A year after the invasion of Iraq was launched, those who openly justified the war are looking more and more exposed.

Not only have the weapons of mass destruction not been found, it has become increasingly clear that the evidence for their existence offered by governments and intelligence services was no more than a tissue of lies, Hutton's attempted cover-up or other bogus 'inquiries' notwithstanding.

Not only has evidence for Saddam's links to Al-Qaida and the September 11 attacks prior to the war not been forthcoming, the war has actually opened the doors of Iraq to international terrorist groups like Al-Qaida, which are now merging with the home-grown 'resistance' forces operating against the occupying armies.

Not only has the war failed to bring prosperity, stability, democracy or even electricity to the Iraqi population, its balance sheet has been horrifying: up to 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed, tens more thousands of Iraqi conscripts, a growing death toll among the Coalition troops, rampant crime, daily acts of terrorism which are increasingly hitting Iraqi civilians.In short, the brutal regime of Saddam has been replaced by an equally brutal and demoralising state of chaos, a quagmire in which peace and stability have become impossible dreams.

The picture is very similar in Afghanistan, which is currently getting very little publicity in the international media. The Taliban have gone from Kabul but continue to resist in their strongholds further south; the murderous warlords whom they replaced in the 90s have re-established their fiefdoms in most of the remaining areas of the country; the oppression of women by the Taliban has been maintained by the same warlords. As in Iraq, attempts to graft a democratic façade over this mess have been an abject failure.

In his response to Clare Short's revelations about British intelligence spying on Kofi Annan, Blair declared that she was being "totally irresponsible". In reality, the military actions carried out by the Blair and Bush governments reveal the depth of irresponsibility of the entire capitalist class today. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not fought to free the people of those countries, nor to make the world safer from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, but for the military/strategic interests of the world's leading power. The defence of these interests requires the US to impose its authority in the oil-rich Middle East and in Central Asia, to squeeze its main imperialist rivals out of these areas, and, ultimately, to build a ring of steel around both Russia and Europe; it requires, in short, the US to protect its global domination from the threat of the emergence of a new superpower. And to achieve these entirely sordid ends, the US bourgeoisie has made full use of its own arsenal of mass destruction against much weaker states, leaving a trail of death and chaos in its wake. The Blair faction of the British ruling class decided that it was in Britain's best imperialist interests to tail-end the US war-effort, even if other factions (represented by the likes of Short and Robin Cook) are enraged at this, because for them it would be more in Britain's interests to pursue a more 'independent' line vis-à-vis the USA.

But whatever the disagreements there may be within the ruling capitalist class, they can only be over the best tactics to employ in the defence of the national economy and the nation state. And ever since 1914 it has been plain that the defence of the nation means imperialism - policies of war and domination directed against other nations or blocs of nations, policies from which no nation, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, can hold aloof. Thus every nation state, every faction of the capitalist class, for whom 'responsibility' to the national interest is the highest ideal, must be an advocate of imperialism and war, whatever the language they may use at a particular moment. In the build-up towards the invasion of Iraq, France and Germany had to speak the language of peace to defend their interests against those of the USA. It didn't make them any less imperialist. Similarly Cook and Short were only 'pacifists' faced with the Iraq war; they had been openly bellicose war-mongers during the attacks on Serbia in 1999 or Afghanistan in 2001.

The world war of 1914-18 provided the first historical proof that the bourgeoisie was no longer fit to rule human society. The world war of 1939-45 and the long-drawn out period of wars that has followed it amply confirm this. Capitalism has reached a stage in its existence when it lives for war and by war. And in the epoch of imperialism, there are no 'progressive' wars, no wars justified by the need to expand the world market and develop the productive forces. In the epoch of capitalist decay, every war is an expression of that decay and an active factor in its acceleration. The negative balance sheet of the 'war against terrorism' demonstrates this once again. Since the collapse of the USSR, the USA has been faced with the necessity to make use of its vast military superiority to impose its will on a 'multi-polar' world where its former allies have become its principal rivals. But every attempt to intimidate these challengers brings not a Pax Americana, not a world where everyone quietly recognises who's boss, but a world where anti-Americanism has become the ideological bread and butter of more and more states, more and more political factions. A chaotic world where the spread of wars both external and internal have made the Cold War period look stable and harmonious in comparison.

Opposition to war means class struggle, not pacifism!

Left to itself, this spiralling nightmare of chaos and war can only overwhelm humanity. But if capitalism has no future to offer, it has created a force which does: the class which it exploits and which produces the essential wealth of society. The working class has no national interest to defend. It is fundamentally antagonistic to the interests of the national economy which 'grows' on the soil of its exploitation; and thus it is no less fundamentally antagonistic to the war-drive of each national ruling class, which is fuelled by its sacrifices at home and on the battlefronts. History has proved that the more the working class raises the stakes of its struggle against exploitation, the harder it is for the ruling class to wage war. In 1917-18 workers' strikes and uprisings brought the world butchery to an end; in 1939, the ruling class was able to drag humanity into another slaughter because it had defeated the first attempts of the working class to get rid of this system once and for all.

In the last year, the world scene has been dominated by war and rumours of war. But after a long period of relative peace on the social front, there have been visible signs of another war brewing - the class war. In France last spring, in Italy, in Spain, Austria, in Britain, even in America, there has been a revival of workers' strikes and demonstrations, giving the lie to the propaganda about the 'end of the class struggle' that has helped to confuse and disorient workers over the past decade and more. These movements are not directly a response to the capitalist war-drive but to a growing series of economic attacks on jobs, wages, pensions and other benefits. But for that very reason they contain the seeds of a wider struggle against capitalism which will inevitably lead workers to reject any enrolment in imperialist war.

There are no short-cuts to this, but there are many diversions. Principal among them is the whole 'Stop the War' carnival which pretends that imperialist war can be halted by a democratic and peaceful alliance of all classes and all decent-minded people. Pacifism has never stopped wars; on the contrary it has prepared the ground for them by helping to spread the deadly illusion that you can have world peace without the world wide overthrow of the bourgeoisie. And the worst part of this illusion is the idea that some parts of the ruling class, some countries or regimes, are really in favour of peace against a minority of war-mongers. In the build up to the Iraq war, the 'peace movement' acted as a direct instrument of the imperialist policies of countries like France and Germany or of the bourgeois cliques opposed to the Bush/Blair line.

The only real struggle against imperialist war is the international class war!

WR, 28/2/04.

