History does not obey the dates on a calendar and yet decades often become symbols for specific historical events. The thirties bring to mind the depression which hit capitalism fifty years ago; the forties, the war which destroyed the equivalent of a country life France or Italy. On the threshold of the eighties, how can we characterize the decade just ending and what will be the major phenomena of the new one just beginning?

The crisis? The crisis certainly made its mark on the 1970s but it will mark the 1980s even more. Between the sixties and the seventies there was a real change in the economic situa­tion of the world: the sixties were the last years of the reconstruction period when the dying fires of an artificial ‘prosperity’ still burned; artificial because this ‘prosperity’ was based on the ephemeral mechanisms of the reconstitution of the industrial and commercial potential of Europe and Japan destroyed during the war. Once this potential was realized capitalism found it­self once again facing its fatal impasse: the saturation of markets; that is why the sixties ended in ‘prosperity’ and the seventies in para­lysis. But there will be no difference of this sort between the seventies and the eighties except that economic stagnation will be even worse.

Slaughter and suffering? The coming years pro­mise to be particularly ‘rich’ in this domain. Never before has there been so much famine, so much genocide in the world. With all the ‘liber­ation’ of peoples, with all the aid given to them mostly in the form of war machines, the great powers will soon have erased them from the map. This apocalypse is not new, but in the coming decade with the deepening of the crisis, there will be more and more Cambodias despite all the petitions and humanitarian campaigns. Cambodia is simply a more terrifying example of the horrors which have followed in an unbroken line since World War II and which have plunged a large part of humanity into total hell. In this sense the eighties will be ravaged by the same specter of genocide as the seventies.

However recent events show very important changes developing in the very depths of society; these changes are less to do with the economic infra­structure or the degree of misery and poverty than with the behavior of the major classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

In a sense the seventies were the years of illu­sion. In the major centers of capitalism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat came up against the stark reality of the crisis, often in a very brutal way. But at the same time, and particu­larly in the more advanced countries, these two classes which decide the fate of the world have had a tendency to blind themselves to this rea­lity: the bourgeoisie because it finds it unbear­able to face the historical bankruptcy of its system and the proletariat partly because it suffers from the illusions of bourgeois ideology and partly because it is not easy for the prole­tariat to understand and shoulder the crushing historic responsibilities which the crisis and the understanding of its implications place on the shoulders of the revolutionary class. For years now the bourgeoisie has been grasping at straws trying to prove that the crisis can have a solution. And it is true that since 1967 the regularly recurrent recessions (1967, 1970-71, 1974-75) accompanied by chronic inflation have been followed by a ‘recovery’. The recovery of 1972-73 led to the highest expansion rates since the war (particularly in the US). Although there were waves of galloping inflation, certain govern­ment deflationary policies were (at least, some­what) effective in keeping inflation to less than 5 per cent a year. The bourgeoisie had only to keep applying these policies and all would be well. Obviously the bourgeoisie began to realize that these reflationary policies just reflated inflation and that the deflationary policies led to recession. But even if things were not going as well as they used to, the bourgeoisie could not give up the idea that it could just continue to cut away the dead weight of the economy, to impose austerity and unemployment and one day business would be back to normal.

Today the bourgeoisie has abandoned this illusion. After the failure of all the remedies administered to the economy (see the article ‘The Acceleration of the Crisis’ in this issue) which have only managed to poison it, the bourgeoisie has discov­ered in a muffled but painful way that there is no solution to the crisis. Recognizing the impasse, there is nothing left but a leap in the dark. And for the bourgeoisie a leap in the dark is war.

This march towards war is nothing new; in fact since the end of World War II capitalism has never really disarmed as it at least partially did after the first war. And since the end of the sixties when capitalism experienced once again a decline in its economic situation, inter-imperialist tens­ions have increased and armaments have grown phen­omenally. Today a million dollars a minute are being poured into the production of the means of destruction and death. Up to now the bourgeoisie has been following the path to war in a more or less conscious way. The objective needs of its economy have been pushing it towards war but the bourgeoisie has not really been aware that war is indeed the only perspective its system can offer to humanity. The bourgeoisie is not fully aware of the fact that its inability to mobilize the proletariat for war constitutes the only serious obstacle barring the way.

Today with the total failure of the economy, the bour­geoisie is slowly realizing its true situation and is acting on it. On the one hand it is arming to the teeth. Everywhere military budgets are sky­rocketing. The already terrifying weapons at its disposal are being replaced by even more ‘effic­ient’ ones (‘Backfires’, Pershing 2s, neutron bombs, etc). But armaments are not the only field of its activity. As we pointed out in the ICC declaration on the Iran/USA crisis, the bourgeoisie has also undertaken a massive campaign to create an atmosphere of war psychosis in order to prepare public opinion for its increasingly war-like projects. Because war is on the cards and because people are not prepared for this perspective, all possible pretexts must be exploited to create ‘national unity’, ‘national pride’ and guide opinion away from sordid struggles of self-interest (meaning class struggle) towards the altruism of patriotism and the defense of civilization against the threatening forces of barbarism like Islamic fanaticism, Arab greed, totalitarianism or imperialism. This is the language the ruling class is using all over the world.

The bourgeoisie’s speeches to the working class are indeed changing. As long as it seemed as though the crisis could have a solution the bourgeoisie lulled the exploited with illusory promises: accept austerity today and everything will be better tomorrow. The left was very successful with these kinds of lies: the crisis is not the result of the insurmountable inner contradictions of the system itself, but simply a question of ‘bad management’ or ‘greedy mono­polies’ or ‘multinationals’ -- voting for the left will change all this! But today this language does not work anymore. When the left was in power it did no better than the right and from the workers point of view, often worse. Since the promise of a ‘better tomorrow’ does not fool anyone anymore, the ruling class has changed its tune. The opposite is starting to be trumpeted now: the worst is ahead of us and there is noth­ing we can do, ‘the others are to blame’, there is no way out. The bourgeoisie is hoping in this way to create the national unity which Churchill obtained in other circumstances by offering the British population “blood, sweat, tears and toil”.

As the bourgeoisie loses its own illusions it is increasingly forced to speak clearly to the work­ing class about the future. If the workers today were resigned and demoralized as they were in the thirties this language could be effective. Since we are going to have war anyway we might as well try to save what we can: ‘democracy’, the ‘land of my forefathers’, my ‘territory’; so we have to accept war and sacrifices. This is the response the ruling class would like us to make. But unhappily for them the new generations of workers do not have the resignation of their forebears. As soon as the crisis began to affect the workers, even before the crisis was recognized as such by anyone except tiny minori­ties of revolutionaries who had not forgotten the lessons of Marxism, the working class began to struggle. Its struggles at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies showed by their broad scope and militant determination that the terrible counter-revolution which weighed on society since the crushing of the first revo­lutionary wave after World War I, was now over. It was no longer ‘midnight in the century’ and capitalism had to confront the proletariat once again -- that giant it thought had been safely put to sleep. But although the proletariat was full of vitality it lacked experience and it let it­self be taken in by the traps the bourgeoisie set once it had recovered from shock. Relying on the fact that its crisis was developing at a slower pace than in the thirties, the bourgeoisie managed to communicate its own illusions about a ‘solution’ to the crisis to the workers. For several years the working class believed these stories about the ‘left alternative’ -- whether it was called the Labor government, popular power, the Programme Commun, the Social Contract, the Moncloa Pact or the historic compromise. Leaving aside open struggle for a while the workers let themselves be paraded around in electoral dead-ends adjusting themselves, almost without any reaction, to greater and greater doses of unemploy­ment and austerity. But what the first wave of struggles in 1968 already showed is being con­firmed again today: bourgeois mystifications do not have the force they used to have. After so much use the speeches on ‘the defense of democracy and civilization’ or on ‘the socialist fatherland’ wear out their impact. And the ‘national inter­est’, ‘terrorism’ or other ideological gadgets cannot replace them. As we say in our article ‘Our Intervention and its Critics’ (in this issue) the proletariat has once again taken up the path of struggle and obliged the left, if it was in government, to move into the opposition in order to accomplish its capitalist task by radicalizing its verbiage.

With a crisis whose effects weigh more and more heavily on the working class with each passing day, with the experience of a first wave of struggle and an awareness of the traps laid by the bourgeoisie to stop it, and with the very hesitant but real emergence of revolutionary minorities, the working class has returned to assert its force and its enormous reservoir of combativity. If the bourgeoisie has nothing but generalized war to give humanity as its future, the class struggles developing today prove that the proletariat is not ready to give the bourgeoisie free rein. The working class has another future to propose, a future of communism where there will be no wars, no exploitation.

In the decade beginning today, the historical alternative will be decided: either the proleta­riat will continue its offensive, continue to paralyze the murderous arm of capitalism in its death throes and gather its forces to destroy the system, or else it will let itself be trapped, worn out, demoralized by speeches and repression and then the way will be open for a new holo­caust which risks the elimination of all human society.

If the seventies were years of illusion both for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; because the reality of the world will be revealed in its true colors, because the future of humanity will in large part be decided, the eighties will be the years of truth.

The so-called ‘economic explanations’ that the ruling class soaks into the public mind through the press, radio and TV, almost always have one clear and avowed purpose: to justify in the name of ‘economic science’ the sacrifices which capital demands from those it exploits.

The ‘experts’ take the floor and quote their statistics only to ‘explain’ why we have to acc­ept the growth of unemployment, resign ourselves to a decline in real wages, pay more taxes but still work harder; why immigrant workers have to be thrown out of the country -- in short, why we have to remain forever under the domination of the laws of capitalism even though these laws are leading humanity to ruin and despair.

To refuse these laws and to fight against them means rejecting the ‘economic’ justifications governments use to impose their system of exploi­tation. It is not enough to say: “It doesn’t matter what they say because it is all lies any­way”. The how and the why has to be understood if we want to be able to build something really different tomorrow.

The proletarian revolution is and must be a cons­cious revolution. The proletariat cannot rid humanity of the paralyzing obstacles of capita­lism without knowing what they are. Understanding the economic situation of capitalism is essential to any conscious action in society because up to now humanity has been dominated by economic needs.

Under capitalism, as in all social systems in history, understanding the world is first of all understanding economic life. Understanding how to destroy capitalism is understanding how it is weakening, understanding its crises.

The aim of this article is to elucidate recent developments in the crisis and to clarify the perspectives. Its intention is to show that today’s aggravation of the crisis is the harbin­ger of a recession in the 1980s of unprecedented proportions since the end of World War II.

The article contains a considerable amount of statistics but these dry figures are necessary to an analysis of the crisis, to seeing where it is heading. The article uses ‘official’ statis­tics despite an awareness of their limitations. Economic statistics suffer from ideological as well as technical distortions. Because the so-called ‘economic science’ is part and parcel of the ideology and propaganda of the ruling class, statistics can always be manipulated to justify the defense and survival of the system. The ‘experts’ of the bourgeoisie do not necessarily do this with Machiavellian forethought: they themselves are the victims of the ideological poison they secrete. But it is not only a ques­tion of ideological distortions. The statistics also suffer from technical errors due to the decomposition of the economic system itself. In fact, the measurement used in most economic stat­istics is money, the dollar or another currency. But inflation and the increasingly violent con­vulsions of international exchange rates make monetary values less and less valid as measurements of real economic activity. This is particularly true for the measurement of economic aggregates in terms of volume (the volume of the gross national product, for example), that is, in terms of ‘constant money’, a theoretical abstraction of money which is not devalued by inflation.

But whatever the known faults of existing econo­mic statistics, they are the only ones available. If they lack precision, they do, however, in one way or another, reflect the direction of major economic trends. In any case, using capitalism’s own statistics to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the system and the possibility of destroying it does not weaken the force of the arguments; on the contrary, it tends to strengthen it.

***********************

The world economy enters the 1980s sliding into a new recession, the fourth since 1967.

In the eastern bloc countries, growth rates have fallen to the lowest level since World War II (4 per cent growth in 1978).

The Secretariat of the OECD, an organization which groups the twenty-four most industrialized count­ries of the western bloc, announced a growth rate of 3% in 1979 for the whole of its zone and pre­dicted a decline to 1.5% in 1980. This means a quasi-stagnation of economic activity.

The US and Great Britain are the first to slide into this new recession. The first and fifth greatest powers in the bloc -- which together account for 40% of the production of the OECD countries -- will have a negative growth in 1980. This means that the mass of production realized everyday will not only cease to grow but will actually diminish in absolute terms.

What will be the extent of this recession? How many countries will it affect? How long will it last? How deep will it be?

The recession gives indications of being the most geographically widespread since World War II: for the first time all regions of the planet will be simultaneously affected.

It risks being the longest lasting.

It will probably be the most profound in terms of the decline in growth and thus in terms of unemployment.

In other words, the workers of the entire world will experience the most brutal degradation of their living conditions since World War II. Mill­ions more workers will be laid off in all count­ries, even those who seemed to be able to keep their head above water. Wages will be drastica­lly cut by the combined effects of wage-freeze policies and inflation.

The last crumbs given by capitalism in the years of the relative prosperity of reconstruction are being taken back by capitalism ... and they will not think of offering them again. The various nations of this world are preparing to undergo another round of economic and social convulsions.

But what allow us to assert that the recession capitalism is sliding into will be the longest and the deepest since the war?

Three types of factors:

-- first of all, the broad scope of the present decline in the world economy;

-- secondly, the increasing inadequacy of the means at capitalism’s disposal to re-launch the economy;

-- thirdly, the growing impossibility for the different national governments to continue to use reflation policies.

In other words, the fatal disease of capitalism is passing through a phase of major decline; not only are the usual drugs administered by the dif­ferent governments having less and less of an effect but the abusive use of these remedies have poisoned the patient. Like the doctors who frantically tried to keep the dying Franco ‘alive’, the bourgeoisie today is using desperate therapies even though they serve no scientific purpose!

Each of the three aspects mentioned will be further expanded in the article: the intensifica­tion of the present crisis on the one hand, and on the other the inadequacy of present methods available to induce recovery and the impossibil­ity of increasing their scope without further accelerating the crisis.

The present deepening of the crisis

For the moment, among the major industrial coun­tries of the western bloc the US and Great Britain are the hardest hits. Growth rates have declined most sharply in these countries in the course of 1979 as the following table shows:

But no-one has any illusions about the possibility of other countries of the bloc keeping up their growth rates for very long if the US goes into a recession because the economies of Japan and Europe are totally tied to their economic and military leader.

This dependency, which rests primarily on the absolute supremacy of the leader of the bloc within its sphere (and the same is true in the Russian bloc), has in fact increased since the beginning of the 1970s. By reducing the growth of their production, the US hopes to reduce their imports. But by reducing their buying power on the world market, they directly or indirectly limit outlets for European and Japanese production.

Contrary to the assertions of certain econom­ists, present growth rates in Europe and Japan cannot be maintained to compensate for a collapse in the US. On the contrary, like in 1969, the fall in growth in the US is simply an immediate precursor of the fall in all other industrial countries.

The annual report of the Common Market Commission, which published its forecasts for the 1980s in October, has already announced a slowdown of 3.1% in growth for EEC countries in 1979 and 2% in 1980; an acceleration of inflation and an increase in unemployment from 5.6% to 6.2%, “the highest increase foreseen since the Commission began to establish its statistics in 1973” (Le Soir, Bruxelles).

At the end of 1979 lay-off announcements prolifer­ated in all western countries. But the specifi­city of these announcements was that they concer­ned not only sectors already in difficulty, but also sectors which had been considered relatively safe from the effects of the crisis up to now. The lay-offs continue to grow in hard-hit sectors: the largest steel producer in the US, US Steel, has announced the closing of ten factories and lay-offs affecting 13,000 workers in Great Britain the British Steel Corporation intends to reduce its workforce by 50,000 workers.

But now it is also the motor industry and electr­onics, the sectors considered to be the ‘locomo­tives of the economy’ which are being hit. In the US, motor car production fell by 25% between December 1978 and December 1979. “One hundred thousand car workers (one out of every seven) are from now on indefinitely unemployed and forty thousand others are temporarily unemployed follow­ing one--or-two-week shutdowns in several states” (Le Monde, France). In Germany, whose economy is the envy of governments all over the world, car production fell 4% in a year. Opel had to put 16,000 on partial unemployment for two weeks and Ford-Germany 12,000 for twenty-five days. The vanguard sector, electronics, has just been hit by the collapse of the German company, AFG-­Telefunken, which predicts 13,000 lay-offs.

In the underdeveloped countries, the economic crisis, which has long since plunged most of them into total economic atrophy, has now hit certain countries which used to be considered economic ‘miracles’. Whether we look at countries which experienced a relative industrial development in recent years like South Korea or Brazil, or oil-producing countries like Venezuela or Iran, these countries are now experiencing a violent degrada­tion of their economic situation ... and along with this, the collapse of all the myths about their eventual ‘economic take-off’.

The eastern bloc countries too are experiencing a powerful exacerbation of their economic diffi­culties. Despite policies designed to reduce their debt to the west, these debts have only increased.

According to the UN Economic Commission for Europe, these debts have increased more than 17% in 1978 in relation to the previous year. If we turn to the internal situation, the investigation of the economic situation undertaken by Russian leaders for the Autumn 1979 Session of the Supreme Soviet drew a particularly somber balance sheet in such important areas as transportation, agricultural production and oil production. In the satellite countries, such as Poland, govern­ments are beginning to speak officially of unem­ployment and especially inflation. Inflation, that disease which Stalinist dogma pretends to reserve only for western countries, is increasing on an unprecedented scale.

So much for the immediate situation. In itself, by the scope and rapidity of the economic decline, the situation can be seen as but the beginning of a new recession of which the worst is yet to come.

The techniques of ‘recovery’

I. The Growing Inadequacy of Reflation Techniques

One of the major characteristics of the econo­mic evolution of the world, particularly in the west since the 1974-75 recession, is that con­trary to what happened after the recessions of 1967 or 1970, reflation policies have brought more and more mediocre results, if any at all, despite all the considerable governmental efforts.

With the definitive end of the mechanisms of reconstruction in the mid-sixties, western capita­lism has had to adapt itself to a life of perpet­ual downward swings whose scope is increasingly large and violent. Like an enraged animal stri­king its head against the bars of its cage, west­ern capitalism has more and more violently come up against two dangers: on the one hand deeper and deeper recessions and on the other hand more and more difficult and inflationary recoveries. The graph below, which traces the evolution of the growth in production for the seven major powers of the western bloc (the US, Japan, West Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Canada) shows how these swings have been more and more drastic, ending in the striking failure of refla­tion policies from 1976 to 1979.

graph 1

The major stages of the crisis in the western economy since 1967 can be summarized as follows:

-- in 1967 slowdown in growth;

-- in 1968 recovery;

-- from 1969 to 1971 a new recession, deeper than 1967;

-- from 1972 to the middle of 1973 a second recovery breaking up the international monetary system with the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 and the floating of the major monetary parities; governments financed the general recovery with tons of new paper money;

-- at the beginning of 1973 the seven major powers had the highest growth rate in eighteen years (8 and a third as an annual base in the first half of 1973);

-- the end of 1973 to the end of 1975 a new recession, the third, the longest and deepest; in the second half of 1973 production increased at a rate of only 2% a year; more than a year later in early 1975 it regressed at more than a rate of 4.3% per year;

-- 1976-1979, third recovery; but this time despite recourse to the Keynesian policy of reflation through the creation of state budgetary defi­cits, despite the new market created by the OPEC countries which due to the rise in oil prices represented a strong demand for manufactured goods from the industrialized world1, despite the enormous deficit in the trade balance of the US which due to the international role of the dollar, created and maintained an artificial market by importing much more than it exported, despite all these methods put into place by governments, economic growth after the brief recovery in 1976 kept losing ground, slowly but surely.

Yet the doses of the remedies applied by the governments were particularly strong:

Budget deficits: since 1975 the major industrial countries have had recourse to uninterrupted increases in state expenditures over and above that of revenues in order to create a demand capable of re-launching growth. This led to perm­anent budget deficits which reached levels equi­valent to more than 5% of national production in some cases (5.8% for Germany in 1975; 5.4% for Japan in 1979) and went above 10% for weaker countries like Italy (11.7% in 1975; 11.5% in 1979). The average of these budget deficits for the five year period between 1975 and 1979 is in itself eloquent enough.

The financing of growth in the bloc through the trade deficit of the US: by buying much more than they managed to sell, the US was an import­ant factor in the growth of the economy of their bloc from 1976-79. In fact, since the conclusion of the reconstruction of Europe and Japan at the end of the sixties and with the war in Vietnam, the growth of the western bloc has, in part, been artificially financed by the trade deficit of the US. Because the US dollar serves as the medium of exchange and reserve on the world market, other countries are obliged to accept the artificial money of the US as payment.

Thus the recovery after the 1970 recession was ‘stimulated’ by two years of a particularly large US deficit. And after the 1974-75 recession, the US again had recourse to this policy to an unpre­cedented extent. In the last three years the US has increased its imports more rapidly than the other powers in its bloc as the following figures show:




 

This policy led to a dizzying growth of the trade deficit of the US. This deficit momentarily allowed the other countries of its bloc to have positive trade balances.

It is clear that both the ‘budget deficit’ remedy and the ‘US trade deficit’ remedy (“injecting dollars into the economy”) have been administered in massive doses over the past few years. The mediocrity of the results obtained proves only one thing: their effectiveness is steadily decrea­sing. And that is the second reason why we fore­see an exceptionally deep recession for the beginning of the 1980s.

But there are even more serious reasons. Because governments have had such extensive recourse to these artificial stimulants in increasing doses, they have ended up by completely poisoning the body of their economies.

II. The Impossibility of Continuing to Use the Same Remedies

Among other economic shocks, the year 1979 was marked by the most spectacular monetary alert that the system has experienced since the war. While capitalism celebrated the fiftieth anniver­sary of the 1929 crash, the price of gold shot up to incredible heights. In several weeks the price of gold went over $400 an ounce. The alert was not simply an accident due to speculation. At the beginning of the seventies the official price of gold was S38 an ounce (after the first devaluation of the dollar in 1971). Nine years later ten times more greenbacks were needed for an ounce. But the price of gold has not just increased in dollar terms. It has shot up in terms of all currencies. This really means that the buying power of all currencies has drastically fallen.

The recent gold crisis represented nothing less than the real threat of a definitive collapse of the international monetary system, the threat of the disappearance of the tool which conditions all the economic transactions of capitalism from the buying of soap powder to the joint financing of a dam in a third world country.

The monetary crisis sanctions the impossibility not only of continuing to run capitalism through national and international monetary manipulations but in fact, the impossibility of even surviving in the endless spiral of inflation and monetary credits. The debt of the entire world economy has reached critical proportions in all spheres: the debts of third world countries which for years bought factories on credit without being able to find any markets for their products; the debts of eastern bloc countries which are contin­ually growing without any hope of repayment. The debts of the US have flooded the world market with dollars (Eurodollars or petro-dollars); in recent years the US has experienced a wild acceleration of its domestic debts.

According to Business Week one of the most cohe­rent spokesmen of big business in the US: “Since the end of 1975 the US has stimulated the economy through indebtedness and has provoked such a wild explosion of credit that it has left far behind even the fever which marked the beginning of the 1970s” (16 October, 1978). According to the same article from 1975-78 the debts of the state (government loans) have increased 47% reaching $825 billion in 1978, more than a third of the GNP of the country. This year’s debts of all economic agents (that is, companies, individuals, the government etc) has reached 3900 billion dollars, almost double the GNP! Faced with the growing impossibility of selling what it is able to produce, capitalism is increa­singly living on indebtedness towards the future. Credit in all its forms has allowed it to put off facing the real, fundamental problems for a while. But this has not solved the problem, on the contrary, it has only aggravated it. By con­tinuing to push payment deadlines forward, world capitalism has become highly fragile and unstable as the ‘gold crisis’ of Autumn 1979 proves.

Capitalism, at the beginning of the 80s, faces two alternatives: either to continue reflation policies in which case the monetary system will completely collapse, or to stop the artificial remedies and face recession.

The US government has already been forced to choose the latter ‘solution’ ... and so has made the choice for the entire world.

A false alternative for the workers

In this context all the governments in the world try to convince the workers that they must accept wage cuts and lay-offs so that ‘things can get better tomorrow’. 'Restructure our national economy and we'll make it’ is supposed to be the precondition for recovery.

Certainly market difficulties oblige national capitals to become as competitive as they can (and this implies lay-offs and wage-cuts). The few existing markets will go to those capitalists who manage to sell at the best price. But dying last is not escaping from death. All countries are facing the scarcity of markets; the world market is shrinking. And whatever the order in which countries fall, they will all fall.

The restructuration of the productive apparatus today is not a preparation for a new take-off, it is a preparation for death. Capitalism is not experiencing growing pains but the death rattle. For the workers, accepting sacrifices today will not solve the problems of tomorrow. The only thing they will gain is getting an even more bru­tal attack from capitalism later. Submitting to capitalism in its death throes is simply preparing the way for the only solution to its crises that capitalism has been able to find in sixty years: war. But resisting the attack now is in fact forging the will and the strength to destroy the old world and build a new one.

RV

The agitation and combativity that appeared during the negotiation of the last pay agreement in the textile industry have not disappeared. A general assembly, called by the textile union (SUTISS), ended by naming a ‘conflict committee’ at the regional level, with the aim of organizing a workers’ counter attack. That this committee was dominated by unionists of the PAD1 does not at all diminish the importance of the fact that a need was felt, however confusedly, for a combat organization distinct from the union apparatus. This is similar to the engineers’ demand for the presence at the negotiating table of a delegate elected by the general assembly. The ‘conflict committee’ put forward the idea of a regional strike for 17 October 1979. The union Federation was reticent at first, but finally gave way to the committee (even lending it their premises), and after a bit of diplomacy to try to get the CTV’s2 consent, a strike call was finally put out for Wednesday, 17 October. The CTV then began to talk about a national strike for 25 October. What was about to happen in Aragua was seen as a test which would determine the course of events to come.

“Follow Aragua’s Example!”3

The dawn of 17 October found Maracay (capital of the state of Aragua) paralyzed; in several out­lying districts, all kinds of obstacles dumped in the streets interrupted the traffic. The workers arrived at their factories, and then made their way towards the Plaza Girardot in the town centre. The unions had distributed the strike call, but they intentionally remained silent about the time and place for the assembly. The union lead­ership wanted the strike to be a numerical success, but they were just as concerned that it should remain under their control. This explains why they put out the strike call, and why they kept a monopoly of information about the action that was planned. Nonetheless, the workers didn’t want to lose this opportunity to demonstrate their discontent, and accepted these conditions in their desire to unite in the street with their class brothers.

At 10am the Plaza was full of people. The vast majority was workers; a whole host of hastily-made banners were visible, indicating the presence of particular factories, demanding wage rises, or simply affirming a class viewpoint (for example, “they have the power because they want it”).

Then began the never-ending speeches, whose main lines were: the rise in prices, the need for wages to be adjusted, the government’s bad admini­stration, the struggle against the Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and the preparation for the national strike.

In the crowd, you could feel that the workers interpreted the strike as well as the assembly as the beginning of a confrontation with the bour­geoisie and its state. Clearly, the mass of workers weren’t satisfied with listening passively, but wanted to express themselves as a collective body, which they could only do by marching through the streets. The pressure on the union leaders was so strong that they ended up by call­ing for a march down the Avenue Bolivar as far as the provincial Parliament, despite the fact that they had only planned on an assembly.

Beforehand, groups of young workers had patrolled the streets of the city centre, closing down all the shops (except the chemists’), with an attitude of determination to enforce the strike, but with­out any attempt at personal violence or individual aggression. In the same way, they intercepted buses and taxis, made the passengers get out and left the vehicles to go on their way without the slightest hindrance.

The demonstration gets out of control

The working class practically took possession of the streets of the city centre, it blocked the traffic, shut the shops, let its anger burst out, imposed its power. From this moment, events took on their own dynamic. The 10-15,000 demon­strators (the press talked of 30,000 probably because of the great fright the day gave them, for example, E Mendoza’s heart attack4, began to take up improvised slogans, especially insist­ing on ones that expressed their class feelings (“the discontented worker demands his rights”, “in shoes or sandals, the working class commands respect” were a couple of them). It was imposs­ible to go back to the whining tones of the CTV’s explicit support for the wages law. The only fig­ure put forward was for a 50% rise, but in general the demonstrators didn’t formulate precise ‘demands’; they expressed their rage and their will to struggle. There were frequent comments about the total uselessness of this famous law, about the beginning of the war of “poor against rich”. Near the Palace of Parliament there sud­denly appeared a small detachment of the ‘forces of order’. Those at the front of the demonstra­tion hurled themselves against it, and the police were obliged to run for shelter in the Palace, where they felt more protected. Immediately, the crowd concentrated before the entrance, which was obviously locked. The demonstration had not been prepared for this, and decided not to try to force an entry, but it fully felt the difference between ‘the people’ in the street and their ‘representatives’ barricaded in the Palace. Pre­dictably, the union bureaucracy made every effort to pacify the demonstrators and to divert atten­tion by calling for a return to the Plaza Girardot to close the day. After some hesitations, the cortege started off again, but instead of going straight to the Plaza Girardot, it preferred to make a tour of the ‘Legislative Palace’. Thus the workers marked out the places they would have to occupy tomorrow. One after another, spontaneous orators spoke standing on car rooves and the demonstrators savored the taste of being masters of the street, in contrast to the aggrava­tions and impotence that they are daily subjected to.

At the Plaza Girardot, a new series of union speeches greeted them, with the aim of putting a stop to ‘all that’. But part of the demonstration, once it arrived at the Plaza, carried on to the Labor Inspectorate building. It was, of course, shut. So they returned to the square. There, thousands of workers, already tired, were sitting in the street on the pavement. They don’t have any clear idea of what to do, but no-one seems to feel like going home to the intolerable, monoto­nous round of daily life. The leaders had already left, and the union militants were rolling up their banners. Apparently, this is the end.

But it goes on …

Suddenly, at midday, a small demonstration of textile workers appeared. Things got lively again, and a wild march began all through the town, and this time without the union leadership.

First of all, it decided to march together onto the Municipality, where, after filling the staircases on all four floors, the workers demanded a confrontation with the Municipal councilors. These latter didn’t seem to appreciate the insis­tence of an elderly worker knocking on the door with his stick. Then someone put forward the idea of marching on the premises of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where, strangely, nothing was to be found apart from a few cases of mineral water, which were swiftly used to calm the collective thirst. From there, the workers decided to go to the transport terminus. On the way they closed down a construction site and looked up the foreman in order to give him a bit of ‘advice’. With an elevated social and demo­cratic sentiment, they divided up the contents of a poultry shop which had had the unfortunate idea of staying open.

It was after 2 O'clock in the afternoon, and the demonstration had travelled some ten kilometers. Hunger, heat and fatigue had considerably reduced the number of demonstrators. It was time to put an end to the collective intoxication and bring them back to sad reality. Given that the union leadership had failed, this task fell to other organisms. With truncheon blows and other ‘persuasive’ methods5, the ‘forces of order’ showed for the nth time that the streets don’t yet belong to the people, out to the police. At 3 O'clock in the afternoon, order reigned in Maracay.

The day had been extremely rich in lessons. Instinctively, the working class had identified several nerve centers of power; parliament, the Municipal Council, the Ministry of Labor, the unions and the passenger terminus, this latter as a springboard for extending the struggle outside Maracay. It was like a kind of reconnaissance mission for future struggles. Apparently, there were demonstrations during the night in some districts. It was a proletarian holiday.

CTV: Oil on troubled waters

If any worker might have entertained some illu­sions about this being a first step in a series of triumphant struggles, apparently thanks to the support of the union apparatus, the next day’s papers took care to remind them of their condi­tion as an exploited and manipulated class. In fact, the CTV, as if by magic, transformed the national strike into a general mobilization ... for 4 O'clock in the afternoon of 25 October. Clearly, the CTV didn’t want to be overtaken again by the spontaneous initiative of the masses, and this time on a national scale. Let the workers work all day first, and then go and demonstrate, if they still feel like it! The night would calm down any hot-heads. For the unions, it was now a matter of trying to arrange an impressive demonstration, but without a strike, a formula which would allow them to maintain social control without losing an appearance of militancy. More­over, some industries in Aragua, profiting from the strike of 17 October’s juridical illegality, carried out massive lay-offs (especially in La Victoria, an industrial town in Aragua, where some 500 workers were made redundant). In this way, they put into practice already planned pro­jects of ‘reduction of personnel’, ‘industrial mobility’, and ‘administrative improvement’. The object was to confront as cheaply as possible the particularly critical financial situation of the small and medium-sized businesses. This maneuver created a very tense situation in La Victoria, with marches and protests opening up a perspective for new struggles in the weeks to come, but this time without the fake support of the CTV. Either the workers of La Victoria will learn to struggle for themselves, or they will be forced to accept the conditions of the dictatorship of capital.

In spite of everything, anger explodes

Despite the characteristics we have described above, the day of ‘national mobilization’ on 25 October gave rise to new demonstrations of the workers’ combativity. In the state of Carabobo, and in Guyana6, there were region-wide strikes with massive and enthusiastic marches. In the capital, Caracas, where union prestige demanded that the demonstration should be well attended, the CTV even took it on itself to bring in coach-loads of workers, who for their part took advan­tage of their first opportunity in years to express their class hatred. Aware, after the events of the 17th, of the danger of a working class outburst, the government could not allow the demonstration to invade the centre of the capital, as had happened at Maracay. Furthermore, the ‘forces of order’ had themselves decided to confront the workers practically from the outset. This wasn’t an ‘excess’ or a ‘mistake’; the police were just valiantly carrying out their class function. The confrontation took place. Instead of running in panic as usual, the demon­strators put up a stubborn resistance for several hours; they destroyed symbols of bourgeois luxury in the neighborhood, and a climate of violence persisted for several days in the working class districts, especially in “23 de Janero” (a working class district with a very concentrated and combative working class), leaving a balance-sheet of several dead.

Meanwhile, in Maracay, the mass of workers who had already tasted the events of the 17th were not won over to participation in what seemed to everybody to be a watered-down repeat perform­ance. Very few workers bothered to turn up to the meeting. By contrast, the false rumor that a student had been assassinated in Valencia7 (in fact there really had been a death in Valencia: a worker) brought some 2,000 students into the streets. It’s typical of students to be shocked by the murder of one student by the police, and to remain blind to the less spectacular daily destruction of the working class in the factories: 250 fatal accidents and more than a million industrial injuries and diseases a year reveal capitalism’s violence to the full.

It was a student demonstration; the working class character of the 17th had disappeared, the whole affair was drowned in a sea of university, youth and other slogans. Despite this, it was worth noting the absence of the traditional student organizations, and the participation of many ‘independent’ students, who could in the future converge with the emerging workers’ movement. Only a group of teachers -- they were on strike -- maintained a certain class character.

The working class had shown its readiness to express its extreme discontent as soon as the opportunity arose, but it was not, and is not yet, prepared to try to create this possibility autonomously through its own initiative.

From the street to Parliament

Without losing any time, the CTV at once conclu­ded that such an opportunity should at all costs be prevented from arising. In fact, for the moment a relative calm is being imposed -- a situation that could well be overturned when the year’s end bonuses come up, given the financial diffi­culties of some companies. There is less and less talk of mobilizations, and more of parlia­mentary negotiations, which are supposed to put through the famous law proposed by the CTV; but this time, there’s no question of applying pres­sure at street level. On 29 October, the CTV’s consultative council concretized the results of negotiations between social democrats and Christian democrats, and decided that from now on the centre should be informed beforehand when­ever a strike movement is decided by the local or craft federations. This was to keep control of any dangerous situation. And once this point was granted, all strikes in the ministries were declared illegal. If the centre behaves like this towards its own federations, you can imagine its attitude when confronted with a workers’ movement acting independently of the unions.

All this throws a clear light on the alternative which supposedly characterizes the unions: of being complaints bureaus or instruments of struggle. In reality, the unions are complaints bureaus in periods of social calm and organs of sabotage of the workers’ struggle as soon as it raises its head.

The old mole shows its nose and the leaders contemplate the heavens

The present situation is one of resurgence of the proletariat on the national scene. This is simi­lar to what happened at the beginning of the sixties and during 1969-72. This resurgence is the product of the end of the oil boom, and of the national bourgeoisie’s delusions of grandeur. Today the bill has to be paid, which in plain language means rationalization of production, bringing bankruptcy in its wake for small and medium-sized companies (the maintenance of whose profits is one of the main preoccupations of our ‘socialists’ -- ah how beautiful capitalism was before there were any monopolies!), and intensi­fied exploitation of the working class.

The liberation of prices is only one weapon of the policy of restructuring the country’s produc­tive apparatus -- a policy which must be carried out along the only lines left to the capitalists: crisis and recession. Contrary to the assertions of the university professors, this policy is not mistaken -- it is inevitable within the framework of the capitalist system. To struggle against this policy without attacking the very foundations of the capitalist system (like those who demand the resignation of the economics cabinet for being supposedly ‘misinformed’ or ‘too ignorant’) is to show a socio-political shortsightedness which comes down to rejecting revolutionary struggle.

What must be put forward in the face of the problems that the development of capitalism imposes on the masses, is the imperative need to go beyond, relations of production determined by money and the market, to the takeover of produc­tion and distribution by the freely associated producers.

The bourgeoisie tries to divert the masses’ attention by orienting it towards a wages law, which is reduced to its bare bones thanks to the unions’ own fear of mobilizing the masses. In fact, this law hardly aims to compensate for infla­tion at the rate measured and recognized by the Venezuelan Central Bank since prices were liberated. Those who claim to be more ‘radical’ do so by demanding a higher percentage or even the nec plus ultra of a sliding scale of wages (which at best comes down to definitively tying the workers’ income to the oscillations of the bourgeois economy). While we’re on the subject, it’s inter­esting to note that the Brazilian workers have just opposed a similar law, because they say it would diminish their ability to struggle at fac­tory level to win rises much higher than inflation, as did indeed happen at the beginning of the year.

The problem isn’t the percentage of the wage rises. What’s needed is to push forward all those struggles which tend to show up the autonomy of workers’ interests against those of bourgeois society, those struggles which tend to generalize, unifying and extending themselves beyond narrow craft limitations to all sectors in struggle, all those which tend to attack the very existence of wage labor. It’s not so much the particular reasons behind each struggle which matter but the organizational experience gained during them. It’s possible, moreover, to distin­guish a watershed in the proletariat’s activity when we consider that since 1976, the number of strikes has not stopped growing, while the same has not been true for the deposition of the ‘claim casebooks’ demanded by law. This seems to indicate that the working class feels itself less and less concerned with bourgeois legality, that its action tends more and more to be a direct function of its interests.

Confronted with the liberation of prices, the workers will have to impose a liberation of wages; just as they will have to tear into shreds the schedules laid down in wage agreements. They will have to prepare themselves for a daily and permanent struggle in their workplaces and in the street.

The workers in Venezuela are not alone

What’s happening in Venezuela is not unique in the world; on the contrary, we are simply taking part in a phenomenon of universal dimensions. Nowhere has capitalism succeeded, and nowhere will it succeed, in satisfying humanity’s needs in a stable way. Unemployment in Europe and China, inflation in the USA and in Poland, nuclear inse­curity and insecurity in the food supply, with the social struggles they engender, are the witnesses.

The battle-cry of the Ist International is still on the order of the day:

“The emancipation of the working class will be the work of the workers themselves.”

Venezuela,

November, 1979

Ten months after a ‘revolution’ which accomplish­ed the great feat of setting up an even more ana­chronistic regime than the one before it, the situation in Iran has forcefully returned to the centre of world affairs, giving rise to a tidal-wave of curses against the ‘barbarism’ of Iranians and Muslims, and of alarmist predictions about the threat of war or economic catastrophe. In the midst of all this noise and furor, so complacently spread around by the mass media, it’s necessary for revolutionaries to look at the situation clearly and in particular to ans­wer the following questions:

1. What does the seizure of hostages in the Ame­rican embassy tell us about the internal situat­ion in Iran?

2. What impact does this operation and this sit­uation have on the world situation, in particular:

*** -- what are the big powers playing at?

*** -- is there really a danger of an armed conf­lict?

3. What lessons can be drawn from it about the general perspectives facing society in the next decade?

1. The taking of diplomatic personnel as hostag­es by a legal government is a sort of ‘first’ even in the agitated world of contemporary capit­alism. The taking of hostages in itself is a common occurrence in the convulsions of a decade­nt capitalism: in all inter-imperialist confron­tations entire populations can fall victim to this without causing any anxiety to the interna­tional community of imperialist brigands. The particularity and ‘scandalous’ character of what’s been going on in Teheran resides in the fact that this has upset the elementary rules of etiq­uette which these brigands have established.

Just as it’s the golden rule in the world of gangsters to keep quiet in front of the police, so respect for diplomats is the golden rule of the leaders of capitalism. The fact that the leaders of Iran have adopted or sanctioned the kind of behavior that is generally reserved to ‘terrorists’ speaks volumes about the level of political decomposition in this country.

In fact, since the departure of the Shah, the ruling class of Iran has shown itself incapable of ensuring the most elementary level of polit­ical stability. The near-unanimity which was achieved by the forces of opposition against the bloody and corrupt dictatorship to the Shah has rapidly disintegrated, owing to:

*** -- the heterogeneous nature of the social forces fighting against the old regime;

*** -- the completely anachronistic character of the new regime, which bases itself on medieval ideological themes;

*** -- the inability of the regime to give any satisfaction to the economic demands of the poor­est strata, in particular the working class;

*** -- the significant weakening of the armed forces, which were partly decapitated after the

fall of the Shah, and in which demoralization and desertion are becoming rife.

In just a few months, opposition to the governm­ent has developed to the point of totally under­mining the cohesion and the economic base of the social edifice. This includes:

*** -- the opposition from the ‘liberal’ and mod­ern sectors of the bourgeoisie;

*** -- the secession of the Kurdish provinces;

*** -- the resurgence of proletarian struggles which are more and more threatening what is almost the only source of the country’s wealth: the production and refining of oil.

Faced with the general decomposition of society, the leaders of the ‘Islamic Republic’ have gone back to the theme which managed to achieve an ephemeral unity ten months ago: hatred for the Shah and for the power which supported him until his overthrow and is now harboring him. Whether the occupation of the American embassy was ‘spontaneous’ or was wanted by the ‘hardline’ Iranian leaders (Khomeini, Bani-Sadr) doesn’t alter the fact that the bugbear of the Shah has -- like the fascist bugbear in other circumstances -- been used to re-establish a momentary ‘national unity’, expressed by:

*** -- the cease-fire of the Kurdish nationalists;

*** -- the banning of strikes by the ‘Council of the Revolution’.

But in the long run the remedy chosen by Khomeini and Co will make things worse than ever and show that the present ruling team is in an impasse: by choosing a political and economic confrontat­ion with the USA, it can only end up by aggravat­ing the internal situation, especially on the economic level.

2. The convulsions which are now shaking Iran are a new illustration of:

a. the gravity of the present crisis of world capitalism, expressing itself in increasingly profound and frequent political crises in the advanced countries, and, in the backward countries, in the almost total decomposition of the social body;

b. the impossibility of any real national ind­ependence for the under-developed countries: either they must align themselves tamely behind one bloc or the other, or they will be plunged into such instability and economic chaos that they will sooner or later be forced to tow the line in the same way: it’s impossible to see Iran under the Imam Khomeini succeeding where De Gaulle’s France and Mao’s China failed.

3. Contrary to all the alarmist rumors, the present convulsions in Iran are not giving rise to the immediate threat of a major military conf­rontation in the region. The essential reason for this is that, despite the whole anti-American campaign being conducted by Khomeini, there is no possibility today of Iran going over to the Russian bloc. As has been shown many times in the past, notably in the Cyprus affair of 1974, the difficulties and instability that may arise in a country within the US bloc, in so far as they weaken the cohesion of the bloc, may be a generally favorable factor for Russia, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Russians are in a position to really take advantage of the situ­ation. At the present moment, the USSR, which is already having great difficulties with the Muslim guerillas in Afghanistan and which has to bear in mind the possible threat of nationali­st agitation among its own Muslim populations, is not in a position to get its hands on a country which is being swept by the ‘Islamic wave’. This is all the more evident when we consider that there is no political force in Iran capable of leading the country into the Russian bloc (the CP is weak and the army is well controlled by the US bloc).

4. For some months the situation in Iran has been getting out of the US control. The US made the mistake of supporting for too long a regime that was completely discredited, even in the eyes of most of the ruling class; this led to the failure of its last-minute attempts to achie­ve a smooth transition to a more ‘democratic’ regime (in the person of Bakhtiar) capable of dampening down popular discontent. Once the army began to fall apart in February 1979, this transition took place in a heated atmosphere, in favor of a political force which was momentarily the most ‘popular’ but which in the long run is the least capable of managing Iranian capital in a lucid and effective manner. At the present time we are seeing a new stage in the US bloc’s efforts to regain control of the Iranian situation: after the failure of the ‘progressive’ solution represented by Bazargan, it’s now letting the local situation go to pieces. Like the declaration of war on the US and the European powers by the Venezuelan dicta­tor Gomez in the 1930s, the Iranian decision to declare not just a ‘holy war’ but an economic war on the US is truly suicidal: the interrup­tion of trade between Iran and the US may cause minor perturbations for the latter, but it will condemn Iran to economic strangulation. The US policy therefore boils down to letting the present regime stay in the impasse which its now reached, allowing it to isolate itself from the various sectors of society, so that it can pick the fruit when it’s ripe, replacing the Khomeini clique with another governmental team, which would have to have the following characte­ristics:

*** -- being more conciliatory towards the US;

*** -- being more capable of controlling the situation;

*** -- having the support of the army (if it’s not the army itself), seeing that the army is crucial to the political life of all third world countries.

Without pushing the analogy too far, it’s prob­able that Iran will go through a similar process as Portugal did. Here political instability and the preponderance of a party that was hostile to the USA (the PCP) -- the result of the late and brutal transition from a completely discredited dictatorship -- were eliminated following pressure from the US bloc on the diplomatic and econ­omic level.

5. There is every reason to suppose that this trial of strength between Iran and the USA, far from representing a weakening of the American bloc, will serve to strengthen it. Apart from the fact that it will sooner or later allow the US to get a firmer grip on the Middle East situation, it will constrain the western powers (Europe, Japan) to strengthen their allegiance to the leading country of the bloc. This allegiance has been somewhat disturbed recently by the fact that these powers were (apart from the backward non-oil producing countries) the main victims of the oil price-rises underhand­edly encouraged by the USA (cf. International Review, no.19). The present crisis highlights the fact that these powers are much more depend­ent on Iranian oil than America. This compels them to close ranks behind their leader and collaborate in its efforts to stabilize this part of the world. The relatively moderate way that these powers (notably France) have con­demned Khomeini shouldn’t delude us: if they didn’t tie their hands straight away, it’s beca­use this will leave them better placed to make a contribution -- especially on the diplomatic level -- to the US bloc regaining control of the situation. As we’ve already seen in Zaire, for example, one of the strengths of this bloc is its ability to have its less ‘compromised’ members intervene in situations where the domin­ant power itself is unable to act directly.

6. While one of America’s objectives in the present crisis is to strengthen the internation­al cohesion of its bloc; another, even more impor­tant objective is to whip up a war psychosis. Never has the misfortune of fifty American citi­zens caused so much concern to the mass media, the politicians and the churches. A torrent of war hysteria like this hasn’t been seen for a long time; it’s even reached the point where the government, which orchestrated the campaign in the first place, is now playing the role of mode­rator. Faced with a population that has tradit­ionally not been favorable to the idea of foreign intervention, a population which was only mobilized for world war by the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and which has been mark­edly cool towards adventures of this kind since the Vietnam war, the ‘barbarous’ acts of the ‘Islamic Republic’ have been an excellent theme for the war campaigns of the American bourgeoisie. Khomeini has found the Shah to be an excellent bugbear to use for re-forging the unity of the nation. Carter -- whether, as it would seem, he deliberately provoked the present crisis by let­ting the Shah into the States, or whether he’s merely using the situation -- has found Khomeini to be an equally useful bugbear in his efforts to reinforce national unity at home and get the American population used to the idea of foreign intervention, even if this doesn’t happen in Iran. The difference between these two maneuvers is the fact that the first is an act of desp­eration and is going to quickly rebound on its promoters, whereas the second is part of a much more lucid plan by American capital.

The USA isn’t the only country to use the present crisis to mobilize public opinion behind prepar­ations for imperialist war. In Western Europe, with themes adapted to the local situation, the whole barrage about the ‘Arab’ or ‘Islamic’ peril (similar to the old ‘Yellow Peril’) being the source of the crisis, is part of the same kind of preparations, the same kind of war psychosis.

As for the USSR, even if, for the reasons that we’ve seen, it isn’t trying to exploit the situation from the outside, it is trying to respond to the western campaign about ‘human rights’ by denouncing the ‘imperialist threats’ of the USA and proclaiming its solidarity with the anti-American sentiments of the Iranian masses.

7. Even if it’s reached a caricatural level in Iran, as in all the under-developed countries, the decomposition of Iranian society is by no means a local phenomenon. On the contrary, the virulence of the ideological campaigns being waged by the main powers indicates that the bourgeoisie everywhere is up against the wall; that it’s more and more taking refuge in a headlong flight towards a new imperialist war; and that it feels the masses’ lack of enthusiasm for its warlike objectives as a major obstacle to its plans.

For revolutionaries, the task is once again:

*** -- to denounce all these ideological campaigns, wherever they come from, whatever mottoes they use (human rights, anti-imperialism, the Arab menace, etc.), and whoever their promoters are -- right or left, east or west;

*** -- to insist that humanity’s only alternative to a new holocaust, the only way to avoid its own destruction, is the intensification of the proletarian offensive and the overthrow of capitalism.

28 November, 1979, ICC.

Afghanistan: There’s only one way to fight the threat of world war: By strengthening the proletarian struggle

With the events in Afghanistan and all their reper­cussions, capitalism has taken one more step towards world war. It would be criminal to hide this fact.

Up till now, through its struggle, through its ref­usal to submit passively to the diktats of austerity the world proletariat has prevented the bourgeoisie from imposing its apocalyptic solution to the crisis of its economy. It must now take its struggle onto a higher level. In order to do that, the workers must not abandon their struggles of economic resist­ance, but on the contrary unify them, generalize them, and above all take up their real meaning in a resolute and consistent manner: in other words, see them as part of the struggle to do away with the barbarism of war by destroying the capitalist economic laws which give rise to it.

Once again, the threat of war is shaking the world. Only a year ago, under the pretext of ‘punishing’ Vietnam for its actions in Cambodia, China went onto the offensive with over 300,000 soldiers in a war that left tens of thousands dead in a few days. Today, another so-called ‘socialist’ country, under the guise of ‘helping a regime threatened by the hands of imperialism’, has sent 100,000 soldiers of its ‘Red Army’ to put another country under military occupation. But whereas last year the specter of world war was quickly extinguished after the initial alert, today there’s nothing fleeting about this threat. On the contrary, even before the USSR’s intervention in Afghanistan, the danger of war was being frantically stirred up in the press, on television, and in the speeches of the politicians.

What is the meaning of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan?

What underlies the present campaigns about the threat of war?

How can a third imperialist holocaust be prevented?

The lies of the bourgeoisie and the threats of war

Like the time that it invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, the USSR claims that it has sent in its divisions ‘at the request of a friendly people threatened by imperialism’. This lie is as old as war itself. Capitalism has always launched its imperialist wars to ‘defend itself from foreign threats’ or to ‘protect’ this or that people. Hitler invaded Cze­choslovakia in 1938 to ‘protect’ the German-speaking population of the Sudetenland. In the mid-sixties, the USA sent in half a million soldiers to ‘defend’ South Vietnam against ‘Communist aggression’. Imp­erialist propaganda has a long list of lies. Today the American bloc is playing the game of denouncing the Russian intervention and its hypocritical just­ifications, because it will use every chance it can get to step up its own propaganda in favor of its own imperialist designs and war preparations. Under the pretext of facing up to the ‘Russian danger’ -- which is the subject of a deafening bar­rage by the press, radio and television -- the American bourgeoisie and its allies are pushing ahead not only with their ideological campaigns, but also with an enormous deployment of military forces (the Pershing II missiles in Europe, naval forces in the Indian Ocean, the supplying of arms to China and Pakistan).

