Warning :

Although this review has been printed after the NUM's decision to call for a return to work, the article on the miners' strike was written 4 months earlier. Since the general outlines of the strike, which we've analysed in this article, remain valid, and moreover, are confirmed by the (provisional) outcome of the struggle, we've decided to publish this text anyway without reactualising it. We'll complete it by drawing up, in a separate leaflet, the balance-sheet of this strike, because the proletarian struggle, in spite of this severe setback, goes on, be it through different means. Undoubtedly, the consequences of this strike will be numerous for the struggles to come. Not only negatively though: more precisely concerning the bourgeois nature of the unions, especially of radical unions and on the rank-and-file level, we'll do everything in our power so that this most crucial lesson from the miners' strike will never be forgotten!

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In all countries, the bourgeoisie continually steps up its attacks on the working class. Everywhere, austerity plans have to be imposed: redundancies, speed-ups, expulsions of immigrant workers, industrial rationalisations, wage-cuts... it all mounts up to an intensification of misery, an increase in exploitation and in the end... the destruction of proletarians on a world-scale.

In Brazil, hundreds of thousands of starved proletarians spread over cities and started looting: they attacked shops, storehouses, trains,.. In Spain, steelworkers clashed violently with police. In Tunisia, in Morocco, in Algeria, in Egypt, in Belgium, in Holland... the proletariat has been refusing, for reasons which are fundamentally identical, the measures governments have taken against them. All these struggles, even though they are limited and contingent, are expressions of the proletariat's tendency to universally organise itself against capital.

The miners' strike that has been going on for many months now is part of this world-wide proletarian attempt to refuse and oppose the impeccable logic of the dominant system.

We have to analyse this struggle as such, which means we have to put all actions, all violence, all organisational attempts into their general framework, i.e. the total comprehension of the communist perspective.

In the first part of this article, we'll analyse the positive elements of the miners' strike, its characteristics that constitute a step forward considering today's balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. But must of all, we want to analyse the general weaknesses of this strike. In opposition to many groups who think their role is only to be able to explain weaknesses (for this reason they analyse each particular struggle "in itself" without linking it to the historical communist movement), which finally comes down to accepting the status quo under pretext that weaknesses can only be bypassed when all workers have become conscious of them, we claim that our internationalist solidarity with all proletarian movements must express itself through the pitiless criticism of their weaknesses. It is only through this criticism (with all its practical implications) that we can try not to be as powerless as before in front of always the same enemies, of always the same deadlocks. So one of our specific tasks must be to fight those weaknesses. More generally, to draw up the balance-sheet of historical as well as of today's struggles, in order to transform it into practical arms for tomorrow's struggles, is one of the fundamental tasks of revolutionary militants. This way we can also see that weaknesses are not specific to one or another struggle, be it on a national level, but that they are determined by the world-wide and historical balance of forces between the two classes. The weaknesses of each particular struggle are a materialisation of the general state of non-preparation of our class; if a particular struggle is not radical enough to bypass the general weaknesses, it not only reproduces but also reinforces them!

Massiveness and determination

Miners have been on strike for nine months now. Although it is clear that the overall direction and control of the strike remains firmly in the hands of the NUM. In spite of NUM propaganda on the sense of responsibility of strikers, of their care for the health of British national industry, those tens of thousands of workers show, through their daily practice - be it for a majority of them in a passive way - that they don't give a shit about neither Britain nor its economy. Their failure to make common cause with capitalist interests remains mainly passive - they don't oppose union militancy for national economy - but it nevertheless constitutes an important feature of this movement. It explains why the NUM, the NCB and the government have not been able so far to put through their rationalisation plans. Scargill will just have to wait for miners to get demoralised before he is able to impose his new productivity plans for British coal.

After nine months of struggle many miners are realising that they haven't got much more to lose in this system of wage-labour; on the contrary, through struggle, and in spite of all hardship that comes with it, they have experienced relationships, activities based on class solidarity instead of humiliating bourgeois competition.

Another important feature of this struggle is its massiveness. The strike has spread to all pits, to all areas, except for some (F.i. Nottinghamshire). It spread because of spontaneous class-solidarity (based on the class-interests all workers have in common) actively organised during the first few weeks of the strike - when the NUM had not yet recognised the strike on the national level - by miners who efficiently picketed indistinctly on mines and factories of other sectors. Later on these pickets were replaced by union organised pickets, disorganising and confining the strike (see later on), but nevertheless the strike remained massive, and on some occasions managed to draw workers from other sectors into action, despite the unions' efforts to prevent this. Workers of other sectors recently have been showing signs of discontent and militancy (hospitals, railway workers), but this mobilisation from more or less large sectors of the working class remains far below the level it reached during the 1979 strike-wave.

The attempt of Dockers to come out on strike twice already (July, August) each time sabotaged by the unions, is most clearly the sign of workers' solidarity. By trying to join this movement and making it more massive, other workers not only reinforce the miners' pressure on the NCB, on the unions and on the government, but they also take advantage of the uncomfortable position of the bourgeoisie which is scared to death at the thought of a general paralysis of production. Thatcher, usually so firmly opposed to all concessions, all of a sudden recommended important rises of wages to directors of other working class sectors (steel, railways,...). This shows that the proletariat's strength lies in the generalisation of its struggles to all working class sectors. But a fundamental condition for all generalisation, as the first few weeks of the strike showed us, is the autonomous organisation of the working class, a condition which today is -nearly- completely absent from the strike. This allowed the NUM to take a -nearly- full control of the strike.

The unions against the strike

As always, as everywhere, the unions have been attacking workers' militancy for a generalisation and a radicalisation of their struggle, as well directly by opposing it face to face, as indirectly by deviating the struggle from its proper aims. Especially when a union is radicalising its policy, when it is calling for generalisation, for mass picketing, as it is the case in today's miners' strike, it just means they're having a tough time trying to control and finally destroy workers' militancy.

The strike, at its very beginning, started in spite of the unions (Yorkshire and Scotland). Unlike last year when the NUM openly and directly sabotaged wildcat strikes (involving l5,000 miners) in Scotland (Polmaise Pit, Solsgirth, Comrie and Seafield), this time one week after the start of the strike the unions decided to officialise it, be it, at that moment, only in the most militant areas. At that stage, Yorkshire miners started picketing every Nottinghamshire pit, trying to get miners there to come out on strike also. But the NUM's backing the strike in Yorkshire only and the deal worked out between the unions whereby Yorkshire miners wouldn't picket Nottinghamshire in return for a "2 day strike" of Nottinghamshire miners until a ballot was held, demobilised pickets and allowed for the NCB and the government to use this most precious time to bring in 8.000 policemen. The following Monday the Nottinghamshire coalfields were under police control. This is how the NCB was enabled to keep 38 pits working!!!

This shows clearly that even if we are separating -in this article- the different aspects of the strike so as to analyse in detail the specific role of each bourgeois party (left, right, unions, police, media, NUM's counterinformation...) - and also for the sake of the clearness of our explanations - we must never forget that all these aspects are linked together organically, because they are determined by the same class reality, by the same need for maintaining the system of wage-slavery.

Each party can play a specific role, specific roles (repressive, conciliatory, civil, military, informative,..). But also each party, at any time, can play each role, all roles. For instance, the unions usually rely on the credit they have within the working class to put through their plans for austerity; as soon as the credit they have is melting away, they have to rely direct1y on their repressive capacities to continue to defend their interests and those of the capital. Many strikes have shown this, the unions in Eastern European countries (including Solidarnosc***) show this, and history has shown this. It is the class reality that determines their practice.

The NUM has been campaigning for "British coal", against pit closures, arguing that there were no "loss-making" pits. So workers shouldn't fight for their own class-interests, but should defend British coal, which comes down to defending the competitiveness of British coal against French, Belgian, Italian or Russian coal. The NUM's watchword "British coal!" synthesises the whole program of counter-revolution: accept to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the competitiveness of the national economy on the world market, and this logically will lead you to accept the sacrifice of your life to defend "your" bourgeoisie in the war that opposes you to other proletarians who are also sacrificing their lives for "their" bourgeoisie! In all countries, the bourgeoisie has been rationalising the steel, coal, cars,... production and this each time has required thousands of redundancies, speed-ups and wage-cuts. In France, in Italy and in Spain it has been the socialist governments that have been managing these measures of economic "purification"; each time they have had them accompanied by social measures (like extra training for workers or public works for young unemployed) trying to prevent workers' reactions against these attacks on their living-conditions.

The NUM, the NCB and the government are doing exactly this: they all three agree about the need for British coal to be of high quality and of low cost. But it is the NUM's specific role to get these productivity plans through (which include pit closures, whatever Scargill may say about it). In 1978 already, it was the NUM that put through the productivity deal in mines, through which bonus became a larger part of earnings, and so miners in richer areas, like Nottingham, earned up to L 100/week more than miners in poorer pits, like in Yorkshire or Scotland. This productivity deal is responsible for a lot of dissension amongst miners during today's strike.

Another of the NUM's keystones in its attacks on the strike is its propaganda about the need for a change of government. They're deviating the class opposition, between workers and bourgeoisie towards an opposition between the left and the right (this is also what all the fuss about Kadhafi is about). Apart from the productivity deal already mentioned, the Labour Party and the unions have shown on many occasions that they have nothing to begrudge the Conservatives for, on the contrary! Should we recall that when the Labour Party was in government, they managed to enforce the biggest proportional fall in the living standards of the working class since the beginning of the century; that, during their eleven years of rule, they closed 300 pits!!! Because of their influence on workers, their constant references to the cause and struggles of the working class, they are still more redoubtable enemies. Most of all, what the bourgeois class is aiming at, is that workers leave the grounds of autonomous class-struggle and abdicate in favour of bourgeois politics, i.e. that workers rely on bourgeois society and bourgeois parties rather than fight them! A change of government always constitutes an attack against the proletariat and its struggles, independently from which bourgeois fraction is coming to power. Just like when the bourgeois class was claiming a ballot on the strike, they didn't hope workers would reject the strike, but most of all, they wanted workers to place themselves from within capitalist society (unions, elections...).

On pickets

From the very beginning the development of the strike has been at stake in the organisation and action of pickets. Pickets are an essential feature of workers' struggles; they can become a real centre of struggle since they allow more easily for all most determined workers, independently from the sector they belong to, whether they are unemployed or not, to organise their actions. Pickets can destroy the walls of factories in so far as those are real barriers against our struggles.

The flying pickets set up in the beginning of the strike, proved to be very successful. Workers picketed indistinctly on all factories. The NUM soon realised that the only way to go against this was by submitting and at the same time transforming those pickets, i.e. by destroying them as a means to generalise and centralise the strike.

So they started denouncing pickets they did not control, they allowed money only to pickets they had organised, they started organising symbolic actions against scabs, mobilising thousands of strikers against a handful of scabs (who were not able to do any work in the mine anyway) while at the same time letting pass through many highly qualified workers (who did continue to work in the mine - maintenance and security) alleging they didn't belong to the NUM.

Picketing has descended into a ritual shoving of pickets against police; the struggle has become a show of clashes with cops, when the latter are sure to win because they are well prepared and well organised. Fellow-workers, instead of being solicited by pickets and being allowed to join in the struggle, are being transformed into mere supporters. The huge stocks of coal that pickets can use as an important arm (paralysing other factories, distribution of coal to other proletarians,...) were used by the NUM as a means to negotiate union solidarity from other factories, bargaining coal "for heating only"(!) against some act of "solidarity" (sometimes money, more often moral support!).

Union mass picketing has become a means to canalise workers' class anger into the deadlock of sterile confrontation with police. That's why Scargill had to justify certain acts of violence. He says he understands the violence miners use to defend themselves against police brutality (!); but when he denounces police violence and supports the miners defending themselves, it is only in the name of democracy, for the better sake of law and order. Each time miners have left this bourgeois ground of democracy, as they have on many occasions, and have started organising their violence, i.e. attacking police offensively, destroying State and NCB properties, then Scargill just like all other bourgeois denounced the vandals, the hooligans, the provocateurs, calling for police and justice to put a stop on this. Not only do unions claim efficient, well equipped police forces, not only do they militate for the constant improvement, i.e. the reinforcement of the whole judicial body, but all this, so they say, is for the sake of the working class. To turn each worker into a delator, into a potential cop watching his fellow-worker, denouncing each manifestation of insubordination: that's their ideal! They really are the watchdogs of capital!

On repression

In England, but even more so abroad, public opinion praises the commendable understanding that seems to govern social relations. According to public opinion (the sum of ideas of all citizens, of all individuals dispossessed of themselves and of their activities and conscience), social conflicts are rare in Britain, workers have strong unions, representative of their interests, negotiating around the clock for workers' sake, and even when workers have to come out on strike, they proceed decently, without violence, respecting law and order! And isn't the British "bobby" also a gentleman?

Here, just like everywhere else, when they stand up for their interests, workers have to confront the cannibalism of society, organised centrally within the State. Not only do workers have to confront the violence of the State, all fractions united, but they also find in front of them the world-wide coalition of all bourgeois states!

During this strike, the State has mobilised all its forces against the working class. All parties, all unions, all police forces, all media, all specially trained riot-squads are on their feet 24 hours a day, trying to get miners to go back to work. We have already explained the role played by the unions in this struggle. We now want to insist on the role of the police and the media.

In order to deny and negate the class-character of society and of all conflicts that shake this world violently, capital has to deform, mystify and obscure the reality of today's commodity relationships constantly. The dominant ideology - mediated by all existing information channels, TV, papers, conferences,... - is a materialisation in thought of the terror the bourgeoisie imposes in practice on its class-enemy. All media, claiming to be organs of information on objective reality, on actual facts, on concrete events, on statistical data, pretend to allow for a true appreciation of reality. In fact, they are nothing else but the adequate vehicle - medium - to reflect a mystified world from which all social antagonisms have been evacuated. But in order to make class-reality disappear from social consciousness, it is not enough for the bourgeoisie to simply describe reality from a non-class point of view (point of view of the dominating system), it also has to simply hide (by not talking about it, by destroying all elements relative to this aspect of reality) the facts of class-struggle, especially when this reality is becoming more and more obvious through the aggravation of class-antagonisms (for instance, the anticommunist nature of war, the communist nature of workers' struggles).

Not one day goes by without all TV broadcasts, all papers spitting their filthy propaganda on our class struggle. All the fuss about some scabs continuing to work in some mines, about miners in other regions going back to work, all the campaigns on legal action as far as the preservation of the holy "right to work" of some scabs is concerned, all the filth and lies poured day after day on proletarians' attempts to resist and organise themselves against police action, all the propaganda about the threat of this struggle on the fate of the poor, of old people, of children, of hospitals and schools, all this serves only one aim, making workers go back to work! In front of this, the only reasonable reaction of miners has been to beat up press and TV hyenas!

At the same time those very reasonable gentlemen spit on all our attempts to organise our struggle and to radicalise it, they also try to deviate it from its proper objectives and to confine it to a conflict between different bourgeois fractions. Incapable of recognising the reality of our struggle, they can only see and interpret it as the difficulties of the unions to control their "rank and file". They, time after time, try to present our struggle as a conflict between the left and the right, or even as a dispute between miners, between those who want to work and those who want to strike! For sure we can count on sociologists' and psychologists' commitment to bourgeois society to find even more subtle explanations for our strike and our aggressiveness. More recently, the media have tried to transform our strike by depicting it as a conflict between the East and the West (about the NUM getting money from Libya and the Soviet Union). So the media, independently from the journalists' will to pursue untiringly the phantom of objectivity (the point of view objectively bourgeois!) necessarily and harmoniously completes the repressive role of police and unions.

With the lessons of the strikes of 1972 and 1974, and of the strike-wave of 1979 followed by the unemployed's riots of 1981, still fresh in its mind, the ruling class has been able to develop its understanding of workers' struggle, i.e. to more clearly seize the real objectives of workers' struggle as well as the different means of achieving them. They've been able, mainly because the union is keeping a strong hold on this strike and preventing miners from organising efficiently against repression, to use to the full their whole apparatus of repression, which they've been developing since the struggles five years ago, including the involvement of army forces, the intervention of special trained, riot-squads, and the use of modern electronics in this class war. When social peace is in danger, the essential nature of democracy becomes clear: crushing the class-enemy! Is there a clearer image of the true nature of democracy, than this daily ritual of scabs using their right to work, trying to get into the mines escorted by a few hundreds of riot police!!!

Police systematically have been establishing precise lists of all strikers (names, addresses, phone numbers, car numbers,...) so as to be able to phonetap miners and identify the more militant among them, to identify cars moving around the mining areas in the early morning hours and to break into miners' houses, knowing exactly who to find, who's been staying overnight, so as to arrest pre-emptively the more radical miners.

Each time workers have been arrested (7O00 of them have been since the beginning of the strike), they have been sentenced to pay huge fines in case they ever got caught again on picket lines. This way, the State is sure miners will think twice before joining picket lines again.

On top of that, the State has taken hostages amongst the strikers, imprisoning those miners who were particularly isolated from their fellow-workers, mainly because they've been caught in one of the many minoritarian and sometimes individual sabotage actions. Strikers have been unable, except for some specific cases, to counteract this and to react to the imprisonment of fellow-workers.

The State has used cavalry charges by club wielding mounted police, they've brought in riot-squads set up after the inner city riots, they've set up road blocks to prevent miners from leaving their home areas - for any reason! They have intimidated, beaten up and arrested miners trying to make their way to picket lines, they've imposed a military siege on many pit areas, cordoning off coalfields. At night, they've been going into pubs to arrest miners.

Should we add the "agents provocateurs", the informers they have used, the video cameras to film pickets and identify people later on, should we mention that they have "handcuffed, photographed and locked up miners for twenty-four hours, merely for being on a picket line"? (Sunday Times) This strike shows that democracy means to beat up strikers, to starve them, to kill them!

Perspectives for this struggle: the need for workers' autonomy!

We have already said that the overall direction of the strike remains firmly in the hands of the NUM. In the 1979 steel strike workers tried to picket in spite of the unions and they sometimes succeeded (the violent picketing at Hadfields against the dispensation issued by Bill Sirs exempting Hadfields from the strike!). Even four years ago, in February '81, Welsh miners, and also miners in Kent and in Scotland, decided to ignore Scargill's appeal for a return to work when they came out as soon as they had heard about the plans to shut down twenty pits. When the strike collapsed a few days later (Scargill sabotaging all generalisation attempts, telling Yorkshire miners he had received "assurances" from the NCB) angry Kent miners went to the NUM headquarters in London, and Scargill needed police protection to get in.

In today's miners' strike, since the very beginning workers have been placing all their faith in the actions of the NUM and of other unions to help them in their efforts to spread the strike. The whole episode of the NACODS "mobilisation" about getting paid for crossing picket-lines' illustrates just this when workers don't take into their own hands the organisation of their struggles, they remain at the mercy of the unions' intrigues. When the NACODS finally cancelled its strike threat, many miners became discouraged and even more passive. If the strike had been organised more actively by miners, like during the first few weeks, the scabs from the NACODS would never have been allowed to cross picket lines in the first place!

All calculations about how to use for one's own interests the contradictions between different bourgeois parties always fail to becomes true: on the contrary, they disorganise! When workers don't organise, don't act for themselves, directly against all bourgeois fractions, the only thing that's left for them to do is to implore the "aid" of humanists, democrats, progressists, leftists, Socialists and Communists (!) to protect them from the all-out State repression. Capital will be merciful towards its subjects but only on the condition that democracy reigns again, i.e. that workers, after having the most radical amongst them being terminated, "accept" to return to work for lower wages. Our class has witnessed this scenario all throughout the long history of its struggles.

In spite of the NUM' control on the strike, workers, to some extent, have been organising actions that the unions disavowed, especially as far as sabotage actions and attacks on police are concerned. The extent these actions have taken in recent months (and this will probably continue) indicates a growing dissatisfaction with the way the strike is going:

- there have been full scale riots, with arson attacks and with barricades being set up;

- there were attacks on police stations (at Hemsworth, Maltby, Armthorpe, Plexborough, Garv, Betws, Easington); during the Fitwilliam riot workers laid siege to a Police station to prevent police from arresting a miner, they later on destroyed NCB offices.

- there have been organised attempts to bypass the unions' set piece mass picketing, more particularly by workers ambushing police in guerrilla style operations (Silverwood pit near Rotherham)

- scabs have been efficiently intimidated, terrorised!

- on many occasions, there has been organised sabotage, ignoring union pleas to respect private and State property! "Vandals caused an estimated £ 250,000 damage at NCB offices at Cadeby, St.Yorkshire" while police didn't intervene "because of violence from pickets at Cadeby colliery opposite and other vandalism by strikers" (The Times, 20/11/84). In Liverpool, a transport company has been attacked! Pits have been flooded by miners (making them inexploitable for a long, long time, like Polkemmet pit in Scotland).

- the NCB has been reporting on "pickets wearing paramilitary uniform, building barricades and stoning any vehicle passing through". "Hit squads" have caused vast amounts of damage.

So miners have been trying on many occasions to organise themselves against the NCB, against police, but without ever attacking the NUM; actions have been organised parallelly to NUM's actions, never against them. That is the main reason why these actions have remained isolated, never have been centralised, in spite of their multiplication in recent months. This is criminal for the future of the strike, because it means the NUM will be able to remain in control of the struggle, "tolerating" these violent actions!

The future of the strike depends on the most militant workers' capacity to clearly designate the NUM, like all unions, as a class enemy and to take into their own hands the conduct of the struggle, i.e. to give clear directives, to designate clear objectives to strikers. This is essential, especially today, when more and more miners are getting pissed off about the way the strike is going, and need more than ever a clear centre of direction, of struggle. All proletarian efforts and actions must not remain scattered, and isolated (making it more easy for the unions and police to repress them and, by their filthy propaganda, to isolate them even further) but have to be united, centralised into one clear direction of confrontation with the whole State (unions, bosses, Labour, government and all bourgeois parties) and of generalisation of the struggle to all workers!