Tony Blair and his political allies hoped that the Hutton report would 'draw a line' under all the arguments over the war on Iraq. This did not happen. Critics of Blair's policy of more sustained and closer relations with the US were angered by Hutton's 'whitewash'. Positions are now more strongly polarised and contested. More questions are being asked. More new material is being produced. The Butler inquiry into intelligence matters will provide another arena for opponents of the government's line to continue their combat. There was the well publicised collapse of the court case over the revelation by a secret service employee that the US had asked for British help in spying on certain delegations at the UN prior to the war. Clare Short then detonated her 'bombshell' that Britain eavesdropped on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. By the time you read this there will almost certainly have been further stages in this conflict within the ruling class, flak from Blair's critics, counter-attacks from the government and its friends.

It is necessary to put this in a historical context. From the end of the Second World War to the end of the 1980s the imperialist policy of the British bourgeoisie was mainly determined by the need to play its role in the bloc dominated by the US in the 45-year Cold War confrontation with the Russian bloc. British capitalism had plenty of frustrations with the way that the US treated it - most notably with the way its 1956 action over Suez was subject to US sabotage - but throughout the period the British bourgeoisie was broadly united in accepting the 'special relationship' on American terms. With the collapse of the Russian bloc there was no basis for keeping to the discipline of the western bloc. Since then the central fraction of the British bourgeoisie has tried to maintain an imperialist orientation that is not too tied up with, and therefore overwhelmed by any of the other major imperialisms. This is not accepted by all the ruling class as some - a lot of the Tory party, the Murdoch media - want to strengthen links with the US and distance Britain from European powers such as Germany and France. It is the continuing concessions that Blair has made to the 'pro-US' position which have so alarmed the central faction of the bourgeoisie and provoked the most serious political crisis of the British bourgeoisie since the 1930s.

The policy of appeasement - British imperialism manoeuvring to establish an international framework which might restrain the advances of German imperialism, making concessions if they could be justified in Britain's long term interests - this was the policy of the main part of the British bourgeoisie. In the mid-1930s Churchill was in a minority, crying in the wilderness. His attitude was seen as rash and reckless. After more than a decade of denouncing Russia as 'Bolshevik' he thought they should be included in a 'Grand Alliance' against Germany, as Russia had become "an asset to the cause of peace". As for the Labour party (and even those further to the left) Churchill was prepared to provide "protection" for "their ideas" in "return for their aid in the rearmament of Britain". At one point Churchill even said that he "would speak on every socialist platform in the country against the Government". There was talk about a coalition government led by Churchill and Eden with Labour and Liberal ministers. It came to nothing, not just because the likes of Churchill and Lloyd George were rejected as political adventurers by leading figures in the bourgeoisie, but because the policy of appeasement was still seen as the best way to defend British interests. The conflict over imperialist policy continued for years. It only began to be resolved in March 1939 with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia which prompted a crash acceleration in Britain's defence programme. Even then Churchill didn't become Prime Minister until May 1940, and there were still differences on Britain negotiating a separate peace with Germany.

The present crisis within the British bourgeoisie shows no immediate prospect of being resolved. Following the Hutton report the Blair faction has even less credibility, the bourgeoisie is even more clearly divided. The arguments might focus on whether David Kelly really killed himself, or on the existence of 'weapons of mass destruction' - but the conflict within the ruling class is ultimately concerned with the nature of Britain's relationship with the US. Growth of anti-Americanism

The question of 'weapons of mass destruction' would not be an issue if the bourgeoisie was united. Iraq's possession of materials for chemical and biological warfare was no obstacle to British support for Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. But with a divided bourgeoisie anything can become contentious. In the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq the faction round Blair was prepared to play a role in the US's 'war on terrorism'. This has taken place while Blair still talks of Britain being a 'bridge' between Europe and America, but that has not satisfied the government's critics.

The central faction of the bourgeoisie accepts that alliances with other powers will sometimes be necessary, but that these will tend to be only temporary coalitions. In the relationship with the US the British bourgeoisie is wary of losing the capacity to defend its own particular interests. For example, it is possible to see how British imperialism gains from having a military presence in Afghanistan or Iraq, but this gain is diminished if British forces are restricted to acting within the framework of American strategy.

Rather than explicitly spelling out the raw selfish national interests that the bourgeoisie want to defend, a part of the ruling class is increasingly embracing anti-Americanism.

We are treated to a vision of the US as a lethal leviathan lead by a right-wing idiot. America is the country that is developing tactical nuclear weapons while demanding that others give up WMDs; it refuses to sign up to or take seriously environmental agreements as it pollutes the world; it has no plan for dealing with the chaos in Iraq; it has a military presence in 130 countries and is responsible for 40% of the world's military spending. Look at all the publicity over Guantanamo Bay. This is portrayed as uniquely 'unjust' and contrary to the 'rule of law'. When asked in Germany whether the US was bound by any international system, legal framework or code of conduct, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld replied "I honestly believe that every country ought to do what it wants to do ... It either is proud of itself afterwards, or it is less proud of itself". Commentators in Britain have said that this is a terrible admission from the US that it will do what it likes - shooting first and asking questions afterwards - regardless of the views of the rest of the 'international community'.

There is also the anti-Americanism that focuses on the way that the US government treats its 'own' people - like the 29,000 American troops that have been killed, wounded, injured or become so ill as to require evacuation from Iraq. This is where the unusually generous coverage in the British media of the US primaries and caucuses comes in to play. The emergence of John Kerry - a 'man with a conscience' - is contrasted with the brutality of Bush, the man who as Governor of Texas executed more people (152) than any in modern US history.

At the moment a lot of the British media is devoted to disparaging the weight of US influence internationally, as a way of discrediting those policies of Blair that seem to sacrifice British imperialism's position through too close association with the US. For example, the British government has been perceived as being less vocal than other governments in its protests at the detention of British citizens in Camp Delta. The bourgeois critics care no more for the detainees than the government does, but their plight is another anti-American stick to hit it with. Britain as a 'bridge'

Media coverage of the recent summit between Chirac, Schroeder and Blair showed how the divisions within the British bourgeoisie operate. The faction that favours closer links with the US chose to focus on Chirac's affirmation of the importance of Franco-German relations, thereby trying to undermine any significance for British participation in European schemes. Meanwhile, British involvement in European projects continues to grow. The blueprint for a 60,000 strong European rapid reaction force was first laid out in 1998. There have been difficulties in this original idea being taken up, so Britain, France and Germany are now going to create 1500-strong battle groups capable of being deployed in 15 days, which will be used as commando forces for missions "appropriate for, but not limited to, use in failed or failing states". There are also advanced plans for a joint aircraft carrier.

