The birth of modern communism - La Banquise

What Continuity?

Whether or not they are our contemporaries, we could point to numerous, sometimes reciprocal, relationships between those groups and individuals which have made us what we are. It would be absurd to claim any organisational continuity. But might we not speak of an invariance, or at least a doctrinal thread ?

No eclectic revolutionary exists who can be content to take his inheritance just as he finds it. If today we read a profound thought which transforms us in the work of Flora Tristan, tomorrow a second in the work of Bakunin, later still a third in the work of Marx, this can only enrich us if their contributions form part of a coherence that is constructed and modified, but which still tends towards a unitary critique. It is pointless to reject eclecticism in the name of a doctrinal purity. Instead one rejects it almost naturally because a communist movement exists. Moreover it is the conviction of that existence which forms the difference between our "current", of which La Banquise is an aspect, and other revolutionaries. Beyond a historical clarification, this text will have achieved its aim if it illuminates what the communist movement is, its nature as well as its present day expressions.

Perhaps one day the human being will be a capitalised mutant. In the meantime, it is comforting to note that they still haven’t succeeded in manufacturing such beings, and we doubt they ever will. As past and present history shows us, the human being is characterised, amongst other things, by the fact that he engages in activity with other beings. Through this relation, he transforms himself while transforming that which surrounds him. This is what distinguishes humanity from the "societies" of insects or of apes, etc. (See La Banquise no. 1 "For a World without Moral Order".) The communist movement is the human tendency to make this activity and this relation the main element of human life, a theoretical and practical tendency which appears embryonically, without calling society into question, within elementary acts of solidarity and help, and at the level of society, through a revolutionary movement.

"The question of sovereignty thus leads straight to the communist organisation, and by the same token arouses all those questions which derive from the rational causes of the existence of a state of society... What is society ?... Society only exists due to the fact of the connection between men, putting in common their diverse faculties... consequently, its object is to use these forces, this collective power for the greatest good of all..." (La Fraternité de 1845, 1847)

99% of all known societies are based on man’s exploitation by man, and on the oppression of groups by a dominant class, which interposes mediations between beings and their activity: the State, religion, politics, etc. Yet, this anticommunist world would not function without the human tendency towards communism, however diverted and degraded it is. One of the most alienated conditions of work is the need for activity, just as the necessity to act and to go beyond oneself enables the dispossession of yourself in religion, in politics and in art.

Communism is what one does and what one has in common with others. It is a function necessary to all existence and to all action. Then, one will ask, does "communism" exist everywhere? Yes. The communist movement is the coherent action and expression of this irresistible tendency, which helps to assure the triumph of what is common to humans, their being-together. Societies of exploitation play on this latent community and the need which everyone has for it, the need to act together, and on this basis they build up a string of small groups or individuals linked together, above all, by the intermediary of the state or the market. Gregariousness and individualism go hand in hand. Communism, on the contrary, is the need to be and to act together, but without abdicating your own autonomous existence and action.

The communist movement is thus, by nature, multiform and convergent. It doesn’t fear doctrinal impurity. By contrast, the politician, himself, must be either inheritor or founder. For politics filiation poses an eternal problem. To regroup the separated it needs reference points, ancestors and founders. And conversely, in the work of the specialists in sceptical research, who need to seek without finding, a phobia for tradition imposes itself.

In the economy, just as in the life of societies, despite the importance of movements of long duration, for us the crucial moments are those where communism leaves its everyday phenomenological reality to emerge as an offensive social force. That was the case in the years before and after 1848 and after 1917, which constitute key periods in its history. In both cases however the proletariat did not go far enough forward to become unified and truly act for themselves. These intense periods remain no less decisive, in practise as well as "doctrinally". On the other hand, the long phases which followed these breakdowns increased their dispersion — the theoretical fracturing corresponding to the disintegration of the movement. In 1933 the journal Bilan noted in its first issue that since 1923 "the vision of revolutionary development all over the world (...) is no longer unitary".