There is no need for waiting for all miners to agree on the true nature of the NUM; it is now that the most radical workers must organise themselves, on a national level, against the unions, and become a centre of struggle. All the proletarian actions we have mentioned have been assumed and organised by workers or groups of workers, in spite of the other miners' opinions about it! Those actions have been assumed by the most determined workers, because they are indispensable to the development of the strike. Today's development of the strike requires more than ever the autonomous organisation of strikers and the centralisation of all actions. This will also be a decisive condition for workers from other sectors to join the struggle.

Note

*** Solidarnosc has expressed its solidarity (!) with the miners' strike by sending the following message to the Polish government denouncing the exportation of Polish scab coal to Britain: "The conquest of foreign markets through the practice of competitive prices, i.e. prices below world market prices, is a denial of the Jastrzebic agreement, where it has been admitted that coal is a national source of wealth which has to be exploited in a rational manner. With such prices, investments in the coal industry can only increase the deficit of our national economy. Only bad capitalists (sic!) and dictators act like this!" (Labour Focus, vol.7, No 2,London).

"What Marx and Lenin emphasised about the state - that despite the formal democracy that it professes, its organisation makes it unsuited to serve as an instrument for proletarian revolution - applies equally to the trade-union organisations. Their counter-revolutionary strength cannot be destroyed or diminished by a change in personnel, by the replacement of reactionary leaders with left-wing or revolutionary people." (Gorter, p.6 of "Oppositionist" edition)

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Leaflet

We are publishing here one of our leaflets which as been distributed in Yorkshire during the miners' strike.

AUTONOMOUS ORGANISATION OF THE WORKING CLASS

GENERALISATION OF THE STRUGGLE TO ALL WORKING CLASS' SECTORS

SABOTAGE NATIONAL ECONOMY

NO COMPROMISES

After the struggle of steelworkers in France and Belgium, after the revolts in Tunisia and Morocco, in Brazil and South Africa... how could anyone continue to pretend that what's going on here only concerns us as far as coal goes, as far as Britain goes!

By going on strike against wage cuts, against redundancies, we call upon the whole working class to join our struggle because today all working class' sectors in all countries are facing similar attacks.

While the strike originally started as a refusal of tens of thousands of redundancies that the government still wants to impose, the unions try to transform the struggle into a support to the British economy! The unions just translated "no redundancies" into "coal for Britain" as if being exploited in coal-mines was better than being exploited in oil-refineries, or in... porridge factories!

The NUM demands a stop in coal imports, an increase in exports, a rise in coal investments, etc. but where the hell does all this take into account the interests of the workers!! We don't give a shit about the difficulties "they" have in managing their system!

The unions imprison the workers on the bourgeois field of competition (coal against oil, Britain against France), they check pickets so they won't move around too much (that's why the NUM allows money only to pickets it controls), they organise symbolic actions against scabs, transforming the struggle into a show of clashes with cops (when the latter are sure to win because they are well prepared and well organised), they prevent strikers from destroying stocks... That's how the unions prevent a real generalisation of our struggles, that's how they faithfully accomplish their duty as watchdogs of capital. How could a change at the head of the state possibly reduce our exploitation? What we want is not to bring down Thatcher so as to replace her by Scargill or by the Labour party; they all, Mitterand as well as Thatcher, as well as Reagan or Alfonsin impose the same anti-working class politics.

When Scargill says he wants to "generalise" our struggle, he is only trying to get new credit for his union, to overthrow Thatcher so as to put forward another alternative capable of imposing the sacrifices needed to save the British economy. They all just want to negotiate the price of our blood!

What we want is to destroy completely this system of wage-slavery! Comrades, to reinforce our struggle means to:

- ORGANISE OURSELVES AUTONOMOUSLY IN SPITE OF AS WELL AS AGAINST UNIONS

- GENERALIZE OUR STRUGGLE BY UNIFYING CLAIMS

- USE DIRECT ACTION SABOTAGING NATIONAL ECONOMY, DESTROYING STOCKS, EFFICIENT INTIMIDATION OF SCABS...

- GENERALIZE OUR STRUGGLE BY MASSIVE PICKETTING OF ALL FACTORIES OF ALL SECTORS

Internationalist Communist Group
Address: B.P.54 - Bruxelles 31
1060 BRUXELLES - Belgium
Read "Communism", our central review in English (available in London).

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Correspondence

We are publishing here a leaflet that has been sent to us by the FITZWILLIAM PRISONERS' AID GROUP from Yorkshire. That group is organising help for the imprisoned miners, for all those who "have gone too far" in the eyes of the State. The information activity is one of the revolutionaries' most important tasks which is to be supported and developed particularly today because the lack of international connections between revolutionary minorities is still an important deficiency at this point of time. In complement to the publication of this leaflet, we give a summary of our essential positions on the question of prisons.

CLASS WAR PRISONERS' AID

For eleven months the miners have been on strike against the destruction of their jobs and communities.

For eleven months the State has used all the means at its disposal to try to break the strike - media lies, money and force.

Despite constant claims that the strike is over, despite bribes for scabs and the use of far more expensive fuels, despite the massive police presence in pit towns, mass arrests, oppressive bail conditions, curfews, etc., the miners have refused to bow down before the bulldozer of profitability.

There have been thousands of arrests and numerous long prison sentences for struggling against the imposition of poverty.

We support all those imprisoned for supporting their communities, their standard of living and their colleagues, and we are collecting money for them and their families.

When the occupying police force in Fitzwilliam, North Yorkshire, tried to arrest a well-known miner, he refused to co-operate and a riot ensued. All sections of the working class joined in, building burning barricades from material and vehicles (including cranes) taken from the pit. The police captured nine people. Despite the Yorkshire NUM's attempts to sabotage solidarity with the prisoners (including taking away the Fitzwilliam branch minibus) the Fitzwilliam Prisoners Aid Committee have continued to give active support to their imprisoned comrades.

Like many other prisoners, miners and other working class people nicked in connection with the miners' strike are inside for trying to resist poverty, for crimes against capitalist property and its enforcers. To segregate them as political prisoners would be to isolate them from the rest of the working class. The divisions between different sections of workers and between the employed and the unemployed must be broken down on both sides of, and across, the prison walls. As long as there are prisons for those who resist, we are all enslaved, and as long as there is poverty of dole for those who demand better pay and conditions, we will all be pushed down into poverty.

Only working class solidarity can free the prisoners. The liberation of the working class is the task of the working class ourselves.

If you wane to help the class war prisoners, come to our weekly meetings, Thursday 6:30 pm at 355 Holloway Rd. London N7, or send donations to Box CWPA at the same address.

Any cheques should be made payable to: "Max Holz Committee".

1. Introduction

The reinforcement of social antagonisms between proletariat and "bourgeoisie" is creating preoccupations at the front line of the two classes: the reinforcement of repression measures on one hand, and the proletariat's answers to that repression on the other hand. Because if the world-wide crisis exacerbates the competition between the different fractions of the bourgeoisie, there is a sphere where they all do agree: the repression against what will be its gravedigger: the proletariat.

Everywhere, in all States, the repression measures are directed against all the people, all the social activities that disturb "public security", which means the normal course of production and the circulation of commodities. Millions of imprisoned workers are kept in the State's prisons as hostages, to ensure the bourgeois order.

Flying pickets, wild strikes, sabotage actions... all manifestations of strength by the proletariat are condemned by regulations such as the "right to strike", the "right to work", etc. They are considered as "bandit activities" or as some provocateurs' work. All workers' associations are at the mercy of the new "anti-terrorist" repression measures of the bourgeois State. In front of all these bourgeois terrorist campaigns, which direction must the counter-repression measures and the solidarity with/between the imprisoned proletarians take?

2. The prisons as a condition of the existence of "the best possible world"... Let's destroy all the prisons! Solidarity with all the imprisoned struggling against the bourgeois state

Capitalism has only liberated society from the obstacles that prevented the bourgeoisie from developing the exploitation of the working class and improved the institutions bequeathed by the previous ruling classes, such as the prisons, the jails or hard labour...

The bourgeoisie has only taken the heavy and cumbersome chains away from the slaves while it has submitted the entire humanity to the meshes of capitalist production and in the same time the reclusion, the imprisonment, the social exclusions have reached their ultimate development. The State repression has become institutional, permanent and normal thanks to the subtle game of Justice which gives it its apparent exteriority, exclusivity and segregation.

The repression, which is present at all degrees in prisons (isolation, close watch, persecutions, tortures...) has become the guarantee of the general interest! To impose itself to the citizens, to the "free people", as the code of behaviour, the society of commodities needs the speeches of the priests, of the democrats and the humanists, but also needs spaces and special places to learn "freedom", to re-educate to the "civic values", to intimidate and exclude all the unhealthy elements, all the "social misfits"... all those who are suspected of not respecting the laws and rules of the merchant society. Prisons are not only used to withdraw the trouble-makers generated by society but also to persuade the "sane", the "good" and "honest" people of their privilege to live in the best possible world...

Prisons are a necessary condition for the existence of "the best possible world", the prisoner is nothing but the counter-image of the "free man" without which he wouldn't know the price of his freedom, the virtue of his morals and the equity of social Justice!!!

The guardians of peace cannot be but armed guardians: the guarantee of "freedom" depends on the efficiency of the reclusion places... Such is the unbearable and contradictory reality of civil bourgeois society, codified in the penal right and achieved by Justice, its tribunals and its prisons.

It is not in the name of "God's will" but in the name of laws that the bourgeoisie does inflict the measures required for the functioning of civilised society to the working class.

All the proletarians thrown in jails are subject to the most extreme proletarisation and undergo the yoke of the interests of Capital reproduction in some intense social conditions of oppression: reclusion, persecutions (alimentary, sexual...), political and social isolation, total submission, etc.

All of them are used as hostages of the bourgeoisie, entrusted with serving as examples, with terrorising the proletarians who still have the privilege to choose where they are going to sell their working force.

Situating the question of prisoners outside the bourgeois content and against the criterions of innocence or guilt, of justice or injustice as defined by the bourgeoisie itself means in no way to idealise the prisoners and the delinquents, nor to find them in a position of being radical and special revolutionary proletarians, but it means giving to the struggle the fundamental axis on which we must build the proletarian answer to the repression and organise the struggle of all imprisoned workers.

We never situate our criterions of solidarity with the prisoners according to their degrees of criminality, guilt or honesty. Those criterions are initiated by the torturers.

For us the most important thing is to establish a class line between the prisoners and the jailers based on a practice of common reaction against the repression, the persecutions (for example through prisoner associations; through putting prisoner solidarity in direct connection with the taking over and the participation in the various requirements of the struggle against repression; through the fight against repentant denouncers and pressions on the scabs and on the over-zealous warders...).

3. Amnesty and political statute against the constitution of a class strength, against the liberation of proletarians

When it imputes the cause of imprisonment, detention camps, massacres, to the excesses of one kind of government, or of one political gang, or to the misuse of authority of one leader..., the bourgeoisie cleans its dictatorship, the dictatorship of the capitalist social system: democracy.

When the State imprisons, tortures and kills systematically, the bourgeois denounce the errors of management, the illegitimacy of a government, the seizure of a "fascist", a "militarist", a "bureaucratic" clique. When "red terrorists", "hooligans", "subversive" proletarians are imprisoned, tortured or killed, the bourgeois only see a side-slip of democracy, produced by the imperfections of the system and by the unconsciousness of some "trouble-makers".

So the bourgeoisie formally adapts itself to the proletarian claim of freeing the imprisoned militant but it falsifies the sense of that claim and its power completely.

When it claims a special statute for "political prisoners", when it defends the "rights of political prisoners", the bourgeoisie exalts "political prisoners" to some category apart, whose social practice and interests are opposed to the other proletarians' and whose defence has nothing to do with the proletarian interests.

So the "common criminals" are considered as victims of the vice, the perversion and the selfishness that dominate them, while "political prisoners" (in default of being the victims of those victims whose evils they try to remedy) are considered as the victims of Authority, of the lack of tolerance, the lack of democracy, of the rigour and the heaviness of the State.

The first ones deserve their punishment and have no perspective but to expiate and venerate the courage and the loyalty of their big "political" brothers.

The second ones are the scapegoats, the martyrs, the "free-thinkers" and deserve, while waiting for the amnesty, a privileged lot. For the bourgeoisie's survival, for the maintenance of pacific coexistence between fractions of the bourgeoisie and between bourgeoisie and proletariat, it is necessary to admit philosophical, political, religious, economic or social "opposition" in the society, which undergoes a permanent reform and, through its contradictions, brings about an unceasing class struggle.

The political prisoners recognised by States and by their humanist' organisations are the victims of that permanent overthrow, the victims of the State limits of tolerance towards its reformers. The political statute of prisoners has the function of providing the proletarians with martyrs of the revolutionary faith, martyrs of the people's cause, of the struggle for "work, peace and freedom": they represent the injustice that falls down on the men of good will, who, here below, believe in a quiet development of progress and who, in front of the capitalists' difficulty in facing the crisis, propose remedies : new governments, news plans of reorganisation... in order to conciliate the class conflicts, to recompose the nation, etc. There is consequently no political statute neither for the combative proletarians nor for the communist militants condemned because of their class belonging and actions. Only those who disown the reasons for their condemnation have the right of getting that statute: all the democrat rascals, the unionists... who only preach for the liberty of being exploited.

The champion of the organisations defending the political statute for prisoners, the famous Amnesty International, supplies by itself the whole anti-proletarian meaning of the political prisoners' statute. In order to benefit from the support of this organisation, one must not "have done anything against the security of the State and never have used violence".

Falling in with the defence of the human bourgeois rights, and so invariably on the side of the bourgeois State, this organisation takes a direct part in the very democratic repression against the proletariat... By organising the spectacular defence of the "innocent" victims of the social injustice, it contributes to the killing of thousands of proletarians "guilty" of having violently fought against the abject capitalist exploitation of the proletariat. It is not only the division between "common criminals" and "political prisoners", "guilty" and "innocent", "defensible" and "not defensible" that the defenders of the political prisoners' statute claim and organise but also the division between "prisoners" and "free men".

Within a relation of force that is not in favour of the bourgeoisie, at a time of important class movements, the political amnesty is nothing but a juridical manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie trying to integrate what is happening in the street and what it cannot avoid (see the latest struggle in Bolivia and the liberation of hundreds of imprisoned workers), all this within the legal context of the democratic State, of the bourgeois policy.

The bourgeoisie's aim is clear: turning a relation of force that is in favour of its historical enemy into its contrary, by taking control of the situation. The amnesty can also achieve a reversal of the relation of force in favour of the bourgeoisie once a State has succeeded in imposing its power, its terror, the hostages are freed and this amnesty gives a new credibility, a new strength to the bourgeoisie.

It is only through a real action against the State, through the application of the working class terror, that the imprisoned and the "free men" defend and support the struggles in prisons. Any manifestation from "outside" showing that the prisoners haven't lost the "freedom" of the "free men" but that those "free men" reject the so-called individual and privative privileges by revolting himself and fighting against the State, its system of wage slavery, austerity and rigour: such manifestations give the prisoners the strength of not getting destroyed, broken, overwhelmed.

4. Our tasks

Spreading communist perspectives for the struggle means in no way retreating into an ivory tower and taking an indifferentist position such as: there is no proletarian prisoner to defend because none of our own militants is imprisoned; or: we can do nothing before there exists a social movement capable of freeing our imprisoned comrades! The revolutionary movement is not a factory of martyrs, its development depends notably on its capacity to preserve its forces, its communist militants from the repression. The repression by bourgeois State is a selective one (even in its massivity), it tries to isolate the avant-garde of the class, to imprison the proletariat in some respective roles the active are inevitably oppressed and the passive are eternally oppressed...

The dead are the evidence of its determination, the prisoners are its hostages, and, above all, it demonstrates to the petrified class the helplessness and the isolation, or worse, the incoherence and the irresponsibility of any revolutionary perspective. By imprisoning communist militants, combative proletarians, the bourgeois State fights the revolutionary movement on its ground. But if it is obvious that communist militants run the risk of repression, we must work in order not to give the State the possibility of restricting our struggle ground nor the initiative of suffocating us on its own ground by limiting the revolutionary activity to the support of imprisoned comrades (see the R.B. in Italy) and/or worse, the possibility to dislocate the proletarian organisations. How many "revolutionary" organisations do abandon the fight by joining some front of bourgeois organisations, by integrating and standing for campaigns of the democratic State, under a pretext of solidarity (to free their militants...)? How many organisations do find in the strength of the State some encouragement to preserve themselves by denouncing working class terrorism (which is directly a support to pacifism), or inversely believe that the best way to make common cause with their imprisoned comrades is to join armed struggle?

For all those reasons, we must do everything in our power to make sure that a minimum of militants be imprisoned and that a maximum escape from repression, so that the State will not be able to isolate us and to take the avant-garde of the movement as hostage.

We must criticise the irresponsibility of organisations that do not take elementary defence measures for their militants and for the other class militants: those who do not prepare some practical dispositions to give the militants the possibility of escaping from justice and to continue their revolutionary activity. At the same time we must criticise the erring ways of direct action, of working class violence by clarifying the proletarian struggle methods and by placing them in a general vision of the evolution of the struggle relation between classes. Apart from the case of revolutionary movements in which the class power imposes the liberation of imprisoned comrades and in which their interest is to claim for their actions, we know that the proletarian prisoner is most of the time alone in front of the State. In conditions as we live everywhere in the world today, an imprisoned militant finds himself in a situation similar to that of a revolutionary proletarian who is alone to continue the struggle in a sector being totally under Capital counter-revolutionary power (quiet factory, disciplined regiment...). His atomisation only expresses the general class atomisation and puts him on the ground of Capital. Therefore when a comrade falls in a time of such struggle, his interest is not to play the martyr or to revendicate his actions, but to deny them. His interest lies in using all possible ways to get out of prison: sickness, vice of procedure, use of humanitarian supports, use of the "U.N.O. refugee" statute, of "political refugee" statute, use of amnesty actions... This does not mean supporting the bourgeois institutions politically or the democratic campaigns or the reforms of justice. Nor does it mean making front with them. We must help the imprisoned militants, but we must know and say that it is not the class struggle ground but the ground of Capital. We can't say that such defence is a proletarian class struggle for it is only the extreme weakness of the class. Our main support is the organisation of the fight against repression on the basis of class struggle methods... The liberation of prisoners is not in itself a victory for the proletariat: it all depends on what class it reinforces. We cannot separate the prisoners' liberation and the methods used to that purpose. Concretely the first task is to destroy the wall of silence of the bourgeoisie, the State lies and the "anti-terrorist" propaganda that assimilate working class actions with gangsterism. And this means spreading all the information, all the manifestos, all calls for solidarity with imprisoned proletarian militants between the groups. It also means supporting the resistance actions of the imprisoned against repression by organising solidarity with the movements happening outside. The minimum to do while the prisoners have to keep their mouth shut in front of the judges, is, for the organisation', to defend their actions in front of the working class.

It is because the proletarian organs support the prisoners' working class actions that they can keep quiet in front of justice, risk less trouble and can keep confidence in the struggle for the destruction of all class violence.

During periods of social open fights, some struggle organs act against repression: this is where communists must act and develop some personal struggle methods: direct action, terrorism against the tormentors...

Let's take the examples of prisoners' struggles and resistance during the late years: successive occupations of roofs in France; strikes in Spain and Italy; riots, strikes and uproars against torture and imprisonment conditions in Italy; sieges of prisons and liberations by force, in opposition to amnesty, of prisoners in Argentina (at Villa Devoto prison in 1966) and lately in Bolivia, Peru, Pakistan...; liberation by force of Neapolitan proletarians who, imprisoned for their participation in important struggle movements consecutive to the earthquake, were liberated by a mobilisation, which central and anti-democratic watchword was: "we are all subversive"; and more other struggles in prisons in Turkey, Iran, Iraq... of which we have had very little echo...

If communist militants are constrained to have relations with some State procedures and/or if bourgeois democrats help to save the life of a few militants, no revolutionary militant can oppose himself to that; but what is inadmissible is when "revolutionaries" pay for their freedom by deserting the working class struggle and by joining their torturers' ranks.

There is a limit beyond which talking about class struggle and solidarity means bourgeois solidarity, defence of bourgeois perspectives and interests. The fact of consciously and voluntary getting into action together, towards one common social perspective, essentially contains the consolidation of solidarity relations between those who act in this movement, the class solidarity is the relation around which the proletarians associate and unite.

Solidarity is the dialectical relation of the communist militant in relationship with the revolutionary movement. An imprisoned militant who refuses to give any information about his comrades to his tormentors acts by solidarity with the working class struggle that exists beyond his own personal existence. And the revolutionaries who organise solidarity with him from the "outside" do it because his life carries the movement further, because the movement that is developing means "life" to this comrade. On the ground of democracy, there is no possibility for the proletarian solidarity to take place; the State doesn't tolerate any other community but its own, in which men are only what they return, in which men are but exchangeable value. The prisoners who are freed by the State and protected by its regulations only count as exchangeable money. The prison is a destruction tool used to dislocate the revolutionary movements. We must organise ourselves to escape from this but also to support any expression of life in the working class. We must organise ourselves outside and against all democratic "front" campaigns and reinforce, spread, preserve and develop any theoretical, practical, organisational contribution consolidating class solidarity. Today, some combative proletarians and militants are imprisoned: our task is to organise solidarity and to prepare the working class riposte against repression.

Libcom note: A better translation of this text was published in Communism #10

Introduction

One of the bourgeoisie's strengths is to present the reforms needed for the accumulation of capital as working class conquests. This is the case of the so-called 'reduction of working time' preached by all the unions and left parties of the world.

