leftists dwindled, the state also accelerated its integration of the union leaders to parliamentarism and legalized activity. In January 1993, under the Ramos administration, sectoral representatives for labor74 were appointed to the Ninth Congress.75 From then on, the so-called “communists” in the left of capital followed the road of parliamentarism.

In 1992, the CPP was marked by splits because of the vanguardism and absolutism of its leadership. Its regional organization in National Capital Region (NCR), led by Filemon Lagman declared autonomy and started to reorient towards “Marxism-Leninism” against Maoism.76 After the split, the Lagman group seized control of the KMU-NCR and transformed it into the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP).

As in the past, the leftists tried to unify the different unions to make their presence felt as a bargaining power within the state apparatus. In September 1993, three major federations (NFL, NAFLU and UWP) announced their disaffiliation from KMU due to ideological infighting within the organization. These federations became the core of the National Confederation of Labor of the Philippines (NCLP). In October of the same year, the Labor Alliance for Wage Increase of P35 (LAWIN 35) was formed to spearhead the call for a Php35 hourly wage increase for the private sector and a Php2,000 across-the-board salary hike for public sector employees. This campaign was supposed to usher in a new era in labor cooperation as LMLC, TUCP, FFW, BMP, KATIPUNAN, NFL, NAFLU, TUPAS, and CIU joined forces. But these alliances did not last.

The last attempt at union unification was the Katipunan ng mga Pangulo ng Unyon sa Pilipinas (KPUP) or Brotherhood of Union Presidents of the Philippines set up by the group of Filemon ‘Popoy’ Lagman. But this also failed since the different union federations did not want their rivals entering their own unions.

In February 1998, the Social Accord for Industrial Harmony and Stability was signed by representatives from the LACC, TUCP, ECOP, PCCI, DOLE and DTI. This accord was in essence the same as the Social Justice Program promoted by Manuel Quezon in the 1930s. Once again, the unions are to be found acting as accomplices of the state to imprison the consciousness of the class.

In May 1998, Joseph Ejercito Estrada was elected as the 13th President of the Philippine Republic. He was dubbed as the “president of the masses”.

In May 2000, the Labor Solidarity Movement (LSM) was launched in a massive rally at the Araneta Coliseum with a clear anti-Erap (Estrada) stance. It was composed of four national labor centers namely: Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), the Federation of Free Workers (FFW), the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) and the National Confederation of Labor (NCL). They claimed to constitute about 60% of the organized labor. LSM’s "impeachment or resign position" followed its early analysis and judgment on the Estrada administration and it promptly allied itself with the Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino 2 (KOMPIL 2), a coalition of the anti-Estrada "bourgeois opposition". In reply, the pro-Estrada faction formed its own Labor Reform Bloc (LRB) under the leadership of Roberto Oca, Jr., who is a childhood friend of Erap and Attorney Roberto Padilla, a vice-president of TUCP and the brother of Congressman Roy Padilla of LAMP. Two labor representatives known for their left-wing politics from the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) also signed. Even the NAFLU - the former KMU union that formed the NCL - joined this new formation.

This only showed how the unions work as appendages of the different factions of the ruling class in their internecine power struggles.

In January 2001, an inter-classist “People Power” movement ousted Joseph Estrada as president and brought Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to power as the 14th President of the Republic of the Philippines.

Once again the workers had been led by the unions and the Leftists to support a faction of the ruling class.

In May 1, 2001, Estrada supporters, mostly urban poor led a violent attack on Malacanang Palace. The uprising was labeled as a “poor man’s revolt” due to the mobilization of many die-hard Erap supporters from the lower income bracket of the society. It was crushed by the state led by Gloria Arroyo.

This was an indication how the non-proletarian exploited strata – the urban poor and informal sector – in the absence of a strong and independent working class movement can be used by the bourgeoisie in its own interests.

In May 2001, the second party-list elections saw the failure again of “labor” parties to win a seat in the House of Representatives. Nine parties based on a working-class electorate joined this round and the highest ranking party within the labor sector in Partido ng Manggagawa (PM), a “Marxist-leninist” front of the Partido ng Manggagawang Pilipino of late Filemon Lagma. Labor leader Crispin Beltran of KMU won a party list Representative under the Bayan Muna Party. This completed the absorption of the ultra-left maoist organizations into “classical” bourgeois parliamentary politics. The “victory” of the Leftist labor leaders in the bourgeois parliament only increased their opportunistic appetites.

Conclusion

Over and over again, the Filipino workers have demonstrated their unbreakable courage and their ability to organize in their own defense. They have taken part in every wave and phase of struggles of their international class.

Filipino workers have been forced to emigrate all over the world, and have taken part directly in the class struggle world wide.77 This has the potentiel to contribute a precious experience to the rest of their class.

Yet for all their courage and their combativeness, the workers in the Philippines remain mired in the morass of bourgeois politics, used and abused by an ever-changing, bewildering kaleidoscope of unions, "socialist", "communist", and "worker" parties whose only interest is their struggle for petty advantage in the endless factional warfare of the Filipino ruling class.

As we have tried to show in this article, if workers in the Philippines have been unable, in the final analysis, to assert their own independent organization as a class, outside the structure of the state and all its factions, whether of the "bourgeois" or the "workers'" opposition, this is fundamentally for two inter-related reasons: first, their inability to break with nationalism, and second their belief that revolutionary opposition to capital can only be national and nationalist.

The mentality of militant, nationalist unionism is still very strong in the minds of Filipino workers. For these workers, only unions with a “revolutionary” leadership could defeat capitalism. Furthermore, this militant unionist line entraps the workers behind the prison walls of nationalism, parliamentarism, guerilla warfare, democracy and reformism.

We have aimed here to highlight some of the many historical factors responsible for this situation:

1. The experience of colonization; first by Spain from the 1500s to late 1800s and then by American capitalism from 1900s up to 1940s (with a short interregnum under Japanese rule during World War II). Thus, nationalism (ie, anti-foreign domination) is very strong even among militant workers.

2. The Filipino bourgeoisie together with their foreign patrons effectively utilize unions by dividing them between “purely economistic”, nationalist, radicals and moderate; dividing the workers and putting the “radicals” in the opposition so as to sow false hope that there are “bad” and “good” unions, “pro-worker” and “anti-worker” unions.

The generally anti-union sentiment of the capitalists in the Philippines strongly contributed to the illusion that unions are really pro-worker and that their constant betrayals are just a problem of “good” and “bad” leadership.

3. The effectiveness of bourgeois propaganda that Stalinism and Maoism are “communist” ideologies. This propaganda has never been refuted for more than 80 years. And lately, those leftist organizations that claim to be “anti-Stalinism” and “anti-Maoism”, instead of giving clarification only spew more confusion since their behavior is identical to the Stalinists and Maoists before them.

These factors are exacerbated by the decomposition of decadent capitalism since the end of the 1980s. The sabotage of the Leftists created demoralization and pushed many workers to submissiveness and a loss in self-confidence, the fertile ground for the penetration of bourgeois ideology of “every man for himself” and “one against all” within the working class.