This military co-operation is evidence that Britain has not turned its back on Europe. As for Chirac's remarks about relations with Germany, this partly reflects French concerns that Germany is edging closer to Britain. German imperialism, after all, has no interests in Anglo-American relations becoming closer. Some critics of Blair also highlighted Chirac's remarks, as a way of suggesting that Britain was being pushed to the periphery of European developments.

The idea of Britain as a 'bridge' between the US and Europe has not been abandoned by Blair. However, there are still great suspicions in parts of the ruling class that the Prime Minister has forgotten the importance of maintaining an independent imperialist orientation. The arguments are not going away. Bourgeois unity in democracy

The Hutton report has not strengthened the position of the Blair faction. The Butler inquiry will also be a battleground for different factions. However, this intra-bourgeois dispute has not hampered the ruling class's ability to use its divisions for ideological purposes.

For instance, calls for new inquiries feed the illusion that somehow there are figures capable of conducting investigations with their only goal being the disinterested uncovering of truth. In reality, all the inquiries are entirely within the framework of bourgeois politics. Or take the example of the intelligence services. Critics of Blair say that intelligence was perverted for political ends, as if the secret state wasn't an integral part of the bourgeoisie's apparatus of repression, which only exists to serve the needs of the ruling class.

The inquiries and the intelligence services are used in the conflicts within the bourgeoisie. They are integral parts of the democratic state, and, as such, they are supposed to be respected by the whole population, rather than seen as the tools of our exploiters.

The working class must become conscious of the way that the bourgeoisie functions, of the way that, even when it's divided and going through an internal political conflict, it can still act against workers' interests. It must also be aware of the way democracy is used as one of the state's main weapons against workers' struggles.

Car, 26/02/04.

The World Social Forum, that has so far met annually in Porto Alegre, Brazil, this year met at Mumbai, India between Jan 16 and 21, 2004. The WSF at Mumbai was no different from other such gatherings. It had all the trappings of a gigantic fair (it was held at National Exhibitions Grounds, a venue of Trade Fairs) with pronounced 'ethnic' and 'tribal' flavour. The show was definitely big - nearly 80000 people from 132 countries are supposed to have participated in 1200 events around the WSF. Even more are supposed to have joined the Anti-American rally on 21st Jan 2004 at the end of the WSF.

We have often shown that the world bourgeoisie did everything it could to hit the consciousness of working class following the collapse of the stalinist bourgeoisie in the former Soviet Union. It tried to extinguish any thought of destroying the capitalist system. 'There is no alternative to the market economy', the ideologues of capital hammered day in and out. This lying propaganda did not go without its impact. But with deepening crises, spreading misery and more and more genocidal wars, this propaganda has become increasingly exposed. This has allowed the working class to recover the path of class combat and to start a process of questioning of the capitalist system. It has also provoked worldwide anger against the war mongering of the imperialist gangsters.

The bourgeoisie has taken note of this fermentation among the proletariat. It has set about building new instruments of mystification to contain this emerging process. Gatherings like the WSF and its offshoot the European Social Forum, with their sham 'alternatives', have emerged as an important tool of the bourgeoisie to contain the working class and also as a tool of inter-imperialist rivalries. The bourgeois media the world over have done everything possible to build up the WSF.

Long before WSF 2004 began, the bourgeois media in India, following in the footsteps of their western counterparts, was propagating its virtues. Indian press and TV sympathetically covered the events. Indian trade and industry accorded it 'due respect' as a legitimate expression of 'dissent'. Success of the WSF in Mumbai was further assured by the sympathy of the Congress - erstwhile ruling party of India, currently the ruling party in Mumbai - and the participation of the party of the dalit (lower-caste) bourgeoisie: the Republican Party, coalition partners of Congress in Mumbai. Some major events were chaired by top Indian politicians known for their links with 'lower castes' - VP Singh, the ex-Prime Minister of India famous for triggering caste clashes as a means of strengthening the Indian state, and R. K. Naryanan, the ex-President of India.

But the main organisers in India were the biggest Stalinist parties - the CPI (M) and CPI. They mobilised the nation-wide apparatus of their front organisations. The Mumbai office of the WSF was housed in a stalinist building in 'Leningrad Square'. The youth wings of the stalinist parties provided volunteers to the WSF. Stalinist intellectuals adorned the stages at many events at the WSF.

Also present at WSF Mumbai were a large number of NGOs who provide ideological cover for the state's attack on social wages. And there were the regular international personalities: from Le Monde Diplomatique, leader of the French farmers Jose Bove, Labour MPs Clare Short and Jeremy Corbin, Winnie Mandela et al.

WSF Mumbai took up all the well-known chants of 'alternative worldism'. There were 'events' on fair trade, citizens' democracy, corporate governance and many more. Indian flavour, to meet the needs of Indian Stalinists and the dalit bourgeoisie, was provided by 'Anti-Communalism' and 'dalit emancipation'.

But the main focus of the WSF show at Mumbai was imperialism or, in the words of Maoists, 'Imperialist Globalisation'. Anti-imperialism at the WSF boiled down to Anti-Americanism. With slogans like 'US Quit Iraq', 'Bush Quit Afghanistan', the closing WSF rally joined the chorus of America's imperialist rivals. There was no denunciation of other imperialist gangsters like France, Germany, Russia or China, not to mention that local imperialist gangster, the Indian state.

The WSF was of course the biggest show, but, mirroring the spectacle in Paris in November 2003, where the anarchists held a libertarian alternative to the ESF, two parallel shows were organised during this period by rival Maoist groups.

Held in the Veterinary College Grounds, in front of the WSF Venue, Mumbai Resistance 2004 (MR-2004) was second in size. It was held at the initiation of ILPS, an international umbrella of Maoist Groups and their camp followers from different countries including Turkey, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Britain and Greece. MR considers itself not as the opponent of the WSF but parallel to it. Many of the personalities, specially the Indian ones, e.g. Arunditi Roy, Nandita Das, Vandana Shiva and others spoke both from WSF and MR platforms.

The central theme of MR-2004 was the same as that of the WSF. They too thundered against American Imperialism, no doubt with more vehemence. Again there was no discussion of the imperialist appetites of America's rivals, least of all those of the Indian bourgeoisie. All the Maoist rhetoric only provided radical cover to the anti-Americanism of the WSF.