This ideological campaign isn’t new. It’s already several years since Carter and his friends began preparing public opinion for the idea of a war ag­ainst the USSR under the pretext of ‘defending human rights’. More recently the oil price rises, and above all the seizure of the hostages in Tehran, have been used as an excuse to step up the whole war-campaign: in order to ‘defend our security’ and ‘protect our interests’, we must be prepared for military intervention abroad. Today, with the invasion of Afghanistan, the campaign has reached new heights. Using all the means at its disposal, the bourgeoisie is trying to get us used to the idea that ‘war is becoming inevitable’, that its ‘some­one else’s fault’, that whether we like it or not there’s no alternative and we’d better get ready for it.

Is war inevitable?

It is from capitalism’s point of view. Two world­wide butcheries have shown that generalized war is the only response that this system can have to the aggravation of its economic crisis.

War doesn’t happen simply because there are part­icularly warlike regimes -- Germany yesterday or Russia today. All countries are preparing for war, all governments are continuously increasing their military budgets, all governments and all parties -- including the so-called workers’ parties -- call for ‘defending the fatherland’, for the national defense which has cost humanity more than 100 million lives since 1914. All of them bear the same responsibility for the holocausts of the past and for those future holocausts which capitalism is preparing. When gangsters are settling scores amongst themselves, what’s the point in asking who fired the first shot? Before a war, the imperialist gangsters who’ve got the most loot generally have the luxury of presenting themselves as the ‘victims of aggression’. After the war, it’s always discover­ed, as if by chance, that the ‘aggressors’ were the losing side. In imperialist wars, all countries are ‘aggressors’; the only victims of aggression are the exploited masses who are sent to the slaught­er to defend their respective bourgeoisies.

Today the bourgeoisie in all countries is accentuat­ing its preparations for war because the crisis of its economy has got it by the throat. For years, it has tried to overcome the crisis by all sorts of policies, all of which had one thing in common: austerity for the workers. But despite this ever-increasing austerity, each one of the remedies tried out by the bourgeoisie has only made the disease worse. Each time it has tried to reduce inflation it’s only succeeded in reducing production; each time it’s tried to raise production it’s only succeeded in raising inflation. As long as it thought it could get out of this situation, it kept telling the workers that they must ‘make sac­rifices today so that things will get better to­morrow’. But reality is more and more giving the lie to such optimism. More and more, the impasse facing its economic system has forced the bour­geoisie to make a ‘retreat forward’ -- and that can only mean towards war. In the last few years there has been a proliferation and aggravation of local wars behind which the major imperialist powers have confronted each other: Africa, Cambodia, Vietnam-China, and now Afghanistan. The USSR’s invasion of this country in no way means that ‘socialism is essentially warmongering’. What it does show is that this country -- like China and all the others that call themselves ‘social­ist’ -- is capitalist and imperialist like all the rest, that it is subject to the same world crisis which is hitting the entire capitalist system, that everywhere capital is incapable of overcoming the crisis and is everywhere being pushed towards war.

Thus, all over the world, the bourgeoisie is inc­reasingly becoming aware that the only perspective it has is a new generalized war.

In fact, from the point of view both of the level of the crisis and the level of armaments, the cond­itions for a new world butchery are much riper than they were in 1914 or 1939. What, up to now, has stayed the criminal hands of the bourgeoisie is its incapacity to mobilize the population, and the working class in particular, behind its imperialist objectives. The workers’ struggles which have dev­eloped since 1968 are the sign that, up to now, the bourgeoisie has not had a free hand to impose its own response to the insoluble crisis of its econ­omy: world war.

And it’s precisely to change this state of affairs that the bourgeoisie is now intensifying its ideol­ogical barrage about the danger of war.

The bourgeoisie is less and less pretending that ‘things will be better tomorrow’. On the contrary, it’s now demanding sacrifices from the workers while letting them know that it’s going to demand more and more sacrifices, including the supreme sacrifice -- their lives, in a generalized war. It is now feeding us the following line: it’s true that there’s a danger of war, but war is an inevitability which doesn’t depend on us and which we can’t avoid. We must therefore strengthen national unity, accept sacrifices, put up with all the austerity implied by all the armaments prog­rams.

What is the way out for the working class?

It’s true that war is an inevitability for the bourgeoisie! From its point of view, in its logic, its the only perspective it can offer society. And its whole campaign today has no other aim than to get the working class to accept this point of view, this logic. While it expresses a real threat hanging over humanity, the whole deafening barrage about war is aimed at instilling a mood of resig­nation in the workers, an acceptance of a new hol­ocaust that will be even more terrible than the two previous ones.

And if the workers accept the logic of the bour­geoisie, then yes, world war is inevitable!

If the workers capitulate to the lies of the ruling class, if they accept the growing sacrifices demand­ed of them without responding, if they consent to abandoning their class struggle in the name of ‘national unity’ or the ‘national interest’, which is nothing but the interest of capital, then yes, the bourgeoisie will have a free hand to unleash a new imperialist butchery which, this time, threat­ens to destroy the whole of humanity.

Workers of the whole world,

You bear an immense responsibility on your shoulders.

The whole of society is threatened by the insol­uble contradictions of capitalism. But only the working class is in a position to stay the criminal hands of this system. In order to mobilize the population for war, the ruling class and its state require ‘discipline’ and ‘obedience’. And who else but the proletariat, through its intransigent stru­ggle, is capable of breaking out of the discipline of capital?

Only by taking up its struggles to resist auster­ity, unemployment and poverty, by strengthening them against the barriers which the unions and left parties -- even if they do it with a radical lang­uage -- constantly put against them, only in this way will the proletariat be able to hold back capitalism’s inherent tendency towards generalized war.

But even this is not enough! The only way that the working class will really be able to dispel the threat of war is by clearly understanding that the struggle against austerity and the struggle against war are one and the same struggle, that it’s not enough to resist austerity on the economic level alone, but that it’s necessary to go onto the offensive against the whole system of bourgeois power.

The proletariat’s struggles will only attain their full scope and effectiveness if the class draws all the lessons it can from them, if it sees them as a preparation for the decisive, generalized con­frontation which, by overthrowing capitalism, will free humanity from all the calamities which this system imposes on it: exploitation, poverty, famine, genocide, and imperialist holocausts.

International Communist Current

20 January 1980

Introduction

The renewal of working class combativity over the last year obliges revolutionary organizations to develop their intervention. More than ever, we have to know how to grasp quickly what’s at stake in a given situation, how to intervene putting forward the “general goals of the move­ment” in a concrete and comprehensible way.

Concrete intervention in the class struggle is a test, a measure of the theoretico-political and organizational solidity of a revolutionary group. Ambiguities or beatings about the bush at the programmatic level are inevitably translated into erroneous, shaky, fragmented interventions, or even into a total paralysis when faced with the reality of a rising tide of struggle. For example, in all the present and future struggles an understanding of the role of the trade unions is absolutely key to the development of proletarian autonomy. If a revolutionary group has not understood that the unions are no longer organs of the working class and have once and for all become weapons of the capitalist state inside the class, then that group won’t be able the contribute to the development of class consciousness.

The action of the class itself demands clear answers concerning all the theoretical bases of a class program, whether we’re talking about the economic crisis, national liberation strug­gles, or the various expressions of the general decomposition of the bourgeois order. This is why discussion and reflection within revolutionary groups today and between groups on the internat­ional level must have the aim of clarifying, criticizing, completing and actualizing the whole inheritance of the political positions of Marxism, especially of the last great international workers’ organization, the Communist Internatio­nal.

But concrete intervention in class confrontations doesn’t only measure the ‘theoretical’ or ‘progr­ammatic’ capacities of an organization: it’s also a measure of the organizational capacities of a proletarian political group. Over the ten years which separates us from the wave of struggles of 1968, the revolutionary milieu has worked long and hard to understand the necessity for an organized activity on an international scale, to set up and develop a revolutionary press, and to build organizations worthy of the name. In the present period of rising class struggle, a group which isn’t capable of mobilizing itself, imprinting its political presence, and intervening energe­tically when things really get going is doomed to impotence and failure. However correct its po­litical positions may be, they will become mere verbiage and empty phrases. For a proletarian organization, the effectiveness of its interv­ention depends both on its programmatic principles and its ability to develop an organizational framework in conformity with these principles. But if these are necessary conditions, they are not in themselves sufficient conditions. The ability to create an appropriate political organization doesn’t derive automatically from a theoretical understanding of communist principles; it demands a specific grasp of the question of the revolutionary organization (assimilating the lessons of the past and adapting them to the present period). Similarly, effective intervention in the class struggles of today isn’t the autom­atic result of a theoretical or organizational understanding. Reflection and action form a cohe­rent whole called praxis; but each aspect of the whole brings its own contribution to it and has its own specific characteristics.

On the theoretical level, you have to know how to analyze the balance of forces between classes, but on a fairly wide time-scale, through whole historic periods. Class positions, the communist program, evolve and are enriched slowly, as historical experience gives those who are conc­erned with these questions time to assimilate its lessons. Moreover, theoretical study allows you, if not in an integral manner, then at least in an adequate one, to understand historical materialism, the functioning of the capitalist system and its fundamental laws.

Similarly, concerning the question of organizat­ional practice, whilst theoretical knowledge can’t replace the organic continuity that has been broken by the convulsions of the twentieth centu­ry, the will, effort, and limited but still real experience of our own generation can help to clarify matters. It’s quite different, however, with regard to timely interventions in the heat of events. Here you have to analyze a conjuncture not on a scale of twenty years, or even five years, but to see what’s happening in the short-term -- a few months, weeks, even days. In any trial of strength between the classes, there are rapid, important fluctuations, and you have to know how to orientate yourself, to use your prin­ciples and analyses as a guide without getting swept away. You have to know how to join the flow of a movement, how to make the "general goals" more concrete, how to respond to the real preocc­upations of a struggle, how to be able to support and stimulate its positive tendencies. Here theoretical knowledge can’t replace experience. But the limited experiences which the working class and its revolutionary minorities have been able to participate in since 1968 aren’t enough to provide us with a sure way of judging things.

No more than the working class as a whole, the ICC hasn’t suddenly ‘discovered’ intervention. But we do want to contribute to the development of an awareness of the immense possibilities of the struggles in the years ahead of us. This is something that’s going to go well beyond the experience of the immediate past. The present outbreaks of struggle, and above all the ones to come, are going to face revolutionaries with great responsibilities, and the whole workers’ milieu must be able to profit from the experiences of everyone in it, in order to be able to correct our weaknesses and prepare ourselves more effecti­vely for the future. That’s why we are returning here to the struggles in France last winter and the ICC’s intervention in them from the steel­workers’ attack on the Longwy police station in February 1979 to the march on Paris of 23 March. Since then there have been other important experiences of intervention, notably in the Rotterdan dockers’ strike in autumn 1979 (see Internationalisme, the paper of the ICC’s section in Belgium). But we’re devoting this article to the events around the 23 March because this has given rise to numerous criticisms of the ICC by other political groups; these criticisms are often delivered as if from a great height, gener­ally by those who didn’t intervene at all, with the apparent aim of giving us lessons about what we should have done.

The ICC has never claimed to possess an inborn science or completed program. We inevitably make mistakes and we try to recognize those mistakes so that we can correct them. At the same time, we want to reply to our ‘critics’ with the aim of clarifying an experience for everyone and not of encouraging a sterile in-fight among political groups.

The meaning of the ‘March on Paris’

If we look at the demonstration of 23 March 1979 on its own, as an isolated event, we won’t be able to understand why it should have given rise to so much discussion and polemic. A demonstration in Paris led by the CGT isn’t something new.

An enormous crowd marching for hours isn’t in itself anything to stimulate the imagination. Even the exceptional mobilization of the police force and the violent clashes between thousands of demonstrators and the forces of order weren’t entirely new. We’ve seen such things before. But the picture changes radically and takes on a very different meaning as soon as one abandons a circumstantial perspective and situates the 23 March in a more general context. This context indicates a profound change in the evolution of the proletarian struggle. It wasn’t the 23 March which brought about this change, but this change does allow us to understand the meaning of the 23 March, which was one of its expressions.

What does this new situation consist of? The answer is: the advent of a new wave of hard, violent workers’ struggles against the aggrava­tion of the crisis and the draconian austerity measures which capital is imposing on the prole­tariat: lay-offs, unemployment, inflation, falling living standards, etc.

For four or five years, from 1973 to 1978, capita­lism in Europe managed to block the discontent of the workers by dangling in front of them the prospect of a ‘change’. The ‘left in power’ was the main weapon for mystifying the working class and channeling its discontent into the dead-end of elections. For years the left used all its strength to minimize the world-wide, historical scale of the crisis, reducing it to the mere ‘bad management’ of the right-wing parties. The crisis wasn’t presented as a general crisis of capitalism but as something restricted to each country and thus the fault of right wing govern­ments. It followed from this that a solution to the crisis could also be found at the national level, by replacing the right with the left in government. This mystifying theme was very effective in demobilizing the working class in all the countries of Western Europe. During these years, the illusory hope that the workers’ living conditions could be improved by the left coming to power served to anaesthetize the combat­ivity of the first wave of workers’ struggles. Thus the left was able to put into practice the ‘Social Contract’ in Britain, the ‘Historic Compromise’ in Italy, the ‘Moncloa Pact’ in Spain and the ‘Programme Commun’ in France.

But as Marx wrote, “it is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the proletariat as a whole, may imagine for the moment to be the aim. It is a question of what the proletariat actually is and what it will be compelled to do historically as the result of this being” (The Holy Family).

The weight of bourgeois ideology and mystifica­tions can momentarily win out over the workers’ discontent, but it can’t indefinitely stop the course of the class struggle. In the present his­toric conditions, the illusions about the ‘left in power’ couldn’t stand up for long against the aggravation of the crisis, this was true both in countries where the left was already in government and in countries where it was still only moving towards office. The barrage about the ‘left in power’ began to wear thin and slowly receded in the face of a workers’ discontent that was every day growing more visible and less controllable.

It was the unions, the capitalist organs most directly implanted in the class, in the work­places and factories, which first and most clear­ly noted this change that was about to take place in the class, which first saw the danger of an explosion of class struggle. They were aware that from the position they were currently occupying, ie supporting the ‘left in power’, they would be unable to control such struggles. It was they who put pressure on the political parties of the left -- of which the unions are an extension -- and showed them the urgent need for a move into opposition, which was the most adequate place for derailing the train of the newly resurgent struggle. No longer able to do what they had been doing before -- opposing and preventing the outbreak of strikes and other struggles -- the left parties and above all the unions now had to give the appear­ance of supporting the class struggle. They had to radicalize their language in order to be able to sabotage struggles while they were underway.

Revolutionary groups were and remain late in fully understanding this new situation, character­ized by the left in opposition, with all that this implies. Restricting themselves to generalities and not taking the concrete changes into account, their interventions inevitably remain abstract and their shots can’t help but miss the target.

The 23 March wasn’t an isolated event but was part of the general course towards a resurgence of struggle. It was preceded by a series of strikes, all over France, and particularly in Paris: hard strikes with a high level of combat­ivity. It was above all the direct product of the steelworkers’ struggle in Longwy and Denain, which involved violent confrontations with the armed forces of the state. It was the workers of Longwy and Denain, in struggle against the threat of massive lay-offs, who put forward the idea of a march on Paris. Should revolutionaries support this initiative and participate in this action? Any hesitation on this question was absolutely inadmissible. The fact that the CGT, after doing all it could, along with the other unions, to delay this project and undermine it, then decided to participate in it, to take on the task of ‘org­anizing’ the march, in no way justified abstention by revolutionaries. It would be extremely stupid for any revolutionary to wait for ‘pure’ struggles, in which the working class has already completely thrown off the influence of the unions, before deigning to take part in anything. If that were to be so, revolutionaries would never participate in the struggles of the working class, up to and including the revolution. At the same time you would provide convincing proof that the very existence of revolutionary groups was completely pointless.

By formally taking the initiative for the 23 March demonstration, the CGT proved not the inanity of the demonstration, but that union’s extreme ability to adapt to the situation, its enormous capacity for maneuver and recuperation in order to be able to derail and sabotage the actions of the proletariat. This ability of the unions to sabotage workers’ struggles from within is the greatest danger confronting the working class in the coming months and for a long time ahead. It also faces revolutionaries with their most difficult tasks in combating these most effective agents of the bourgeoisie. Revolutionaries must learn to fight these organs within the struggle itself, and not from the sidelines. Revolutionaries will only be able to unmask the unions and denounce their anti-working class role in practice; not through abstract generalities, but with concrete examples put forward during the course of the struggle, understandable and convincing to every worker.

Our critics

The approach of our eminent critics is quite different. We won’t talk about the modernists, who are still preoccupied with the question: who is the proletariat? They spend all their time looking for the subversive forces that can change society. It’s a waste of time trying to convince them. Perhaps we’ll come across them again after the revolution, if they last that long! There are others, the intellectuals, who are too busy writing their great oeuvres ... they haven’t got the time for such trifles as the 23 March. There are also the ‘old fighters’, now become skeptics who look at the present struggles and shrug their shoulders. Exhausted and dis­illusioned by the struggles of the past in which they once took part, they don’t have much faith in the struggles of today. They prefer to write their memoirs and it would be inhuman to disturb their sad retirement. There are also those well-meaning spectators, who sometimes write a great deal but who are nevertheless rigorous ‘anti-militants’. They only ask to be convinced and so they ... wait for something to happen. They wait, and they don’t understand that others are already engaged in the struggle. But there are also political groups for whom militant intervent­ion is the reason for their existence, but who find much to criticize in our intervention of 23 March.

Ferment Ouviere Revolutionnaire (FOR), for example. Despite its activism and voluntarism, the FOR refused to participate in the demonstration, probably because it was axed around the struggle against lay-offs. The FOR only recognizes a ‘crisis of civilization’ and denies that there is an economic crisis of the capitalist system. For them lay-offs, unemployment, and austerity are mere appearances or secondary phenomena which can’t provide a basis for the mobilization of the class. However, the FOR has frequently devoted itself to elaborating economic demands, like massive wage rises, refusal of overtime, and, notably in ‘68, the 35-hour week. One could easily believe that all this was just a sign of a pronounced taste for verbal radicalism and for being the highest bidder. The presence and leadership of the CGT in the demonstration completed the FOR’s reasons for denouncing it.

Another example: Pour Une Intervention Communiste (PIC). This group, which has made intervention its hobby horse, distinguished itself by its abs­ence precisely in the turbulent months of struggle at the beginning of 1979. In 1974 -- the very time the struggle was reaching a state of stag­nation and reflux -- the PIC set off at full steam, pretending that it was ‘intervening’ in every small localized strike, proposing to produce lots and lots of factory bulletins, etc. Now, like a bad sportsman, the PIC arrives exhausted and out of breath at the very moment it has to leap for­ward. Obviously, the PIC doesn’t think to ask itself whether the reason for the repeated fail­ures of its artificial ‘campaigns’ (committees to support the Portuguese workers, conference of groups for workers’ autonomy, anti-election blocs, international meetings) might lie in its incomp­rehension of what intervention can and should be, in its willful ignorance of the need to establish a relationship between communist intervention and the state of the class struggle. For the PIC, intervention is a pure act of will: just as it doesn’t understand that you must swim on the edge of the river when you want to go upstream, it also doesn’t see that you should be swimming in the middle of the river when you’re going down­stream. All these arguments are ancient Hebrew to the PIC, which prefers to invent other explanations to justify and -- inevitably -- theorize its absence. Thus dead-end interventions, the illusion of intervening, are now transformed into a real non-intervention.

Just at the point when the class is beginning to erupt, when it shows a militant will to face up to the attacks of capital, its austerity policies and its lay-offs, the PIC discovers that these struggles, like all struggles for economic demands, are just reformism. Against these resistant struggles the PIC proposes to launch a new campaign around the slogan ‘abolition of wage labor’.

We know by experience what lies behind these campaigns of the PIC: soap bubbles, appearing and disappearing in a few moments. What’s more interesting, is the PIC’s rediscovery of the language of the modernists, its recuperation of the ‘revolutionary phraseology’ which used to be so typical of Union Ouvriere -- whose empty chair the PIC now wants to sit on, perhaps. But let’s return to the definition of reformism, which the PIC wrongly identifies with the workers’ resist­ance to the immediate attacks of the bourgeoisie1. Reformism in the workers’ movement before 1914 did not consist in the defense of the immed­iate interests of the working class but in the separation it made between the defense of immed­iate interests and the ultimate goal of the proletariat -- communism, which could only be ach­ieved through revolution.2

The ideologues of the radical petty bourgeoisie, the vestiges of the student movement, the anarch­ist continuators of the Proudhonist school, all of them spear out against reformism with their fiery, pseudo-revolutionary phraseology, but they share with reformism with the artificial separation between immediate struggles and the final goal, between economic demands and political struggles. The slogan of the reformists ‘the movement is everything, the goal is nothing’ (Bernstein) and the modernist idea that the ‘goal is everything, the movement nothing’, only oppose each other in appearance. In fact they end up going in the same direction. Revolutionary Marxists have always fought against both conceptions. They always vigorously opposed any attempt to make a separation of this kind. They have always shown the indivisible unity of the proletariat, which is both an exploited class and a revolutionary class, and the indivisible unity of its struggle, both for the defense of its immediate interests and for its historical goals. Just as in the ascendant period of capitalism, when it was possible to obtain long-lasting improvements, the abandonment of these revolutionary historical goals amounted to a betrayal of the proletariat, so in the period of decadence the impossibility of such improve­ments can never be a justification for the renunciation of working class resistance and the abandonment of the struggle for the defense of the immediate interests of the class. However radical it might sound, such a position could only mean deserting and abandoning the working class.

It’s a shameful distortion to use the slogan ‘abolition of wage labor’ as a counter-weight to the violent struggle the working class is launching against the lay-offs that threaten it today. Misusing this famous slogan -- which appears in Marx’s 1865 expose against the Owenite J. Weston in the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, now known as Wages, Prices and Profit -- and quoting it out of context results in a gross deformation of the letter and spirit of its author. This deform­ation, rooted in what Marx calls a “false and superficial radicalism” (Wages, Price and Profit), is based on a separation, an opposition, between the defense of the living conditions of the class and the abolition of wage labor. In that remark­able expose, Marx insisted on showing the possibi­lity and the necessity for the working class to conduct the day-to-day struggle for the defense of its economic interests -- not only because this was in its immediate interest but above all because this struggle was one of the main pre­conditions for the development of the revolution­ary struggle against capital. Thus he warned that:

“If he (the proletarian) resigned himself to accept the will, the dictates of the capitalist as a permanent economical law, he would share in all the miseries of the slave, without the security of the slave.” (ibid).

And, further on, after showing that “the general tendency of capitalist production isn’t to raise the average standard of wages, but to sink them”, Marx came to the following conclusion:

“Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches beyond salvation.” (ibid).

And further on:

“By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.”

Contrary to what those braggarts who gargle with ‘revolutionary’ phraseology would have us believe, Marx never entertained the absurd notion of rais­ing the slogan ‘abolition of wage labor’ in opposition to the immediate struggle, the latter being defined and rejected as reformist. No: it was specifically to counter the illusion and lie of a possible harmony between the proletariat and capital, based on a false, abstract notion of justice and equality, that Marx put forward the formula:

“Instead of the conservative motto, ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they (the workers) ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchwords ‘Abolition of the wages system!’”

Let’s also remember Rosa Luxemburg’s struggle against the separation between the minimum pro­gram and the maximum program. In her speech at the founding Congress of the KPD in 1918, she defended the unity of the proletarian program, showing that the immediate economic struggle and the political struggle for the final goal were two aspects of a single historic struggle. In the same spirit, Lenin, who is so deeply abhorred by the PIC, argued that “behind every strike stands the hydra of revolution.”

For the PIC on the other hand, a struggle against lay-offs amounts to a demand for ... wage labor, just as for Proudhon the association of the workers and going on strike amounted to recognizing capit­al. This is how our severe critics understand, interpret, and distort Marxist thought.

As for the Bordigist PCI, it wasn’t far behind when it came to minimizing the importance of the 23 March demonstration or presenting it as something completely different to what it really was. Le Proletaire (No.288) had most of its front page taken up with an article on the 1 May, even though this has for so long been nothing but a festival of exploitation, a sinister masquerade orchestrated by the worst enemies of the working class, the unions and left parties. In contrast to this, both before and after 23 March, the PCI made only a few furtive comments on the subject of the steelworkers’ demo, tending to interpret this demonstration as just another union ‘day of action’. Thus, before 23 March, it said in Le Proletaire, (No.285, p. 2):

“As soon as these forces were contained, there was nothing left but this ‘broad action’ of the national day of action variety, which by giving the illusion of solidarity, destroyed its real class base, leading to no other out­come than an intervention on the parliamentary terrain.”

After 23 March, the PCI could still see nothing in it but:

“a predictable waste of workers’ energies, an enterprise of division and demoralization, an occasion for bluff, chauvinist bleatings, social pacifism and electoral cretinism.” (‘Some Lessons of the March on Paris’, Le Proletaire, No.287)

Thus, locked up in its outdated schemas, the PCI largely stood on the sidelines during the class confrontations of last winter. This didn’t stop it denouncing:

“the new, more ‘romantic’ forms of opportunism which will inevitably flourish in reaction to reformist and centrist sabotage -- ie the various forms of syndicalism, councilism, autonomism, terrorism, etc.” (Le Proletaire, No.285)

Without being paranoid, we think the PCI is talk­ing about us when it refers to ‘councilism’, since this is how they always characterize our organization, and since at various public meetings their militants have not hesitated to attack our ‘opportunism’ and ‘suivism’ with regard to the struggles of early 1979 in France. You’d think they never look at themselves in the mirror! Don’t they know you should never discuss rope in the house of someone who’s been hanged?

It’s a bit much to be told off in this way by a ‘Party’ (sic) which still talks about the unions having a proletarian character simply because they’re made up of workers -- an argument as specious as the Trotskyist idea that the Russian state is ‘still proletarian’. It wasn’t long ago that the PCI was verifying the noble credentials of the CGT, because of its proletarian origins which disting­uished it from other union confederations whose origins were more dubious. And what are we to make of the PCI’s list of immediate demands which call, among other things, for the right of the unemployed ... to remain members of the trade unions? And what about their demand that immigrant workers should have equal rights to vote? We also haven’t forgotten the great zeal with which the members of the PCI who were acting as stewards on the demonstration of the Sonacotra hostels forbade the selling of revolutionary newspapers, on the pretext of apoliticism. And how are we to interpret the PCI’s support for the Coordinating Committee of the Sonacotra hostels, when, at the recent public meeting of the Gauche Internation­aliste, they gave out a leaflet calling for a meeting in Saint-Denis, countersigned by trade union sections and the local CFDT, and moreover bearing the precision that it was a “meeting supported by the Socialist Party in Saint-Denis”? Does the PCI recognize its own politics when it reads in the leaflet “Today, all the democrats of this country must take a position....”?

These formidable warriors against opportunism, who still advocate the oh-so-revolutionary tactic of the Trade Union United Front -- a tactic daily applied by the CGT and the CFDT to contain and immobilize the workers in struggle -- are not really in a very good position to give lessons to anyone. By identifying reformism with the unions in general, they spread the greatest confusion among the workers. Revolutionaries could and were obliged to participate in the union movement in the ascendant period of capitalism, despite the fact that the orientation of the unions and the majority inside them were reformist. It’s not the same today, in the period of decadence, when the unions had to become and have become organs of the capitalist state in all countries. There is no place in such organizations for the defense of the class, and thus for revolutionaries.

By failing to take into account this fundamental difference between reformism and the unions today, by identifying these two things and calling these unions reformist, the PCI renders a great service to the bourgeoisie, by helping them to get the workers to see the unions as their organ­izations. They gratuitously hand the bourgeoisie a sizeable present: the PCI’s revolutionary seal of approval for the unions, which can be used as a G-string to cover up the nudity of the unions, their anti-working class nature and function. When the PCI has understood this difference, then it may be in a better position to judge what is a revolutionary intervention, and what opportunism and suivism mean.

The CWO and our intervention

To finish in a more detailed way, we want to look at Revolutionary Perspectives No.15, in which the Communist Workers Organization in Britain makes a learned dissection of what should have been done and could have been done on 23 March, all of this with a minimum of information about what happened and a maximum of outrageous remarks about the ICC, and all in the noble cause of polemics.

“..given the outlook of this group, dominated by spontaneism and economism, their interventions were a series of disconnected and conf­usionist endeavors .... While they made an early intervention in the steel towns, denoun­cing the unions and calling on workers to organize and spread the struggle, they rejected any vanguard role for themselves, true to their councilist tendencies. They refused to attempt to channel the demand of some workers for a march on Paris into a practical course, prefer­ring to tell the workers that they must “org­anize themselves”. On occasions they did over­come this hesitation, as for example in Dunkirk, where ICC militants successfully helped steel workers to turn a union meeting into a mass assembly. But this was done empirically, without any real transcending of their spontaneist and councilist notions. The ICC, in its “practical turn”, is likely to end up in opportunism, rather than in a coherent practice of intervention, since it lacks any overall understanding of conscious­ness and the role of the communist vanguard.” (Revolutionary Perspectives, No.15, p. 38)

The CWO, on the other hand, which has a perfect understanding of consciousness and of the leading role of the party, understood all about 23 March: “In relation to 23 March, it is clear that only a rearguard action was possible by this time.” What magnificent clarity, telling us six months after the events that they weren’t worth fussing over!

What deep analysis does the CWO base this luminous clarity on? What do they say about the political and social situation in France? In RP No.10, at the time of the elections in France, the CWO (along with everyone else) was saying that “the initiative lies firmly with the ruling class” and that there had been relative social peace in France for five years. In RP No.15, in October 1979, the CWO reprinted this passage but added “Since then we are pleased to report that the situation has changed.” Thanks for the good news! To make a note of reality when it’s right before your eyes is hardly a basis for intervention. You can’t prepare an intervention by getting excited about things after they’ve happened and thus giving yourself a sense of importance: it’s a question of refining one’s political analysis in time to do something. This is no easy thing for an isolated revolutionary group like the CWO but the same limitations apply to all other revolution­ary organizations today. Despite the difficulty of grasping all the nuances of a moving reality, even before the March 1978 elections the ICC (in IR,No.13) drew attention to the fact that the conditions of the reflux were beginning to wear out and that new outbreaks of class combativity were looming up. This perspective was shown to be correct by the strikes in spring 1978 in Germany, USA, Italy, and France. This perspective enabled us to be vigilant, to recognize the importance of the first signs of struggle and to be present in those struggles; subsequently this analysis enabled us to warn the class about the dangers of the left in opposition. The CWO says nothing about this analysis, again perhaps for polemical reasons. To acknowledge the existence of a new situation is better than the attitude of those revolutionary groups who refuse to recognize the resurgence of class struggle, but it’s not enough if we are to orientate ourselves rapidly in the face of sudden upheavals.

If the CWO can’t reproach us for failing to prepare ourselves for a resurgence of class struggle, it does attack us for failing to be the ‘vanguard’ of a movement which could only be a ‘rearguard action’. This notion of the ‘vanguard of the rearguard’ gives them the impression that the CWO has its head on back to front, or at least that it’s rather fond of contortions.

What brilliant analysis leads the CWO, from its exalted throne, to say that the 23 March was doom­ed in advance? What was the real situation?

The combativity of the workers exploded at Longwy with the general mobilization of the steelworkers against lay-offs, attacks on police-stations, destruction of dossiers in the bosses’ HQ; it was a situation of open struggle which began to escape the control of the unions and which was denounced by them. The movement spread to Denain and the rest of the steel industry. Moreover, in Paris a number of strikes broke out against lay-offs, aust­erity, and miserable working conditions: in French TV (SFP), in the banks, the insurance companies, the post office. In a situation that was full of potential, and in the whole context of the crisis, what was to be done? Was it enough to talk vague­ly about the need to generalize the struggle, to go beyond regional and sectional boundaries? The workers themselves had already begun to think of ways of concretizing this extension of the struggle and were talking about a march on Paris -- Paris, which throughout the history of the workers’ move­ment in France has always been the centre for the detonation of social struggles. How could we not support this need, expressed and demanded by the workers from the areas in struggle, to direct their energies towards Paris? Why was it that, for over a month, the unions tried to deal with this initiative by putting it off day after day? Wasn’t it because they hoped to destroy it completely or at least to disperse it.

But even before they had fixed the date for the end of March (sufficiently late for them to be able to bludgeon the workers back into line), the unions had already set about their job of under­mining the whole movement. They used the tactic of divisions between the unions to break up any tendency towards unity on the part of the workers. The CGT (the CP union) took on the task of ‘organ­izing’ the march, the better to sabotage it from within, while the CFDT went about proclaiming that it was against ‘diversionary days of action’. At the beginning, no one could say for certain just how far the 23 March demonstration could go. The whole question depended on the potentialities of the struggles that were unfolding at that moment. Ten days before the demonstration, it was still possible for this march to act as a concrete cata­lyst of the will to extend the struggle, to unite the steelworkers with the workers on strike in Paris, to take the march outside of the unions. But while revolutionaries (ie those who didn’t believe that everything was doomed in advance) were aware of this potentiality, so were the bourgeoisie and its union army. The unions set to work and a few days before 23 March, they rushed through the return of all the strikers in the Paris region. One by one these struggles were extinguished, thanks to the unions’ redoubled efforts. In any case, it is clear that the late date of the demonstration was chosen by the union in order to carry through this tactic.

We distributed leaflets to the strikers, calling on them to go on the march, for unity in the struggle, for going outside the unions. But the pressure coming from the bourgeoisie won out over these initial expressions of workers’ militancy. Already in the northern towns the workers were rightly showing distrust for the CGT, which was taking the whole thing in hand. Although we said that the march shouldn’t be restricted to union delegations, that the workers should go en masse, -- which was the only way the march could be saved -- we became aware of the fact that the delegation from Denain, for example, would be much smaller than it could have been.

What was to be done? Go on as though nothing had changed? Of course not. In the days before 23 March, the ICC prepared a leaflet for the demon­stration which said that only going outside the unions could give the march the real content the workers had hoped for.

The CWO accuses the ICC of distributing a leaflet which called the demonstration “a step forward”. It’s easy to take a phrase out of context to make it mean its opposite. In fact the leaflet says “In order for the 23 March to be a step forward for all of our struggles...”, and the content of the leaflet leaves no doubt about the need to break out of the union jail. The unions understood this well enough, because their service d’ordre tore up the leaflets and attacked our militants selling RI, No 59, whose headline said “No extens­ion of the struggle without going outside the unions” and “Greetings to the workers of Longwy”.

But watch out! The CWO would have done things differently. They give us a lesson: first we should have “channeled” the march into a “practical course”, instead of “telling the workers that they must ‘organize themselves’”. What does “channeling” the march actually mean? Before the demonstration, the ICC should have intervened to denounce the march as a “maneuver… to derail the class struggle”. Should we have done this in early February, or only after the CGT had taken the march in hand and got the Paris workers back to work? The CWO doesn’t bother to clarify these small details. It doesn’t seem to understand that a class movement goes very quickly and that you have to assess the balance of forces between classes while it’s all happening. But the ICC should have “called for an alternative route and function to the march, ie to go to the factories in Paris and call for strike action in solidarity ...” We did call for solidarity from the enter­prises of Paris. But if we understand the CWO, they say that the march was doomed in advance. Should we have denounced it and proposed another (where? On the TV? By pulling rabbits out of a hat?), and during the course of this alternative march, gone to the factories (which ones? None were on strike at the time)? The CWO has to make up its mind. Either a demonstration is doomed in advance, in which case one must rigorously denounce it with no ideas about ‘diverting’ it; or a demon­stration has an important potential, in which case you don’t denounce it. As for the idea of an ‘alt­ernative’ march, it’s as absurd as the suggestion of a handful of workers in Longwy who asked if we could put them up in Paris if 3,000 of them came down. To think that we could offer such an altern­ative today is to have one’s head in the clouds of rhetoric; it amounts to believing that we are in a quasi-insurrectional period. The question isn’t to imagine the impossible on paper, but to carry out everything that’s possible in practice.

The CWO thinks that it was possible for a revolut­ionary minority to divert this demonstration. Once again it neglects to say how and in what circumstances. It’s a strange conception the CWO seems to have -- seeing the revolution at every street corner the moment the infallible party gives the right directives, no matter what degree of maturity the class has reached.

However, despite the most refined, systematic sabotage, despite a service d’ordre of 3,000 CP heavies, despite the fragmentation of the most combative workers the moment they arrived in the outskirts of Paris, despite military-style disper­sion in the streets around L’Opera, the 23 March wasn’t an empty procession like the sinister May­day parades. On 23 March, the combativity of the workers couldn’t find an outlet through which to express itself, so it exploded into a fight in which hundreds of workers confronted the union service d’ordre. But here again the CWO has its own version of reality: “To go along and mind­lessly join those workers in a futile fight with the CRS/CGT was an act of desperation” on the ICC’s part.

The CWO tries to paint a picture of a ‘mindless’ intervention which boiled down to going along to fight the cops alongside the workers in a ‘futile’ battle. Coming from any other publication this accusation wouldn’t be quite so astounding. Do we really need to affirm that our comrades didn’t go looking for a brawl, but defended themselves against the CRS charges like the other workers and alongside them? They retreated with the demon­strators until the march had been completely disp­ersed, all the while continuing to distribute leaflets and to discuss. The ICC has never exalted violence in itself, neither today nor tomorrow, as can be seen by the texts we have published on the period of transition. The CWO now reproaches us for being obliged to defend ourselves against the police, whereas in RP, No.13 it says “the ICC is under the growing influence of liberal and pacifist illusions” (p6). The CWO must decide. On the one hand it says that the ICC are ‘dreamers’ and ‘utopians’ because we are against violence within the class during the revolution (whereas the CWO, as if it were the schoolmaster of the revolution, is already rubbing its hands in expectation of the lesson in lead it’s going to give to the workers who don’t get it right). On the other hand, when the ICC confronts the police in a demonstration, the CWO finds this ‘mindless’. Confronting the police is ‘futile’, but killing each other is a truly revolutionary ‘tactic’!

We have said that the march on Paris could have been a concretization of the necessity to gener­alize the struggle, an occasion for showing the real strength of the working class. The fact that this potentiality wasn’t realized wasn’t because of us. Although we tried to put forward the idea of an on-the-spot assembly, the rapidity of the police charge combined with the dispersion organized by the unions prevented the thousands of workers who were unwilling to disperse from holding such a meeting.

The fact that the 23 March demonstration didn’t end up doing much more than what the unions wanted it to do doesn’t mean that it never had any potential. Despite all the sabotage that took place before the march, despite the fact that it was put off until after the strikes in Paris were over, it could still have turned out differently, as was shown a few days later at a demonstration in Dunkirk; here the union meeting which concluded the demonstration was transformed into a workers’ assembly where a significant number of workers denounced the unions. Following the CWO’s logic revolutionaries shouldn’t have participated in this demonstration because it was still contained by the unions and was in many ways much more ‘artificial’ than the 23 March demonstration. But this would have deprived them of the possibility of making an important and relatively effective intervention, as happened with the PCI which had a similar analysis to the CWO’s.

After the march, the ICC distributed to all the factories where it intervenes regularly a leaflet analyzing how the unions had carried out their sabotage. The leaflet said that the essential lesson of this struggle, in which the unions had unmasked themselves as defenders of the police against the anger of the workers, was that there was no other way forward for the workers except to go outside the unions.

For the CWO, the ICC’s intervention throughout the period of the French steelworkers’ struggle was simply the culmination “of a long series of political capitulation by the ICC”. This group doesn’t know how to measure its words. Apart from the fact that its remarks about what a “genuine (!) revolutionary intervention” would have looked like don’t stand up to scrutiny, nothing in what the ICC did justifies the charge of “political capitulation”. The ICC was faithful to its principles and to a coherent orientation. Agitation is a difficult weapon to master and you can only learn to do so in practice. We don’t claim that each of the seven leaflets we distributed in six weeks was a master-piece, but there’s absolutely nothing in any of the CWO’s criticisms which shows that we abandoned our principles. We are happy to note that the gentlemen who aspire to be the ‘leaders’ of the working class tomorrow recognize that the ICC’s intervention doesn’t have a substitutionist style. But when it comes to real practical questions they bring nothing precise to the discussion, and in the end their words are nothing but hot air.

The CWO ends its bad-faith assault on the ICC, by saying that on many vital issues facing revolutionaries today, such as “‘should they help in setting up unemployed circles?’, ‘Should they be in favor of workers’ groups?’, Should they attend unofficial international meetings of workers if there is still union influence in them?’ ... the ICC can only leave its members stumbling in the dark, and eventually collapsing into opportunism”. Here again it’s lost any sense of proportion. The CWO attended the ICC’s Third Congress where these questions were discussed, but the CWO seems to have been deaf at the time or has had amnesia since. It has to be said that when, as is the case with the CWO, you’re not used to elaborating political positions inside an international organization, and when you think monolithism is the best armour for a revolutionary organization, then you’re going to have a hard time finding your feet in a Congress where different proposals are inevitably put forward, and where there is a real confront­ation of ideas. But if the CWO is already shut up in a watertight case today, what will it do in the whirlpool of the class struggle, when all the workers will feel the need to debate and discuss?

We don't pretend to have all the answers – no more than the CWO, who in a sudden outburst of realism, admit that they have “not yet formulated a total picture on these questions”. But in the questions posed above, the ICC has already replied yes in its own practice (cf the unemployed committees of Angers, the Rotterdam strike, the international dockers’ meeting in Barcelona). While we support every tendency towards the self organization of the working class, we must also know how to orientate these efforts, what dangers to avoid, what specific contribution to make. And in this we can only rely on our principles and on what we learn from experience.

It’s in this sense that we affirm the necessity to give our support to all the struggles which the proletariat wages on its own class terrain. We support the demands decided on by the workers themselves on the condition that they conform to the interests of the class. We reject the auctioneering games of the leftists (the unions and the left ask for 20 centimes, so the leftists ask for 25!) as well as the PCI’s absurd idea of making up a ‘list of demands’ instead of the workers.

The greatest obstacle facing workers’ struggles today is the union apparatus. In a period of rising class struggle we try to denounce the unions not only in a general, abstract way, but above all in a concrete manner, inside the struggle, showing how they sabotage the workers’ militancy on a day-to-day level.

The essential thing in any workers’ struggle today is the thrust towards extending it, towards forging the unity of the class against a decompos­ing capitalist system, towards going beyond categories, regions, and even nations. An isolat­ed struggle can only end in defeat. The only way to force capital to retreat is to unify and generalize the struggle. Here the situation today is different from last century, when the length of a struggle was an essential factor in its success. Faced with a boss-class that was much more disp­ersed than it is today, stopping production for a long period could mean catastrophic economic loss­es for the enterprise and was thus an effective way of pressuring the owners. Today on the other hand, there is much greater solidarity between all sectors of the national capital, mainly under the aegis of the state, and this allows an enterprise to hold out much longer (especially in a moment of overproduction and excess stocks). Because of this, a struggle that goes on and on has every possibility of being lost, due to the economic difficulties facing the strikers and the exhaustion that eventually sets in. This is why the unions don’t mind playing the game of ‘class war’ and declaring ‘we’ll hold out for as long as it takes’. They know the struggle will be broken in the long run. On the other hand, it’s no accident that they will try to sabotage any move to generalize the struggle: what they fear more than any other section of the bourgeoisie is having to deal with a movement which doesn’t simply affect this or that sector of the class, but tends to generalize to the whole class, uncovering the fact that the struggle is between two antagonistic classes, not just between a group of workers and a boss. In such situations the bourgeoisie is faced with economic and polit­ical paralysis, which is why one of the most vital weapons of the struggle is the tendency towards extending itself, even if this doesn’t happen right away. The bourgeoisie is much more scared of strikers who go from one factory to another trying to convince their comrades to join the struggle, than of strikers who shut themselves up in one factory, even when they’re determined to hold out for two months.

The generalization of the struggle is the leit­motif of revolutionary intervention today because it is the prefiguration of the revolutionary battles that will embrace the whole class tomorrow.

In order to be able to wage the struggle outside and against the unions, the working class is organizing itself, in a hesitant manner at first, but nonetheless in a way that already allows us to foresee the general self-organization of the proletariat (cf the Rotterdam strike of September ‘79). With all our strength, we support these expressions which serve to enrich class conscious­ness on this vital issue.

As for the most combative workers, we stimulate them to regroup themselves, not to set-up new trade unions, or to lose themselves in a sterile apoliticism which comes from a lack of confidence in themselves, but in workers’ groups, action committees, collectives, co-ordinations, etc, meeting places between workers, open to all workers to discuss the basic questions facing the class. Without falling into over-enthusiasm and without bluffing, we can say that the formation of such combative minorities is a sign of the ferment going on in the whole class. Such minorities contribute to the development of class conscious­ness not so much through the individuals directly involved at a given moment, but through the histor­ic thread which the class is once again taking up, by opening up discussion and debate in its own ranks.

On these questions as on the 23 March demonstration it has to be said there are no eternally valid recipes. Tomorrow many other expressions of class combativity will come to our attention, all of them showing the strength of the proletar­iat. Like the class as a whole, revolutionaries are faced with the most vital tasks: defending a perspective by taking a precise situation into account; knowing when to go from a general denunciation to a concrete denunciation based on the immediate facts; when to act at a faster pace; how to appreciate the real level of struggle; how to define, at each stage, the immediate goals, and how to relate these to the revolutionary perspective.

In the whole world today there are only a handful of revolutionary militants. We must have no illusions about revolutionaries having a direct influence today, nor about the difficulty the working class has in reappropriating Marxism. In the coming storms of the class struggle, in this work “of consciousness, will, passion and imagination that is the proletarian struggle”, revolutionaries will only be able to play a role “if they haven’t forgotten how to learn”.

JA/MC/JL/CG

In International Review, no.10 (June/August 1977), we began publication of the texts of the Mexican Communist Left. As we proposed, we are continuing this work (after some delay, it is true, although this was contrary to our wishes) with the publica­tion in the last IR, no.19, of the text on ‘Nationalizations’, in which the Mexican Left vig­orously denounced this mystification, which is used chiefly by the so-called workers’ parties to shamelessly defeat the working class, binding it more firmly to the defense of capitalism. Today, as yesterday, nationalization remains the platform of these parties, and the acceleration of the development towards state capitalism is always presented by them as the proletarian alternative to the crisis of capitalism. And, just like yes­terday, the Trotskyists and the other leftists continue, on this question as on so many others, to fall into line, to act as very devoted servants of capital.

The two texts we are publishing now are, to the best of our knowledge, the last this group pub­lished, in their magazine Comunismo, no.2, Decem­ber 1938. The violent hostility of all the forces of the bourgeoisie, left and right; the Stalinist-style campaign of public denunciation by the Mexi­can section of the IVth International of the militants and the group as ‘provocateurs’, ‘agents of Hitler and Stalin’; the repression (see their ‘Appeal’ in IR, no.10) handed out by the left government; and above all, the storms of the evermore rapidly approaching war -- all these, along with the weak forces of the Mexican Left and its extreme youth, meant it could not long resist such a coalition of enemy forces. The Marxist Workers’ Group of Mexico disappeared in the turmoil of 1939. But, in the short two years of its existence the Mexican left communist group made an effective contribution to the defense of fundamental communist positions. Its place, and its contribution, in the darkest hours of the international revolutionary movement, should not remain unrecognized by new generations.

The first text is a vital example of how revolu­tionaries in an underdeveloped country defend class positions, and denounce all the lies of a ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie. A good example, not only in contrast to the Trotskyist support of Cardenas, but also against the Bordigists of today, who can find nothing better than to criti­cize the ‘weaknesses’ of the left government of Allende as regards Pinochet, reproaching him for his hesitations, and giving him, after the event, edifying advice on the question of ‘revolutionary violence’. We should also recall the apologies made by the Bordigists for the exemplary ‘revolu­tionary terror’ of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It is towards them, too, that the conclusion of the article of the Mexican left is addressed. Denouncing the lie of ‘social revolution’ lauded by the revolutionary National Party (the govern­mental party), the Marxist Workers’ Group pro­claimed:

“What a glorious ‘social’ vision: to establish in this country the peace of the cemetery, and call it a ‘classless society’ ... as these generals understand it.”

The second text is an analytical study of the Theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International on the national and colonial ques­tions. It is absolutely inevitable that any communist grouping disengaging itself from the long course of the degeneration and final betra­yal of the IIIrd International will have to not only denounce the Stalinist counter-revolution, but also undertake a detailed critique of the work of the Communist International, from its first years, from the glorious times of Lenin. Like the Italian and Belgian fractions of the International Communist Left, the Mexican left could not simply be satisfied with a flat apology for all that came from Lenin, as the Trotskyists did, nor as the Bordigists do today. The Mexican left would have the greatest difficulty in recognizing the Bordigists as the continuation of Bilan, since they have regressed on so many questions, that they now look like a variant of Trotskyism.

Just as revolutionaries on the outbreak of World War I could not content themselves with a simple denunciation of the betrayal of the IInd Inter­national, but had to submit the whole of its development and history to a critical examination, so the left communists could not and should not have been content with a characterization of the Stalinist counter-revolution but had to seek to lay bare its roots, not the least of which lay in the immaturity of the thought and organization of the communists movement itself. Stalinism did not fall from the sky, nor did it arise from a void. And if it is absurd to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so it is absurd to condemn the Commu­nist International because Stalinism developed and triumphed from within it (see, for example, the ‘modern’, oh-so-severe judges like the PIC and the Gauche Internationaliste in France). But it is no less absurd to pretend that the dirty bathwater was always absolutely pure and limpidly clear and to present the history of the Communist International as divided into two neat periods, the first when it was pure, revolutionary, spotless, without weakness, until sharply interrupted by the explosion of the counter-revolution. These images of a happy paradise and a horrible hell, with no link between them, have nothing to do with a real movement, such as the history of the communist movement, where continuity flows through profound splits and where future ruptures have their seeds in the process of this continuity.

Only this inexorable critical examination, this constant self-criticism, allows the revolutionary movement of our class to overcome the weaknesses and the immaturity of yesterday, to correct the errors of the past, and create the possibility of raising itself to fulfill its historic tasks, of evolving its positions through its experience.

It is not surprising that the Mexican left placed the examination of the national question at the heart of its preoccupations. Alongside the ques­tions of the historic period of decadence and its implications, trade unions, electoral questions, the question of fascism and anti-fascism, the national question is one of those which have con­tained the most ambiguities, allowing for oppor­tunist interpretations, and lending strength to all kinds of dubious currents.

In the first part of this text the Mexican left, recalling the first and second paragraphs of the second Thesis, endeavors to show how the Trotsky­ists and other ‘anti-imperialists’ shamelessly distort the principled position developed in the Theses of the Second Congress. It defends the internationalist principle as a gain of the comm­unist movement, and denounces any alteration of it as a regression towards nationalist, bourgeois positions. The Mexican left then proposes to make a critique of the inadequacies and ambigui­ties still contained in the Theses of the Commu­nist International, most notably in the third point of the second paragraph. The first two points in this paragraph clearly put the accent on the fundamental separation between the class interests of the exploited, and the mystifying bourgeois concept of the so-called national interest, common to all classes. The third point is much more vague, a simple description of the extreme exploitation of the majority of the under­developed countries by a minority of countries where capitalism is highly developed, and draws no conclusion other than the statement that this is “characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism”.

What flows from this statement? For the centrist majority of the International, around Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, it followed that in certain circumstances, and more particularly in a revo­lutionary period, the proletariat concentrated in the most developed capitalist countries could find, in its assault on the capitalist world, support in the underdeveloped countries, which has been exposed to the oppression of the major powers. The error of such a position lays in the mechanical way it proceeds from observing the antagonism between dominant and dominated countries to affirming that this antagonism repre­sents an irreconcilable historic opposition to the existing order. Bourgeois society is not a harmon­ious society, but is founded on many antagonisms: between highly developed capitalist countries and underdeveloped countries, and between developed countries themselves and between one bloc of countries and another for the domination of the world, which culminates in the period of genera­lized imperialist wars. The question is to understand whether these antagonisms put into question the bourgeois order, whether they offer a solution to the contradictions which are tear­ing it apart and leading it towards catastrophe, or whether these antagonisms are merely manifesta­tions of the existing order, of its mode of existence?