4. In more than 100 years history of unionism, the state adapted the “militancy” of unions by making laws regulating and controlling them. After the unions effectively sabotage the struggles, the state made suppressive laws restricting the struggles. When the workers showed “uncontrollable” militance, the state “liberalizes” its laws so that the unions could again imprison the class in their structure.

The workers will never be strong until they learn to stand alone, outside and inevitably against the whole capitalist class, whether left or right, whether private capitalist or state capitalist. And when the union bosses come, yet again, to dragoon them into another futile struggle on behalf of this or that senator or presidential hopeful, then let the Filipino workers remember these words of the great 19th century French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui, that still echo to us down the years: "Those proletarians who allow themselves to be amused by ridiculous street demonstrations, by the planting of liberty trees, by the grand words of lawyers, will be met first with priestly blessings, then with insults, and finally with bullets, and with famine and poverty always".

Talyo/Jens

The outbreak of the world war in 1939 was a shattering blow to the small revolutionary movement which had survived the first storms of the counter-revolution in the 20s and 30s. The Italian communist left in exile, which had been so lucid about the build-up to war for most of its existence, had succumbed to the consolations of the ‘theory of the war economy’, whose defenders insisted that world war, if it came, would be motivated by the need to contain the incipient world revolution, only to switch over to the theory of the ‘social non-existence of the proletariat’ during the war, a formula for liquidating the Fraction. Like the council communists, those comrades in Belgium or France who rejected these theories and wanted to maintain revolutionary activity soon faced the terrors of the Nazi occupation or the repression of collaborationist regimes. Scattered internationalist anarchist groups and individuals held firm to their principles, but many more had already capitulated to the ideology of anti-fascism1. And the most resounding betrayal of all was embodied by the Trotskyist current, the overwhelming majority of which signed up for the imperialist war under the banners of anti-fascism, the defence of democracy and of the USSR. The debates about the form and content of the future revolution, which had led to real theoretical advances in the 1930s, were inevitably put on a back burner.

But after a short period of disarray, the revolutionary movement began to recover, despite the enormous challenge posed by clandestine work and the isolation of the communist minority from a working class which had to a large extent been convinced that this war was different, that it was a war for the defence of civilisation against barbarism. In France, a small group active mainly in the Vichy-controlled south, having firmly opposed the liquidationist tendency in the Italian Fraction, formed itself into a French Fraction of the Communist Left in 19422. In Holland, survivors of the council communist current and in particular the ‘MLL’ group around Sneevliet were able to maintain an organised activity, including an intervention into the heroic 1941 strike of shipyard and other workers against both the deportation of work comrades to Germany and the persecution of the Jews3. In the Trotskyist milieu, a number of groups came out against the treason of the ‘official’ organisations: the Stinas group in Greece, the group around the Spanish revolutionary Munis, the RKD (Revolutionary Communists of Germany), composed mainly of Austrian revolutionaries exiled to France4. In Italy, in 1943, a powerful wave of strikes swept the big factories of the north and revived the hopes of many comrades that the second imperialist war would end in the same way as the first: with a wave of proletarian revolutions. This surge of optimism quickly led to the constitution of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in Italy, made up of elements of the Italian left returning from exile and those who had remained in Italy, either (periodically) in jail, like Damen, or under house arrest, like Bordiga5.

And it was not long before theoretical reflection and debate about the goals of revolution also revived in this re-emerging movement. In occupied Holland, Anton Pannekoek secretly began writing his book Workers’ Councils6, which reaffirmed the perspective of revolution and investigated the forms and methods of struggle needed to overthrow capitalism and create a communist society. In the French Fraction, there were intense discussions about the class nature of ‘Soviet’ Russia and the characteristics of a genuine proletarian regime. And when the end of the war freed the various organisations from the restraints of underground activity, there was, for a time, a flourishing of debate within and sometimes between the different organisations, such as the conference of internationalists held in Holland in 19477. The post war period thus saw the formation of the Spartacusbond in Holland, which rejected the anti-organisational conclusions drawn by most of the Dutch groups in the 1930s; it also brought key texts by Bordiga on dictatorship and violence, and in particular a significant theoretical examination of the nature of the state in the period of transition by the group which succeeded the French Fraction in 1946, the Gauche Communiste de France.

We are publishing the latter here because it represents both continuity with and an advance on the work on the problems of the transition period published by Bilan and republished earlier in this series. In our opinion, it was the most enduring contribution on the problem of the transition to communism that emerged from the post-war period.

This doesn’t mean at all that there is nothing to be gained from studying the contributions by other currents in the revolutionary movement at the time.

Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils for example is an excellent presentation of his understanding of the dynamic of the class struggle, and the way in which its fundamental characteristics – the development of solidarity, organisation and consciousness, above all in the tendency towards the mass strike – were taken onto a new level with the appearance of workers’ councils, the finally discovered organisational form that would enable the proletariat to overthrow capitalism and reconstruct society on communist foundations. Any discussion of the forms of class organisation in the epoch of the proletarian revolution needs to assimilate this work.

And yet, as our book on the Dutch and German left points out, the essay suffers from certain key weaknesses8.

Regarding the period of transition, this work was in critical continuity with the GIC’s Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, focussing on the issue of labour time vouchers and ‘social’ book-keeping as the means for the working class to maintain control of the productive process in the construction of the new society. In other words, the central issue for Pannekoek, as for the GIC, is located in the sphere of the economy, even if he recognises that for the working class the economic and the political cannot be rigidly separated, and that the workers’ councils will certainly take on political tasks in the movement towards the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. And yet these political tasks remain vague in the extreme. The collective power of the working class in its councils, elected by workplace assemblies, is seen as the expression of Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but the problem of a transitional state – its inevitable appearance, and the dangers this entails, as put forward in the classics of Marxism such as Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State - is simply absent from his considerations; and this underestimation of the political dimension of the revolution is equally expressed in Pannekoek’s abandonment of the notion of a communist party which he had defended in the ascendant phase of the revolutionary wave in the early 20s.

Bordiga’s ‘Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle’ (1946)9 seems in many ways to fall into symmetrical errors to those of Pannekoek. The strength of the work is to re-affirm, against the pacifist hypocrisy of a post-war ‘democratic’ consensus which included the Stalinist Communist Party – a consensus which had emerged on the basis of the greatest slaughter in human history – the class basis of the revolution which was on the historical agenda, and the necessity for the proletariat to use organised violence in the overthrow of the capitalist regime and in the establishment of its own political dictatorship. Bordiga emphasised the inevitability of a civil war, of a transitional state to crush the resistance of the ruling class, and of a communist party to express and defend the goals of communism against the inevitable confusions and hesitations existing in the class.

Bordiga also understood the historic importance of soviet or council type organs:

“Soviets in their essence are actual class organisations and are not, as some believed, conglomerations of trade or craft organisations. Consequently they do not suffer from the narrowness of the purely economic organisation. For us their importance lies above all in the fact that they are organs of struggle. We do not try to view them in terms of ideal structural models but in terms of the history of their real development.