A third, smaller 'Convention Against Imperialist Globalisation', lasting three days, was held a short distance away from the venues of WSF and MR. It was organised by another of the many Maoist Groups (New Democracy). Apart from other obscure differences between MR and this third convention, it was purely local with a solitary German soul providing the international touch. The ICC's intervention: defending internationalism

The ICC intervened in all these three parallel events. Like the ICC intervention at the ESF in Paris in November, our objective was not to intervene in the well-managed conferences. Rather ICC members and sympathisers from different parts of India intervened through leaflets and sales of our publications (almost five hundred publications were sold). Also, during our interventions we carried on hundreds of discussions around the events.

Some of the questions that came up repeatedly during these discussions were:

• the idea of fair trade, globalisation and anti-globalisation;
• which other world is possible;
• is America the only imperialist power;
• the nature of the Maoist 'alternatives'.

We insisted that there can be nothing fair about trade, free or protected. It has always been and always will be tilted in favour of the more powerful capitalists or capitalist states. Also, the ICC pointed out that the global character of capitalism is not a new thing. Capitalism has been pushing to become a global system since its inceptions and by the end of the 19th century it had already incorporated the entire planet. While writing the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx and Engels already brought out the international nature of the capitalist system. They insisted that the proletarian revolution destroying capitalism can only be a world revolution. Today, in the period of capitalist decadence and decomposition, it is not for the proletariat to defend national particularities against the global nature of the capitalist system. Rather, its task is to destroy this system on a planetary scale, along with its framework of nation states, and to replace it with a worldwide communist community. All talk of fair trade or anti-globalisation and 'another world is possible', without a communist perspective, is a reformist myth aiming to arrest the development of consciousness within the working class.

On imperialism, we underlined that it is not a characteristic of this or that nation, this or that faction of the bourgeoisie. Today, capitalism exists as imperialism with the result that all nations are imperialist. All nations, big or small, are driven by the same imperialist appetites - only their capacity to satisfy these is different. The British ruling class seemingly acting as a poodle to US, or the US bourgeoisie kicking the ass of nations like France, Germany, Russia, China or for that matter Pakistan, Iraq or India, does not make these countries non-imperialist. In a world governed by the law of the underworld, these other countries are only lesser gangsters who have to pursue their imperialist appetites within the limits violently imposed by the top dog, the US bourgeoisie. It is not the task of the working class to play the game of lesser imperialisms against the US, as is being done by WSF, MR and others.

The Maoist 'alternatives' are the opposite of what proletarian politics has always stood for: internationalism. At the apogee of capitalism, in 1871, when in their view German nationalism was still progressive, Marx and Engels took an internationalist position in the Franco-Prussian War. German Socialists went to jail for refusing to endorse national defence. During the First World War, communists defended the slogan 'turn the imperialist war into a civil war'. Lenin above all waged a bitter and ruthless struggle against the patriotic treason of Kautsky et al. Unlike marxists, who have always made internationalism the cornerstone of their politics, Maoists and Stalinists proclaim their patriotism from the rooftops. This is quite in keeping with their class nature - they are the perfect defenders of the personification of national capital, the nation state. The theory of 'India Mortgaged' (or for that matter the Turkey, Iran, Syria or South Africa 'mortgaged' of respective Maoists) ties the working class to the yoke of national capital.

Maoism tells the working class of the 'third world' countries - don't fight for the destruction of the capitalist system and its national apparatus. Instead die for your nation state - as it has been 'mortgaged'. Against all this we insisted that the task of the working class everywhere is to fight for the destruction of capitalism in all countries and work for the setting up of a classless, moneyless society based on the elimination of nation states.

Am, 31/01/04.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is 100 years old this year. Formed in June 1904 it has maintained the same platform through wars, revolution and recession, it continues to attract the interest of people who are looking for an alternative to capitalism and who have rejected the distortions of socialism offered by bourgeois currents like Stalinism and Trotskyism. The question we have to ask, however, is whether this group genuinely offers a positive way forward for those proletarian minorities searching for a revolutionary critique of the present system. In order to provide a serious answer to this question, we need to place the SPGB in its historical context - to understand its place in the history of the workers' movement and to provide an analysis of what it represents today.

Prehistory

The origins of the SPGB lie in the struggle that took place within the Second International between the revisionist and revolutionary tendencies in the years around the start of the twentieth century. This struggle was taken up by the left of the workers' movement and is particularly associated with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. At the Paris Congress of the International, held in 1900, the majority of the British delegation supported a resolution proposed by Kautsky which, while opposing the participation of socialists in bourgeois governments in principle, allowed the participation of the French socialist Millerand in the government of Waldeck-Rousseau in practice. This government included General Gallifet who had been responsible for the massacre of 20,000 communards after the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1870. The resolution, which Iskra called the 'india-rubber resolution', was opposed by the representatives of the left of Social Democracy, including a single British delegate, George Yates, a member of the Social Democratic Federation. Following the congress Yates took a leading role in the struggle within the SDF between the leadership and the faction that was dubbed the 'impossibilists'.

The particular situation in Britain was marked by the failure of attempts over the preceding twenty years to create a real proletarian party [1]. Engels had analysed the development of conditions in Britain in some detail and argued that the deterioration of Britain's economic supremacy, and the consequent worsening of the situation of the working class, would produce conditions favourable for the return of socialism, and a socialist political organisation, to Britain. However, while a number of organisations were created none was able to accomplish this task.

The SDF and the Socialist League that split from it were never able to overcome the stage of circle functioning. The SDF, under the leadership of the adventurer H. M. Hyndeman (more than one revolutionary suggested he might actually be an agent of the state) sought to control and manipulate the workers' movement and opposed the spread of marxism, despite Hyndeman's fiery verbal adherence to it. It was frequently hostile to strikes, which it denounced as futile, and preferred to orchestrate demonstrations and riots of the unemployed. At the international level it supported the possibilist congress against the marxist one that established the Second International [2]. Hyndeman conducted a campaign of slander against Marx, whose work he had plagiarised, and attacked Engels and made accusations against Eleanor Marx and others in the internal struggle that led to the split which produced the Socialist League. He also spread nationalist, anti-German and anti-Semitic poison within the workers movement.