For Marxists, only the class antagonism of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie offers a revolutio­nary dynamic, not only because it is the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors, but be­cause it is the proletariat which bears within it the solution to all these antagonisms and contra­dictions in which society is floundering; and this solution is the establishment of a new soc­ial order, a society without classes, and without national divisions: communism. The ambiguity of this position started the Communist International on a dangerous slope. The shattering contradic­tions and successive setbacks which this policy led to (support for Kemal Pasha in Turkey or Chiang Kai-shek in China) only served to grease the slope, and accelerate the degeneration of the International.

From an ‘occasional possibility’ the position be­came a constant rule and the possibility of the proletariat finding support in the national strug­gles of colonial countries was transformed into unconditional support by the proletariat of national and nationalist struggles. In this way the Trotskyists ended up by participating in the imperialist war and in national defense in the name of anti-fascism, and the Bordigists, turning their backs on the concept of an international revolution, constructed a theory of geographical areas, where, for some (a minority) proletarian revolution was on the agenda, and for others (a category comprising the vast majority of countries and of the world population), ‘the anti-imperia­list bourgeois-democratic revolution’ was on the agenda.

The disappearance of their magazine in 1939 impe­ded the Mexican left from pursuing its implacable critique of the ambiguous positions of the IIIrd International. But the first part of their study was already an important contribution to this work. It is the task of revolutionaries today to take up this critique and to continue it.

MC

The Party of the Mexican Revolution ‘recognizes the class struggle’ to combat the proletarian revolution

One of the most characteristic features of poli­tical life today, is the fact that the bourgeoi­sie, in order to derail the attack of the starv­ing and desperate masses, hypocritically and demagogically presents itself as the opposite of what it really is, ie it tries to pass as the defenders of the masses against the bourgeoisie itself. Of course, in order to succeed in such a shameless and absurd fraud, the bourgeoisie has to divide itself into two parts: one the ‘oppressor’, the other the ‘protector’, and these two factions, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ capita­lists must be seen to be engaged in a ‘struggle’.

In some cases, in ‘democratic’ countries, where the dictatorship is disguised, the sector composed of ‘good’ capitalists, holds state power, and in the other, the countries with an overt dictator­ship, ‘bad’ capitalists do so. In the latter case, the ‘good’ capitalists, the ‘protectors of the masses’ are in a position of ‘irreconcilable opposition’, in their own terms. But in both cases it is a question of one capitalist sector ‘defending’ the masses against another capitalist sector. The workers and poor peasants, in order to liberate themselves from the capitalist yoke, need only link their destinies to their own capi­talists -- the ‘good’ ones of course, those who are disguised as their ‘friends’.

And this total surrenders to the class enemy, which naturally demands enormous sacrifices: economic, political, and even of life itself (like today in Spain and China), in order to ‘protect’ the proletarians and peasants from the other ‘reactionary’, ‘fascist’ or ‘imperialist’ capita­lists, such an abandonment of struggle is ironi­cally called ‘struggle’. In Mexico, today the tropical garden of demagogic exuberance, this is even called ‘class struggle’.

When you read the following phrases in the dec­laration of the ‘new’ PRM (‘Party of the Mexican Revolution and authentic representative of the workers’) and the Editorial entitled ‘On Patrio­tism’ in E1 Nacional, 21 April 1938, you could easily believe you were in a madhouse:

“The class struggle is recognized by the PRM and by the consensus of workers’ opinion throughout the country, as an insuperable reality, a phenomenon inherent to the capita­list system of production. We can hope for social peace only when this system has been replaced. We revolutionaries conceive of society as divided into two strata, superimposed by the force of an economic law imposed by capitalism. This conception is still valid, even if only in a transient sense. The mayan peasant is more a brother to the Finnish fish­erman, living by his icy waters, than to the white landowner, son of the same soil, and protected by the same institutions, who only uses what he has in common with his serf to better rob him.”

And who is it saying these things? The true representative of the bourgeoisie, the true rep­resentative of the capitalist system, the true representative of the white owners, the irrecon­cilable enemy of the mayan peasants and of the Finnish fishermen, the party of the so-called ‘Mexican Revolution’!

Thus the Mexican landowners ‘recognize’ the class struggle, but naturally they do not refer to the struggle between them and the oppressed masses, but to the struggle of the oppressed and exploited against the other landowners and capitalists, the ‘baddies’, the ‘fascists’. Against the latter, the ‘good’ Mexican bourgeoisie, led by the ‘demo­cratic’ generals, struggle side by side with the workers and peasants, and not only do they parti­cipate in this ‘class struggle’, they also lead it! Of course, such a ‘class struggle’, controlled by a sector of the bourgeoisie itself, is not a struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors, but, on the contrary, is a struggle of the oppressors against the oppressed. It is the class struggle of the bourgeoisie and land­owners, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ together, against the proletarians and the peasants.

The Mexican bourgeoisie ‘recognizes’ the class struggle, with the aim of distorting the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters, and using this combativity to strengthen the struggle of the exploiters against the exploited. This is the key to the confusion which today reigns among the proletariat and the peasantry in this country, and the explanation for their numerous defeats.

There is a need for a Party of the proletarian revolution!

The triumph of the ‘classist’ demagogy of the Mexican bourgeoisie can be explained by the lack of a proletarian class party in Mexico.

There does not exist, outside of our organization, any group, however small, which tries, on the basis of Marxist positions, to combat the lies of the ‘revolutionary’ bourgeoisie of this country. So the demagogy of the PRM and all their great ‘workerists’ in the government, has a clear run and can reach limits unheard of in other countries.

“Someone who only accepts the class struggle is not yet a Marxist, and can still remain within the framework of bourgeois politics and thought ... Only those who extend the recognition of the class struggle to that of the dictatorship of the proletariat are Marxists.” (Lenin, State and Revolution)

Fighting the bourgeoisie and destroying it com­pletely through the proletarian dictatorship, is, for Marxists, for communists, the only way to ‘substitute’ for the present system one which would finally establish ‘social peace’ (to use the words of the PRM’s declaration).

The generals of the PRM and their astute ‘worker­ist’ advisers have, of course, an entirely diff­erent conception. For them, to substitute one system for another means simply changing its label, and naturally they can and must do these themselves. In other words, they are not con­cerned solely with a so-called ‘class struggle’, but with a ‘social revolution’ ... under the direction of the generals!

What a glorious ‘social’ vision! To establish in this country the peace of the cemetery, and call it a ‘classless’ society ... as these generals understand it!

On the national and colonial questions

“Abolish the exploitation of man by man, and you have abolished the exploitation of one nation by another.” (The Communist Manifesto)

The text of the second paragraph of the Theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International on the national and colonial questions says:

“As the conscious expression of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and in accordance with its main task, which is the fight against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies and hypocrisy, the Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national ques­tion on abstract and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu. Secondly, it should emphasize the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed classes, of the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national interest, which means the interests of the ruling class. Thirdly, it must empha­size the equally clear division of the oppres­sed, dependent nations which do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, exploiting, privileged nations, as a counter to the bour­geois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s population, by a tiny minority of the richest and most advanced capi­talist countries, that is characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism.”

We shall analyze this paragraph point by point.

Without doubt the most significant point in this paragraph is its opening: the clear and unequivo­cal declaration that the primary task of the world Communist Party is not the renowned ‘defense of democracy’, about which we hear so much today from so-called ‘communists’, but, on the contrary, the struggle against democracy!

This affirmation, which was reiterated many times in other Theses of the International in the time of Lenin, although roundly denied today by the organization which still bears this name, served Lenin and his comrades as a point of departure for the study of national and colonial questions. There is no other point of departure! Those who do not accept the struggle against bourgeois democracy as a fundamental task of communists can never offer a Marxist solution to these questions.

The first paragraph of the Theses explains in more detail what these “abstract and formal prin­ciples” are that the party of the revolutionary world proletariat must reject as a basis for its tactics on the national and colonial questions:

“An abstract or formal conception of the question of equality in general and national equality in particular is characteristic of the bourgeoisie by its very nature. Under the pretence of the equality of the human person in general, bourgeois democracy proclaims the formal legal equality of the proprietor and the proletarian, of the exploiter and the exploited, and thus deceives the oppressed classes in the highest degree. The idea of equality, which is itself a reflection of the relations of commodity production, is trans­formed by the bourgeoisie, under the pretext of the absolute equality of the human person, into a tool in the struggle against the abolition of classes.”

Of course, the struggle for the abolition of classes would be superfluous if, in reality, as the bourgeoisie declares, equality were possible within the present society, despite its division into classes. The truth is that not only is there no equality within the present society, but there can never be any. Therefore the Theses add at the end of the paragraph quoted: “the true significance of the demand for equality lies only in the demand for the abolition of classes” and again, paragraph four speaks of: “... victory over capitalism, without which the destruction of national oppression and equality is impossible.”

In other words, the affirmation of the exis­tence of equality, or at least the possibility of its existence, within the present society, tends to preserve exploitation and the oppres­sion of classes and nations. The demand for equality, on the basis of the abolition of classes, tends towards the opposite goal: the destruction of present day society and the con­struction of a new classless society. The first is the chosen weapon of all reformists in their service of the counter-revolution. The second is the demand of a proletariat conscious of its class interests, the demand of the party of the revolutionary world proletariat.

In accord with the 2nd part of the Thesis quoted, the world Communist Party has to reject “the general concept of so-called national interests” because these do not nor cannot exist when all nations are divided into classes, with conflicting and irreconcilable interests, so that those who speak of ‘national interests’ either consciously or unconsciously defend the interests of the dominant classes. The affirmation that ‘national interests’ exist, means interests common to all the members of the nation, and is based precisely on this supposed “formal legal equality of the proprietor and the proletarian, of the exploiter and the exploited” hypocritically proclaimed by these very owners and exploiters. In the way indicated by Marx and Engels we must fight the lie that, for example, ‘all Mexicans’ are equal and have common interests and therefore a common fatherland to defend. The fatherland isn’t theirs. The workers, as the Communist Manifesto, with its absolute clarity, asserted a hundred years ago, have no fatherland. The future, which is ours, will not have different fatherlands in whose names the owners will command the dispossessed on the battlefields, but one fatherland: the human society of producers.

In order to successfully struggle against the bourgeoisie and destroy this society we must reject not only the lie of the equality of men within each nation, but also the lie of the equality of nations. We must show, as the first part of the Thesis indicates, that “the enslavement of the vast majority of the population of the world, by an insignificant minority of advanced capitalist countries”'(USA, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan) is “characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism”, and that this enslavement therefore cannot dis­appear with a few farcical declarations against imperialism and in favor of a so-called ‘good neighbor’ policy, but only with the disappear­ance of capitalism itself, with its violent destruction by the world proletariat.

We can never weary of repeating this fundamental truth, not in a general or abstract way, but by concretely and daily unmasking this democratic hypocrisy which the Theses speak of. In the case of Mexico this means, precisely, unmasking the lie that an advanced, and therefore imperialist, capitalist country like the USA could be the ‘good neighbor’ of a backward country like Mexico. We must destroy the myth that the treaty which, at the present time, is being forged between the North American exploiters and the only good neigh­bors that they have in Mexico, the servile Mexi­can exploiters, means a treaty between the North American and Mexican peoples, as the exploiters of both countries would have us believe. We must insist that, on the contrary, our only good neighbors are the proletarians and all the oppressed of the US and the whole world, and with whom truly common interests unite us against all the exploiters and their respective fatherlands.

All this is recognized ‘theoretically’ by the so-called communists of the Stalinist and Trotskyist varieties, but practically they act in contra­diction to it. The Stalinists of Mexico and the US, today stand in the front line of those who praise the ‘new policy’ of North American imperialism. The Trotskyists do not do this overtly, but follow the indirect method of exclu­sively attacking the ‘bad neighbors’ of the Mexican bourgeoisie: English, German or Japanese imperialism ...

But their struggle against fundamental positions of the Communist International of Lenin’s time goes beyond this. With a trickery characteristic of renegades, the Stalinists and Trotskyists ‘forget’ that part of the Theses quoted which speaks of the “clear separation of the interests of oppressed classes, the workers, the exploited, from the general concept of the so-called ‘national interest’ which really means the inte­rests of the ruling class” and fix exclusively on the other part, which speaks of “the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent nations ...from the oppressing, exploited, privileged nations”.

Trotsky, for example, does this in his attacks on our position on the Chinese war (see the Internal Bulletin, no.1, of the Internationalist Communist League of Mexico). With this method he arrives at exactly the same positions as the Stalinists: instead of showing the Chinese proletarians that their class interests are irreconcilable with the so-called ‘national interest’ (in reality the interests of the Chinese exploiters), and that they must struggle as much against their ‘compat­riot’ enemies as against the invading enemy, through fraternization with the Japanese soldiers and revolutionary defeatism, instead of all this Trotsky tries to convince the exploited of China that their class interests coincide -- to a certain extent, of course -- ie on the decisive point of the defense of the so-called ‘fatherland’-- with the ‘national interests’ of their exploiters!

For Trotsky, the proletariat ‘in general’ has no fatherland. And so in ‘theory’ ('theoretically’) he remains faithful to Marxism. But in the con­crete case of the proletariat of China, of Mexico, of all the oppressed and dependent countries, ie in the cases of the overwhelming majority of the countries of the world he sees no application of this fundamental law of Marxism. “Chinese patr­iotism is legitimate and progressive” affirms that renegade! Clearly for him and his followers so also is Mexican, Guatemalan, Argentinian, Cuban patriotism, etc.

For a Marxist there can be no doubt that the most essential of the three points in the Theses of the Second Congress is the second, which empha­sizes the non-existence of ‘national interests’, and insists that the distinction made in the third point, between “oppressed nations” and “oppressing nations” must be understood in this light. In other words, even in the oppressed nations there are no ‘national interests’ other than those of the dominant class. The practical conclusion of this theoretical position is that the fundamental rules of communist politics must be applicable to all countries, imperialist, semi-colonial, and colonial. The struggle against patriotism, fraternization with the oppressed of all countries, including the uniformed proletar­ians and peasants in the armies of the imperialist countries, is one of the tenets of communist politics which can allow no exceptions.

“From the principles set forth it follows that the whole policy of the Communist International on the national and colonial question must be based mainly on the union of the workers and toiling masses of all nations and countries in the common revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the landlords and the bourgeoisie. For only such a union can secure victory over capitalism, without which the destruction of national oppression and equality is impossible.”

The application of this cornerstone to concrete situations clearly excludes any ‘legitimate patriotism’ or ‘national defense’. In the case of the Chinese war, for example, what other appli­cation can there be of the general rule of “the common struggle of the workers and toiling masses of all nations and countries against the landlords and the bourgeoisie”, than that of fraternization between the Chinese and the Japanese soldiers in a common struggle against the Chinese and Japanese owners and capitalists, revolutionary defeatism on both sides. And where does this policy proposed by Trotsky of “participation in the military struggle under the command of Chiang Kai-shek” fit into this general rule?

In answer to us Trotsky cites the case when Marx and Engels supported the Irish war against Great Britain and that of the Poles against the Czar, although in these two national wars the leaders were mostly bourgeois, and at times, almost feudal! Trotsky, despite his great understanding, fails to understand the primordial importance of the first of the points that the Theses of the Second Congress saw as the prime key to the national question: “an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu”.

Does our great un-Marxist historian not at least recall that communist tactics cannot be the same in the ascendant phase of capitalism (from which he has cited two examples of progressive wars) and in its phase of decomposition, the imperialist phase in which we are now living? The economic and historic circumstances have changed to such a degree since the time in which Marx and Engels supported the Irish war and that of the Poles, that it would be suicidal for the proletariat today to follow the same tactics as in that period.

Of course, these changed tactics should not nor cannot go beyond the framework of already established communist principles, whose validity events have already proved a thousand times. Far from going beyond this framework, each tactical adjustment must be a more correct, more strict application of these principles, for it is not merely new situations which oblige us to make such changes, but also historic experiences, that is to say, the study of our past errors. Only in this way can we maintain the continuity of the communist struggle, through the decomposi­tion of the old proletarian organs and the creation of new ones.

The renegade Trotsky revises the Communist Manifesto and the Theses of the Second Congress

One of the fundamental principles which must rule all our tactics on the national question is anti­-patriotism. “The workers have no fatherland”. Whoever proposes a new tactic which goes against this principle abandons Marxist guidelines and goes over to the service of the enemy.

So, the interesting thing is that this same Trotsky, who insists that the proletariat today must follow the same tactics as in the time of Marx and Engels, openly abandons the principles already set down by these two men in the Communist Manifesto. In his preface to the new edition of the Communist Manifesto published recently in South Africa this renegade openly declares: “... it is very clear that the ‘national fatherland’ which, in the advanced countries has been transformed into the worst historic fetter, still remains a relatively progressive factor in the backward countries, which are obliged to struggle for their independent existence.”

In this way the renegade Trotsky wants to put the clock back a hundred years!

(The text was not completed)

In the previous issue of the International Review, we underlined the importance of the new decade, which we called the "years of truth." In particular we emphasized that the bourgeoisie was taking a qualitative step forward in its prep­arations for a new world war:

"In a sense the seventies were the years of illusion... For years now the bourgeoisie has been grasping at straws trying to prove that the crisis can have a solution... Today the bourgeoisie has abandoned this illusion... (it has discovered in a muffled but painful way that there is no solution to the crisis. Recognizing the impasse, there is nothing left but a leap in the dark. And for the bourgeoisie a leap in the dark is war..

Today, with the total failure of the economy, the bourgeoisie is slowly realizing its true situation and is acting on it. On the one hand it is arming to the teeth... But armaments are not the only field of its activity... the bourgeoisie has also under­taken a massive campaign to create an atmosphere of war-psychosis in order to prepare public opinion for its increasingly war-like projects". (‘The 80's: years of truth')

Following the barrage provoked by the seizure of hostages in Iran, we emphasized the intensif­ication of the ideological campaign, especially in the USA:

"While one of America's objectives in the present crisis is to strengthen the inter­national cohesion of its bloc, another, even more important objective is to whip up a war-psychosis... A torrent of war hysteria like this hasn't been seen for a long time... Faced with a population that has traditionally not been favorable to the idea of foreign intervention... and which has been markedly cool towards adventures of this kind since the Vietnam war, the ‘barbarous' acts of the ‘Islamic Republic' have been an excellent theme for the war campaigns of the American bourgeoisie. Khomeini has found the Shah to be an excellent bugbear to use for reforging the unity of the nation. Carter -- whether, as it would seem, he deliberately provoked the present crisis by letting the Shah into the States, or whether he's merely using the situation, has found Khomeini to be an equally useful bugbear in his efforts to reinforce national unity at home and get the American population used to the idea of foreign intervention, even if this doesn't happen in Iran." (Behind the Iran-US crisis, the ideological campaigns).

A few days after we wrote these lines, the events in Afghanistan and their aftermath confirmed this analysis. On the one hand they highlighted the profound aggravation of inter-imperialist tensions; on the other hand, they allowed the western bloc to intensify its ideological campaign. But while the war-like campaign around the events in Afghanistan were a continuation of the one whipped up over Iran, the events that took place in these two countries were not of the same nature and didn't have the same function in the context of inter-imperialist rivalries.

The gravity of what's at stake

The Iranian events did not directly threaten the imperialist interests of the USA, despite the difficulties it's had to face since the fall of the Shah and the wave of anti-Americanism which has swept the country. This was confirmed when Russian troops entered Afghanistan and Bani Sadr announced that Iran would be sending military aid to the Afghan guerillas. In contrast, the intervention of the Russian armed forces really was an attack on US strategic interests, inasmuch as it:

• permitted the installation of military bases in a country which stands between Pakistan, Iran, China, and the USSR;
• represented a break in the growing encircle­ment of the USSR by the US bloc, an encirclement which has been further aggravated by the integration of China into the Western bloc;
• allowed the USSR to come within 400 km, of the Indian Ocean, an outlet which it has always lacked;
• represented a much more direct threat to the main sources of oil for the Western bloc and to the extremely important Ormuz straits.

This is why we cannot see this intervention merely as an operation of Russian domestic policy, as some have claimed, aimed simply at preserving order within its own bloc or its own frontiers against the threat posed by the Islamic agitation. The real issues are much more serious and have meant that the Russians are prepared to pay the price of the murderous resistance of the Afghan guerillas. In reality, the ‘pacification of the feudal rebels' was above all a pretext enabling the USSR to improve a military-strategic position that has been continuously deteriorating over the last few years. Taking advantage of the decomposition of the political situation in Iran, which used to have the mission of acting as the US gendarme in the region, the USSR took the risk of a grave international crisis in order to transform Afghanistan into a military base. This is why the ideological barrage in the Western bloc, especially in America, over the Afghanistan events was not simply hot air, as it was over the Iran episode. Even if it was part of the ideological campaign that had already got going, it expressed a real concern of the US bloc about the Russian advance, and thus constituted a real aggravation of inter-imperialist tensions, one more step towards a new world war.

The war-like campaigns of the USA and the Western Bloc

However, despite the gravity for the US bloc of the massive installation of Russian troops in Afghanistan, the American bloc wasn't able to do anything to stop it. Today it's trying to make up for and utilize this partial set-back by a deafening intensification of its war-like campaigns, so that, when necessary, it will be able to send in its expeditionary corps without fear of internal dissent. Carter's official decisions to set up an expeditionary force of 110,000 men and to re-register young people for an eventual mobilization -- decisions taken when the campaign was reaching its paroxysm-- are a clear expression of this policy. The unfolding of the events in Iran and Afghanistan leads to the following conclusion: everything happened as though the USA foresaw the Russian intervention in Afghanistan (its ‘experts' and observation satellites have some uses after all!) and consciously provoked the seizure of hostages in Tehran by letting the Shah into the States when they knew what reaction this would stir up. This allowed them to let the situation in Iran decompose even further, in order to isolate the extremist elements and force the ‘moderates' to take things in hand in favor of the US (the ‘anti-Russian' turn of events being guaranteed by the USSR's intervention against a brother Islamic country . This is what Bani Sadr is trying to do now).

What's more, the events in Iran allowed the campaign to be mounted in two stages:

• first, you stir up war hysteria in the name of defending American citizens or of responding to an ‘affront against national honor';
• next, when the USSR goes into action, you give a new push to a campaign that's beginning to wear out by pointing to the real enemy: the USSR (the US bourgeoisie simply used Khomeini as a bugbear to set its campaign in motion).

But even if we have to guard against too Machiavellian a view in the analysis of political events -- the bourgeoisie always being at the mercy of imponderable elements -- and even if the whole operation wasn't planned with such precision, it's important to point out the breadth of the present ideological campaign. This was in no way improvised and had been in preparation for many months, notably since the sudden and showy ‘discovery' of Russian troops in Cuba -- troops which had already been there for years.

And everything indicates that the USA and its bloc are not prepared to abandon this campaign, that they have decided to make maximum use of the present situation in order to tighten their ideological grip on the population and achieve the ‘national solidarity' which is so precious and so necessary in all wars. Thus the embargo on grain and the boycott of the Olympic Games are not so much directly aimed at putting pressure on the USSR (which can buy what it wants from elsewhere and can live without the Olympic Games) as at keeping up this war-like tension, at ideologically mobilizing the population of its own bloc.

Even though the role of revolutionaries isn't to make a choice between the imperialist blocs, even if it's not up to them, as Bordiga and his followers once did, to say that one is ‘More dangerous' than the other, and to ‘consider preferable the defeat of the stronger' (sic:), they must still denounce the lies and dangerous ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie, especially their most mystifying elements, as they did between the wars on the question of ‘anti-fascism'.

Today one of the battle-cries of the US bloc is its alleged military ‘weakness' vis-a-vis a USSR which is becoming better armed and more and more ‘aggressive'. In reality, the military ‘superiority' of the Russian bloc is a pure lie, a creation of propaganda, The authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which can hardly be suspected of pro-Russian sympathies, dealt with this question in its 1979 report, calling it a "particularly successful propaganda exercise" on the part of the Western countries. It's true that armaments expenditure in the USSR and its bloc have continued to grow over the last few years: in 1958, Russian expenditure on arms made up 20.3% of the world total. In 1978, it was up to 25.5%. But even at the latter date they were still slightly less than the USA's share: 25.6%. On the other hand, the total expenses of NATO in 1978 made up 42.8% of the world total, as against the Warsaw Pact's 28.6% (figures from SIPRI).

Although these figures are significant, they have to be completed by the following facts:

1. They don't take into account the accumulation of arms in the previous period, which was much greater in NATO than in the Warsaw Pact (in 1968, NATO expenditure made up 56.2% of the world total, as against the Warsaw Pact's 25.3%).
2. They only include the two official military alliances and thus exclude countries like China (which alone accounts for 10.5% of the world total) which undoubtedly belong to the American bloc, whereas the only important Russian-bloc country which isn't affiliated to the Warsaw Pact is Vietnam.
3. They say nothing about the quality of the arms themselves nor about their quantity: the USSR's enormous technological inferiority to the USA means that Russian weapons are much less perfect, effective, and viable, that they are more expensive to produce and demand more manpower to put them to use, for equal effect.

Thus:

• with less land and submarine missiles (1700 against 2400) the USA can launch two or three times as many nuclear war-heads (7700 against 3100) than the USSR (an American rocket can carry up to 14 atomic charges);
• the 415 American ‘strategic' bombers can carry 5400 atomic bombs whereas the 180 Pussian bombers can only carry 1,800;
• of the 12,000 American nuclear rocket-launchers, 10,400 are mobile (submarines or planes) and thus practically invulnerable, whereas only 3000 of the 5000 Russian rocket launch-pads are in the same situation;
• in order to use these nuclear arsenals, 75,000 American soldiers are needed as against 400,000 Russians, even though, contrary to the legend, NATO has always had more men under arms than the Warsaw Pact (despite the fact that Russia has more soldiers than America).

The American bloc's enormous superiority also applies to classical armaments: is it by accident that Israel, using American arms, has always won its wars against the Arab countries armed by the USSR? That, in 1973, Israel stopped the 2,000 Syrian tanks bound for Faifa after they'd moved only 10 km -- the same tanks with which the Warsaw Pact is equipped and which have been presented as the threat to Western Europe; Or are we to believe that Jehova is stronger than Allah?

In reality, the crushing military superiority of the western camp doesn't have any mysterious origins. As Engels said a long time ago, military superiority is always an expression of economic superiority. And the economic superiority of the West is equally crushing.

For example:

• in 1978, the gross production of the Warsaw Pact countries was 1,365 billion dollars;
• in the same year, the figure for the NATO countries was 4,265 billion.

And if we include the gross production of the other important countries of the Western bloc we arrive at 6200 billion, whereas the Eastern bloc is more or less made up of the Warsaw Pact countries. It's hardly worth counting Vietnam's 8.9 billion or Ethiopia's 3.6.

Another fact: among the twelve economically most powerful countries in the world, only two belong to the Eastern bloc: USSR (no.3) and Poland (no.12). All the others are entirely integrated into the Western bloc.

It is precisely because of this enormous economic weakness that the USSR appears to be the ‘aggressive' power in most local conflicts. As was the case with Germany in 1914 and 1939, it's the country which has come off worst in the dividing up of an already limited imperialist cake which tends to put the whole division into question.

This is a constant reality in the decadent period of capitalism. It expresses both the ineluctable character of imperialist war and its absurdity even from the bourgeois economic standpoint (not to mention its absurdity for humanity).

Last century, when capitalism was in the ascendant, wars could have a real rationality, especially colonial wars. Certain countries could throw themselves into a war with the guarantee that this would pay off on the economic level (new markets, raw materials, etc). In contrast to this, the wars of the 20th century are expre­ssions of the impasse in which capitalism finds itself. Since the world is entirely divided up between the major imperialist powers, wars can no longer lead to the conquest of new markets, and thus to a new field of expansion for capitalism. They simply result in a redivision of the existing markets. This isn't accompanied by the possibility of a great new development of the productive forces, but, on the contrary, by the massive destruction of the productive forces, because such wars

• no longer take place simply between the advanced countries and the backward countries, but between the great powers themselves, which involves a much higher level of destruction;
• can no longer remain isolated but lead to butchery and destruction on a global scale.

Thus, imperialist wars appear as a pure aberration for the whole of capitalism, and this absurdity is, among other things, expressed by the fact that it's the very bloc that's condemned to ‘lose' -- because it's weaker economically -- which is forced to push hardest for a war (if it makes sense at all to talk of losers and victors in today's conditions!) This ‘suicidal' behavior on the part of the eventual loser isn't the result of its leaders going mad. It's an expression of the inevitable character of war under decadent capitalism, of an ineluctable juggernaut which is completely out of the control of the ruling classes and their governments. The march towards suicide by the so-called ‘aggressive' powers simply expresses the fact that the whole of capitalism is marching towards suicide.

The fact that, in general, the most ‘belligerent' imperialism loses the war, gives a semblance of credibility to all the post-war masquerades about ‘reparations', trials of ‘war criminals', of those who are ‘responsible' for the holocaust (as if all the governments, all the bourgeois parties, all the military leaders weren't criminals, weren't responsible for the orgy of murder, for the massacre and destruction of imperialist wars). Through these masquerades, the victorious imper­ialism can cover up its attempts to cash in on its own military expenditure, and to install in the defeated countries a ruling political team which corresponds to its interests.

All is fair in bourgeois propaganda: the deaths at Auschwitz are used to justify the deaths in Dresden and Hiroshima; the deaths in Vietnam are used to justify those in Afghanistan; past massacres are used to prepare future massacres. Similarly, the arms expenditures (real or exagger­ated) and the imperialist maneuvers of the ‘enemy' bloc are used to justify the military expenditures, the resulting austerity and the imperialist maneuvers of one's ‘own' bloc -- to prepare the ‘national solidarity' needed for the next holocaust.

Just as revolutionaries have to denounce the mystifications which accompany the imperialist policies of the Eastern bloc, notably the myth of ‘national liberation' (something we've always done in our press), so they also have to unmask the hypocrisy of the ideological campaigns of the Western bloc.

The division of labor between sectors of the bourgeoisie

In no.20 of the IR, we dealt at length with the main features of the present ideological offensive of the bourgeoisies of the American bloc in preparation for imperialist war: the creation of a war-psychosis aimed at demoralizing the population, at making them accept with fatalism and resignation the perspective of a new world war. We have just been examining another aspect of this offensive: the development of an ‘anti-Russian' feeling, through such things as the lies about levels of armaments, campaigns about ‘human rights' and the boycott of the Olympics. This is still an incomplete list of the methods being used by the bourgeoisie of the Western countries to prepare the population, and above all the exploited class, for the ‘supreme sacrifice'. We must add a campaign that is less noisy but more insidious and dangerous: the one aimed more specifically at the working class.

The first type of campaign has mainly been carried out by the right and centre parties of the bourgeoisie, whose language consists in calling on ‘all the citizens' to realize a ‘national unity' in the face of the dangers threatening the ‘country' or ‘civilization'. Behind the creation of an ‘anti-Russian' phobia which completes the first kind of campaign, you will find the same parties, to which should be joined the social democratic parties whose arguments are more nuanced and less hysterical, but who won't pass up an opportunity to denounce Stalinism and the violat­ion of human rights in the east. Obviously, the ‘Communist' parties don't participate directly in this variety of ideological campaign: despite the fact that some of them have been obliged to condemn certain actions by the USSR in order to pacify the bourgeoisie and ‘public opinion' in their respective countries.

On the other hand, there is one aspect of the ideological offensive of the bourgeoisie which is common to both parties whose specific function is to contain the working class -- the SPs and CPs. The language of the left of capital is presented as the opposite of the language of the right: in fact it is complementary. This language consists of a denunciation of the alarmist campaigns of the right, of an assertion that there is no real danger of war at present. In some countries, like France, we've even seen the left declaring unanimously that the alarmist campaign of the right has the aim of diverting the attention of the workers and imposing additional austerity on them. The language of the left is obviously connected to the fact that, at the present time, they have been compelled to carry out their capitalist function in opposition, the better to sabotage the workers struggles from within. Since they're not in government, they don't have the job of creating ‘national unity' around the leaders of the country[1]; their task is to radicalize their language in order to win the confidence of the workers, so that they can lead the class into a dead-end and wear out its combativity.

But this isn't the only reason why the left parties are sticking to their soothing words. Their language has the aim of filling in the gaps left by the ideological campaign of the right. The right is more and more emphasizing a partial truth: that war is inevitable (obviously without making it clear that such a fatality exists only in the framework of capitalism). The aim of this is to demoralize the whole population, to make it accept with resignation the sacrifices of today in order to prepare for the still greater sacrifices of the future. But this half-truth has the inconvenient feature of being a recognition that capitalist society is now in a total impasse. In certain sectors of the population, above all the proletariat, the class which is best equipped to put the whole system into question, this propaganda runs the risk of having the opposite effect to what was intended. It could help the workers to see the necessity for a massive confrontation against capitalism, in order to stay its criminal hand and destroy it. The soothing words of the left allow capital to run the whole gamut of mystifications, to plug up any gaps which might let the working class develop its consciousness.

Already the left and right have divided up the work concerning the economic crisis: the right saying that the crisis was world-wide, that nothing could be done about it, that austerity was the only resort; and the left replying; that the crisis was the result of bad policies, of the wicked doings of the monopolies, and that you could overcome the crisis by applying policies which really corresponded to the interests of the nation and of the workers. Thus, the right was already calling for resignation, for accepting austerity without resistance, while the left got down to the job of derailing working class discontent into the electoral dead-end of the ‘left alternative' (the Labor government in Britain, the union of the left in France, the historic compromise in Italy, etc...)

This division of labor between the right and the left, aimed at subordinating the whole of society, and above all the working class, to the needs of capital, is nothing new. It was put to use during the ideological preparations for the First World War. On the one hand, the right wing of capital was shouting the loudest about patriotism and openly calling for war against the ‘hereditary enemy', on the other hand, the opportunists and reformists who were helping to push the parties of the II International into the carp of capital, while attacking the chauvinist hysteria, continuously minimized the dangers of war. The left of the International (notably Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg) was insisting that imperialist war was an inevitability within the logic of capitalism, that the workers had to mobilize themselves on a massive scale to prevent capitalism from having a free hand and to prepare for the destruction of the system. The right, on the other hand, whose influence was growing, was developing a whole theory about the possibility of a ‘peaceful' capitalism, able to resolve conflicts between nations through ‘arbitration'. As long as the working class was mobilized, notably through mass demonstrations in response to the various conflicts which broke out at the beginning of the century (Franco-German confrontations over Morocco, conflicts in the Balkans, invasion of the Tripolitaine by Italy, etc...); as long as the left had a preponderant influence within the International (special notions against war at the Congresses of 1907 and 1910, Extraordinary Congress in 1912 on the same question) , the bourgeoisie could not allow these conflicts to degenerate into a generalized war. It wasn't until the working class, lulled by the speeches of the opportunists, ceased to mobilize itself against the threat of war (between 1912 and 1914) that capitalism could unleash a generalized war following an incident that was seemingly trivial in relation to previous ones (the Sarajevo assassination).

Thus the ideological preparation for world war wasn't simply a matter of chauvinist, war-like hysteria. It was also made up of the soothing, pacifist sermons disseminate by the political forces who had most influence on the working class. These sermons helped to demobilize the class, to make it lose sight of what was really at stake, to tie it hand and feet and deliver it over to the bourgeois governments and the whole war hysteria; in sum, it served to prevent the class from playing its role as the only force that could prevent world war. The mobilization for imperialist war demands the demobilization of the proletariat from its class terrain.

What perspective: War or Revolution?

We can clearly affirm that the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and its aftermath express and accentuate the acceleration of the drive towards generalized imperialist war, capital's only solution of its crisis. Should we therefore question the analysis that the ICC has put forward since it was formed, concerning the historic course, our conclusion that what is on the agenda is not a generalized imperialist confrontation, but massive confrontations between the working class and the bourgeoisie?

The answer is no. In fact, the determination with which the bourgeoisie is going about the ideological preparations for war itself indicates that the subjective conditions for such an outcome to the capitalist crisis have not been met. For some, if world war hasn't yet broken out, it's because the objective conditions -- economic situation, military preparations, etc. don't yet exist. This is the thesis defended, for example, by the International Communist Party (Programme Communiste). In reality, if we compare the present situation to the one existing in 1939 or 1914, we can see that, from the standpoint of the gravity of the crisis, the level of armaments, and the strengthening military alliances within each bloc, the conditions for a new world war are even more ripe today. The only missing factor -- although a decisive one -- is the proletariat's adherence to bourgeois ideals, its discipline and submission towards the needs of the national capital. This adherence, discipline and submission did exist in 1939, following the most terrible defeat in the history of the working class; a defeat that was all the more terrible because at the end of the first world war, the proletariat had risen to its greatest heights, a defeat that was both physical and ideological, a long list of massacres and mystifications, especially about the so-called socialist nature of Russia; a procession of defeats presented as victories. These were similar to the conditions which existed in 1914, although the defeat of the working class then was much less profound than it was in 1939, and this allowed for the resurgence of 1917-18. The 1914 defeat was essentially on the ideological level. It took the form of the opportunist gangrene which more and more infected the IInd International, culminating in 1914 with the treason of most of its parties. When they went over to the enemy, these parties, as well as the trade unions, were able to hand the proletariat over to the imperialist appetites of the bourgeoisie, dragging; it into ‘national defense' and ‘the defense of civilizations' - precisely because these organizations still retained the hearts and minds of the working class. And this mobilization of the proletariat behind national capital was facilitated by the fact that, with the exception of Russia, there was no important development of the class struggle just prior to 1914, and that the economic crisis had not had time to really deepen before it had broken out in war. The situation is very different today. The mystifications which were used to mobilize the class for World War II, notably anti-fascism and the myth of socialism in Russia, have long since lost their old force. It's the same with the belief in the unending progress of ‘civilization' and ‘democracy' which existed in 1914, but which after over half a century of decadence have been replaced by a general disgust for the system. Similarly the parties of the left, which betrayed the working class a long time ago, no longer have the same impact on the class as they had in 1914 or the 1930's. Furthermore, capitalism's deepening slide into the crisis since the mid-sixties has provoked a historical resurgence of the class struggle. Thus, instead of announcing to the proletariat that the game is up, that, whatever it does, it can't prevent the outbreak of a new holocaust, it's the task of revolutionaries to indicate to their class that the historical situation is still in its hands, that it depends on its struggles whether or not humanity will go down under a deluge of thermo­nuclear bombs.

However, this situation is not fixed in a definitive manner. If today the road is not open to the bourgeois solution to the crisis, that shouldn't lead us to believe that nothing can change this situation, that the historic course cannot be reversed. In reality, what could be called the ‘normal' course of capitalist society is towards war. The resistance of the working class, which can put this course into question, appears as a sort of ‘anomaly', as something running ‘against the stream', of the organic processes of the capitalist world. This is why, when we look at the eight decades of this century, we can find hardly more than two during which the balance of forces was sufficiently in the proletariat's favor for it to have been able to bar the way to imperialist war (1905-12, 1917-23, 1968-80).

For the moment, the potential combativity of the class, which began to manifest itself after 1968, has not been destroyed. But it is necessary to be vigilant, and the events in Afghanistan are a reminder of this necessity. This is because:

• the more slowly the proletariat responds to the crisis, the less experienced and prepared it will be when it enters into decisive confront­ations with capitalism;
• whereas the proletariat has only one road to victory -- armed, generalized confrontation with the bourgeoisie -- the latter has at its disposal numerous and varying means with which to defeat its enemy. It can derail its combativity into dead-ends (this is the present tactic of the left); it can crush it sector by sector (as it did in Germany between 1918 and 1923); or it can crush it physically during a frontal confrontation (even so, this remains the kind of confrontation most favorable to the proletariat).

This vigilance which the working class must keep up, and which revolutionaries must contribute to as much as possible, involves the clearest possible understanding of what's at stake in the present situation and in the struggles it's engaged in today. The contribution to this made by revolutionaries can't consist of the assertion that nothing can be done about the threat of imperialist war. If they did this they would become auxiliaries to the campaign of demoralization being waged by the right. Neither can they go around saying that there is no real danger of an imperialist war, of a reversal of the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. If they did, their ‘contribution' would simply add grist to the mills of the left. If revolutionaries are going to be able to denounce both the campaigns of the right and of the left, they can't do this simply by affirming the opposite of what either of them say. No! We must be able to throw the bourgeoisie's various arguments back into its face:

• it's true that there is no way out of the crisis and that there is a threat of war, as the right says
• it's true, as the left says, that the alarmist campaigns are being used to impose austerity...

In both cases, this is ample reason not for resigning ourselves, but for launching ourselves into a resistance against austerity, the prelude to the struggle to destroy the system. In its coming struggles the working class must develop a clear understanding of what's at stake, of the fact that today's struggle isn't simply a blow-for-blow resistance against the growing attacks of capital, but that it is the only rampart against the threat of imperialist war, that it is the indispensable preparation for the only way out for humanity: the communist revolution. Such an understanding of what's really at stake is a precondition not only for the immediate effectiveness of the struggle, but also for its capacity to serve as a real preparation for the decisive confrontations that lie ahead.

On the other hand, any struggle which is restricted to a purely economic or defensive level will be defeated all the more easily, both in an immediate sense and as part of a much broader struggle. When this happens the workers are deprived of that vital weapon, the general­ization of the struggle, which is based on an awareness that the class war is a social, not a professional phenomenon. Similarly, if they lack any broader perspectives, immediate defeats will be a factor of demoralization instead of fruitful experiences that assist the development of class consciousness.

If the new wave of class struggle that is now underway is to avoid being worn out by the maneuvers of the left and the unions -- which would leave a free rein to the war-like ‘solution' to the crisis -- if it is to be a real step towards the revolutionary offensive for the overthrow of capitalism it must contain the following three inter-linked characteristics:

• a rejection of the union prison and a direct taking-in-hand of the struggle by the workers themselves;
• a growing use of the weapon of generalization, the extension of the struggle beyond sectoral categories, enterprises, industrial branches, towns and regions and, finally, national frontiers;
• a growing awareness of the indissoluble link between the struggle against austerity, the struggle against the threat of war, and the struggle against this moribund, dying society and for the creation of communism.

FM

[1] Where the left is still in government, its attitude isn't clear. In Belgium we've even seen the Socialist foreign minister making alarmist speeches, while his equally Socialist colleague, the minister of social affairs, was saying the opposite.

In this third part of the series, we are going to deal with one of the most important theoretical foundations of the Dutch Left. From its origin at the begin­ning of this century, the Dutch Left gave an interpretation of historical materialism which be­came a characteristic mark of the ‘Dutch Marxist school' (Anton Pannekoek, Hermann Gorter, H. Roland-H­olst). This interpretation of Marxist method is often called ‘spontaneism'. We will show in this article why the term is inappropriate. Gorter and Pannekoeks' position on the role of spontaneity allowed the Dutch Left to understand the changes imposed on the class struggle with the onset of capitalist decadence. At the same time, we can see certain weaknesses in Pannekoek which today's ‘councilists' have pushed to their most absurd conclusions.

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Marxism made a decisive contribution to socialist theory in that unlike the utopian socialists, it did not depart from arbitrary or dogmatic presuppo­sitions. Marxist theory in fact departs from "real individuals, their acts and the material conditions in which they live, those they find and at the same time those they bring about by their own acts" (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology). Let us recall the formulation on historical materialism in the ‘Preface to a Contribution of Political Economy' by Marx:

"In the social production of their existence, men enter into definite, necessary relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production corresponding to a determinate stage of development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which there arises a legal and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social conscious­ness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellec­tual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary it is their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or -- what is merely a legal expres­sion for the same thing -- with the property relations within the framework of which they have hitherto operated. From forms of develop­ment of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. At that point an era of social revolution begins. With the change in the economic foundation the whole immense superstructure is more slowly or more rapidly transformed. In considering such transforma­tions it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the eco­nomic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic, in short, ideological, forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such an epoch of transfor­mation by its consciousness, but, on the contr­ary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces cf production and the relations of production. A social order never perishes before all the productive forces for which it is broadly sufficient have been developed, and new sup­erior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the womb of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it can solve, since closer examination will also show that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already pre­sent or at least in the process of formation. In broad outline, the Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as progressive epochs of the socio-economic order. The bourgeois rela­tions of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production -- antagonistic not in the sense of an individual antagonism but of an antagonism growing out of the social conditions of existence of the individuals; but the productive forces deve­loping in the womb of bourgeois society simultaneously create the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. The pre­history of human society therefore closes with this social formation."

The contribution of the Dutch Left to historical materialism

One can distinguish two fundamental aspects of historical materialism that are indissolubly linked:

1. That there is a relationship between being and consciousness, or in other words, between the infrastructure and the superstructure.
2. That there is necessarily a relationship bet­ween the development of the productive forces and the relations of production.

It is from the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production that we can deduce the objective necessity for a commu­nist society. Marxist theory, for which being determines consciousness, also allows one to understand how the workers subjectively act in the process of revolution. The ‘Dutch Marxist school' always put the emphasis on this subjective factor, on the relationship between being and consciousness, on the relation between infra­structure and superstructure. Rosa Luxemburg was just as keen to clarify the question of class consciousness. In 1904 she opposed Lenin, who defended Kautsky's position that conscious­ness was brought from outside in the class struggle and was not a product of the struggle itself. For Rosa Luxemburg, faced with the bureaucratization of German Social Democracy, this question was of central importance. By basing herself on the history of the workers' movement in Russia, she showed that only the creative initiative of the large proletarian masses could lead to victory.

"In general, the tactical policy of the social democracy is not something that may be ‘invented'. It is the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward. The uncons­cious comes before the conscious. The logic of the historic process comes before the subjective logic of the human beings who participate in the historic process." (Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Question of Social Democracy)

Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch Left defended this position on the role of spontaneity for the masses which has nothing to do with the spontan­eist position of today's ‘councilists'. ‘Spontan­eism' completely neglects the task of the most conscious elements in the class: that conscious­ness once arisen from the experience of struggle becomes the point of departure for future struggles. The spontaneists and the councilists embrace proletarian experience only to reject it later.

The ‘Dutch Marxist school', on the contrary, deepened the positions defended by Rosa Luxem­burg on the role of spontaneity in the develop­ment of class consciousness. Gorter, Pannekoek and Roland-Holst found in the work of Joseph Dietzgen, a first generation social democrat, a development of Marx's basic conception that being determines consciousness. They wrote many articles on Dietzgen's positions and Gorter translated his most important work The Essence of Human Intellectual Work[1] into Dutch.

The Dutch Left thought it was necessary to stress the subjective aspects of historical materialism because:

"The great revolutions in modes of production (from feudalism to capitalism, from capita­lism to socialism) happen because new neces­sities transform the mind of man and produce a will; when this will is translated into acts, man changes society in order to respond to new needs." (Pannekoek, ‘Marxism as Action', in Lichstrahlen, no.6, 1915)

These lines were written at the time when the productive forces had clearly entered into contradiction with capitalist relations of production; World War I had demonstrated the decadence of capitalism in the most horrible manner. Social Democracy had been shown incapable of adapting itself to the needs of the proletariat in the period of decadence, in the epoch of wars and social revolutions.

"Today, the hour has come to underline the other aspect, neglected by Marxism up to now, because the workers' movement must reorient itself, it must liberate itself from the narrowness and passivity of the past period in order to overcome its crisis." (Ibid)

However, while stressing the subjective aspect of Marxism, Pannekoek neglected the objective aspect of historical materialism. The contra­dictions, which were clearly present in the economic base of society in the period of capi­talist decadence, were neglected, denied, put aside for the future (later on we will look at Pannekoek's critique of different crisis theories and the effects of his critique on today's councilist epigones). Pannekoek feared that certain of the crisis theories could lead the working class to passively wait for an ‘auto­matic' collapse of the capitalist system. In the article of 1915 quoted above, Pannekoek pointed out that Marxism has two aspects: "man is the product of circumstances, but he also transforms the circumstances". According to Pannekoek, these two aspects are: "... equally correct and important; it is only by their close relationship that they form a coherent theory. But of course in different circumstances one or other of these two aspects prevail" (Ibid). Thus in the difficult period of the anti-socialist laws of 1878, 1890, when Bismarck put Social Democracy outside the law, the idea was to let the circumstances mature. The strongly fatalistic turn taken by historical materialism during those years was, according to Pannekoek, deliberately maintained in the years preceding World War I. Kautsky said that a true Marxist was one who let circumstances mature. The need for new methods of struggle threatened the rou­tine habits of the leaders of the party. Panne­koek was right when he stressed the need to put the emphasis on the subjective element in histo­rical materialism, but in doing this he under­estimated the objective evolution of capitalism. The proletariat must act consciously, pose new problems, raise them and resolve them in the experience of struggle. Of course, but why? What are these new problems? Why are they raised? Why the need for a new society, for communism? Can capitalism still develop? What can it offer humanity?

Pannekoek doesn't provide the answers, not even insufficient or false ones. He didn't see clearly that the objective change in capitalism, its decadence, posed the necessity for the mass acti­vity of the proletariat. In the progressive development of capitalism the objective of class struggle was in general limited; thus the strug­gles for reforms led by the unions and parliamen­tary socialists were adequate in the preceding period, but were no longer appropriate in the period of decadence.

Crisis theories

The answers to the questions posed above are found in Marxist theories of crisis. By seeking to determine the objective laws of capitalism's development, these theories have tried to evaluate if the crises which have taken place are the crises of growth of an ascendant mode of production in its prosperous period, or if, on the contrary, these crises are expressions of a system in decline which must be consciously replaced by a new revolutionary class.

On the basis of crisis theories we can draw cer­tain important programmatic consequences, even if it remains true that consciousness of the necessity to accelerate the evolution of capita­lism through struggle is never the product of ‘purely economic' arguments. Crisis theories clarify the process of class struggle. But at the same time, this clarification is an important need of the struggle. A theory of crisis provides revolutionaries with precious arguments against bourgeois ideology in their task of stimulating class consciousness which develops through and in the struggle. With theories of crisis, the working class could understand, for example, that Proudhonist ideas of self-management do not in fact abolish wage slavery. The Marxist theory of crisis combatted reformist illusions by show­ing that reforms meant nothing more than a rela­tive amelioration in the situation of the working class which at the same time pushed capitalist development towards its final decadence. Today a Marxist theory of crisis shows the working class that the struggle to defend its living standards can no longer be a struggle for reforms when capitalism can no longer offer lasting improvements.

The fundamental unity of these two aspects of historical materialism, the objective and the subjective, appears very clearly in the work of Rosa Luxemburg. She doesn't simply put the acc­ent on the role of the spontaneity of the masses in the development of new methods of struggle, she also shows why these new tactics are necessary. In a course given at the central school of the party in 1907, she pointed out that "the strong­est unions are completely impotent" against the consequences that technical progress has on wages:

"The struggle against a relative fall in wages is no longer a struggle within the con­text of a commodity economy but is becoming a revolutionary attack against the very exis­tence of this economy; it is the socialist movement of the proletariat. Hence the sympa­thies of the capitalist class for the unions (even though previously it had struggled furiously against them) because as the social­ist struggle begins, so the unions will turn against socialism." (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Intro­duction to Political Economy', ed. Antropos, 1970, p.248)

In the Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg traces the historic limits of capitalist produc­tion in the development of the world market. In the Communist Manifesto, we already find the idea that cyclical crises, which for Marx and Engels were an expression of the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of produc­tion, could only be surmounted by the conquest of new markets, by the creation of the world market. In the German Ideology they call this creation of the world market "a universal inter­dependence, this first natural form of the histo­rical world co-operation of individuals", a pre­condition for the world revolution which will lead to the "control and conscious management of those forces which, though born of the interac­tion of men have until now dazzled and dominated them". In Capital, Marx explicitly says:

"In our description of how production relations are converted into entities and rendered independent in relation to the agents of produc­tion, we leave aside the manner in which the interrelations, due to the world-market, its conjunctures, movements of market-prices, periods of credit, industrial and commercial cycles, alternations of prosperity and crisis, appear to them as overwhelming natural laws that irresistibly enforce their will over them, and confront them as blind necessity. We leave this aside because the actual movement of competition belongs beyond our scope, and we need present only the inner organization of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average, as it were." (Marx, Capital, vol.3, part vii, chap.48)

This plan to simply describe the internal organi­zation of capitalism was justified because capi­talism, after the troubled revolutionary years of 1848-49, had entered into a long period of pros­perity. Marx and Engels concluded "a new revolu­tion is only possible as a result of a new crisis. But it is as certain as the crisis itself". Marx seemed to take account of the fact that the per­iod of social revolution hadn't yet started and that capitalism was still in its period of pro­gressive development. Capital demystifies the contemporary bourgeois ideology which tried to mask the division of society into classes and to present capitalism as an eternally progressive system.