Turning back to these two pivotal moments — 1848 and 1917 — is more than historical reminder. Summing up the debates which have animated the revolutionary movement since the sixties, they make it possible to see whether the open historical phase that has existed for about fifteen years could lead to another of these intense periods. What you will read about 1848 or 1917 also expresses the route travelled by an entire generation. Obviously we don’t put Marx or the Russian revolution on the same level as la Vieille Taupe! But its necessary to know what la Vieille Taupe thought about the Russian revolution in order to understand it, and to know what we think of Marx in order to understand us. This is not a matter of evaluating what we have borrowed from here or there, nor of weighing the pro’s and con’s. Revealing the limitations of a particular current counts for less than its overall movement and the depth of its contribution. Rather it is a question of showing how and why ideas, which in those periods were subversive, became transformed into ideology.

"(...) ideology is not constructed from the errors of the radical critique which gave birth to it, but from the historical truth which the latter will have brought out, or contributed to bringing out." (To finish with work and its world, C.R.C.R.E no. 1, June 1982.)

Eighteen Forty-Eight

Why constantly return to 1848 ? It is neither a matter of Eurocentrism, nor of contempt for the millennia which preceded the industrial era. Before the 19th century, the communist movement was already present within natural, that is to say social, communities, and also within those artificial communities bonded together by religion or by a semi-religious utopia. Moreover, before the 19th century there was already a "working class". At the beginning of the 16th century, it is thought that the troops of Thomas Munzer primarily gathered together workers, weavers and miners living in cities. In the Hanseatic cities at the start of the 18th century, in Leyden about 1670 and in Paris in 1789, at least half of the population was made up of wage workers. It is estimated that there were 1.5 million textile workers in the south of Belgium and the north of France about 1795. While wage labourers were numerous in the urban centres, they were also found in the countryside. In short, society everywhere generated this vast layer of the uprooted and dispossessed, those whom Sully called "men of nothingness".

In any case, a low level of "development of the productive forces" has never prevented the communisation of society. In those rare societies near to communism which can still be seen today, where exploitation, private property and coercive institutions are unknown, and where the environment doesn’t pose a problem, material production is barely developed.

Whereas communism locates true wealth in the act of production itself, capitalism is animated by the need to produce. It considers the product before the process, and this chronological impossibility obliges it to organize itself in order to cheat time. For Capital, wealth is what one produces. In communism wealth is what one does, and thus what one is. Doing goes beyond the age-old alternative between "being" or "having", which has recently been made flavour of the month through theorizations of a homo ludens opposed to a homo faber. Doing is not just the action of the producer; it doesn’t reduce intelligence to a mere tool; it consists of the multiplicity of possible activities, including doing nothing. Communist man is not afraid of wasting his time. Communism goes beyond separations and exists as continual self-creation: within it being is not one with what it does, and is not what it does, but is the direction, the future of what it does.

By reinterpreting history, capitalism has finished by making us believe that men have always wanted to enlarge surpluses and to increase productivity, whereas it is Capital which has created the need to save time and, in particular, to systematically reduce labour time. The primitive community was not dissolved on the day that it first produced an exchangeable surplus.

There was no threshold of growth beyond which the productive forces would have necessarily generated commodities, classes and the State. The deciding factor was social and not economic. In the same way, there is no threshold of the "abundance" created by Capital, which must be crossed in order to arrive at communism. The reason that capitalism can make it possible to pass on to communism is also social. Capitalism doesn’t restrict itself to developing the forces of production, it also creates a mass of people who, at the right moment, have both the need and the capacity to communise the world, to make common again everything which exists.

Those primitive communities that we can describe as communist are the exception. Theoretical communism is not a teleology; it doesn’t pretend that industry was inevitably inscribed in the destiny of humanity. It only takes note of the fact that human beings did not find within themselves the means of unifying into a human species. If they had been telepaths, perhaps the universality of the species would have affirmed itself differently, by avoiding the long detour through class societies. But as it exists today humanity will benefit from communising for itself the means of production and communication created by Capital.

In the absence of modern industry, the followers of Babeuf could only with difficulty make a revolution. The decisive absence in their time was not the lack of an abundance of consumer goods, for material wealth is not simply appreciated in terms of quantity (the revolution will reorient production and close all those factories which are not adaptable to communism). What the Babouvists lacked was this mass of people, who possess the capacity to make their revolt succeed through having universally unified productive forces at their disposal. Technology is not so much used to produce goods in abundance as to create the material basis of social ties. And it is only for this reason that the capacity to produce a lot, to transport rapidly, etc., are conditions of communism. The historic contribution of capitalism is the product of one of the worst horrors it has committed. It has not allowed man to become social or human, as a human species, while at the same time it has uprooted him from the soil. Ecology would like to return him there but man will only once again put down roots if he appropriates all of his conditions of existence. Having given up the obsession with his lost roots, he will put down new ones which will weave themselves together ad infinitum.