Thus it was a decisive moment in the Russian Revolution when, shortly after the election of the Constituent Assembly, the soviets rose up against the latter as its dialectical opposite and Bolshevik power dissolved the parliamentary assembly by force. This was the realisation of the brilliant historical slogan “All Power to the Soviets”.

At the same time Bordiga warned against making a fetish out of democratic majorities in such organs:

“However, all this was not sufficient for us to accept the idea that once such a form of class representation is born (and leaving aside here the fluctuations, in every sense, of its representative composition which we are not able to examine here), a majority vote, at whatever moment and turn in the difficult struggle waged by the revolution both domestically and externally is a reliable and easy method for solving every question and even avoiding the counter-revolutionary degeneration.

We must admit that the soviet system, due to the very complexity of its historical evolutionary cycle (which incidentally must end in the most optimistic hypothesis with the disappearance of the soviets along with the withering away of the state), is susceptible of falling under counter-revolutionary influence just as it is susceptible of being a revolutionary instrument. In conclusion, we do not believe that there is any constitutional form which can immunise us against such a danger – the only guarantee, if any, lies in the development of the domestic and international relations of social forces.

It is certainly true that a majority vote, or mere “constitutional forms”, is no guarantor of class consciousness and no automatic barrier against opportunism or degeneration. This criticism of what might be termed ‘democratism’ had already been elaborated in previous works on the transitional period by the Italian Fraction, such as Vercesi’s articles ‘Party-State-International’10. But Bordiga seemed totally unaware of the Fraction’s critical work on the problem of the post-revolutionary state - of those writings which, drawing on the experience of the degeneration of proletarian power in Russia, argued against ignoring the negative aspects even of the ‘semi-state’. Bordiga by contrast saw no distinction between the “proletarian state” and the real exercising of power by the proletariat, and even saw the state as the lever for the transformation of society; and where the Fraction had seen that there was a real problem with the party identifying itself with the state, that it had made a significant contribution to the inner degeneration of the revolution in Russia, Bordiga denied outright that this was a serious factor in the liquidation of proletarian political power. For him, the party was the principal instrument both of proletarian insurrection and of post-insurrectional rule. As he put it in a 1951 text, ‘Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party’11

“The communist party unleashes and wins the civil war, it occupies the key positions in a military and social sense, it multiplies its means of propaganda and agitation a thousand-fold through seizing buildings and public establishments. And without losing time and without procedural whims, it establishes the "armed bodies of workers" of which Lenin spoke, the red guard, the revolutionary police. At the meetings of the Soviets, it wins over a majority to the slogan: "All power to the Soviets!". Is this majority a merely legal, or a coldly and plainly numerical fact? Not at all! Should anyone - be he a spy or a well-intentioned but misled worker - vote for the Soviet to renounce or compromise the power conquered thanks to the blood of the proletarian fighters, he will be kicked out by his comrades' rifle butts. And no one will waste time with counting him in the "legal minority", that criminal hypocrisy which the revolution can do without and which the counterrevolution can only feed upon.......

......In conclusion the communist party will rule alone, and will never give up power without a physical struggle. This bold declaration of not yielding to the deception of figures and of not making use of them will aid the struggle against revolutionary degeneration”.

The idea of delegating power to the party was to be challenged within the PCInt by Damen and others, and was an element in the 1952 split in the party, but in our view it was the GCF which went furthest in assimilating the real theoretical enrichments made by the Fraction in the previous decade. The GCF was the successor to the French Fraction following a split over the constitution of the party in Italy. A nucleus of comrades in France had been opposed to the hasty dissolution of the Italian Fraction and recognised that the hopes of a proletarian revival raised in 1943 had proved unfounded: the war’s outcome had strengthened the defeat of the proletariat and consequently the task of the hour was not the formation of a new party but essentially the continuation of the work of the Fraction. An element of this stance was the GCF’s commitment to continuing and developing the more general theoretical patrimony of the Fraction, and it applied this method to the question of the transition period.

Like the Fraction, the GCF text renewed the links with the most profound critiques of the state contained in the writings of Marx and Engels, showing that the relationship between the proletariat and the state – including the post-revolutionary state – was very different from that of previous revolutionary classes whose mission was to introduce a new form of class exploitation. But while the Fraction had taken up, in the light of the degeneration of the Russian revolution, Engels’ prescient warnings that even the transitional state should be treated as a “scourge”, and insisted that the proletariat could not identify with it, the GCF went a step further, because they concluded logically from this that if the proletariat cannot identify with the transitional state, it makes no sense to define the latter as proletarian.

“The historic necessity for the proletariat to make use of the state must not lead to the fatal theoretical and political error of identifying this instrument with socialism. The state, like a prison, is not a symbol of socialism, nor of the class whose mission is to create it: the proletariat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, expressing the will of the revolutionary class to crush the resistance of the enemy and to ensure the movement towards a socialist society, also expresses its fundamental opposition to the idea of the proletarian nature of the state, the error of identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the utilisation by the proletariat of this instrument of coercion, the state....

...History and the Russian experience, in particular, have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist. If the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, the state will become the stronghold, the rallying point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a re-born capitalism”

Again, while the Fraction had begun to develop an understanding of the general tendency towards state capitalism in the decadent period of bourgeois society, the GCF text makes this much more explicit, while at the same time rejecting Bilan’s ambiguities about the survivals of a ‘proletarian economy’ in the USSR of the 1930s, embodied in the collectivisation of the means of production. The GCF text is quite clear that capitalism is in no way dependent on ‘private’ individual ownership and is indeed perfectly compatible with state ownership even in an extreme and totalitarian form: therefore the system in the USSR, based as it was on the extraction of surplus value from the proletariat by a minority of state bureaucrats, was entirely capitalist. The GCF text even rejects the very idea of a ‘proletarian economy’, and instead sees the transitional period not as a stable mode of production but as a battleground between capitalism and the movement towards socialism.

In some areas, the GCF of 1946 had not yet gone beyond some of the weaker points of Bilan’s position:

• The notion that the economic tasks of the transition period centre round the development of the productive forces towards a point where abundance can be achieved, conceived as a process of “accumulation of values”, albeit one marked by a proportional increase of variable capital as opposed to constant capital, by a fundamental switch from the production of capital goods to the production of consumer goods. This approach underestimates the necessity to struggle against the wage labour form from the beginning, even if both the Fraction and the GCF were right to understand that the law of value would not disappear overnight. Moreover, it is more than ever evident today, more than half a century after the GCF’s text was written, that the primary economic task of the proletariat will not be to ‘develop’ technology to the point where abundance becomes possible, but to reorganise and transform the social relations of production in order to release the already-existing potential for abundance;

• The text still talks, as the Fraction did, about the party exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat, even though both warned against any identification between party and state. With the GCF, this is perhaps even more contradictory, since the 1946 text shows a greater understanding of the central role to be played by the workers’ councils in the process of economic and social transformation, and makes it quite explicit that the party can only ‘lead’ the councils through its political role, its capacity to convince the mass of workers:

“In the councils, the proletarians will for the first time learn the art of administering society for themselves. The party will not impose its economic policies on the councils through decrees or by claiming some divine right. It will have to make its conceptions and policies prevail by proposing them, defending them, and submitting them to the approval of the masses organised in the councils or soviets, relying on the councils of workers and on the workers’ delegates to the central councils to bring its class policies to a successful conclusion”.