Clearly Rosa Luxemburg could not be satisfied with Marx's plan. She saw in the mass movements and in imperialism the beginning of the end of the progressive era of capitalism. Her study of the Accumulation of Capital enabled her to write in the Program of the Communist Party of Germany after World War I and in the midst of the German revolution:

"The World War confronted society with a choice of two alternatives; either the continued existence of capitalism, with its consequent new wars and inevitable and speedy destruction due to chaos and anarchy, or the abolition of capitalist exploitation.

With the end of the World War the class rule of the capitalists lost its right to existence. It is no longer capable of leading society out of the terrible economic chaos which the imperialist orgy has left in its wake. (...) Only the worldwide proletarian revolution can establish order in place of this anarchy." (Rosa Luxemburg, What Does Spartacus Want?)

With the onset of the period of decadence, all revolutionaries felt the need to develop a theory of crisis in order to show the consequences of decadence on the class struggle: Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg and Gorter (cf his pamphlet entitled Imperialism, World War and Social Democracy, 1915, and quoted in the first part of this series of articles). Pannekoek, who more than others, had grasped the political implications of the change in capitalism, remained firmly opposed to economic theories which sought to deduce changes in the methods of proletarian struggle from objective causes. As we will see, his criticism of theories of crisis unhappily contributed very little to the development of class consciousness.

Pannekoek's critique of the theory of the mortal crisis of capitalism

After the reflux in the revolutionary struggle, the KAPD turned its attention towards developing a theory of the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism'.

After years of almost total silence, Pannekoek once more entered into the discussions going on within the Dutch Left. In 1927, under the pseudonym of Karl Horner, he published an article in Proletarier (organ of the Berlin tendency of the KAPD) called ‘Principle and Tactic' (July/ August 1927). Refuting the theory of the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism', Pannekoek defined the question of the crisis in a new way:

"What are the consequences for the develop­ment of revolution? Once more the question of the ‘mortal crisis' comes to the fore, now clearly posed: are we faced with an economic depression of such length that the reaction to it by the proletariat will become perman­ent and lead to revolution? It is true that the KAPD shares the position that capitalism can no longer return to a phase of prosperity and has reached a final crisis that can no longer be resolved. Because this question is very important for the tactics of the KAPD, it requires a very profound examination."

Pannekoek quite rightly remarked that the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism' goes back to the Accumula­tion of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg, but he also said that this theory leads to conclusions which are not drawn in the Accumulation of Capital because "the book was published some years before the war" (sic!). Then Pannekoek returned to his critique of the Accumulation of Capital published in 1913 and in one of the first issues of Proletarier. In these criticisms, Pannekoek went into details about the schemas of capitalist reproduction that are found in Capital, vol. 2. We will not enter here into the debate on how Rosa Luxemburg and others have interpreted Marx's schema. The essential question is that the schema must be corrected, as we said above, a question never taken up by Pannekoek. Panne­koek warned against the position which said that capitalism had reached a final crisis because he thought that would lead to the adoption of short term tactics. He thought that a new period of prosperity could not be excluded.

To argue this position, he showed that new dis­coveries of gold could possibly stimulate demand again and insisted that the emergence of East Asia was an independent factor in capitalist production. To the extent that Pannekoek illus­trated the question of gold and East Asia by referring to capitalism in the nineteenth century, he not only defended the possibility of an econo­mic recovery (as the theory of the mortal crisis had posed the problem), but he even denied that capitalism had entered a new phase different from the phase of ascendancy and prosperity which the nineteenth century had been a part of. The recovery of capitalist production which effec­tively took place in the mid-thirties wasn't the result of discoveries of gold[2] but of a dis­covery which had the same outcome!

It wasn't the discovery of new resources of gold which got the economy moving, but the discovery of the stimulating role of the state in the economy through inflation. But from 1933 to the war this hardly stimulated any demand in the means of production and consumption as the Keynesian ideology of state intervention claims, but mostly in the means of destruction: war material, what a wonderful prosperity! In the same way, the appearance of East Asia as an independent factor in capitalist production, took the form of Japanese imperialism and the Berlin/Rome/Tokyo axis.

The ‘new period of capitalist economic prosperity' predicted by Pannekoek, cannot be compared with the conjunctural movements of prosperity and commercial crises of the nineteenth century. The so-called ‘prosperity' of the war economy of the mid-thirties was only an essential moment in the cycle of crisis, war, reconstruction, crisis etc, characteristic of the historic period of the decadence of capitalism. But, nevertheless, Pannekoek put his finger on the question when he said that any eventual prosperity must lead to a more violent crisis, which would provoke revolution again.

Decadence? Final crisis? The political consequences of the crisis according to the KAPD and the GIC

In the second part of this article we saw how Pannekoek showed that from the beginning the ‘Unions' were not unitary organizations and that it was preferable to abandon the ‘Unions' for the party. Also, the question of knowing whether the ‘Unions' must organize or support wage strug­gles wasn't the right question in his eyes. More interesting for him was the question of knowing whether or not revolutionaries must intervene in the wage struggles, and if so, how? In spite of all the confusions on the tasks of the ‘Unions', we find in a text of the Essen Tendency of the KAPD/AAUD on the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism' some very valuable arguments on the imperious need to transform wage struggles into struggles for the destruction of capitalism:

"Where the bourgeoisie's offensive of reducing workers' wages and living conditions leads to a purely economic struggle by the affected group of workers, this struggle almost with­out exception ends up in a victory for the bosses and a defeat for the workers. The reason for the defeat of workers in such struggles, despite tenacious and powerful strikes, lies once more in the reality of the mortal crisis of capitalism (...). The outc­ome of these defensive struggles for wages in the period of capitalism's mortal crisis is a bitter but irreversible proof that the strug­gle for better wages and conditions for wor­kers in the present phase of mortal crisis is a pure utopia; and consequently the unions, as well,(whose only historic task was to take care of the selling of labor power to the bourgeoisie) with all their aims, their means of struggle and their forms of organization, have, because of the historic process, become completely anachronistic and are therefore counter-revolutionary structures. The trade unions know that with the collapse of the capitalist economic system their vital role as sellers of proletarian labor power will be over as will be the basis for that exchange. As a result, they try to conserve capitalism's conditions of existence, which are at the same time their own conditions of existence, by trading proletarian labor power for the lowest price." (Proletarier, 1922)

Pannekoek paid close attention to this economic argument. Pannekoek's article ‘Principle and Tactic' had such a success in the organizations of the Dutch and German communist lefts in the late 1920s that some tendencies started to see a contradiction between discussing crisis theories and discussing class consciousness. Some tenden­cies completely denied any need for a theoretical elaboration of the crisis. But they all stuck to the position on ‘the crisis of capitalism' and the ‘decadence of capitalism' formulated in the KAPD's program of 1920, from which they had all originated. This was also the case with the Group of Communist Internationalists (GIC) to which, from 1926, Pannekoek regularly contributed. The GIC wrote this on the positions:

"The development of capitalism leads to increa­singly violent crises which express themselves in an ever growing unemployment and greater and greater dislocation of the productive apparatus, so that millions of workers find themselves outside production and at the mercy of starvation. The increasing impoverishment and uncertitude of existence force the working class to start to struggle for the communist mode of production ..."

When Paul Mattick, after the 1929 crash, made the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) adopt Grossman's theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in their program (see the Mortal Crisis of Capitalism, Chicago, 1933) Pannekoek extended his critique of Rosa Luxemburg to Mattick's theory of the crisis in a presentation which he made to the GIC and which was published. Again he warned that the final collapse of capi­talism that Mattick talked about could take place later than foreseen and that, fundamentally, only the working class could put an end to capitalism. The GIC was in agreement with the political consequences of Pannekoek's critique, and today we think that revolutionary groups and elements can also be in broad agreement with these consequences. In 1933 the GIC, in a pamph­let on ‘the movements of the capitalist economy' engaged in a chicken and egg type discussion which continues today between those who defend a theory of the crisis based on the saturation of markets (Rosa Luxemburg) and those who defend a theory of the crisis based on the tendency of the falling rate of profit (Bukharin/Lenin, Grossman/ Mattick). In this pamphlet the GIC presents it­self as a supporter of the falling rate of profit analysis but insists at the same time on a fact stressed by the theory of the saturation of markets:

"The whole world has been made into a gigantic workshop. This means that crises on the present level of specialization have an international character."

We can say that the GIC, in its main lines, foll­owed Mattick's economic theory. But, at the same time, the GIC put forward the same warning as Pannekoek:

"Particularly at the present time when there is so much talk about the ‘mortal crisis' of capitalism, of the ‘final crisis' in which we find ourselves, it is important to be aware of the essential characteristics of the pre­sent crisis. Not to do so would mean submit­ting to all sorts of illusions and surprises regarding the measures which the ruling class tries in order to maintain the future devel­opment of the capitalist system. An ‘absolute' collapse is expected, without taking into account what that means. One must say that capitalism is stronger than was foreseen bec­ause the ‘absolute' collapse hasn't happened, because a large part of economic life contin­ues to function. Thus the transition from capitalism to communism isn't automatic but will always be linked to the level of consc­iousness developed in the working class. It is precisely because of this that the propa­ganda of principles is necessary." (De bewegingen van het kaitalistische bedrijfs­leven, Permateriaal GIC, 6 Jg, no.5)

And so, in the following years, the GIC analyzed the measures of the bourgeoisie which led to the development of the war economy. It showed that economic ‘planning' lowered the standard of living of the working class without really over­coming the crisis. Here is the conclusion of an article on economic ‘planning' in Holland:

"It is clear that the relations of property have entered into conflict with the productive forces. And, at the same time, this clearly shows that the problem cannot be resolved on the basis of capitalist production. The problem can only be solved through a world 'economy' based on an international division of labor, on communist foundations." (Radencommunisme, May 1936)

A second article on this question demystified the social democratic ‘labor plans' which were part of the tendency towards statification, and which followed the example of the fascist organization of capital. The GIC showed that with the social democrats in power national defense would be stimulated while at the same time the war economy created new conditions of struggle for the workers: the purely economic struggles became useless against the organized policy of prices and so were struggles for the preservation of the dying, democratic bourgeois legal system. The GIC's articles on Germany showed how, during the period of the Weimar Republic, social democracy and Russia's foreign policy brought about economic ‘planning', the defeat of workers' struggles and preserved Germany's military might which could be perfected by the Nazis into a fully functioning war machine.

From Pannekoek to the Councilist Epigones

Let us return to Pannekoek's ‘disgust' for econo­mic theories of the crisis. In Workers' Councils, written during World War II, he treated the ques­tion of the limits of capitalist development in a coherent and global manner. Departing from the idea developed in the Communist Manifesto about the expansion of capitalism on a world scale, Pannekoek arrived at the conclusion that the end of capitalism would be approached:

"When tens of millions of people who live in the fertile plains of East Asia and the South are pushed into the orbit of capitalism, the principal task of capitalism would have been fulfilled." (P. Aartsz, Workers' Councils, chap.II)

It is interesting to see that Marx posed the same question in a letter to Engels (8.10.1858):

"The specific task of bourgeois society is the establishment of a world market, at least in outline, and of production based upon this world market. As the world is round, this seems to have been completed by the coloniza­tion of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan. The difficult question for us is this: on the Continent the revolution is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist character. Is it not bound to be crushed in this little corner, considering that in a far greater territory the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant?"

But in his article on China in the same years, (published in the New York Daily Tribune), Marx responded to this question in the negative.

Today, 120 years later, Pannekoek's epigones continue to defend the idea that capitalism still has a great task to fulfill in Asia[3]. While Marx in the 1850s showed that American and Brit­ish expectations concerning the development of trade with the opening up of China were greatly exaggerated, today, the bourgeoisie of the US bloc has already reached this conclusion concer­ning the recent re-opening up of China to the western bloc: the western bourgeoisie merely provides military equipment in preparation for a third world war and even sees its trade diminish given the restricted nature of the Chinese mar­ket. Today, the crisis is there. Nobody with sense would dare to claim that it doesn't exist.

Today's councilists, like Daad en Gedacht would leave one to understand that capitalism is free of crises, if not in words, then at least by their silence on the present crisis. Is that an exaggeration on our part? This is what Cajo Brendel claims in reply to our criticisms (in Wereld Revolutie):

"I thought I knew the positions of Daad en Gedacht to some degree. I want to know where Daad en Gedacht has ever written something which could justify this position. As far as I know Daad en Gedacht takes exactly the opposite position by saying that capitalism cannot be crisis-free (...) It is one thing to say that there cannot be a crisis-free capitalism and quite another to speak of a ‘permanent crisis' or a ‘mortal crisis' of capitalism or something like that. Already the GIC, in the thirties, not only presumed but also proved with arguments that the permanent crisis didn't exist. I agree with this, but whoever interprets this as a belief in a crisis-free capitalism show, in my opinion, that he has understood nothing of this position ..."

We also think we know a bit about the positions of Daad en Gedacht insofar as they are found in their publications! Perhaps we don't read very well, but nowhere do we find that there can't be a crisis-free capitalism. Apart from the pamphlet Beschouwingen over geld en goud (a repetition of the Marxist labor theory of value and functions of money and gold), we haven't found a single article on economic subjects for the last ten years. This silence on the crisis seems to be one of the principles of this group!

So, what do we understand by the ‘permanent crisis' and ‘mortal crisis', terms which were developed by the German Left? Do we defend the idea that the collapse, the death of capitalism is as certain as a physical phenomenon in a laboratory? That's not what we think.

If the term ‘permanent crisis' means something, it is because it refers to a whole period of capitalism, the period of decadence, in which the cycle crisis-war-reconstruction-crisis ... has replaced the periodic and conjunctural cycle of commercial crises and crises of prosperity in the ascendant period of capitalism. Of course, there isn't a mortal crisis in the sense of an automatic collapse of capitalism; capitalism's solution is world war if the proletariat doesn't act in a revolutionary way. Capitalism could come out of crisis while it was in a period of development because it could still penetrate new geographic areas, a possibility suggested by Cajo Brendel in his book on Spain and China. But Cajo Brendel and Daad en Gedacht aren't interested in this question. Their study of many so-called ‘bourgeois revolutions' (Spain ‘36, China) depart from a national framework and not from the internationalist framework which was the deter­mining factor for Marx and Pannekoek (cf Workers' Councils by Pannekoek), even if Pannekoek made a different response to this question.

It is this internationalism of Pannekoek and of the international communist left of which the Dutch Left was a part before slowly degenerating, that we lay claim to.

Today when the open crisis of world capitalism is a flagrant reality, it is important to deepen the contributions of the Dutch Left. If it was tentative, multi-faceted and diverse in its elaboration of the theory of capitalist crisis, it at least exposed the problems and contributed to the enriching of Marxist theory even if it didn't resolve them. Above all it maintained the essentials: its class loyalty to the commun­ist revolution, to internationalism, to proletarian principles.

FK

[1] Translation Champ Libre, 1973 with preface by Pannekoek.

[2] "Because gold, alone of the products of labor, has the specific power to buy without having been sold in the first place, it can be the point of departure of the cycle and put it into movement." (Karl Horner, ‘Principle and Tactic', Proletarier, 1927)

[3] See the ICC's critique on ‘Theses of the Chinese Revolution' by Cajo Brendel in the ‘Epigones of Councilism', Part II, International Review, no. 2.

The text we are reproducing here appeared in Internationalisme, n°46 in summer 1952. This was the last issue of the review, and this text was in some ways a condensed summary of the pos­itions and political orientation of this group. It will certainly be of interest to many.

What is particularly important to point out is that the perspective contained in this text is different from the one we see today. Internationalisme was right to analyze the period which followed World War II as the continuation of the period of reaction, of reflux in the proletarian struggle; consequently, they were correct in condemning the Bordigists' proclamation of the party as artificial and adventurist. They were also right to say that the end of the war didn't mean that capitalism was no longer decadent; all the contradictions that had led capitalism to war were still there and were pushing the world inexorably towards new wars. But Internationalisme didn't see or didn't suffic­iently emphasize the phase of ‘reconstruction' that was part of the cycle crisis-war-reconst­ruction-crisis.

For this reason, and in the somber atmosphere of the cold war between the USA and the USSR, Inter­nationalisme only saw the possibility of a prol­etarian resurgence during and after a third world war. Today there are still revolutionaries who share this view. However, the crisis which has of necessity followed the period of reconstruction -- which saw many mystifications begin to wear out -- has led to a renewal of working class struggle; despite the aggravation of its internal contrad­ictions, this forces world capitalism to deal first and foremost with its class enemy.

If the perspective of an inevitable third world war was understandable in the context of the 1950's, and based on a real possibility, we have no reason to maintain this perspective today. Capitalism can still use local wars as a temporary outlet for its contradictions and antagonisms but it can't launch a generalized war as long as it hasn't succeeded in immobilizing the proletariat. Our perspective today looks to a major class confront­ation, and this is what we must be preparing our­selves for. Nothing indicates that we should predict an unfavorable outcome to this confront­ation. With all their struggle, revolutionaries must work and hope for the victory of their class.[1]

We're publishing here a series of exposes given at meetings with the comrades of the Union Ouvrière Internationaliste. In order to allow the discuss­ion to take place as quickly as possible, we're presenting them in the form of an analytical summary. Thus the reader won't find the necessary statistical information or certain important developments. The text is a schema for a more profound work rather than the work itself. 

Comrade M, who is responsible for these exposes, intends to enlarge them and add the relevant documentation.

We hope that the text gives rise to as broad a discussion as possible. It's superfluous to insist on the necessity of having such a discussion and of publishing all the documents relating to it. It goes without saying that we're prepared to take charge of doing the publishing work.

Internationalisme: The evolution of capitalism and the new perspective

Before drawing out the general characteristics of capitalism in its present phase of state capitalism it's necessary to recall and delineate the funda­mental characteristics of capitalism as a system.

Every economic system in a class-divided society has the aim of extracting surplus labor from the laboring classes for the benefit of the exploiting classes. What distinguishes these different soci­eties is the way that the exploiters appropriate this surplus labor, and the way this evolves as a necessity imposed by the development of the productive forces.

Here we will limit ourselves to recalling the essential aspects of the capitalist exploitation of labor power.

Separation of the producers from the means of production

Past, accumulated labor -- dead labor -- domin­ates and exploits present labor -- living labor. It's as the controllers of dead labor, ie of the means of production, that the capitalists -- not taken individually, but as a social class -- exploit the workers' labor.

Economic life is entirely geared towards this quest for profit by the capitalist. This profit is partly consumed by the capitalist, while the greater part of it is earmarked for the reproduction and expansion of capital.

Production as the production of commodities

The relationship between the members of society takes the form of a relationship between commod­ities. Labor power is itself a commodity which is paid for at its value: the value of the products necessary to reproduce it (wages). The wage-earning class's share in total social prod­uction can be measured by comparing the value of labor power to the value of what's produced. Thus the growing productivity of labor, by redu­cing the value of the commodities consumed by the wage-earning class, and thus the value of labor power, leads to the diminution of the wage in comparison to surplus-value. The more production augments; the more restricted is the workers' share in this production, the more wages fall in relation to this expanding production.

The exchange of commodities takes place on the basis of the law of value. This exchange is measured by the quantity of necessary social labor expended in the production of these comm­odities.

These characteristics apply to all stages in the evolution of capitalism. They are no doubt modif­ied by this evolution, but these modifications take place within the system and are secondary: they don't fundamentally alter the nature of the system.

The mode of appropriation

You can only analyze capitalism by grasping its essence -- the relationship between Capital and Labor. You must examine Capital in its relationship with Labor, not the relationship between this capitalist and that worker.

In societies previous to capitalism, ownership of the means of production was based on personal labor: the use of force was seen as an expression of this personal labor. Property really was private property, private ownership of the means of production, considering that the slave for example was himself a means of production. The owner was sovereign, and his sovereignty was limited only by even higher ties of allegiance (tribute, vassalage, etc...).

With capitalism, property is based on social labor. The capitalist is subject to the laws of the market. His freedom is limited both outside and inside his enterprise. He can't produce at a loss, infringing the laws of the market. If he does, he is immediately punished by bankruptcy. We should note, however, that this bankruptcy applies to the individual capitalist, not to the capitalist class as a whole. Everything happens as if the capitalist class is the collective, social owner of the means of production. The situation of the individual capitalist is unstable it's called into question every minute. Thus Marx could say that "the system of appropriation that derives from the capitalist mode of production, and thus capitalist property itself, is the first negation of individual private property based on personal labor". Capitalist property is essenti­ally the property of the capitalist class as such. And thus in his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy Marx rightly defined property relations as the "juridical expression of the relations of production".

The capitalist's ownership of his own private enterprise corresponded to a stage of capitalism when this was necessary because of the low development of the productive forces and because the system still had a vast field of expansion in front of it, which meant that a higher level of concentration of property wasn't necessary. In these conditions, the state had a very limited intervention into the economy: the state remained a political organ, whose role was to administer society in accordance with the interests of the capitalists.

However, while the low level of the development of the productive forces was the basis for the capitalist's private ownership of a fraction of global social capital -- the fraction represented by his own enterprise -- it doesn't follow that a high level of the development of the productive forces is the basis for state capitalism. This higher level certainly gave rise to a concentration of property, as we saw with the emergence of public companies and monopolies, but it's insuff­icient to invoke this to explain the resort to concentrating property in the hands of the state. In fact, purely on the level of property, concen­tration would have taken place -- and did in part do so -- on a different basis: the monopolistic concentration of property on an international scale (cartels for example), and not on the national scale, which is implied by any form of state property.

Capitalism as a necessary historic phase towards the establishment of socialism

One of the essential features of the exploitation of man by man is that the whole of production does not satisfy all human social needs. There is a struggle for the distribution of goods, ie over    the exploitation of labor. Thus the historic possibility of the emancipation of the workers can only arise on the basis of a certain level of the development of the productive forces; the productive forces must be capable of satisfying the whole of social needs.

Socialism, as a classless society is only concei­vable on the basis of this level of development, which will make it possible to eliminate class contradictions. Because capitalism has brought production to the level it has, it can be seen to be a necessary precondition for socialism. Socialism can only be established because of the advances brought about by capitalism.

Thus we cannot say, as the anarchists do for example, that a socialist perspective would still be open even if the productive forces were in regression. We cannot ignore the level of their development. Capitalism has been a neces­sary, indispensable stage towards the establish­ment of socialism to the extent that it has sufficiently developed the objective conditions for it. But, as this text will attempt to show, just as in its present phase capitalism has become a fetter on the development of the productive forces, so the prolongation of capitalism in this phase will lead to the disappearance of the conditions for socialism. It's in this sense that the historic alternative being posed today is between socialism and barbarism.

Theories of the evolution of capitalism

While Marx analyzed the conditions for the development of capitalist production, he was unable, for obvious historic reasons, to concretely examine the supreme forms of its evolution. This task fell to his continuators. Thus, different theories have arisen in the Marxist movement, aiming to illuminate the    evolution of capital. To make this expose more clear, we intend to make a very brief examination of the three main theories.

The theory of concentration

Proposed by Hilferding, then taken up by Lenin, this theory is more a description than an interpr­etation of the evolution of capitalism. It starts from the general observation that the high degree of concentration of production and centralization of capital gives the monopolies the role of direct­ing the economy. The tendency of the monopolies to appropriate gigantic super-profits leads to the dividing-up of the world by imperialism.

This theory may have applied to the period when capitalism was moving from free competition to the monopolist phase, but it doesn't apply to state capitalism, which appeared as the negation of inter­national monopoly. A more advanced level of concen­tration doesn't necessarily imply the resort to state forms of concentration. Capitalist concentr­ation is the result of competition between the capitalists, which leads to the absorption of technically weaker capitals by stronger ones. This results in the expansion of the victorious capit­alist. The continual development of a few enter­prises tends to forbid the appearance of new enterprises, because of the size of the capital needed for investment in fixed and circulating capitals. This process may explain the formation of monopolistic trusts of highly centralized capital; but from the standpoint of the rising amount of capital needed for investment, it doesn't show that monopoly was incapable of facing up to the demands of an even higher level of concentration than had already been attained. Statification in no way represents a higher level of concentration than that attained by the monopolies. In fact certain international monopolistic alliances represent a higher level of concentration than the level operating inside a single state.

Moreover, in taking up the standpoint of the reformist Hilferding, Lenin arrived at the conclusion -- at least logically and implicitly -- that capitalism had not reached the last phase of its development. Thus barbarism for him wasn't a historic eventuality, but an image: an expression of the stagnation of the productive forces and the ‘parasitic' character of capitalism in these conditions. For Lenin, as for the social democrats -- though through different, opposed ways and means -- the question of the objective conditions for revolution were no longer posed in terms of regr­ession, of regression of the productive forces, but simply in terms of the historic necessity for the proletariat to conclude the bourgeois revolution through the proletarian revolution. We will return to this aspect later on.

The theory of the tendential fall in the rate of profit

This theory was presented by Henryk Grossman. Starting from a new formulation of the Marxist schemas of enlarged reproduction, Grossman emphasized the fact that the continuous rise in the organic composition of capital would lead to a fall in the valorization of capital (a fall in the rate of profit leading to a fall in the mass of profit): the relative lack of surplus value would conflict with the needs of accumulation. To remedy this, the capitalists try to diminish the cost of production of capital and of transport­ation, the level of wages, etc... Technical devel­opment accelerates, while the class struggle intensifies in reaction to the super-exploitation of labor.

This theory clearly assigns an objective limit to the development of capitalist accumulation, pointing to its collapse. Capital will no longer find profitable outlets for investment. There will be a series of wars -- provisionally allowing profitability to be maintained -- and beyond that the collapse of capitalism. Grossman's viewpoint however, is hardly convincing in so far as it establishes an absolute connection between the fall in the rate of profit and the relative diminution of the mass of profit.

In her Anticritique Rosa Luxemburg observed:

"...we are left with the somewhat oblique comfort...that capitalism will eventually collapse because of the falling rate of profit. ...However...this comfort is unfort­unately dispelled by a single sentence by Marx, namely the statement that ‘large capitals will compensate for the fall in the rate of profit by mass production'. Thus there is still some time to pass before capitalism collapses because of the falling rate of profit, roughly until the sun burns out".

How does capitalism respond to the falling rate of profit? Marx has already shown that, faced with the falling rate of profit, capitalism can respond in a number of ways that make the exploitation of additional labor profitable. Intensifying the exploitation of labor power is one of these means. Another is the expansion of production: although the falling rate of profit means that there will be less profit in each product, the total sum of profit is increased by the higher sum of products obtained. Finally capitalism responds by eliminating the ‘parasitic' elements which cut down on total profit. Thus the move from free competition to monopoly capitalism involved the partial elimin­ation of backward small producers. But we cannot say that the move to state capitalism involves a similar process. On the contrary, there is more reason for saying that state concentration gives rise to a social stratum which produces no value and is therefore parasitic: the bureaucracy.

For this theory to be able to pass for an interpre­tation of the crisis of the system it would have to demonstrate that the increase of the mass of profit no longer succeeded in compensating for the fall in the rate of profit, or, in other words, that the sum of the global social profit diminished in spite of an increase in production.

The theorem that Grossman's theory must demonstrate, then, would be the following: at the end of a new cycle of production, the global profit (as the product of an increased mass of production multip­lied by a lower rate of profit) is lower than the global social profit resulting from the preceding cycle (as the product of a lower mass of production multiplied by a higher rate of profit -- before its fall). Such a demonstration can be infinitely provided by schemas, but it is not confirmed in the real conditions of production. We must therefore conclude that the real solution is elsewhere. The impossibility of expanding production resides today not in the non-profitability of this enlarged production, but in the impossibility of finding outlets for it.

Rosa Luxemburg's theory of accumulation

As with the preceding theories we will only give a very incomplete summary of Rosa's thesis.[2] As is known, Rosa Luxemburg concluded, after profound study of the Marxist schemas of reproduct­ion, that the capitalists could not realize all their surplus value on their own market. In order to continue accumulating, the capitalists were compelled to sell a part of their commodities in the extra-capitalist milieux: producers owning their own means of production (artisans, peasants, colonies or semi-colonies). It was the existence of these extra-capitalist milieux which determined the rhythm of capitalist accumulation. This extra-capitalist milieux was shrinking and capitalism was plunging into crisis. The different sectors of world capitalism were fighting each other over the exploitation of these extra-capitalist regions.

The disappearance of extra-capitalist markets was thus leading to a permanent crisis of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg also showed that this crisis was opening up well before this disappearance had become absolute. In order to compensate for the disappearance of these markets, capitalism was developing a parasitic form of production, by its very nature unproductive: the production of the means of destruction. The decadent character of capitalism was confirmed by the fact that it was becoming incapable of maintaining the production of social values (objects of consumption). War became capitalism's way of life: wars between states or coalitions of states in which each one tries to survive by pillaging or subjugating its victims. Whereas in previous periods war led to the expansion of production in one or other of the protagonists, it now led, in varying degrees, to the ruin of both. This ruin was expressed both by the fall in the living standards of the popula­tion and by the increasingly unproductive character (in terms of value) of production.

The aggravation of struggles between states and their decadent character since 1914 leads each state to attempt to survive on its own, in a closed circle, and to resort to state concentration. This is what we ourselves are arguing here, and the aim of this text is to adjust this theory to historical reality.

Some fundamental characteristics of state capitalism

State capitalism is not an attempt to resolve the essential contradictions of capitalism as a system of exploitation of labor power, it is the express­ion of these contradictions. Each group of capital­ist interests attempts to push the effects of the crisis of the system onto a rival group, by taking it over as a market and as a field of exploitation. State capitalism is born out of the necessity for a given group of capital to concentrate itself and take hold of external markets. The economy is thus transformed into a war economy.

The problem of production and exchange

In the phases of capital prior to state capitalism, exchange preceded production: production followed the market. When the indices of production approa­ched the indices of the volume of world trade, the crisis opened up. This crisis was a manifestation of the saturation of the market. Following the crisis, the revival of economic expansion took place first of all in the sphere of exchange and not of production, which followed demand.

From 1914 onwards, the phenomenon was reversed: production preceded exchange. At first it seemed that this could be put down to the destruction caused by the war. But in 1929 the indices of exchange matched those of production and we had the crisis. Stocks piled up and the capitalist was unable to realize surplus value on the market. Previously crises were reabsorbed by the opening up of new markets, which led to a revival of world trade and then of production. Between 1929 and 1935, the crisis could not find a solution to the extension of markets, since the tendential limits of this extension had already been reached. The crisis forced capitalism to turn itself into a war economy.

The capitalist world had entered into its perman­ent crisis: it could no longer go on expanding production. This was a striking confirmation of Rosa's theory: the shrinking of extra-capitalist markets led to the saturation of the capitalist market itself.

The problem of crises

The essential character of the crises since 1929 is that they are more profound than previous ones. We are no longer dealing with cyclical crises, but a permanent crisis. The cyclical crises which classical capitalism went through affected all capitalist countries. The booms that followed also had a global effect. The permanent crisis that we are now going through has been charact­erized by the continuing fall of production and trade in all capitalist countries (as in 1929-­1934). But we no longer see a generalized recovery. Recovery only takes place in one compartment of production, and this at the expense of other sectors. Moreover, the crisis shifts from one country to another, keeping the entire world economy in a permanent state of crisis.

Unable to open up new markets, each country closes itself off and tries to live on its own. The universalisation of the capitalist economy, which had been achieved through the world market, is breaking down. Instead we have autarky. Each country tries to go it alone: it creates unprofit­able sectors of production to compensate for the break-up of the market. This palliative further aggravates the dislocation of the world market.

Before 1914, profitability, via the mediation of the market, was the standard, the measure, the stimulant of capitalist production. In the present period this law of profitability is being violated. The law is no longer applied at the level of the enterprise, but at the global level of the state The distribution of value is carried out according to a plan of accounts at national level, no longer through the direct pressure of the world market. Either the state subsidizes the deficit part of the economy or the state itself takes over the entire economy.

This does not mean a ‘negation' of the law of value. What we are seeing here is that a given unit of production seems to be detached from the law of value, that this production takes place without any apparent concern for profitability.

Monopoly super-profits are realized through ‘artif­icial' prices, but on the global level of produc­tion this is still connected to the law of value. The sum of prices for production as a whole still expresses the global value of these products. Only the distribution of value among the various capitalist groups is transformed: the monopolies arrogate for themselves a super-profit at the expense of the less well-armed capitalists. In the same way we can say that the law of value continues to operate at the level of national production. The law of value no longer acts on a product taken individually, but on the entirety of products. This is a restriction in the law of value's field of application. The total mass of profit tends to diminish, because of the burden exerted by deficit branches of the economy on the other branches.

The field of application of the law of value

a) Capital. From what has been said it follows that while the rigorous mechanisms of the law of value do not always operate at the level of one enterprise, or even of a whole branch of the economy, the law does manifest itself at the level of exchange. As in previous periods the market remains, in the last instance, the supreme regula­tor of the capitalist value of commodities or, if, you prefer, of products. The law of value seems to be negated in countries where several industrial sectors are in the hands of the state. But when they exchange with other sectors, this takes place on the basis of the law of value.

In Russia the disappearance of individual property has led to a very great restriction in the capital­ist application of the law of value. This law may no longer operate in exchanges between two statified sectors -- just as it doesn't operate between the workshops of one factory -- but it does operate as soon as it's a question of exchang­ing one completed product for another. The price of the product is still fixed according to the social labor time necessary for its production, and not by the omnipotent will of a ‘bureaucrat'. Products circulate and are exchanged according to the needs of production, and thus, no matter how ‘organized' this process may be, according to the needs of the market. Prices remain the mercantile expression of the law of value.

b) Labor Power: but the fundamental exchange in the capitalist economy is the one that takes place between products and labor power. In Russia as elsewhere labor power is bought at its capitalist value. The price paid is the one necessary for the reproduction of labor power.

The greater or lesser valorization of labor power, the higher or lower level of wages doesn't change the basic question. The value of labor is fixed partly by the way that the workers react against their exploitation. Their struggle, or lack of it, can increase or diminish that part of production which accrues to them in the form of wages. But within the framework of capitalism, the workers can only affect the volume of products attributed to them in exchange for their labor power, and not the capitalist basis of this distribution.

The fact that in Russia and elsewhere there exist a form of ‘concentration camp' labor doesn't change these observations. Not only does this represent a minimal fraction of the labor power expended in the whole country, but this phenomenon itself retains the fundamental characteristics of the relationship between capital and labor.

The meaning of the phenomenon is to be found in the necessity for a backward capitalist country to maintain a low level of wages. It's a pressure exerted within the framework of accumulation, in order to affect the global social value of the products aimed towards the reproduction of labor power, in the same way that the industrial reserve army, the unemployed, were used under classical capitalism. The transitory nature of this phenomenon can be seen when we consider that, in general, this ‘forced labor' is directed towards works of internal colonization. These are works that only have a long-term profitability and are carried out by a cheap, non-specialized work­force; in the general conditions of a backward economy, it's not possible to pay for this work­force at its capitalist value. We should also add that, in Russia, this use of labor power also serves as an effective method of political coercion.

Some see this form of exploitation as the beginnings of a return to slavery. To prove this you would have to show that the capitalist law of value had disappeared absolutely. It's worth pointing out that, when a slave was punished in antiquity, he received corporal punishment (the rod, branding, gladitorial games). The Russian worker convicted of ‘sabotage' is punished in value: he's forced to work a certain number of extra hours, unpaid. What's more, the ‘good' Stakhanovist gets extra wages and especially better housing and leisure facilities. Politically the aim of this is to div­ide the exploited class (by forming a labor arist­ocracy devoted to the regime).

In a general way it should be recognized that to palliate the fall in the average rate and the mass of profit, the available labor power must be used to the maximum. The number of workers is increased; the proletarianisation of the peasant or petty bour­geois masses is accelerated; the war-wounded and the insane are looked after so that they can be recuper­ated into the cycle of production; the procreation and education of children is encouraged and suppor­ted. The intensity of labor is increased: time is rigorously controlled; there is a return to piece-work in the form of bonuses and suchlike, etc ..... The swinish theoreticians of the growth of productivity or of full employment are simply rat­ionalizing this tendency towards the maximum exploitation of human labor.

The goal of production

Production develops while trade diminishes. What happens to this production, which because of the lack of possibility for exchange, is doomed to remain devoid of any social use? It is orientated towards the production of the means of destruction. While state capitalism increases industrial prod­uction, it still doesn't create new value, but bombs or uniforms.

This production is financed essentially in three ways:

1. In a given cycle of production, an ever-larg­er part of this production goes into products which don't reappear in the following cycle. The product leaves the sphere of production and doesn't return to it. A tractor comes back into production in the form of sheaves of corn, but not a tank.

The amount of social labor time incorporated in this production confers a value to it. But this labor time is expended without any social counter­part: neither consumed, nor reinvested, it doesn't play any role in reproduction. It remains profit­able to the individual capitalist, but not on the global level.

Production expands in volumes, but not in real social value. Thus an initial part of the product­ion of means of destruction is levied from current production.

2. A second part is paid for by draining unprod­uctive capitals (stockholders, shopkeepers, peasants) and also accumulated capitals which are productive but not indispensable to the operation of a productive apparatus which is no longer geared towards productive consumption. Savings start to disappear. Although they are open to dispute, the following figures give an idea of how things are going in a country like France, which is typical of this process.

"Evaluated in buying power, the capital of 1950 ...represents only 144 billion in 1911, as against 286 today, which means that half its value has been lost. But this view would be incomplete if we didn't take into consideration the mass of contributions from savings. At the 1910-1914 rate (4 billion), all things being equal, it would have added 144 billion to today's 300 billion. Reduced by two wars, the annual savings did still exist. Now there is no trace of them". (René Papin in Problèmes Economiques no.159, 16-1651).

Commercial profits are being amputated by an enor­mous state levy. Finally, inflation has become permanent and the degradation of the buying power of money has reached considerable proportions.

3. A third part is directly levied from the workers, by the reduction of living standards and the intensification of exploitation. In France for example, whereas the production figures for the beginning of 1952 were at 153 in relation the level of 1938, the living standards of the workers have fallen by 30% in relation to the pre­war period, and this gap is even greater if we examine the increase in production. This apparent paradox -- continuously progressing production accompanied by a continuously regressing consump­tion by the workers and a continuously shrinking pile of social capital -- is one of the expressions of the decadence of capitalism.

Social structure of the capitalist class

Such economic transformations involve profound social changes. The concentration of economic power in the hands of the state -- and sometimes even the physical elimination of the bourgeois as an individual capitalist -- precipitates an evol­ution which was already discernible in previous stages of capitalism. A number of theories have flourished -- particularly on the soil of Trotskyism -- on the basis of interpreting this evolution as the dynamic of a struggle by a new class against the classical bourgeoisie. These theoreticians argue thus because of the physical destruction of the bourgeois and of individual private property in Eastern Europe and their limitation in the fascist or social democratic regimes, as well as those regimes which have come out of the ‘Resist­ance'. However, these examples do not justify that conclusion. To build a theory on a series of facts which find their most typical application in a relatively backward economy, and on facts which are more apparent than real (the capitalist isn't a physical person, but a social function) is to build on sand.

To make a clear analysis, you must observe the highly developed capitalist world. The situation there is characterized by an amalgam, an over­lapping of traditional capitalist elements and elements from the state apparatus. Such amalgams don't of course take place without real friction and difficulties. In this sense ‘fascism' and the ‘Resistance' regimes were both failed attempts.

The conclusion drawn by our theoreticians -- a civil war between the new ‘bureaucratic' class and the classical capitalism -- leads to denying the evidence of a permanent crisis of capitalism. This crisis, whose effects have repercussions even within the exploiting strata, is then replaced by a struggle between two ‘historic' classes -- a struggle that is progressive for the official Trotskyists, though not for Schachtman and others. The proletariats' absence on the historic scene is therefore rationalized. The alternative posed by history and by revolutionaries -- socialism or barbarism -- is now joined by a third, which allows our theoreticians to integrate themselves into one bloc or another. This idea of the existence, with­in capitalism, of a new exploiting class, bearing with it a historic solution to the contradictions of capitalism, leads to the abandonment of revolut­ionary theory and to the adoption of a capitalist viewpoint.

The situation of the capitalists

The bourgeoisie's benefits from private property used to take the form of a reward proportionate to the size of the enterprise he was running. The ‘salary earning' character of the capitalist, in relation to capital, remained hidden: he appeared to be the owner of his enterprise. In his more recent form, the capitalist continues to live on the surplus value extracted from the workers, but receives his profit in the form of a direct salary; he is a functionary. Profits are no longer distri­buted according to juridical titles of ownership, but according to the social function of the capit­alist. Thus the capitalist always feels a profound sense of solidarity with the whole of national production, and is no longer interested merely in the profits of his own enterprise. He tends to treat all workers equally, and tries to associate them to the concerns of production as a whole. The proletariat can see clearly that capitalism can exist without the individual ownership of the means of production. However, this tendency towards the ‘salarisation' of capital seems to abolish economic frontiers between classes. The proletariat knows that it's exploited, but finds it hard to recognize its exploiters when they've donned the garb of a union boss or progressive intellectual.

The colonial problem

It was once believed in the worker's movement that the colonies could only be emancipated with­in the context of the socialist revolution. Certainly their character as ‘the weakest link in the chain of imperialism' owing to the exacerbation of capitalist exploitation and repression in those areas, made them particularly vulnerable to social movements. Always their accession to independence was linked to the revolution in the metropoles.

These last years have seen, however, most of the colonies becoming independent: the colonial bour­geoisies have emancipated themselves, more or less, from the metropoles. This phenomenon, how­ever limited it may be in reality, cannot be under­stood in the context of the old theory, which saw colonial capitalism as the lackey pure and simple of imperialism, a mere broker.

The truth is that the colonies have ceased to represent an extra-capitalist market for the metropoles; they have become new capitalist countries. They have thus lost their character as outlets, which make the old imperialisms less res­istant to the demands of the colonial bourgeoisie. To which it must be added that these imperialisms' own problems have favored -- in the course of two world wars -- the economic expansion of the colonies. Constant capital destroyed itself in Europe, while the productive capacity of the colonies or semi-colonies grew, leading to an explosion of indigen­ous nationalism (South Africa, Argentina, India, etc). It is noteworthy that these new capitalist countries, right from their creation as independent nations, pass to the stage of state capitalism, showing the same aspects of an economy geared to war as has been discerned elsewhere.

The theory of Lenin and Trotsky has fallen apart. The colonies have integrated themselves into the capitalist world, and have even propped it up. There is no longer a ‘weakest link': the domination of capital is equally distributed throughout the surface of the planet.

The incorporation of the proletarian struggle and of civil society into the state

In classical capitalism, real life took place in civil society, outside the state. The state was simply the instrument of the dominant interests in civil society and that alone: it was an agent of execution rather than the organ effectively direc­ting economic and political life. The agencies of the state, however, whose task is to maintain order -- ie to administer men -- have tended to escape the control of society and to form an autonomous caste with their own interests. This disassociation, this, struggle between the state and civil society, couldn't result in the absolute domination of the state as long as the state didn't control the means of production. The period of monopolies saw the beginnings of an amalgam between the state and the oligarchy, but this amalgam remained unsta­ble: the state remained external to civil society which was still based essentially on individual property. In the present phase, the administration of things and the government of men are being unified under the same hands. Decadent capitalism has negated the antagonism between the two econom­ically exploiting classes -- the capitalists and the landowners -- through the disappearance of the latter. It also negates the contradictions between the various capitalist groupings, the contrasts between which used to be one of the motor-forces of production. Today this production, in real value terms, is on the decline.

In its turn the economically exploited class is integrated into the state. On the level of mystification, this integration is facilitated by the fact that the workers are now confronted by capital as such, as the representative of the Nation, as the Nation itself, which the workers are supposed to belong to.

We've seen that state capitalism is forced to reduce the amount of goods accruing to variable capital, to savagely exploit the labor of workers. In the past, the economic demands of the workers could be at least partially satisfied through the expansion of production. The proletariat could effectively improve its conditions. This time is over. Capital can no longer resort to the safety-valve of a real increase in wages. The fall in real production makes it impossible for capitalism to revalorize wages. The economic struggles of the workers can only end in failure -- at best in main­taining living conditions which have already been degraded. They tie the proletariat to its exploit­ers by leading it to feel a solidarity with the system in exchange for an extra bowl of soup (which, in the last analysis, is only obtained through increasing ‘productivity').

The state maintains the forms of workers' organ­izations (the trade unions) the better to dragoon and mystify the class. The unions have become a cog in the state, and as such are concerned with developing productivity, ie with increasing the exploitation of labor. The unions were defensive organs of the class for as long as the economic struggle had any meaning. Devoid of their former content, without changing their form, the unions have become instruments of ideological repression for state capitalism, organs for the control of labor power.

Agrarian reform and the organization of distribution: the co-operatives

In order to obtain the maximum output from labor in the best conditions, state capitalism has to organize and centralize agricultural production and cut down on parasitism at the level of dist­ribution. The same goes for the artisan sectors. These different branches are grouped together in cooperatives whose aim is to eliminate commercial capital, reduce the distance between production and consumption, and integrate agricultural production into the state.[3]

Social security

The wage itself has been integrated into the state. Fixing wages at their capitalist value has devolved upon the state organs. Part of the workers' wages is directly levied and administered by the state. Thus the state ‘takes charge' of the life of the worker, controls his health (as part of the struggle against absenteeism) and directs his leisure (for purposes of ideological repression). In the end the worker no longer has a private life; every minute of his life belongs directly or indirectly to the state. The worker is seen as an active cell in a wider body: his personality disappears (but not without provoking innumerable neuroses: mental alienation in all its forms is to our epoch what the great epidemics were to the Mdiddle Ages). It goes without saying that the lot of the workers is also, mutatis mutandis, the lot of other economic categories in society.

There's no need to emphasize that, while socialist society will defend the individual against illness or other risks, its aims will not be those of capit­alist Social Security. The latter only has a meaning in the framework of the exploitation of human labor. It's nothing but an appendage of the system.

Revolutionary perspective

We've seen that economic struggle, immediate demands can in no way emancipate the workers. The same goes for their political struggle waged inside and for the reform of the capitalist system. When civil society was separate from the state, the struggles between the different social strata who made up civil society resulted in a contin­uous transformation of political conditions. The theory of the permanent revolution corresponded to this perpetual modification of the balance of forces within society. These transformations allowed the proletariat to wage its own political struggle by outflanking the open struggles within the bourge­oisie.

Society thus created the social conditions and ideo­logical climate for its own subversion. Revol­utionary flux and reflux followed each other in a more and more profound rhythm. Each one of these crises allowed the proletariat to develop an inc­reasingly clear historic class consciousness. The dates 1791, 1848, 1871 and 1917 are the most significant of a long list.

Under state capitalism we no longer have profound political struggles engendered by the antagonisms between different interest groups. In classical capitalism the multiplication of these interests gave rise to a multiplication of parties, the pre­condition for the functioning of parliamentary democracy. In state capitalism society is unified and there is a tendency towards the single-party system: the distribution of surplus value according to function creates a common interest for the exploiting class, a unification of the conditions under which surplus value is extracted and distrib­uted. The single-party system is the expression of these new conditions. This means the end of classical bourgeois democracy: political offences have become a crime. The struggles which were traditionally expressed in parliament, or even in the street, now unfold within the state apparatus itself; or, with a few variations, they take place within the general coalition of the capitalist interests of a nation and, in the conditions of today, a bloc of nations.

The present situation of the proletariat

The proletariat has been unable to become conscious of this transformation of the economy. What's more it finds itself integrated into the state. Capita­lism could have been overthrown before it reached its statified form. The epoch of revolutions had begun. But the revolutionary political struggle of the workers ended in failure, in an absolute retreat of the class, on a scale unprecedented in history. This failure and retreat have allowed capitalism to carry out this transformation.

It seems to be impossible for the proletariat to reaffirm itself as a historic class during this process. What used to give the class the possib­ility of doing so was the fact that, through its cyclical crises, society would break through its own framework and eject the proletariat from the cycle of production. Rejected from society the workers would develop a revolutionary conscious­ness about their condition and the way to trans­form it.

Since the period before the war in Spain and the beginnings of the ‘anti-fascist' mystification, when for the first time we saw the relative unifi­cation of the exploiting class, and then during and after the second world war, capitalism has been moving towards the disappearance of its cyclical crises and their after-effects, by enter­ing into a permanent crisis. The proletariat now finds itself associated to its own exploitation. It is thus mentally and politically integrated into capitalism.

State capitalism enchains the proletariat more firmly than ever, and it does it with its own traditions of struggle. This is because the capitalists, as a class, have drawn the lessons of experience and have understood that the essential weapon for preserving their class rule is not so much the police as direct ideological repression. The political party of the workers has become a capitalist party. What has happened with the trade unions, emptied of their former content and absorb­ed into the state, has also happened to what used to be the workers' party. While still using a pro­letarian phraseology, this party has become an exp­ression of the exploiting class, adapting its interests and its vocabulary to new realities. One of the basic planks of this mystification is the slogan of struggling against private property.

This struggle had a revolutionary meaning when capitalism could be identified with individual pro­perty: it was a challenge to exploitation because it challenged its most apparent form. The trans­formation of the conditions of capital has made this struggle of the workers against individual property historically obsolete. It has become the battle-cry of those capitalist factions who have advanced the furthest along the road of decadence. It serves to ally the workers to those factions.

The workers' attachment to their traditions of struggle, to a whole series of outworn myths and images, is used to integrate the class into the state. Thus the First of May, which once meant strikes, often violent ones, and always had the character of a struggle, has become a capitalist Holy Day: the workers' Christmas. The Internation­ale is sung by generals and priests who excel themselves in anti-clericalism.

All this serves capitalism, because the old object­ives of the struggle, linked to a bygone period, have disappeared, while the forms of the struggle survive, without their former content.

Elements of a revolutionary perspective   

The development of a revolutionary consciousness by the proletariat is directly linked to the return of the objective conditions in which this coming-to-consciousness can take place. These can be reduced to the general postulate that the proletariat is ejected from society, that capital­ism is no longer able to assure the material cond­itions of its existence. This condition comes about at the culminating point of the crisis. And, in the period of state capitalism, this culminating point of the crisis takes place during a war.

Up to this point, the proletariat cannot affirm it­self as a historic class with its own mission. On the contrary, it can only express itself as an eco­nomic category of capital.

In the present conditions of capital, generalized war is inevitable. But this doesn't mean that the revolution is inevitable, and still less the vict­ory of the revolution. The revolution only repre­sents one pole of the alternative which historical development has set before humanity. If the proletariat doesn't achieve a socialist conscious­ness, the course will be opened to the kind of barbarism of which we can see some aspects today.

May 1952

[1] Extract from the introduction to the republica­tion of the text in the Bulletin d'études et de discussion of Révolution Internationale, n°8, July 1974

[2] This summary has been done by Lucien Laurat (L'Accumulation du Capital d'apres Rosa Luxembourg, Paris 1930). See also J. Buret Le Marxisme et les Crises, Paris 1933; Leon Sarbre La Theorie Marxiste des Crises, 1934 - and that's the whole French language bibliography on the subject.