The Socialist League rejected nationalism and supported the creation of the International. It initially received the support of Engels and included Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax, William Morris and other marxists in its membership. However, under the weight of a strong anarchist element, it was unable to escape from a sterile purism that rejected participation in parliament and the struggle for reforms. No decisive combat was waged against the anarchists, partly because they were already so strong, but also because some of the leaders, notably William Morris, didn't understand the danger they posed until too late. By the early 1890s the League had been destroyed, and was used by the anarchists, with the assistance of police spies and agent provocateurs, to throw discredit on the revolutionary movement.

The Independent Labour Party, founded in 1893, seemed to be based on much more solid foundations and was hailed by Engels as the basis for the creation of a genuine workers' party. Again, marxists took an active part in its early years (Aveling was on the executive), but this time confronted not the anarchists, but the reformist weight of the unions, assisted by the Fabians, which eventually emptied it of all revolutionary content, turning it simply into the seed-bed for the Labour Party.

Thus, by the turn of the century, the working class movement in Britain was divided between a small revolutionary current, trapped in dogmatism and weakened by the parasitic manoeuvres of Hyndeman, and a far larger reformist current, dominated by active anti-marxists in the unions and the Fabian Society and increasingly led by careerists such as Ramsay MacDonald and Phillip Snowden. For the revolutionary current to fight effectively against reformism it would first have to break from the circle and sectarian mode of functioning inculcated by the SDF.

The 'impossibilists' in the SDF

The authoritarianism of Hyndeman and the sectarianism of the SDF's programme and practice ensured that it never really made contact with the working class and produced dissension and, more frequently, demoralisation within the membership. Although the SDF never had more than a few thousand members (and these figures were frequently inflated), vast numbers of people passed through its ranks (Bernstein gives a figure of over a hundred thousand; Hyndeman himself spoke of a million - Kendall, The revolutionary movement in Britain 1900-21, p323). While some may have gained an education in socialism as Hyndeman claimed, the vast majority were more likely to have been lost to the revolutionary cause and driven into the arms of reformism or complete inactivity.

The minority who attempted to fight the control of the Hyndeman clique frequently tended to take up even more absolutist positions than the official policy, for example opposing the unity discussions with the ILP in the mid to late 1890s, although they also attacked the personal control exercised by Hyndeman through his domination of the Executive and the SDF's publications (they were produced by a private publishing company owned by Hyndeman). They also challenged the xenophobic and anti-Semitic way in which the SDF initially opposed the Boer war and its subsequent tacit support for a British victory.

From the late 1890s on, the opposition, who were dubbed 'impossibilists', gained ground in Scotland, taking control of the Scottish Executive Council, and to a lesser extent in London.

The elements in Scotland and London both opposed the negotiations with the ILP, the support given to the Kautsky Resolution and Hyndeman's control of the press. However, those in Scotland were distinguished by their more internationalist orientation and greater concern for the organisational question. Specifically, they were strongly influenced by De Leon and the American Socialist Labor Party, whose paper Weekly People was widely sold, and by James Connolly. They stressed the central role of the industrial struggle and the necessity for a strong revolutionary organisation to act as the vanguard of the class struggle.

Attempts by the impossibilists to develop the debate in the SDF's journal Justice were suppressed by the Executive, leading the Scottish elements first to have their positions published in the Weekly People and subsequently to launch their own paper The Socialist. The struggle developed at the SDF conferences between 1901 and 1903. In 1901 the impossibilists were defeated in attempts to repudiate the delegation's support for the Kautsky resolution, to remove Justice from Hyndeman's control and to abandon discussions with the ILP. The following year attempts to have a verbatim report of the conference, to end talks with the ILP and to create socialist trade unions were also defeated. At the 1903 conference Yates and other Scottish delegates were expelled. Immediately afterwards the Scottish Divisional Council disaffiliated from the SDF and two months later (June 1903) the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was created.

The impossibilists in London refused to join those in Scotland, preferring to continue to try to change the SDF from within and accusing the Scottish elements of not informing them of their plans and of provoking the expulsions with attacks on the Executive. They also opposed the emphasis on industrial action, giving central importance to the electoral struggle. Alongside this were personal animosities and feuds. The London impossibilists accused their Scottish comrades of being undemocratic and their leading figure, Fitzgerald, was unwilling to give up his pre-eminent position. However, after the expulsion of Fitzgerald and another London impossibilist a few months later, they too left the SDF to set up their own organisation, founding The Socialist Party of Great Britain in June 1904.

The two new parties emerged in a particularly demanding period. At the global level, capitalism was entering the transition from its period of ascendance to its decadence. This presented the entire workers' movement with immense theoretical and practical challenges. One response to this was the theoretical works of Lenin and Luxemburg and the fight they led against various forms of opportunism. It is not possible to present our analysis of these developments here and we refer readers to the various publications of the ICC (for example, the articles in the series "Communism is not just a 'nice idea'" in IR 86 and 88). The SPGB and SLP also faced the particular situation in Britain with its legacy of the failures of the previous decades and the enormous weight of reformism on the movement in Britain. At the heart of the problems they faced was a failure to fully grasp the marxist understanding of how consciousness develops in the working class. The same difficulty could be seen in the Socialist League, which opposed any support for reforms and opposed participation in elections, thereby failing to understand the relationship between the immediate struggles of the working class and its ultimate perspective. Indeed, as suggested above, it is possible to encapsulate the problem in Britain as being a result of a failure to unite these two elements. The result was the separation between the minority of revolutionaries, who tended towards a sectarian approach to other organisations and the day to day struggle of the working class, in order to defend their revolutionary integrity, and the majority of reformists who were increasingly drawn towards tacit support for the bourgeoisie and hostility to the proletariat. The challenge that faced the SPGB and SLP was precisely to overcome this separation.

The Socialist Labour Party

The subsequent development of the SLP is significant for the advances it made at the organisational level and its determined defence of class interests during the First World War and after 1917. It provides an important comparison with the SPGB.

It struggled to become a militant, centralised organisation capable of being the vanguard of the working class. It demanded commitment and discipline from its members, reacting strongly to failure to pay dues or carry out the work of the organisation. It recognised that the working class would have to seize political power and overthrow the bourgeois state. While it gave priority to the industrial struggle, founding the Advocates of Industrial Unionism in 1907, it also participated in elections and, while it saw the struggle for the revolution as its main task, it also (despite the opposition of part of the membership) recognised the need to win reforms to improve the immediate position of the working class. These developments expressed its greater openness to the real life and experiences of the proletariat and were a counterweight to the sectarianism of its origins. However, it did not entirely overcome this sectarianism. It condemned the German Social Democratic Party as reformist, showing a failure to understand the struggle going on within it and also to fully grasp the relationship between the minimum and maximum programme. At the Amsterdam Congress of the International in 1904 it refused to be part of a single British delegation that included non-socialists and reformers and demanded separate representation. When this was denied it refused to take part in the Congress.