Equally explicit is the rejection of any relation of violence within the class, and even between the working class and other non-exploiting classes, who will be integrated into the new state through participation in soviet type organisations. Violence, while necessary and inevitable in the struggle against the exploiting class, is rejected as a method of social transformation because it is inconsistent with the goals of communism; and this position is further reinforced by the observation that the capitalist state, above all in its decadent epoch, has evolved from an instrument of violence on behalf of the ruling class to an instrument which tends to perpetuate violence for its own sake.

Given these contradictions, it is not surprising that the idea of the party exercising the dictatorship was to be definitively and quite rapidly rejected, partly as a result of the GCF’s capacity to assimilate the contribution of other left fractions, in particular the German-Dutch left. Thus in June 1948 (Internationalisme no 38), the GCF published a programmatic text ‘On the nature and function of the political party of the proletariat’, which states:

“During the insurrectionary period of the revolution, the role of the party is not to demand power for itself, nor to call on the masses to ‘have confidence’ in it. It intervenes and develops its activity in favour of the self-mobilisation of the class, inside of which it aims for the triumph of its principles and the means for revolutionary action.

The mobilisation of the class around the party to which it ‘confides’ or rather abandons leadership is a conception reflecting a state of immaturity in the class. Experience has shown that in such conditions the revolution will find it impossible to triumph and will quickly degenerate, resulting in a divorce between class and party. The latter would find itself forced to resort more and more to coercive methods to impose itself on the class and would end up as a redoubtable obstacle to the forward march of the revolution.

The party is not an organism of direction and execution – these are the functions that belong to the unitary organisation of the class. If militants of the party participate in these functions, it is as members of the great community of the proletariat”12

The emphasis on the councils – which the Italian Left of the 30s hesitated to generalise from the Russian experience - is also in contradiction with another weakness in the text: its expectation that the trade unions (or rather a renewed form of the trade unions) will play a key role in the defence of class autonomy in the transition period. This was based on the idea that the trade unions, despite their tendency towards bureaucratisation and entanglement with the bourgeois state, remained class organs. Again this idea would soon be dropped, partly in the light of direct experience of the class struggle (e.g. the Renault strike of 47) and partly, again, through debates with currents like the German-Dutch left who had been quicker to recognise that the unions had been irreversibly integrated into capitalism.

The GCF would never have seen their text as the last word on the problem of the period of transition. But the Theses are a shining example of the theoretical method needed to approach this and all other genuine questions: basing ourselves solidly on the acquisitions of the past, but ready to criticise and transcend those aspects of the work of our predecessors which have proved to be invalid or which history has left behind.

CDW

Theses on the Nature of the State and the Proletarian Revolution

1) The state appears in history as the expression of antagonistic interests which divide human society; it is the product and result of antagonistic economic relations. Although the state has played an active role in history, it is above all directly determined by the process of economic development.

It appears to stand above classes but in reality it is the juridical expression of the dominant economic system; it is the super-structure, the political dressing of the economic rule of a given class in society.

The economic relationships between men, the formation of classes, and the place they occupy in society are determined by the development of the productive forces at a given moment. The state’s only reason for being is to codify and sanction an already existing economic state of affairs, to give it a legal force which all members of society are obliged to accept. Thus, the state seeks to maintain an equilibrium, a stabilisation of the relations between classes, relations which flow from the economic process itself. At the same time the state seeks to prevent any attempt of the suppressed classes to put society into question by engaging in agitation and disturbances. Thus the state fulfils an important function in society, ensuring the security and order indispensable for the maintenance of production. But it can only do this through its essentially conservative character. In the course of history, the state has appeared as a CONSERVATIVE and REACTIONARY factor of the highest order, a fetter which the evolution and development of the productive forces has constantly had to confront.

2) In order to fulfil its dual role as an agent of security and an agent of reaction, the state bases itself on material force, on violence. Its authority resides in its coercive capacities. It posses an exclusive monopoly of all the existing forces of violence: police, army and prisons.

In the struggle between classes, the state, while being the representative of the ruling class, tends to develop a certain independence. As the bourgeoisie develops its national formations, its huge concentrated democratic and political units; as the antagonism between the classes reaches higher and higher levels; as the rivalry between the great capitalist states intensifies, the state is forced to develop its coercive forces to the very limit in order to maintain order. Internally it forces the proletariat and other labouring classes to put up with capitalist exploitation while formally and juridically recognising the freedom of the individual; externally it guarantees the frontiers of the area of economic exploitation against the greed of other capitalist groupings and enlarges them at the expense of other states.

Thus, in the decadent epoch of capitalism when the horizontal and vertical division of society and the struggles engendered by this division have reached a culminating point in human history, the state has also reached a zenith in its development as an organism of coercion and violence.

Having its origin in the historic necessity for violence (the use of coercion being the precondition of its growth), the state tends to resort independently to violence as a means of preserving its own existence. From being a means, violence becomes an end in itself, undertaken and cultivated by the state, which thus negates by its very nature any form of society which goes beyond violence as a way of regulating relations between men.

3) In the complexity of the contradictions which blossom and grow with the development of the capitalist economy, the state is constantly obliged to involve itself in every area of life: economic, social cultural, political; in the private life of each individual and in his relations with society on a local, national or world-wide scale.

In order to cope with its immense social obligations, the state has to call upon the services of an ever-growing mass of people, removing them from productive activity and creating a social spectrum apart, with its own interests, whose speciality and responsibility is the maintenance of the governmental state machine.

An important section of society (10% and perhaps more) thus constitutes an independent social stratum (politicians, the judiciary, the police and the army) with its own economic interests, living parasitically off society, their exclusive sphere of interest being the state apparatus.

This social stratum, beginning as servants of society in the hands of the ruling class, tends, because of its size and above all because of its place in society at the head of the state machinery, to free itself more and more and to put itself forward as the master of society, assimilating the ruling class into this tendency. It has an exclusive monopoly of the public finances, the right to dictate and interpret laws, and the material force of violence with which to apply these laws in its own interests.

Thus we can see the emergence of a new privileged social stratum which derives its material existence from the existence of the state, a parasitic and essentially reactionary stratum concerned with the perpetuation of the state, relatively independent, but always associated with the class whose economic system is based on the exploitation of man by man and whose main principle is the perpetuation of human exploitation and the protection of its economic and social privileges.