Constantly in search of extraordinary surplus value, the capitalists are always obliged to renew, to modernise their means of production in order to increase productivity. The increase in productivity comes essentially from a more continuous, more organised and more intense use of the productive forces, among which the most important one is the labour-power. As capital changes its methods of work, it changes labour-power as well as men themselves since it changes the relation of men to their work. For the workers, it always means an increase in the exploitation rate; first of all because the salaries are never related to the production of wealth; secondly because any increase in productivity means an increase in the labour intensity. Under capital, the use of new machines always brings along an increase in the division of work, a more severe, more scientific and more rational organisation of working time, which submits the proletarian to more severe controls, regulations and obligations. This means the 'dead times' chase, the struggle against absenteeism, the development of the mobility of the labour force, the continuous supervision, the acceleration of rates...

Facing the perpetual reinforcement of exploitation, a steady claim of the working class has always been and still is the reduction of working time. This is why the bourgeoisie tries to identify this proletarian claim with the "legal limitation of the working day" (without which the social work could not be made more intense and more productive of surplus-value) in order to change the workers' movement into a permanent reform of capital.

The legal reduction of the working time has nothing to do with a reappropriation of time by the workers and is only a formal reduction of the working time, which is only measured in terms of quantity by the chronometer without any care about its quality (intensity, density). This measure, far from being a step towards the emancipation of the proletariat, only aims at adapting the labour power, the living labour, to the new conditions of exploitation, to let the workers accept to be more and more dependent of the capitalist machines, to reinforce the division of their lives following the needs of capitalist production, making them, in their work and in their leisure, simple reproducers of surplus-value.

The reduction of working time as the expression of the proletariat's emancipation from its secular work slavery will only be real in a situation of hard struggles between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie where the working class tends to impose by force its own claims of destruction of capitalism.

It is therefore necessary to distinguish increase in productivity and intensification of work. Under capital, both concepts are bound because productivity cannot be increased without reinforcing the labour intensity and the exploitation of the proletariat. Under proletarian dictatorship, to the contrary, the increase in productivity will aim at reducing the labour intensity, reducing the exploitation of the proletariat.

Communism, because it does not need to accumulate capital and, to the contrary, answers human needs, because it will free the development of productive forces from the shackles of the capitalist mode of production, will reach a much higher productivity through the abolition of work.

The permanent increase in surplus-labour

While the serf, for example, works half the time on his own land and the other half on his lord's -in this way, the exploitation appears clearly-, the salaried worker receives a salary for his whole day of work, which seems then to be paid completely. The exploitation of free work is hidden by the abstract character of work under capital: "The individual works of isolated individuals do not acquire a character of social work in the form in which they have been carried out in the process of production but they acquire it only in the exchange, which represents an abstraction of the particular objects and of the specific forms of work". (I.Roubine, Essay on Marx' theory of Value)

Within the capitalist production, all commodities - including labour power - to be exchanged, have to be equalised, reduced to the same denominator, value or abstract work, whose measure is the social working time crystallised in it, necessary for their production or reproduction. Any good is therefore sold at its value (the law of supply and demand makes the prices oscillate around an average). Now precisely, the worker sells his labour power by the day while, for example, one hour of work would be sufficient to produce the value necessary for the reproduction of his own force; by working one hour a day, the worker would have produced enough goods to be exchanged against his means of survival (food, clothes, lodging...). The salary is the payment for this necessary work without which the proletarian would not be able to preserve or reproduce himself.

In this way, by paying the labour power at its value, the capitalist can appropriate himself the work performed during the rest of the hours of the day without owing anything to the proletarian since he respects the contract and the principle according to which any merchandise is sold at its value. This part of the work which is stolen by the bourgeoisie is called surplus-work; the value created during this surplus-work is called surplus-value; the rate between the necessary work and the surplus-work or between the salary and the surplus-value is called the rate of exploitation.

We have just seen the worker's day could be divided into two parts: the necessary work and the "surplus-work". The capitalist mode of production can only develop itself by reducing the necessary work and by increasing the "surplus-work". For the communists, the rate between necessary and surplus work is fundamental: not only the reduction of daily working time is compatible with the extension of surplus-work, but it is one of the elements used to extend this free work. In order to increase surplus-work, the capitalists have the possibility to lengthen the working day but the workers' struggle for the reduction of working time has been one of the elements that pushed the capitalists to increase surplus-work by reducing the necessary work (1).

"But when the surplus-value has to be produced by the conversion of necessary labour into surplus-labour, it by no means suffices for capital to take the labour process in the form under which it has been historically handed down, and then simply to prolong the duration of that process. The technical and social conditions of the process, and consequently the very mode of production must be revolutionised, before the productiveness of labour can be increased. By that means only can the value of labour power be made to sink, and the portion of working day necessary for the reproduction of that value be shortened." (MARX, Capital)

If a capital A, by new production techniques, can produce a larger amount of goods with less workers than its rival, it will have the possibility of selling its products at a lower price than its rival (it has to if it wants to sell the largest amount of goods), but, of course, at a higher price than their cost of production (less living work is crystallised in them and therefore less salary and more profit) until the value of identical commodities on the market decreases as a consequence of the generalisation of the production process and until the extraordinary surplus-value disappears. This is the process that pushes capitalists to find new technical innovations because it is only by winning rival markets that they can win this extraordinary surplus-value.

So every capitalist is forced to increase surplus-labour by reducing necessary-labour and therefore, increase productiveness and decrease the social work crystallised in each commodity and, in this way, decrease their value. This value decrease is also applicable to labour-power, which means a reduction of necessary labour. Temporarily, this decrease in the value of labour power gives the possibility to achieve an extraordinary surplus-value. But in this need for reducing necessary labour lies the basic contradiction of all the capitalist system, between the permanent processes of valorisation and devalorisation. Although the only source of profit, surplus-value, is nothing but the living labour included in any commodity, the increase in productiveness (or raising of the organic component of the capital) always means an increase in dead labour (technological development) or regard to living labour (labour power development). Hence the achievement of extraordinary surplus-value increasing the falling rate of profit.

One can therefore understand that the investment expenses grow continuously and tend to lower the profit rate (rate between profit and invested capital). In the same time, the constant decrease in the value of commodities causes an accelerated devalorisation of constant capital: buildings, machines. The redemption of these machines has to be made in an always shorter time; this requires a maximum production rate of the working forces: it is necessary to work the machines night and day to extract enough surplus-value and decrease the cost of labour power. This is why, under capitalist production, any increase in productiveness means an increase in the proletariat's subjection to the machines, to dead labour.

Productiveness today is the productiveness of capital. For capital, the interest does not lie in producing two goods instead of one for the sake of reducing man's labour to its half. What counts before all is that, in these two goods, a higher surplus-value will be produced to compensate the devalorisation of the commodities produced by half as much living labour. Any increase in productiveness causes a relative decrease in wages (compared to the quantity of wealth produced), a decrease in necessary work and an increase in surplus-work. The basic reality that the exploitation rate is relative because it is social and historical makes us understand the growing antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie and demystify the "social acquirements", the "increase in the standards of living", the "reduction of working time"...

In Belgium, for example, we can see in the statistics of the "Universite catholique de Louvain" that there has been a 11% cut in the working hours between l960 and 1973. But what the bourgeoisie will not tell is that this "progress" is due to the extraordinary rise in work productivity, which allows the workers to produce the same amount of goods in 1973 as in 1960 in only 43% of the working time they spent that year.

If this rise in work productivity had entirely benefited to the workers and had only been used to reduce the working time, it could have been reduced not by 11% but by 57%, which would mean a working time of less than 20 hours a week! (See the article "Maintien du pouvoir d'achat, un mot d'ordre reactionnaire". In Le Communiste No 4).

To limit the cost of new investments as much as possible, the capitalist is obliged to reduce the development of constant capital. To increase productivity, he will try, through technological developments, to intensify the work of the proletarians. This need for increasing the work intensity will force him to reduce the working time, not in order to reduce work but in order to increase it.

The duration of working time: an expression of the world-wide force relationship between classes

Historically, capital has developed itself by imposing work and extending the working day to its very limits. The descendants of serfs, who were dislodged from their lands and sent to the first textile manufactures, were heaped up in new industrial centres, locked up in workhouses. Those who tried to escape, the "vagabonds", were pursued, killed and used as examples to terrify the proletarians. The Niggers and American Indians as well as the European serfs all ended up in the industrial convict-prisons, factories and plantations. All of them went through the misery of the "primitive" expropriation and it was under the terror of weapons, of hunger and misery that they were educated to the last form of exploitation: salaried work.

All the bourgeois who know a little about history admit these facts but do not see the irreversible class antagonism revealed by them. To the contrary, they only see them as excesses from a past that progress has definitively eliminated, from times that are through. 0ne of their big arguments is the reduction of the working day (16,14,12,10,8 hours). These are supposititiously absolute facts, that could convince the workers that capitalism is not such an inhuman system (they will then talk about the "leisure society", the "free times era" as a fair reward for so many years of efforts, services and work for capital. But this only shows the lies and dreams of the stupid bourgeois understanding that substitutes the ideal vision of its own class situation to the world's reality.

In the historical centres of accumulation and concentration of capital, the big cities (in South America, North America, Europe...), the legal working day effectively tends to be reduced, but this is due only to the fantastic development of productivity which allows capital to stabilise class struggle and force social peace through giving "advantages" to certain categories of workers, while in the same time they increase the rate of surplus-value extraction.

Complementarily, the only possibility of capitalist valorisation in deserted zones is to maintain a very long working day that can compensate the low organic composition of the capital, making the labour conditions of these workers look out of time.

In some parts of the U.S.A., for example, (which are a symbol for a "developed society"), the extraction of surplus value takes the form of slavery (see the article in "Comunismo" No 7 on the working conditions of the clandestine immigrants in Texas, Florida, Virginia...). The flourishing multinational food company "Gulf and Western" has its offices in ultra-modern buildings in New York where the employees work under the U.S. legal standards, and gets its raw materials in Haiti where everybody knows that sugar plantations are real slavery-camps (work without rest, miserable wages, military surveillance...).

But salaried work does not only reveal its penal servitude character in the USA: see the camps in Siberia, South Africa, Mauritania, Mali, as well as the concentrationary "communities" in Cambodia, China, Haiti... In all industrial centres, (non-declared) labour is an essential stabilising factor of the economic life. New York, Chicago, and Hong Kong all have their "sweatshops", and the crowd of home-workers: "after eight or nine hours of work in workshops, the employees take their piece of work home where they work on another five or six hours,... the work conditions in the workshops are unbelievable: it is not rare to see thirty sawing machines piled up in a small room without any airing nor opening but the front door" (Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1982). The "clandestine" dress-making workshops of Paris are well-known. The factories for children in Napoli and in Bangkok don't even surprise the bourgeois newspapers any more... "The number of children and teen-agers of less than 15 years who work throughout the world has increased in the last two years. Today we can count 55 millions of them, but experts state that this number is by far underestimated, compared to the real extension of the phenomenon (Le Monde, 10-11/5/1981, after an investigation of the International Work Office).

"Everywhere, the industrial subcontracting helps evacuating part of the workers from the big metropolitan industry... In Italy, the small industries, reanimated by the crisis, at the limit of legality and of clandestinity, are often considered as the basis of the "second Italian miracle". In Japan, recent investigations have shown that subcontracting is an essential key of the present success of Nippon products in the world market... Forms of home-work, subcontracting techniques and "sweating systems" that we thought had disappeared in the West, have a new development as controlled segments of big industry. Thus, the dispersed factory (or, as the Italians call it, the "diffuse industry") has to be analysed as a particularity of the new organisation of production." (Le Monde Diplomatique, January 1982).

By showing these facts as excesses of the capitalist system, or as remains of pre-capitalist societies, not only does the bourgeoisie extenuate their real importance but it also gives credibility to "normal", "legal" work. But in these "clandestine" workshops as well as in the "legal" factories, the same commodities are produced to valorise capital and in both cases the worker has to sell himself to survive. The needs of the proletarians working there are never satisfied: unemployment for example mainly touches the "official" industry workers, and it is the same bourgeois misery that feeds the black markets and industrial convict-prisons. For us, there is no real difference between the proletarian labour in New York and in the Siberia mines, it seems to us vital to assert the similitude of wage-slavery all over the world (see the article on "worker-aristocracy" in "Le Communiste" No 10/11).

Some bourgeois claim that the "historical" diminution of labour time is a materialisation of worker acquirements, an evidence that capitalism and socialism can coexist and that there can be a progressive way from one to the other. It is always dangerous for the bourgeoisie to alter labour time reductions it gave up under class struggle pressure without compromising the credibility of its social system (i.e., the 40 hours in France in 1936, the 8 hour day in "Soviet" Russia and in Germany after the revolutionary struggles of 1917-1923).

After the crushing of the revolutionary wave of the twenties in the name of the workers' well-being, the bourgeoisie had to increase productivity all of a sudden in order to increase the exploitation rate. The deep and violent changes in the organic composition of the capital (increase in constant capital in proportion to the variable capital) led to an exacerbation of competition and conflicts between the different accumulation centres of the capital. The valorisation of capitals meant taking the rival productive forces or destroying them. It is those mutual destruction, especially of labour power, the generalisation of work-camps to all the planet, following very closely the "social acquirements" of the working class movement.

In 1948, when the English parliament voted the first laws of limitation of the working day (the Factory Act), it was already to put an and to a worker agitation that threatened to turn into a civil war. After the 10 hours legislation that also brought a wage-cut of 25%, the "working class, declared as criminal, was struck by prohibition and put under the suspect law" (Marx - Capital). In the same way, in France, the reform promulgated after February 1848 "dictates at the same time to all workshops and manufactures, without distinction, the same limit to the working day (...) and puts as a principle what had been obtained in England only for minors and women" (Marx - Capital). But it was immediately followed by the bloody slaughter of June insurrection in Paris. With this link between "the constant pressure of the workers acting from outside" and the legal intervention, the bourgeois rapidly transformed the class struggle into a struggle for the conquest of rights and the social laws produced by the state to reform its own system as "social acquirements".

It was under the pressure of a possible proletarian revolt that the bourgeois class unified, in spite of the difficulty, in the State, which represents general interests. The laws reducing the working day appear when the division of work comes to the point of making all industries dependent one upon another and when it becomes vital for "everybody" to avoid social troubles due to the excesses of some behind- hand capitalists, when these troubles compromise the interests of capital. So it becomes necessary for social reproduction to adapt the workers to their tools (which are continuously revolutioned) and to their new living conditions. This is why, for example, the State makes laws to limit the women's labour time and suppresses children's work, but in the same time establishes obligatory school and a family code (obligation of thrifty work at home).

But despite the reduction of labour time, the time of the worker is every day more submitted to the capital's necessities. Would it be his working time, the transportation time between his home and his working place, the time he needs to be in order with the administration, the police, the unions, the social security, etc., the time for professional formation, the time for taking care of his professional harms, the time for reproducing his labour power... all this social time belongs to the capital.

The social laws only materialise the bourgeois pretension to manage a production system based on work slavery with a scientific and humanitarian legitimity. They are nothing but formalisation of the bourgeois humanist and humanist principles, that "the worker sells his labour power in order to reproduce it and not to destroy it" and "the interest of capital itself is to ask him a normal working day".

The so-called "historical" reduction in France

Affected by the world crisis, all states have to face their "growth rate" -profit rate- collapsing. There is a surpllus production of goods and in the same time a quick devalorisation of constant capital; which force the capitalists to reduce investments. To fight this investment crisis (called "capital leakage" by the left and by the unions), the bourgeoisie will always try to find a new "industrial restructuration" (discovery of new organisation forms and of capital management). But the capitalists are unable to understand and to fight the reasons causing devalorisation: the growing contradiction between exchange value and use value. The measures they take only postpone the unavoidable bankrupt of their industry and impose the dominant class interests to the proletariat. By putting in question of form (neoliberalism, or Keynesian politics, self-management, or co-management) the causes or the answer to the crisis, the bourgeoisie creates its own weapons to slaughter the revolutionary proletariat. The "false consciousness" of the bourgeoisie comes from its dominant class position, which it has to defend. Thus, behind the government's reforms, one will always find fundamental class interests. With the "reduction of labour time to 39 h. a week" as it is asked for by the Socialist government in France, it is the opening of a new systematical battle against the proletariat.

All capital needs is to enslave more and more the labour power in order to control its use, its cost, following the standards of valorisation, restructuration and concentration.

By trying to show any increase in productivity as a simple mechanical perfection, without recognising the unavoidable intensification of work that it lays on proletarians, the socialist government shows a purely capitalist measure as a "worker conquest" and pushes the workers to believe that their own interests are those of national economy. Sacrifices, austerity, discipline and work are the very principles of "solidarity" which the government always refers to. Behind the so-called alternative: "either unemployment or a distribution of work that would allow a reduction of working time" we meet the same principles and the same reality: the absolute decrease in wages submitting the proletariat totally to the bourgeois state.

There is a general tendency by all governments (whatever their political "colour") to reduce the legal working time the "historical" shift from 40 to 39 hours in France, the decrease in official working time in manufactures has changed between 1970 and 1979 from 44.9 to 43.2 in Great Britain, from 43.3 to 40.6 in Japan, from 39.9 to 35.4 in Belgium. From 1974 to 1980 the highest differences have been observed in Norway and Israel (4 hours). While the working time was 40.6 hours a week in France in 1980, it reached 39.7 in the USA, 39.1 in Australia, 37.7 in Austria, 33.4 in Belgium, 32.9 in Denmark... (Le Monde, 16/2/82).

The whole protocol on "the reduction of working time" on which both the French bosses and trade unions agreed is guided by the aim of making French industry more competitive thanks to a more systematical use of constant capital (the duration of use of the equipment in automobile industry reaches 6150 hours in USA, 4000 to 4600 hours in Japan, 3700 to 4000 hours in France - INSEE Statistics) and more flexibility iin the distribution of work (in the USA as in Japan, the time-tables are well adapted to the needs of the market and the overtime work is largely used, from 10 to 15% in Japan).

"The investments in industrial equipment have decreased by 12% over 1981": such was a title in "Le Monde" of 9 June 1982. According to "Liberation" of 14 September 1981, "since 1973 any increase in wealth has come from a better efficiency in production". In order to fight the lack of investments, the bourgeoisie seems to use its machines to the maximum by making them work day and night with a more movable and less expensive mass of workers.

With the aggravation of world crisis, the work by teams and by posts has been generalised. The posted work becomes a normal thing for one third of the workers, among whom one half works on night teams. Steel industry, mines, textile and paper industries used to have the most posted workers: up to 85%. For a few years, this kind of work has spread to food industry and to the services sector. From 1957 to 1977, the percentage of workers "in posts" in transformation industry has more than doubled. This increase in posted work is to be related to the increase in the record of productivity: the sum of commodities produced in the Belgian industry has almost gone from one to three between 1956 and 1977 (following the weekly bulletin of the Kredietbank of 17 November 1978).

The French Prime Minister can say that those reforms will make the machines sweat instead of men, that they will improve the relationship between man and his work, that this will create new and more qualified employment, the only statement of such measures is in contradiction with their promises:

- extension of posted work with a fifth team for non-stop work;
- generalisation of temporary work;
- extension of overnight work for women;
- week-end work;
- "dead time" chase so as to make the 35 hours 35 effective hours of work;
- vulgarisation of overtime work, which will be paid only 25% more.

As Minister Auroux said: "To increase productiveness is not a mechanical operation: it's more a sort of compliance of the wage workers". The work conditions regulate the life of workers at the rhythm of capitalist valorisation; the often-changing time-tables disorganise the rhythm of life of the workers, of whom many are over-exhausted. According to the B.I.T., experiments have shown that night work require more physical and nervous energy for the same result and that mortality is higher among posted workers. Consequently it is really an increase in work intensity and in proletarians' exploitation that the "39 hours of the socialist government" aim at generalising; this is what Pierre Mauroy calls "the improvement of the relationships between man and his work" (2). For him, as for Stalin and for all capitalists: "man is the most precious capital". No need to wait for Raymond Barre's congratulations to the socialist government to understand that the agreements on the "reduction of working time" was the beginning of a big attack against the working class.

Only a few months after the legislation on working time reduction the socialist government established what it called "pecuniary compensation", which turned out to be nothing but a direct attack on salaries. New "solidarity taxes" were required from civil servants, "solidarity" contracts were settled between unions and bosses (wage- cuts from 1,6% at Gervais-Danone and B.S.N. to 20% at Fleury-Michon): the left government generalised wage-cuts.

The increases in taxes, in the prices of manufactured goods and services, the devaluation, the blocking of salaries, the decrease in unemployment benefits... all are direct attacks on proletarians' real salaries and help in financing the aid to industry through "solidarity contracts" (the enterprises that reduce working time to 36 hours a week before September 1983 will be free from social security subscriptions for each new employment resulting from the "reduction of working time").

The constant increase in unemployment (more than 2 millions now under the socialist government) contradicts the "socialist solutions" to unemployment. As Minister Delors admitted that the shift from 40 to 39 hours did not create new employment, the so-called reduction of work that was supposed to reduce unemployment showed its true face: a systematic attack against the working class. The new plans for employment of the French socialists mean nothing but unemployment allowances, intensified work and general wage-cuts. The Mauroy plans are but the repetition of those applied by all bourgeoisie in the world.

The French government, as any government, tries to distribute work in the most productive way in order to, as an Air-France commander says, "compensate the rigidity of the working time organisation, which often leads to insufficient yearly use of more and more sophisticated equipment that are an obstacle to the development of the productiveness of such equipment".

The principle directing the working time limitation is, consequently, a principle of rationalisation, productiveness of capital and intensification of work.

Conclusion

In this text we have shown how capital always tries to recuperate the workers' struggles and claims, which express their permanent interest to work less. The formal reduction of working time (the government's 35 hours) corresponds to an important increase in the exploitation rate and to the surplus-value rate extracted from the proletarians.

In fact, the reduction of working time, from the capitalist point of view (which includes all government's and unions' claims and promises), always corresponds to a decrease in the necessary work so as to increase the ratio of surplus work even if it is comprised in a day of 7 instead of 8 hours.