In 1914 it took an internationalist position against the war and sought to continue the class struggle, taking a central part in the industrial struggles that developed in Clydeside in 1915-16. It continued to publish The Socialist, despite its presses being seized, and despite the fact that many members had been conscripted or were on the run, in prison or exiled to other parts of the country. It printed various articles by Lenin as well as Liebknecht's speech at his court-martial.

In 1917, almost alone amongst the socialist organisations in Britain (the Workers Socialist Federation led by Sylvia Pankhurst was the other), it hailed the October Revolution and declared complete solidarity with the Bolsheviks. It saw the revolution as confirmation of the correctness of its positions and in 1918 proclaimed "We are the British Bolsheviks". It not only defended the revolution but also participated actively in the struggles of 1918-19, seeking to link the struggles in the various parts of the country together. Between 1919 and 1921 the SLP participated in the discussions that led to the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Part of the SLP joined the CPGB while another part tried to carry on independently, but saw a rapid decline in numbers and sales of publications, leading to the effective closure of The Socialist in 1922 and the disappearance of the SLP.

The SPGB in its early years

Both the SLP and SPGB sought to oppose the tide of reformism, to defend marxism and the necessity for revolution. Both were expressions of the working class, but while the SLP struggled to overcome the sectarianism of the SDF, the SPGB remained trapped.

This was shown in the Declaration of Principles and the first discussions in the SPGB. The former, which is still printed unaltered in every issue of the Socialist Standard, sets out the opposed class interests of the proletariat and bourgeoisie, declares that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the class itself and that it is necessary for it to organise itself politically to achieve this. But within the Declaration can also be seen the basis of the democratic mystification and sectarianism that condemned the SPGB to sterility. Clause six called for the transformation of the machinery of government and the armed forces "from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation". The lessons learnt from the bloody experience of the Paris Commune on the necessity to overthrow the bourgeois state are ignored [3]. Clause 8 declared the SPGB to be the one true church of the revolution and declared war "against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist". They see no genuine expressions of the working class beyond themselves, making no distinction between organisations of the bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat. They will debate with anyone, but the marxist conception of the confrontation of positions as a necessary part of the advance of the workers movement is alien. The SPGB's positions are correct and invariant: the task of the working class is simply to "muster under its banner".

The rigidity with which the SPGB interprets marxism changes it from an incisive method for analysing the world from the perspective of the working class into a dogma to be blindly followed. In the SPGB's own recent history, The Socialist Party of Great Britain: Politics, Economics and Britain's Oldest Socialist Party, they try to link their rejection of reforms with Rosa Luxemburg's position, giving a quotation from Reform or Revolution? (p26). But Luxemburg's critique of reformism was part of her broader analysis of the relationship between the minimum and the maximum programme: "From the viewpoint of a movement for socialism, the trade union struggle and our parliamentary practice are vastly important insofar as they make socialistic the awareness, the consciousness, of the proletariat and help to organise it as a class" ("Reform or Revolution" in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p.58). Barltrop, in his account of the SPGB, offers an interesting perspective on the method of the SPGB: "It is true to say, however, that the dialectic was never embraced in any real sense by the Socialist Party. Historical materialism, Marx's demonstration of social superstructures standing on economic bases and the drive to change arising from the compulsion for every class to pursue its interests, was advanced as confidently as the labour theory of value. For the dialectic no such confidence existed. It carried a tinge of mysticism from its philosophical origins" (The Monument, p.11). However, such avoidance did not allow the new party to completely escape the challenges confronting the proletariat.

The first discussion in the new organisation concerned the attitude towards the trade unions. A minority, supported by the Executive, dismissed the unions because they sought to win reforms and did not share the positions of the SPGB. They were defeated by the majority who portrayed the unions as simply a means to defend the economic interests of the working class. Neither saw the unions in a dynamic way, as part of the process of the class coming to consciousness. The 1907 manifesto noted that the industrial equivalent of the SPGB did not yet exist, but nothing was done to create such an organisation. The struggle to defend the economic interests of the working class was separated from the political struggle of the proletariat, showing that the leaders of the SPGB, some of whom had been taught by Marx's son-in-law Aveling, had not understood Marx's analysis of the development of the class struggle and class consciousness [4]. Instead, the democratic process became the universal panacea, with the road to socialism reduced to the level of the consciousness of the individual worker [5].

A second dispute arose over the attitude that socialist Members of Parliament would adopt towards possible reforms. The Executive essentially argued that while the party opposed reformism it could not oppose measures that would benefit the working class, declaring that "the attainment of socialism is dependent on the preservation of the workers in general" (Perrin, p.34). This led to a split with those who opposed support for any reforms since such support would "tend to efface the bitter hostility against the capitalist class required from the working class to finally vanquish their most deadly enemy" (Barltrop, p.38).

At the same time the SPGB gradually detached itself from the international working class movement, declaring the Second International lost to reformism and breaking contact with the leaders of the workers' movement in various countries. They stopped printing the writings and speeches of these leaders and in 1910 wrote in the Socialist Standard, "It is a sad reflection that, except the SPGB, every body that contained the germ of Socialist existence has been swallowed up by...compromise and confusion" (quoted in Baltorp, p35).

In the second part of this article we will look at the response of the SPGB to the challenges posed by capitalism's entry into its decadent period - in particular, to the wars and revolutions which characterised this new epoch.

Notes

1. See the series "The struggle for the class party in Britain" in WR nos 198, 205, 208, 213, 215, 218, 222, 225, 226, 228, 230, 232, 233 and 237.

2. The Second International was founded in July 1889. At the same time the French 'Possibilist' party held a seprate conference bringing together an assortment of opportunists, reformists and anarchists united only by their opposition to marxism. See the second part of the series on the class party in WR 205.

3. In The Socialist Party of Great Brtain: Politics, Economics and Britain's Oldest Socialist Party, published by the SPGB they claim Marx's support for this position "This passage from the Declaration of Principles closely resembles a phrase used by Marx himself in the preamble to the 1880 programme of the Guesdist 'Federation of the Party of the Socialist Workers in France', where it was stated that socialism 'must be pursued by all the means which the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery which it has been till now into an instrument of emancipation'" (p.28). Apart from the detail that this quotation in no way supports the SPGB position, since it sees the vote as only one means amongst many, there is also the fact that Marx stated his position quite explicitly in the 1872 introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes". The un-marxist position of the SPGB on this is expressed quite clearly in their own publications: In From Capitalism to Socialism, published in 1986, they ask "Where does the state's power come from?" and answer, "The power to form a government is invested in the votes of the electorate" (p44).