The modern proletarian, who appeared in the 19th century, at the same time as the revival of the word itself, is not more exploited than the slave or the serf. The difference between them is qualitative : the proletarian is the first whose exploitation is accompanied by a radical dispossession of himself at the very moment when the conditions of a communist revolution seem to have come together. Elementary struggle is not a form of existence of the proletariat, because the proletariat only exists as a group of proletarians acting collectively in a revolutionary sense. Even if embryonically, the proletariat only exists as a revolutionary force. Within society, there always exists both a diffuse communist movement and isolated proletarians. Only occasionally, when the communist movement passes to the offensive, is there a proletariat. The proletariat is the agent of the communist movement. It tends towards communism or it is nothing.

If the proletariat possesses reality only within a dynamic, the class struggle, and cannot be reduced to a statistically measurable quantity, it still doesn’t just have a merely negative existence — it also exists in an internal relation to Capital. A necessary bond unites those who will attempt a communist revolution and their reality within capitalist social relations. They will only destroy the capitalist relation inasmuch as they are a constituent part of it. Only the associated labour which capitalism has generalised gives a consistency to the connection between the productive activities of proletarians all over the world. Failing which, this connection can only be ensured by commodity exchange, by the coexistence of states or through moral force as in utopia.

Until now, social movements, including the communist left in the 20 century, have wanted to organise men, to create a space in which to join them together, because they had insufficiently coherent links between them to rise up. But from the 19th century, capitalist development has created a condition of communism by giving birth to a real "man of nothingness". Whatever the scarcity or abundance of goods, this being is totally denuded, for within his life activity has become secondary to the market consumption of objects or services, which have now been rendered essential. The proletarian is the person who is separated from everything, and who enters into relation with this everything through needs. Saint-Simon defined the industrialist as the "man who works to produce or put at the disposal of the different members of society one or more material means to satisfy their physical needs and tastes". Human action now comes second to its result, objectified within a product which one must buy.

"Look at Raphaël [the hero of The Wild Ass’s Skin (La Peau de chagrin)]. How the sentiment of self preservation smothers within him any other thought! (...) he lives and dies in a convulsion of selfishness. It is this personality which corrodes the heart and devours the entrails of the society we live in. As it increases, individuals isolate themselves; the more ties, the more common life."

(Balzac, preface to Romans et contes philosophiques, 1831.)

It was in opposition to this degeneration of human activity, in which poverty became no more than the corollary of the level of consumption, and in opposition to the new form taken by "wealth" that the communist movement grew in the middle of the 19th century, through setting as its goal the recomposition of a man who was not separated from his activity, from others and from himself. In our opinion Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts are the best synthesis of this immense aspiration toward a world without mercantilism or individualism, a world where man is the principle wealth of man. If for this alone, this text justifies Rosa Luxemburg’s formula: that Marx thereby expresses a movement which goes beyond himself, and which exceeds the theoretico-practical needs of his time.

In all periods it is communism which defines the revolutionary movement, as opposed to the left and leftism. Its wholly negative affirmation (against the State, against the trade unions, etc.), which in any case would only really emerge after 1917, is merely a logical consequence of this. If you really want to destroy the roots of capitalism and not just organize it differently in order to better distribute its wealth, then you must attack everything that helps it to function and tends to "improve" it — the State, politics, trade unionism, etc. Communism is not a mode of production but above all an entire mode of existence. "To each according to his needs?" Yes, but only because communism is primarily activity. It is not constructed, it liberates the means of life from capitalist fetters and transforms them.

Economic man is connected to the world by needs, which he satisfies by producing objects and then by buying them. The revolution, which calls into question the commodity, also challenges the being defined by needs. Need implies separation: man needs objects produced outside of himself, and his perpetually unsatisfied frenzy of consumption arises from this separation, for it seeks within the object that which is no longer there: the activity which produced it. In the same way, labour, however pleasant it is, produces nothing directly for yourself and obliges you to buy what you need elsewhere. Imposed by 150 years of capitalism, the concept of need is the result of capital’s integration of human activity, separated into two successive acts: to produce and to buy.