From this point of view, if the working day is reduced there must be an increase in the intensity of the exploitation. The proletarian point of view is completely opposed to this. The workers will always try to struggle to limit this exploitation not only in duration but in intensity. The proletarians' interest will be to really work less, which means to create less surplus value and to have their salaries increased. The true workers' struggles and claims only correspond to this historical perspective and are opposed to the bourgeois claims, to the so-called "strikes for the 35 hours" of the government, which mean nothing but capital's restructuration (hiding unemployment under part-time work,...) and increase exploitation.

Since proletariat and bourgeoisie have existed, the workers' struggle has expressed, even at the first level, the tendency to reduce working time, to increase salary whether by sabotage, theft or by strike and to impose, at least for some time, a reduction of working time and/or an increase in salaries.

Independently of any circumstantial claim expressing a permanent historical tendency at a certain time, in a certain place (it is sure that in some struggles the 40 hours are a real workers' claim, while in others it means the liquidation of the struggle) what counts is the direct antagonism to the logic of capital, to the surplus value production.

The interest of capital is to freeze any proletarian claim through legalising it and making it a "worker victory", changing it into an increase in exploitation. Hence the same difference of class existing between, for example, the 1st of May, an international day of struggle, and its legalisation/transformation into a holiday to the glory of wage slavery and between the meaning of the reduction of working time that aims at suppressing salaried work and its legalisation/transformation into a capitalist restructuration. Between the reduction of working time, which corresponds to the proletarian interests, and the same formula applied to capital's interests, there is all the antagonism separating the revolutionary proletariat from the bourgeoisie.

Notes

(1) "On the other hand, the length of the working day also has its extreme limits although very extensible. These extreme limits are given by the strength of the worker. If the daily exhaustion of his vital force goes under a certain degree, he will not be able to undertake a new activity. Nevertheless, as we said, this limit is extensible. A rapid succession of weakly generations will feed the work market as well as a series of strong and long lasting generations" (MARX, Salaries, prices and profits).

(2) "Work kills or wounds, each day, in the world, 160,000 people, but it creates even more mental illnesses (...). 1,200,000 people today suffer of grave mental disturbances", (B.I.T. Report for the international year of the crippled).

I- Communism as an essential determination

On several occasions, we have considered the fundamental question of the party (1). Even more so for this question than for any other, it seems essential to us to conceive it non-separately and to place it in the whole of the communist programme More than any other programmatical issue, the "question of the party" has been extracted and separated from the rest of the programme, has been conceived as a "question in itself" (the "deus ex machina"), be it in trying to "bypass the party", "cause of all evil" (2) or in transforming it into an "ideal should be" to which the proletarian movement has to be modelled (3). Not one of these conceptions (and all their numerous sub-products which all derive from the same social-democratic mould) manages to perceive the party as the social force historically determined to impose communism violently.

Within the capitalist mode of production that dominates the whole planet dictatorially, two social classes, two social projects exist, always more antagonistically, and oppose each other always more violently: the capitalist social project - wage-slavery, personified by the bourgeoisie, and which, as a product of past history, dominates our present, our immediacy - and the communist social project - the World-wide human community, born and personified by the proletariat. From the most global point of view, it is the capitalist social project that determines the law-and-order party and it is the communist social project, non immediately perceptible reality that determines the party of revolution. The capitalist forces, unified against the proletariat in a single party, even if this single party takes the shape of several "parties" which all defend the same programme, are those which maintain, under different forms (parliamentary, bonapartist,...) the capitalist mode of production, salariat, camouflaged and unified in the bosom of fictitious communities (religion, nation, people,...), communities of capital (4). Antagonistically opposed to these fictitious communities, the proletariat affirms itself as the social force (5) that, from the beginning of its existence, organises its struggle to destroy capitalism, to impose a new, at last human community. In this meaning communism, as far as its theory goes, is at the same time a description of the new community that the proletariat is historically forced to achieve and a description of the action the proletariat takes in order to impose its programme; it is therefore a description of the prefiguration of communism: the party. The essential determination of the proletarian party, therefore, is not one or another circumstantial event at the present time, but is directly communism itself. "Bounding over the entire cycle, communism is the knowledge of a plan of life for the species, i.e. for the human species" (Bordiga - "Property and capital"). That's why the tasks, the central activities of the party never vary, for they are not, just like the party, determined by immediate reality, but directly by the whole historical arch, from primitive communism up to full communism. Consequently the party is communist because in the present it represents the future and acts for its accomplishment. The party is the indispensable condition for the instauration of communism, and in the same time its prefiguration. This prefiguration in no way means the constitution of utopian communities where full communism reigns (return to the phalansteries of Fourier and other anarchist communes) but means that in the bosom of capitalism a social force exists, which acts, which has its own interests, which structures, organises and centralises itself, unifying itself in order to oppose and violently destroy the existing order, and to achieve its own essence: classless society. The whole capitalist society divides itself more and more into two enemy sides, into two organised forces, into two classes, two parties: one, the party of capital; the other, the party of communism (6).

Revolutionary Marxism principally retains the most general, the most abstract level... capitalism against communism... in order to understand the social classes and their antagonism, rejecting this way any statical, sociological, economic view of the classes. "Classes are not statical data but organical acting forces. They determine and define themselves in the struggle as a movement of opposition to other classes" ("Class and party" in "Rupture with the ICC", brochure in French of the ICG). When Marx states "The proletariat is revolutionary or isn't at all" (Marx to Engels-1865), he expresses that either the proletariat really acts as a class, i.e. as a force bearing a communist project, as a party, or it does not exist as a class, a party, leaving nothing but individuals, atomised citizens, sociological workers, producers and reproducers of capital (7). In the same way, Bordiga explained that "In the salient characters of its movement one can identify a class" (Party and Class - 1921), insisting also on this central element of our theory, namely that a class only exists when it reveals its interests, its programme, when it organises into a party. As we noticed on several occasions, the working class is the revolutionary class within the capitalist mode of production because it bears the new social project, communism the world-wide human community. Consequently, we can only grasp the very existence of the working class as an organised social force acting to impose its proper programme, antagonistic to all existing social order, violent negation, destruction of capitalism, i.e. of the law of value, of salariat. This action, this struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is its permanent historical tendency to constitute itself as the universal party. This way, the permanent affirmation of the communist left has been illuminated: the proletariat acts as a class only when it constitute itself into a party. "When we discover a social tendency, a movement directed towards a precise goal, then we can identify the existence of a class, in the real sense of the word. But this means that the "class-party" exists, in a substantial, if not formal way". (Bordiga - Party and Class - 1921).

The Marxist methodology (against Kantian theories) explains that the contents - here the historical programme - is not a thing in itself to which a certain form "adheres"; on the contrary, it is the contents itself that gives birth to the form it already contained in a latent way. It is the historical party that expresses the contents and the revolutionary moving forward of the working class. This is why, without ever identifying party and class, the revolutionary Marxism defines the transition of the proletariat from a non-class to a class for itself (9) by its contribution, its organisation into a party.

When Marx writes the famous sentence in the manifesto of the party, in 1847: "This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being destroyed by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier."

Or still elsewhere, in the statutes of the First International, in 1872: "In its struggle against the collective power of the possessing classes, the proletariat can only act as a class by constituting itself into a distinct political party, opposed to all old parties, formed by the possessing classes. This constitution into a political party is indispensable to assure the triumph of the social revolution and of its supreme aim: the abolition of wage-slavery."

Marx expresses undoubtfully that the only possible organisation of proletarians fighting for communism is the organisation into a party, that there exists but one and unique movement that, even if it might disappear in certain counter-revolutionary periods because of the "competition between workers", rises up again, always firmer, always clearer... that this movement is nothing else but the organisation, the unification of the proletariat into a class, and consequently into a party. The permanent movement of the workers to associate themselves, to centralise themselves, to unify themselves to defend their own interests, workers' associationism, is the motor of the organisation into a party, of the organisation of the most conscious proletarians around the nuclei that have been able to draw the conclusions from past struggles, that have been able to intransigently defend the communist programme, giving birth this way, during a period of international struggle, to the world-wide communist party. So the only motor is class-practice (in this sense that theory, of course, is one aspect of this practice, just like strikes, propaganda, armed struggle... are), with clashes "spontaneously" giving birth to multiple crystallisation, to organisations of struggling proletarians, more or less ephemeral, which, in order to go on opposing themselves to capital, have to unify themselves, centralise themselves and have to understand always more clearly the very movement that animates them, in connection with past struggles. For the proletariat, drawing more and more critical conclusions from its past means holding the key of humanity's future always more firmly. This permanent tendency towards associationism for struggle, the formal structures of which are periodically destroyed, is the historical tendency of the proletariat to organise into a party.

The essential determination of the proletariat's struggle to destroy capitalism is its revolutionary programme: communism. Communism, borne by the proletariat, is not, in spite of all vulgar materialists, the simple and immediate product of the sociological place of workers in the capitalist mode of production, but is the product of the whole development of humanity, which historically determines (Marxism is an implacable historical determinism) the place of the proletariat at one pole of the production process, and therefore, determines the material interests that flow from it, necessarily engendering communism, at one and the same time as a movement of destruction of capital and as the affirmation of the new community (10). It is the whole of the development of the productive forces, it is the cycle of value that determines, as a product of the whole history of class-societies, the proletariat, collective and associated producer of value, at one pole of the production relationships, and, at the other pole, the bourgeois class, personification of capital, whose function is to manage this value, and that lives from it.

Classes do not exist by themselves, nor as fixed entities, but exist only as active forces. Classes determine themselves by their practice, on basis of the pole they hold in the production relationships and on basis of the interests determined by those relationships. This is why the revolutionary or reactionary character of a class can only express itself antagonistically to the other class, one as bearer of a human community, the other as conservative force of the relations of production that envelop and hinder the productive forces of humanity. In capitalism, the bourgeoisie as personification of the capitalist mode of production, necessarily is reactionary in front of the revolutionary class: the proletariat. When we state that there can be no class without party, this essentially means that there can be no human collectivity being historically determined without the existence as an active force, of its programme, its social project. Therefore, to try to define the working class without its essential characteristic, i.e. to be a revolutionary class, bearer of communism, can only be counter-revolutionary. If, tendentially, the proletariat at first, by instauring its class dictatorship, but afterwards the whole of humanity, organises into a universal communist party - knowing that when the whole of humanity is organised into a party, this party ceases to exist, for having engendered the universal human community, nevertheless it is completely erroneous to identify class and party (i.e. to put an equation mark between them), because, not only it is methodologically absurd to identify a being with its most fundamental characteristic, but most of all, it is extremely dangerous to identify the human collectivity with the project, the programme that it embodies only tendentially, (and in the same way as this collectivity is only tendentially conscious of its project) and which therefore only tendentially becomes the project, the programme, the party of all members of this collectivity.

From the point of view of historical materialism, it is communism that defines the proletarian movement, it is the party that defines the class. But this historical reality exists today only as a more or less strong tendency to destroy capitalism. Communism isn't obvious (the Italian communist left defined it as "a fact already passed") but for an extreme minority of the collectivity, of the class, which however will be historically forced to realise communism. For the larger majority of proletarians, the heterogeneity of consciousness still predominates, while as a process, considered as a whole, the communist movement is the first movement of history completely conscious, the first movement for which it is the consciousness of communism that precedes and determines action. This process where, more and more, for the proletariat, it is its consciousness, its programme that determines its action, is the process of reversal of praxis, because, contrary to vulgar materialism, it isn't the immediate reality that determines the being, but its historical moving forward. This fundamental process of the reversal of praxis isn't the appendage or private property of this or another formal party, but is a real movement that takes a concrete form and expresses itself through communist nuclei, groups, fractions... and even individuals. Those, "in return", "have the task to unify themselves, to centralise themselves internationally, in order to constitute, on basis of their practical-theoretical convergence, the world-wide communist party" ("Presentation" - Le Communiste No 6). So, today, just like yesterday and tomorrow, it is communism that defines, that characterises the movement, the programme of the working class. In the same way, Marx explained how "it is anatomy of man that is the key to anatomy of ape", it is the superior stadium, communism - ultimate product of the evolution of class-societies, of the cycle of value - which is the key to the "anatomy" of the working class. The proletariat is communist, or isn't at all. It organises into a party, or it isn't but a number of atomised individuals ("non-class") producing and reproducing capital. "It is from the description of communist society that Marx and Engels drew the characteristics of the party-form" ("Origin and Function of the party-form" - Invariance No 1 - 1968).

II- Leninism and anti-Leninism: the counterrevolutionary theory of the party (*)

Note: (*) When in this chapter we criticise as well the "Leninist" conceptions (which of course, we find in Lenin himself) as the antithetic, the "anti-Leninist" conceptions, in fact we want to demolish the bourgeois ideologies and practices, products of the triumphant counterrevolution. Those ideologies both come from the falsification, the plundering of the revolutionary programme, in order to keep only the form, while transforming the contents in the same time. "Leninism" therefore has nothing to do with Lenin's practice/critique. And, besides, historically, "Leninism" (and consequently its antithetic "anti-Leninism") only manifested itself at Lenin's death, as a mummification and a distortion of Lenin's own critical method. "Leninism" is nothing else but Stalinism, its opposite, "anti-Leninism", nothing else but anti-Stalinism of stinking democrats.

The methodological foundations of the Leninist theory of the Party (developed as soon as 1900 particularly in "The immediate objectives of our movement" and in "What is to be done?" in 1902) essentially are nothing else but a remake, radicalised (mainly due to the different political situation of Germany and Russia), of the dominant theory within Social-Democracy - the Second International - of which Kauttsky was the uncontested master and guardian of the "orthodoxy" (a "quality" he held formally from the ageing Engels). If today militants of the numerous Leninist groups immediately associate the qualification of "renegade" to Kautsky's name (see "The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky"), they do this, without realising that if Kautsky was a "renegade", it is in the first place because he was the theoretical master of the whole social-democracy, and consequently of Lenin (but also of Pannekoek, Luxembourg,...). For the whole of this conceptions, be it, as we see it here, about the party, but also about capital, imperialism, "philosophy", revolution, about the national question... Lenin never broke away completely from the social-democratic interpretations, i.e. from the understanding and the bourgeois practices of the workers' movement, from the understanding of the proletariat as an exploited class, but not as a revolutionary class. And if we recognise Lenin as a revolutionary, it is fundamentally on basis of his action which, de facto, to a large extent was in contradiction with his own theories. Although Lenin tried in practice to rupture with Social-Democracy (particularly by organising the armed insurrection of October 1917), he never really pushed on those attempts to rupture until the clear affirmation of communism, which implies the refusal of the whole of the reformist conceptions characterising the Second International from its very foundation (11). As to the question of the party, of consciousness, etc., Lenin was and claimed to be a disciple of Kautsky, whom, besides, he often quotes:

"...socialist consciousness would be the necessary, direct result of proletarian struggle. This, however, is completely wrong (...). Socialist consciousness today can only emerge on the basis of solid scientific knowledge (...). In fact, it is in the brain of certain individuals belonging to this category (bourgeois intellectuals) that contemporary socialism was born, and it was by them that socialism was transmitted to the most developed proletarians, who introduced it into the proletariat's class struggle later on, wherever conditions enabled them to. This is how socialist consciousness is an element imported from the outside into the proletariat's class struggle, and does not spontaneously arise from it."

Lenin uses the same non-Marxist idea:

"The political class-consciousness can only be brought to the worker from the outside, i.e., from the outside of economic struggle, from the outside of the sphere of the relationships between workers and bosses." ("What is to be done?")

These quotations are often used to criticise the Leninist conceptions of the party (particularly by the "anti-Leninist" current), but without realising how the practice of the fraction grouped around Lenin tried, in reality, to break up with the conceptions of Lenin himself (e.g. when Lenin has to call upon the "spontaneous" movement of the proletarians who are organising the insurrection, in order to force the central committee of the Bolshevik party to formalise this preparation in progress) and without understanding all implications of the criticism of the idealist-worker conception of "importation of consciousness from the outside". To criticise this conception does not mean, as councilists do, to deny the organisation of proletarians into a party, but, on the contrary, means to understand the workers' movement as a unity, to place each spontaneous expression of the proletarian struggle into the historical line of the constitution of the party, to place each struggle in the totality that constitutes the communist programme.

Whoever says workers' struggle, says political struggle. "All class struggle is a political struggle" Marx stated. Whoever says political struggle, says unity of the struggle, of the movement (even non-conscious) and of its historical intrinsic goal. Besides, the proletarian movement cannot be conceived, as we already wrote, without its goal, without its programme. The essence of the kautskyist/Leninist falsification is based on the separation of the struggles and the movement, on one hand, and the aim: communism, the party, on the other hand. While Bernstein (rightist social-democrat) crudely expresses this falsification: "The goal is nothing, the movement is everything", the kautskyist orthodoxy can only answer him by introducing a mediation, reforms, the transition-programme, the "party"... between the movement and the goal, and confirm the dichotomy completely. As a matter of fact, it is because Kautsky, just like Lenin, agrees with this separation, that he is forced, in order to answer to the obvious revisionism of Bernstein, to introduce a new element from the outside, so as to "join together again" what he conceives as being separated.

And of course, we criticise Leninism and anti-Leninism not simply as bourgeois ideologies, as wrong ideas, but mainly as counterrevolutionary practices on which the bourgeois ideas and ideologies can grow. Because large fractions of the proletariat did not break away from union practices, from reformist and legal politics, the theorisation of these counterrevolutionary practices could impose themselves as easily as they did on the third International, dialectically reinforcing this way the bourgeois practices of the proletariat. It is because union practices still persisted within the proletariat that the Unionist Red International could be created in 1920-1921 as easily as it was, and, by its creation reinforce and answer for such practices. So the problem of ideologies within the proletariat can never be reduced to the simple question of "wrong ideas", "wrong consciousness" (to which it would be sufficient to oppose a "true consciousness"), but it takes its roots in the real existence of social forces acting in a conformist way, giving a material basis to those ideologies. This is why each time we stress the fact that ideologies are first of all material forces; if a religious ideology exists, it is first of all through and because of the reality of the earthly force of its army of priests and mollahs, of its Vatican-State, of its capitalist interests. To destroy religion does not simply mean to destroy the religious idea, but first of all to destroy the social forces, the mode of production on which the religious idea was based, justifying this mode of production. "The religious world isn't but the reflection of the real world." ("Capital" - Marx)

Lenin, like all his followers, also uses most of this theory about a "double workers' movement", a "double centralisation" on the one hand the "spontaneous" movement that cannot bypass the "trade-unionist" consciousness, i.e. "economic" consciousness (we would almost say the "alimentary" consciousness), and on the other hand the "political" consciousness, the "communist" one, existing in itself and having to be introduced into the "spontaneous" movement by bourgeois intellectuals, converted to "socialism".

So, for Lenin, workers can only become conscious about the fact of being exploited; they need help from outside to realise that their force is revolutionary. This conception of Lenin and Kautsky is in direct opposition to Marx' s position, defined very clearly in his circular letter to the leaders of the German Social-Democracy: Bebel, Liebknecht, Brack...

Once more, we can find in Lenin's works the Kautskyist separation, which in theory separates the subject from the object, the being from the consciousness, separates movement and goal, exploited "class" and revolutionary "class", "economic" struggles and "political" struggles, "immediate" struggles and "historical" struggles... (12) and which in practice has led to the criminal separation between the "economic movement" organised by reformist unions and the "political movement" organised by the parties of Social-Democracy (traced from the model of German Social-Democracy), only busy with "universal suffrage" and parliamentary trickery. This separation of the workers' movement also meant the liquidation of the revolutionary programme and led astray workers' struggles, directing them in the perspective of a reform of the system. The counterrevolution that established itself with the defeat of the Paris commune and the dissolution of the first international dominates that period entirely (from 1871 until the beginning of this century, 1905), and this is not only because of open repression, but also, and most of all, under the more vicious influence of reformist, unionist, legalist, parliamentary ideologies. In opposition to the first International, which aimed at uniting proletarians from all over the world into one organised force to destroy capitalism, the second International, set up in a period of complete counterrevolution, divided the movement directly, not only, as we have already seen it, into "economic" and "political" movement, but also broke away from its internationalist character by grouping the proletarians according to their countries, in a more or less federate manner, and so it laid down, from the very start, all the bases for its participation in the first world-wide butchery of 1914. And although the third International rose up as an attempt to break away from the bourgeois rottenness of the second International, and this in a period of revolutionary struggles in the whole world, it did maintain, to a large extent, in affiliation with Kautsky-Lenin, not only the double organisation on the one hand the third ("political") International, and on the other hand the "economic" I.R.U., but it also maintained the organisation according to the countries, conceived as an addition of the different national parties, directed by an executive (which was in fact the Bolshevik party).

To this counterrevolutionary separation of the workers' movement - "economic"/"political", "immediate"/"historical",... -reproduced as well by the "Leninist" current as by the "anti-Leninists" (who substitute the word "soviet", supposedly pure from any deviation, to the word "union"), correspond the legalist ideologies - "pacific way for socialism" -, reformist, parliamentary,... and the "non-political" ideologies, "managerist", unionist... as we have already written in one of our reviews:

"At the very source of the existence of unionism there is the counterrevolutionary separation between, on the one hand, the so-called "immediate" struggles - "struggles" against the "consequences" oof the system, which are left to the trade-unions and to the ignorant workers - and on the other hand the co-called "political" struggles - the so-called revolutionary "struggles" left to the professionals of politics, to parliamentarians and other rascals - unionism is therefore, historically, thee perfect complement of reformist and parliamentary politics. The social-democratic separation between class and party gets its prolongation with the separation between the class organised in the unions and/or the soviets, the "immediate" or "economic" struggle and the "political" or "revolutionary" party/struggle. Therefore unionism, product of those separations, can only mean the "struggle" within the framework of the system, reproducing and reinforcing it, and is incompatible with the real communist struggle for the abolition of wage-slavery." (Action Communiste No 6 - "Concerning a certain balance-sheet about the activity of the group "Unemployed on struggle")

The proletariat's force expresses itself, at each wave of international struggle, not by the divisions, but by its capacity to unify, to centralise all the proletarian expressions that are dispersed into one single force, bypassing all the old organisational forms, produced and set by many years of counterrevolution. This is how it is only during periods of revolutionary struggle that the bourgeois separations are really bypassed, and so is the competition between workers, so as to constitute, in tendency, the beginning of a new community, which has to impose itself as a dominant class, as a workers' state (semi-State), before negating itself through its generalisation to the whole humanity (extinction by its extension to the whole world).