[3] Our comrade Morel has given an expose on this question, which can be found in Internationalisme no. 43.

Since May ‘68 in France, the leftist movement has gone through various transformations. After reaching its strongest point in 1969, the years that followed saw a relative decline in the influence of certain leftist groups and the dev­elopment of a crisis within them taking diff­erent forms in different currents.

The Maoist or the so-called Marxist-Leninist Movement

In contrast to the Trotskyist current which came out of a proletarian tradition that passed into the bourgeois camp during World War II, the Maoist current is a direct abortion of the counter­revolution. Coming out of the PCF (Communist Party of France) in the mid-sixties on the basis of the deterioration of relations between Russian capitalism and Chinese capitalism, the ‘pro-Chinese' movement never broke with any of the counter-revolutionary positions of the PCF. In fact it advocated a return to the teachings of Stalin and an alignment behind Mao's bourgeois state.

In 1969, the two main Maoist groups were the Gauche Proletarienne, which dissolved three years later, and the PCMLF (Parti Communiste Marxiste Leniniste de France). Since then about a dozen splits have taken place in the Maoist movement in France and today (early 1980) there are four main groups: the PCML (Parti Communiste Marxiste Leniniste), the PCPml (Parti Communiste Revolu­tionaire marxist leniniste), UCFML (Union des Communistes de France Marxistes Leninistes) and the OCFml (Organisation Communiste de France marxiste leniniste, Drapeau Rouge). In addition to these there are a dozen or so small local circles, some of them pro-Albanian like the PCOF (Parti Communiste des Ouvriers de France) which publishes La Forge. But in fact over the last ten years the Maoist movement has gone through a major numerical decline and a semi-­permanent crisis, the product of various political contradictions specific to an inexperienced bourgeois current and linked to the policies of the Chinese state. This crisis is the product of the decreasing capacity of the Maoist groups to intervene and sell their mystifications, and the fact that they are caught between a strong Trotskyist movement, a powerful Stalinist party and a social democratic party that has been growing since 1968.

More precisely, the Maoist groups have been weakened by the following developments in the class struggle and the international situation:

1. The development of the CP-SP mystification of the ‘Programme Commun', which the Maoists didn't support. They openly conciliated with the right and even the extreme right on the question of national defense (anti-Russian propaganda, support for the atomic strike-force, denunciation of the anti-militarist movement, support for French imperialism). Thus, Humanité Rouge (paper of the PCMLF) could write:

"The present government, while holding to the principle of national defense, is incapable of mobilizing the popular masses because of the reactionary and oppressive character of its domestic policies. As for the ‘Programme Commun', which represents a growing tendency in the bourgeoisie, it is extremely dangerous, because while it claims to be for the strengthening of national defense, it is completely silent about the Soviet danger" (Humanité Rouge, 240, Sept. 1974).

And also:

"As for ourselves, more than ever we call on the workers and youth to act for the strengthening of national defense..." (Humanité Rouge, 309, July 1975).

Maoism has undermined the basis of its own influence by unmasking itself too rapidly as a nationalist drug directly at the service of the bourgeoisie and the American bloc.

2. The abandonment of verbal anti-unionism by most of the Maoist groups is also helping to liquidate the Maoist myth: in many ways, this anti-union verbiage was one of the principal factors behind the influence of the Maoist groups. During and after May ‘68, many of the workers who were aware of the sabotage of the unions turned towards groups like the GP who advocated ‘hanging the bureaucrats', or like the PCMLF who called for the formation of ‘base unions' and denounced the CGT as ‘social fascist'. This kind of demagogy, which was useful for diverting the workers in a period of struggle, became useless during the ensuing period of reflux. The Maoists were unable to adapt their policies to this change.

3. The more and more open integration of China into the American bloc (remember that the Maoist groups in France arose essentially on the basis of support for Vietnam against the USA and a critique of Russia's capitulations to the US).

4. The political shifts within the Chinese state, especially after Mao's death (the liquidation of the ‘Gang of Four', the re-emergence of Teng Hsiao Ping, who had been thoroughly denounced by all the Maoist groups).

All these factors have led to the dispersion of the Maoists in all kinds of obscure directions: the abandonment of militantism and the entry into marginalism, journalism (Libération), philosophy (the ‘New Philosophy', now overtly right wing), semi-terrorism (NAPAP), spontaneist autonomy (Camarades), and even certain attempts to move onto a proletarian terrain, as expressed by the formation of the Organisation Communiste Bolshevik, which after various splits has given rise to L'Eveil Interna,tionaliste and the Gauche Internationaliste.

After the failure of the ‘Programme Cormun' and the resurgence of proletarian struggle, the main Maoist groups (PCMLF and PCRml) accelerated the change of image which they had begun in the mid-sixties, abandoning the overtly ‘radical' aspects of their interventions. They have now opted for a more conciliatory attitude towards the unions and left parties. The latter have also softened their attitude to the leftists in general.

This turn by the Maoist current was clearly expressed at the beginning of 1978 during the 40th Congress of the CGT, whose "democratic opening-up" was hailed by the PCMLF. Similarly the decision of the PCMLF and the PCRml to present a joint list at the March ‘78 election was a way of revamping electoralism something for which the Maoists had always denounced the left parties and Trotskyists. Finally, just after these elections, the PCMLF evolved a perspective for a work of "explanation directed at the electors, base militants, workers, employees and small peasants of the PS and PCF, linked to the indispensable pursuit of the class struggle for the defense of immediate demands" (HR, 851, March ‘78).

At the end of 1978, the PCMLF even undertook a self-criticism of its excessively chauvinist position of support for French imperialism, notably their support for the French intervention in Zaire.

As for the resurgence of workers' struggles, it's worth pointing out that the Maoist press is more and more advancing the perspective of ‘unity at the base' within the union framework. This confirms that the Maoists are moving towards the old Trotskyist tactics for sabotaging struggles. Under the heading ‘What is unity at the base', the PCMLF explained at the end of 1979:

"The realization of unity at the base requires compromises... both as individuals, or as representatives of an organized political force, or as members of a union section, we must abandon unilateral action. In a united action, we mustn't only popularize our own ideas, or only the program of our party or union... In the same way, we can't accept militants of other political forces ‘recuperating' our common action by trying to direct it towards their own party program." (HR, 1133)

They could hardly be more explicit. Just like the Stalinists of the PCF and the Trotskyists, the Maoists are openly preparing to break any attempt at autonomous class organization during the struggle.

More precisely the Maoist groups, apart from the small UCFML, have integrated themselves fully into the union apparatus, especially the CFDT. However, now that the divided left is assuring a clearer oppositional role, there seems to be a certain hesitation in the Maoist ranks, the logic of which is leading them to support social democracy against the PCF, especially the Maire-Rocard duo (the leader of the CFDT and the ‘new man' of social democracy). This perspective has been put forward very clearly by the small OCFml:

"The political and economic failure of the right, but above all the profound ideological failure both of the parties of the old right and the parties of the fake left, demand a new, clear alternative: a revolutionary anti-totalitarian force. The basis for the emergence of such a force can be seen both in the CFDT's good showing in the conciliation board elections, and in Michel Rocard's public-opinion successes" (Drapeau Pouge, 72, Dec. 1979).

In the same issue, the OCFml, in an article entitled "Will the leftists rejoin the PCF"', expressed its fears in seeing the leftists tail-ending the PCF, which is now engaged in a ‘radical' activity demanded by the need to control and contain the resurgence of workers' struggles. As an example of this it cites an extract from a letter written by a union militant to Humanité Rouge, which says that

"There are even comrades who think that the PCF is better than our party (the PCMLF) and who are leaving us on this basis. Because it lacks any serious analysis, I'm really afraid that our party will simply become an auxiliary to the present line of the PCF/CGT".

The OCFml uses this occasion to point out that the PCF is aligned to the Russian bloc and to stress the necessity to strengthen the camp of ‘democratic socialism', clearly the camp of social democracy and alignment behind the American bloc.

On the international level, most of the Maoist groups have tried to follow, in a more or less coherent manner, the evolution of China, and to put themselves at the disposal of the anti-Russian propaganda of the Western bloc. On several occasions, the Maoist groups have openly supported the maneuvers of the American bloc. For them, Russian imperialism is the main enemy and this explains their belligerent propaganda. Thus no. 65 of Drapeau Pouge, September ‘79, reproduced an advert from Le Monde for General Hachett's book The Third World War, and explained, in an article called ‘Defense: arm the people', that

"In Europe and in France, the consciousness of dangers and of realities seems to be sharper in bourgeois circles (than in the USA), and even if doubt and indecision still reign, there is also a will to face up to the Russian war danger."

A few months previously, this same group reproached the American bloc for its weakness over the China-Vietnam conflict:

"Carter has even given way to this military and political pressure. At a time when the whole world was talking about the USSR's preparations for war against China, he declared that ‘there is no doubt in my mind that the Soviets want peace'" (DR, 54, March ‘79).

In the Same article, the OCFml supported China's attack on Vietnam:

"China is in the right! It is simply affirming that it won't give way to the threats of petty hegemonism supported by the USSR. Munich 1938 has already shown that any policy of weakness only encourages aggression."

In a broader sense, when the Maoists aren't explicitly supporting western imperialism their implicit support for the European options blessed by Washington clearly shows the pro-western perspective of all the Maoist groups. The UCFML, a small ‘marginal' group, didn't support the Chinese invasion of Vietnam: "The entry of Chinese troops into Vietnamese territory is justified neither by Vietnamese provocations at the frontier, nor by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, nor by the infiltration of Vietnam by Russian social-imperialism". In no.36 of its paper (Le Marxiste Leniniste) this group devoted a long article defending the idea of a re-unified Europe, East and West Europe against the two ‘superpowers', a ‘Europe of the peoples'. Very rapidly, the group admitted that the China-US alliance was ‘inevitable', and at the end of ‘78 it explained about the threat of imperialist war, saying:

"On the question of war, the proletariat can't have a passive attitude. Pacifism is a guarantee for disaster. When at the beginning of the 1939-45 war the PCF refused to put itself at the head of the resistance against the Nazi invader, it made a dramatic error, clearly paid for afterwards, despite the heroism of the FTP. Allowing De Gaulle to appear as the incarnation of the resistance allowed the capitulationist bourgeoisie to reconstitute itself." (Le Marxiste Leniniste, no. 31)

This same patriotic tradition is claimed by the ‘pro-Albanian' PCOF. It denounces the preparations for war and puts equal blame on the PS and PCF, "accomplices in the fascisisation of the regime." This pseudo-denunciation is part of the PCOF's ‘anti-fascist' logic; in its own small way the PCOF is trying to refurbish the old myths used by the PCF to mobilize the proletariat for World War II. By assimilating war with fascism, the PCOF completes the whole panoply of Maoist lies. Thus Maoism defends bourgeois positions from A to Z, and with an imperturbable tenacity.

But, lacking a real influence in the working class, the Maoist current doesn't have much perspective of growth in comparison to the Trotskyist movement, which remains the ‘spearhead' of leftism in France.

The Trotskyist Movement

Trotskyism is the main force of the extreme left of capital in France, The Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), Lutte Ouvriere (LO) and the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) have since 1968 shared most of leftisms's work of mystification.

The Trotskyist groups, unlike the Maoists, were less affected by crises and splits during the reflux in the workers' struggle. However there has been a sort of creeping crisis, which has taken the form of a crisis of militantism in the LCR, the definite organizational decline of the OCI, and a weakening of the political phraseology of LO which used to have an image as a ‘pure', ‘radical' group. The underlying cause of these phenomena was the alignment of these three groups behind the Union of the left (PC, PS, Left Radicals), and their rapid integration into the electoral circus.

This orientation in the Trotskyist movement has provoked a series of small ‘left-wing' splits, reacting against a policy that was too tail­endist and too openly anti-working class. Thus the small group LIRQUI (now the Ligue Ouvriere Revolutionnaire -- LOR), after splitting from the OCI, explained during the spring ‘74 elections that:

"The OCI's recent rallying ‘without ambiguity for the victory of Mitterand' is one of the most important political facts of the day. This position is a complete negation of the whole past struggle of the 4th International in France. It is neither more nor less than a rallying behind the Popular Front. It is a shameful, unconditional capitulation" (Bulletin, no.4).

As for the Ligue Trotskyiste de France (LTF) which comes from a group expelled from the LCR, it makes the same accusation:

"The LTF's major accusation against the pseudo-Trotskyists is their inability to draw a class line against the Union of the Left Popular Front, both in their general intervention and in their trade union work. The strategic axis of the intervention of Trotskyists is the independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie, an independence that is obliterated when the workers' parties and unions enter into a popular front. The central axis of trade union work for consis­tent revolutionaries must be the denunciation of the treason of the popular front and the break between the unions and the popular front. The pseudo-Trotskyists have either called for the coming to power of the popular front (LCR and LO) or called for a vote to Mitterand against... the popular front (OCI)!" (French Bulletin of the Spartacist League no.10, October ‘75)

Finally, Combat Communiste, a small group called ‘state capitalist' because it recognizes the capitalist nature of the USSR, expelled from LO after a split by another group (Union Ouvriere), was banging the same drum:

"LO supports the camouflaged coalition between the bourgeoisie and the counter­revolutionary workers' leaders without even asking what is positive in this for the working class" (CC pamphlet, Critique du Programme de Transition).

All these groups, including Combat Communiste, maintain the logic of Trotskyism on the issue of supporting the capitalist left. They only differ on whether this support is opportune in a ‘non-revolutionary' period. Thus Combat Communiste, denouncing the caricatural way the big Trotskyist groups use the slogan of the workers' government, added:

"We have just seen that the ‘workers' government' slogan only has a meaning in a pre-revolutionary period. In a situation in which -- as happened in the Russian revolution -- the bourgeois leaders of the working class had a majority in the workers' councils, we can't exclude the possibility of inviting them to take power" (ibid) .

This position, which CC has never publicly criticized, shows the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of such a group breaking with the counter-revolution, despite its recognition of the capitalist nature of the USSR.

As for the LTF, sympathizing section of the international Spartacist tendency, which advocates a return to the origins of Trotskyism, it in no sense represents a class rupture with official Trotskyism. The radicalism of such a group is just verbiage and artifice built around the same counter-revolutionary positions as the other Trotskyists: frontism, defense of bourgeois democratism, of trade unionism and the Russian imperialist bloc (though, as we shall see, this last point is the source of various contradictions in the present Trotskyist movement). In fact these splits have had hardly any impact on the three main French Trtoskyist groups.

During the resurgence of class struggle in the winter of ‘79, these groups were unable to make up for the difficulties the Trotskyist movement was having in redefining a new policy after the electoral failure of the Union of the Left. The desire to maintain a ‘pure' Trotskyism can only be dashed by the reality of the class struggle: in this sense, groups like the LTF, the LOR, or even CC (which doesn't seem to be able to be consistent in its efforts to break with Trotskyism) don't have any independent perspective in France.

Another aspect of the French Trotskyist movement is its relative weight at the international level, The LCR, attached to the Unified Secretariat (USec) of the 4th International (more or less led by E Mandel), and the OCI, which has constructed the Comite d'organisation pour la Reconstruction de la Auatrieme Internat­ionale (CORQUI), compete with each other in the subtlety of their maneuvers to set up an international organization which could create the illusion of being a real international proletarian organization. The myth of the existence of a truly revolutionary 4th Internat­ional has kept going ever since Trotskyism passed into the bourgeois camp during World War II, when it supported Russian imperialism and the allies against the fascist imperialist bloc. It would take much too long to go through the history of all the splits and short-lived regroupments which have taken place since the 1930's, but in this whole shopping basket there's been nothing that's come anywhere near a real proletarian internationalist activity.

The OCI has also seen the downfall of the International Committee for the Reconstruction of the 4th International which it used to participate in -- first after the break with Healy's group in Britain (the SLL, now the WRP), and then the departure of the LIRQUI, led by Varga, who was denounced as a double agent of the CIA and GPU! Since then, the OCI has tried, not without some success, to prise away the American SWP which belongs to the USec but is the main rival to the LCR...

In fact, behind all these sordid maneuvers, there is a crisis in the Trotskyist movement, partly due to the present period, which is seeing the strengthening of the imperialist blocs and the resurgence of the proletarian struggle. This crisis is taking the form of a realignment of a large part of the Trotskyist movement, which has been more and more tempted to line up behind social democracy. As early as 1974, during the events in Portugal, we saw within the USec. a division between a ‘classical' tendency still attached to the defense of Russian interests and thus closer to the Stalinist party, and a ‘pro-social democratic' tendency more and more influenced by the needs of the American bloc. In this sense the OCI was the precursor of this tendency, and at this point it rallied to the standpoint of the American SWP by almost openly supporting the Portuguese SP:

"To note that the radicalization of the masses is using the channel of the Socialist Party doesn't mean adopting the program or policies of the Portuguese SP leadership. But it would be sheer blindness to refuse to see that, on the burning issues of the revolution, the Portuguese SP has started a struggle which coincides with the fundamental interests of the proletariat (workers' democracy in the unions, municipal elections, respect for the Constituent Assembly, freedom of the press, etc)" (Information Ouvrières, 717, Sept. ‘75).

On other issues, and in particular the question of support for the ‘dissidents' of the Eastern bloc, the (OCI has aligned itself behind the Western bloc, helping to give a ‘revolutionary' veneer to the nationalist and democratic cliques which are active in the Eastern bloc and which will be a dangerous force for mystification for the proletariat in struggle:

"The right of peoples to self-determination is today a powerful lever in the hands of the proletariat in its struggle against imperialism and the Kremlin bureaucracy: it can dislocate the counter-revolutionary European order which imperialism and the Kremlin bureaucracy, through the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, imposed on the peoples and proletariats of Europe, and which they want to preserve. It can give a powerful impetus to social contradictions. It is part of the struggle for political revolution in Eastern Europe and for social revolution in the West" (La Vérité, 565, January ‘75).

The Trotskyists are in the front ranks of those who aim to castrate the proletarian movement in the Eastern bloc by diverting it into the utopian struggle for ‘the rights of peoples to self-determination', a slogan which only serves the interests of imperialism in this instance western imperialism.

With the deepening of inter-imperialist contrad­ictions, which are increasingly centering on Europe, a part of the Trotskyist movement has tended to adapt itself more and more to social democracy. What's more, the French social democrats have recently started a campaign to rehabilitate Trotsky, as a politician who opposed Stalin. More concretely, when the Frente Sandinista came to power in Nicaragua, this convergence between part of the Trotskyist move­ment and the Socialist Party was further solidified, notably through the campaigns of support for the ‘new' Nicaragua. The more or less rapid abandonment of the intransigent defense of the Russian bloc has not taken place without friction, given the particularly decaying character of the Trotskyist milieu, racked by rivalries and personal quarrels. There can only be an exacerbation of the conflicts between the Trotskyist groups who have concentrated their energies on the Stalinist parties, particularly LO and even the LCR to a lesser extent, and those who follow social democracy like the OCI, or who already act like a small social democratic party themselves, like the American SWP. It's this which allows us to understand why the Ligue Ccmmuniste Internationaliste was more or less expelled by the LCR, at the time of its last Congress, because of its links with the OCI, when at the exact same moment the LCR was engaged in official negotiations with the OCI!

Behind all these games is the real issue of how Trotskyism is to play its role of mystification in the workers' struggle. Initially all the French Trotskyist groups supported the electoral illusions of the union of the Left; now this left has split up and is playing a more oppositional role in order to sabotage workers' struggles more effectively. This has left the Trotskyist movement high and dry, temporarily incapable of developing a coherent policy. This in turn explains why the Trotskyists had such a weak intervention in the steelworkers' struggles of early ‘79. Thus, concerning the demonstration of 23 March, the LTF was left sermonizing to its big brothers about their ‘lack of militancy':

"The CGT and PC have both sabotaged their own march, mortally afraid that it might escape their control. Faced with this potentially explosive situation, the pseudo-Trotskyists of all kinds showed themselves lamentably incapable of advancing a perspective of struggle for the workers" (Le Bolshevik, 13 October ‘79)

While revolutionaries can only welcome these moments of impotence for Trotskyism, they can't sell the bearskin before the bear's been killed. The tail-endism vis-a-vis social democracy favored by part of the Trotskyist movement undoubtedly marks a weakening of the capacities for mystification which it derived from its support for the Russian bloc. This support allowed it to have an image of ‘anti-imperialism' and internationalism, and thus to have an influence on Stalinist militants. However, it won't be so easy for a group like LO to be tempted in this direction. At the time of the Union of the Left, this group had a clear divergence with the other Trotskyists:

"If there is one party in the Union of the Left which revolutionaries must be pre­occupied with, it's not the Socialist Party, but the French Communist Party. Because the PCF has retained a working class base, and organizes in its ranks a number of militants who are devoted to the working class, to really changing the world, to socialism... Thus we ought to be preoccupied with what's going on inside the PCF, with the aspirations, hopes and doubts of the militants of this party." (Lutte de Classe, 22, October ‘74).

Today we can see how a group like LO is a precious supplement to the PCF, which is in fact the only left party that is really in a position to smash the workers' resistance, their combativity and their moves towards autonomy, thanks to its control over the CGT. By giving a new gloss to the militant work of the Stalinists, LO is rendering a more ‘radical' service to the counter-revolution than the OCI, which tends to sing about Bergeron, the leader of the union Force Ouvriere, or the LCR, which tends towards the CFDT.

But in the end, whether they are more ‘pro-Stalinist' or ‘pro-social democrat', more ‘pro- Russian' or more ‘pro-Western', the Trotskyist groups have the same basic tasks as guard dogs of capital, the same task of diverting class consciousness and sabotaging workers' struggles. At the international level, there are plenty of examples of this effort to undermine the proletariat's initial movements. The French Trotskyists have not yet had the chance of a government post like the Ceylonese Trotskyist group LSSP, or of supporting a military coup d'état like the Argentinian Trotskyists of the PST, who, after supporting Peron's return in 1973, applauded General Videla's seizure of power in 1976. But at one time or another they have all supported the direct suppression of the proletariat at an international level.

Thus, when Allende was in power in Chile, the LCR openly supported the government of Popular Unity, presenting it as something different from a bourgeois government, and presenting Chile as something different from a capitalist state. Faced with the danger of the army, the LCR called on the working class to defend one faction of the bourgeoisie against another:

"The Chilean revolutionaries of the MIR have clearly analyzed this situation: they call for the setting up of committees for socialism supporting Allende as long as he situates himself on a class terrain, and ready to go into action the moment he moves away from it." (Rouge, 86, Nov.73)

Let's remember that the MIR formed Allende's personal bodyguard and constantly supported the bourgeois left in power.

We've already mentioned the OCI's support for the Portuguese SP. For its part LO claimed that the Armed Forces Movement (AFM) -- ie the military clique responsible for repressing strikes -- could go in the same direction as the aspirations of the masses:

"In a period in which broad layers of the masses have confidence in the AFM, precisely because it proposes to carry out the objectives that correspond to their aspirations, to oppose the policies of the AFM en bloc would mean cutting oneself off from the masses. On the contrary, it's necessary to support these objectives of the AFM which are correct: agrarian reform for example. It's necessary to affirm loudly that, every time the AFM takes a step forward in satisfying democratic demands, it will have the workers' support against the forces of reaction." (Lutte de Classe, 31, Oct. ‘75)

As for inter-imperialist conflicts, these have given rise to the most cynical positions, notably on the part of the more ‘radical' Trotskyist groups. "Revolutionaries are for the right of peoples to self-determination. Even if in certain cases, supporting the right of certain peoples to self-determination means supporting the interests of imperialism." (Lutte de classe, 34, Feb. ‘76). In the same article, LO avoids saying a single word about the role of the USSR in so-called national liberation struggles. The Spartacist tendency is less hypocritical and takes up its positions more crudely in relation to Russian military interests. During the war in Angola, this group put forward the following positions:

"While the Stalinists of various kinds sing the praises of their favorite nationalist movement, the Spartacist tendency, since early November, has called for military support for the MPLA against the imperialist coalition... We have always refused to give political support to the forces that intend to create a capitalist Angola" (Spartacist 11).

This group thinks it can cover its tracks by making a subtle distinction between military and political support; this is the height of chauvinist chicanery, to be internationalist on paper and ferociously nationalist on the battle­field, arms in hand. In the case of the Spartacist tendency, it's all the more disgusting because the group doesn't put into practice its idea of military support: it simply calls on the African or Asian workers to get themselves slaughtered for Russian capital, with the blessing of international Trotskyism and third worldism. This is what it did once again over Afghanistan. The LTF, which defends the positions of the Spartacist tendency in France, wasn't left behind, and, concerning the situation in Iran, the LTF showed what lay beneath its ‘intran­sigence' against the Trotskyists who supported Khomeini. In a polemic against Combat Communiste the LTF attacks CC for seeing the struggles in Iran as being more important for the proletariat than the "nationalist peasant guerillas" in Vietnam, because that means preferring Khomeini to Ho Chi Minh and denying the "workers' gains" in Vietnam. It's hardly surprising that the LTF should prefer the stigmata of capitalist barbarism in the zones dominated by Russian imperialism to the first steps of the Iranian proletariat. The LTF's denunciation of Khomeini is in no way a defense of class positions, but simply an appeal to the pro-Russian forces in Iran to liquidate the Islamic clique. In this perspective, the LTF continues to defend ‘democratic' rights and the ‘right to self-determination', which are precisely the bloody impasses which the Iranian proletariat has to avoid.

In conclusion, the Trotskyist movement in France has over the last few years confirmed its bourgeois nature, mainly by its increasingly massive presence in the electoral game (in the 1978 legislative elections, LO put forward more than 5000 candidates:), by its presence in the three main unions (CGT, CFDT, FO), and by the control over the student union UNEF-Unite Syndicale by the OCI and the Etudiants Socialistes, competing with the UNEF-Renouveau controlled by the Stalinists. We can also mention the ‘responsible' role of the Trotskyist stewards at demonstrations, who have not hesitated in attacking the ‘autonomous' groups and calling them ‘provoc­ateurs'. Finally, during workers' struggles, either by fighting for trade union unity, or by defending frontism and democratism vis-a-vis the Stalinists and Social democrats, the Trotskyists movement is carrying out its anti-proletarian role with consistency and self-denial.

The Trotskyist current plays its anti-proletarian role at another level: by distorting and caricaturing the role and functioning of a genuine internationalist proletarian organization, by presenting their quarrels between bureaucratic cliques as proletarian political debate, the various Trotskyist groups help to repel many workers trying to rejoin the revolutionary communist tradition. Faced with the miserable spectacle of the Trotskyist current, many people reject any form of revolutionary organization, any kind of militantism, and fall into anarchism, modernism, and individualism, which are very often points of no return.

But Trotskyism also exerts a weight on the revolutionary milieu itself. The Bordigist International Communist Party, for example, due to both dubious tactical considerations and political incomprehension, has in its criticisms of Trotsky more or less liquidated the work carried out by the Italian Left around the journal Bilan before the last war (on the analysis of the period, on the question of frontist and entryist tactics, on the national question, etc.) Today, the ICP has fallen into superficial polemics in which the class nature of Trotskyism is carefully hidden, and the Trotskyists are denounced as ‘centrist' or ‘opportunist', never bourgeois. What's more, the ICP uses the work of Trotsky himself to criticize the ‘renegades' of today, breaking with the tradition of the Communist Left which unanimously denounced Trotsky's capitulations to Stalinism, which led Trotskyism into the bourgeois camp during the second world war. For all these reasons it's necessary to insist on the counter-revolutionary role and nature of the Trotskyist groups today.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Far from being an expression of the petty bourgeoisie or an ‘activist', ‘centrist', or ‘opportunist' proletarian current, the leftist movement is part of capital's left front. There is nothing proletarian or revolutionary about either Trotskyism or Maoism. On the other hand, they share any number of basic agreements with Stalinism and social democracy even if they may differ on secondary, tactical questions. As for the question of the ‘armed' revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat which might appear to place leftism in the revolutionary camp, all the leftist currents not only present this as one tactic among others, but also portray the seizures of power by Castro, Mao or Ho as models for the workers to follow.

What leftism is attempting to prepare is the defeat of the proletariat; what it defends are political methods for smashing the proletariat.

The leftist current can only prepare the ground for the statist counter-revolution which has already been practiced by Stalinism and which consists of presenting state capitalism or self-management as socialism or even communism.

Chenier

IR21, 2nd Quarter 1980

ORIENTATION TEXT

(This text was adopted by the 3rd Congress of Internationalisme, the ICC's section in Belgium, February 1980.)

What is to be done outside times of open struggle? How should we organise when the strike is finished? How to prepare the struggles to come?

Faced with this question, faced with the problems posed by the existence of committees, circles, nuc­lei, etc, regrouping small minorities of the work­ing class, we have no recipes to provide. We can­not choose between giving them moral lessons (‘organise yourselves like this or that’, ‘dissolve your­selves’, ‘join us’) and demagogically flattering them. Instead, our concern is this: to understand these minority expressions of the proletariat as a part of the whole class. If we situate them in the general movement of the class struggle; if we see that they are strictly linked to the strengths and weaknesses of different periods in this struggle between the classes, then, in this way, we’ll be able to understand to what general necessity they are a response. By neither remaining politically imprecise in relation to them, nor by imprisoning ourselves inside rigid schemas, we’ll also be able to grasp what their positive aspects are and be able to point out what dangers lie in wait for them.

Characteristics of the workers struggle in deca­dent capitalism

Our first concern in understanding this problem must be to recall the general, historical context within which we find ourselves. We must remember the nature of this historic period (the period of social revolutions) and the characteristics of the class struggle in decadence. This analysis is fundamental because it allows us to understand the type of class organisation that can exist in such a period.

Without going into all the details, let’s recall simply that the proletariat in the nineteenth century existed as an organised force in a perm­anent way. The proletariat unified itself as a class through an economic and political struggle for reforms. The progressive character of the cap­italist system allowed the proletariat to bring pressure to bear on the bourgeoisie in order to obtain reforms, and for this, large masses of the working class regrouped within unions and parties.

In the period of capitalism’s senility, the char­acteristics and the forms of organisation of the class changed. A quasi-permanent mobilisation of the proletariat around its immediate and political interests was no longer possible, nor viable. Henceforward, the permanent unitary organs of the class were no longer able to exist except in the course of the struggle itself. From this time on, the function of these unitary organs could no long­er be limited to simply ‘negotiating’ an improve­ment in the proletariat’s living conditions (bec­ause an improvement was no longer possible over the long term and because the only realistic answer was that of revolution). Their task was to prepare for the seizure of power.

The unitary organs of the dictatorship of the pro­letariat are the workers’ councils. These organs possess a certain number of characteristics which we must make clear if we are to grasp the entire process which leads to the self-organisation of the proletariat.

Thus, we must clearly show that the councils are a direct expression of working class struggle. They arise in a spontaneous (but not mechanical) way from out of this struggle. This is why they are intimately tied to the development and maturity of the struggle. They draw from it their substance and their vitality. They don’t constitute, then, a simple ‘delegation’ of power, a parody of Parl­iament, but are truly the organised expression of the whole working class and its power. Their task isn’t to organise a proportional representation of social groupings, or political parties, but allow the will of the proletariat to realise itself pra­ctically. It’s through them that all the decis­ions are taken. That is the reason why the work­ers must constantly keep control of them (the revo­cability of delegates) by means of the General Assemblies.

Only the workers’ councils are capable of realising the living identification between the immediate struggle and the final goal. In this liaison between the struggle for immediate interests and the stru­ggle for political power, the councils establish the objective and subjective basis for the revolut­ion. They constitute, par excellence, the crucib­le of class consciousness. The constitution of the proletariat in councils is not then a simple quest­ion of a form of organisation, but is the product of the development of the struggle and of class consciousness. The appearance of the councils isn’t the fruit of organisational recipes, of prefabric­ated structures, of intermediate organs.

The more and more conscious extension and centralisation of struggles, beyond the factories and beyond frontiers, cannot be artificial, voluntar­ist action. To be convinced of the correction of this idea, it’s sufficient to recall the experie­nce of the AAUD and its artificial attempt to unite and centralise the ‘factory organisations’ in a period when the struggle was in reflux. [1]

The Councils can only continue to exist when the permanent, open struggle continues to exist, sign­ifying the participation of an ever-growing number of workers in the struggle. Their appearance is essentially a function of the development of the struggle itself and of the development of class consciousness.

The attempts to bridge a gap

But we are not yet in a period of permanent strug­gle, in a revolutionary context which would allow the proletariat to organise itself in workers’ councils. The constitution of the proletariat in councils is the result of objective conditions (the depth of the crisis, the historic course) and subjective conditions (the maturity of the struggle and the consciousness of the class). It is the result of an entire apprenticeship, a whole maturation, which is as much organisa­tional as it is political.

We must be conscious that this maturation, this political fermentation, doesn’t unfold in a well-designated straight line. It expresses itself instead as a fiery, impetuous, confused process within a jostling, jerky movement. It demands the active participation of revolutionary minorities.

Since it is incapable of acting mechanically in accordance with abstract principles, preconceived plans or voluntarist schemes detached from reality, the proletariat must forge its unity and conscious­ness by means of a painful apprenticeship. Incap­able of regrouping all its forces on a preordained day, it consolidates its ranks in the course of the battle itself. It forms its ‘army’ within the conf­lict itself. But in the course of the struggle it forms in its ranks more combative elements, a more determined vanguard. These elements don’t necess­arily regroup themselves within the revolutionary organisation (because, in certain periods, it is virtually unknown). The appearance of these combative minorities within the proletariat, whether before or after open struggles, isn’t an incompre­hensible or new phenomenon. It really expresses the irregular character of the struggle, the unequal and heterogeneous development of class con­sciousness. Thus, since the end of the 1960’s, we’ve witnessed, at one and the same time, the development of the struggle (in the sense of its greater self-organisation), a reinforcement of revolutionary minorities, and the appearance of committees, nuclei, circles, etc, trying to re­group a working class avant-garde. The develop­ment of a coherent political pole of regroupment, and the tendency for the proletariat to try to organise itself outside the unions, both issue from the same maturation of the struggle.

The appearance of these committees, circles, etc, truly responds to a necessity within the struggle. If some combative elements sense the need to remain grouped together after they’ve been struggling tog­ether, they do so with the aim of simultaneously continuing to ‘act together’ (the eventual preparation of a new strike) and of drawing the lessons of the struggle (through political discussion). The problem which poses itself to these workers is as much one of regrouping with a view to future action as it is of regrouping with a view to clari­fying questions posed by the past struggle and the struggle to come. This attitude is understandable in the sense that the absence of permanent struggle the ‘bankruptcy’ of the unions, and the very great weakness of revolutionary organisations creates an organisational and political void. When the work­ing class returns to the path of its historic str­uggle, it has a horror of this void. Therefore, it seeks to reply to the need posed by this organisat­ional and political void.

These committees, these nuclei, these proletarian minorities who still don’t understand clearly their own function, are a response to this need. They are, at one and the same time, an expression of the general weakness of today’s class struggle and an expression of the maturation of the organisation of the class. They are a crystallisation of a whole subterranean development at work within the proletariat.

The reflux of 1973-77

That is why we must be careful not to lock away these organs in a hermetic, rigidly classified drawer. We cannot forecast their appearance and development in a totally precise way. Furthermore, we must be careful not to make artificial separations in the different moments in the life of these committees, getting ourselves caught in the false dilemma: ‘action or discussion’.

This said, it must not stop us from making an int­ervention towards these organs. We must also be capable of appreciating their evolution in terms of the period, depending on whether we are in a phase of renewal or reflux in the struggle. Because they are a spontaneous, immediate product of the strug­gle, and because the appearance of these nuclei is based mainly on conjunctural problems (in distinct­ion to the revolutionary organisation which appears on the basis of the historical necessities of the proletariat), this means that they remain very dep­endent on the surrounding milieu of the class str­uggle. They remain more strongly imprisoned by the general weaknesses of the movement and have a ten­dency to follow the ups and downs of the struggle.

We must make a distinction in the development of these nuclei between the period of reflux in the struggle (1973-77) and today’s period of renewed class struggle internationally. While underlining the fact that the dangers threatening them remain identical in both periods, we must, nonetheless, be capable of grasping what differences the change in period implies for their evolution.

At the end of the first wave of struggle at the end of the 1960’s, we witnessed the appearance of a whole series of confusions within the working class. We could measure the extent of these conf­usions by examining the attitude of some of the combative elements of the class, who tried to re­main regrouped.

We saw develop:

-               the illusion in fighting unionism and the dis­trust of anything political (OHK, AAH, Komiteewerk­ing [2] ). In many cases, the committees that came out of struggles transformed themselves, categorically, into semi-unions. This was the case for the workers’ commissions in Spain and the ‘factory councils’ in Italy. Even more often they just disapp­eared.

- a very strong corporatism (which itself constit­utes the basis for the illusion in ‘fighting union­ism’).

- when attempts were made to go beyond the limits of the factory, the result was confusion and a great political eclecticism.

- a very great political confusion was present, rendering these organs very vulnerable to the manoeuvres of the leftists, and also allowing them to fall prey to illusions of the type held by the PIC (cf. their ‘bluff’ about workers’ groups)[3]. Also, in the course of this period, the ideology of ‘workers autonomy’ developed, bringing with it an apology for immediatism, factoryism and econ­omism.

All of these weaknesses were essentially a function of the weaknesses of the first wave of strug­gle at the end of the 60’s. This movement was characterised by a disproportion between the stre­ngth and extension of the strikes and the weakness in the content of the demands made. What especially indicated this disproportion was the absence of any clear, political perspective in the movement. The falling-back of the workers, which happened between 1973 and 1977, was a product of this weak­ness, which the bourgeoisie utilised to demobilise and ideologically contain the struggles. Each of the weak points of the first wave of strikes was ‘recuperated’ by the bourgeoisie to its own profit:

“Thus the idea of a permanent organisation of the class, at one and the same time economic and political, was transformed later into the idea of ‘new unions’ to end finally in a return to classical trade unionism. The vision of the General Assembly as a form independent of any content ended up — via the mystification conc­erning direct democracy and popular power - re­-establishing trust in classical bourgeois demo­cracy. Ideas about self-management and workers’ control of production (confusions which were understandable at the beginning) were theorised into the myth of ‘generalised self-management’, ‘islands of communism’ or ‘nationalisation under workers’ control’. All this caused the workers to put their confidence in plans to restructure the economy, which would supposedly avoid lay­offs or caused them to back national solidarity pacts presented as a way of ‘getting out of the crisis”.

(Report on the Class Struggle presented to the IIIrd International Congress of the ICC).

The renewal of struggles since 1977

With the renewal in struggle since 1977, we have seen other tendencies delineate themselves. The proletariat matured through its ‘defeat’. It had drawn albeit in a confused way, the lessons of the reflux, and even if the dangers represented by ‘fighting unionism’, corporatism, etc remain, they exist within a different general evolution in the struggle.

Since 1977, we have seen the hesitant development of:

- a more or less marked will on the part of the avant-garde of combative workers to develop political discussion (remember the General Assembly of Co-ordinamenti in Turin, the debate at Antwerp with the workers of Rotterdam, Antwerp, etc, the conference of dockers in Barcelona. [4]);

- the will to enlarge the field of struggle, to go beyond the ghetto of factoryism, to give a more global political framework to the struggle. This will expressed itself through the appearance of the ‘co—ordinamenti’, and more specifically in the political manifesto produced by one of the co-ordinamenti situated in the North of Italy (Sesto S. Giovanni). This manifesto demanded the unification of the combative avant-garde in the factories, spelt out the necessity for a pol­itically independent struggle by the workers and insisted on the necessity for the struggle to break out of factory limitations;

- the concern to establish a link between the imm­ediate aspect of the struggle and the final goal. This concern was particularly expressed in workers groups in Italy (FIAT) and in Spain (FEYCU, FORD). The first of these groups intervened by means of a leaflet to denounce the dangers of layoffs made by the bourgeoisie in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’, and the second intervened to denounce the illusion of parliamentarism.

- the concern to better prepare and organise the struggles to come (cf. the action of the ‘spokesmen’ group of dockers in Rotterdam calling for the formation of a General Assembly).

We must repeat that the dangers of corporatism, ‘fighting unionism’ and locking-up of the struggle on a strictly economic terrain continue to exist even within this period. But what we must take into account is the important influence of the period on the evolution of the committees and nuclei that appear both before and after open struggles. When the period is one of combativity and resurgence of class struggle, the intervention of such minorities takes on a different sense, as does our attitude to­ward them. In a period of generalised reflux in the struggle, we have to insist more on the danger of these organs becoming transformed into semi-unions, of falling into the clutches of the leftists, of having illusions in terrorism, etc. In a period of class resurgence we insist more on the dangers represented by voluntarism and activism (see the illusions expressed in this connection in the mani­festo of the co-ordinamenti of Sesto S. Giovanni), and by the illusion which some of these combative workers may have about the possibility of forming the embryos of future strike committees, etc. In a period of renewal in the struggle, we will also be more open to combative minorities which appear and regroup with a view to calling for strikes and the formation of strike committees, General Assem­blies, etc.

The possibilities of these organs

The concern to situate the committees, nuclei, etc, in the cauldron of the class struggle, to understand them in terms of the period in which they appear, doesn’t imply, however, abruptly changing our anal­ysis in the wake of the different stages in the class struggle. Whatever the mo5ent that gives birth to these committees, we know that they const­itute only one stage in a dynamic, general process they are one moment in the maturation of the organ­isation and consciousness of the class. They can only have a positive role when they give themselves a broad, supple framework to work within, in order not to freeze the general process. This is why these organs must be vigilant if they are to avoid falling into the following traps:

- imagining that they constitute a structure which can prepare the way for the appearance of strike committees or councils;

- imagining themselves to be invested with a sort of ‘potentiality’ which can develop future stru­ggles. (It isn’t the minorities who artificially create a strike or cause a General Assembly or a committee to appear, even though they do have an active intervention to make in this process).

- giving themselves a platform or statutes or any­thing else that risks freezing their evolution and thus condemning them to political confusion.

- presenting themselves as intermediate organs, half-way between the class and a political organ­isation, as if they were an organisation that is at one and the same time unitary and political.

This is why our attitude towards these minority organs remains open, but at the same time tries to influence the evolution of political reflection in their midst, and this whatever the period in which we find ourselves. We must try our hardest to en­sure that these committees, nuclei, etc. don’t freeze up, either in one direction (a structure which imagines itself to prefigure the workers’ councils) or another (political fixation). Before all else, what must guide us in our inter­vention is not the interests and the conjunctural concerns of these organs (since we can’t suggest to them any organisational recipes nor any ready-made answers), but the general interests of the whole class. Our concern is always to homogenise and develop class consciousness in such a way that the development of the class struggle happens with a greater, more massive participation of all workers, and that the struggle is taken in-hand by the workers themselves and not by a minority, no matter what type it may be. It is for this reason that we insist on the dynamic of the movement and that we put the combative elements on their guard against any attempt at substitutionism or anything that might block the later development of the struggle and of class consciousness.

In orientating the evolution of these organs in one direction (reflection and political discussion), rather than another, we can give a response which will be favourable to the dynamic of the movement. But let it be well-understood that this doesn’t signify that we condemn any form of ‘intervention’ or ‘action’ undertaken by these organs. It is obvious that the instant a group of combative workers understands that the task isn’t to act to constitute themselves as a semi-union, but rather to draw the political lessons of the past struggles, this doesn’t imply that their political reflection is going to happen in an ethereal vacuum, in the abstract, without any-practical consequences. The political clarification undertaken by these combative workers will also push them to act together within their own factory (and in the most positive of cases, even outside their own factory). They will feel the necessity to give a material, polit­ical expression to their political reflection (leaf­lets, newspapers, etc). They will feel the need to take up positions in relation to the concrete issues that face the working class. In order to defend and disseminate their positions, they will thus have to make a concrete intervention. In certain circumstances they will propose concrete means of action (formation of General Assemblies, strike committees…) to advance the struggle. In the course of the struggle itself, they will sense the necessity for a concerted effort to develop a certain orientation for the struggle; they will support demands that will permit the struggle to extend itself and they will insist on the necess­ity for its enlargement, generalisation, etc.

Even though we remain attentive to these efforts and don’t try to lay down rigid schemas for them to follow, nonetheless it is clear that we must continue to insist on the fact that what counts the most is the active participation of all the workers in the struggle, and that the combative workers should at no time substitute themselves for their comrades in the organisation and co-ordination of the strike. Moreover, it is also clear that the more the organisation of revolutionaries increases its influence within the struggles, the more the combative elements will turn toward it. Not be­cause the organisation will have a policy of for­cibly recruiting these elements, but quite simply because the combative workers themselves will become conscious that a political intervention, which is really active and effective, can only be made in the framework of such an international organisation.

The intervention of revolutionaries

All that glitters isn’t gold. To point out that the working class in its struggle can cause more combative elements to appear doesn’t mean affirming that the impact of these minorities is decisive for the later development of class consciousness. We must not make this absolute identification: an ex­pression of the maturation of consciousness = an active factor in its development.

In reality the influence which these nuclei can have in the later unfolding of the struggle is very limited. Their influence entirely depends on the general combativity of the proletariat and of the capacity of these nuclei to pursue without let-up this work of political clarification. In the long-term, this work cannot be followed except within the framework of a revolutionary organisa­tion.

But here again, we’ve no mechanism to drop in place. It’s not in an artificial manner that the revolutionary organisation wins these elements. Contrary to the ideas of organisations like Battaglia Communista or the PIC, the ICC does not seek to fill-in, in an artificial, voluntarist manner, ‘the gap’ between the party and the class. Our understanding of the working class as a historic force, and our comprehension of our own role prevents us from wanting to freeze these com­mittees into the form of an intermediate structure. Nor do we seek to create ‘factory groups’ as trans­mission belts between the class and the party.

This presents us with the question of determining what our attitude to such circles, committees, etc should be. Even while recognising their limited influence and their weaknesses, we must remain open to them and attentive to their appearance. The most important thing that we propose to them is that they open up widely to discussions. At no time, do we adopt toward them a distrustful or condemnatory attitude under the pretext of react­ing against their political ‘impurity’. So that’s one thing we should avoid; another is to avoid fla­ttering them or even uniquely concentrating our energies on them. We mustn’t ignore workers’ groups, but equally we mustn’t become obsessive about them. We recognise that the struggle matures and class-consciousness develops in a process.

Within this process, tendencies exist within the class that attempt to ‘hoist’ the struggle onto a political terrain. In the course of this process, we know that the proletariat will give rise to combative minorities within itself, but they won’t necessarily organise themselves within political organisations. We must be careful not to identify this process of maturation in the class today with what characterised the development of the struggle last century. This understanding is very important because it permits us to appreciate in what way these committees, circles, etc are a real expression of the maturation of class cons­ciousness, but an expression which is, above all, temporary and ephemeral and not a fixed, structured organisational rung in the development of the class struggle. The class struggle in the period of capitalist decadence advances explosively. Sudden eruptions appear which surprise even those elements who were the most combative in the proceeding round of struggle, and these eruptions can immediately go beyond previous experience in terms of the consciousness and maturity developed in the new struggle. The proletariat can only really organise itself on a unitary level within the struggle. To the extent that the struggle itself becomes permanent, it causes the unitary organis­ations of the class to grow and become stronger.

This understanding is what allows us to grasp why we don’t have a specific policy, a special ‘tactic’ in relation to workers’ committees, even though in; certain circumstances it can be very positive for us to begin and systematically continue discussions with them, and to participate in their meetings. We know that it is possible and increasingly easy to discuss with these combative elements (particularly when open struggle isn’t taking place). We are also aware that certain of these elements may want to join us, but we don’t focus all our attention on them. Because what is of primary importance for us, is the general dynamic of the struggle, and we don’t set up any rigid classifica­tions or hierarchies within this dynamic. Before everything, we address ourselves to the working class as a whole. Contrary to other political groups who try to surmount the problem of the lack of influence of revolutionary minorities in the class by artificial methods and by feeding them­selves on illusions about these workers’ groups, the ICC recognises that it has very little impact in the present period. We don’t try to increase our influence among the workers by giving them artificial ‘confidence’ in us. We aren’t worker­ist, nor are we megalomaniacs. The influence which we will progressively develop within the struggles will come essentially from our political practice inside these struggles and not from our acting as toadies, or flatterers, or as ‘water-carriers’ who restrict themselves to performing technical tasks. Furthermore, we address our political intervention to all the workers, to the proletariat taken as a whole, as a class, because our fundamental task is to call for the maximum extension of the struggles. We don’t exist in order to feel satisfied at winning the confidence of two or three horny-handed worker but to homogenise and accelerate the development of the consciousness of the class. It’s necessary to be aware that it will only be in the revolutionary process itself that the proletariat will accord us its political ‘confidence’ to the extent that it realises that the revolutionary party really makes up a part of its historic struggle.

I

In the period leading up to the First World War, then during the war itself, revolutionary Marxists were obliged not only to denounce the imperialist character of the war, but also to show that war was inevitable as long as capitalism remained the dominant mode of production in the world.

Against the pacifists who pined for a capitalism without wars, revolutionaries insisted that it was impossible to prevent imperialist wars without at the same time des­troying capitalism itself. Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital and Junius Pamphlet, as well as Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, were written with essentially this objective. The methods of analysis in these works, as well as some of their con­clusions, are different, but the underlying concern in them is the same: to hasten the revolutionary action of the international proletariat against capitalist barbarism.

Today, when a new open crisis of capitalism is once again conjuring up the threat of a world imperialist war, while at the same time creating the conditions for a new revolutionary offensive against capital on a world scale, revolutionaries must continue this work of analyzing capitalist society in the same spirit of militant intervention.

Whatever the university professors of marxology might think, Marxism isn’t a branch of political economy: it is the revolutionary critique of political economy. For revolutionaries, the analysis of the present crisis of capitalism can never be an academic speculation floating in the ethereal regions of economic analysis. It is simply a moment in an overall intervention whose aim is to prepare the weapons of the proletarian revolution. It’s not a pure interpretation of the capitalist world, but a weapon for destroying it.

II

Faced with the growing economic convulsions that capitalism is now going through, revolutionaries must underline that the perspective of revolutionary Marxism has been verified. They must do this by showing:

-- that the present crisis isn’t just a passing problem for capitalism, but a new mortal convulsion after more than half-a-century of decadence;

-- that, as in 1914 and 1939, decadent capitalism’s only ‘solution’ to the crisis is a new world war which, this time, puts the very existence of humanity at risk;

-- that the only way humanity can escape from this apocalyptic impasse is by abandoning and destroying all the relations of production which make up capitalism, and installing a society in which the factors which have led humanity to this situation will have disappeared: a society without commodities or exchange, without profit or wage labor, without nations or the state: a communist society;

-- that the only force capable of taking the initiative in such a transformation is the principal producer class itself: the world working class.

III

In order to be able to carry out this task, revolutionaries must be able to express the main foundations of the Marxist analysis of the internal contradictions of capitalism in terms that are clear and broadly verifiable through the reality of the crisis which the whole of society is living through, in particular the working class. To defend the idea of the necessity and possibility of destroying capitalism, without being capable of explaining clearly and simply the origins of the crisis of the system, is to condemn ourselves to appearing like university professors of economics, or utopian illuminati.1 And this necessity is all the more urgent today when everything indicates that, in contrast to the revolutionary movements of 1871, 1905, or 1917-23, the next revolutionary proletarian wave will break out not in the wake of a war but in response to an economic crisis. More and more, the debate on the causes of the crisis of capitalism will take place not just in the theoretical reviews of a few tiny revolutionary groups, but in assemblies of unemployed workers, in factory assemblies, in the very heart of a working class struggling against the growing attacks of a capitalist system that has reached the end of its tether. The task of communists in this domain is to know how to prepare themselves to be effective factors of clarification within this process.

IV

Paradoxically, the question of the foundations of the crisis of capitalism the corner-stone of scientific socialism has been the object of numerous disagreements amongst Marxists, especially since the debate on imperialism.

All communist tendencies generally share the fundamental notion that the installation of a communist society becomes a necessity and a possibility on the historical agenda at the point where capitalist relations of production cease to be indispensable factors in the develop­ment of the productive forces, and transform themselves into fetters; or, to use the formulation in the Communist Manifesto, when “the conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.”