But, through its violence, the severing of the connection with their roots in the first half of the 19th century provoked a democratic upsurge which offered proletarians a substitute community, as political activity came to compensate for the practical activity they were henceforth deprived of. However the most outstanding aspects of the movement prior to 1848, the most forceful texts, and the insurrectionary gestures, such as the riots by Silesian weavers in 1844 which were theorised by all of the radicals, showed the working class in the guise of a monster which, emptied of any substance, could only attack the foundations of the system. Having made a clean sweep of all previous community, industrialisation no longer left any space except for a human community. Engels said of Irish workers that with a few hundred lads of their calibre one could revolutionise Europe. Balzac echoed this in his own way when speaking in 1844 of "these modern barbarians which a new Spartacus, part Marat, part Calvin, would lead in assault on the wretched Bourgeoisie whose power has expired". The fact remained that the social vacuum created by Capital filled itself by itself. In 1848–50 the communists — Marx and Engels included — hardly put communism forward, even as a distant programme.

Even in its most violent actions, the proletariat did not act as communists. The Lyons insurrection of 1831, which brought into the open the question of the working class, was only the self-organisation of wage labour as such, the hierarchical structure of labour being transposed into a military community. In June 1848, it was the working class districts which took up arms but without leaving the arena of wage labour. As with many other defensive movements, where proletarians are killed on the spot without taking on their condition. In England, the riots of 1842 and 1848 were the most violent until those in Brixton in 1982. But Chartism diverted energies into the demand for universal suffrage. The immense crowd which united on Kensington Common in South London on April 10, 1848 did not take the next step...

In 1847, Marx wrote: "Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of Capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against Capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle (...) this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests." (The Poverty of Philosophy, in Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6, p.211). But contrary to the theory the proletariat didn’t act for itself. The achievements of the — democratic — revolutions of 1848–50 remained on this side of the hopes of the previous day.

However the twenty years that led up to them were essential in the formation of the communist movement, and not only theoretically: the theory would not have approached communism as it did without a practical movement. To cite only one example, it is sufficient to compare the forms of organisation before and after 1848. The trade unions which appeared after 1848 were a regression compared to the first workers’ associations, which had tried to unite professions and different skills — a union of trades and not trade unions as subsequently. These associations had combined utopian aspirations, social demands and political reforms. The communist movement grew on terrain that on the whole was reformist, but where the question of communism was raised. By contrast the International Working Men’s Association, founded in 1864, would above all be an organisation of labour.

From Utopia to the Critique of Capitalism

In their practise, the proletarians of the first half of the 19th century remained torn by the coexistence, within the same society, of two opposed universes: that of Capital, which socialised the world by uniting them at work, and their own life of not entirely atomised exclusion, for Capital had not yet completely destroyed the old collective ties, particularly in the industrial villages formed in the 18th century. At that time revolutionaries believed that they could solve the contradictions between society and individual, wealth and poverty, Capital and labour, thanks to a community that arose, not from the "natural" coherence of activities, but from the practical realization of a communal principle, whether it be profane or sacred. Saint Simon, Owen, Cabet and Fourier wished to establish the community like a business enterprise. Feuerbach compared humanity to a god: "The unity of me and of you, is God", said Feuerbach. Certain utopians were communist in that they wanted communism; but they did not want a revolution.

A social movement, the proletarian movement was also international: groups of exiles and craftsmen travelled all over Europe. Sometimes it was also a political movement: many bridges connected it to the democratic upsurge, which as we have seen ended up by absorbing it. Cabet, for example, far from being an ivory tower thinker, had a political career behind him. For a long time he had cherished the project of rallying the republican opposition around the idea he held of communism. "...we, communists, we have always called for and always will call for the union of all democrats..." he wrote in 1845. He said that at this time his paper Le Populaire had "perhaps a hundred thousand readers". And it was political failure which incited him to found Icaria, his ideal society, "elsewhere".

The real social bond between them being neither sufficiently strong or visible, people tried to create unity on the basis of a principle that stood outside the world, but which conformed to man’s essence. Against the horror of Capital they opposed man’s nature. Utopianism coincided with anthropology. As Feuerbach said: "Man’s essence is only contained in the community... Man must lead a life in conformity with his true nature: a 'generic' life".