This way, the first International, the I.W.A., with all the limits typical of its period - the difficult disengagement from the "utopian socialist" phase, from the period of the Proudhonist, Lassalist, Saint-Simonist sects -, materialised the "Organisation of proleetariat into a class, and consequently into a party", much more clearly than the second "International", still-born, and also than the third International, which very soon (13) degenerated into counterrevolution. Indeed, the aim of the I.W.A. was "the abolition of all class-regime" and it directly organised, as its first task, the unification of all the proletarians, in struggle all over the world: "first article: The Working Men's Association has been established in order to create a centre of communication and cooperation between the workers' associations of all countries, which long for the same aim, i.e. mutual help, progress and the complete emancipation of the working class" (Statutes of the I.W.A. - Marx/Engels). Obviously this first Interrnational isn't an organisational model that we should try to reproduce today, but it expressed "more purely" the proletarian answer of always, the organisation of proletarians from all countries, from all conditions, from all ideological origins... around the international fraction that was best able to theoretically and practically defend the historical interests of the movement, in this case Marx and Engels. It is somewhat in the same way that, everywhere in the world, from 1917 onwards, internationalist fractions, groups, "parties"... recognised themselves in the communist and destructive character of the revolution in Russia, and that, without knowing the programmatical positions of the Bolsheviks, and being nearly always more radical than the latter, recognised themselves in the party of Lenin (14). This way the tendency of always became clear: revolutionary periods are periods of unification, of fusion, in the heat of the struggle, between the various proletarian forces the counterrevolution had dispersed and destroyed. The periods of counterrevolution, on the contrary, confirm themselves as a generalised dislocation of the proletarian forces, as a forced and imposed return of the few minorities that still resist to the state of "sects", a situation that can only be bypassed in a new revolutionary period. In opposition to the Kautskyist vision, which considers the party as growing gradually until it includes all workers (the same as the Leninist conception of the mass-party) in order to, after having educated them, "pass on to socialism pacifically", the Marxist vision, considers the existence of the party as a qualitative step deriving from the fusion and the centralisation, in a revolutionary period, of thousands of workers' groups - products of the heterogeneousness of the class - under the single direction of the fraction that was best able to preserve, defend, restore, theoretically and practically, the programme of communism. It is during those short but very intense moments of world-wide and general unification of the proletariat that the unique organisation of the proletariat into a class, and consequently into a party takes a concrete form in the clearest way and that the central position of Marx: "consciousness can be nothing but the conscious being" (German Ideology) takes a concrete form in the most visible manner, and the proletariat can be nothing but the social-force imposing communism, imposing the party.

In opposition to this "monist" totalising conception, we find all the reactionary "theories" that originate from the social-democratic falsifications and define "the class and the party" separately. Therefore, (and this is the essential part of their "theory") they have to look for the many "tricks", "transition programmes", "intermediate programmes", "transmission belts",... that could possibly "link" the class to its party. The basic methodological error of all these "theories" lies in the dichotomy they lay down between two concepts - class and party -, which, for sure are different but can in no way be separated. In the same way, life cannot be defined separately from man, from the animal or from the living vegetal. If "life" existed separately from man, only then the problem of the "link" between man and life would arise. In the same way as in the Marxist concept of merchandise, the exchange-value cannot exist, and therefore be defined, without its support, which is the exchange-value; the concept of class cannot exist without its tendency to constitute itself into a party. The Kautsky/Lenin filiation on the question of the party, be it in the classical Leninist version - Trotskyist, Stalinist, Bordiguist.... - or the antithetical version - anti-Leninist, councilist, anarchist,.... - corresponds therefore, as well for its methodological foundations, for its theory as for its practice, to a counterrevolutionary understanding of the party, meaning the liquidation of the real historical line of the constitution of the party, meaning the out and out fetishisation of the formal aspect - the organisation as an aim in itself, being constructed any time and any way, - inevitably bringing about democratic, bureaucratic, followist practices,... at the expense of the real movement, the invariant programme, the historical party.

III- Formal "parties" and historical party

In addition to the question of separating movement and consciousness, class and party, the Kautsky-Lenin tradition also obliterated the essential difference Marx made between the party in its historical meaning and the multiple groups, leagues... existing at one or another time, in one or another place: the formal "parties".

"Talking about the party, I give its historical meaning to this concept." (Marx to Freiligrath - 1860)

Marx, like Bordiga after him, (see "The substantial existence of the party") always stresses forcefully the essential difference between on the one hand the permanent historical tendency of the proletariat to constitute itself into a party, to affirm itself as a conscious class, and on the other hand the various materialisation, more or less clear, of such a tendency, in time and in space. "The "League", like the "Society of Seasons" in Paris, like a hundred other societies, weren't but one episode of this history of the party, which spontaneously springs up from the soil of modern society" (The letter of Marx to Freiligrath - 1860). In the same way, Marx and Engels synthesised magnificently the communist programme in the famous manifesto of 1847, which, even if it was "ordered" by a formal "party" - the "Communist League" - has a validity, a contents that bypass this narrow framework of the little communist militants' group to such an extent that today nobody would ever dare to restrict the universal significance of the manifesto to the simple programme of the League. The manifesto is a direct achievement of the party "in its large historical acceptation".

Moreover, the invariant line of the party being the line of the historical party, its different formal expressions throughout the past have all been more or less marked by their limits - limits of the non-integral restoration of the revolutionary programme, because of the more or less important influence of the bourgeois ideology - and so they have been not only ephemeral (see Marx) but also contingent and limited. It is obvious that such a contingent and limited character is entirely relating to the action of these "formal" parties in history. The more they separate themselves in theory and practice from the historical and invariant line of the communist programme, the more their "limited and non-historical" characteristics are important, the more their communist quality transforms itself, first sliding towards centryism, and afterwards towards counterrevolution. As "Bilan" stated: "Parties do not die, they betray".

Inversely, the everlasting task of communist fractions and nuclei is to represent the historical programme in the present. The more this central task of theoretical and practical restoration is entirely assumed, the more the historical party, in the immediate reality, takes a concrete form. This is why the task of communist nuclei is not to constitute, to direct a formal "party" but to be the central direction pole of the combating party, the party that, in reality, organises armed insurrection and imposes communism upon the whole world. The universal party that will impose the definite victory of the proletariat is the historical party acting presently as the centraliser, in time and in space, of the whole communist programme (16). In this way, the historical line of the constitution of the party always exists; only its various formal expressions, because of the counterrevolution force, disappear or betray.

"After the League was dissolved on my request, in November 1852, I never belonged (nor do I now belong) to any secret or public organisation; so, for me, the party, in this quite ephemeral meaning, has ceased to exist for eight years already..." (Marx to Freiligrath)

In a period of dominant counterrevolution, only the very small groups and fractions that are firmly anchored to the historical programme can manage to subsist, expressing the perenniality of the party line more or less adequately, while being in the same time completely in opposition to the whole immediate reality. The only compass is the invariant contents of the programme. "It is the attachment to this being (the human being, which is man's real "Gemeinwesen"), which is apparently denied during counter-revolution periods, (just like today, when revolution seems utopian to most people), that allows one to resist". (Origin and function of the party form - Invariance, 1968). It is in such dark times that communists, following Marx, declare : "I've always neglected the proletariat's momentary opinion" (Marx - 1850). This was not only the position of Marx, but also of Lenin in 1915 and of the Italian fraction of the communist left in the thirties, which passionately fought for the intransigent defence of the communist programme and against any artificial foundation, on confused programmatical bases, of new parties, which, consequently, would inevitably be bound to join the counterrevolution (see the struggle of the "Bilan" fraction against the foundation of the IVth Trotskyist International).

In those most sombre periods of the workers' movement, the tasks of the communist groups, nuclei and fractions do not vary either. Only the relationship between those various tasks - theory, direct action, propaganda, agitation, international centralisation, etc. - varies, and in view of the extreme-weakness of these groups, it is the most central, the most directly historical tasks that should come first. In the same way, in an insurrectional period, although the whole of the tasks have to be maintained, obviously it will be the tasks on which the military victory depends that will then dominate. As Bordiga expressed it very clearly in his "Considerations on the organic activity of the party when the general situation is historically unfavourable": "So we claim all forms of activity that belong to a favourable period, but only to the extent allowed for by the real balance of forces" (1965). The real activity of the party, in its historical acceptation, is to assume the whole of the tasks of always, while the relationship between them is determined by our relative strength: the more the communist forces are concentrated and powerful on a world scale, the more the whole of the tasks will be reinforced on all levels of communist action. Only our capacity, be it very limited, to assume this totality, to answer programatically on all levels of the workers' struggle, will put us in the historical line of the party. This everlasting struggle of communists is the only real preparatory work to the "spontaneous" rise of the party. This way, to break the entirety of activity, of the communist practice, under the pretext of assuming one or another of those tasks "better" or "more thoroughly" (be it the "theoretical",the "military" tasks or the "action in today's struggles") means in fact to destroy the activity of the party in favour of immediate results, in favour of one or another aspect that will consequently become hypertrophied and as it degenerates rapidly into the activity in itself, into the apology of this particular form having become privileged compared with the totality, this task loses its communist character. Once again, this means putting forward the contingent and limited aspects to the detriment of the total aspect, the historical aspect.

Unfortunately, today this is the case of a large majority of the weak communist forces. As a matter of fact, the catastrophic course of the capitalist crisis - the essential motor of the proletarian struggle - is only getting worse from day to day; struggles, revolts break out more and more often and radically, while the "communist forces" keep "discussing", "lingering on", "playing"... and are unable to assume the tasks for which they were made. Dispersion exists everywhere and under many forms.

Some try to artificially compensate the real lack of programmatical and organisational restoration through "old tactical solutions": they "go to the masses", they drown themselves in the smallest local conflict in order to find "the solution" to the crisis of the communist movement and in the end they lose everything altogether, as well the programmatical tasks as the tasks of action, agitation and propaganda within local struggles, because it becomes clear that they cannot fulfil the tasks neither of the struggle that is going on, nor of the potential future development of this struggle. Activism has become the absolute master; in order to unite just anybody on just any basis, one should agitate, "carry out opinion polls", "sound the feelings of workers",... but, most of all, one should not at any price consider the basic questions, the revolutionary programme, which means abandoning the programme.

Others, on the contrary, retrench themselves in the ivory tower of "theoretical work" they consider as a preliminary separated from the rest of the tasks. The pretext is no longer "to go to the masses", or "to know the workers", but to solve all the programmatical questions before being able to take a clear position on such or such event (17). Here also militant work, considered as a whole in its real communist meanings is being destroyed. Communist theory, as a matter of fact, can only draw its function and its force from the bosom of the entirety of revolutionary praxis: "We cannot, however, draw up a barrier between theory and practical action, because this would mean, once certain limits are passed, to destroy ourselves as well as all the bases of our principles" ("Considerations on the organic activity of the party when the general situation is historically unfavourable").

There are other deviations - militarism, propagandism, localism, sectarianism... - and they can complete one another. But tthey all put forward one particular form as being the solution, around which the "true party" should be constructed. Once more, this means confounding between today's formalizations, which are still essentially determined by immediate and therefore capitalistic reality (a more or less important deviation of all today's groups), and the historical tendency towards the constitution of the party that, through its concrete form as a single world-wide force, the party of revolution - full and complete existence of the histoorical party in the immediate reality - will necessarily mean the destruction, the bursting of all old forms, of all groups that claim being the party today, of all groups that act as the "constructors of the party" but in fact have only constructed some more or less fixed forms that will necessarily be bypassed and destroyed by the revolutionary contents of the proletarian movement.

The task of communist nuclei is not to "build parties" but on the contrary, to act consciously and voluntarily in function of historical reality, in order to prepare and to direct the rise of the party and in order to prepare the militant and theoretical executives capable of directing it towards the new community. When Marx clearly states that "our designation as representatives of the proletarian party comes from nobody else but ourselves", he once more neglects all "democratic representation", all electoral and "majority" mystique, which is what all humanist and bourgeois philanthropists will always blame him for. "Our only designation as representatives of the proletarian party" comes from the programme we defend, from our intransigent defence of the historical interests of the proletariat, even if this should mean, as it means to most communists most of the time, standing at counter-current of the dominating ideas, even amongst workers. So what defines the workers' vanguard, the real direction of the movement, is neither the democratic designation election, possibility to revoke... and other democratic libertarian bullshit - nor the self-proclamation of being the direction, but the real capacity to direct the movement towards communism. As Marx defines it in the Manifesto, communists are not necessarily these who call themselves "communists", "internationalists", "revo1utionaries", but those who, in the reality of struggles, are "the most determined fraction", those who "involve all the others", not towards an "ephemeral victory" but towards "the interest of the whole of the movement", those who in each struggle "put forward the interest shared by the whole proletariat, independently from each nationality". Therefore it is in view of a real total practice action, theory, propaganda, agitation... - that communists define themselves and that they prove the validity of their conception of the world. It is this real direction that is always determined, not by the "immediate success" but by the revolutionary watchword: "abolition of wage-slavery" (Marx "Salary, price and profit"), which will enable the movement to not always start again its history, its weaknesses, its hesitations, its lack of decision, to not always make the same mistakes, and which will enable the movement to reappropriate its own past, and therefore its future. "Whoever commands the past, commands the future" (G.Orwell - "1984").

And if, as we see further on, we criticise the conceptions and practices of the "constructors of parties", we always more firmly oppose to them the necessity of the "construction", of the preliminary formation of the executives, of the direction of the party as the indispensable organ to the crystallisation of the universal party. It is only this conscious and voluntary work, starting before the emergence of large movements, of constituting a central nucleus assuming programmatical restoration to the best, as well as world-wide centralisation of revolutionary forces, action in struggles and propaganda..., that will allow, in the right time, i.e. in a revolution period, to summon up the proletarian forces still dispersed into one force directed by a single world-centre, the directing organ of the party. Such preparatory work - like an old mole digging out the soil of society without nearly anybody noticing - has to be reinforced, centralised, organised constantly... so that the next revolution wave won't get lost but will be able to do away with this old world. The central task of communists is to work internationally for the constitution of a centre, of the direction of tomorrow's party. Communists have no interests different from those of the rest of the proletariat in struggle, they are only the vanguard, the real direction of the struggle and they organise themselves consequently.

IV- The "spontaneous" rise of the party

Another essential question in the Marxist theory of the party concerns the process of its constitution. Its basic premise is that the fundamental determinant of the class, and therefore of the party, is "the soil of modern society": the capitalistic mode of production giving rise "spontaneously" (Marx) to the tendency of the constitution as a party. This spontaneous rise means in the same time the ineluctable appearance of the forces giving birth to the party and the necessary crystallisation, centralisation of these forces into a single organisation. This centralisation, which expresses the passage of the party from its substantial form to its real and complete existence, is only possible because of the preliminary formation of the militant and theoretical executives of the communist minority, the only one that can allow for all class-attacks to move forward in a communist sense. This way we have clarified the spontaneous process of the rise of the class-party, which, in the Marxist understanding, implies a preliminary factor of preparation, organisation and direction of this "spontaneity", a process that was synthesised by the communist left through the following sentence: Just like revolution, the party cannot be created, but has to be directed.

"One does not create neither parties nor revolutions. Parties and revolutions have to be directed by uniting all useful revolutionary experiments on an international level, in order to assure the chance of victory of the proletariat in this battle to the utmost, as this battle is the inevitable outcome of the historical period we are living. It seems to us that this must be the conclusion." (Party and class action -1921 - Rassegna Communista)

This understanding liquidates as well spontaneism as Leninism, dilettante queuism and activism of "constructors of parties".

Indeed, for spontaneism, the class is directly, all of a sudden, revolutionary. The preparatory work, theoretical and practical, of communist nuclei, the indispensable organisation of this spontaneity, is denied. All what is left to do, for communists, if they are still necessary, is to "comment" class struggle, and to the most, to illuminate, to guide by their sole ideas, the working class. More sophisticated forms of spontaneism do exist, among which, the various councilist, democratic, culturalist, educational, anti-substitutionist, libertarian (18), etc. variations. But at the same time other forms of spontaneism exist, camouflaged behind the ultra-partyist phrases and affirmations, which, beyond their formal affirmations about the need for the party, can only conceive their activity either as being exclusively propagandist (joining this way, through activism, propagandist councillism), or exclusively "theoretical" without understanding how the communist programme is a praxis, the undissociable unity of theory and practice.

On the other pole (as we have already seen), we can find the "Leninist" theories, more or less derived from a reduced interpretation of "What is to be done? ", of the "construction of the party" conceived as an addition of "union-militancy" - reproducing unionism, be it in "official" unions or in "open", "immediate" groups... - and "political militancy", with its whole counterrevolutionary problematic of the minimum-programme, the transitory demands, the "bridge to be established between class and party, between movement and goal, which are this way considered as separate entities. Of course, this conception denies the spontaneous rise of the party from the soil of old society and opposes to it a whole plan of construction, in reality a plan of individual recruitment of proletarians, which requires the infiltration of all groups where one can find "sociological proletarians" - unions, sport and cultural clubs, etc. -- in order to obtain, through many manoeuvres, the direction of these organisations and to direct large worker masses. But this direction is only possible at the cost of abandoning the communist programme and adopting a bourgeois programme since the dominating ideology is the one of the dominating class. When those militants manage to get to the head of bourgeois organisations, this means their liquidation at short term either as leaders or as communists. It always means the liquidation of the party itself, of its programme, which, just like its militants, gets dragged along an activist/opportunist spiral, transforming itself rapidly into a single bourgeois, unionist practice. This process, which has already dragged many groups into the bourgeois camp, is caricaturally completed by a series of "supple tactics" (of compromission), all justified for the sake of "realism" and "concretism" and based on Lenin's leaflet "The infantile illness of communism: leftism", which has unfortunately become famous. Those "tactics" include trickery as well as the meticulous elaboration of all stages of the continuous claims that should unfailingly drag proletarians to revolution. All these artificial constructions, these various stages, these lists of transitory demands, besides the fact that they try to model the movement according to their ideological schemes, at best have no influence at all for they will be completely bypassed by the generalised launching of the movement, and, at worst, they will be real brakes to the struggle which does not proceed gradually but by qualitative bonds and which, in order to advance, shouldn't fix itself any preliminary limits, but, on the contrary, should tend to want everything, to take everything. As we have already seen, it is the very contents of the movement that bypasses all transitory stages invented by "constructors", which are, in most cases, nothing but new obstacles to the struggle.

From the basic premise, which determines the rise of the party from the soil of modern society, we can derive the following: the party is being directed centrally and directly on a world-wide level - organic centralism: centralisation, in time and space -. Its full and entire existence therefore can only be materially possible when there is an international wave of class struggles like in l9l7-l923. In this sense, we can state that a real and effective embodiment of the party, its world-wide existence (no longer only as a tendency, no longer substantially) can only be possible when there are powerful acting proletarian forces, which, for sure, to a large extent are still unconscious of their movement when the period is a clear period of revolution, of reversal of the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and this can only be considered on a world-wide level. In these circumstances, in the heat of the struggle, the many communist nuclei, groups..., spread all over the world, which have most adequately assumed the preparatory tasks, manage to unify, to centralise themselves in order to effectively direct the world-wide communist revolution. The party therefore does not proceed from a pure and single matrix, nor from any particular geographical zone or from a single communist cell, but on the contrary, it rises "spontaneously" from the flanks of our decaying society, and the guarantee of its true revolutionary contents comes precisely from the impersonal militancy of communist nuclei, which, at the right moment, enables them to avoid making the same errors again and enables them to direct the movement until definite victory. Identifying today's communist nuclei with tomorrow's party, besides the megalomaniac character of such identification, means misunderstanding the two fundamental aspects of the existence of the party, which are its spontaneous rise and, preliminarily to this rise, the indispensable maturation prepared by extreme minorities among small communist groups, which, at decisive times, will be the only ones capable of giving a full communist direction to the party. Understanding this essential difference - quantitative and qualitative - between the party of revolution and those groups which, in spite of all changes of names or other vicissitudes, tirelessly prepare its rise, means being able to work today at this central task of assuming, from now on, despite our weak forces, all the tasks that will in a revolution period, determine the proletarian victory.

The exiled communist left of Italy ("Bilan" - "Prometeo") had already perceived this reality when it defined, on the base of the fundamental change of the balance of forces between capitalism and communism in the thirties, the tasks of the fraction: to criticise past experiments always more radically; to fight all falsifications more and more in order to restore the communist programme while rejecting organisational voluntarism, activism, artificial construction of the "Party", which, during this counter-revolution period, can only serve the enemy (as was shown by the creation of the Trotskyist "International"). In this sense, the non-activist direction of the fraction (Vercesi, Pieri, Jacobs...) gave it the theoretical and practical capacity (as it was one of the few groups in the world really able to do this) to interpret and to intervene, from a proletarian point of view, against the imperialist war launched in Spain to destroy the proletariat (1936-1939). But a few years later, this position of "falling back", in a counter-revolution period, on the most fundamental tasks, of refusing ephemeral success in the "conquest of the masses" was defeated to the advantage of the voluntary creation without principles of the "Party" in Italy around Damen in 1943-1945, even though Vercesi just like Bordiga stuck on to a position of return to the more fundamental task of programmatical restoration (which more particularly provoked the 1952-scission).