The disagreements arise when it comes to making more precise how this general contradiction becomes concrete, when it comes to defining the characteristics and timing of the economic phenomenon which transforms these conditions -- wage labor, profit, the nation, etc -- into definite fetters on the development of the productive forces, precipitating capitalism into crisis, bankruptcy, and decline.

These disagreements still exist today; very often they are the same divergences which divided revolutionaries at the beginning of the century.2 However, the extraordinary weakening of the revolutionary forces under the blows of fifty years of counter-revolution, the almost total organic break with the organizations of the past, as well as the extreme isolation communist groups have had to put up with for decades, all this has reduced the debate between revolutionaries on this question to virtual non-existence.

With the resurgence of proletarian struggle and the emergence of new revolutionary groups over the last ten years, there has been a certain revival in the discussion, spurred on by the need to understand the growing economic diffi­culties world capitalism is going through. But very often the debate has got going on a basis which makes it difficult for it to result in an enrichment of Marxist analysis.

It’s quite natural that the debate has re-emerged around the discussions left in suspense by the Marxist theoreticians at the beginning of the century and subsequently taken up by, among others groups like Bilan, Internationalisme, or the review Living Marxism. At the centre of the debate is the confrontation between the analysis of Rosa Luxemburg and those who, rejecting this analysis, defend the idea that it is the tendential fall in the rate of profit which provides the fundamental explanation of the contradictions of capitalism. But, unfortunately, up till now this debate has had the unfortunate tendency to get bogged down in an exegesis of the writings of Marx, one side trying to show that the theses of Rosa Luxemburg are “totally alien to Marxism” or at least a very poor interpretation of the works of the founder of scientific socialism, the other side attempting to show the Marxist continuity in the theses of The Accumulation of Capital.

Important as it is to define any ‘Marxist’ analysis in relation to Marx’s work, the debate will be condemned to a total impasse if it restricts itself to this preoccupation alone. It’s only in the confrontation with the reality that it claims to explain that a theory can be confirmed or refuted. Only in the crucible of the criticism of real events can a system of thought develop positively and find the means to become a material force.

If it is to develop with a constructive perspective, the present debate on the found­ations of the crisis of capitalism must therefore

-- learn to look at the Marxist analyses of the past, including those of Marx himself, not as sacred books which leave us with the simple task of making an exegesis in order to explain all the economic phenomena of present-day capitalism, but as theoretical efforts which must, if they are to be taken up and understood, be placed in the context of the historic conditions under which they were elaborated;

-- make a concrete analysis of the concrete reality of capitalism’s evolution, confronting the different theories that claim adherence to Marxism with this reality.

It’s then and only then that we will be able to begin to really determine whether it’s Luxemburg or Grossmann-Mattick, to take an example, who have provided us with the most valuable instruments for developing the prolet­ariat’s understanding of the objective conditions for its historic action. It’s in this way that we’ll really be able to contribute to the proletariat’s attempt to widen its consciousness of the general conditions of its revolutionary mission.

It therefore seems essential to us to:

1) place the main works of previous Marxists in their historic context, to get a better appreciation of their relevance to the present period;

2) confront these results with the only thing that can allow us to go forward in the debate, ie. the reality of capitalism both its evolution since the First World War and in its present crisis.

MARX

It was at the heart of the economic crisis of 1847-8, and with a view to intervening in the workers’ struggles engendered by that crisis, that Marx developed the main lines of his explanation of the crisis of capitalism, first at the Bruxelles conferences of the Association of German Workers (Wage Labor and Capital) and then in the Communist Manifesto. In a few simple but precise formulae, Marx uncovered the main specificity of the capitalist economic crisis compared to the economic crises of previous societies: in contrast to what happened in pre-capitalist societies where production was immediately geared towards consumption, under capitalism, where the capitalists’ objective is the sale of commodities and the accumulation of capital, and consumption is simply a by-product, the economic crisis doesn’t take the form of a shortage of goods, but of overproduction. The goods needed for subsistence, or the material conditions to produce them exist, but the mass of producers, who only receive from their masters the cost of their labor power, are deprived of the means and the money to buy the goods. What’s more, at the same time as the crisis hurls the producers into poverty and unemployment, the capitalists destroy the means of production that would allow this poverty to be palliated.

At the same time, Marx pointed to the underlying reason for these crises: living in a state of permanent competition amongst themselves, the capitalists can only live by developing their capital, and they can’t develop their capital if they don’t have new outlets at their disposal. This is why the bourgeoisie was compelled to invade the whole surface of the globe in search of new markets. But precisely by continuing this expansion, which was the only way it could overcome its crises, capitalism was narrowing the world market and thus creating the conditions for new, more powerful crises.

To sum up: by the very nature of wage labor and capitalist profit, capital cannot provide the wage-earners with the means of purchasing everything they produce. The buyers of those products that couldn’t be sold to the class it exploited were found by the bourgeoisie in sectors and countries that were not dominated by capitalism. But by selling its production to these sectors, it was forcing them to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, which would eliminate them as outlets and create in turn the need for new markets. As Marx wrote in the 1848 Manifesto:

“For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, to much industry, too much commerce....”

“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.” (our emphasis)

What did Marx and Engels mean by “the conquest of new markets”? The Manifesto answers as follows:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle every­where, establish connections everywhere.”

“The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, ie, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image....”

“Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”

How did this conquest of the world constitute the means whereby the bourgeoisie could overcome its crises while at the same time condemning it to “more extensive and more destructive crises”? In Wage Labor and Capital Marx replies: “as the mass of production grows, and consequently the need for extended markets, the world market becomes more and more contracted, fewer and fewer new markets remain available for exploitation, since every preceding crisis has subjected to world trade a market hitherto unconquered or only superficially exploited” (Our emphasis).

These formulations certainly represent a masterful summary of the Marxist theory of crises. It wasn’t by accident that Marx and Engels formulated them in the documents that they edited with the aim of presenting to the working class the quintessence of a communist analysis. Neither Marx, nor Engels subse­quently put these formulations into question -- on the contrary. However, in Marx’s subsequent economic works, we don’t find a systematic and completed expose of these theses. There are two main reasons for this:

-- the first is connected to the way Marx wanted to organize his study of the economy. He always envisaged that the part devoted to the world market and world crises would be dealt with last. As we know, he died before he could complete his work on the economy;

-- the second reason, which partially explains the first, is connected to the historical conditions of the period Marx was living through.

The 19th century was the period in which the movement towards the constitution of the world market reached its zenith. The bourgeoisie was invading “the whole surface of the globe” and creating “a world after its own image” as Marx said. But the movement towards the constitution of the world market was not really completed. The movement through which capital “subjected to world trade a market hitherto unconquered or only superficially exploited”, the movement which meant that “the world market becomes more and more contracted”, the historic movement which meant that the bourgeoisie was “paving the way for more extensive and destructive crises, and ... diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented”, this movement had not yet reached the critical point where the world market was so narrow that the bourgeoisie no longer had any means left to prevent and overcome its crises. The contraction of the world market, the contraction of outlets, had not yet reached the level where the crisis of capitalism would become a permanent phenomenon.

The crises of the 19th century which Marx described were still crises of growth, crises which capitalism came out of strengthened. The commercial crises which, in Marx’s words, “by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society”, “were not yet capitalism’s death rattles” -- as Marx himself recognized a few years later in the preface to The Class Struggles in France -- but crises of development. In the 19th century, as Marx said, the bourgeoisie got over these crises “by the conquest of new markets and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones”. This was possible because the world market was still being constituted. After each crisis, there were still new outlets to be conquered by the capitalist countries.

For example, between 1860 and 1900, Britain colonized another 7 million square miles of territory, inhabited by 164 million people (this tripled the surface and doubled the population of its Empire). France expanded its empire by 3.5 million square miles and 53 million inhabitants (this multiplied the extent of its colonies 18 times and of its population 16 times).

Marx was witnessing the evolution of the contradictions of capitalism and he defined the fundamental contradiction which on the one hand impulse this movement and on the other hand condemned it to an impasse. At the zenith of capitalism’s historical power, Marx diagnosed the sickness that would condemn it to death. But this sickness had not yet become mortal. And thus Marx was not able to study all aspects of it.

Just as, when you are measuring the resistance of a given material, you have to push it to breaking point; just as, when you are trying to understand all the effects of a nutritious substance on a living being, you have to deprive the creature of the substance to the point where the consequences of its absence can be seen most clearly, so we had to wait until the world market had contracted to the point of definitively blocking the expansion of capitalism before the fundamental contradictions of the system could be analyzed in all their complexity.

We had to wait until the beginning of the 20th century and the exacerbation of the antagonisms between capitalist countries over the conquest of new markets, up to the point where a world war was on the agenda, before the analysis of the problem could reach a new and higher level of understanding. This is what was done in the debates on imperialism.

****************

All the same, Marx didn’t stop analyzing the internal contradictions of capitalism after the publication of the Manifesto. In Capital, we can find a number of detailed studies of the conditions of capitalist crises. But in nearly all his studies, he explicitly abstracted the world market, referring the reader to a later study that he proposed to make, Rather than drawing a total picture of the capitalist world, he analyzed the internal mechanisms of “the process of capital as a whole,” making an abstraction of all those sectors of the world market that he had called “new outlets” in the Manifesto.

This was particularly the case with the famous tendential fall in the rate of profit. This law, which he discovered, pointed to the mechanisms through which, in the absence of a certain number of counter-tendencies, the rise in the organic composition of capital (ie the growth of the productivity of labor through the introduction into the process of production of a growing proportion of dead labor -- machines in particular -- in relation to living labor), would lead to a fall in the capitalist’s rate of profit. It described the economic mechanisms which expressed, at the level of capital’s rate of profit, the contradiction between, on the one hand, the fact that capitalist profit can only be drawn from the exploitation of living labor (the capitalist can only rob the worker, not machines), and, on the other hand, the fact that the proportion of living labor contained in each capitalist commodity is continually diminishing in favor of the proportion of dead labor. In a world without workers where only machines produced, capitalist profit wouldn’t exist. The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit describes how, by mechanizing and automating production more and more, the capitalist was forced to resort to a series of measures to prevent the tendency of the rate of profit to fall from becoming an effective fall.

Marx made a study of the measures which were aimed at counter-acting this fall, and which made it a tendential law, not an absolute one. Now, the main factors counter-acting this law were themselves dependent on capital’s capacity to extend the scale of its production, and thus on its capacity to procure new outlets.

Whether we are talking about the factors which compensate the fall in the rate of profit by increasing the mass of profit, or about factors which prevent this fall by intensifying the exploitation of the worker (raising the rate of surplus value) thanks to an elevation in social productivity (falling real wages, growing extraction of relative surplus value), these two kind of factors can only be effective if the capitalist is continuously discovering new outlets allowing him to increase the scale of his production and thus

1) augment the mass of profit

2) increase the extraction of relative surplus value.

This is why Marx insisted so much on the tendential and not the absolute character of this law. This is also why, in his expose on this law and the factors which counteracted it, he, on several occasions, refers the reader to a later study.

The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit describes, in reality, the race between two parallel movements in the life of capitalism: on the one hand, the movement towards the growing mechanization and automation of the productive process, and, on the other hand, capitalism’s movement towards an ever-greater exploitation of the proletariat.3 If the mechanization of capitalist production develops more rapidly than capital’s capacity to intensify the exploitation of the proletariat, the rate of profit falls. If, on the other hand, the intensification of exploitation develops faster than the rhythm of the mechanization of production, the rate of profit tends to increase.

In describing this contradictory race, the law of the falling rate of profit highlights a real phenomenon. But it doesn’t in itself describe all the elements in this phenomenon, its causes and its limits. Take such questions as: what is it that determines the pace of each of these movements? What is it that engenders and maintains the race to modernize the process of production? What is it that permanently provokes the movement towards the intensifica­tion of exploitation? The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit does not answer these questions and, what’s more, doesn’t pretend to. The response can be found in the basic historical specificity of capitalism: the fact that it is a universal system of commodity production.

Capitalism isn’t the first mode of production in history to have commodity exchange and money. In the slave mode of production as in feudalism, commodity exchange existed, but it only affected certain limited aspects of social production. What is specific to the capitalist system is its tendency to universalize exchange, not only across the whole planet, but also and above all across all the domains of social production, particularly labor power. Neither the slaves nor the serfs sold their labor power. The part of social production which went to them depended, on the one hand, on the amount of production carried out, and, on the other hand, on the prevailing rules regulating the distribution of the products.

Under capitalism the worker sells his labor power. The amount of social production that goes to him is determined by the law of wages, ie by the value of his labor power, which capitalism has transformed into a commodity. His ‘share’ is simply the equivalent of the cost of his labor power to the capitalist, and this only on condition that he is not unemployed (something that never happened to slaves or serfs). This is why capitalism can find itself in a situation unknown in history before: overproduction, ie a situation where the exploiters find themselves stuck with ‘too many’ products, ‘too much’ wealth, wealth that they are unable to reintroduce into the process of production.

This problem doesn’t pose itself to capital as long as it has at its disposal markets other than those made up by its own wage-earners. But this very fact means that the life of each capitalist depends on a permanent race for markets. Competition between capitalist, this essential characteristic of the life of capital, isn’t competition for honor or high ideals, but for markets. A capitalist without markets is a dead capitalist. Even a capitalist who managed to work the biological miracle of getting his workers to produce for nothing (thus realizing an infinitely huge rate of exploitation and so an enormously high rate of profit) would go bankrupt the moment he was unable to sell the commodities made by those he’s exploiting.

That’s why the life of capital is constantly faced with the choice: conquer markets or die.

This is the capitalist competition which no capital can escape from. It’s this competition for markets (those which exist already as well as those still to be conquered) which pitilessly compels each capitalist to try to produce at lower and lower costs. The low price of its commodities isn’t just the “heavy artillery” With which capital “batters down all the Chinese walls” that encircled the pre-capitalist sectors; it’s also the essential economic weapon in the competition between capitalist.

It’s this struggle to lower the price of their commodities in order to maintain or conquer markets which constitutes the motor-force of the two movements whose pace determines the rate of profit. The two principal means capital has at its disposal to lower the costs of its production are:

1) a greater mechanization of the productive apparatus

2) the diminution of labor costs, ie an intensification of exploitation.

A capitalist doesn’t modernize his factories because he has modernizing ideals, but because he’s forced to, on pain of death, by the competition for markets. It’s the same with the obligation to intensify the exploitation of the working class.

Thus, whether we look at the falling rate of profit from the point of view of the forces that provoke it, or whether we look at it from the point of view of the factors which moderate it and counter-act it, we are still dealing with a phenomenon which is dependent on capital’s struggle for new markets.

The economic contradiction expressed by this law, like all the other economic contradictions of the system, always boils down to the fund­amental contradiction between, on the one hand, the necessity for capital to enlarge production more and more, and, on the other hand, the fact that it can never create within itself the outlets it needs for this expansion by giving its wage-earners the necessary purchasing power.

This is why, after describing the law of the falling rate of profit, Marx wrote, two sections further on, in the same 3rd volume of Capital:

“The workers’ power of consumption is limited partly by the laws of wages, partly by the fact that they are only employed as long as their labor is profitable to the capitalist class. The ultimate reason for all real crises is always the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses faced with the tendency of the capitalist economy to develop the productive forces as if they had no limit than society’s absolute power of consumption.” (Capital III, section 5, our emphasis)

As we have already said, and for the reasons which were already given (the death of Marx before he could complete his studies of the economy, the limits of the historical period he lived in), Marx wasn’t able to develop and systematize “the ultimate reason for all real crises”. But from the Manifesto to the 3rd Volume of Capital, his approach remained the same.

***************

An under-consumptionist theory?

In order to make more precise what Marx actually said -- and at the risk of once again making concessions to exegitical discussions -- we should respond to one of the most recent arguments developed by one of the defenders of the idea that the ‘falling rate of profit’ was Marx’s only theory of crisis. According to Paul Mattick, in his book Crise et Theories des crise, Marx’s references to the problems of the market provoked by the inevitably restricted consumption of the workers were either “slips of the pen”, or concessions to under-consumptionist theories, especially Sismondi’s.

Marx criticized Sismondi’s under-consumptionist theory. But what Marx rejected in this theory wasn’t the idea that capitalism faced problems of the market because, even while it was enlarging its field of activity, it was perm­anently restricting the buying-power and consumption of the workers. What Marx rejected in the under-consumptionist theories was:

1) the fact that they envisaged the possibility of avoiding the ‘under-consumption’ of the workers within the framework of capitalism, through wage increases. Marx showed that, in reality, exactly the opposite was the case: the more the capitalists were faced with overproduction and a lack of markets, the more they reduced workers’ wages. For capitalism to be able to resolve its crises by raising wages, the competition which continuously obliged it to reduce its wage costs would have to disappear. In short, capitalism would have to stop being capitalism;

2) Sismondi was in fact an expression of the 19th century petty bourgeoisie, condemned to proletarianization by capitalism. What lay behind his theory was the demand for a capitalism that wouldn’t destroy the petty bourgeoisie. Sismondi’s under-consumptionist theory didn’t try to demonstrate the necessity for humanity to free itself from commodity relations, and thus wage labor, in order to permit the flowering of the productive forces in a communist society, he advocated a return to the past by putting limits on the capitalist growth that was sweeping aside all the pre-capitalist sectors of the petty bourgeoisie. Sismondi said that if capitalism could control its blind thirst for growth, there would be no problem of constantly having to find new markets... and the agricultural, artisan, and commercial petty bourgeoisie would be able to survive. It was this reactionary, utopian vision that Marx rejected, by showing that it ended up denying reality and dreaming of a capitalism that could not exist.

Summarizing Marx’s basic criticism of the under­consumptionists, one could say that he didn’t reject the economic problem they were posing, but 1) the way they posed it 2) the answers they came up with.

Marx’s theory of crisis places at the centre of its analysis the problem of capitalism’s inability to create all the outlets needed for its expansion, and thus the problem of the restricted consumption of the workers. But this doesn’t make it an ‘under-consumptionist’ theory.

From Marx to the debates on imperialism

The last quarter of the 19th century was without doubt the historical apogee of capitalism. Capitalist colonialism dominated practically the whole planet. Capitalism developed at an unprecedented rhythm, both in its outward extension and its internal production. The trade union and parliamentary struggles of the workers’ movement allowed it to wrest real, lasting reforms from capitalism. In the most developed countries the proletariat’s living conditions were substantially improved, while at the same time the formidable expansion of world capitalism seemed to have relegated the great economic crises to mere memories of the past.

This was when the workers’ movement saw the development of ‘revisionism’, ie tendencies which put into question Marx’s idea that capitalism was condemned to go through mortal crises, and which put forward the possibility of peacefully and gradually advancing towards socialism through progressive social reforms. In Bernstein’s words, “the movement is everything, the goal is nothing.”

In 1901, one of the principal ‘Marxist’ revisionists, the Russian professor Tugan-­Baranowski published a book supporting the idea that the crises of capitalism derived not from a lack of salvable consumption in relation to capitalism’s capacity to extend its production, but simply from disproportionality between different sectors of the economy, a disproportionality that could be avoided through suitable government intervention. This was in fact a revival of one of the fundamental theories of bourgeois economy as formulated by JB Say, according to which capitalism could never have a real markets problem.

This thesis gave rise to a debate which led Social Democracy to return to the question of the cause of crises. It fell to Kautsky, who was then still the most widely recognized spokesman for Marx’s theories in the workers’ movement, to reply to Tugan-Baranowski. We cite here an extract from Kautsky’s reply, which shows that in this period there was still no doubt in the workers’ movement that the cause of capitalist crises resided in its inability to create the outlets needed for its expansion:

“Although capitalists increase their wealth and the number of exploited workers grows, they cannot themselves form a sufficient market for capitalist-produced commodities, as accumulation of capital and productivity grows even faster. They must find a market in those strata and nations which is still non-capitalist. They find this market, and expand it, but still not fast enough, since this additional market hardly has the flexibility and ability to expand of the capitalist process of production. Once capitalist production has developed large-scale industry, as was already the case in England in the nineteenth century, it has the possibility of expanding by such leaps and bounds that it soon overtakes any expansion of the market. Thus, any prosperity which results from a substantial expansion in the market is doomed from the beginning to a short life, and will necessarily end in a crisis.

This, in short, is the theory of crises which, as far as we can see, is generally accepted by ‘orthodox’ Marxists and which was set up by Marx.” (Neue Zeit, 1902, Quoted by Luxemburg in the Anti-critique)

Kautsky underlined the political significance of the debate when, in the same article, he wrote:

“It is no mere accident that revisionism attacks Marx’s theory of crises with part­icular vigor.... (revisionism wants to) change social democracy from a party of proletarian class struggle into a demo­cratic party on the left wing of a demo­cratic party of social reform.”

However, although this theory summarized “in short” by Kautsky was “generally accepted” in the Marxist workers’ movement, no one has tried to develop it in a more systematic way, as Marx had intended.

This is what Rosa Luxemburg tried to do during the debates on imperialism at the time of the outbreak of World War One.

The debates on imperialism

The beginning of the 20th century saw the completion of the contradictory tendencies Marx had described. Capital had effectively extended its rule across the whole world. There was hardly a square kilometer on the planet which wasn’t in the hands of one or other of the imperialist metropoles. The process of constituting the world market, ie the integration of all the economies of the world into the same circuit of production and exchange, had reached such a point that the struggle over the last non-capitalist territories had become a life or death question for all countries.

New powers like Germany, Japan, and the USA, were now able to compete with the all-powerful Britain on the industrial level, but at the same time they had little share in the colonial division of the world. In the four corners of the planet, the antagonisms, between all the powers got sharper. Between 1905 and 1913, five times these antagonisms led to incidents which seemed to make generalized war the only way that capitalism could divide up the world market. In the end, the outbreak of World War One, the greatest holocaust humanity had ever been through, showed quite clearly that capitalism couldn’t go on living in the old way. The capitalist nations could no longer go on developing in parallel to each other; letting free exchange and the initiative of explorers determine the extent of their domination. The world had become too narrow for too many capitalist appetites. Free exchange had to give way to war and explorers to cannons. One capitalist nation could only develop at the expense of one or several others. There was no longer any real possibility of enlarging the world market. Now, it could only be re-divided in different ways. Capitalism could therefore only live by wars and by preparing wars for these divisions and re-divisions.

“For the first time, the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only re-division is possible, ie territories can only pass from one ‘owner’ to another, instead of passing as ownerless territories to an ‘owner’” (Lenin -- Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism)

Without destroying world capitalism, humanity would be condemned to live in a semi-permanent state of war. “Socialism or barbarism” became the watchword of all revolutionaries.

The Third International was constituted in 1919 on the basis of a recognition and understanding of this change, this qualitative historical break. Thus, the first point in the platform of the Communist International declared:

“The contradictions of the capitalist system, which lay concealed within its womb, broke out with colossal force in a gigantic explosion, in the great imperialist world war.

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

With these formulations, the CI reaffirmed its break with the reformist and patriotic tendencies which had developed within the 2nd International and which had just led the proletariat into the inter-imperialist butchery, using their arguments in favor of the possibility of a continuous development of the productive forces, which would allow a peaceful passage from capitalism to socialism.

The CI clearly affirmed:

1) that the world war wasn’t a choice that capitalism could have avoided but an inevitable consequence of capitalism, the violent revelation of its internal contradictions, “which lay concealed in its womb”;

2) that this war wasn’t like previous capitalist wars. It marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new period, “the epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration”;

3) that the entry of capitalism in to this epoch of decline corresponded historically to the proletarian revolution coming onto the agenda, to the beginning of “the epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”.

Thus the whole Communist International recognized that the First World War was a manifestation of the fact that the internal contradictions of capitalism had reached a point of historical no-return.

However, while all revolutionary Marxists shared these conclusions, it was different when it came to analyzing the precise nature of these contradictions and of their development.

Within what had been the left of the 2nd International, there had been two main theories of imperialism and the economic contradictions in capitalism which gave rise to it. One was Rosa Luxemburg’s, as developed in The Accumulation of Capital (1912) then in The Crisis of German Social Democracy written in prison during the war; the other was that of Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).

For these two theories, the analysis of imperialism and the analysis of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism were simply two aspects of the same question. Their works had been aimed at the patriotic Social Democrats who defended a superficial pacifism via the illusion that you could prevent imperialist war and imperialism itself through legal parliamentary struggle that could influence government policy. For Rosa Luxemburg as for Lenin, it was impossible to prevent war without destroying capitalism, because imperialism was simply the consequence of the internal contradictions of capitalism. To answer the question “what is imperialism” therefore implied answering this other question: ‘what is the fundamental contradiction that capitalism is trying to palliate through its imperialist policies?’

Rosa Luxemburg’s response

Rosa Luxemburg’s response saw itself -- correctly, we think -- continuing Marx’s work on the development of capitalism, by looking at it not in the abstract, simplified form of a pure system, operating in a world made up entirely of capitalists and workers, but in its concrete historic form, ie as the integral part of the world market. Her response is a systematic development of Marx’s analysis of crises, as he began to elaborate in the Communist Manifesto and Capital. In The Accumulation of Capital she undertook an analysis of the growth of capitalism in relationship with the rest of the world, the non-capitalist part. Using a thoroughly adept Marxist method, she examined the main historical stages in this growth, and the different theoretical approaches to the problem.

Her response to the question of imperialism was simply an actualization of the analysis in the Communist Manifesto, sixty years on. Capitalism could not create, within itself the outlets needed for its expansion. The workers, the capitalists and their direct agents could only buy a part of the total production. That part of production which they didn’t consume, ie that part of the profit which had to be reinvested in production, capital had to sell to someone outside of the agencies which were subjected to its direct domination, and which capital paid out of its own funds. These buyers could only be found in sectors that were still producing in a pre-capitalist manner.

Capital developed by selling its surplus products first to the feudal lords, then to the backward agricultural and artisan sectors, and finally to the ‘barbaric’ pre-capitalist nations which it colonized.

In so doing, capital eliminated the feudal lords, and transformed the artisans and peasants into proletarians. In the pre-capital­ist nations it proletarianized part of the population and reduced the rest to poverty, destroying the old subsistence economies with the low price of its commodities.

For Rosa Luxemburg, imperialism was essentially the form of life that capitalism took on when the extra-capitalist markets were becoming too narrow for the expansion-requirements of a growing number of increasingly developed powers. The latter were thus forced into permanent and more and more violent confronta­tions to find a place in the division of the world market.

“Modern imperialism … is only the last chapter of its (capital’s) historical process of expansion, it is the period of universally sharpened world competition between the capitalist states for the last remaining non-capitalist areas on earth”. (Luxemburg, The Anti-critique)

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, ie that which in the last instance determined the lines of action and the life of capitalism, was the contradiction between, on the one hand, the permanent need for the expansion of each national capital under the pressure of competition, and, on the other hand, the fact that by its very development, by generalizing wage labor, capitalism was restricting the outlets that were indispensible for this expansion.

“... by this process capital prepares its own destruction in two ways. As it approaches the point where humanity only consists of capitalists and proletarians, further accumulation will become impossible. At the same time, the absolute and undivided rule of capital aggravates class struggle throughout the world and the international economic and political anarchy to such an extent that, long before the last consequences of economic development, it must lead to the rebellion of the international proletariat against the existence of the rule of capital.”

Luxemburg points out that the final point of this theoretical contradiction will never be reached, “because capital accumulation is not just an economic but also a political process” (Anti-critique)

“Imperialism is as much a historical method for prolonging capital’s existence as it is the surest way of setting an objective limit to its existence as fast as possible. This is not to say that the final point need actually be attained. The very tendency of capitalist development towards this end is expressed in forms which make the concluding phase of capitalism a period of catastrophes.” (Accumulation of Capital)

The exacerbation of inter-imperialist antagonisms over the conquest of colonies at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries obliged Luxemburg, more than Marx, to analyze the importance of the non-capitalist sectors in the growth of capitalism. The historical gap and the specificities of the period which separated her from Marx were at the basis of her conviction of the need to pursue the master’s analysis.

However, in developing her analysis, Luxemburg was compelled to make a critique of Marx’s work on enlarged reproduction (particularly the mathematical schemas) in the IInd Volume of Capital. This critique consisted above all in showing that this work was incomplete, despite the tendency to present it as definitive and final. At the same time she tried to show that the theoretical postulate upon which they were based -- studying the conditions for the enlarged reproduction of capital by making an abstraction of the surrounding non-capitalist milieu, ie considering the world as a purely capitalist world -- does not allow us to understand the totality of the problem.

The publication of Rosa Luxemburg’s work on the eve of the world war provoked is extremely violent and energetic reaction inside the official apparatus of German Social Democracy, generally hiding behind the pretext of wanting to ‘safeguard’ Marx’s work. Rosa, they said, had invented a problem where none existed; the problem of the market was a false problem; Marx had ‘demonstrated’ this with his famous schemas of enlarged reproduction etc. And, behind all these ‘official’ critiques, lay the basic thesis of the future patriots: imperialism isn’t inevitable under capitalism.

Lenin’s response

Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, doesn’t refer to Luxemburg’s work and only deals with the question of the markets in passing. In order to show the inevitable character of imperialism in “decaying” capitalism, Lenin emphasized the phenomenon of the accelerated concentration of capital in the decades leading up to the war. Here his analysis took up Hilferding’s thesis in Finance Capital (1910), according to which this phenomenon of concen­tration was the essential element in the evolution of capitalism in this period. As Lenin wrote:

“If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”

Lenin defined five fundamental characteristics of imperialism:

“And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its complete development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: 1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; 4) the formation of inter­national monopolist capitalist combines which share the world among themselves, and 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.”

Of the five “basic features”, three relate to the growing concentration of capital at national and international level. For Lenin, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, the one that led to the stage of imperialism and “decay”, was the contradiction between its tendency towards “monopolism”, which made capitalist production become more and more social, and the general conditions of capitalism (private property, commodity production, competition) which contradicted this tendency.

“Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads right up to the most comprehensive socialization of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalist, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognized free competition remains, but the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”

Then, in the chapter on “The Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism”:

“.... the deepest economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. This is capitalist monopoly, ie monopoly which has grown out of capitalism and exists in the general environment of capitalism, commodity production and competition, in permanent and insoluble contradiction to this general environ­ment.”

This contradiction between the increasingly ‘social’ character which capitalist production acquires as it extends and becomes concentrated, and, on the other hand, the persistence of private capitalist appropriation, is a real contradiction of capitalism, which Marx frequently referred to. But in itself it doesn’t come near providing an explanation for imperialism and the collapse of capitalism.

The tendency towards ‘monopolism’ doesn’t explain why, at a certain degree of development, the capitalist countries were compelled to wage a fight to the death for colonies. On the contrary, it is the necessity to prosecute this increasingly bitter war over the colonies which explains the tendency within each capitalist nation towards the unification and concentration of the whole national capital. The capitalist powers which underwent the most rapid and extensive concentration weren’t those which possessed the biggest empires (Britain, France), but those which had to carve out a place on the world market (Germany, Japan).

By neglecting the problem of the markets, Lenin was led into taking for a cause of imperialism what in reality was a consequence -- like imperialism itself -- of the capitalists’ struggle for new outlets. Similarly he was led to see the export of capital as a fundamental phenomenon of imperialism (“as distinguished from the export of commodities”), whereas in reality the export of capital was simply one of the weapons in the struggle between the powers for markets to place their commodities (Lenin himself recognized this elsewhere in his book: “The export of capital abroad thus becomes a means for encouraging the export of commodities”. Chapter IV)

By taking as his starting point Hilferding’s work on monopolism, it was difficult to come to conclusions that were coherent with his premises. Hilferding was one of the theoreticians of the reformist wing of the 2nd International; behind the disproportionate emphasis which he gave to the phenomenon of the concentration of capital in finance capital, there was the attempt to show that it was possible to reach socialism by peaceful, gradual methods. (According to Hilferding, the growing concentration imposed by monopolism would make it possible to carry out, within capitalism, a series of measures that would progressively lay the foundations of socialism: elimination of competition, elimination of money, elimination of nations... even unto communism). The whole of Hilferding’s theoretical effort was aimed at trying to prove the falsity of the revolutionary road to communism. The whole of Lenin’s effort had the opposite intention. By borrowing from Hilferding the basis for his theory of imperialism, Lenin could only arrive at revolutionary conclusions by subjecting his theory to contradictory contortions.

The position of the Communist International

In its platform, the CI didn’t really take a position on the basics of the debate. However, its interpretation of the evolution of capitalism towards its “inner disintegration” refers explicitly to the monopolism and anarchy of capitalism, whereas the question of the markets is only mentioned as a partial explanation of imperialism:

“Capitalism tried to overcome its own anarchy by organizing production. Instead of numerous competing businessmen, powerful capitalist associations (syndicates, cartels, trusts) were formed; bank capital united with industrial capital; all economic life was dominated by the finance-capitalist oligarchy, who attained sole dominion by organizing on the basis of this power. Monopoly took the place of free competition. The individual capitalist became a trust-capitalist. Insane anarchy was replaced by organization.

But while in each country the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production was superseded by capitalist organization, the contradictions, the competitive struggle, and the anarchy in world economy grew ever sharper. The struggle between the largest organized robber States led with iron necessity to the monstrous imperialist world war. Greed for profits drove world capital to fight for new markets, new investment openings, new raw material sources, the cheap labor power of colonial slaves. The imperialist changed many millions of African, Asiatic Australian, and American proletarians and peasants into beasts of burden, had sooner or later to expose the true anarchist nature of capital in that tremendous conflict. This was the origin of the greatest of all crimes -- the predatory world war.

It would be difficult to draw from these formulations a really clear idea about the question of imperialism and of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. To the question of the internal contradictions of the system, the CI replied, following Lenin and thus the influence of Hilferding, by pointing to the evolution of the system towards monopoly. And, like Lenin, it immediately affirmed the impossibility of a continuous evolution to the point where nations would be eliminated by successive international concentrations. Concentration at a national level meant that “the contradictions, the competitive struggle, and the anarchy in world economy grew ever sharper,” leaving it as read, as Lenin had done, that this tendency towards concentration was the cause and not the consequence of the exacerbation of “the contradictions, the competitive struggle, and the anarchy” at international level.

As for the imperialist policy of conquests, the CI simply talked about “greed for profits” pushing capital “to fight for new markets, new investment openings, new raw material sources, the cheap labor power of colonial slaves”. All this was correct, at the level of denouncing those ideologies which talked about imperialism as a means for spreading ‘civilization’ but at the economic level it’s just a description which doesn’t help you see in what way imperialism is linked to the fundamental contradiction of capitalism.

Finally, in its explanation for the First World War and the reasons for its outbreak, the CI like Lenin and Rosa referred to the fact that “the imperialist states... divided the entire world amongst themselves”, but they don’t say why this division, once completed, should lead inevitably to war, why this division could not be accompanied by a parallel development of the different powers.

As to the question of the crises of overproduction, the world market, its contraction, etc, which the Manifesto talked about, the CI didn’t say a word.

The Communist International as a whole was unable to come to an agreement on this question. What’s more, the Communist Parties in 1919 had much more urgent and important questions to discuss: the proletariat held power in Russia, the outbreak of the German revolution had been a confirmation of the communists’ view that the world war would provoke an international revolutionary movement. But the immediate defeat of this first revolutionary offensive in Germany posed the question of the real strength of this international movement. In such a situation, the question of knowing the theoretical reasons for the outbreak of the world war took a back seat. After the barbarism of war and the fires of revolution, history had already taken charge of sweeping aside all the theories about the continuous development of well-being under capitalism, and peaceful passage to socialism.

The war, the most violent form of human misery, was there. It had engendered and international revolutionary movement and it was inevitably the questions that directly related to the revolutionary struggle that came into the foreground.

But this isn’t the only reason why the CI didn’t reach an agreement on the foundations of the economic crisis of capitalism. The First World War took the form of a total war, ie a war which, for the first time, demanded the active participation not only of the soldiers at the front, but also the whole civil population that had become incarcerated in a state apparatus that was now the omnipresent organizer of the march to slaughter and of the industrial production of the instruments of death.

The monstrous reality of the war was based on factories ‘operating at full steam’, on the mass expenditure of human lives, in uniform or not; this made unemployment ‘disappear’. The first world holocaust, which cost humanity 24 million lives, hid beneath the roar of factories producing for destruction the fact that capitalism was no longer capable of producing. The under-production of armaments concealed the overproduction of commodities. The sales to the state for war purposes hid the fact that the capitalists had no other way selling. They had to sell to destroy because they could no longer produce to sell.

This was certainly the major reason behind the surprising fact that the platform of the CI doesn’t take a single comma from the Manifesto on the question of the crises of overproduction and the contraction of the world market.

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In conclusion, we can say that the necessity to explain imperialism allowed for a development of the analysis elaborated by Marx. But the very conditions of this crisis (revolutionary proletarian movements which pushed economic-theoretical questions into the background; the recent character of the communists’ break with the 2nd International and the weight of the theories of Social Democratic reformists on the analyses of the revolutionaries; finally the fact that the war hid the fundamental specificities of the crisis of capitalism, in particular overproduction) stood in the way of the revolutionaries of the Communist International coming to an agreement about the causes of the crisis.

RV

The revolutionary milieu in France in the 1930''s was a real microcosm of the revolution­ary currents existing at that time. While Trotskyism was in the process of losing its proletarian character and becoming a real counter-revolutionary force, a few groups clung to class positions during this period. The Italian communist left was the most authentic expression of revolutionary coherence and firm­ness.

The confusion which the group Union Communiste gave into unfortunately meant that it was unable to pass the test of the events in Spain. Born out of confusion, it disappeared in 1939 back into confusion, without making a substant­ial contribution to the proletarian movement.

One of its founders (Chaze), over forty years later, has re-edited a collection of texts from its organ, L'Internationale, and written a preface to it. Unfortunately, by remaining fixated on positions which have become bank­rupt (anarchism, councilism), by slipping into pessimism and bitterness, old proletarian mili­tants often provide a tragic illustration of the gulf between the previous generation of revol­utionaries, exhausted and demoralized by the counter-revolution, and the new generation which has a great difficulty in reappropriat­ing past experience. Let us hope that a critical balance-sheet of the past can stir the flame of proletarians who have not lived through the stifling atmosphere of the counter­revolution.

L'Union Communiste

The war in Spain (1936-39) has provoked a number of studies in recent years, though sadly they are often equivocal and of the academic or ‘memoirs' variety. Often indeed, it is the voice of the ‘Frente Popular', ‘POUmist', ‘Trotskyist' or ‘anarchist', that makes itself heard. All these ‘voices', these multiple ‘visions' come together in chorus to sing the merits of the ‘Frente Popular', the virtues of the collectivizations, or the courage of the ‘anti-fascist fighters'.

The revolutionary voice, by contrast, could only make itself heard faintly. The publi­cation in the ICC's International Review and then in a French paperback edition of texts from Bilan[1] dealing with this period has filled a gap, and has broadcast -- weakly, it's true, -- the voice of the internationalist revolution­aries. The interest in these class positions, defended in total isolation, is a positive sign; little by little, and still too slowly, the grip is loosening of the ideological vice that the world bourgeoisie clamped on the proletariat to annihilate its theoretical and organizational capacity to fight on the only terrain where its real nature can be expressed; that of the world proletarian revolution.

It is, then, with great interest that the small internationalist revolutionary milieu has observed the publication in French of the Chroniques de la Revolution Espagnole, a colle­ction of texts by the Union Communiste, written between 1933 and 1939, one of these texts' main editors was H.Chaze, who republishes them today.

Origins and political itinerary of Union Communiste

Union Communiste was born in 1933. In April of the same year, it had regrouped under the name "Gauche Communiste" the old opposition from the 15th ‘rayon' of Courbevoie and Bagnolet[2], as well as the Treint group (Treint, before being expelled, had been a leader of the French Comm­unist Party), which had broken with the Trotsky­ist Ligue Communiste of Frank and Molinier. In December, 35 expelled members of the Ligue, almost all coming from the "Jewish group", joined with Gauche Communiste in forming Union Communiste.

This group pronounced itself against the form­ation of a 4th international, and against "socialism in one country". Union Communiste (UC) was a revolutionary group, but retained many confusions from its Trotskyist heritage. Not only did it pronounce itself for "the defence of the USSR", but its positions were not clearly distinguishable from the surrounding anti-fascism. In February 1934, it was to call for workers' militias, reproaching the PCF and the SFIO (Socialist Party)[3] for not wanting to set up a "united Front" to beat "fascism". In April 1934, it was pleased to see Marceau Pivert's Gauche Socialiste[4] "taking a revolutionary attitude", pushed "into posing the problem of the revolutionary seizure of power" (L'Internationale, no.5, publication of the UC). In 1935, it was to contact Revolution Proletarienne[5], pacifists, Trotskyists, all "anti-fascists", to advocate a regroupment of these organizations. In 1936, it was to participate, in a consultative capacity, in the creation of a Trotskyist party (Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste).

This goes to show the UC's enormous difficulty in defining itself as a proletarian organization. In the surrounding confusion, which expressed the weight of the counter-revolution, revolutionary militants were reduced to a hand­ful, and their progress towards the clarific­ation of class positions came up against inn­umerable obstacles. In his introduction to Chroniques de la Revolution Espagnole, H.Chaze recognises this, and reviews the past with a critical eye:

"As regards the nature and counter-revolution­ary role of the USSR, we were at least 10 years behind our Dutch comrades (council communists) and the comrades of the German Left."

He adds that this backwardness was to lead some members of the UC to give up:

"...some looking for an audience from Doriot[6] in ‘34-‘35, others because in the UC they couldn't play at ‘number one', still others simply because our rapid evolution frightened them. They left, either on tiptoe, or after a short and friendly discussion. A few years later, almost all these comrades were either in Marceau Pivert's Gauche Socialiste or with the left Stalinists of the group that published Que Faire[7]."

The UC, then, was set up in the greatest polit­ical heterogeneity. It was nonetheless capable -- this is its merit -- of attaching itself pro­gressively to class positions, in rejecting the "defense of the USSR" and the Popular Front, quite rightly defined as a "national front".

Was this clarification really complete? Were the events in Spain, decisive as they were through the massacre of the Spanish prolet­ariat and the preparation of the imperialist war, to lead the UC to break definitively with its past confusions, and to make it a firm aid to revolutionary consciousness?

This is what H.Chaze affirms in his preface:

"After 40 years of Francoism, the Spanish workers have begun to confront the traps of bourgeois democracy in a context of world economic and social crisis....the class struggle cannot be lastingly ensnared... always providing that the workers take account of the lessons of past struggles. It is to help them break the straitjacket they are held in that we publish this chronicle of the 1936-37 revolution."

What kind of "help" is this?

The "teachings" of the "Spanish Revolution" L'Internationale 1936-37

Reading the texts of L'Internationale forces us to the conclusion that they do not help break any straitjackets. L'Internationale like the Trotskyists, thought that the revol­ution had begun in Spain. In October 1936, after the Barcelona workers' 18th July insurr­ection, followed by the insurrection in Madrid, it wrote

"the army, police, and state bureaucracy have been cut to pieces, and the proletar­iat's direct intervention has pulverized the republican remnants. In a few days, the proletariat has created from nothing its militia, its police, its tribunals, and it has laid the foundations of a new economic and social edifice" (no.23).

The UC saw the foundations of the "Spanish revolution" above all in the collectivisations and the formation of base militias.

To support this "revolution", the UC founded, at the end of 1936, a "Committee for the Spanish Revolution" in which Trotskyists and syndic­alists also participated. As H.Chaze reminds us, this included military support, although the UC did not take part formally in the Spanish milit­ias; "Several comrades, who were technicians specializing in arms production and members of the Engineers and Technicians Federation, had asked me to find out from the CNT leaders whether they could be of use. They were ready to leave their jobs in France to go and work in Catalonia".

Here, the UC joined the same chorus as the Trotskyists and the PCF who were demanding arms for Spain. L'Internationale proclaimed that "non-intervention (by the French Popular Front government; our note) means the blockade of the Spanish revolution". Finally, the UC saw the CNT and the POUM as vanguard workers' organizations. The POUM especially, despite its "gross errors" seemed to be "called to play an important part in the international regroup­ment of revolutionaries", provided it rejected "the defense of the USSR". Until its disapp­earance, L'Internationale set itself up as the adviser, first of the POUM, and then of its "left" wing; it saw a revolutionary ferment among the anarchist youth, and congratulated itself on the fact that its paper was being read among young POUMists and anarchists.

All these positions, which we will come back to, were moreover very confused. In the article already quoted, we read that the republican state which has been "pulverized" a paragraph earlier is still alive and kicking: "a lot is left to demolish, for the democratic bourgeoisie is hang­ing on to the last fragments of bourgeois power left to it". Alongside a call for "intervention" in Spain, we read further on "the struggle for a real support for our comrades in Spain in real­ity comes down to the revolutionary struggle against our own bourgeoisie".

Enthusiasm for the "Spanish revolution" was to wane as the days went by. By December 1936, L'Internationale was writing, in its no.24, "The Spanish revolution is in retreat... Imperialist war threatens....the bankruptcy of anarchism faced with the state....the POUM is set on a path which may rapidly lead it to betray the revolution, if it does not radically alter its policies".

In May 1937, the massacre of the Barcelona workers would lead L'Internationale to denounce the treason of the anarchist leaders. It insisted that the counter-revolution had triumphed. It nonetheless continued to see revolutionary possibilities in the POUM's ‘left' wing and in the Friends of Durruti. When war broke out 2 years later, the UC dis­banded.

The counter-revolution in Spain

So what revolution are we talking about?

The only examples that F.Chaze gives are the anarchist collectivisations and the Popular Front "committees" in 1936. Attacking Revolution Internationale, the ICC's publicat­ion in France, he accuses us of speaking only of the counter-revolution, while "denying that there was so much as a revolutionary ferment to provoke this ‘counter-revolution'" , he adds "They affirm that the Spanish proletariat was not organized in ‘councils'". But what then were all these committees born just after the 19th July? In France, the word ‘council' is usually used by the bourgeoisie to describe managerial, juridical and political bodies.

While it is true that 19th July 1936 expressed the Spanish proletariat's revolutionary potential, this was quickly exhausted. It was pre­cisely these committees, often formed at the initiative of anarchists and POUMists that were to line the proletariat up behind the defense of the Republican state. Very rapidly these committees were to enroll the workers in the militias, which took them out of the towns and sent them off to the military front. In this way, the republican bourgeoisie kept its state apparatus practically intact and espec­ially its government, which did not delay in banning strikes and demonstrations in the name of "national unity" for the "defense of the revolution". The Popular Front's openly counter-revolutionary role was to be fully supported by the CNT and the POUM, in which H.Chaze still detects revolutionary virtues 40 years later.

"We know that revolutionaries existed and that they showed themselves, especially during the 1937 May days"

he says in his preface. But the fact that individual revolutionaries remained, and that they took part in the armed struggle against the Republican government in May 1937, should not become a tree hiding in the forest. The in­eradicable lesson of these events is that the policy of POUMists and anarchists led the pro­letariat to the slaughter. It is they who put an end to the general strike in July ‘36; who pushed the workers out of the towns; who supported the "Catalonian Generality"; who made these "committees" into instruments that compelled the workers to "produce first, demand afterwards".

This is the sad result of this ‘revolutionary' policy, whereby the "committees" became instruments of capitalism. Nothing to do with the workers' councils -- real organs of power thrown up by the revolution. It's not just a question of words!

But worst of all in the Union Communiste's pos­ition, which H.Chaze defends to this day, is its call for arms for Spain, the under-estimat­ion, if not the denial of the Spanish war's imperialist nature. H.Chaze still proudly reminds us that his organization put itself at the disposal of the CNT to aid in the fabricat­ion of arms. Doesn't he know that these guns were used to send workers into a massacre? He complains that the Blum government gave no weapons. The USSR did. What were they used for if not to shoot down the Barcelona insurrection­ists in May 1937? Of all this, not a word from H.Chaze. He prefers to hide the counter-revol­utionary nature of these policies by calling them "class solidarity with the struggle of the Spanish workers".

It's painful to see an old militant like H.Chaze hang onto the same illusions as L'Internationale in 1936-39. When, today, he still insists that in the war in Spain, the position of revolutionary defeatism was "madness", he denies the imper­ialist character of this ‘civil war'. "This war is indeed a class war" said L'Internationale in October 1936. H.Chaze repeats it today. And yet the same articles in L'Internationale show clear­ly the war's imperialist nature; "On one side Rosenberg, soviet ambassador in Madrid, is Caballero's ‘eminence grise', on the other Hitler and Mussolini direct the operations.... In the Madrid sky, Russian planes and pilots do battle with German and Italian planes and pilots." (No.24, 5th Dec.1936). This passage, clear as it is, was not enough to clarify the UC (nor H.Chaze today), who wondered "Will the civil war in Spain be transformed into an imperial­ist war?" H.Chaze does not see the transform­ation into imperialist war until after May ‘37, as if this massacre were not the result of the imperialist bloodletting begun in July '36!

"Lies", "Falsification", "Amalgam"?

H.Chaze takes the opportunity offered by the preface to Chroniques de la Revolution Espagnole to settle accounts with Bilan and Communisme, the publications, respectively, of the suppos­edly "Bordigist" Italian and Belgian fractions of the communist left. He says; "A handful of young Belgian Bordigists had, from 1935 and so before publishing Communisme, cheerfully used the practice of lies, the falsification of texts, and amalgams....As regards Spain, they continued to do so in Communisme and were upheld by the leadership of the Italian Bord­igist organization that published Bilan, and often used the same methods, unworthy of revol­utionary militants". And he concludes: "The ‘a priori' position of the Bordigist leadership led them to a monstrous refusal of class solid­arity with the struggle of the Spanish workers." (Preface, p.78).

One looks in vain for any arguments to support such serious accusations. What's certain is that during the war in Spain Bilan and Commun­isme defended internationalist positions with­out any concessions to the prevailing ‘inter­ventionist' atmosphere. They refused to support one or other of the imperialist camps, and untiringly affirmed that only struggle on a "class front" against all bourgeois fractions, including the anarchists and POUMists, could put an end to the massacre on the imperialist "mili­tary front". The "Bordigist" current opposed the only possible internationalist slogan - "make the revolution to turn the imperialist war into civil war" -- to the classic chorus of all traitors to the proletariat "war first, the revolution after­wards". Only the Italian and Belgian left, with the Mexican Marxist Workers' Group[8], firmly defended this position, without concessions, against the tide of resignation and betrayal that carried away even the small communist groups to the left of Trotskyism. Such a position could only leave the Italian and Belgian left communists isolated. They made this choice rather than betray the internat­ional proletariat.

Hidden behind these charges of "falsification", "lies", and "amalgams" is a political intransigence that the Union Communiste group was incapable of adopting. The UC remained in an ill-defined swamp where it tried, for better or worse, to reconcile bourgeois and class positions. This was the reason for the definitive break between the UC and the Italian left who up to then had maintained some links with UC. The "Bordigist" current even thought that the UC had passed to the other side of the barricades during the massacre in Spain[9].

Because it prepared, right from the beginning, the second great imperialist massacre, the war in Spain was a decisive test for all prolet­arian organizations. While the UC did not, like the Trotskyists, pass over to the enemy camp in 1939, its confusions and lack of polit­ical coherence condemned it to disappear with­out leaving the proletariat any real contri­butions.

No doubt H.Chaze thinks he wounds us deeply by representing us as the heirs of the "falsifiers" "our critics of ‘36 have heirs, who rant and rave in their paper Revolution Internationale." We pass over this reduction of the ICC to its section in France -- this is the usual method used to deny our current's international reality. Far from feeling wounded, we can only be flatter­ed to be identified as the "heirs" of the UC's "critics". The Belgian and Italian left commun­ists' heritage, which H.Chaze considers "mons­trous", is one of staunch revolutionary stead­fastness, which allowed them to survive as a proletarian current during the Second World War. What Bilan and Communisme denounced, was precisely the lie of an imperialist war presented to the Spanish workers as a "class war". What they denounced, was the most gigan­tic historical falsification, which dressed up the massacre of workers on military fronts in May 1937 as a "workers' revolution". The worst kind of amalgam was, and still is, to mix up the capitalist and the proletarian terrain when they are mutually exclusive; the proletarian terrain being the destruction of the capitalist state, the capitalist terrain being the prolet­ariat's regimentation in its enemy's cause, in the name of the ‘revolution'.