4) The development of technology and of the productive forces can no longer be imprisoned in the bourgeois principle of the private ownership of the means of production. Even capitalist production is obliged to violate the sacrosanct principle of private ownership and have recourse to the capitalist nationalisation of certain branches of the economy, such as the railways, the post, and to some extent aviation, the merchant marine, metallurgy and the mines. State intervention increasingly makes itself felt throughout the economy and this is obviously done to safeguard the capitalist system as a whole. Moreover, in the class struggle between conflicting forces in society, between classes and economic groupings, the state can only play its role as a representative, mediating force by supporting itself on a material, economic, independent, solid base.

In this historic evolution of capitalist society, the state takes on a new character, a new role – that of the state as boss. While maintaining and even accentuating its political functions, the capitalist state has evolved on the economic terrain towards state capitalism. Either the state levies part of the surplus-value generated in the sectors where private ownership of the means of production still exists, just like any other capital (bank or finance); or it directly exploits state-owned sectors as a single collective employer in order to create surplus value. This surplus value is shared out among the functionaries of the state (except for the part which is capitalised by being reinvested in production) according to the ranks and privileges they have obtained.

The economic tendency towards state capitalism, while being unable to reach complete socialisation and collectivisation within capitalist society, is nevertheless a very real tendency which, to some extent, frees the state from playing a strictly instrumental role and gives it a new economic character as a collective, anonymous employer which collectively extracts surplus-value.

Although the private ownership of the means of production was the fundamental basis of the economic system of capitalism and remains so today, it can, in the final phase of capitalism, undergo profound modifications without threatening the basic principles of capitalist economy. Far from signifying the end of the system, the more or less large-scale statification of the means of production is in perfect accord with the system and can even be the condition for the system’s survival, providing that the fundamental principle of capitalism still exists: that is to say the extraction of surplus value from the working class for the benefit of a powerful and privileged minority. The fundamental opposition between the capitalist economy and the socialist economy does not therefore reside in the private possession of the means of production. While socialism is incompatible with the private ownership of the means of production, the absence of private ownership (although an indispensible precondition for the creation of a socialist economy) is by no means in itself identical to socialism, since reality has demonstrated how capitalism can accommodate itself to the statification of the means of production by moving towards state capitalism.

The fundamental opposition between the capitalist economy and socialism is to be found:

1. in the motive force and aim of production. Under capitalism this is the quest for a greater and greater amount of surplus value; the aim of socialism, on the other hand, is the satisfaction of the needs of society and its members;

2. in the fact that under capitalism, in the immediate redistribution of the products and values created, a smaller and smaller fraction of the values created are given over to consumption, the largest part being reinvested in order to expand production. Under socialism an increasing proportion of the values created is immediately consumed by the producers. That part of the values produced which is directly consumable must tend to increase in relation to the part which is invested in production in order to contribute to the process of reproduction.

Thus, far from representing any weakening of capitalist society, the state’s growing tendency towards economic and political independence merely serves to transform the economic power of capitalism to the state by elevating the latter until it becomes the real seat of power in capitalism. In reaction to the proletariat and its historic mission of creating a socialist society, the capitalist state takes on the appearance of a Goliath. By its very nature the state represents the whole past history of humanity, of all the exploiting classes and reactionary forces in history. Its very character, as we have shown, being one of CONSERVATISM, VIOLENCE, BUREAUCRACY, THE DEFENCE OF PRIVILLEGES AND OF ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION, it is the incarnation of the principle of oppression and is irreconcilably opposed to the principle of liberation, incarnated by the proletariat and socialism.

5) Up until now all new classes have simply substituted their domination and privileges for that of other classes; the economic development of the new class unfolded slowly and over a long period prior to the establishment of its political hegemony. Because their economic interests (which coincided with the development of the productive forces) were the interests of a minority, of a single class, their power developed within the old society, first of all on the economic level. It is only after reaching a certain degree of economic development, after economically supplanting or partially absorbing the old ruling class, that the political power, ie the state and the juridical system, came to sanctify the new state of affairs. The bourgeoisie developed its economic domination over a long period, strengthening the power of merchant capital. It was only when the bourgeoisie had achieved its economic domination over the old feudal society that it carried out its political revolution. The bourgeois revolution had to break the resistance of feudalism and its ideological superstructure because feudal law had became a fetter on the development of the productive forces; but it did not destroy the state. Because the underlying principle of the state is the defence of exploitation of man by man, the bourgeoisie merely had to seize hold of the state machine and continue to use it in its own class interests. The revolutionary process in previous class societies was, thus, as follows:

a) the economic rise and strengthening of the new class within the old society;

b) its economic domination, a peaceful economic revolution;

c) a violent political revolution sanctifying the economic state of affairs;

d) the maintaining of the state apparatus in order to use it in the interests of the new class;

e) the gradual absorption of the old ruling classes who live on within the new ruling class.

6) However, unlike the other classes in history, the proletariat does not possess any wealth, any instrument of labour, any material property. It cannot build any economic system inside capitalist society. Its position as a revolutionary class resides in the objective evolution of society, which makes the existence of private property incompatible with the development of the productive forces, makes the continued production of surplus value an impossibility. Capitalist society is faced with an insufficient market for the realisation of the surplus value it creates. The objective necessity for a socialist society, insofar as socialism is the dialectical solution to the internal contradictions of the capitalist system, finds in the proletariat the only class whose interests coincide with the needs of historical evolution. This last class in history, possessing nothing, having no privileges to defend, complies with the historic necessity for the suppression of all privileges. The proletariat is the only class which can carry out this revolutionary task of suppressing every privilege, all private property, of liberating the productive forces from their capitalist fetters and developing them in the interests of humanity. The proletariat does not and cannot have any economic policy inside the capitalist system.

The proletariat has no class economy to set up before or after the revolution. In contrast to other classes, and for the first time in history, the revolution of the proletariat begins as a political revolution which precedes and creates the conditions for a social-economic transformation. The economic liberation of the proletariat is an economic liberation from the fetters of all class interests; it is the disappearance of all classes. The proletariat liberates itself by liberating the whole of humanity, by dissolving itself into the latter.

The state, the incarnation of class rule and economic oppression, cannot be conquered by the proletariat in the classic sense. On the contrary, the first step towards the proletariat’s emancipation is the revolutionary destruction of the state. Not having any economic power, nor any economic property, the proletariat draws its strength from the consciousness which it acquires from the objective historical laws of the economic process. Its strength lies exclusively in its CONSCIOUSNESS and its capacity for ORGANISATION. The class party, which crystallises the consciousness of the class, represents the indispensible precondition for the realisation of the proletariat’s historic mission, just as its unitary organs of struggle represent its practical material capacity for action.

Because other classes in history had economic power in society, they could more or less do without a party; they were themselves hardly conscious of where their actions were leading and they identified themselves with the state, the incarnation of privilege and oppression. But at every moment of its activity as a class, the proletariat comes up against the state – the proletariat is the historical antithesis of the state.

The conquest of the state by an EXPLOITING class in a given country marked the end of an historical process and was the last revolutionary act of that class. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE STATE by the proletariat is simply THE FIRST REVOLUTIONARY ACT OF THE CLASS, which opens the way for the proletariat and its party towards a whole revolutionary process, leading at first to the WORLD REVOLUTION and then on the economic terrain to the creation of a SOCIALIST SOCIETY.