Fourier’s strong point was that unlike Cabet he didn’t attempt to form a "new man". He started out from what exists, describing the human being at length and making an inventory of his passions, in order to show, beyond his function as producer, the plurality of his being. With the aid of his classifications, he opposed a society, which in 1830 just as today, primarily saw man as a worker. His critique went beyond the capitalist era; Fourier took on a "civilisation" within which capitalism, in his eyes, was no more than one moment, and proposed to restore nature, which had been pillaged by men. That which humanity must attain by the natural movement of its needs and actions, Fourier wanted to organise by means of a plan. This would classify the passions in order to harmonise them. Critical of science — he let himself be guided by intuition — Fourier remained a system man. He privileged knowledge and he looked for THE solution, whose application would depend only on capitalist good will. Neither politics nor revolution had any place in his thought, in which the proletariat remained an object.

After Fourier, utopia became radicalised. Always posing the question of a different life, it wondered about the nature of the revolution which would bring it into being, and about the forces which would make that revolution. Prior to 1848 revolutionaries like Dezamy passed from the problems of the human being to those of social groups and the struggles which set them in opposition. They no longer started from man’s essence but from his historical development, and began by making a critique of alienated labour. The principal reproach they addressed to the utopians was not of being visionaries, but of hoping to achieve their vision by means of recipes, instead of conceiving of a solution starting from existing conditions. By contrast, the theoretical communism of the period from 1840–48 sought to pierce the secret of the irresistible force of such a degrading system as capitalism. Rooting itself in reality, it would espouse its contradictions and finish by being drawn in to them.

It is to Marx’s credit that he was the first to show that the aspiration for a human community, some aspects of which could be better expressed by others like Fourier, can only succeed on the day that social life has acquired a collective character for all men, and thus crossed a threshold beyond which associated labour and common action made it possible to make the revolution. In Capital, Marx would describe the mechanism of this process, whose content had been outlined in the 1844 Manuscripts. But Marx was to lose the original communist thread through involving himself in an analysis of capitalism from the inside, and no longer from a communist perspective. Far too much he would see the communist movement as being like the movement of the bourgeoisie, a movement which expanded the development of the productive forces. His contradiction was to have privileged political economy while making a critique of it, and to have made a critical study of it without it ceasing to be his theoretical horizon. Marx simultaneously criticized Capital from a capitalist point of view and from a communist point of view, but he forgot that the development of production is only useful to the proletariat as the means of destroying itself as proletariat. Often he studied the proletarian condition starting from capitalist development and not from the social activity confined within in it.

However, he remained the only one, in his time, to offer an overall vision of the historical process, from the original communities to the reconciliation between man and nature. Since his work achieved the greatest synthesis of the period, its contradictions were only the more acute. The same movement simultaneously led him to develop and to abandon the communist dynamic. In this way, he expressed in theory the practical contradictions which the proletariat ran up against in the middle of the 19th century, and heralded its subsequent conquest by Capital and then its reappearance as communist proletariat in the 20th century. Marx was the product of the strength and the ambiguity of the communism of his time.

"Marxism" — the subsequent use of Marx’s work — would resolve the contradiction that ran through his work by neutralising its subversive aspect. The tendency of revolutionaries like Marx to bury themselves in the critique of capitalism in itself, was turned by Marxism into the sole reality. It is the thought of a world incapable of thinking of anything other than Capital. "Revolutionary" vis-à-vis pre-capitalist societies and social strata, it identifies itself with progress and the economy. In this way Marxism constitutes one of the dominant ideologies.

For theoretical communism Marx is no more and no less exempt from criticism than Fourier or the communist left after 1914. Those who don’t understand Fourier or Gorter don’t understand Marx, and vice-versa. Theoretical communism, as expressed by Marx, cannot be completely digested by Capital because it contains more than an exposition of the internal contradictions of capitalism. This is not the case with Saint-Simonism, for example, whose programme was entirely realised by Capital: the development of production, the creation of an industrial class, the reduction of politics to management, the generalisation of labour. The "industrial system" is Capital. By contrast, even in those texts by Marx most open to criticism, communism remains present, if only in negative. To believe in a Marx fully realised by Capital, is to believe in a Marx as described by Capital.