4. A 1980 publication, Socialism and the Trade Unions, describes the industrial struggle as "innevitable but…only a rearguard action" (p.21), and warns workers of the fact that "any increase of pay that might eventually be gained has to be set against the loss of wages during the strike" (p.26).

5. In their 1975 text, Socialist Principles Explained, the SPGB tell us that "workers who will not vote for socialism certainly will not strike for it" (p.20).

In the first part of this series, we saw that communism is not merely an old dream of humanity, or the simple product of human will, but is the only form of society which can overcome the contradictions strangling the capitalist system. After developing the productive forces to an unprecedented degree and having constructed a world economy, capitalism then entered into its era of decadence. The permanent barbarism of this era has made communism a necessity not only for the further progress of humanity but even for its simple survival. Thus, contrary to those who announced the ‘death of communism’ when the Stalinist regimes of the east collapsed, it is impossible to reform capitalism or make it more human.

In this second part, we are going to look at those who tell us that a communist society as envisaged by Marx and others is in any case impossible to realise because the characteristic features of capitalism, such as egoism, lust for wealth and power, the war of each against all, are actually unchangeable expressions of ‘human nature’. 

Human nature

‘Human nature’ is a bit like the Philosophers’ Stone for which the alchemists searched for centuries. Up till now, all significant studies of ‘social invariants’ (as the sociologists would have it) — i.e. characteristics of human behaviour which are the same in all societies — have ended up showing the extent to which human psychology and attitudes are variable and linked to the social framework in which the individual develops. In fact, if we wanted to point to a fundamental characteristic of this ‘human nature’, to the feature which distinguishes man from other animals, we would have to point out the enormous importance of ‘acquired’ as opposed to the ‘innate’; to the decisive role played by education, by the social environment in which human beings grow up.

“The operations carried out by a spider resemble those of a weaver, and many a human architect is put to shame by the bee in the construction of its wax cells. However, the poorest architect is categorically distinguished from the best of bees by the fact that before he builds a cell in wax, he has built it in his head.” (Marx, Capital Vol. 1)

The bee is genetically programmed to build perfect hexagons, and it’s the same with the homing pigeon which can find its home at a distance of hundreds of miles, or with the squirrel storing up nuts. On the other hand, the final form of the structure conceived by our architect is not so much determined by a genetic inheritance as by a whole series of elements provided by the society in which he/she lives. Whether we’re talking about the kind of structure we have been told to build, the materials and tools that can be used, the productive techniques and the skills that can be applied, the scientific knowledge and artistic canons that guide us - all of this is determined by the social milieu.

Apart from that, the part played in all of this by ‘innate’ characteristics transmitted genetically to the architect by the parents can be essentially reduced to the fact that the fruit of their union wasn’t a bee or a pigeon, but a human being like themselves: i.e. an individual belonging to an animal species in which the ‘acquired’ element is by far the most important factor in the development of the adult.

It’s the same with behaviour as it is with the products of labour. Thus theft is a ‘crime’, a perturbation in the functioning of society which would become catastrophic if it became generalised. One who steals, or who threatens, abducts or kills people with the aim of stealing, is a ‘criminal’, and will almost unanimously be considered as a harmful, anti-social element who must be ‘prevented from doing harm’ (unless of course he does this stealing within the framework of the existing laws, in which case the skill in extorting surplus value from the proletariat will be praised and generously rewarded, just as generals skilled in mass murder are awarded medals). But the behaviour known as ‘stealing’, and criminals who ‘steal’, ‘murder’, etc, as well as everything to do with them - laws, judges, policemen, prisons, detective films, crime novels - would any of this exist if there was nothing to steal? If the abundance made possible by the development of the productive forces was at the free disposition of every member of society? Obviously not! And we could give many more examples showing just how much behaviour, attitudes, feelings, and relations between human beings are determined by the social milieu.

The peevish-minded will object to this by saying that if asocial behaviour exists, no matter what form it takes, in different forms of society, it’s because at the root of ‘human nature’ there’s an anti-social element, an element of aggressiveness against others, of ‘potential criminality’. They will argue that, very often, people don’t steal out of material necessity; that gratuitous crime exists; that if the Nazis could commit such atrocities, it’s because there’s something evil in Man, which comes to the surface in certain conditions. In fact such objections only show that there’s no human nature which is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in itself; Man is a social animal whose numerous potentialities take on different expressions depending on the conditions that are lived in. Statistics speak eloquently on this question: is it ‘human nature’ which gets worse during periods of crisis in society, when we see a growth in criminality and all kinds of morbid behaviour? On the contrary, isn’t the development of ‘asocial’ attitudes among an increasing number of individuals the expression of the fact that the existing society is becoming more and more incapable of satisfying human needs - needs which are eminently social and which can no longer be satisfied in a system which is less and less functioning as a society, a community?

The same peevish spirits base their rejection of the possibility of communism on the following argument: ‘You talk about a society which will really satisfy human needs, but the desire for property and power over others are themselves essential human needs, and communism, which excludes them, is therefore unable to satisfy human needs. Communism is impossible because man is egoistic.’

In her ‘Introduction to Political Economy’ Rosa Luxemburg described the reaction of the British bourgeoisie when, in the cause of conquering India, they came across peoples who had no private property. They consoled themselves by saying that these people were ‘savages’, but it was still rather embarrassing for people who had been taught that private property was something ‘natural’ to conclude that it was precisely these ‘savages’ who had the most ‘artificial’ way of living! In reality, humanity has such a ‘natural need for private property’ that it did without it for over a million years. And in many cases it was only after bloody massacres, as in the case of the Indians described by Rosa Luxemburg, that they were instilled with this ‘natural need’. It’s the same with commerce, that ‘unique, natural’ form of the circulation of goods, the natives’ ignorance of which so scandalised the colonialists. Inseparable from private property, it arose with it and will disappear with it.