7) There is a great historical gulf between, on the one hand, the level attained by the productive forces, which have entered into conflict with the capitalist system, and which have to go beyond the framework of that system and, on the other hand, the level of development necessary for the advent of socialist society, for the full satisfaction of the needs of everyone in society. This gulf cannot be wiped out by a simple programmatic declaration, as the anarchists believe, but must be bridged on the economic terrain by an economic policy, the economic policy of the proletariat. This is why theory posits the inevitability of a historic period of transition between capitalism and socialism – a transition period in which political power, and not economic power, is in the hands of the revolutionary class. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The development of the economic foundations of socialism is the political task of the proletariat and its party and cannot be undertaken on a national terrain, but only on a world-wide scale. Capitalism is a world system. The world domination of capital ensures that the economic development of the different sectors of the world economy and of different branches of industry can only take place within the limits imposed by the interests of capital.

In other words, the development of different sectors and branches of the world economy is being severely handicapped. Socialism, on the other hand, is based on a very high economic development of all sectors of the world economy. The liberation of the productive forces from their capitalist fetters by the proletarian revolution is, therefore, the first precondition for the economic evolution of society towards socialism.

The economic policy of the proletariat develops on the basis of the generalisation of the revolution onto the world scale; its content resides not in a one-sided affirmation of the development of production, but essentially in the establishment of a harmonious rhythm between the development of production and a proportional rise in the living standards of the producers.

The period of transition expresses an economic continuity with the pre-socialist epoch in the sense that it cannot yet satisfy all the needs of society and contains within it the necessity of continuing accumulation. But any policy which bases itself on the maximum accumulation in order to expand production has no proletarian content and is simply the continuation of the capitalist economy. There economic policy of the proletariat, therefore, is based on a necessary accumulation which is compatible with, and conditioned by, the improvement of the workers’ living standards, with a relative and progressive increase in variable capital.

After its victory over the bourgeoisie, the proletariat on the one hand becomes the politically dominant class, which with its class party assures its class dictatorship throughout the period of transition in order to lead society towards socialism; on the other hand, the proletariat remains a class in production which has particular immediate economic interests to defend and it must, therefore, continue to make these interests prevail through its own economic organisations – the unions – and its own methods of struggle – the strike – throughout the period of transition.

8) The revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state, the instrument of class domination, does not mean that the economic power of the enemy class has been destroyed or that it has disappeared. The expropriation and socialisation of the key sectors of production are the first, indispensible measures of the proletariat’s economic policy. The existence of backward sectors of the economy, particularly in agriculture, does not permit an immediate transition to a socialist economy or a total abolition of private property. Socialism cannot be built by mere decrees; it is the fruit of a long economic process in which the methods of socialism have to combat and defeat the methods of capitalism on an economic terrain.

The existence of these backward economic sectors, the inevitable survival of private property, represents a real danger: the soil of economic conservatism, of the consolidation and regeneration of those social forces which stand in the way of the movement towards socialism.

The period of transition is a period of bitter struggle between capitalism and socialism; in this struggle the proletariat will have the advantage of having won political power but this is not an automatic guarantee of its final victory.

The outcome of the struggle, the guarantee of the proletariat’s final victory resides exclusively in the strength of consciousness in the class and its ability to translate this consciousness into practical politics.

Any political mistake, any tactical error, will strengthen the position of the class enemy. The elimination of the political formations of the class enemy, of its organisations and press, is an indispensible measure for breaking its resistance. But this is not enough. The proletariat must above all safeguard the independence of its own class organisations, preventing them from being deformed by taking up tasks and functions which do not correspond to their real nature. The party, which represents the consciousness of the historic mission of the class and of its final goal, exercises the dictatorship in the name of the proletariat; the trade union, the unitary organ of the class which expresses its economic position and which has to defend the immediate interests of the class, must not identify with the state or become integrated into it.

9) The state, insofar as it is reconstituted after the revolution, expresses the immaturity of the conditions for a socialist society. It is the political superstructure of an economic base which is not yet socialist. By its nature it is opposed to and hostile towards socialism. Just as the period of transition is an historically inevitable stage which the proletariat has to go through, so the state is for the proletariat an unavoidable instrument of violence which it must use against the dispossessed classes, but with which it cannot indentify itself. “AND THE LEAST ONE CAN SAY IS THAT THE STATE IS A NECESSARY EVIL WHICH IS INHERITED BY THE PROLETARIAT IN ITS STRUGGLE FOR CLASS DOMINATION” (Engels, Preface to The Civil War in France).

As a social institution, the state set up after the victory of the proletarian insurrection remains alien and hostile to socialism.

Expropriation and nationalisation, the problems of managing the economy, the historic unpreparedness of the labouring classes and the proletariat to direct the economy, the need to have recourse to technical specialists, to men who come out of the ranks of the exploiting classes and their servants, the disastrous state of the economy following the civil war, all these are historical factors which will tend to strengthen the state machine and its fundamental characteristics of conservatism and coercion. The historic necessity for the proletariat to make use of the state must not lead to the fatal theoretical and political error of identifying this instrument with socialism. The state, like a prison, is not a symbol of socialism, nor of the class whose mission is to create it: the proletariat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, expressing the will of the revolutionary class to crush the resistance of the enemy and to ensure the movement towards a socialist society, also expresses its fundamental opposition to the idea of the proletarian nature of the state, the error of identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the utilisation by the proletariat of this instrument of coercion, the state.

10) When the proletariat becomes master of society through the victory of the revolution against the bourgeoisie, it will be faced with a social situation which is not yet ripe for socialism but which can only attain this ripeness under the proletariat’s leadership. In every sphere – economic, political, cultural, social – the proletariat will inherit remnants of nations and all kinds of backward superstructures, institutions and ideologies which the proletariat cannot abolish by a simple act of will. It will have to take them into account, to fight against them, to attenuate their most pernicious effects. Violence is not the essential means for doing this; it can only be used strictly in proportion to the violence used by the class enemy in order to crush him. Violence must absolutely and categorically be rejected in the relations between the proletariat and other labouring classes, and within itself. In a general way, the methods used to move towards socialism are closely related to the goal that is being sought after, in other words, to socialism itself.

In the beginning of the transition period, the proletariat will be forced to make use of instruments bequeathed to it by the whole past history of violence and class rule. The state is such an instrument; it is the very symbol of violence, plunder and oppression. The proletariat inherits this instrument and can only use it on the condition that:

1. it recognises and proclaims the anti-socialist nature of the state and at no time indentifies itself with it; it must constantly stand against the state with its own class organs, the party and the unions, ensuring that the state is under the perpetual vigilance and control of the whole class;

2. It attenuates the pernicious effects of the state as far as possible, as in the Paris Commune (Engels, Preface to The Civil War in France).