The lessons of the Communist left are not a dead heritage. Tomorrow, as yesterday, the workers may perfectly well be taken off their class terrain and called to die for their enemy's cause. In a situation as difficult as that of Spain in ‘36, it is decisive to understand -- whatever difficulties the prol­etariat may encounter on a military terrain faced with the advance of capitalist armies -- that these military fronts can only be beaten if the proletariat firmly and resolutely oppo­ses to them its class front. Such a front can be strong only if it stands against the capitalist state and the ‘workers' parties. The proletari­at has no momentary or ‘tactical' alliances to make with them: alone, relying on its own strength, it must do battle with these supposed ‘allies' which seek to paralyze it for the slau­ghter and condemn it to a new May ‘37. The pro­letariat of any given country has no allies other than the worldwide working class.

The road of defeatism or the road of revolution?

H.Chaze explains that he wanted to republish these texts from L'Internationale, to help "break a straitjacket". Sadly, his attempt has the opposite effect. Not only does he not budge an iota from the UC's positions, demonstrating an inability to draw up a serious balance-sheet of the period, but throughout the preface to Chroniques de la  Revolution Espagnole a clearly defeatist tone can be distinguished. While today, a compre­hension of the activity and organization of revolutionaries is fundamental to the prolet­arian struggle, and will be a decisive instr­ument in the maturing of class consciousness, H.Chaze advocates precisely that "libertarian communism" (or socialism) which went so lame­ntably bankrupt in Spain. He rejects any poss­ibility of, or necessity for a proletarian org­anization of revolutionaries, affirming: "the idea of the party (group or groupuscule), the sole bearer of revolutionary ‘truth', contains the seeds of totalitarianism." As for the present period, H.Chaze is the gloomiest of pessimists, saying that he has "few illusions in the international context, hardly any different from what it was in 1936, despite the number of long and bitter wildcat strikes against the policies of one-way austerity of the bosses in the industrialized countries" (...) "the forces of counter-revolution have grown throu­ghout the world." If we are still in a period of counter-revolution, what good will be the "lessons" that H.Chaze wants to give his readers?

H.Chaze is one of those old militants whose imme­nse merit has been to resist the counter-revol­utionary current. But like many who have gone through the blackest period in the history of the workers' movement, tragically impotent, he has been left with an immense bitterness, a disill­usionment in the possibility of a proletarian revolution. H.Chaze's pessimism , the lessons he wants to give, are not our's.[10] Today, the long night of the counter-revolution has been ended for more than ten years. The prol­etariat has appeared once more on the terrain of class struggle. Faced with a capitalism seeking as in the ‘30's to lead it into imper­ialist butchery, its combativity is unbroken it has not been defeated. In spite of the weight of its illusions, which H.Chaze rightly underlines, the proletariat is an immense force which is advancing towards the day when it can stand and proclaim in the face of the capitalist world "I was, I am, I will be".

Roux/Ch

[1] See: IR nos. 4, 6, 7

La Contre-Revolution en Espagne, UGE 1979, with a preface by Barrot, whose content we criticize in this issue.

Etcetera editions in Barcelona published in 1978, a translation of some of Bilan's texts on Spain: Textos sobre la Revolution Espagnola, 1936-39.

[2] "Rayon": rank-and-file organization of the Parti Communiste Francais.

Courbevoie, Bagnolet: working class suburbs of Paris.

[3] SFIO: "Section Francais de l'Internationale Ouvriere" ie the 2nd International.

[4] Pivert, Marceau: leading member of SFIO, his Gauche socialiste was a loyal opposition within the SFIO.

[5] La Revolution Proletarianne: a revolutionary syndicalist publication.

[6] Doriot: member of the PC from 1920, leader of the Rayon de Saint-Denis: supported United Front against the PC leadership, was expelled in 1934 and ended up forming his own fascist party in 1936.  

[7] Que Faire, run by Ferrat, was a split from the PCF, and a supporter of the "United Front" with the socialist SFIO. After the war, Ferrat joined Leon Blum's party (the SFIO).

[8] See the Texts published in IR's nos. 10, 19, 20.

[9] The Spanish question brought about the break between Bilan and the Belgian "Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes" in 1937. From this latter emerged the Belgian Fraction, which published Communisme up until the war. The attitude to adopt towards the war in Spain was at the bottom of this split. The LCI had basically the same positions as the Union Communiste of H. Chaze and Lasterade.

[10] The collection of L'Internationale's texts prefaced by H. Chase has found enthusiastic admirers in the PIC (Pour une Intervention Communiste), which publishes Jeune Taupe. In Jeune Taupe no. 30 of March 1980, we find this enticing invitation to "read so as not to die an idiot". For some time, JT has made a speciality of re-editing L'Internationale's texts. Unfortunately, the aim is often to oppose the "clearsightedness" of the UC to Bilan, which the PIC rejects as Leninist. Does this mean that the PIC identifies with the UC's position on Spain, in particular its support for the militias, and sees the CNT and the POUM as authentically ‘revolutionary' forces? While we wait for this point to be determined, we can't help noting that the PIC prefers paddling delightedly in modernism or even flirting with the "left socialists" of the review Spartacus - all of them great admirers of the ‘resistance' and the Spanish ‘anti-fascist revolution' - rather than concerning itself with serious revolutionary work. Apparently the PIC, in such a brilliant company, is abandoning a number of class positions, and is doing its utmost to die an idiot. How wretched to see so sad an evolution on the part of a group which only a few years ago showed a greater revolutionary firmness.

The Third Conference of left communist groups ended up dislocated. Two of the principal groups to have animated previous conferences (the Inter­nationalist Communist Party (Italy) and the Communist Workers' Organization (Great Britain)) made their participation in future Conferences dependent on the closing of the debate on the role of the revolutionary party[1]. The ICC rejected this condition.

For almost four years a number of revolutionary groups have tried to create a framework to facili­tate the regroupment of political organizations of the proletariat. Given the present situation, this effort can be summed up in two phrases:

• there will certainly be no more conferences like the three which have already taken place;
• in order to be viable, the new conferences must: 1. shake off the remains of sectarianism which still weigh heavily on certain groups; 2. be politically responsible.

Readers interested in the detailed unfolding of debate at the Third Conference will be able to read the minutes which will be published shortly. What we would like to do here is to draw the les­sons of the experience coming from the first three conferences.

These four years of strenuous effort "to regroup revolutionaries" have constituted the most ser­ious attempt since 1968 to break down the isola­tion and division among revolutionary groups. Despite the gigantic weaknesses of the confer­ences, it is only by drawing out all the lessons contained in them that the general work of revo­lutionary regroupment can be followed up.

To go forward, it is necessary to understand the reasons which led to the dislocation of the Third Conference and to define from that what is neces­sary in order for the next conferences to take place.

The weight of sectarianism

A debate took place at the Second Conference between the PCInt (Battaglia Comunista, as its newspaper is called) and the ICC, concerning the sectarian attitude of those revolutionary groups which had refused to participate in the interna­tional conferences. The PCInt rejected the reso­lution, affirming - among other things - that the refusal by groups to participate wasn't a question of sectarianism, but of political divergence. Battaglia stated that we were chasing after a phantom hobby-horse called sectarianism, instead of concerning ourselves with the real question of political divergence. Because the PCInt was, itself, in the act of mounting this particular steed, it didn't see the need to corral it. Sectarianism does exist. It isn't a phantom. We've met it - throughout the work of these conferences.

What is sectarianism?

Sectarianism is the spirit of the sect, the spirit of the religious splinter group. In the religi­ous world, the question of knowing what's true and what isn't is posed as a pure confrontation of ideas in the ethereal realm of abstract thought.

Since reality, the material practice of living mortals, is never considered to be superior to the sacred texts and their divine interpretation, and is never allowed to resolve debate; each sect - pitted against the others - is faced with only two possibilities. Either it can renounce its divergences and disappear as a separate entity or it can continue to live on its own, eternally isolated from, and opposed to, all the other ‘rival' sects.

Since social and material practice is not permit­ted to determine the truth, each isolated sect, inevitably cut off from all the others, must lov­ingly cultivate within its own pristine cell, its own truth.

In speaking of sects in the workers' movement, Engels said that what essentially characterized their existence was that they always gave pride of place to what differentiated them from the rest of the movement. And certainly it is this, the major expression of the sectarian disease, which isol­ates its victims from reality.

No matter what problem confronts them, sects are concerned with only one thing: how to establish what distinguishes them from the rest of the movement, while ignoring or condemning what they have in common with it. Their fear of openly recognizing what they share with the movement as a whole springs from their fear of disappearing. This caricatural manifestation of sectarianism hamstrung the work of all three conferences of the left communist groups, and finally led to the utter dislocation of the Third.

"No common declarations?"

The Third Conference opened in May 1980 amid events dominated by the menace of a third world war. All the contributions prepared for the Conference by the participating groups had under­lined the seriousness of the situation, and had affirmed the position of the working class confr­onted with the danger of war: a third world war would have the same nature as the two previous world wars, ie imperialist; the world working class had nothing to defend in any bloc; the only effective struggle against war would be the struggle of the proletariat against world capitalism.

The ICC asked the Conference as a whole to take up a position on this question and proposed a resolution for discussion and amendment, if that proved necessary, which would affirm the position of revolutionaries faced with war.

The PCInt refused to sign it, and the CWO and L'Eveil Internationaliste followed suit. The Conference remained silent. Given the criteria determining participation in the conferences, each of the groups present inevitably shared the same basic positions on what attitude the prole­tariat must have in the event of world conflict or the menace of war. But the partisans of silence told us: "Watch it. As for us, we're not about to sign anything with just anyone. We're not opportunists." And we replied to them: "Opportu­nism is the betrayal of principles at the first opportunity. What we are proposing isn't the betrayal of a principle, but the affirmation of that self-same principle with all of our strength". The principle of internationalism is one of the highest and most important principles of the proletarian struggle. Whatever other divergences may separate the internationalist groups, few political organizations in the world defend it in a consistent way. Their conference should have spoken about the war and in the loudest possible voice.

Instead of that the conference said nothing ... "because divergences exist on what will be the role of the revolutionary party tomorrow". The content of this brilliant, ‘non-opportunist' logic is the following: if revolutionary organi­zations can't succeed in agreeing on all questions, then they must not mention those positions which they do agree on and have agreed on for a very long time.

The specificities of each group are made, on principle, more important than what is common to all of them. That is sectarianism. The silence of all three conferences is the clearest demonstra­tion of how sectarianism leads to impotence. (In all three, the PCInt, followed by the CWO, refused to produce any common declaration, despite the ICC's insistence[2].)

Conferences aren't a boxing-match

Select. Select. That was the only function which the PCInt and the CWO saw in the conferences.

But how to explain to a sect that it must consider the possibility that ... perhaps ... it could be wrong? How to get the sectarians to understand that in today's conditions it's an absurdity to say, that it's these conferences that will select the groups meant to construct the party of tomorrow?

Certainly in the revolutionary process, selection will take place among groups claiming to be part of the workers' movement. But such a selection arises out of the practice of the class or in rel­ation to world wars, not as a result of discussion conducted behind closed doors. Even a split as important as the one which took place between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks wasn't concretized until the outbreak of war in 1914 and the struggle of 1917.

This is why to begin with, it is necessary not to over-estimate the capacity of ‘self-selection' through simple debate, or through conferences. Secondly, in today's conditions, debates between revolutionaries are far from the point where the questions under debate could be said to have been resolved in common. At the moment, the framework within which a debate can begin to take place in an effective and useful way for the working class has scarcely been created. Selection - speak of that at the required time.

Conclude a debate which hasn't happened?

Either out of impatience or fear, the PCInt and the CWO refused to continue to the end the debate on the problem of the party. This question is one of the most serious and most important ques­tions confronting revolutionaries today, particu­larly in regard to their appreciation of the practice of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution (the repression of the workers' coun­cils, of Kronstadt, the thousands of deaths orde­red by the Bolshevik Party at the head of the state and the army). The debate on this question has never yet been seriously approached.

However, that didn't prevent the PCInt and the CWO from quite inexplicably deciding, one fine day, to declare the question closed, thus dislo­cating the conferences. They had suddenly dis­covered that they didn't agree with the ‘spontaneists' of the ICC.

Independently of the fact that neither the PCInt nor the CWO know what it means to say that a group is ‘spontaneist' (all they know is that ‘spontaneism' is something different from what they themselves think), it is at least inconsis­tent to declare a debate closed when it has never taken place, especially if the question is con­sidered to be of the greatest importance and if this is used as a justification for remaining silent regarding the danger of world war. The seriousness of the question must make the neces­sity of discussing it that much more important.

The necessity for organized debate among revolutionaries

This debate must take place. Perhaps we will not succeed in resolving it before a new revolutionary wave of the scope of 1917-23 comes and decides the question in practice. But at least we'll reach the decisive battles with the problems correctly posed, with incomprehension and atti­tudes originating in the sect mentality swept to one side.

In relation to the role of the revolutionary van­guard, the period of struggle between 1917 and 1923 posed more questions than it answered. From the impotence of the newly-created German Commu­nist Party in January 1919 to the bloody repres­sion of Kronstadt by the Bolsheviks in 1921, the experience of the years of failed insurrection has shown us more what shouldn't be done, rather than what should. But still it's necessary to know what those years have shown us and what we can deduce from the experience. This debate isn't new. It has existed in its preliminary stages since the first Congresses of the Communist International. But inevitably, it is this debate which revolutionaries must take up again today in a serious, open, responsible, consistent way, in the face of the working class and all the new revolutionary groups which are developing, and are going to develop everywhere in the world. To consider this debate closed, finished, doesn't merely mean ignoring the meaning of the word ‘debate'; worse still it means running away from the historical responsibility placed on a revolu­tionary organization (even if this could seem an exaggerated contention in relation to some sects).

To refuse to conduct this debate within the frame­work of a conference of revolutionary groups is to refuse to conduct it in the only serious way that could allow it to progress[3].

Those who run away from this debate are really fleeing from the necessities facing the present-day revolutionary movement, such as it actually exists, in order to take refuge within their hard-and-fast, bookish certainties. Whether revolutio­naries today prepare for it or not, this debate will take place within the class in future struggles, in the full glare of all the problems the class will encounter then. But those who refuse to clarify this question today, within an organized framework of discussion, will ensure that it is taken up by the class in the worst of conditions. And this is the case for the super-partyists of Communist Program (the International Communist Party (PCI)), the ‘anti-party builders' of the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste), as much as the ‘non-opportunists' of the PCInt or the CWO.

How to express the tendency for the class                   

The tendency towards unification conforms to the nature of the proletariat as a class. The tendency for revolutionary organizations to unify is a manifestation of this. Like the class whose cause they have adopted, revolutionary organizations aren't divided by material interests. Con­trary to the political organizations of the bourgeoisie, which incarnate and reflect the material interests of different factions of the exploiting class, revolutionary organizations express - above all else - the need for the conscious uni­fication of the class. Revolutionaries debate and often have differences over how to effect this unity, but all their efforts must be given to trying to attain it. To be on a par with their class means that revolutionaries must be capable, first and foremost, of expressing the proletarian tendency towards unity, a tendency which makes their class the bearer of what Marx termed "the human community".

A dialogue of the deaf?

For a sect, dialogues with others obviously have no purpose. "We don't agree! We don't agree! We're not going to be convinced!" Why can't revolutionary organizations convince other revo­lutionary organizations through debate? They can, because it's only the sects who refuse to question their own certitudes[4].

How did all the revolutionary regroupments of the past come about if it's impossible for anyone to convince anyone else through debate? For the sect, to be convinced by another organization never leads to a new clarity. Debate, for the ‘programmists', is a matter of "fucking or being fucked" (as an article published in Programma Comunista put it). For the CWO and the GCI (Groupe Communiste Internationaliste), if you're convinced in a debate that means you've fallen victim to the imperialism of another group. In both cases, it's the worst evil that could happen[5]. Something reserved for other groups, but never for one's own. That is the sect spirit.

Certainly debate is difficult. It is very possi­ble, as we said above, that revolutionaries will not succeed in deciding these debates in the absence of great movements of the mass of the working class. But:

1. The fact that the task is difficult isn't an argument against attempting it.

2. Since 1968, new class practice has resurged throughout the entire world - from the USA to Korea, from Gdansk or Togliattigrad to São Paolo. This has created the basis for new reflection within the class and has faced revolutionary min­orities with their responsibilities.

There's nobody deafer than those who don't want to hear. Let us hope that revolutionaries will not wait too much longer before they begin to hear the powerful sound of rumbling within the class, which is even now preparing the historical transformations of the future.

What the future conferences must be

A Point of Reference

The 1980s will see an unprecedented development of the class struggle under the pressure of the economic crisis. The evident bankruptcy of capitalism, the murderous impasse into which it will lead humanity if the working class doesn't react, makes - and will make - the proletarian revolutionary goal appear less and less as a utopian dream, and more and more as the only way of responding to the world holocaust which the survival of the system of exploitation carries within it.

The development of proletarian struggles is, and will be, accompanied more and more by the upsurge of new elements, circles, revolutionary organizations. These new forces, in seeking to become active and effective factors in the international struggle of the proletariat, are - and will rapidly be - confronted with the necessity of re-appropriating the lessons coming from the past experience of the world proletarian struggle. Whether for good or ill, it is the revolutionary groups whose existence has preceded the growth of these new forces of the class which have sought to define these lessons and have taken up the teachings of the past international workers' movement. Also, it is towards these organizations that the new elements will inevitably turn, sooner or later, in order to try to arm themselves with the fundamental gains of past experience in the wor­kers' movement. One of the most important func­tions of the International Conferences is that of allowing these new forces of the class to find a framework where the task of re-appropriating past lessons can begin to be realized in the best possible conditions. This framework is a frame­work of open, responsible confrontation of positions between organizations situated on the revo­lutionary terrain, a debate linked to the struggles of the class which are actually taking place.

The echo which the three conferences of the groups of the communist left provoked, the interest raised by this experience in the US, in Algeria, Italy, Columbia... demonstrated, above and be­yond the enormous insufficiencies of the confer­ences themselves, that this type of work responds to a real necessity in the revolutionary movement. That is why the continuation of this work consti­tutes, today, one of the first-ranking responsi­bilities in the intervention of revolutionary groups.

Criteria for serious participation in the Conferences

In order for the conferences to fulfill this func­tion they must be organized around precise criteria determining participation, which will permit the best possible delimitation of a class terrain. These criteria can't be the result of a ‘brain­storm' on the part of a few organizations. Contrary to the initial idea of refusing to establish criteria, an idea put forward by the PCInt at the time of the preparation for the First Conference, the ICC has always defended:

1. The necessity for criteria.
2. The idea that the criteria had to respond to two requirements. On the one hand they had to take into account the principal gains coming from the last, international organization of the pro­letariat, which was an expression of the last wave of international revolutionary struggle between 1917-23, in other words the first two Congresses of the IIIrd International. On the other hand, the criteria had to be based on the principal lessons appearing as a result of the experience of World War II: the capitalist nature of the USSR and all the so-called ‘socialist' states, even those in the process of being labe­led as such, the capitalist nature of all organizations from the Communist Parties to the Socia­list Parties and including the Trotskyists, which ‘defend' such states.

The criteria of participation defined by the three conferences constitute, in this sense, a solid base for the future (apart from a few minor reformulations such as replacing the term "science of the proletariat" when speaking of Marxism, with that of "the theory of the proletariat"[6]).

Since the time of the IIIrd International, the important debates which had begun to unfold within it, particularly those between the Bolshe­viks and the different ‘Lefts' from Western Europe, have been illuminated by more than sixty years of critical experience for the class. Ques­tions such as those connected to the Party and its role, the nature of the unions in capitalism after World War I, the nature of ‘national liber­ation struggles', ‘revolutionary parliamentarism' and the tactic of the ‘united front', etc, have not lost any of their significance since then, It's not an accident that these are the questions which still divide revolutionary groups today.

But their importance and their seriousness only make more urgent and more inevitable the organized confrontation of revolutionary positions. The seriousness of the debate doesn't constitute an impediment to it taking place as the CWO and the PCInt (suddenly a ferocious partisan of ‘new cri­teria for selection') pretend. In this sense to close the conferences to groups holding divergent positions on these questions could constitute, in the present state of the movement, condemning the conferences to impotence. It would also mean transforming the conferences, very quickly, into a new form of ‘sect'.

The conferences don't represent regroupment in itself. They provide a framework; they are an instrument in the more overall and more general process of revolutionary regroupment. It's only by considering them as such that they can fulfill their function, not by precipitously searching to transform them into a new, definitive, politi­cal organization[7].

However, experience has proven - especially at the Third Conference - that general political princi­ples don't constitute, in themselves, sufficient criteria. The next conferences must demand from their participants a real conviction in the use­fulness and seriousness of the conferences, and hence how they should be conducted. Groups like the GCI participated in the Third Conference only to denounce it, and to use it as a ‘fishing ground' for recruitment. Such groups will have no place in future conferences.

The most obvious condition for the effectiveness of collective work is that those who want to undertake it are convinced of the usefulness of its goal. That should be self-evident, but it will be necessary to make this explicit in pre­paring future conferences. To remain silent is for revolutionaries to deny their own existence. Communists have nothing to hide from their class. Before their class, the class whose vanguard they hope to be, communists must assume their acts and their convictions in a responsible manner. For this reason, future conferences must break with the ‘silence' of the three previous conferences. Future conferences must learn how to affirm clearly and explicitly in texts and short, precise resolutions - and not in hundreds of pages of written minutes - the results of their work, whether it's a question of illu­minating some divergences and what implications they bear, or whether it's a question of making clear the common positions shared by all the groups present.

The inability of the past conferences to put the real content of the divergences in black-and­white was one indication of their weakness. The self-righteous silence of the Third Conference on the question of the war is shameful. The next conferences must know how to assume their responsibilities, if they want to be viable.

Conclusion

The regroupment of revolutionaries is a necessity and a possibility which goes hand-in-hand with the movement towards the unification of the world working class.

Those who today remain prisoners of the sect spirit imposed by years of counter-revolution and atomization of the proletariat, who ignore the task demanded of revolutionaries, and whose credo begins with the words "We are the one and only ones" will be mercilessly judged by history as irresponsible, egocentric sects.

As for us, we remain convinced of the validity and the urgency of the work towards revolutionary regroupment, however long, painful and difficult this task may turn out to be. It is within this understanding that we will continue to act.

RV

[1] Organizations which participated at the Conference:

a. Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt which publish Battaglia Comunista)

b. The International Communist Current (ICC)

c. I Nuclei Leninisti (a fusion of the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and the Il Leninista)

d. Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI)

e. L'Eveil Internationaliste

f. The Communist Workers' Organization (CWO)

g. L'Organization Communiste Revolutionaire Internationaliste d'Algeria (the OCRIA which publishes Travailleurs Immigres en Lutte) sent written contributions.

h. The American group, Marxist Workers' Group, associated itself to the Conference and would have sent a delegate, but was prevented from doing so at the last minute.

[2] At the First Conference even refused to sign a declaration which tried to summarize the divergences.

[3] Nothing can replace organized oral debate concerning the present problems of the class struggle.

[4] It wasn't out of flippancy that Marx said that his personal motto was "Doubt everything". This was someone who never ceased throughout his life to combat the sect spirit in the workers' movement.

[5] Do these groups think that the Left Fractions of the IInd International, which were convinced by the arguments of Luxemburg, Lenin, Pannekoek and Trotsky to conduct the most intransigent struggle against the rottenness of Social Democracy, were victims?

[6] The criteria defined at the Second Conference determining participation in the international conferences were as follows:

• the recognition of the October Revolution as a proletarian revolution;
• the recognition of the split with Social Democracy, effected at the first and second Congresses of the Communist International;
• the unreserved rejection of state capitalism and self-management;
• the rejection of all the Communist and Socialist Parties as bourgeois parties;
• an orientation toward a revolutionary organization which refers itself to a Marxist doctrine and methodology as the science of the proletariat;
• a refusal to support the dragooning of the proletariat behind, in any form whatsoever, the banners of the bourgeoisie.

[7] The unfolding of the Conferences and their enlarging through the inclusion of other groups has not prevented regroupments from taking place among the participating organizations. Since the first conferences, the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and Il Leninista unified to form a single organization. Similarly, most of the elements which constituted the group For Kommunismen in Sweden, a group present at the Second Conference, have since constituted the section in Sweden of the ICC.

When society is in crisis, history seems to accel­erate. In a few weeks, events which, when they took place, shook you to the core, seem like small and distant ephemera. After two months, the Amer­ican raid on Iran of 24 April already seems to have been half-forgotten. However, the problems which it brought to light or underlined remain as important as ever:

-- the crucial role Iran plays in the strategic options of the US bloc;

-- the chaos which continues to reign in Iran: the inability of the legal authorities to solve the problem of the hostages is only one aspect of this chaos, which in turn expresses the general chaos the whole world is descending into;

-- the intensification of war preparations on the part of the imperialist blocs, notably the USA, whose raid on Iran had a significance that goes well beyond the events that are shaking that particular country: as a warning to the other bloc, as a way of tightening up the western bloc around its top nation, as a way of pursuing and intensifying the ideological barrage directed at the American population.

To the extent that it tries to shed light on these different problems, this statement adopted by the ICC following the American raid, retains its contemporary interest despite the fact that it is somewhat ‘dated' on certain events, notably concerning what is happening in Iran.

********************

With the US raid on 24 April into Iran, this country was once more placed at the centre of the international political game, as was the threat of world war. Leaving aside all the foggy camp­aigns put about by the bourgeoisie and its mass media, it is important that revolutionaries and the working class have a clear idea of:

-- the true objectives of the US bourgeoisie;

-- the situation which led to the event, both in Iran and internationally.

A. The US campaign in Iran wasn't a fiasco. On the contrary, it was a success. You could speak of a fiasco if the objectives envisaged hadn't been achieved, but they were. These objectives were the following:

1. To point out to the Iranian bourgeoisie that the US wasn't inclined to put up with the anarchy reigning in its country for a long time.

2. To point out to the other countries in the bloc that an active solidarity was expected from them, not only as regards Iran, but as regards all the problems which confront the USA and its bloc on the international scene.

3. To point out to Russia that faced with this country's attempt to profit from the situation in order to enlarge its zone of influence, the US was determined not to tolerate another Kabul.

4. To reactivate at home the campaign of ‘national solidarity' already put into gear by the ‘discovery' of Russian troops in Cuba and considerably broad­ened by the taking of the hostages in Tehran and the invasion of Afghanistan.

Clearly if the objective of the US had been to free the hostages, then one could speak of a fiasco. On the other hand if the objectives had been those listed above, then we must speak of a success:

-- the Iranian bourgeoisie hasn't profited in any way from the raid to strengthen its anti-American campaign; on the contrary, the moderation of its response, leaving aside the mistakes made by the most fanatical and stupid elements of the clergy, indicated that they had received the message;

-- the governments of the major countries of the US bloc have all, without fail, given support to Carter after the American operation: it is interesting to note that it was the only point of agreement coming out of the recent summit of EEC countries in Luxemburg;

-- Russia, too, has shown great moderation in its condemnation of American ‘intrigues', content­ing itself with denouncing Carter's irresponsi­bility, thus indicating that it had understood the warning which had been addressed to it;

-- a majority of the American population and the whole US political apparatus gave their support to Carter in spite of the official failure of the operation.

B. What are the reasons that make it necessary to consider these as the main objectives of the US bourgeoisie?

1. Iran constitutes an essential part of the strategic apparatus of the US bloc. First of all its importance as a producer of oil, one of the crucial factors of modern war, goes without saying. But it isn't the essential reason for its importance. The US bloc has considerable oil stocks at its disposal in Mexico, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Iraq (without taking into account that the Iranian oil-fields could, if necessary, be kept for the west by the intervention of Iraq). In fact, more important is the geographic position of this country:

-- which controls the Straits of Hormuz, the route for oil tankers;

-- which has a border of several thousand kilometers with Russia;

-- which constitutes an obstacle against Russia's progression towards the ‘warm seas', towards which taking control of Afghanistan was an important step.

All this gives Iran an exceptional importance to the US bloc and was the motive for providing it, at the time of the Shah, with one of the most powerful armies in the world.

The most important sectors of the Iranian bour­geoisie have always been conscious of this fact and of the interest they have in keeping their country within the US bloc rather than letting it become a satellite of Russia. Even at the most intense moments of anti-Americanism over these last months, the Iranian bourgeoisie hasn't given rise to any major political force favoring the Russian bloc. That is why the events in Iran and the conflict between this country and the US haven't constituted at any time an expression of the conflict between the major blocs; they have always been an internal affair of the US bloc. That, above all, is why the US hasn't inter­vened militarily up to now, preferring to make the greatest effort to take things in hand in a gradual, and therefore, more effective manner.

However, Iran can only assume its role as an essential pawn of America if it maintains a mini­mum of internal stability and a strong political power: its incapacity to play its role as police­man of the region was certainly not ignored in Russia's decision to invade Afghanistan.

But, since the fall of the Shah more than a year ago, Iran has been in a state of anarchy; since that date, it hasn't found any political force within it to take the situation in hand, to constitute a real power. Moreover it was because the US foresaw such a situation -- and not through blindness -- that it supported, practically right up to the last minute, a regime which was unanimously hated. Successively, Bakhtiar and then Bazargan failed in their attempts to put the country into order by taking into account both the national capital and the US bloc. In fact, the considerable weakening of the army because of is too-close ties with the Shah's regime -- the army being in general the only force that can exercise power in an underdeveloped country deprived Iranian capital of a political alterna­tive. The Church has played its role as a force of mystification very well, but hasn't the competence to assume political power.

Me taking of the Tehran hostages:

-- by reforging a national unity badly threat­ened by nationalist revolts and class struggle,

-- by pointing out the impasse into which the most backward and fanatical sectors of the ruling class had dragged the country, and thus isolating them, could have marked the beginning of the situation being taken in hand to the benefit of the US. Bani-Sadr, representing after Bakhtiar and Bazargan, the most modern and lucid sectors of the national bourgeoisie but playing to a larger ‘popular' audience than his predecessors, was able to regain some order for the Americans. His election to the Presidency of the Republic constituted the first step in such a process, but it quickly became apparent that he was incapable of exercising a real authority over the whole of the ruling class, above all over the ecclesiasti­cal sector. For the moment no real power exists in Iran: the legal, state apparatus is paralyzed as much by internal dissensions as by the actions of the numerous social and political forces which do not accept its authority:

-- the working class

-- national minorities

-- the Church

-- ‘Islamic' paramilitary forces (the ‘guardians the revolution') or the ‘Islamic' left (the modjahedin).

The working class has played a decisive role in the overthrow of the Shah's regime: it was its strikes in the Autumn of 1978 which by paralyzing the economic apparatus of the country gave the signal that it was time for the last forces supporting the Shah (namely the USA) to ‘release' him. Since then the different governments which have succeeded each other to head the ‘Islamic Republic' has not really managed to control the working class.

In the same way, national minorities, the Baluchis, the Arabs and especially the Kurds, have profited from the upheavals in Tehran in order to secede. So far successive efforts by the army and the ‘guardians of the revolution' haven't managed to liquidate the secession, despite repeated massacres.

Faced with these two forces of disintegration in the country, Iranian capital has found active support in the Shi'ite church and the ‘guardians of the revolution', who have excelled themselves in repression. But at the same time these forces have profited from their role in this repression in order to act on their own account over and above the legal power, of which the army, despite its disorganization and its internal tensions, would seem to be the only pillar. These divisions between the different sectors of the political apparatus of the country, ideological and military, have only, at the end of the day, encouraged the revolts of the national minorities and the class struggle. Setting the country in order on behalf of the national capital and of the US bloc re­quires first of all setting this apparatus in order, and that finally has to take place around the army and the industrial bourgeoisie.

Thus the message the US sent to the Iranian bour­geoisie through their operation is clear: "put your house in order, or else we will come and do it". And it seems that this message has begun to be understood, notably by Khomeini who has just authorized Bani-Sadr to nominate a new mini­stry as well as to take supreme command of all the ‘forces of order' and control of all the means of information (even if at the same time he is continuing to put a spoke in the wheel with his slogan of "Vote Islam")[1]. Apparently weakened by the US raid, Bani-Sadr has come out, in fact, as one of its beneficiaries: that was one of the US' objectives.

2. Globally, since the beginning of the worsening of the economic contradictions of capitalism at the end of the sixties and of the worsening of inter-imperialist tensions which have come as a result of that, the US bloc has shown a good cohesion, tending to strengthen itself as the tensions became more sharp, and not to crumble, as some groups like the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste) thought. If it has appeared to hold within it different diplomatic or military orientations, this was a result of the fact that:

-- the existence of blocs doesn't eliminate antagonistic interests, above all commercial ones, between the countries which comprise a bloc;

-- it is often easier for the bloc to carry out certain tasks through apparently ‘independent' countries (for example, the military and diplom­atic interventions by France in Africa and the Middle East).

However, this ‘suppleness' of the US bloc, even though relative and limited, is less possible as inter-imperialist tensions worsen, with this exacerbation:

-- national interests must give way more and more to the general interests of the bloc, which to a large extent are identified with the national interests of the leader of the bloc. For example, the ‘bad temper' shown by some allies of the US when they saw that the US was in favor of oil price rises had to give way to a greater ‘discipline';

-- the use for the bloc of an apparent ‘inde­pendence' of some of its constituents, particu­larly effective on the diplomatic level, lessens and tends to become a handicap when the language of arms becomes necessary, to the degree that such an ‘independence' risks being seen, on the international level, as a lack of cohesion, a weakness of the bloc; on an internal level, such manifestations of ‘independence' can get in the way of the bloc's ideological campaigns.

This need for a greater cohesion of the bloc around its leader is necessitated by the new facts of the international situation, but wasn't, as far as the US was concerned, sufficiently perceived by all its allies, especially those who had to be coaxed into associating themselves with the commercial restrictions towards Russia and the boycott of the Olympic Games. This has been confirmed with the fracas of the American raid of 24 April. This operation underlined and concretized the determination of the US to assure a greater solidarity on the part of its allies, a determination which was expressed by Carter's declarations to four European television networks on 13 April. These were received with reticence by some European countries. The operation on 24 April, which contradicted America's assurance that it would not intervene militarily before mid-May, forced the allies up against the wall: on 28 April, at the Luxemburg summit, the nine "reaffirmed their solidarity with the government and the people of the United States". The second objective of the American raid was achieved.

3. When Russia invaded Afghanistan, it did so with the certainty that it wouldn't come up against the armed forces of the western bloc, a certainty which was above all based on the fact that the local policeman of this bloc, Iran, was paralyzed by internal convulsions. The US was obliged to place Afghanistan in the ‘losses' col­umn of their balance-sheet but it was very impor­tant that this misadventure wasn't repeated. They had, therefore, to point out very clearly to Russia that they were also capable of carrying out military actions outside their borders, a thing they haven't done since the Vietnam war. In particular, they had to warn Russia very clearly that they wouldn't accept Russia abandon­ing the prudence it had shown up to now regarding Iran, and use the instability of this country to advance its own pawns. And this warning if it was to be taken seriously, had to be emphasized by a concrete demonstration of American determina­tion: the intervention in Iran equally fulfilled this function. When on 9 May, Carter recalled his words of 23 January: "Any external attempt to take control of the area of the Gulf would be considered as an attack against the vital inter­ests of the US and would be answered by any means, including arms" he was better placed to point out that his determination wasn't only verbal, that it wasn't a matter of impulse, but of a deliberate and resolute political and military choice.

4. Since November 1979, the American population has been subjected to a daily torrent of propa­ganda designed to prepare it for the military needs of its bourgeoisie, and in particular for the idea of a foreign intervention, an idea which has not been very popular since the Vietnam war. On the whole this operation has born fruit, but there were some discords when it came to playing the symphony composed by the maestro Carter:

-- reactions against registration for the draft;

-- persistence of workers' strikes.

In reality, the intensive propaganda put out by the whole media can't be effectively kept up for long, just as it can't make people permanently forget the harsh consequences of the crisis which is hitting the working class. However, the bour­geoisie will continue to relaunch these campaigns at regular intervals whenever there is a specta­cular event.

After the hostages affair the American bourgeoisie exploited the invasion of Afghanistan up to the hilt (even if the importance of the stakes of this latter event goes much further than a simple ideological campaign) and deliberately cultivated anti-Russian feeling, notably through going on about the Olympic Games. But it was useful to flesh out this bellicose campaign by adding ‘deeds to words'. The American raid on Iran was advantageous in three ways:

-- to satisfy the sectors of the population who were demanding that ‘something be tried' to free the hostages;

-- to test how much the population would accept the idea of a foreign intervention;

-- to prepare the population not only in words but in practice for future, more important, interventions.

Although this operation looked like a pitiful fiasco, one can't hide from the fact that the principle behind it has, in the main, received the approval of the US population. Besides, this operation has provided the occasion to demonstrate and further strengthen the unity which exists within the US bourgeoisie on the problems of foreign policy. For example, none of Carter's presidential competitors have tried to gain from the ‘fiasco' by attacking it. On the contrary, we have seen a wonderful unanimity. So we should not see Cyrus Vance's resignation as a manifestation of political crisis. In reality, it is to do with the rigidity of US foreign policy as it moves towards a more and more bellicose and military orientation which isn't put into question by any major sector of the bourgeoisie. Vance, who is a certain type of political man, of a more diplomatic make-up couldn't personally carry that policy out.

C. In relation to the objectives which appear to be essential for the US and its bloc, the US raid of 24 April would therefore seem to be a remarkable success. However this operation is presented, almost unanimously as a ‘fiasco' to the extent that:

1. It didn't achieve its official objective: the freeing of the hostages.

2. It displays a weakness of the US army, both in its equipment and in its personnel, which affects the credibility of US military might in the eyes of the world.

3. It reinforces the image of Carter as a ‘loser', and this puts his re-election at risk.

1. It must be said that the US bourgeoisie cares nothing for the fate of the fifty hostages. On the contrary, up until now the taking of the hostages has served its purposes admirably (cf International Review, nos.20 & 21). For it, the question of the restitution of the hostages (in­sofar as it is at all interested) has the unique value of indicating the capacity of the official Iranian government to take control of the situa­tion and of its policies towards the US: the day the hostages are returned, it would mean that the US could once more count on Iran as a part of its military game. In this sense, the free­ing by force of the hostages would not only have deprived it of one of its most useful themes in its ideological campaign, it would equally have deprived the US government of this indicator. Further, if the expedition had reached Tehran, it would only have been able to free the hostages (those that were still alive that is) at the cost of a murderous slaughter, in particular of Iran­ians; and this wouldn't have made the regulation of the contentious relations between the US and Iran any easier. In any case, Carter in his spectacular declaration announcing the ‘failure' of the operation was insistent that Iranian blood would not have been spilt and that the intention of the operation was ‘simply humanita­rian' and not aggressive towards Iran: the door .was thus left open for an amicable solution to the conflict. Thus the ‘failure' of the US raid was more profitable regarding the regaining of control over Iran by the US, than any ‘success' would have been.

2. Regarding the present ideological campaign of the US bloc, the ‘failure' of the raid was a very positive element: it totally reinforced the false argument that says that the US bloc is weaker than the Russian bloc. To feed a myth there must be a semblance of reality in it: on this level the US ‘fiasco' was a wonderful success. As for the ideas which the governments of the major countries of the world (allies as well as enemies) may form of the real power of the US, they are based on more serious elements than this event.

Thus even where it would appear as a failure, the operation mounted by the US government can be shown to be a success: even if one must be sus­picious of a too Machiavellian interpretation of the gestures and deeds of the bourgeoisie, one can still say that the whole operation, which has been described as a failure, looks very much like a gigantic stage production. This is corro­borated by:

-- the unconvincing nature of technical explana­tions for the ‘failure',knowing as we do the deg­ree of perfection in American armaments;

-- the spectacular and dramatic aspect of the announcement of this ‘failure'.

As for the argument about Carter's image as a ‘loser', the facts don't bear it out:

-- in the first place, this image doesn't seem to have been really affected by this ‘fiasco', nor even have his chances of re-election;

-- in the second place, such an argument spreads the illusion that the policies of the bourgeoisie are still influenced by universal suffrage: when the US bourgeoisie decided to withdraw from Vietnam, it cheerfully sacrificed Johnson's re-election in 1968.

In fact, the US bourgeoisie is already familiar with this kind of ‘catastrophe' which is turned into a success. Just as it has been established that Roosevelt wanted the destruction of the US fleet in the Pacific in 1941 in order to entice the population and reticent sectors of the bourgeoisie into the war against Japan, perhaps one day we will learn that Jimmy Carter's little ‘Pearl Harbor' was a trick.

Whatever the degree of authenticity of the US operation on Iran, it is important to underline that it reveals the following facts about the present international situation:

-- a very clear new sharpening of the bellicose orientation of American politics: if Carter was shown from the very beginning as the man for preparing for war with his ‘preachings' and ‘human rights', today he has amply confirmed this orientation; from now on Russia will no longer have the quasi-monopoly of military expeditions. After having essentially based itself on its economic power, US imperialism will more and more base itself on its military power;

-- a further worsening of inter-imperialist tensions (even if Iran isn't today a direct focus for them) .

More than ever revolutionaries must highlight and denounce these war preparations and make it an element of propaganda in their task of participa­ting in the development of class consciousness.

ICC 6.5.80

[1] The recent freeing by the British SAS of the Iranian diplomats taken hostage in their Embassy in London, which got the British government the thanks of Bani-Sadr, constitutes the ‘positive' aspect of this message, an expression of the ‘good will' of the western bloc.

Sectarianism, an inheritance from the counter-revolution that must be transcended

The Third Conference of left communist groups ended up dislocated. Two of the principal groups to have animated previous conferences (the Inter­nationalist Communist Party (Italy) and the Communist Workers' Organization (Great Britain)) made their participation in future Conferences dependent on the closing of the debate on the role of the revolutionary party[1]. The ICC rejected this condition.

For almost four years a number of revolutionary groups have tried to create a framework to facili­tate the regroupment of political organizations of the proletariat. Given the present situation, this effort can be summed up in two phrases:

• there will certainly be no more conferences like the three which have already taken place;
• in order to be viable, the new conferences must: 1. shake off the remains of sectarianism which still weigh heavily on certain groups; 2. be politically responsible.

Readers interested in the detailed unfolding of debate at the Third Conference will be able to read the minutes which will be published shortly. What we would like to do here is to draw the les­sons of the experience coming from the first three conferences.

These four years of strenuous effort "to regroup revolutionaries" have constituted the most ser­ious attempt since 1968 to break down the isola­tion and division among revolutionary groups. Despite the gigantic weaknesses of the confer­ences, it is only by drawing out all the lessons contained in them that the general work of revo­lutionary regroupment can be followed up.

To go forward, it is necessary to understand the reasons which led to the dislocation of the Third Conference and to define from that what is neces­sary in order for the next conferences to take place.

The weight of sectarianism

A debate took place at the Second Conference between the PCInt (Battaglia Comunista, as its newspaper is called) and the ICC, concerning the sectarian attitude of those revolutionary groups which had refused to participate in the interna­tional conferences. The PCInt rejected the reso­lution, affirming - among other things - that the refusal by groups to participate wasn't a question of sectarianism, but of political divergence. Battaglia stated that we were chasing after a phantom hobby-horse called sectarianism, instead of concerning ourselves with the real question of political divergence. Because the PCInt was, itself, in the act of mounting this particular steed, it didn't see the need to corral it. Sectarianism does exist. It isn't a phantom. We've met it - throughout the work of these conferences.

What is sectarianism?

Sectarianism is the spirit of the sect, the spirit of the religious splinter group. In the religi­ous world, the question of knowing what's true and what isn't is posed as a pure confrontation of ideas in the ethereal realm of abstract thought.

Since reality, the material practice of living mortals, is never considered to be superior to the sacred texts and their divine interpretation, and is never allowed to resolve debate; each sect - pitted against the others - is faced with only two possibilities. Either it can renounce its divergences and disappear as a separate entity or it can continue to live on its own, eternally isolated from, and opposed to, all the other ‘rival' sects.

Since social and material practice is not permit­ted to determine the truth, each isolated sect, inevitably cut off from all the others, must lov­ingly cultivate within its own pristine cell, its own truth.

In speaking of sects in the workers' movement, Engels said that what essentially characterized their existence was that they always gave pride of place to what differentiated them from the rest of the movement. And certainly it is this, the major expression of the sectarian disease, which isol­ates its victims from reality.

No matter what problem confronts them, sects are concerned with only one thing: how to establish what distinguishes them from the rest of the movement, while ignoring or condemning what they have in common with it. Their fear of openly recognizing what they share with the movement as a whole springs from their fear of disappearing. This caricatural manifestation of sectarianism hamstrung the work of all three conferences of the left communist groups, and finally led to the utter dislocation of the Third.

"No common declarations?"

The Third Conference opened in May 1980 amid events dominated by the menace of a third world war. All the contributions prepared for the Conference by the participating groups had under­lined the seriousness of the situation, and had affirmed the position of the working class confr­onted with the danger of war: a third world war would have the same nature as the two previous world wars, ie imperialist; the world working class had nothing to defend in any bloc; the only effective struggle against war would be the struggle of the proletariat against world capitalism.

The ICC asked the Conference as a whole to take up a position on this question and proposed a resolution for discussion and amendment, if that proved necessary, which would affirm the position of revolutionaries faced with war.

The PCInt refused to sign it, and the CWO and L'Eveil Internationaliste followed suit. The Conference remained silent. Given the criteria determining participation in the conferences, each of the groups present inevitably shared the same basic positions on what attitude the prole­tariat must have in the event of world conflict or the menace of war. But the partisans of silence told us: "Watch it. As for us, we're not about to sign anything with just anyone. We're not opportunists." And we replied to them: "Opportu­nism is the betrayal of principles at the first opportunity. What we are proposing isn't the betrayal of a principle, but the affirmation of that self-same principle with all of our strength". The principle of internationalism is one of the highest and most important principles of the proletarian struggle. Whatever other divergences may separate the internationalist groups, few political organizations in the world defend it in a consistent way. Their conference should have spoken about the war and in the loudest possible voice.

Instead of that the conference said nothing ... "because divergences exist on what will be the role of the revolutionary party tomorrow". The content of this brilliant, ‘non-opportunist' logic is the following: if revolutionary organi­zations can't succeed in agreeing on all questions, then they must not mention those positions which they do agree on and have agreed on for a very long time.

The specificities of each group are made, on principle, more important than what is common to all of them. That is sectarianism. The silence of all three conferences is the clearest demonstra­tion of how sectarianism leads to impotence. (In all three, the PCInt, followed by the CWO, refused to produce any common declaration, despite the ICC's insistence[2].)

Conferences aren't a boxing-match

Select. Select. That was the only function which the PCInt and the CWO saw in the conferences.

But how to explain to a sect that it must consider the possibility that ... perhaps ... it could be wrong? How to get the sectarians to understand that in today's conditions it's an absurdity to say, that it's these conferences that will select the groups meant to construct the party of tomorrow?

Certainly in the revolutionary process, selection will take place among groups claiming to be part of the workers' movement. But such a selection arises out of the practice of the class or in rel­ation to world wars, not as a result of discussion conducted behind closed doors. Even a split as important as the one which took place between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks wasn't concretized until the outbreak of war in 1914 and the struggle of 1917.

This is why to begin with, it is necessary not to over-estimate the capacity of ‘self-selection' through simple debate, or through conferences. Secondly, in today's conditions, debates between revolutionaries are far from the point where the questions under debate could be said to have been resolved in common. At the moment, the framework within which a debate can begin to take place in an effective and useful way for the working class has scarcely been created. Selection - speak of that at the required time.

Conclude a debate which hasn't happened?

Either out of impatience or fear, the PCInt and the CWO refused to continue to the end the debate on the problem of the party. This question is one of the most serious and most important ques­tions confronting revolutionaries today, particu­larly in regard to their appreciation of the practice of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution (the repression of the workers' coun­cils, of Kronstadt, the thousands of deaths orde­red by the Bolshevik Party at the head of the state and the army). The debate on this question has never yet been seriously approached.

However, that didn't prevent the PCInt and the CWO from quite inexplicably deciding, one fine day, to declare the question closed, thus dislo­cating the conferences. They had suddenly dis­covered that they didn't agree with the ‘spontaneists' of the ICC.

Independently of the fact that neither the PCInt nor the CWO know what it means to say that a group is ‘spontaneist' (all they know is that ‘spontaneism' is something different from what they themselves think), it is at least inconsis­tent to declare a debate closed when it has never taken place, especially if the question is con­sidered to be of the greatest importance and if this is used as a justification for remaining silent regarding the danger of world war. The seriousness of the question must make the neces­sity of discussing it that much more important.

The necessity for organized debate among revolutionaries

This debate must take place. Perhaps we will not succeed in resolving it before a new revolutionary wave of the scope of 1917-23 comes and decides the question in practice. But at least we'll reach the decisive battles with the problems correctly posed, with incomprehension and atti­tudes originating in the sect mentality swept to one side.

In relation to the role of the revolutionary van­guard, the period of struggle between 1917 and 1923 posed more questions than it answered. From the impotence of the newly-created German Commu­nist Party in January 1919 to the bloody repres­sion of Kronstadt by the Bolsheviks in 1921, the experience of the years of failed insurrection has shown us more what shouldn't be done, rather than what should. But still it's necessary to know what those years have shown us and what we can deduce from the experience. This debate isn't new. It has existed in its preliminary stages since the first Congresses of the Communist International. But inevitably, it is this debate which revolutionaries must take up again today in a serious, open, responsible, consistent way, in the face of the working class and all the new revolutionary groups which are developing, and are going to develop everywhere in the world. To consider this debate closed, finished, doesn't merely mean ignoring the meaning of the word ‘debate'; worse still it means running away from the historical responsibility placed on a revolu­tionary organization (even if this could seem an exaggerated contention in relation to some sects).

To refuse to conduct this debate within the frame­work of a conference of revolutionary groups is to refuse to conduct it in the only serious way that could allow it to progress[3].

Those who run away from this debate are really fleeing from the necessities facing the present-day revolutionary movement, such as it actually exists, in order to take refuge within their hard-and-fast, bookish certainties. Whether revolutio­naries today prepare for it or not, this debate will take place within the class in future struggles, in the full glare of all the problems the class will encounter then. But those who refuse to clarify this question today, within an organized framework of discussion, will ensure that it is taken up by the class in the worst of conditions. And this is the case for the super-partyists of Communist Program (the International Communist Party (PCI)), the ‘anti-party builders' of the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste), as much as the ‘non-opportunists' of the PCInt or the CWO.

How to express the tendency for the class

The tendency towards unification conforms to the nature of the proletariat as a class. The tendency for revolutionary organizations to unify is a manifestation of this. Like the class whose cause they have adopted, revolutionary organizations aren't divided by material interests. Con­trary to the political organizations of the bourgeoisie, which incarnate and reflect the material interests of different factions of the exploiting class, revolutionary organizations express - above all else - the need for the conscious uni­fication of the class. Revolutionaries debate and often have differences over how to effect this unity, but all their efforts must be given to trying to attain it. To be on a par with their class means that revolutionaries must be capable, first and foremost, of expressing the proletarian tendency towards unity, a tendency which makes their class the bearer of what Marx termed "the human community".

A dialogue of the deaf?

For a sect, dialogues with others obviously have no purpose. "We don't agree! We don't agree! We're not going to be convinced!" Why can't revolutionary organizations convince other revo­lutionary organizations through debate? They can, because it's only the sects who refuse to question their own certitudes[4].

How did all the revolutionary regroupments of the past come about if it's impossible for anyone to convince anyone else through debate? For the sect, to be convinced by another organization never leads to a new clarity. Debate, for the ‘programmists', is a matter of "fucking or being fucked" (as an article published in Programma Comunista put it). For the CWO and the GCI (Groupe Communiste Internationaliste), if you're convinced in a debate that means you've fallen victim to the imperialism of another group. In both cases, it's the worst evil that could happen[5]. Something reserved for other groups, but never for one's own. That is the sect spirit.