The qualitative weakness of the proletarian assault in 1848 enabled Capital to absorb limited aspects of its revolutionary critique. But it must be recognised that "Marxism" also contaminated revolutionaries, as much at the end of the 19th century as nowadays. The radical groups which came after Marx believed that capitalist expansion would limit the segmentation and division of the working class, by removing, for example, the dominant position of English Capital, and by slowing down the formation of a privileged working class strata. They did not see capitalism’s capacity to create a new community, and to absorb the organisations born from the terrain of the class struggle. The illusion of the simplification of the communist question through capitalist universalism remains a widespread idea. No matter what some say, in the revolutionary ranks "the development of the productive forces" often remains a good thing in itself.

What past failure hasn’t been explained by the insufficiency of the degree of industrialisation! And this error in perspective also deforms the communist vision. It makes the constitution of the human community depend on economic growth: "when the productive forces gush forth in abundance..." It results in brushing aside the risk of seeing the emergence of conflicts in communism by postulating the existence of a humanity that has finally become "good" because it has an easy life. Both the Left and leftism justify authorities — whether "revolutionary" or progressive — which they support in the name of the necessity to manage scarcity. The revolutionaries explain proletarian failures by the insufficiency of resources.

This illusion amounts to making us, in Guesde’s expression, "the sons of horsepower". It takes up the twin dreams — of capitalist and worker — of being able to escape from exploitation thanks to technology and automation. Capital dreams of passing beyond the wage-worker, the source of conflict. Wage workers dream of passing beyond the capitalist, the boss and the profiteer. The first longs for a machine which dispenses with human initiative; the second for a machine which would rid them of human management.

The appearance of "Marxism" at the end of the 19th century was the product of the remoteness of the communist perspective, which fragmented and divided itself into two monsters: Marxism and anarchism. (The choice of the terms attests to the confusion — each having initially been employed by the other camp before their use imposed itself on everyone). These two monsters, which grew into two poles of theory and practise, each erected a partial aspect of communism into the totality. Marxism hypertrophied the concepts of economic growth and crisis, of the seizure of power and centralism. Anarchism hypertrophied the concepts of the liberation of men, of self-government and of autonomy. Isolated, each of these aspects lost any subversive potentiality; one-sided, they opened themselves to becoming agents of capitalist modernisation. Anarchism rewrote history by reducing it to the fight between two principles: authority and freedom. Marxism interpreted it from the standpoint of the development of production. When the visionary dimension remained, as in Bebel with his book on Woman and Socialism, or in the work of Kropotkin, it was like a mutilated fragment. Anarchism continued to preach certain modes of refusal of capitalism — free love, communal life — but detached from a global vision. The synthesis attempted before 1848 had shattered into pieces.

Nineteen-Seventeen and afterwards

"As for me, I see a sufficient demonstration of the need for communist revolution in the social tremors of the inter-war period. In fact, it is the most sufficient of demonstrations... The disgusting international situation, constantly aggravated, completely corresponded to this."

(G. Munis, Parti-Etat. Stalinisme. Révolution, Spartacus, 1975, p. 84)

The scale and the depth of the second great proletarian assault are particularly explained by what proletarians had previously undergone and undertaken — they had to rebel against what they had largely contributed to creating. The defence of labour power, undertaken by the labour movement up to the war in 1914, could neither prepare the revolution, nor even unite workers. The trade unions never integrated the unemployed. The latter conducted specific struggles (the big hunger marches in the US after 1929), but for their own objectives: to obtain work. During this period employed workers themselves demanded the maintenance and improvement of their work. On this basis, the straightforward defence of work, there could be no possible solidarity. Thus the awakening in 1914 was painful — the proletariat discovered not only that "its" organisations belonged instead to capitalism, but that "the class" would only unite itself for radical action and in violence.

The cynicism of a J. Gould, the American industrialist and multimillionaire, who in 1886 declared: "I have the means to hire half the working class to kill the other half" (quoted in F. Browning et J. Gerassi, Le Crime à l’américaine, Fayard, 1981, p. 183), well expresses Capital’s contempt for man. But most of the time the capitalists don’t need to buy the exploited in order to hurl them against the others. The violence of economic and political contradictions is sufficient to organize one against another. All "defence of employment", from the demands of the AIT, to the disguised xenophobia maintained by trade unions today, ends in protecting wage workers against others.