The Russian experience has amply vindicated Marx and Engels’ warnings concerning the dangers of the state and the need to take measures against these dangers.

These measures include: the working masses electing representatives who are revocable at any time; destruction of any armed force separate from the people and its replacement by the general armament of the proletariat and the toiling classes; the widest possible democracy for the working class and its organisations; vigilant and permanent control by the whole class over the functioning of the state; state functionaries to be paid no more than a workman’s wage. Such measures must cease to be mere formulae; they must be carried out to the letter and strengthened as far as possible by complementary social and political measures.

History and the Russian experience, in particular, have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist. If the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, the state will become the stronghold, the rallying point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a re-born capitalism.

THE TRADE UNIONS AFTER THE REVOLUTION

11) The trade unions, unitary organs for the defence of the proletariat’s economic interests, have their origins in the mechanisms of production. They arise out of the necessity for the proletariat to struggle against economic exploitation, against the extraction of an ever-growing mass of surplus value, i.e. an increase in unpaid labour-time.

By increasing productivity the development of technology diminishes the labour-time necessary for the reproduction of labour power. Under capitalism greater productivity does not tend to reduce labour-time nor create a proportional amelioration of the workers’ living standards. On the contrary, the capitalists’ search for greater productivity is carried out purely and simply to increase the production of surplus value.

The conflict between capital and labour, constant capital and variable capital, capitalism and the proletariat, is centred round an economic problem; the role of the two forces in production is based on a fundamental antagonism which gives rise to a continuous class struggle. In this struggle against capitalism, the proletariat organises for the defence of its immediate interests through an association of all those who are exploited: the trade union.

However much the trade unions have come under the influence of the agents of the bourgeoisie, i.e. the reformist bureaucracy, whose policies sabotage and deflect the role of the unions, they remain organs of the class as long as they maintain their independence from the capitalist state.

12) The proletarian revolution will not immediately do away with classes and with relations of production between different classes. The victorious revolution is simply “the organisation of the proletariat as the ruling class” which through its party opens up an historic path, an economic tendency which begins from the existence of classes and of exploitation and ends up in a classless society.

This period of transition between capitalism and socialism under the political dictatorship of the proletariat expresses itself on the economic terrain in an energetic policy which aims to diminish class exploitation, to constantly increase the proletariat’s share of the national income, to alter the relationship between variable and constant capital in favour of the former. This policy cannot simply be based on programmatic declarations of the party; still less is it the prerogative of the state, the organ of coercion and of management. This policy can only find a guarantee and a real expression in the working class itself, through the pressure which the class exerts over society, through its opposition to, and struggle against, all other classes.

Trade union organisation under capitalism represents a tendency towards the regroupment of the class against exploitation, which is constantly being held back and blocked by the influence and repression of the ruling bourgeoisie. It is only after the revolution that the trade union organisations will really become the unitary organs of the class, regrouping all the workers without exception. Only then will the unions really be able to undertake the defence of the proletariat’s immediate economic interests.

13) The role of trade union organisations after the revolution does not derive simply from the fact that they are the only organisations that can undertake the defence of the proletariat’s immediate interests, even though this in itself is enough justification for complete freedom and independence for the trade unions and for the rejection of any subordination or integration of the unions into the state. But more than this, the trade union organisations are an extremely sensitive living barometer which can quickly show whether the main trend in society is towards socialism (through the proportional increase of variable capital) or towards capitalism (through a much larger proportional growth of constant capital). When there is any oscillation in economic administration towards capitalist policies (as a result of economic pressures which come from immature conditions and from surviving non-proletarian classes), the proletariat, by means of its independent union and its specific struggles, will have to react and intervene thereby providing a social counterweight which will push economic policy back onto a socialist path.

To give trade unions the role of managing the economy will not eliminate the essential problems that arise out of this economic situation. This would not solve the difficulties which are engendered by a real lack of maturity in the economy, but such a role would deprive the proletariat and its organisations of their freedom. It would destroy the proletariat’s capacity to exert the pressure necessary both for the defence of its immediate interests and for guaranteeing a socialist policy for the economy.

14) Under capitalism, the trade unions provide a very imperfect reflection of the level of class consciousness. This consciousness can only be fully acquired by the proletariat after the revolution when it is free from all the shackles imposed on it by the bourgeoisie and its agents, the reformist leaders.

After the revolution, the trade unions will reflect much more clearly the level of consciousness that the whole class has reached and will provide a milieu for the political education of the masses. Communists draw their inspiration from the conception that that the defence of the revolution and the building of socialism cannot be achieved by the will of a small elite, but finds its strength only in the political maturity of the proletarian masses. Violence exerted against the proletarian masses, even if it aims at guaranteeing progress towards socialism, can in no way provide such a guarantee.

Socialism cannot be a rape of the proletariat, created against its will. Socialism can only be based on the consciousness and will of the working class. Communists reject all methods of violence within the proletariat because such methods stand in the way of any movement towards socialism, because they obstruct the class from attaining an understanding of its historic mission. Within the unions communists will fight for full freedom of expression and political criticism. It is among the proletariat organised in the unions that communists will fight for their political positions, against all the tendencies which reflect the persistence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois influences within the proletariat and within certain backward strata of the class. Freedom for fractions and tendencies within the unions, freedom of speech and of the press for all the currents inside the unions: these are the conditions which will enable the class party to recognise and evaluate the level of consciousness in the masses, to guarantee the movement towards socialism through the political education of the masses, to verify its own policies and correct them when necessary.

The relationship between party and class is simply the relationship between the party and the unions.

15) Any tendency to reduce the role of the trade unions after the revolution; any pretence that the existence of a ‘workers’ state’ means the end of freedom to engage in union activity or strikes; any advocacy of fusing the unions with the state through the theory of handing economic administration over to the unions, which seems revolutionary but which in fact leads to an incorporation of the unions into the state machine; any position which, however revolutionary in its intentions, calls for violence within the proletariat and its organisations; any attempt to stand in the way of the broadest workers’ democracy and the free-play of political struggle and of fractions within the unions: any such policies are anti-working class. They falsify the relationship between party and class and weaken the proletariat’s position during the transition period. The duty of communists will be to energetically denounce and fight against all these tendencies and to work for the full development and independence of the trade union movement, which is an indispensible condition for the victory of socialism.

MANAGEMENT OF THE ECONOMY

16) The management of the economy after the civil war is the most difficult and complex problem which the proletariat and its party will have to face. It would be puerile to try to provide a priori solutions to all the practical aspects of this problem. It would transform marxism into a system of rigid precepts, valid and applicable at any time regardless of the various concrete and circumstantial situations which could arise in different countries and sectors of the economy.

It is only through practical study that we will be able to find the necessary solutions to any situation that may arise. Following Marx and Engels, we can today only give a broad outline, provide the general principles of economic management during the transitional period, basing ourselves mainly on the experience of the Russian revolution.