Certainly debate is difficult. It is very possi­ble, as we said above, that revolutionaries will not succeed in deciding these debates in the absence of great movements of the mass of the working class. But:

1. The fact that the task is difficult isn't an argument against attempting it.
2. Since 1968, new class practice has resurged throughout the entire world - from the USA to Korea, from Gdansk or Togliattigrad to São Paolo. This has created the basis for new reflection within the class and has faced revolutionary min­orities with their responsibilities.

There's nobody deafer than those who don't want to hear. Let us hope that revolutionaries will not wait too much longer before they begin to hear the powerful sound of rumbling within the class, which is even now preparing the historical transformations of the future.

What the future conferences must be

A Point of Reference

The 1980s will see an unprecedented development of the class struggle under the pressure of the economic crisis. The evident bankruptcy of capitalism, the murderous impasse into which it will lead humanity if the working class doesn't react, makes - and will make - the proletarian revolutionary goal appear less and less as a utopian dream, and more and more as the only way of responding to the world holocaust which the survival of the system of exploitation carries within it.

The development of proletarian struggles is, and will be, accompanied more and more by the upsurge of new elements, circles, revolutionary organizations. These new forces, in seeking to become active and effective factors in the international struggle of the proletariat, are - and will rapidly be - confronted with the necessity of re-appropriating the lessons coming from the past experience of the world proletarian struggle. Whether for good or ill, it is the revolutionary groups whose existence has preceded the growth of these new forces of the class which have sought to define these lessons and have taken up the teachings of the past international workers' movement. Also, it is towards these organizations that the new elements will inevitably turn, sooner or later, in order to try to arm themselves with the fundamental gains of past experience in the wor­kers' movement. One of the most important func­tions of the International Conferences is that of allowing these new forces of the class to find a framework where the task of re-appropriating past lessons can begin to be realized in the best possible conditions. This framework is a frame­work of open, responsible confrontation of positions between organizations situated on the revo­lutionary terrain, a debate linked to the struggles of the class which are actually taking place.

The echo which the three conferences of the groups of the communist left provoked, the interest raised by this experience in the US, in Algeria, Italy, Columbia... demonstrated, above and be­yond the enormous insufficiencies of the confer­ences themselves, that this type of work responds to a real necessity in the revolutionary movement. That is why the continuation of this work consti­tutes, today, one of the first-ranking responsi­bilities in the intervention of revolutionary groups.

Criteria for serious participation in the Conferences

In order for the conferences to fulfill this func­tion they must be organized around precise criteria determining participation, which will permit the best possible delimitation of a class terrain. These criteria can't be the result of a ‘brain­storm' on the part of a few organizations. Contrary to the initial idea of refusing to establish criteria, an idea put forward by the PCInt at the time of the preparation for the First Conference, the ICC has always defended:

1. The necessity for criteria.
2. The idea that the criteria had to respond to two requirements. On the one hand they had to take into account the principal gains coming from the last, international organization of the pro­letariat, which was an expression of the last wave of international revolutionary struggle between 1917-23, in other words the first two Congresses of the IIIrd International. On the other hand, the criteria had to be based on the principal lessons appearing as a result of the experience of World War II: the capitalist nature of the USSR and all the so-called ‘socialist' states, even those in the process of being labe­led as such, the capitalist nature of all organizations from the Communist Parties to the Socia­list Parties and including the Trotskyists, which ‘defend' such states.

The criteria of participation defined by the three conferences constitute, in this sense, a solid base for the future (apart from a few minor reformulations such as replacing the term "science of the proletariat" when speaking of Marxism, with that of "the theory of the proletariat"[6]).

Since the time of the IIIrd International, the important debates which had begun to unfold within it, particularly those between the Bolshe­viks and the different ‘Lefts' from Western Europe, have been illuminated by more than sixty years of critical experience for the class. Ques­tions such as those connected to the Party and its role, the nature of the unions in capitalism after World War I, the nature of ‘national liber­ation struggles', ‘revolutionary parliamentarism' and the tactic of the ‘united front', etc, have not lost any of their significance since then, It's not an accident that these are the questions which still divide revolutionary groups today.

But their importance and their seriousness only make more urgent and more inevitable the organized confrontation of revolutionary positions. The seriousness of the debate doesn't constitute an impediment to it taking place as the CWO and the PCInt (suddenly a ferocious partisan of ‘new cri­teria for selection') pretend. In this sense to close the conferences to groups holding divergent positions on these questions could constitute, in the present state of the movement, condemning the conferences to impotence. It would also mean transforming the conferences, very quickly, into a new form of ‘sect'.

The conferences don't represent regroupment in itself. They provide a framework; they are an instrument in the more overall and more general process of revolutionary regroupment. It's only by considering them as such that they can fulfill their function, not by precipitously searching to transform them into a new, definitive, politi­cal organization[7].

However, experience has proven - especially at the Third Conference - that general political princi­ples don't constitute, in themselves, sufficient criteria. The next conferences must demand from their participants a real conviction in the use­fulness and seriousness of the conferences, and hence how they should be conducted. Groups like the GCI participated in the Third Conference only to denounce it, and to use it as a ‘fishing ground' for recruitment. Such groups will have no place in future conferences.

The most obvious condition for the effectiveness of collective work is that those who want to undertake it are convinced of the usefulness of its goal. That should be self-evident, but it will be necessary to make this explicit in pre­paring future conferences. To remain silent is for revolutionaries to deny their own existence. Communists have nothing to hide from their class. Before their class, the class whose vanguard they hope to be, communists must assume their acts and their convictions in a responsible manner. For this reason, future conferences must break with the ‘silence' of the three previous conferences. Future conferences must learn how to affirm clearly and explicitly in texts and short, precise resolutions - and not in hundreds of pages of written minutes - the results of their work, whether it's a question of illu­minating some divergences and what implications they bear, or whether it's a question of making clear the common positions shared by all the groups present.

The inability of the past conferences to put the real content of the divergences in black-and­white was one indication of their weakness. The self-righteous silence of the Third Conference on the question of the war is shameful. The next conferences must know how to assume their responsibilities, if they want to be viable.

Conclusion

The regroupment of revolutionaries is a necessity and a possibility which goes hand-in-hand with the movement towards the unification of the world working class.

Those who today remain prisoners of the sect spirit imposed by years of counter-revolution and atomization of the proletariat, who ignore the task demanded of revolutionaries, and whose credo begins with the words "We are the one and only ones" will be mercilessly judged by history as irresponsible, egocentric sects.

As for us, we remain convinced of the validity and the urgency of the work towards revolutionary regroupment, however long, painful and difficult this task may turn out to be. It is within this understanding that we will continue to act.

RV

[1] Organizations which participated at the Conference:

• Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt which publish Battaglia Comunista)
• The International Communist Current (ICC)
• I Nuclei Leninisti (a fusion of the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and the Il Leninista)
• Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI)
• L'Eveil Internationaliste
• The Communist Workers' Organization (CWO)
• L'Organization Communiste Revolutionaire Internationaliste d'Algeria (the OCRIA which publishes Travailleurs Immigres en Lutte) sent written contributions.
• The American group, Marxist Workers' Group, associated itself to the Conference and would have sent a delegate, but was prevented from doing so at the last minute.

[2] At the First Conference even refused to sign a declaration which tried to summarize the divergences.

[3] Nothing can replace organized oral debate concerning the present problems of the class struggle.

[4] It wasn't out of flippancy that Marx said that his personal motto was "Doubt everything". This was someone who never ceased throughout his life to combat the sect spirit in the workers' movement.

[5] Do these groups think that the Left Fractions of the IInd International, which were convinced by the arguments of Luxemburg, Lenin, Pannekoek and Trotsky to conduct the most intransigent struggle against the rottenness of Social Democracy, were victims?

[6] The criteria defined at the Second Conference determining participation in the international conferences were as follows:

• the recognition of the October Revolution as a proletarian revolution;
• the recognition of the split with Social Democracy, effected at the first and second Congresses of the Communist International;
• the unreserved rejection of state capitalism and self-management;
• the rejection of all the Communist and Socialist Parties as bourgeois parties;
• an orientation toward a revolutionary organization which refers itself to a Marxist doctrine and methodology as the science of the proletariat;
• a refusal to support the dragooning of the proletariat behind, in any form whatsoever, the banners of the bourgeoisie.

[7] The unfolding of the Conferences and their enlarging through the inclusion of other groups has not prevented regroupments from taking place among the participating organizations. Since the first conferences, the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and Il Leninista unified to form a single organization. Similarly, most of the elements which constituted the group For Kommunismen in Sweden, a group present at the Second Conference, have since constituted the section in Sweden of the ICC.

The territory of the present day GDR was fear­fully decimated as a result of World War II; its cities reduced to rubble. Food supply, industry and transport had almost completely collapsed by the end of 1945. The Russian ‘liberators’ from Hitler’s fascism began in the Soviet Occupation Zone with the removal of industrial capacity to Russia, and the occupation of all key positions in the East German economy through Soviet Share­holding Companies. The USSR did not relax this iron grip over the East German economy until the early fifties. The industrial capacity of the Soviet Occupation Zone fell through the war and occupation to less than half the level of 1939.

However, the post war reconstruction followed with staggering speed. By 1959 the GDR had reached the ninth rung on the international ladder of indust­rial production. By 1969 the GDR with its 17 mill­ion inhabitants had achieved a higher industrial production than the German Reich of 1936 with its population of 60 million. Just as the ‘Economic Miracle’ of post war West Germany and other western countries became the basis for myths about the development of a crisis free capitalism, the ‘affluent society’ etc, so also was the post-1945 reconstruction boom in the GDR and other countries of the Eastern Bloc used as a proof of the socialist or non-capitalist nature of these economies. For Marxists of course, the ability to accumulate capital fast has never been a proof of socialism -- quite the contrary. Today the reappearance of the world wide economic crisis of capitalism is proving, if not to the Stalinists and Trotskyists, then certainly to the working class, the capitalist nature of the eastern bloc countries.

We have chosen to examine the unfolding of the crisis in East Germany for the following reasons:

-- because this is the most advanced national capital in the Eastern Bloc where the crisis is supposedly hardest to find

-- because, as we point out below, the Eastern Ger­man, along with the Czechoslovakian economy, is a cornerstone of the entire Russian war economy, so that the development of the crisis there is of particular significance

-- because the ability of the class struggle in Eastern Europe to bar the road to war, to throw a spanner in the war economy hinges upon the development of the crisis and of workers’ resistance in East Germany (and in Czechoslovakia). Nowhere in the Russian bloc is the working class so concentrated as in these countries. Moreover, the situation of these two countries bordering directly onto Western Europe, poses the possibility of spreading the struggle across the ‘Iron Curtain’.

For revolutionaries today it is no longer enough to know that there is a capitalist crisis in the countries of the East. More than that it is ess­ential that we understand:

-- the way in which the crisis deepens

-- the exact stage which the crisis has reached in the Russian bloc as a whole, and in each of the national capitals

-- the perspectives for its future development

-- the effects which the crisis is having and will have on

1) the unfolding political crisis of the bourgeoisie

2) the development of the class struggle of the proletariat

3) the behavior of the other social strata, and especially of the huge peasant masses.

The development of the crisis

The open world-wide death crisis of capitalism, in manifesting itself today in East Germany, imperils not only the political stability of the local bourgeoisie, but also the militaty preparedness of the Russian war machine. The GDR is not only the most important supplier of heavy industrial goods to the Russian war economy, it also acts as Moscow’s gendarme on the western frontiers of its bloc.

It is now admitted in East Berlin that the GDR, as much as any other major national capital today, is suffering from the effects of a slowing down of the growth rate of the economy. The high rates of expansion of the fifties and sixties are a thing of the past. This stagnation signifies that the phase of reconstruction following the Second World War is now being followed by general open crisis. The turning point came with the crisis years 1969 and 1970, during which pro­duction was badly interrupted by seizures in the economy. Through an even more energetic interven­tion of the state in the economy; conjunctural development and through the stimulation of exports, it was possible to overcome the bottle­necks and disequilibriums of those two years, and to reach an average expansion of the national income of around 5.5% over the next years. Despite this recovery, there was every sign that the general growth rate was slowing down, so that the 1976-80 5 Year Plan actually reckons from the beginning with a slowing of economic expansion. Already in 1971, and for the first time, less economic investment had been planned. What is certain is that the rate of growth of the national income in the course of the present 5 Year Plan has continually sunk.

“Already before the second oil crisis had taken effect (growth rates) had reached a level where the ‘Neues Deutschland’ now no longer wanted to publish figures on it any more. At best there could be a 4 before the comma, and even then only on paper.” (Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger, 21/22, July 1979).

The German Institute for Economic Research reckons with a yearly real reduction in the capital productivity of industry in the GDR of 1% “a scale which corresponds almost exactly to the West German one” (See DDR Wirtschaft, DIW). Apart from this, the Stalinist leaders are blaming their factory managers for the increasingly crass under-utilization of productive capacity. This is caused, not by lack of demand, but by the general and deteriorating economic chaos. Older machinery has to be put in mothballs because there isn’t enough capital available to modernize, to repair or to replace it. Repair services are hard to come by. In particular, there is a shortage of spare parts. The dominant shortage of capital is only exacerbated by the necessity to invest as much surplus value as possible in heavy industry, since this leads to a dramatic disequilibrium throughout the economy, to a deteriorating organ­ization of secondary production, to the turning out of faulty and often unusable end products, to a lessening of exports activity. What we are dealing with here are results of the well-known anarchy of capitalist production, of capitalist crisis.

This stagnation of the economy is reflected in the results of the 5 Year Plans. Efforts at expansion are being planned more and more modestly, and even then are not fulfilled. The present 5 Year Plan ending now was already doomed to failure some time ago. The gigantic control apparatus of the ‘planned economy’ is less and less able to master the chaos. During the year 1978, leading functionaries of the ruling party, the SED, including Honecker and Stoph, mentioned these problems during speeches on the economic situ­ation. The present 5 Year Plan, for example, is being hampered by misinvestment to the tune of billions of marks, it was admitted. Apart from that, the authorities are being forced to take up the fight against a growing black market, not only in consumer goods or the currency market (where the West German mark is now the second currency of the GDR -- some say the first), but also in raw materials and energy. The big state owned companies are engaged in the bitterest competition against each other for possession of these highly valued goods, and exchange or buy/sell raw materials and spare parts feverishly, in order to be able to meet their plan figures. This development is accompanied by massive investment outside the plan, the scale of which is becoming a major problem for the ‘planners’.

The post-war capitalist crisis of the world economy arrived unmistakably in the GDR at the end of the sixties. The massive state-directed expansion of heavy industry, in order to supply Russia with capital goods, led to an overexten­sion of capacities, to overinvestment in certain sectors; all in all to a seizure of the economy in face of a sharpened scarcity of capital. The supply of raw materials and manufactured goods from the neglected branches of industry did rise at a similar pace. There followed a spate of bottlenecks and a swift increase of debts abroad. The goals of the 5 Year Plan 1966-70 had to be reduced. The state intervened, replacing the famous New Economic System of the reconstruction period with a firmer state guidance of the economy.

Negative trade balance sheets in East and West

The GDR has always been known as a big exporter wit­hin Comecon, and achieved between 1960-73 an accumulated trade surplus of around 3% of total imports. During this period East Germany built up a trade surplus of 9% with Comecon and 23% with the West. This rosy balance sheet didn’t survive long under the hammer blows of the world crisis. In order to keep its own economy going, and in face of the growing total debts of the Comecon in the West (well over 50 billion dollars), the USSR was forced to shove the burden of the crisis onto the broader shoulders of its allies. In 1973 the USSR raised the prices of a whole series of its exports of raw materials and energy sources. These measures hit the GDR, which possesses very few raw materials of its own, particularly hard. The accumulated ttrade surplus of the GDR of 5.7 billion valuta mar marks for the period 1960-73 was followed in the two years 1974-75 alone, by a balance of trade deficit of 7.3 billion valuta marks. The export prices of the GDR rose from 1972 to 1975 by about a quarter. Up until the end of 1979, GDR owed West Germany alone 2.6 billion marks, itself only a portion of its sixteen billion mark debt in the West Der Spiegel notes that the GDR has even more debts in the west than Britain! (Spiegel, 16.1.78).

In face of these problems in the west, the p­ortion of foreign trade of the GDR taken by the other Comecon countries has risen to 73.5%. In particular, exchange between the GDR and the USSR has risen. This development is an essential factor in the strengthening of the Russian bloc against the west. Whereas trade between the USSR and the Western industrial countries has expanded at crawling pace, trade between the West and the other Comecon countries has tended to stagnate or even decline. The East European satellites, and especially East Germany, are being tied more firmly to the USSR.

East Berlin’s balance of trade with Russia is also causing worries. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei­tung observed “During 1977 a negative balance of trade of 3 billion Valutamark with the Soviet Union has arisen. With this, the GDR has achieved the relative and absolute highest negative trade figures of any country of the Eastern Bloc with the Soviet Union” (FAZ, 5.7.78). An additional difficulty for the East Germans is created by the competition of Western industrial powers, espec­ially West Germany, on the Russian market. In order to meet this challenge, East Berlin has for example been forced to buy steel and semi-manufa­ctured goods in the West, in order to fulfill its contracts with the Russians on time or at a comp­etitive quality.

What’s happened to the ‘economic miracle’?

The post-war boom was actually made possible by the destruction of World War II and the subsequent dismantling of industry. It became necessary to put the advanced infrastructure and the highly skilled and disciplined work force of East Germany to work in order to fortify the Russian bloc. New, more developed capital goods, esp­ecially from the advanced industrial and still intact Czechoslovakian economy, were delivered to the GDR, and were paid for through an unimaginable exploitation of the defeated and prostrate East German proletariat. In this way, East Germany acquired the most modern industrial foundation in the bloc, set in motion by a working class which would not until 1953 be in a position to resist the capitalist terror.

It was the economic weakness of the Russian bloc as a whole which created the necessity for nation­alizations across the board and state administrat­ion at every level of the economy. This brutal state capitalist control could help for a while in forcing the pace of reconstruction, without however resolving any of the contradictions of the system.

World Imperialism with its gas chambers and mass bombardments did German capitalism, in East and West, an unforgettable favor by slaughtering the unemployed and by liquidating a large portion of the petty bourgeoisie. Freed from these burdens, is it any wonder that capitalism in Germany would soon experience a new expan­sion?

In order to favor post-war economic development, the East German state moved against the remaining small farmers and small producers. Already the ‘Land Reform’ of September 1945 had expropriated all landowners who owned more than 100 hectares of land. The land was divided up among the poor farmers in such tiny uneconomic parcels that they were forced from the very beginning to join the state-led agricultural co-operatives. By 1960 there were hardly any independent farmers left. This crusade against the petty-bourgeoisie served not only to cheapen and rationalize the produc­tion of agricultural and manufactured goods, but also helped to meet the problem of a scarcity of labor power in heavy industry.

Even in the period of reconstruction the state had to struggle against the effects of the capitalist crisis, which under decadent capitalism bec­omes permanent in character. The drawing up of the 5 Year Plans, for example, was even at that time nothing but a crude attempt at managing the crisis. The essential aspect of the Plans is that the production of consumer goods and the expansion of private consumption always remain at the bottom of the scale of growth. The wage rises of the first 5 Year Plan 1951 were wiped out through a chronic shortage of consumer goods; a situation which prepared the way for the workers’ rising of 1953. The following Seven Year Plan 1959-65 was already declared a failure in 1962 and broken off. Instead of rising, the total economic growth rate declined (DIW, DDR Wirt­schaft p.26). The Plan 1965-70 was supposed to overcome these problems through a forcing of exports. But what actually happened? Imports in­creased faster than exports! (ibid p.28). So much for ‘socialist planning’ in the GDR!

What measure are the bourgeoisie taking today to slow down the development of open crisis?

-- Especially since the end of the sixties, attempts have been made to stimulate growth through increased concentration (especially through the formation of combines). The share of nationalized concerns in the production of industrial goods rose from 82% in 1971 to 99% in 1972! During the 1970’s, entire sectors of the economy, such as agricultural machinery, the car industry, science and technology, were reorganized in giant combines. However, much of this concent­ration of industrial production takes place simply on paper, covering up for the very real weaknesses in the coherence of the economy.

-- The attempts to launch new export drives. We have already seen the ‘success’ of these efforts (see above).

-- To the degree that the above mentioned and other measures are being exhausted, it becomes all the more necessary to frontally attack the living standards of the working class. And even this hoped-for defeat of the proletariat can only be a prelude to the ‘solution’ of a third world war.

The GDR and the Russian war economy

The GDR itself, despite its economic capacity, possesses no significant war industry of its own. The NVA (National People’s Army, sic!) is equipped with Russian weaponry. In addition, the GDR invests only 22 million marks a year in military ‘development aid’ to third world count­ries, as opposed to the West German equivalent of 82 billion marks (Spiegel, 30.7.78). But East German industry is involved on a grand scale in the development of the Russian war machine. In fact, East German industry produces principally for the Russian war economy. That is to say, it produces directly or indirectly for the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact. The Russian war econ­omy not only swallows up a lion’s share of the surplus value extracted within the USSR itself. It also burns up an important share of the wealth produced in the Eastern European countries. If it didn’t do this, it wouldn’t have the slight­est chance of keeping up with the military develop­ment of the USA.

Foreign trade between the GDR and the USSR has increased five times over since the early fifties. With a 16% share in Russia’s foreign trade turn­over, the GDR is not only the most important trading partner of the USSR overall. In partic­ular, it is its most important supplier of capital goods. A good quarter of all Russian imports of machinery and spare parts come from the GDR. Whereas the other Comecon countries supply the USSR mainly with raw materials and semi-manufact­ured goods, only the GDR and Czechoslovakia are in a position to meet the demand of the Russian war economy with capital goods. The delivered installations and technology is used in the cons­truction of railways, the development of energy sources, as well as directly in the production of tanks, lorries, warships, etc. There also exists of course direct co-operation in military production between Russia and its allies, such as for example the co-operation between the USSR and the famous Skoda Concern of Czechoslovakia in the production of armory, trucks and nuclear reactors. However the GDR has up to now been excluded from any large scale co-operation of this kind.

The economies of Eastern Europe are under constant strain, engaged as they are in a futile attempt to create a heavy industrial base comparable to that possessed by the American bloc. The strength of the war basis of the two blocs is not only to be measured by the present production of tanks or whatever, but also by the capacity of an econ­omy to double or treble this production over a given period of time. The Russian bloc, no matter how effectively it produces, could never spew up as much armaments as the American bloc. The necess­ity to survive as a separate imperialist bloc has forced the Warsaw Pact to mobilize all available resources for the war economy, in order to remain competitive with the West at this one level. And so whereas we have on the one hand all the signs of a massive over-production in the indust­rialized West (too many workers, too much indust­ry, etc), the crisis in the East takes the form of underproduction, because there is not enough capital and labor available to fuel the needs of the war economy. Whereas the result of the crisis of over-production in the stronger Western bloc is the cutting back of production in every field except the military, we can see that this exclusive development of the military sector has already been in force in the Russian Bloc for years.

This phenomenon of underproduction in the East is an expression of the division of the globe into rival military blocs -- it is a result of the universal shortage of markets. It proves that the fetters of the world market are blocking the dev­elopment of the forces of production. The world market is too small to allow for the realization of all the capital which has been accumulated. After the second world war, the advanced countries of the American bloc, which had at their disposal the greater part of the world market, were able (for a variety of reasons which we cannot go into here) to initiate a certain development of the productive forces at the expense of the impoveri­shment of the rest of the world. As for the Russian Bloc, which got next to nothing out of the imperialist redivision of the world following WWII, only a development of the war economy was possible there. This necessity to expand an already consi­derable war economy from a position of economic and strategic weakness leads to a profound modifi­cation of the operation of the law of value within the Russian Bloc, so that the capitalist crisis there takes on different forms than in the West. These differences are seized upon by Stalinism and Trotskyism in order to ‘prove’ the non-capitalist nature of the Eastern Bloc countries. But none of these lies can hide the devastating effects of the capitalist crisis on the living conditions of the proletarians of Eastern Europe, Russia or China.

In order to develop heavy industry (the basis of the war economy), the Eastern European bourgeoisie must neglect every other branch of the economy. Alone this leads from crisis to crisis. For example, in the GDR only 36% of total gross capital investment falls to the non-producing sector as opposed say to 58% in West Germany. Such investment trends, by leading to an inevit­able narrowing of the field of consumption and of the service sector, lead to a further shrinking of markets, to a lowering of the rate of profit, to a dramatic stagnation of the economy. Because the military sector produces neither capital goods nor consumer goods, but simply swallows up surplus value, without contribution to the renewal of the cycle of accumulation, it threatens to turn stagnation into collapse.

The possibilities open to the East German or to the Russian bourgeoisie cannot be seen as a choice between Stalinist ‘planning’ and a ‘market economy’. In fact, the only alternatives, seen abstractly, are between either a state-led, incre­asingly desperate strengthening of the war economy and its supporting industries -- which can only lead to further stagnation and chaos. Or else they have to slow down growth rates in these industries, in order to even out the general development of all economic sectors -- which would lead to an overall, somewhat ‘smoother’ stagnation. But in reality they cannot choose this second alternative, because it would amount to losing the most important competitive struggle with the American Bloc -- namely the arms race.

The Stalinist leadership has therefore no other alternative but to follow its previous course. And it must above all wage and win a new world war, in order to profit on its massive armaments investment program.

The situation of the working class under the war economy

East Germany has at present the highest rate of persons employed in the world (53.3% of the popul­ation). Whereas between 1950 and 1969 the number of East Germans of employable age dropped by 1.9 million, the actual number of unemployed rose by 700,000 -- by 10%. This increase was made possi­ble by the integration of more women, but also of pensioners, into economic life. In addition, the GDR has only been able to attract a relatively small number of ‘guest workers’ from Poland, the Balkans, etc.

This increasingly severe shortage of labor power is a direct result of the war economy. The state is forced to push the price of the commodity labor power below the level necessary to ensure its renewal and expansion. This necessary level, as Marx explains, is not a-historic absolute, but is altered with the development of society. In a modern industrial society like the GDR, where the workers work under a brutal, automated, scienti­fically guided exploitation, it is an absolute ‘impossibility’ that such workers -- and among families where mostly both parents work, and have to clock up endless overtime and work extra shifts -- have to, on top of that, wait for hours in queues outside shops, or go off bargaining on the illegal black markets in order to acquire the necessities of life. It is an ‘impossibility’ that these workers have to live in tiny flats, often to eight or ten people under one roof because auntie and granny and the two married sons can’t get flats for themselves. It is equally an impossibility that in the big cities and urban sprawls, where the workers live in housing projects miles from their work or from anywhere else, that they have to go on waiting lists for years before they can get any kind of a decent car. It’s no wonder that people used try to escape to the West, as long as the post­war boom continued there, or that so few foreign workers want to go and work in the GDR, or that the East German workers can only afford very small families, despite all the ‘baby-boom’ propaganda of the state. The workers of the GDR know only want, because they have to carry the entire weight of the war economy, that bloody parasite, on their backs.

The price of the commodity labor power, like any other commodity, is determined by its average cost of production, and by the law of supply and demand. Here again the Stalinist state has to intervene, in order to keep the price as low as possible. This intervention in the laws of the economy has a military character. It is the law of the market which dictates that workers will go wherever they can sell their labor power at a higher price. But the East German bourgeoisie have solved this problem. They have constructed a wall along their western frontier and laid it with landmines, barbed wire and sentry posts, because the wages in West Germany are higher than in the East.

Or another example: Where there is a shortage of labor, wages generally tend to rise -- there is a sellers’ market. In order to put this law out of action, the state has made the changing of one’s job or place of residence as difficult as possible.

The attacks against the working class

The deepening of the crisis attacks the living standards of the working class from all sides:

-- Through an increase in the level of exploita­tion

-- Through a lowering of real wages, taking place in any of the following ways:

** The number of goods which are difficult or impo­ssible to obtain, grows rapidly; it ranges from coffee and butter to housing and even electricity, which is being regularly cut off in many parts of the country.

**The quality of the goods available degenerates.

**Inflation is passed on in the form of open or disguised price rises and through the dismantling of state subsidies.

**Social services, medical treatment etc are reduced, thereby lowering the social wage. **Continuous interruptions in the process of pro­duction cause catastrophic falls in the wages of piece-rate workers.

**The ‘New Wage System’, introduced in 1978, converts a wage rise before tax into a wage cut after tax for the majority of workers, through an increase in the tax burden. The SED, as cynical as ever, appealed to all toilers to compensate for ‘possible’ loss of earnings through increased overtime.

**The increase in overtime work and the introduction of extra shifts. Therefore the lengthening of the working day is another feature of the present attacks on the working class. Here again, we posess no statistics on this development.

**There is a slow but sure development of unempl­oyment.

It is a true paradox of the capitalist system that countries suffering from a shortage of labor power should also be hit by unemployment. We know for example that in China (a country where basic production is at such a primitive level that it suffers from labor shortages, despite its one billion inhabitants), there are around 20 million unemployed in the cities. We possess no exact figures for unemployment in the GDR, although it seems safe to assume that the numbers without work are considerably fewer than in the USSR or, say, Poland (600,000). Even when the unemployed in the GDR no longer have to fear landing in con­centration camps, they are nonetheless criminaliz­ed by the state. They receive 1.20 to 2 marks a day plus 35 pence for every family dependant, all paid up by the ‘workers state’. Unemployment in the east is immediately caused by the shortage of capital and the subsequent breaking down of pro­duction. Much more significant in the eastern bloc than open unemployment is a development of hidden unemployment of enormous dimensions.

As a result of more and more frequent bottlenecks and clog-ups in production, significant propor­tions of the productive capacity are always out of action. This chaos leads to a permanent over­manning throughout the economy. This permanent hidden unemployment weighs upon the economy of the Russian bloc every bit as much as does open unem­ployment in the West. Whether in the East or in the West the real cause of unemployment lies in the inability of capitalism to really develop the productive forces.

Perspectives for the class struggle

It is not our intention here to attempt to set out in any detail perspectives for the future course of the crisis and the class struggle. What we want to do is simply to mention some of the most important implications of our analysis of the crisis, and of our estimation of the stage which the crisis has presently reached in the countries of the Russian Bloc. We would draw att­ention to the following:

-- The attempt to gauge the depth of the crisis purely along such traditional lines as the comparison of inflation rates and numbers of unemployed, which tend to indicate that the crisis is ‘younger’, less advanced, in the countries of the Russian Bloc, is in fact a fairly useless method, when it comes to measuring the crisis in the East as against the West.

-- The crisis -- and we are talking here about the historical crisis of decadent capitalism, as it has developed over the whole of the present century -- is actually more acute, at the present time, in the countries of the Russian Bloc than in the most advanced industrial nations of the West.

-- This in turn proves that even the total militarization of the economy, and the complete subjugation of economic life and of civilian society under the most direct, dictatorial control of the capitalist state, does not solve any of the contradictions of decadent capitalism whatsoever. These measures will lead to a modification of the forms under which the crisis appears, and they can even allow for a slowing of the pace of the crisis. But the state cannot stop the degenera­tion of capitalism.

The crisis in the West proceeds as a vast over­production of commodities, followed by drastic cutbacks in production. In the East, the in­ability of the Russian bloc to compete openly on the world market accentuates the fall in the rate of profit to such an extent that the state has to syphon off capital from every other sector in order to ensure any kind of expansion in heavy industry and the war industries at all. This in turn leads to the clogging up of production at every stage, and therefore to massive falls in production, firstly in the realm of consumer goods (such as for example the present decline in agricultural production in the USSR, following the marked stagnation in this sector which has been evident for decades), but then to be followed by declining production in key industries as well (in 1979 Brezhnev himself had to announce stagnating or even declining productivity in the energy sector in Russia).

-- For the working class this will mean -- and in countries such as Poland, Russia and Rumania is already meaning -- the most brutal falls in its living standards, as the bourgeoisie is forced to let the consumer goods sector, the agricultural sector etc, go to complete rack and ruin.

-- It will also imply the necessity for the bou­rgeoisie to enact a complete militarization of the working class. It will mean creating a ‘task force’ of millions of workers who can be sent from one sphere of production to another, depending on where production is actually functioning at a given time, and depending on where bottlenecks have to be cleared away. The militarization of the labor force will allow for a certain easing of the awesome burden of hidden unemployment -- if workers go along with it of course! The ‘hidden’ unemployed will therefore become an open army of the unemployed, living way below the existence minimum.

These perspectives are not mere speculations about the future. In fact they project the quantitative development of tendencies unfolding before our very eyes. Thus, for example, the Polish opposi­tionists around the KOR have reported that a third of all industrial equipment in Poland is at the moment not being utilized. The result of this is of course chronic food shortages, regular break-downs in the supply of electricity to homes and even to industry, the shut-down of a consider­able portion of public transport and other services etc. In Rumania, in Bulgaria, even in Hungary, it is the same story, more or less; in the GDR too, although not yet as extreme. In all of these countries workers are being mobilized for overtime and special shifts, but also for work in mobile brigades, where you can be used to build pipelines in west Russia today, and to dig out lignite in East Germany tomorrow. This is the beginning of the kind of militarization we have just mentioned.

The outbreaks of class struggle in Eastern Europe in response to the crisis since the late sixties (Poland ‘70 and ‘76, Czechoslovakia ‘68, Rumania ‘77 were the most notable of these) have been very powerful, but have all tended to remain sporadic and isolated in character, without evolving to a high level of politicization. It is under­standable in view of the inexperience of the workers involved, the weight of fifty years of counter revolution, the severity of state repression, to name but a few of the factors involved. These struggles didn’t really go beyond the level of defensive fights against fall­ing real wages and rises in the level of exploitation. But the class struggle of the 1980’s will have to go way beyond this level, because what we are being confronted with now -- and we can see this particularly clearly with regard to Eastern Europe -- is the collapse of human society under the weight of capitalist economic and social relations. Capitalism is no longer able to guarantee even the most basic prerequisites for the survival of human society in any shape or form. The food shortages and housing shortages of Eastern Europe -- we are seeing more and more of this in Western Europe as well! -- make this perfectly clear. The working class will be forced to pose the question of power in order to save society from total collapse to save it from capitalism. The deepening of the crisis is there­fore creating the preconditions for the unification and the politicization of the class struggle against the capitalist crisis and the militarization of society. The depth of the crisis, and the workers’ response to it, will enable the proletariat to draw the vast masses of the peasantry and the non-exploiting strata behind it, as the Russian proletariat did in 1917.

The success of this struggle is not certain. It all depends on the ability of the proletariat in these countries to reappropriate the lessons of the past, and, in linking up with workers’ strugg­les in the west, to open its ranks to the polit­ical influence and the solidarity of the revol­utionary movement now forming in the West.

Krespel, November 1979.

The reappearance of texts by Bilan on the events in Spain from 1936 to 1938 in a paperback collection is an important development. For so long drowned in the tide of the counter-revolution, internationalist positions are re-emerging little by little in the memory of the proletariat. In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the communist left in general, and in particular in the real Italian left, repres­ented by Bilan.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the self-proclaimed ‘heirs’ of the Italian left -- the Bordigist current haven’t seen fit to publish the texts of Bilan. Their policy of silence isn’t fortuitous. The Italian left of the 30’s is an embarrassing ‘ance­stor’ they’d rather forget about.

In fact, the Bordigists of today have only a very distant relationship with Bilan and can in no way claim a direct descent. In a few months time, we intend to publish a history of the Italian communist left from 1926 to 1945, in the form of a book, so that its contributions can remain truly alive for the new revolutionary generations.

***********************

Bilan

In June ‘79, we greeted with the greatest interest the publication of a selection of texts from Bilan on the subject of the Spanish Civil War, edited by J Barrot. Some of these texts had already been republished by the ICC in the Inter­national Review (nos 4, 6 and 7); for our analysis of the importance of the work of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, we refer readers to our introductions to these texts.

With the aim of situating the work of Bilan in the history of the 'left fractions' which struggled against the degeneration of the IIIrd International, Barrot has written a long introduction which, although based on the re-affirmation of revolutionary positions, will certainly leave the unfamiliar reader confused by the disorganization of its presentation: personal opinions are mingled with those of Bilan, historical and present day comparisons, definitions of concepts, histories of other groups and polemics against the ICC and Bilan. Although much of the annotation is correct, and we would not deny the need to criticize Bilan, like all groups, a product of its own period, it must be said that unfortunately Barrot sets himself up as a judge of history, and that his own opinions only serve to obscure political principles which are fundamental for the emancipation of the working class, as well as an understanding of the existence and historical role of the class.

1. ‘Practical measures’ and revolutionary perspectives

The Spanish experience, the spontaneous reaction of Spanish workers to arm themselves against attack by the forces of Franco, despite the attempts at conciliation by the Popular Front; but later these same workers accepting the authority of the left-wing of the Spanish bourgeoisie, shows the nature of the political barriers confronting the proletariat, and the defeat which awaits it if they are not surmounted.

“Bilan tended to see nothing but the defeat of the working class (which was true) and not the appearance of a social movement which, in differ­ent conditions, could have a revolutionary effect.”

“To denounce the counter-revolution without also drawing out the positive nature measures which were taken, and their roots in the same situation, is to act in a purely negative way. The party (or the ‘faction’) is not a mere ‘axe’”

If, by “social movement”, J Barrot means the inevitable overthrow of bourgeois institutions in times of crisis, for example through strikes and the occupation of land, then this is something that was never denied by Bilan. What Bilan said is that this is insufficient without the destruct­ion of the bourgeois state.

When Bordiga said that it was necessary to destroy the capitalist world before attempting to construct a communist society, this was not just another fine phrase; he wanted to show, as Rosa Luxemburg had done before him that revolutionar­ies can do no more than show the way towards communism. But J Barrot undoubtedly thinks, like the ‘utopian socialist’, that it is possible to demonstrate in advance, and in detail, the develop­ment and constitution of a society which will be built by millions of proletarians, of which we know little apart from the broad outlines: that it will involve the ‘withering away’ of the state, the abolition of wage labor, and the end of the exploitation of man by man.1

J Barrot seems to have forgotten the fundamental importance of denouncing bourgeois society as a whole, when he himself, in passing, echoes the, traditional bourgeois accusation that revolutionaries (and in this case Bilan) are merely nihilists!

Thus it is true that, with regard to the massacre of workers in Spain, the role of the Fraction was and could only be that of an axe clearing bourgeois from proletarian ideas, and, without any nihilism, putting forward the perspective of autonomous class struggle -- which since it is autonomous has nothing to do with trade union struggles around demands put forward by the left. Their role was to affirm the need to oppose the sending of arms by one or the other imperialist bloc, and the need for fraternization between workers, without which death awaits them in local wars first of all, then in a global holocaust. These are the concrete political measures to put forward, and these were the ‘measures’ defended by Bilan!

2. Working class crisis, or necessary reassertion of working class independence?

By forgetting half a century of counter-rev­olution, by distorting Bilan’s conception of class autonomy, J Barrot seems to reduce the question of the independence of working class action to the danger that the economic struggle will remain on the economic level (later on he denies the primacy of politics on the grounds that class action must encompass both the political and the economic):

“... In these conditions to insist on ‘autonomous’ class struggle is not enough. Autonomy is no more a revolutionary principle then ‘leadership’ by a minority: the revolution calls for neither democracy, nor dictatorship.”

Although Barrot reminds us here of the import­ance of the content of autonomous class struggle, one might ask what he would see as the content of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of prol­etarian democracy, of the mass organizations of the proletariat?

One should understand that this author does not regard autonomy as a principle because he rejects the idea that the proletariat has a class iden­tity distinct from other classes, that the prole­tariat’s experience is forged from a whole series of struggles taking place in a world dominated by capital. It is he who makes an artificial distinction between economic and political strug­gles, while neither Bilan nor the ICC, whom he accuses of doing this, has ever made one precede the other in a mechanical way; both Luxemburg and Lenin often demonstrated how succeeding economic and political phases of the struggle are intertwined with one another to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish between the two, since they are both parts of the same class struggle against capitalism.

Revolutionaries have always emphasized the need for workers to go beyond the level of struggle for purely economist demands; otherwise the struggle is doomed to failure. The setbacks encountered by workers in numerous struggles over the past few years thus act as stimulants towards the decisive struggles of the future; however J Barrot thinks he sees a contradiction here:

“... a contradiction (which) is the source of a veritable crisis within the proletariat, reflected by, among other things, the crisis of many revolutionary organizations. Only a revolution offers a practical resolution of this contradiction.”

To resolve this apparent contradiction, Barrot resorts to the word revolution as a cure-all, as a charm to chase off the devil.

It would be of little interest here to dwell on the tangled contradictions of Barrot’s own analysis, but if for example he claims that “proletarian experience is always rooted in day-to-day struggles”, how can he also defend the idea that it “is reformist activity around wages struggles which ties workers to capitalism”.?

What does it mean to describe as reformist, workers’ struggles against deteriorating living conditions? For one thing it means that Barrot identifies the working class -- as the leftists do -- with the counter-revolutionary parties who call themselves and pass as “reformists”.

If workers tie themselves to capitalism, then the left wing parties in Spain (and elsewhere!) cannot be held responsible for the imperialist war. Bourgeois ideas are no longer seen as a material force holding back the working class. In fact this conception implies that the proletariat no longer exists as a revolutionary class, and communism is just one more utopia!

Barrot could claim that we are distorting the questions he is asking if the nature of his questions was not confirmed by his own ‘modernist’ answers, and his a-historical judgments.

We have been told first that class autonomy is not a principle, then that workers tie themselves to capitalism. Later on we shall be told that the ICC “understands that the revolution must be an act of destruction, but not how the working class is to acquire the power to do this”. This brings us back to the “concrete measures” advocated by the Barrotian scheme. Here we shall see that it is Barrot who does not understand.

3. No significan change of the social structure is viable without the destruction of the bourgeois state.

We have already noted the incompleteness of certain social upheavals. For the working class to disrupt capitalist production, for landless peasants to expropriate the land, are not revolutionary actions in themselves, but rather moments in the process by which the class hesitantly moves towards its emancipation. But this will not be achieved if the control of production becomes merely self-management, or if the workers, like in Spain, submit to the authority of one fraction of the bourgeoisie in the name of “anti-fascism”. Barrot recognises the limitations of upheavals of this kind, but still presents them as “an immense revolutionary upsurge”.

While recognizing in a partial sense that the republican bourgeois state “disliked” (of course) using methods of social struggle to enlist workers to the imperialist battle front, Barrot thinks that

“The non-destruction of the state prevents socialization and collectivization from organizing an ‘anti-mercantile economy’ on the level of society as a whole”.

This is true in one sense, but for this author socialization and collectivization are quite clearly “a potential tendency” towards communism. For us, if there is a potential tendency towards communism it is expressed in the capacity of the working class to generalize its struggles, to centralize and co-ordinate its organization, to distinguish itself from the bourgeois parties, and to arm itself to put an end to capitalist domination, as a precondition for social transformation -- rather than in the control of produc­tion which aims to ‘organize things better’ than the bourgeoisie, or worse, claims to have inaugurated a new wave of production before the destruction of the bourgeois state!

In Russia in October 1917 the experience of this type of self-management of the factories was short-lived. What is necessary first of all and above all, is the centralization of the struggle, a centralization which either never existed in Spain or else was taken in hand by the bourgeois state. Workers in Russia, after the destruction of the bourgeois state, believed for a short time that they could organize an anti-mercantile economy despite all the apparent difficulties: what this experience continued was the impossibility of doing this within a national framework, even after the destruction of the bourgeois state.

It is evident that in the period of maturation of the revolution before the assault on the state, workers will interrupt the process of exploitation, bring about a reduction in working hours (cf 8 hour day in 1917) and impose their will on questions of land and peace, but these measures in themselves are not communist. Their application is merely the success of demands which capitalism is no longer capable of granting. And even if capitalism gives way on some of the these demands, the understanding acquired by workers during the course of these struggles is of the necessity for political insurrection.

After the insurrection, the proletariat in any one geographical area will continue to be subject to the rule of the law of value. If this is not recognized, then one would have to deny that, as long as capitalism exists, it imposes its domination over the whole planet -- leaving the door open to the Stalinist thesis of ‘soc­ialism in one country’. All that we know is that the proletarian revolution is not associated with a definite stable mode of production; it will have to constantly overturn existing economic relations in an anti-mercantile direction.

To attempt today to show precisely how social wealth will be distributed according to long term needs (quite apart from the satisfaction of immediate needs such as food and shelter, and the abolition of hierarchical wages structures, etc.), would be to indulge in hazardous speculation or political gimmickry. At this stage we find ourselves in a society in transition from capitalism to communism, the necessity of which has always been affirmed by Marxism.

4. From class struggle under capitalism to the affirmation of the proletariat

It is easy for sociological innovators to theorize the weakness of the workers movement -- to see workers as recuperated by the ‘consumer society’ or integrated into capitalism. The aim of these ‘ideas merchants’ is really nothing less than the destruction of Marxism as a method and a tool of class struggle -- which tends towards the destruction of the infrastructure of their own class, the bourgeoisie. Barrot is in great danger of being into this kind of analysis.

Poor workers of Spain 1936 who did not obey the rules drawn up by the great observer of history! At the start, workers “adopt a communist stance, well reported by Orwell”; later “they do not organize in a communist way because they do not act in a communist way”. Understand who can! In reality Barrot is putting the cart before the horse:

“The communist movement cannot win unless workers go beyond struggles (even if they are armed) which do not challenge wage labor itself. Workers, as wage earners, can only wage armed struggle by destroying themselves as workers.”

Barrot plays with dialectics to draw the lesson of events in Spain, failing to see that at this stage it was still not a question of an armed insurrection against the state. After showing himself incapable of understanding how workers, as atomized individuals, can become the proletariat, a revolutionary force against the existing order, except by resorting to formulas like “the destruction of the theory of the proletariat”(!) he now wants us to believe in the simultaneity of the abolition of wage labor and the destruction of the bhourgeois state. Yet another dream of the immediate establishment of communism!

It is true that insurgent proletarians can no longer really be called wage earners, but do they stop working in factories, even with guns in their hands? Will they work for nothing for the millions who have no work? In the sector under proletarian control, will it be possible to do away with remuneration completely, given the legacy of the anarchy of international capitalism, which by its attempts to crush the revolution will make necessary an even greater production of arms and raw materials? And in any case, who can decide the method of remuneration or the best way to move rapidly towards the abolition of wage labor? Marx and his labor-time vouchers, proposed in the Critique of the Gotha Program? Barrot? The Party? Or the living experience of the working class?

Today what distinguishes communists from all those who only construct communism in their imagination, is the affirmation that all the measures for economic or social transformation will be taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the political control of this class. There can be no definitive economic measures which in themselves guarantee the victory of communism, or which could not be used against the proletariat, until bourgeois politics has been completely destroyed. Barrot has lifted no more than a corner of the veil obscuring the society of tran­sition towards communism. In fact he defines the revolution itself as “the reappropriation of the social and economic conditions of the new social relations” -- and by revolution he means the decisive insurrectional phase. One can understand why, like all modernists, he reproaches the Italian Left for their “working class formalism amounting to economism”, even though he is obliged to recog­nize the key role of the working class. Surely his lack of clarity on all these questions is based on the implicit rejection of the proletariat as subject of the revolution?

All those who declare that the proletariat is already dead, who would have us believe that there is a “crisis of the proletariat” because it has still not broken from the trivial struggles that tie it to capitalism, all those who envisage the disappearance of the proletariat before the revolutionary assault, before communism, are of no use to the proletariat because they obscure the real difficulties confronting the proletariat on the path towards communism. All their nebulous theories will be consigned to the dustbin of his history!

Far from helping us to appreciate the role of left fractions and the lessons that our generation can draw from their work, Barrot deforms their work by accusing them of political hypertrophy, of refusing to break from a conception of revolution “in stages” (political then economic); and what is more, although Bilan traced the general characteristics of the future communist revolution, Barrot accuses the group of having “opposed” the movement to the final goal.

This type of commentary is simply charlatanism. To see how far the truth is different from Barrot’s description of the group, it is enough to read the selection of texts published in this book. There one can see how carefully Bilan analyses the rel­ation of class forces in order to show the real advances made by the proletariat, the sacrifices undertaken by the working class and to show how the class lives in struggle, even when handicapped by the weight of anarchism in Spain, and diverted from a communist perspective. Bilan shows how the experience of the struggles of 1936 are an irreplaceable part of the experience gained by the class in its long striving towards the final goal, communism.

The war in Spain did not halt the theoretical development of the Italian Left; on the contrary, it verified the analyses of Bilan, confirming that proletarian politics must not be abandoned even under the greatest pressure. As for the “potential” movement which Barrot uses to illustrate his theory, the concrete measures such as socialization and collectivization, their importance has been greatly exaggerated, and they have been used by the bourgeoisie to obscure the fundamental political problem the assault on the bourgeois state.

For Barrot, it is now or never for communism. He announces, to anyone who wants to listen, that “communist theory no longer exists, except as the affirmation of the need for revolution.” (Our emphasis). With this in mind, the reader of the preface to the texts from Bilan might well ask what is the basis of the “Barrotian” revolution -- whether it is more than something that leads nowhere and goes anywhere.

The careful reader will discover from Barrot’s preface that the revolution will come along one fine day to solve the “crisis of the proletariat” by the negation of the proletariat; that it will pass by the trivial little groups of revolution­aries which are “really no more than publishing houses”, and groups like the ICC “who don’t know how the revolution will be made”. Barrot, with his mighty pen, has eliminated the programmatic acquisitions of the revolutionary movement, the debate on the period of transition, rejected class consciousness and the importance of revolutionary activity -- and taken a great leap into the void!

Barrot has one great merit: that of having published texts from Bilan on the war in Spain.

JL

The text we’re publishing here is the report pre­sented to the Fourth Congress of Revolution Internationale. The aim of the report isn’t to bring us up to date with the present state of the economic crisis in the eastern bloc, but to help deepen the following question: how can we say that the crisis in the eastern bloc is the same capitalist crisis which is hitting all the countries in the world? In what way and for what reasons are the manifestations of this crisis different from the forms taken in the developed countries of the western bloc?

The second part of the report Looks at the hist­orical aspect of this question, particularly with regard to the USSR: by examining the way that Russian capital arrived late on the world arena, and the methods it used to develop its imperialist strength in the context of decadent capita­lism, it tries to show how the manifestations of the crisis in the USSR are an extreme expression of the contradictions of capitalism.

This is why, in the first part of the report, we touch on the question of the scarcity of capital, which is a manifestation of world capital’s gene­ral crisis of overproduction in the weaker and more militarized countries, particularly the countries in the Russian bloc.

In publishing this report, we’re presenting to our readers the present level of the debate inside our organization about the general characteristics of capitalist decadence in the east, and how they are manifested in today’s open crisis.

Overproduction and scarcity of capital

“The mere relationship of wage-laborer and capitalist implies:

1. That the majority of producers (the workers) are non-consumers (non-buyers) of a very large part of their product, namely, of the means of production, and the raw material;

2. That the majority of producers, the workers, can consume an equivalent for their product only so long as they produce more than this equivalent, that is, so long as they produce surplus-value or surplus-product. They must always be overproducers, producers over and above their needs, in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs.” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. II, p.520)

Faced with this contradiction, which is inherent in the very operation of capitalist exploitation, capitalism could only find a way out by selling to extra-capitalist sectors, in order to realize the surplus value contained in its commodities and perpetuate its accumulation, thus pursuing its development on an enlarged scale.

At the beginning of industrial capitalism, crises were localized crises of overproduction which took place on the scale of existing markets, and which were only resolved by the penetration of new pre-capitalist markets (exports, colonizations).

But the development of the market,ie the disposal of the capitalist surplus-product, has an absolute limit: the limitation of the world market. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the imperialist powers were completing the dividing up of the globe, the remaining pre-capitalist markets were controlled and protected by one or other imperia­lism. It was no longer possible to discover new markets which would have allowed capital to dispose of its surplus-product and thus palliate the crisis.