Gould’s statement sums up his period — the employers strategy in the 19th century did indeed consist of lowering wages and lengthening the working day, while forcibly opposing attempts at workers organisation. It would not apply to the period which opened in 1914–18. But in 1909, Lozinsky still published a rather pessimistic assessment, country by country, of the situation of Capital and the working class. For him, growth didn’t improve working class conditions, but sometimes aggravated them. Democracy was a capitalist weapon. Their own organisations reinforced workers’ submission to Capital. The factory, which organized workers, only united them in servitude. Capitalist development didn’t strengthen the communist movement.

"Then the engineers, the accountants, the technicians multiplied themselves (...) Because one cannot leave the former savage near the machinery, he might break it. No, it is necessary that the workers are instructed and well trained (...) That is why the professors and writers, these specialised trainers, multiply (...) The democratic state signifies that the scientist takes the place of the police. It is for this reason that social leaders multiply: deputies, politicians, agronomists, statisticians, newspaper columnists, lawyers, etc." (J.Makhaïski, 1908, Le socialisme des intellectuels, Le Seuil, 1979, p. 198)

In the social life and evolution of organisations, what counts is their function, not their initial doctrines. Whether it derives its origins from anarchism or from socialism, syndicalism above all emerges as an impotent reaction against reformism, and ends up by giving in to class collaboration. Overly disappointed, former revolutionaries lapsed into elitism. Thus in the work of Georges Darien, one of whose characters no longer sees anything except a "dirty sale" between "a handful of desperate recalcitrants" and "the aristocracy of money" (Les Pharisiens, 1891, UGE, 1979, pp. 125–126).

"...it was a beautiful day that they blended into one another, proletariat and bourgeoisie, and despite their denials, walked hand in hand. Through being affectionate, they were to end up by spanning the muddy pit which separated them with state socialism, this pont d’Avignon on which the horny handed proletarian dances a carmagnole with petty industry and petty commerce, regulated by industrial tribunal..." (Id., pp. 124–125)

By contrast, after 1917 it was undoubtedly the communist movement as such which reappeared in Russia, in Germany and elsewhere. Yet it would never be the heart — that is to say the practical goal — of the social agitation, which mainly remained in the wake of democracy. It emerged, but only as programme.

"Why would we need money, all Petrograd is in the hands of the workers; all the apartments, all the stores, all the factories and workshops, the textile mills, the food stores, everything is in the hands of the social organisations. The working class doesn’t need money", proclaimed Bleikhman, a Russian anarchist worker in 1917.

But proletarians did not take the measures of communisation which would have rendered market exchange useless. The council movement which appeared in 1917 aimed at taking back control of productive activity. In Russia it was a reaction to the impotence of the bourgeoisie. In the United States and Germany it was a reaction against Scientific Management. The defeat of 1919 was that of the skilled workers in the Berlin metal working industries, who formed the heart of the USPD. During the risings in central Germany in 1921, the workers who took centre stage were unskilled, as at Leuna where B.A.S.F had created a modern chemical plant, with an unskilled labour force supervised by skilled workers from other areas. The workers at Leuna and elsewhere, would resist repression and the divisions in their midst for a long time. But their armed organisation was the proletariat in arms — a proletariat which did not undertake to destroy itself as proletariat.

In the 19th century, far from causing "the ever expanding union of the workers" (Communist Manifesto, section 1), struggles for wage demands had split up proletarians along the dividing lines of the division of labour. Accentuating a tendency which had already taken shape in industrial unionism, after 1914–18 the community of struggle passed from the craft union to the factory council, inside which collective labour, which had been broken up and decomposed by Capital, tried to regain the common existence it had lost.

Nevertheless, unlike the non-revolutionary "communists" such as Fourier, the proletariat of 1917 no longer sought to act alongside the state, or else to convert it. From the start of the 20th century, and particularly after 1914–18, the movement explicitly set as its goal, not the conquest of the state, but its destruction. As regards practise it is sufficient to compare the collective suicide of the workers in the old quarters in Paris in 1848 to the offensive of the red army of the Ruhr in 1920 — even though the latter subsequently came to a halt, consumed from within by democracy. As regards theory, we can contrast the ambiguous declarations of Marx (and those of Engels which are stripped of any ambiguity) about the possibility of a peaceful transition towards socialism, with the theses of the communist organisations after 1917.