There’s also the idea that if there was no profit to stimulate the development of production, if the individual effort of the worker wasn’t recompensed by a wage, no one would produce anything anymore. True enough, no one would produce in a capitalist way anymore; i.e. in a system based on profit and wage labour, where the slightest scientific discovery has to be financially viable, where work is a curse to the overwhelming majority of workers, on account of its length, its intensity, and its inhuman form. On the other hand, does the scientist who, through his research, participates in the progress of technology, always need a material stimulant to work? Generally they’re paid less than the sales executive who makes no contribution to the advancement of knowledge. Is manual labour necessarily disagreeable? If so, why do people talk about the ‘love of craftsmanship’, why is there such a craze for ‘do-it-yourself’ and all sorts of manual activities which are often very expensive? In fact, when labour isn’t alienated, absurd, exhausting, when its products no longer become forces hostile to the workers, but serve to really satisfy the needs of the collective then labour will become a prime human need, one of the essential forms of the flourishing of human potential. In communist society, human beings will produce for pleasure.

The need for power

Because leaders and authority-figures exist today, it’s generally concluded that no society can do without leaders, that men and women will never be able to live without submitting to authority and exerting it on others.

We won’t repeat here what marxism has always said about the role of political institutions, about the nature of state power. It can be summarised in the idea that the existence of political authority, of the power of some people over others, is the result of the existence within society of conflicts and confrontations between groups of individuals (social classes) which have antagonistic interests.

A society in which people compete with each other, in which they have opposing interests, in which productive labour is a curse, in which coercion is a permanent fact of life, in which the most elementary human needs are crushed underfoot for the great majority - such a society ‘needs’ leaders, just as it needs policemen and religion. But once all these aberrations have been suppressed, we’ll soon see whether leaders and power will still be necessary. Our sceptic will respond: ‘but men need to dominate others or be dominated. Whatever kind of society you have, there will still be the power of some people over others.’ It’s true that a slave who has always had his feet in chains may have the impression that there is no other way of walking, but a free person will never have this impression. In communist society, free men and women won’t be like the frogs in the fairytale who wanted to have a king. The ‘need’ that people may have to exercise power over others is the flip-side of what could be called the ‘slave mentality’: a significant example of this is the cringing, obedient army adjutant who’s always barking orders at his ‘inferiors’. If people feel a need to exert power over others, it’s because they have no power over their own lives and over the running of society as a whole. The will to power in each person is the measure of their own impotence. In a society in which human beings are no longer the impotent slaves of either natural or economic laws, a society in which they have freed themselves from the latter and are consciously able to use the former for their own purposes, a society in which they are ‘masters without slaves’, they will no longer need that wretched substitute for power - the domination of others.

It’s the same with aggressiveness as with the so-called ‘lust for power’. Faced with the permanent aggression of a society which grinds them into the dirt, plunges them into perpetual anguish and represses all their most basic desires, individuals are necessarily aggressive. This is no more than the survival instinct, which exists in all animals. Some psychologists consider that aggression is an inherent compulsion in all animal species and will therefore express itself in all circumstances. But even if this is the case, let’s give humanity the chance to use this aggression to combat the material obstacles which stand in the way of our own development - then we’ll see whether there’s a real need to exert aggression against other people.

Man’s egoism

‘Everyone for themselves’ is supposed to be a basic human characteristic. It’s undoubtedly a characteristic of bourgeois humanity with its ideal of the ‘self-made man’, but this is simply the ideological expression of the economic reality of capitalism and has nothing to do with ‘human nature’. Otherwise one would have to say that ‘human nature’ has been radically transformed since primitive communism, or even since feudalism with its village communities. In fact individualism massively entered the world of ideas when small independent owners appeared in the countryside (when serfdom was abolished) and in the towns. Made up of small owners who had been successful - mainly by ruining their rivals -  the bourgeoisie was a fanatical adherent of this ideology and saw it as a fact of nature. For example, it had no scruples about using Darwin’s theory of evolution to justify the social ‘struggle for survival’, the war of all against all.

But with the appearance of the proletariat, the associated class par excellence, a breach was opened in the domination of individualism. For the working class, solidarity is the elementary precondition for defending its material interests. At this level of reasoning, we can already reply to those who claim that human beings are ‘naturally egoistic’. If they are egoistic they are also intelligent, and the simple desire to defend their interests pushes them towards association and solidarity as soon as the social conditions allow it. But this isn’t all: in this social being par excellence, solidarity and altruism are essential needs in more ways than one. People need the solidarity of others, but they also need to show solidarity to others. This is something which can be seen even in a society as alienated as ours, expressed in the seemingly banal idea that ‘everyone needs to feel useful to others’. Some will argue that altruism is also a form of egoism because those that practise it do it above all for their own pleasure. Fair enough - but that’s just another way of putting forward the idea defended by communists that there is no essential opposition - on the contrary - between individual interest and collective interest. The opposition between individual and society is an expression of societies of exploitation, societies based on private property (i.e. private to others), and all this is very logical - how could there be a harmony between those who suffer from oppression and the very institutions that guarantee and perpetuate this oppression? In such a society, altruism can only appear in the form of charity or of sacrifice, i.e. the negation of others or the negation of oneself; it does not appear as the affirmation, the common and complementary flowering of the self and others.

Contrary to what the bourgeoisie would like us to believe, communism is not, therefore, the negation of individuality. It is capitalism, which reduces the worker to an appendage of the machine, which negates individuality; and this negation of the individual has reached its most extreme limits under the specific form of capitalism in decay: state capitalism. In communism, in a society which has got rid of that enemy of freedom par excellence -  the state, which will have no reason for existing - each member of society will be living in the reign of freedom. Because humanity can only realise its innumerable potentialities in a social way, and because the antagonisms between individual interest and collective interest will have disappeared, new and immense vistas will be opened up for the flowering of each individual.

Similarly, far from accentuating the dreary uniformity that has been generalised by capitalism, as the bourgeoisie claims, communism is above all a society of diversity, because it will break down the division of labour which fixes each individual in a single role for the rest of their life. In communism, each new step forward in knowledge or technology won’t lead to an even higher level of specialisation, but will serve to expand the field of activities through which each individual can develop. As Marx and Engels put it:

“…as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for one to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (The German Ideology)

Whatever the bourgeoisie and all the sceptical and peevish-minded may say, communism is made for humanity; human beings can live in such a society and make such a society live!

There remains an argument to deal with: ‘OK, communism is necessary and materially possible. Yes, men and women could live in such a society. But today humanity is so alienated under capitalist society that it will never have the strength to undertake a transformation as gigantic as the communist revolution.’ We’ll try to answer this in the next part of the article.  FM