17) The achievement of socialism demands a very advanced development of technology and of the productive forces. Following the victory of the revolution, the proletariat will not have a fully developed technology at its disposal. This is not because the revolution is premature; on the contrary, the development of the productive forces has reached its limit under capitalism. This fact justifies the assertion that the objective conditions for revolution are present. Capitalism has become a fetter on the development of the productive forces and must be destroyed. It is up to the proletariat to conduct a policy which will allow a full development of the productive forces so that socialism can become an economic reality.

The development of technology and of the productive forces is the basis of the economic policy of the proletariat. This requires an accumulation of part of the values produced in order to improve, intensify and ensure an expanded reproduction. But socialism is not simply a result of the speed with which the productive forces develop; the rhythm of the movement towards socialism will be subordinated to, and limited to, the concrete possibilities given by the real economic and political situation.

18) The management of the economy can at no time be separated from the development of the political struggle of the class, and this means on an international scale. A revolution that is victorious in one country cannot simply seek to develop its own economy, independently from the struggle of the proletariat in other countries. The Russian revolution has given us historic proof of the fact that the attempt to develop the economy in Russia outside of an ascendant movement of the revolution in other countries led Russia into a policy of compromises with world capitalism, a policy of external pacts and economic agreements and internal concessions. These compromises turned out to be just so many ways of economically propping up a capitalist system in open crisis, saving it from collapsing. But at the same time, these compromises had a deeply disturbing effect on a proletariat which was in the throes of a revolutionary struggle (the secret Rapallo Treaty of 1922 between the Soviet state and German militarism, for example).

The economic agreements which were aimed simply at achieving a partial strengthening of the country of the revolution in fact led to a political and economic reinforcement of capitalism, an overturn in the balance of class forces in favour of capitalism. Thus the country of the victorious revolution accentuated its isolation and lost its only ally, the only guarantee of its ultimate development: the international revolution. It ended up as a political and economic force diverted by the growing pressure of its historic enemy and was reabsorbed into the capitalist system.

The economic policy of the proletariat in one country cannot aim at the resolution of that country’s economic difficulties or the overcoming of underdevelopment within the narrow framework of one country. The future of that economy is indissolubly linked and directly subordinated to the development of the international revolution. Any internal economic policy must be of a provisional character and essentially aimed at helping the international revolution.

19) The Russian experience has also shown that the attempt to accelerate the rhythm of production beyond a proportionate development of consumption will lead to the production of goods destined for destruction. This is in line with the general tendency of world capitalism in its decadent phase which can only ensure the continuation of production by setting up a war economy.

Against this policy of speeding up industrial development as much as possible, of sacrificing the immediate interests of the proletariat in order to build a war economy, a genuine proletarian economic policy will be based on a rate of growth which is proportionate to the consumption requirements of the producers, and will therefore aim at the production of consumer goods immediately necessary for the satisfaction of workers’ needs.

Accumulation will not be based on the criterion of developing industry as quickly as possible, but will be fixed at a rate which is compatible with the progressive satisfaction of immediate needs. The fundamental principles of economic management will be the production of basic necessities, and the gradual harmonisation of the various branches of production, particularly between town and country, industry and agriculture.

20) As long as the productive forces have not reached a level of development which can do away with small-scale production in every branch of the economy, there can be no question of the complete and immediate disappearance of intermediary classes, of the artisans and small peasants.

After the revolution the proletariat will only be able to collectivise the developed and concentrated sectors of industry, the key industries: transport, banking, big landed property. It will expropriate the big bourgeoisie. But small private property will continue to exist and will only be abolished through a long economic process. Alongside the socialist sector of the economy there will still be a private sector of small producers. The economic relations between these sectors will probably take many forms, from socialist relations to co-operative ones and to the free exchange of commodities between the state and the small-holders and even between the individual, isolated producers themselves. Problems of production, of exchange prices, markets and money will also take many different forms. The economic policy of the proletariat will have to take this situation into account, rejecting bureaucratic violence as a way of regulating economic life and basing itself solely on the real possibilities of absorbing private production through the development of technology. It will aim at the elimination of private property and the isolated producer through the incorporation of these strata into the great family of the proletariat.

21) The management of economic and social life requires a centralised organism. The theory which would give each group of producers the task of managing their own enterprises is a reactionary petty bourgeois utopia. The development of technology requires the participation of the great mass of the workers, their cooperation in the productive process.

Production in each branch of the economy is linked to the whole of national and international production. It calls for the setting in motion of immense forces and for systematic planning, and only a centralised administration can ensure this. Otherwise one would have to transform each member and group of society into so many small proprietors, each with their own antagonistic interests, which would mean a return to the epoch of simple commodity production long since wiped out from history by the development of industry. Socialist society will engender its own organs of social and economic administration. In the period of transition, the function of economic management can only be undertaken by the political power which emerges from the revolution and which, under the control of the entire working population, will manage and direct the economy.

The broadest, most effective and most direct participation of all the workers at every level of the new power will be the only way of ensuring that the economy is under the management of the workers themselves. The Paris Commune gave us the first example of this new kind of state, while the Russian revolution reaffirmed this first attempt and gave it its definitive form in the organs of representation of all the workers at their workplace and in their localities: the councils or soviets.

22) Everyone who works will participate in the elections to organs of direction and management. Only those who do not work or who live off the labour of others will be excluded. The interests of all the working masses will be expressed in the councils, including those of the non-proletarian strata. The proletariat, because of its consciousness, its political strength, the place it occupies at the industrial heart of the economy, because of its concentration in the towns and factories, having acquired a sense of organisation and discipline, will play a preponderant role in the whole life and activity of the councils and will give leadership and direction to the other strata of the labouring population.

In the councils, the proletarians will for the first time learn the art of administering society for themselves. The party will not impose its economic policies on the councils through decrees or by claiming some divine right. It will have to make its conceptions and policies prevail by proposing them, defending them, and submitting them to the approval of the masses organised in the councils or soviets, relying on the councils of workers and on the workers’ delegates to the central councils to bring its class policies to a successful conclusion.

23) Just as the relationship between party and class is expressed through the trade unions, so the relationship the proletariat and its party have with other labouring classes is expressed through the councils or soviets. Just as violence within the class can only falsify its relationship with the party, so there must be a rejection of violence in the relations between the proletariat and the other labouring classes and strata. These relations must be based on full freedom of expression and criticism within the councils of workers’ and peasants’ delegates.

In a general sense, violence as a method of activity in the hands of the proletariat will be indispensable for destroying the rule of capitalism and its state, and for guaranteeing the victory of the proletariat against the resistance and violence of the counter-revolutionary classes during the civil war. But apart from this, violence can play no part in the constructive task of building socialism. On the contrary, it contains the risk of deviating the proletariat’s activity, of falsifying its relationship with other labouring strata, and of distorting its capacity to find class solutions to the problems which confront it, solutions which can only be based on the development of the political maturity of the masses.

Gauche Communiste de France.

First published in Internationalisme, no 9 (April 1946). Reprinted in Bulletin d’Etudes et de discussion of Révolution Internationale, no.1 and first published in English in the ICC pamphlet The period of transition from capitalism to socialism