Through this historical experience, we can see how the capitulation of communists before the difficulty of advancing at counter-current, to the advantage of popularity and of immediacy, inevitably carries them away onto the road of degeneration, of the liquidation of the programmatical experiences of the workers' movement. Communists therefore, even in a revolution period, will remain an extreme minority, even though they represent the interests of the large majority of mankind, of the whole humanity; this is not due to our own will, but because the balance of forces in favour of the proletariat cannot be imposed durably but after the world-wide victory of revolution, after a period of revolutionary dictatorship. Only through the destruction of the universal bourgeois State, of wage-slavery and of all its defenders - priests, bosses, trade-unionists, leftists... - the communist party can become a "mass-party", the "party of humanity", the new victorious community, the communist society. The communist party, even while acting for the interests of humanity, while directing millions of proletarians during the struggle and insurrection, will remain an extreme minority of proletarians united by the programme defending the historical interests of the proletariat and consequently the interests of the liberation of mankind.

V- The "way of life" of the party

The characteristics of tomorrow's party, of its "way of life" flow inevitably from communism as the essential determination of the party.

"Being understood that the party is the prefiguration of communist society, it cannot adapt itself to some mechanism, some principle about life, about organisation which in some way is linked to bourgeois society; the party has to carry into effect its destruction." (Origin and function of the party-form - Invariance No 1)

This problem is not just a technical, a mechanical one, it concerns the very life of the party because for communism there can be no antagonism, for any reason whatsoever, between the "principles" (strategy) and the "tactics", between programmatical affirmations and daily practice. "One cannot mechanically separate the political and the organisational questions." (Lenin - First congress of the CPR)

A few years ago already, we had tried, by a brief statement of theses, to synthesise the few existing programmatical experiences on this question (mainly due to the communist left of Italy) while at the same time outlining our own principles of behaviour. We have copied that document here because it still expresses, in its main aspects, our orientation and this in perfect accordance with the central theses of this text "Communism and Party".

Organisation and organic centralism

1. The communist social movement exists and affirms itself for and as the unification of the last exploited and revolutionary class in human pre-history: the proletariat. The material base for this unification derives from the universalisation of the production relationships, entirely achieved by capitalism.

2. But where we talk about a movement of unification and unifying (A), this presupposes first of all a separation. Indeed, if the communist movement is the unification/affirmation of the proletariat as a class for itself, this movement is the anti-thesis of the capitalistic movement, which aims at atomising all individuals (negation of classes) as "citizens" and consequently at achieving the perfect separation/reification: democracy.

3. Consequently, the proletariat's tendency to unite is fundamentally anti-democratic and. totalitarian because it aims at solving the contradiction between salaried work and capital by the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the revolutionary and exploited class forced to always act in the sense of the very negation of the bases of its domination (this explains the dying away of classes and of the workers' state). This is why "Communists do not have any codified constitutions to propose. They have a world of lies and constitutions to destroy, crystallised in the law and force of the dominant class. They know that only a revolutionary and totalitarian mechanism of force and power, without excluding any means, can possibly prevent the infamous residues of a barbarous epoch to rise up again, and prevent the monster of social privilege, hungering after revenge and servitude, from holding up its head again, launching once more its treacherous cry of Liberty" (Bordiga - 1951).

4. Marxism categorically rejects all anti-authoritarian, all democratic and federalist conceptions, which in fact are nothing but the organisational acceptance of the reality of capitalistic separations and of their ideologies. As a matter of fact, those ideologies in practice are but the addition (i.e. the acceptance) of all particularisms, of all localisms, of all corporatisms... of all separations/categories of capital, the fetishism of decisions made by a majority and consequently the political surrender to the dominating ideas, which necessarily emanate from the dominating class. Here we reply again, with Engels: "A revolution most certainly is the most authoritarian thing possible, its is the act through which one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by means of guns, bayonets and cannons, which indeed are authoritarian means; and the victorious party, if it doesn't want to lose the fruits of its struggle, has to maintain its power by the fear those weapons inspire to reactionaries." (On Authority)

5. Communism, therefore, as a social movement, is by essence (necessity) centralist and organic because it tends to act as a class for itself, as one and one only body - organism - united (i.e. passing dialectically beyond the internal separations) through its historical interests. The communist movement can only act as an organ - quite united and homogeneous - on the condition of being strictly centralised. In this way, communist centralism can only be organic. The movement has to centralise itself to be organic. The centralisation of the movement is organic.

6. This communist movement has existed ever since the existence of proletariat. It materialises in time and space, particularly through the existence of communist groups, fractions and parties, which are in the same time a product of the tendency to the association of the worker movement - the tendency to organic centralisation - and an agent, voluntary and conscious, of centralisation/unification - organicity of the class. The programme oof communists, indeed, is nothing but the synthesis of the aims and means of the historical movement taking place under our eyes.

7. The general laws that determine the communist movement also determine the action and organisation of communist minorities. The party therefore acts like a body and is centralised, it centralises itself in order to act as a body; its internal system is organic centralism (B). "For us democracy cannot be a principle; centralism on the contrary is undoubtfully one, since the essential characteristics of the party organisation have to be the unity of its structure and movement. The term of centralism is sufficient to express the continuity in space of the structure of the party; and to introduce the essential idea of the continuity in time, i.e. the continuity of the aim we are tending to and of the direction we are going in spite of the successive obstacles we have to surmount, and the more so, to link into one formula these two essential ideas of unity, we would propose to say that the communist party founds its organisation on "organic centralism" (Bordiga - 1922).

8. The foundation of the unitary action of the party is its programme. The internal centralisation therefore can only be political (its corollary being technical decentralisation, division of tasks). The function of the political centre is to synthesise the whole of the organisational activity and to direct this activity in perfect harmony with the programme. The permanent link between the centre and the periphery is indispensable to a dialectical functioning of the organisation, to synthesise all experiences, all practices, of each "section", "commission", "cell", of each part of the organisation, and in the same time, to direct these in an unitarian and solid action. "One doesn't create neither parties, nor revolutions. One directs parties and revolutions by unifying all useful revolutionary experiences on an international scale, so as to assure to the utmost the chances of victory for the proletariat in the battle that is the inevitable outcome of the historical period we are living." (Bordiga - 1921)

9. Once more, we have to refuse all democratism on principle, because the question is not, for the "basis", to check from time to time the "summit", nor for the latter to impose any orientation. There is no need for checking the centre, because the centre hasn't got the power - delegation - to change the programme - principles and tactics - of the organisation. The corollary of this conception is the permanent and real development of consciousness formation and information - of each militant so that he can be directly and politically engaged with the whole of the organisational praxis. This is how each militant answers for the general orientation of the organisation, and how the latter guarantees the practice of each of its militants (C). Consequently, in a communist organisation, the point can never be "to delegate" one's power, nor therefore "to elect" the centre. As a matter of fact, delegating means renouncing to the possibility of direct action, and the so-called sovereignty of democratic law is nothing else but an abdication, most often in favour of rascals" (Bordiga - 1951).

10. The question of discipline and self-discipline has to be considered in the same way; strict self-discipline is required as far as the application of organisational orientations goes because the latter is in accordance with the political programme, which constitutes the voluntary base of adhesion for each militant. One can only call on discipline if there is political agreement; if the latter doesn't exist any more, the call for discipline is nothing else but a bureaucratic move in order to suppress political disagreement (proceeding most of the time from minorities) and reveals the incapacity of the organisation to solve the new problems raised by class-struggle.

11. Programmatically (see "the democratic principle") we know we have to make a distinction between the democratic mechanism (decisions made by a majority) and its fetishism (the majority by definition is right and the minority is wrong). And if we have to use the mechanism of decision by a majority technically (if another, more appropriate means existed, we would have to use it immediately) it can only be by deliberately clearing it from its democratic mystic ("one man, one vote", "democratic control", elections, electoral campaigns...), the apanage of all bourgeois organism. "The democratic criterion is for us, up to now, only a material and accidental element in the construction of our internal organisation and in the formulation of our party-statutes; it isn't its indispensable platform. This is why, as far as we are concerned, we will not set up as a principle the well-known organisational formula of "democratic centralism" (Bordiga - 1922).

Notes

(A) As Lukacs asserts it, the concept of unity ("unity of subject and object, finite and infinite, being and thinking", etc.) has the disadvantage that the terms object, subject, etc. express what they are beyond their unity. They no longer mean what their expression states in their unity (History and Class consciousness - 1922).

(B) Obviously the internal regime of an organisation, even if it must conform itself to its political principles, cannot be considered as a guarantee "in itself" of its action and practice. "The party can be or not be adapted to its task, which is to give an impulse to revolutionary action. In fact, this question doesn't concern the party in general but the communist party, which isn't guaranteed against thousands of dangers of degeneration and dissolution; it isn't made equal to its task by its statutes nor by simple measures of internal organisation but by positive characters that grow in the same time as it grows itself because it takes part in the struggle as an organism with an unitary orientation, which it owes to its own conception of the historical process, to a fundamental programme contained in the collective consciousness and to its discipline." (Bordiga - 1922)

(C) Here we see how organic centralism is not unilateral (from periphery to centre) but how it also requires that every militant should himself be a centralising agent (contrarily to the Stalinian vision of the omnipotent centre and the unconscious militants) to really be, at any time, "the arms and the eyes" of the organisation. So, the corollary of the synthetic function of the centre is the personal responsibilizing of each militant, his full understanding of his praxis.

Of course, such theses are only a rough shape yet of the practical understanding of organic centralism. What we are definitely sure of, and this is essential, is what we do not want. It is in the whole of the worker practice, inside the general and universal development of the class struggle, that organic centralism, organic (of the total) and organisational answer to the needs of the proletarian struggle does and will affirm itself, doing away with all the democratic rules and fetishes. There can be no party without organic centralism. Organic centralisation - the class organicity - is the concentration of all proletarian force and power. It is the organisation into one unique party. This way, the historical line of constituting the party takes shape around the centralisation in time and space into one living acting body. This is what we call organic centralism.

Following that reasoning it is obvious that, just like we reject both Leninism and anti-Leninism, we do reject democratism (controls by militants, elections and revocability of the leaders,...) as well as its bureaucratic and militarist complement (prestige, congressism, functionarism, followism, predominance of "technicians",...), both responding to the "democratic centralism" formula. Such formula as its name points it, bears all disadvantages in itself: democratic functioning (completed by "Bolshevisation", i.e. the organisation, on the base of the professional and thus corporatist cells) is one of the most perfect models of functioning for the bourgeoisie's organisations. The bourgeoisie too needs a perfect adequation between its programme, the programme of capital, and its way of functioning: democratic mechanism. Such is the coherence of counterrevolution.

From a historical point of view, democratic centralism was an attempt, on the part of the Bolsheviks, to conciliate the necessary dictatorial direction of the actions in order to be able to answer to the needs of the struggle properly (in a general mood of clandestinity) with the dilettantist, academic and tricky way of life of the social-democracy. This is what gave birth to the anti-natural centralisation of worker actions - the programme of communism - and democracy - the programme of capital -. But it turned out to be practically inadequate and wrong because each time Lenin or Trotsky made a class position triumph (see defeatism, the April theses, the Duma's boycott, the insurrection preparation...) they did it strictly anti-democratically. Lenin openly took no account of all internal democratic rules when he called upon the vanguard militants and threatened the Bolshevik "party" of resigning. On the contrary, each time the point was to confirm a bourgeois policy, this was done with the great pomp of majority, in strict democratic legality (see the IInd, IIIrd, IVth and Vth congresses of the "communist" International). We could never repeat enough that Lenin's only "revolutionary parliamentarist" practice was to have the constituent assembly dissolved with bayonet-thrusts. We will also destroy parliament, even against the majority of workers' opinion.

Even if democratic centralism already was, in Lenin's days, an anti-natural aberration, it quickly became, within the Stalinian, Trotskyist and even councillist parties, the panacea when an irremovable direction wanted the majority of the "uneducated" base to endorse any decision (except as it is logical in case of inter- fraction settlements of account, when a part of the "former" direction, chosen as scapegoat, is liquidated. See the tragi-comical reversals of the Chinese and Russian "communist" parties...). It is therefore most funny to notice that in all those so-called revolutionary "parties", which function because of democratic centralism, any change of orientation (sometimes even of 180ï‚° ) will always be democratically endorsed, since those parties carry on their bourgeois policy democratically. Once again, there is a class frontier between communism and democracy. The way of life of our party can only express our project, the human community, tendentially. But we can by no means tolerate or emphasise practices, attitudes, functioning... in contradiction with our programme. On the contrary, we have to destroy them, as we act to destroy the old world.

oOo

We have tried, through this contribution to the "big" question of the party, to redefine some basic concepts of the Marxist theory - destruction of all ideologies - in the only outlook of communism, of re-unifying the species. Acting for this reunification cannot be conceived but as a whole, as a one and only movement of unification destroying all the mediations imposed by the old world. There aren't several revolutionary movements, parties, orientations... to be chosen according to "free thinking": there is only one revolutionary movement, one party, one orientation, one direction that establishes the truth, from the proletarian point of view, by its own practice, by the setting up of the proletariat's dictatorship -obviously the dictatorship of the party - aiming at abolishing salaried work, as a transition to the new community, to full communism. This is why the "true" world communist party is the one that will lead us to definitive victory, and not the chimerical reproduction of past forms, of unfailing pseudo-recipes : the ideal party hovering in the Leninists' heads and in the heads of their enemy brothers: the anti-Leninists.

"The class lives, fights, advances and triumphs through the working of the forces it has engendered in the pains of history. The class starts from an immediate homogeneity of the economic situation, which seems to us to be the first motor of the tendency to go beyond, to break the present production system. But to assume such a great task, it must have not only its own thinking, but also the proper will to reach the purposes defined by research and criticism and also its own organisation of fight that canalises and uses the efforts and sacrifices most efficiently. All this makes up the party." (Bordiga - "Class party" - 1921) (underlined by us)

Notes

(1) Namely in "Class and party" - "Rupture with the ICC" (Brochure of the ICG); "Presentation" (Le Communiste No 6); "Contribution to the grouping of revolutionaries" (Le Communiste No 7).

(2) In the whole of the democratic-managerist currents, no doubt, the councillist current is the one that has most openly repudiated the Marxist understanding of the proletariat's organisation into a party (see namely the ICC brochure "Communist organisations and class consciousness" and the more recent text "Beyond the party" of the Junius Group, edited by Spartacus).

(3) We are here taking into account the "hard" Leninist conceptions of the "party", built stone by stone on the base of the use of "supple tactics" and not the more populist Leninist currents, whose conceptions of the mass "party" and of the unique front, are but the exact - not even radicalised - reproduction of the social-democratic parties. So, we mean the conception expressed in "What is to be done?" when we criticise the Leninist conception of the party, and not what the epigones of "Leninism" have done with it.

(4) About this question, please see our text: "From man's alienation to human community" in "Le Communiste No 14.

(5) When we use the term "social" (social movement, social project, social revolution...), it is by no means to follow the temporary fashion of the small European extreme-left, but to signify the totality of our movement, our project and our revolution represent, which can never be identified with one of its aspects: economic, philosophical, political, military... (One could use the term "political" in the same totalizing and totalitarian contents, if that term was not commonly interpreted in the sense of the simple superstructural representation of the government).

(6) Marx, even if the formalists don't agree with this, opposed the whole of the party of anarchy to the party of order (see the social class struggles in France): "However varied the socialism of the big fractions of the party of anarchy were, they agreed on one point: to claim that socialism is the means of emancipation for the proletariat and that the emancipation of the proletariat is its aim."

(7) All vulgar materialists don't go beyond the sociological or even strictly economic definition of the working class, which inevitably drags them onto the bourgeoisie's ground and makes them consider the proletariat as the exploited class that reproduces capital and not as a revolutionary class.

(8) In the same way, within the capitalistic mode of production, the form - value of exchange - necessarily proceeds from the substance of the value: abstract work (see the Capital).

(9) The proletariat's extreme situation as a "non-class" is that of its only existing "for capital", its complete atomisation, its dissolution within the people. The full domination of counter-revolution within purified democracy - fascist or antifascist - almost completely succeeded in achieving that state of class denying during the period before the 2nd world war (see "Bilan").

"As to us, we shall use the concept "non-class", rather than the "more classical" "class for itself" in order to better indicate that the difference between "class in itself" and "class for itself" expresses on one hand the inexistence of the proletariat as a revolutionary class and on the other hand its affirmation as such." (Le Communiste No 14).

(10) Historical materialism does not rely on simple and immediate reality - the place of one and another individual or group of individuals in bourgeois society - to deduce its social project, its political programme mechanically. The caricature of this vulgar process is workerism, for which everything depends on the work done by each individual to determine his "individual" nature of class! On the contrary, historical materialism relies on the material and historical reality of the whole "arch" of history - from primitive community to communism - to claim that from a historical point of view, a human collectivity, the proletariat, a class exploited in the capitalistic mode of production, is the revolutionary class that will impose communism on humanity and will free it from reigning need. (See our text "Some criticisms on dialectical materialism" in Le Communiste No 13)

(11) We consider "State and Revolution", the various texts "Against the stream" explaining the defeatist revolutionary positions, and: "What is to be done?" (not reduced to the simple questions of "setting up the party" and "external consciousness" but expressing the necessity of the struggling party) as Lenin's most important attempts to break with the bourgeoisie by restoring the communist programme partly.

On the other hand, in our text "Some lessons from October" (in Le Communiste No 10/11) we had largely explained how Lenin himself had to change the whole programme of his "party" (see the April theses) while desperately fighting against all executives and "old bolsheviks" (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin...) who were by no means different from the Mensheviks. As J.Barrot says "Russian revolution took place contrary to the ideas expressed in "What is to be done?" (The "renegade" Kautsky and his disciple Lenin)

(12) This wrong and dichotomic conception that separates "immediate" and "historical" struggles did even appear in some of our texts. For us also, it materialises a lack of rupture with the old Leninist and/or councillist conceptions.

(13) We shall not here develop the complex question of the late creation (in 1919) and of the extremely rapid involution of the IIIrd International. We would simply like to say that if this creation definitely materialises a class attempt, the direction that has been followed since the very beginning of its existence (Moscow's executive headed by Zinoviev) very early lead the C.I. to give up the communist programme (see the elimination of the "leftist" executives between the Ist and IInd congresses, the setting up of the 21 conditions, the exclusion of the KAPD, the frontism, the inter-classist alliances, among which the "national-bolshevism"... "socialism in one only country",...).

(14) Namely the multiple groups that had a defeatist position during the first world war and organised themselves before the creation of the C.I. See the abstentionist fraction of the Italian S.P., the IKD in Germany; the C.P. of Van Overstraeten in Belgium; the communist FORA in Argentina/Chile... the Pericat-group in France; the C.P. of S.Pankhurst; the Indian C.P.; the IWW and SLP in the USA; the Dutch C.P...

(15) We give this example although we know how delicate it is to exemplify a social process by physiological functioning. Of this example we only want to keep the dialectical image that expresses a non-separate and non-identical reality.

(16) This disqualifies, from now on, all "parties" that, in non-revolutionary days, claim to be the "parties of revolution" while one of the bases of the Marxist understanding of the rise of the party is precisely that the latter should not "proclaim itself" at any time but should crystallise and centralise, on a world scale directly, the reality of the communist forces directing the revolutionary wave.

(17) This is, among others, the case of the "Communism or civilisation" group, which is busy publishing and planifying questions, and postpones its actions "to transform the world" to many decades. What we are criticising is not the fact of undertaking such a work but (in addition to some of their positions) the fact of undertaking ONLY that work.

(18) They all share the pathological bourgeois fear of "violating" the purity of the class (as understood, of course, in the most economist sense).

The I.C.G. bases its principal positions on the historical experiences of the workers' movement:
"¢
The historical arch that relies primitive communism to integral communism constitutes the whole cycle from which revolutionary marxism draws the process that gives birth to the material conditions required for the establishment of the world-wide human community. This society will not be the end of history, but the beginning of the conscious history of the human species through the abolition of classes, private property, labour, state, exploitation, family...
"¢
Capitalism differs from all previous modes of production by its universal nature and by the simplification (exacerbation) of class contradictions. Capitalism at the same time creates the conditions for Communism and the force that will impose it: the proletariat, the only class in human history to be exploited and revolutionary.
"¢
The limit of Capital is Capital itself! Its development necessarily implies the development of its contradictions (proletariat/bourgeoisie, valorization/devalorization, productive forces/relations of productions,...) and it determines, constitutes and develops the social force whose historical mission it is to destroy the capitalist system: the proletariat organized and constituted as communist party.
"¢
Through the revolutionary dictatorship, through the constitution of the world-wide proletarian State (semi-state), the working class organises the destruction of any state and the abolition of social classes by crushing, through red terror openly claimed and applied, all attempts aiming at the restoration of the terrorist dictatorship of the value. To bourgeois terror and terrorism, the proletariat opposes the revolutionary terror.
"¢
The proletariat is historically forced and determined to organize itself as a class fighting consciously for the realization of the communist programme. This is its tendency to constitute itself into one conscious force, into the world-wide party, centralizing the most determined and the most radical fractions of the proletariat.