But what does the demand for the demolition of the state mean if it is limited to that? If the proletarian movement is content to merely occupy the centre of capitals (such as Berlin in January 1919) or to confront the army, it rushes towards defeat. Where the state was weak, as in Russia, proletarians might even overthrow it. But this only meant taking its place and letting the "workers state" manage wage labour, in other words manage capitalism. The proletariat conducted a critique in deeds of the State, but not of Capital as a historic social relation. In Russia and in Germany, it would almost always be a matter of reorganising labour, of reforming the world of the economy, not of communisation. The communist movement became bogged down on the terrain of power.

When Italian workers occupied the factories in September 1920, particularly in Turin, the government allowed the strike to deteriorate by itself. The proletarians did not take the initiative. The State was even clever enough to accept "workers control". Once it is constituted as a social force, the proletariat has nothing else to organise but its own suppression. Its constitution must coincide with its selfsuppression through the propagation of ever larger waves of communisation infecting all activities and all social strata. In the absence of this process, which it did not spark off after 1917, the "organised proletariat", and even "the proletariat in arms", was forced to give way before the weight of capitalist relations which were not long in returning to occupy the entire terrain.

In 1917–21 the language of the social movement remained political. Just as the millenarians had believed they were realizing a divine principle, the most extreme workers acted as if they were realizing a new principle of power, based on workers self-organisation. They believed that they had accomplished an advance compared to the party and trade union bureaucracies, but they did not define communism. Political and no longer religious, the movement secularised itself, but once again it still acted starting from something other than itself.

Aroused by the Russian revolution, the wave of revolutionary and reformist-demand struggles (the two combining and sowing confusion in all minds) would reverberate from continent to continent over the next twenty years. Everywhere the bourgeoisie would end up by taking back what it had been forced to concede. In vain the English and Welsh miners struck for weeks, even months, against wage cuts. In the United States, around 1919, the IWW increased from 40,000 to 100,000 members, just before disappearing. France passed a law establishing the eight hour day but dismissed 18,000 railwaymen in 1920 — it was one of the most serious defeats for French workers. Starting in Russia and central Europe the wave of struggles swept as far as China (1926) and the United States. Fighting a capitalism that was in the middle of modernization, American workers succeeded in setting up... a trade union federation. But the strength and ambivalence of their action was confirmed by the fact that the CIO had difficulty in controlling them. In 1937 sit-in strikes, which were pro- and anti-union at the same time, erupted just after the agreement between the United Auto Workers and General Motors. In exchange for recognition the trade unions had agreed not to support the wildcat strikes, which were characterised as unofficial. Against this agreement between the bosses and the unions, the workers occupied the factories and, as at Flint in Michigan, used nonbureaucratic methods which displayed a high degree of organisation, but they no less continued to support the union.

It took the war to bring order to the American working class: after Germany declared war on the USSR, the Communist Party which more or less directly controlled one third of the members of the CIO, approved the anti-strike clause signed by the unions. The confrontation in May 1937 between the workers of Barcelona and the Spanish Republican State, marked the last revival of the wave of 1917. Once again the contradictions in proletarian practise can be measured by the fact that the majority of the insurrectionists belonged either to the CNT or to the POUM, which did everything they could to stop them, and succeeded. "A historical cycle was closed with the destruction of the Spanish revolution: that of the first international offensive of the proletariat against capitalism" (Munis, Parti-Etat. Stalinisme. Révolution, Spartacus, 1975, p. 67) Once again the proletariat hadn’t acted as a "class for itself".

In spite of a global capitalist expansion the proletariat didn’t know how to prevent either the — fatal — time-lag between the various national uprisings or, in particular, the democratic corruption. It recognised its enemies — who since 1914 had revealed themselves for what they were. It did not do what was necessary to destroy them, since it took on the visible enemies and not the things their power was based on: the relations of wage labour and the market. Although, in contrast to the 19th century, it sometimes took the offensive, it continued to pursue political action. In short, it only put forward "the tactical requirements of the first stage of the new movements: anti-parliamentarism, anti-unionism and anti-frontism" (Mouvement capitaliste et révolution russe, Brussels, 1974). Consequently, the communist left , which would occupy itself for years in attempting to understand what had happened, would distinguish itself by its refusals: refusal of trade unions, of the State (even, and especially, the democratic State), of the Popular Fronts, of the USSR, of national liberation movements, of the Resistance, and so on, and this because the proletariat no longer intervened as a social force. This obliteration of communism as a historic force was not necessarily more serious than that in the second half of the 19th century, but it was certainly more striking.