From these fundamental programmatical aspects, checked by the experiences of revolution and counter-revolution, derive a series of historical lessons that are valid yesterday, today as tomorrow!
"¢
Democracy cannot be reduced to a simple form (parliamentary, fascist, socialist,...) of capitalist domination. Democracy -force of atomization - affirms itself morre and more as the very substance of capitalist dictatorship. Its development is directly linked to the development of commodity-production; therefore the victory of communism implies the destruction of democracy (including "workers' democracy") as the way of life of Capital.
"¢
The so-called socialist countries, blocs (Russia, China, Cuba,...) are capitalist states where the dominant ideology only adds some "marxist" expressions so as to hide their bourgeois character. Where there is wage labour, there is Capital!
"¢
To protect itself from revolutionary assaults, the bourgeoisie has always developed social-democratic and other left fractions to serve as a rampart of the bourgeois state. The currents that support (in a critical way or not) any of today's existing states (trotskyism, maoism, third-world movements, anarchism,...) are just radicalised forms of bourgeois socialism. The proletariat considers these pseudo-workers' parties as the hitsquads of the radical fractions of the bourgeoisie.
"¢
The communist movement characterises itself by its permanent opposition to the bourgeois state, to all bourgeois parties (all of them, whether they are legal or illegal, left or right). Against parliamentarism and elections, it opposes communist abstentionism.
"¢
During the struggle, workers' associationism opposes itself to all the organs of the capitalist state. The proletariat organizes itself outside and against parliaments, unions, armies,... Structures maintaining social peace don't have to be reformed, they must be destroyed!
"¢
The aim of the proletarian struggle is the generalization of the insurrection to the whole planet, is the world-wide dictatorship of the proletariat constituted into a party, is the social revolution affirming itself with the generalized despotism of human needs against Capital and all its laws of existence.
"¢
Communism, as a movement opposes and excludes from its very origins the country, the nation, the national struggle, as well as all class collaboration. Against imperialist peace and war (=social peace) it opposes revolutionary defeatism (=social war).
"¢
The communist direction, an historical (and non-immediate) product of the proletariat, has no interests opposed to the rest of the class. Communists only distinguish themselves by their actions in which they show themselves as the most determined elements and in which they always put forward the interests of the whole working class. They are the most consequent organized force in front of the necessity for the communist movement to give itself a real direction and a single and world-wide centralization. In other words, the party is the "prefiguration" of the human world-wide community.
"¢
As a communist organization, the I.C.G. acts in a conscious, voluntary and organized way to direct this process and bring it to its term.

That's why today it works for :
"¢
the elaboration, the defence and the propagation of the revolutionary programme;
"¢
the centralization of all militants, sympathizers, contacts,... who tend to organize themselves on the basis of the communist programme;
"¢
the organization of workers' nucleus on revolutionary basis;
"¢
the organization of struggles in the interests of the proletariat, always defending the historical and world-wide interests of the proletariat, its internationalist character, its uncompromising opposition to any (even the most radical) capitalist reforms.

Death to labour!

Dictatorship of the proletariat for the abolition of wage labour!

International communism!

For over a year strikes have continually broken out in South Africa's gold and coal mines, car industry, etc. Rent strikes have spread throughout townships and industrial suburbs. Laws on pass-control have been defied by countless illegal immigrants. Teenagers have deserted schools and set them on fire. They have attacked vehicles transporting scabs to work. Foodstores have been looted; townhalls, churches, police stations have been sacked and burnt down. Elections have been rejected and the "people's representatives" have become the target of angry mobs while informers have been terrorized when not executed. The thousands of death no longer inspire submission; every funeral of assassinated proletarians turns into a demonstration against the "peace of the tombs".

Within the course of a year South Africa has been shaken all over by this one movement that not only affected big industrial cities but also remote bantoustans, dormitory-suburbs and most of the huge mining areas. Workers' massive revolt against sacrifices has become the main axis around which struggles develop. These struggles that the bourgeoisie can no longer control are an extension as well as an advancement of the so-called Soweto-riots (savagely put down - 6000 killed - by the State in '76). Today the bourgeois security is irremediably endangered by the violent rupture of social peace.

Confronted with proletarians' rejection of their miserable conditions of life and their revolt against poverty the South African bourgeoisie has no other choice but to repress these struggles violently while at the same time calling upon people to fight for "more freedom", "more democracy", "for the freedom of press", "of association", etc. This way the bourgeoisie manages to present the proletarian struggle as a reaction to the racist attitude of the South-African State. Such polarization assumes the shape of apartheid or anti-apartheid, that are nothing else but two expressions of one and the same reality, of one and the same bourgeois alternative.

In order to take advantage of the struggles, the bourgeoisie mobilises the proletarians on the issue of "Black Consciousness", of "Black people's liberation", of anti-apartheid,...

The cohesion with which world capitalism strives to establish a regime of anti-apartheid is only being equalled by the eagerness each imperialistic constellation display to restore order and stop proletarian struggle.

While miners get surrounded by the army, while workers' living areas get patrolled by the police, the "Black" leaders of the A.N.C., of the U.D.F.,... negotiate with bosses and government representatives in order to put an end to "all that violence". Proletarian blood is being sold by these so-called revolutionary leaders. The crisis of the State in South Africa is only a symptom of the difficulties world capitalism experiences in enrolling proletarians behind measures of austerity and always worsening conditions of survival.

South Africa occupies a strategic position at the meeting point of three oceans. Its industrial power, mainly concentrated in mines and agriculture, equals that of the rest of the African continent. It is the first producer of precious ores and a pole of the world market where capital has been concentrated to an impressive extend. All these conditions have determined the development of an extremely powerful and militarized State. The stability of world capitalism has imposed a state of apartheid in South Africa (it is not by accident that this racist State was accepted as a constitutional regime just after the war in 1948) as the only way - thanks to social peace that this way was achieved at little expense - of facing the strategic battles that continually opposed imperialist powers. Anyway, the Allied forces have never been embarrassed to help create a "racial state)" - what they all are - and other concentration camps after having "freed the world from barbarity" (sic).

If capital backs apartheid or fascist regimes, it is mainly because such regimes allow for a more important valorization (cheaper workforce): this is its major care. At the same time capital never stops trying to show its purity by defending the "world community of democratic interests" (an ideology aimed at cementing the whole of society in order to prevent a real understanding of our class interests). In fact, in South Africa capital's interests are double: on the one hand capital requires an unceasing increase in surplus value and on the other hand it must imperatively move towards a State of anti-apartheid to try to restore law and order amongst proletarians. This brings about dissensions between the various bourgeois fractions in the world.

Counter-revolution takes the shape of polarization not only as a cover for the struggles between fractional interests that shake world capitalism but also and in the first place as a means to stop the more and more threatening waves of proletarian struggles. This polarization is based on always the same obstacles continually faced by proletarians: racism, forced immigration, police control, discriminations, persecutions,... When fighting against pass-control, against deportations to the home-lands, against confinement in town-ships, real concentration camps, or when squatting living places that are forbidden for black people, the proletariat fights against the social misery of this rotten society. Today's struggles are not engendered by the need for "Black liberation" nor by racial antagonism but by the need for liberation from the links that enchain proletarians to the mercy of capital's needs.

The fact that these struggles get a strong echo amongst clandestine immigrants, unemployed and even amongst young whites, illustrates the force of the movement which, instead of being limited to factories, has touched all categories of proletarians and all places of capital reproduction, expressing the general willingness of the proletariat movement to refuse all separations and to keep united in spite of the anti-apartheid movement that tries to hide this reality and to break it down. By claiming the "law of the majority", universal suffrage, the anti-apartheid leaders invite proletarians to give up social struggle and to join them in the "paradise" of democratic rights (for more details on this subject see "Against the myth of democratic rights and liberties", Communism n?1). With their universal suffrage they try to impose black nationalism claiming for a government by African! They use all the power of their organizations, supported by different world capitalist fractions, to try to restrain revolutionary agitation (that attacks all defenders of order, black and white) and to lock it up in the prisons of African nationalism!

The A.N.C. and U.D.F. militants, the union leaders, the Nobel prize of social peace,... they all display their terrorist arsenal against "refractory" proletarians and other "provokers" who threaten the peaceful development of the negotiations for conciliation, for "opening" towards the government and the bosses representatives.

Trade-unions may state their regrets about the outcome of the miners' strike at the end of last August at a time when they actively prepared together with the government the army's demonstration of intimidation against strikers as the only "glorious" outcome possible to make proletarians accept the successive refusals of their claims -amongst which some concerned a rise in wages judged "unrealistic" by the unions as well as the re-engagement of proletarians sacked because of their sabotage actions anti-scab violence-. The anti-white radicalism of certain A.N.C. branches such like the P.A.C., as well as the democretinism of trade-unions and pacifists, is just another way of sabotaging the rising class-movement by trying to link proletarians to a patriotic army, organ of promotion for imperialistic war and massacres (bourgeois attempt to get rid of class contradictions). The pious calls for justice and for "black people's right" (approved by all right-thinking humanitarians) express the pacifist ideology, the violence and the "whites" terror with which the South African bourgeoisie represses the revolutionary vanguard minorities and tries to counter the extension and the organization of different struggle practices that constitute the only alternative for the proletariat.

Apartheid and anti-apartheid both reinforce the South African bourgeoisie; they bring about divisions, isolation and weakening amongst the worlds proletariat.

In order to be able to grant to the South African state the help of international capitalism, the bourgeoisie with its press, its lawyers, its churches of all religions, its many friends of man and earth, accomplishes its dirty job of turning proletarians away from the struggles of their class brothers: this is the only way for the bourgeoisie to stop the revolutionary blaze that is threatening them.

The corollary of this polarization is the organization and social function not only of anti-apartheid campaigns but also of pacifism itself with such masquerades as the "Band Aid" that only serve the purpose of concealing our real class interests so as to strengthen social peace. The anti-apartheid campaigns make the proletariat all over the world believe that those "poor blacks" just have to fight against one "type of regime" and not against world capital.

By presenting these social struggles as specific to Africans, the world state manages to prevent all real class solidarity from coming up and all proletarian internationalism to develop. The proletariat, struggling for its own interests and against austerity, rejects all national solidarity and all cross-class unity. In South Africa, through their hard and violent struggles proletarians try to break the nationalist frontiers. Even though their movement is still marked by weakness mainly due to their isolation, they sabotage the national economy and attack law and order for the sake of their own class interests. To the boycott of elections by anti-apartheid reformists, proletarians have answered by sabotaging the electoral truce and by direct action against the state. With its strikes and never ending riots the proletariat hasn't tried to "overthrow a government" but has shaken the social domination of capital and has denied all bourgeois fractions the capacity of ruling. To the violent police interventions and to the pacific "framing" of the movement by unions and churches, the proletariat has answered with the vital necessity of revolutionary violence to protect the workers' demonstrations from repression, to counter the action of scabs and informers and to prevent mass lock-out and dismissals (1700 miners are threatened with sacking for having been on strike; others have been dismissed for sabotage actions).

Our comrades' struggle in South Africa aims at destroying the frontiers, ideologies, racism,... that are continually used by the state in order to separate us. Their struggles show our common class interests as opposed to sacrifices and austerity. It is our duty to develop here the only real solidarity with this struggle: the merciless fight against austerity, against misery and against social peace. In other words, let's fight here and everywhere for the same interests as those for which our comrades in South Africa attack the world capitalist state!

From every side, we see predatories appearing, swooping time after time to pillage, devour, distort and falsify the revolutionary programme into a disgusting counter-revolutionary mish-mash they call "Marxism": for example Trotskyists who make a pilgrimage across Europe (say from Treves to London) to put upon Marx's tomb ex-voto's in the form of "transitional programmes"; also, overtly bourgeois papers that salute the memory of that "great thinker", "economist", "sociologist", "historian", "journalist",... for which certain parts of his masterwork would still be relevant today.

The palm of these hypocritically recuperative policies nevertheless comes to all regimes (two thirds of this rotten humanity) who call themselves "Marxists", "Marxist-Leninists", "Socialists" indeed "Communists" all who with the centenary of the death of Marx (1883) stage one more morbid spectacle for the glory of capitalism, for the glory of what Marx fought against all his life.

In the same way that capital defines itself by the ruthless dictatorship of dead, objectified labour on living labour, by the vampire-like process that can only survive by sucking human life for the sake of value valorizing itself, the capitalist social relationship also expresses itself at a superstructural level by the infamous dictatorship of mummified walking corpses, inoffensive icons presented to the eyes of the masses in order to cynically exorcize their non-life, to stuck them still a little bit more to the rock of capitalist exploitation.

The more capitalism sinks (and the more it develops itself) in its mortal contradictions, the more it represents itself in caricature, affirming its "working", "communist" image,... which is in fact only the transformation in mits contrary of communism, the movement of which tears out the entrails of capital more and more, menacing capitalist society always more mortally. If at the beginning of its reign, the simple word of "communism" made capital tremble with fear, in the course of its development capital has exorcized that fear by representing itself as being not only the incarnated happiness, the freedom in act,... but also the "finally human society", "realised communism".

The supreme myth of capital is its pretension to have achieved communism through its fictitious community: democracy. This myth is subtended by the fact that it's capital itself that has integrally socialized the production (and consequently the reproduction of immediate living) and therefore has realised the programme of bourgeois socialism, in any kind of form, fascist, stalinist or parliamentary (1).

It is this always more developed, more contradictory world-wide capitalist system that generates communism each time as a more ineluctable, historical necessity, as an already accomplished fact. The movement of capital would like to achieve communism (just like the exchange-value "would like" to autonomise itself totally from the use-value) without destroying itself: that is its utopia. Only the proletariat organised as a class, hence as a party, is able to impose communism to humanity by destroying capital totally, and by negating itself as an exploited class: such is the realised utopia, and such is the programme of revolutionary communism.

Only the proletariat constituted as an autonomous class, thus organised and directed through its party is able to kick out putrefied capitalism which corrupts more and more all that is human in man and is able to achieve the human global community (negation of the negation). Consequently, the utopia of capital is to exist without any contradictions, thus only existing as a positive pole, without the party of its destruction, without the proletarian party (2). It's in the name of this utopia that capital goes to the extend of privatively appropriating the corpse of Marx, which for a long time already is being nibbled by the worms of social reformism. In the cabaret of capital, the mummified Marx finds himself on the same alter as Jesus Christ or Gandhi.

As in China where on innumerable posters Marx has been depicted slant-eyed, the universal bourgeoisie only represents Marx as just another tentative to reform the world, this is to say that he is made at the same time more inhuman and more acceptable in the eyes of the exploited. Against this Marx, posthumous super-start well placed in the hit-parade of ideologies, we oppose the militant Marx, Marx as the genious and modest incarnation of the revolutionary programme existing impersonally as much before as after his death.

"Communism is a social material force which subjugates our intelligence, captivates our feelings and achieves the union of our conscience and our reason. It's a chain from which nobody can free us without breaking our hearts. It's a demon from which man can only triumph by submitting himself to it." (Marx)

All the devotees of the capitalist cause will always present the "individual" Marx as a "thinker" more or less intelligent, as a "philosopher", a "sociologist",... and put him in one or another of these narrow-minded categories of these so-called sciences. For us, Marx is first of all a militant worker, an eager combatant defending the cause of the liberation of humanity. Even if at the beginning of his action, Marx passed through democratic liberalism (period of the "Rheinische Zeitung" 1842-43) and through the groups of the hegelian left (B.Bauer and consorts), he broke very soon with all these currents of the radical bourgeoisie to fully adhere to the cause of communism, to the cause of the complete destruction of the "civil society", of bourgeois society. It's through the fundamental texts such as "The Jewish question" and "The Manuscripts of 1844" that Marx breaks definitely with the bourgeois point of view of democracy and takes up the fully proletarian point of view of communism (3).

"Indeed the perfect Christian state is not the so-called Christian state which recognizes Christianity as its foundation, as the state religion, and which therefore excludes other religions. The perfect state is rather the atheist state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to the level of the other elements of civil society..." "Political democracy is Christian in as much as it regards man - not just one man but all men - as a sovereign and supreme being; but maan in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, man in his contingent existence, man just as he is, man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, sold, and exposed to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements by the enthe organization of our society - in a word, man who is not yet a true species-being. The sovereignty of man - but of a man as an alien being distinct from actual man - is the fantasy, the dream, the postulate of Christianity, whereas in democracy it is a present an material reality, a secular maxim." "Hence man was not freed from religion - he received the freedom of religion. He was not freed from property - he received the freedom of property. He was not freed from egoism of trade - he received the freedom to engage in trade." (Marx - "The Jewish question")

It's in this text that Marx authoritatively threw, polemizing against Bauer, the programmatic bases of the fight to death against the bourgeois state, thus against democracy, a position which he and Engels maintained during their whole life-times: "Our final objective is the suppression of all states, and consequently of democracy." (Engels - 1894)

And in a concomitant way to those anti-state and anti-democratic aphorisms, Marx defined the solution of human alienation (extraenization) (4), the solution of all contradictions which shake the world in which we are living: communism.

"...it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man, the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution." (Marx - "Manuscripts of 1844")

From the very moment of this adhesion to the communist point of view, the masterwork of Marx will always affirm itself as a totality, as a critical whole where, if it develops such or such a question, at such or such a level of abstraction, it remains always from the point of view of the totality (for which Marx drew up multiple plans, but as we know he only managed to produce one tiny part of what he'd intended). The point of view and the method are the central axis that Marx maintained throughout his whole existence. The whole power of his masterwork resides in this totality, in the invariance of his critical method of investigation (5) always put at the service of the denunciation of the transitory character of capitalism and consequently of the ineluctable advent of communism.

So it's not by mere "chance" that all stalinists, democrats or other shitheads have always tried to scientifically destroy the totality of the masterwork of Marx, and tried to find contradictions where there were only different levels of abstraction merely opposing certain passages extracted from their context with the totality of Marx's militant activity. Such is amongst others, the "famous" and false "contradiction" between the theory of value especially developed in the first volume of "Capital" and the theory of "prices of production" in "Capital" - Vol 3 (which all things considered was published by Engels/Kautsky). Even more famous is the polemic on the pseudo "epistomologic cut" between the young hegelian utopian Marx and the mature, serious, scientific and non-revolutionary Marx (!), the putrid theory which gave such notoriety to the neo-stalinist Althusser and all his staff of marxologues who were paid especially to cut Marx up like a vulgar sausage, and to get rid of all the subversive contents of his masterwork, leaving only the "scientific and objective" and consequently bourgeois analyses (cf. the Poulantzas, Mandel, Harnecker, Ellenstein,...)(6).

The masterwork of Marx can only be understood as an attack, a criticism of the whole bourgeois society, or as Marx stated it himself about the publication of "Capital": "The most terrible missile ever to be launched in the face of the bourgeoisie" (Marx to J.P.H. Becker - 1867). And when Marx taken so fully the side of communism it's also by socially defining the people who are the only ones able to achieve it: the modern proletarians.

Thus it's not by conceiving communism as an ideal to aim at, but by conceiving it as the movement of dissolution of the established order, movement that is proceeding in front of our eyes; as well as by determining the people who are forced to impose it, that Marx accomplishes the rupture with the utopian socialists (Fourier, Owen), inventors of systems who could not see communism as a real movement, as a social, acting force proceeding in reality. It is not in philosophy, neither in science and even less in economy that Marx looks for the essential definition of the people historically determined to impose communism by the violence of their class; Marx defines the proletariat by its historical function; he defines the proletariat as the gravedigger of the old world, as the class which has nothing to lose and everything to gain or win. In opposition to the delirium of "workerists" Marx defines the revolutionary class as the one which, in reality is the dissolution of established order, the one which by its increasing force in confrontation against the bourgeois state, always re-affirms more clearly its subversive and revolutionary character.

"...a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general, a sphere of society which can no longer lay claim to a historical title but merely to a human one, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the premise of the state, and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from - and thereby emancipating - all the other spheres of society, which is, in a word, a total loss of humanity and can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat." (Marx - Critique of Hegel's philosophy of right)

The adhesion of Marx to communism is consequently in no way an adhesion to a new school of thought, philosophy, religion or sect. When he is adopting the communist point of view, and this until his death, it's by understanding in which way communism is an already existing movement carried by the revolutionary proletariat (episode of the Silesian workers' revolt), a movement that he'll always strife to direct, to organise, to make stronger as much organizationally as programmatically.

In that sense the masterwork of Marx is before anything a work of the party, work of the impersonal collectivity that will impose communism. Once he's clearly situated in the proletarian camp, Marx will work to always make his basic thesis more precise, solid and operational and that, by pitilessly criticizing all the elements which were impeding the understanding of the world from the communist point of view, and firstly, the many ideologies that the bourgeoisie forged for itself to justify its class domination, ideologies that call themselves philosophy, religion, history, economy,... So Marx didn't become a communist because he would have studied "scientifically and objectively" the different aspects of human knowledge, but quite to the contrary, it's because he was already a communist that he succeeded in totally demolishing all different bourgeois sciences, and that he managed, by demonstrating their narrow-minded and transitory character, to anticipate the coming of a world without any classes, any state, any money,...

"Each method is necessarily linked to the being of its corresponding class." (Lukacs)

Marx: militant of the Communist Party

In all Marx's activities theory and practice were always nothing else but two abstractions on different levels of an organic entity. Marx himself is the expression of this totality that is clearly defined by the word "PRAXIS" and in which action and theory can never be dissociated without misrepresenting the totality that these two words are unable to express. It's in this sense that Marx is first of all a communist militant who applied to all aspects of his activity, the same method to reach the same aim: the liberation of the human race. As Marx stated in his thesis on Feuerbach, written in Brussels in 1845:

"The coincidence of the change of circumstances and of human activity or of self-transformation can only be rationally understood as a revolutionary practice."

In the same way, the life and work of Marx can only be understood as a revolutionary practice. And this understanding can only be the work of groups, individuals,... placing themselves on the same path as Marx: the path of communism, the path of the communist party.

It is during this same period, after having constituted together with some comrades a "committee of communist correspondence" (1846), that Marx and Engels are joining the "Communist League". This adhesion is also a fight against all the archaic forms of communism (Weitling) and against the influences of the bourgeois-socialists. Marx very soon will assume a role of direction of the League and he'll be in charge of completely reorganising it. He'll draw up its statutes, as well as a new platform. The first article of these new statutes affirms clearly the aim of communists: "the aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the domination of the proletariat, the abolition of old bourgeois society based on class antagonisms and the instauration of a new society without classes and without private property."

The second article specifies the militant requirements:

"Joining conditions are as follows:
- a kind of life and activity according to that aim;
- revolutionary vigour and ardour for propaganda;
- to make profession of communism."

Within the League and later on within the International Workingmen's Association, Marx work will be to transform this "contingent and limited organization" into a real world-wide organization; this implied a break with the utopian conceptions that still existed to a large extend within the workers' movement. In order to carry out these tasks and after a first project by Engels (see the profession of faith in communism drawn up by Engels and that still bore to a large extend the mark of old utopian formulas) Marx accepts to draw up a new platform for the League, giving it immediately historical contents. The importance of this text is such that it will not be called the "Manifesto of the League" but will be given the much more fundamental title of "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" (drawn up in 1847 and published in 1848).

Indeed, as we already stated in another article (7), the Manifesto and other texts by Marx-Engels are directly texts of the party, essential expressions of the communist programme.

This programme of the revolutionary class cannot be reduced to one text or another, still less to the platform of some formal organization. On the contrary, the communist programme affirms itself as a "PRAXIS", as a movement of confrontation with the bourgeois state, and some texts of it express more synthetically in a more global way the communist aim and movement. The programme is an invariant entirety that cannot be identified with one of its written or theoretical expressions. It is a totality that cannot be dissociated and that can only be understood as such. In this sense, the Manifesto of the Communist Party is a brilliant example, because it affirms itself beyond all temporal and geographical contingencies; it is directly in its entirety, one of the clearest synthesis of the invariant programme of the workers' movement. Nobody, except idiots, would dare to limit the expressions of the revolutionary programme to the Manifesto of 1847 only. Once more here we can oppose the "praxis" of Marx to all his would-be followers for whom the communist movement and its organization into party could not possibly exist without a text called "programme" or "platform". Of the three fundamental texts: "The Manifesto", "Capital" and "Grundrisse", there is none which could be a better or more complete expression of the communist programme. Each of these texts, like all other communist texts passed and still to come, express a certain level of abstraction, a certain level of understanding of the programmatic entirety and are more or less developed expressions of the invariant programme. These texts that are impersonal achievements of the party, have indeed different functions: "The Manifesto" is more a summary of the fundamental positions of communists in front of the bourgeoisie, while "Capital" is since the implacable demonstration of the catastrophic end of the capitalist mode of production and therefore of the inevitable coining of communism, but both of them are essential expressions of a same and single programme: communism.

The whole history of the communist movement shows us that some texts, some individuals, or some actions,... that are often considered by "Marxists" and other academics of less importance, or even as being insignificant, in fact express superior levels of synthesis and conception; and often the production of texts supposedly expressing the summary, a definite codification of communism, represented in fact a set-back of the workers' movement and the crystallization of counterrevolutionary positions. It was Kautsky (and his followers Plekhanov,...) who was considered as an "orthodox Marxist", as the only depository of "Marxist truth" while all the authentic revolutionary expressions were distorted and rejected as "radicalism", "anarchism",... (e.g. Domela Nieuwenhuis who denounces in his book "Socialism in danger" the Second International). More clear still is the complete black-out on the experiences and the history of left communists, as well German, Italian as Belgian, Mexican or Hindu or still the lies and filth poured on communist militants, on such revolutionaries as Blanqui, Gorter, Miasnikov, Vercesi or Korsch. Who would dare to pretend that the Third Communist International didn't exist before 1928!? But it was only on the VIth world congress on September 1sr, 1928 that the C.I. finally adopted its programme, written by Boukharine; by that rime the C.I. had become nothing else but the formalization of the whole process of degeneration, the crystallization of the counter-revolutionary positions that had affirmed themselves always more clearly after each congress. Our care here is not to disparage the efforts to produce, at certain moments, documents that would state "the fundamental positions of communists" or that would outline the general political orientations, quite to the contrary, we want to denounce the very widespread myth according to which a communist organization wouldn't exist, wouldn't have a coherence and wouldn't be in the historical line of the party if it hadn't a sacred text called "platform" or "programme", pretending at the same time to compare, voluntary or not, these organizational positions to the historical programme of the proletariat. We, communists, don't refer exclusively to this or that sacred or pretended so, text, be it the Manifesto, the Rome thesis or another platform of any formal group, in front of which the revolutionary proletariat would have to fall on its knees. We refer to an organic totality where each expression of the communist movement finds its place insofar that it manages to represent the best it can the historical arch from the natural community to full communism and this, independently of all immediatist, contingent or limited vision. It's because they really are texts of the party, that the works of Marx, with the Manifesto, are always more a guide for our action. But already Engels warned the readers against the insufficiencies of the Manifesto and it is well known that Marx, after the experience of the Paris' Commune indicated the necessity to change the formula "to conquer the democratic state" by the need of destroying it from top to bottom.

"One thing especially was proved by the Commune, that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purpose. Also if the remarks on the relation of the communists to the various opposition parties although in principle are still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated. But the Manifesto still is a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter." (Engels - Preface to the English edition of the Manifesto - 1888)

So for the first time, with the Manifesto, the fundamental positions of communists were explained in a very explicit and synthetic way. Marx and Engels, during their whole life-times not only developed, improved and clarified the main positions enunciated in this text, but at every moment, they'll try to direct the forces that are historically determined to realise the communist revolution. As the Manifesto stated:

"It is high time that the communists explain to the whole world their conceptions, their aims, their tendencies and that they oppose against the legends of the communist spectre a Manifesto of the party itself."

Each time that a revolutionary period arrived, Marx tried to organise, to direct the movement, as well during the movements of 1848 (see "the class-struggles in France") when several times Marx risked his own skin, as later on during the foundation (1864) of the International Workingmen's Association, better known as the First International that took up as its main countersign the famous phrase of the Manifesto: "Workingmen of all countries, unite!" and which was rightly considered as the instigator, as the real political direction of the Paris Commune - 1871 (while the formal direction - the Central Committee of the Commune oscillated between the workers' interests and capitulation in front of the enemy). On the other hand, Marx took advantage of each period of withdrawal, of each period when counter-revolution completely dominated (e.g. from 1850 to 1864) to go deeply into the programmatical basis of the movement even if this meant being at counter-current of the still existing formal organizations. It is this position, at counter-current, that Engels vehemently expresses in a letter to Marx:

"How could we possibly be "a party" while we run away from all official nominations? Do we care about a party while we spit on popularity, while we doubt of ourselves as soon as we begin to become popular? Do we care about "a party" i.e. a flock of donkeys who believe in us because they think we belong to their species? It won't be a loss, indeed, when they will cease to consider us as the 'true expression' of that bunch of narrow-minds to which we have been associated for the last couple of years." (Engels)

What a sane vigour of class interest this excerpt expresses, it's a slash in the face of all those pseudo-partyists, guardians above all of the fetishism of formal organizations! What a clear affirmation of the necessary work of the party, obscure and unpopular work, mostly heaped with calumnies and abuse by all these gentlemen preoccupied above all with their own future! The fundamental understanding of the tasks communists have to assume permanently is clearly included in Marx' practice: at one and the same time the tasks of affirmation and deepening of the revolutionary programme and also, when the material conditions allow for it, the tasks of organization, of direction of the movements taking place in front of our eyes. That's why, when the movement was beaten and counter-revolution reigned, Marx, each time, without ever abandoning the work of the party, was the prime mover of the dissolution of the formal organization (the league, the I.W.A.) before these would pass to the counter-revolution. But each time a wave of revolution flared up, Marx tried to give a direction to this movement, to organise it in the perspective of its international unification, in the perspective of communism. That's why, independently of his adhesion to this or that group, Marx has always worked in the historical line of the party, was always a militant of the communist party.

"Above all, Marx was a revolutionary." (Engels - March 17th, 1883 - oration on Marx's tomb.)

Marx and the invariance of Marxism

As we have already seen in this text, counter-revolution will always try to denature, to pillage the revolutionary Marx, to deprive him from his subversive contents so as to keep only the image of a utopian reformer, full of good intentions. But this falsification, this depreciation not only takes the form of an explicit rejection of the revolutionary conclusions of Marx, of his necrology of capital so as to retain only a simple biology (the social-democratic, reformist and social-christian tradition), but can also take the complementary form of a formal assertion of "orthodox Marxism" while advancing contingent restrictions so as to more easily deny the validity of the fundamental principles. Such is the work of the "orthodoxy" of Kautsky, of the "formal invariance" (Stalinist, Trotskyist and Bordiguist tradition) against which the freedom of criticism can't propose any solution but the renunciation of the principles for the benefit of some innovations and other "transcendencies" that place themselves out of the historic line of the communist programme, and against which we can only hold up the real invariance, the real orthodoxy: the invariance of the class and of its own method:

"The path of consciousness in the historical process does not become smoother quite to the contrary, it becomes more and more arduous and requires an always bigger responsibility. The function of orthodox Marxism - beyond revisionism and utopism - is not the liquidation, once and for all, of all false tendencies; it is the incessant struggle always renewed against the perverted influences of the forms of bourgeois thought on the thought of the proletariat. This orthodoxy is not the guardian of traditions but the messenger always on alert of the relation between the present instant and its tasks in keeping with the totality of the historic process." (Lukacs - "What is orthodox Marxism" - 1919. Our ttranslation)

This fundamental question of real invariance can he exemplified through all of the communist positions. The Manifesto of the communist party declares: "the communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got." Such is the affirmation of the real invariance of the workers' movement: never, the revolutionary proletariat has a home-country, a nationality. Its internationalist character is directly contained in its very essence itself. The proletariat constitutes itself as a class, that is to say, as an historical and world-wide totality - organic centralism, centralization in time and space.

And when workers fight for their country, for a nationality, it means essentially that the proletariat does not exist as a class anymore (e.g. situations of imperialist war during their first stage), it means that if atomized proletarians do have a country, it can only be as citizens, as members of bourgeois society, and not as grave-diggers of the old world. The point of view of communism is invariant: either the proletariat, by its tendential constitution as a class, and therefore as a party, realizes its universal and internationalist essence - the workingmen have no country -; or the proletariat is beaten by counterr-revolution and cannot exist as a class anymore; what will be left are atomized individuals totally submitted to the bourgeois ideology of the nation, the country (8). To this, all "orthodox", all "invariants",... will, while formally maintaining the aphorism: "the workingmen have no country", will deny this immediately after by introducing a multitude of restrictions: "the period", "the particular case", "the specific conditions", that invalidate the communist affirmation. Nevertheless they'll all pretend to have respected word for word a text that this way has become sacred and sanctified.

This process of "aspiration" of the subversive contents so as to retain only the revolutionary phrase, finds a material base in the texts and confusions of Marx himself. That's why, after stating that the proletariat does not have a home-country, all his would-be disciples will largely dissert about the following sentence: "Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word." Obviously this sentence is in contradiction with the programmatic affirmation preceding it, likewise it reflects the confused comprehension of the "conquest of political power" (acquire political supremacy) that later on was to be replaced by Marx himself with the vision of the necessary destruction of the bourgeois state. Therefore two wrong attitudes will be developed on the base of this contradiction of Marx: on the one hand the modernist, innovative attitude of rejection of all programmatical expressions on pretext that some formulations are confused (or totally wrong) and are still marked by the visions of the enemy; on the other hand, the approval of all the sentences signifying the adding up of contradictory positions, which comes down to adopting the counter-revolutionary position. After having thrown out nationalism through the door, they let it in again through the window! This is how even the Manifesto has been used and probably still will be used to justify capitalist war and the worst nationalist and patriotic delirium.

However, the whole history of our class (1789, 1848, 1871, 1905, 1917, 1927, 1936,... 1983,...) proves each time more clearly, since its beginning until today, the validity of the only internationalist, anti-nationalistic and anti-patriotic principled position.

"It follows from this disastrous experience that when the proletariat starts defending "its country", "the oppressed nation", it obtains only one goal, i.e. the reinforcement of its own bourgeoisie (...) The proletariat develops its movement, makes its revolution as a class. Not as a nation." ("L'ouvrier communiste" No 2/3 October 1929.)

Once again, this historical position of communists had already been clearly affirmed by Marx (even though once again our "orthodox", "invariants",... will use still other sentences or texts by Marx that occasionally affirm the contrary):

"The nationality of the worker is not French, nor English neither German, it is work, free slavery, the bargaining of oneself. His government is not French, nor English neither German, it is capital. His native atmosphere is not French, nor English neither German. It is the atmosphere of the factory. The soil that belongs to him is not French soil, nor English and neither German, it is some feet under the earth." (Marx - Critique of national economy - 1845. Our translation)

Marx' work (and that's why we're interested in it) is a fantastic synthesis of the positions that, historically, differentiate the proletariat from the bourgeoisie. This synthesis, on most questions, remains unequalled, Marx having once and for all outlined the main positions of the communist programme. We've seen how the international and internationalist character of the proletariat clearly affirmed itself which constitutes the very base for the comprehension of the revolution to be a world-wide process. In the same way we can take each one of the fundamental questions of the revolutionary programme, each question that still today constitutes the frontier between the interests of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie, and we can see how Marx has magnificently defined the "line and march, the conditions and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement" (the Manifesto).

On the central question of the state. Marx, as his friend Engels, has defined in the most clear way, the imperious necessity of the destruction from top to bottom of the bourgeois state, and the rejection of the deadly illusion of conquering or occupying it (cf. "The State and Revolution" by Lenin). Once this destruction of the bourgeois state accomplished, there will be period of transition when the proletariat organised as the ruling class imposes its class-dictatorship for the abolition of wage labour.

"Between capitalist and communist society stands a period of revolutionary transformation of the first one into the second. To this corresponds a period of political transition when the state can be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat". (Marx - "Critique of the Gotha-programme" - 1875. Our translation)

It is on the contrary the Lassallean tradition (also partially used by Kautsky and social-democracy) that insists, while being wrongly assimilated to Marx's position, insists on the eternal necessity of the state, on its conquest, on the divine reign of democracy and therefore of the bourgeoisie:

"Besides, the whole programme is through and through infected by the servile belief of the lassallean sect in the state, or, which isn't any better, by the belief in the democratic miracle; or indeed, it is a compromise between these two kinds of faith or miracle, equally remote from socialism". (Marx - "Critique of the Gotha-programme" - 1875. Our translation)

So the polemic separating "Marxists" from "anarchists" within the I.W.A. is not to know whether or not we must destroy the state (at this period both currents agreed about the destructive tasks of the revolution) but it is to know if, once the bourgeois state having been destroyed, if a society without classes and without state could immediately and automatically emerge. The essential difference between the Bakuninist current (9) and Marx's positions is not the fight to death against the state, nor even the question of organization (reformists have always reproached Lenin with taking up Bakunin's position on the party: dictatorship of the party of anarchy!) but the essential comprehension of the period of transition, of this phase when the proletariat, organised as a ruling class which means as a state, imposes by the force of arms the destruction of value, the destruction of classes which means also its own negation as "state". This is why Marx always said about the workers' state that it was a semi-state, a state in process of extinction.

"It would be advisable to abandon all this gossip about the state, particularly after the Commune which wasn't really a state in the true sense of the word. Anarchists already talked enough about their popular state, though Marx' pamphlet against Proudhon and then also the Manifesto clearly state that with the instauration of a socialist social regime, the state dissolves itself and disappears. The state being only a temporary institution that we are forced to use in our struggle, in the revolution to repress by force its enemies, it is therefore perfectly absurd to talk about a free and popular state: as long as the proletariat still needs the state, it is not for the sake of freedom but to repress its enemies. And when it becomes possible to talk about freedom, the state ceases to exist as such. So we propose to replace everywhere the word "state" by the excellent old German word "Gemeinwesen" corresponding to the French word "commune"." (Engels - Letter to Bebel - 1875. Our translation))

So Marx's position is clearly against the state.

"The abolition of the state makes sense to communists only as the necessary result of the suppression of classes the disappearance of which automatically implies the disappearance of the need for an organized power by one class for the oppression of another class." (Marx - La Nouvelle Gazette Rhenane - 1850. Our translation)

The very affirmation of the dictatorship of the proletariat as "transition towards the abolition of all classes" (cf. letter to Weydemeyer - 1852) implies the understanding of the necessity of revolutionary terrorism:

"The massacres without any results since the days of June and October, the dull feast of expiation since February and March, the cannibalism of counter-revolution itself will convince the people that in order to shorten, to simplify and to concentrate the murderous death agony of the old society, there is only one way: revolutionary terrorism". (Marx - La Nouvelle Gazette Rhenane - 1850. Our translation)

And it was in this same perspective that Marx strongly criticized the Commune for not having taken the initiative in the struggle, for not having carried out terrorist acts aimed at saving workers' lives even if this entailed the killing of some generals and priests.

"Still the shooting of prisoners was suspended for a time. Hardly however, had Thiers and his decembrist generals become aware that the communal decree of reprisals was only an empty threat, that even their spies caught in Paris under the disguise of National Guards, that even the sergents de ville, taken with incendiary strolls upon them, were spared, then the wholesale shooting of prisoners was resumed and carried on uninterruptedly to the end." (Marx - The civil war in France - 1871)

And if Marx' positions on this question is relatively well known, their connection with the destruction of all alienation/extraenisation (4) is often hidden. Indeed, the bourgeoisie, except for its pacifist sheep, in its fright recognizes itself that Marx' positions involve a violent revolution (didn't it call Marx the "red terror doctor"!), involve a terrorist and then anti-democratic proletarian dictatorship, understood as being the force destroying the extraenisation of men, the force destroying wage-slavery and therefore labour. Even the bourgeois "Marxist" currents - Stalinists, Trotskyists - maintain this violent and dictatorial aspect. What fundamentally differentiates them from Marx' positions is not their anti-violence or their anti-terrorism, but the fact that this violence, this terror is directed against the revolutionary proletariat and not against the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. In front of these pseudo-Marxist rabbles, we do not discuss about the opportunity of the use of violence; against them, because they defend wage-slavery, we turn our arms. The problem is not to know whether one should use terror, but to know against who to direct our class violence so as to impose our class dictatorship. What decides of the class nature of violence is the ultimate goal terror is serving, are the historical class interests terror is defending. Any other debate immediately falls back into metaphysics, into philosophy,... putting the question of "violence", "terror", "the state" in itself, exterior to class struggle, a method Engels already demolished a long time ago in his Anti-During.

The really important thing for us is to replace back into the centre of the whole Marxist comprehension the essential question of the workers' struggle for the abolition of wage-labour and consequently of all labour. It is to impose its revolutionary claim "the abolition of wage-labour" (Marx) that the proletariat fights and will be victorious. It is Marx more than anyone else who has put forward this essential question of the abolition of wage- labour, who's defended the first our central watchword: "Death to work, long live communism!".

"We must not only attack private property as a "state of things" but attack it as activity, as labour if we really want to strike it a deadly blow. One of the most important mistakes is to talk about social, human, free labour, to talk about labour without private property. Labour - by essence - is not free, non-human, anti-social activity conditioned by private property and creating it in its turn. The abolition of private property will only become reality if it is conceived as the abolition of labour." (Marx - Critique of the National Economy - 1845. Our translation)

The proletarian struggle against capital can only be conceived as a struggle against wage-labour (the form labour is taking under capitalism, which means alienated, non-human activity) implying the abolition of all labour.

"In his labour the worker does not affirm himself, he denies himself; he does not feel at ease, he feels unhappy; he does not spread out a free physical and intellectual activity, but he mortifies his body and ruins his spirit. The problem is not to set labour free, but to suppress it!" (Marx - The German Ideology - 1845. Our translation)

Still many other questions could be subject of a reaffirmation of the fundamental positions of Marx, settling radically with what is being said of his positions (what is being said by the class enemy), with what is generally being designated by the term "Marxism". We insisted many times already on the fact that the whole vocabulary expressing the communist project, the revolutionary programme, has been completely plundered, opposing it now to its original meaning, to the meaning it had clearly at the origins of the workers' movement. If in Marx' time the quality of communist referred immediately to an irreducible opposition to the bourgeois state, today, for most proletarians the same word refers to the sad reality of wage-slavery in Eastern countries, in China or in Cuba or still the sinister grimaces of Marchais the clown.

In front of these deformations there can be no question of capitulating, of leaving these expressions full of history to the enemy by reinventing all these concepts, by reinventing a new "proletarian" language (that the bourgeoisie would soon recuperate also). To the contrary, it's important to give back to these words their original meaning, to recall to the collective memory of our class the fundamental experiences that gave real life to these expressions; it is essential to make the bourgeoisie tremble again just by the mere evocation of the "spectre of communism". The same goes for the term "Marxist" generalized by Engels after Marx' death, favouring this way the stupid cult of the "brilliant personality" to the detriment of the appropriation of the programme. Insofar as the term "Marxist" has the same meaning as the word "communist", we totally claim ourselves of this Marxism, of revolutionary communism, knowing that we must always insist more and more on the anonymous and impersonal character of our programme.

"The revolution will reveal itself terrible but anonymous." (Fantomes a la caryle - Il Programma Communista - 1953.)

This way Marx' sentence finds its fully Marxist comprehension: "The only thing I know is that me, I'm not Marxist!" (Marx) It is only from within the communist movement that we can understand why Marx was not Marxist. Here no more than anywhere else, the question is not to "go beyond" or to reject Marxists; what matters is to reaffirm the invariance of the subversion, the invariance of communism and therefore of Marxism as violent negation of the established order.

"In all these writings, I never qualify myself as a social-democrat but as a communist. To Marx as to myself it is absolutely impossible to use such an elastic expression to designate our own conception". (Engels - Preface to the pamphlet of Volksstaat off 1871-75. Our translation)

"You, you flatter in the most vulgar way the national feelings and the corporative prejudices of the German craftsmen, which, of course, is much more popular. In the same way the democrats made a sacred formula of the word "people", you, you are making a sacred formula of the word "proletariat". Just like the democrats you are substituting revolutionary phraseology to the revolutionary development". (Marx - Minutes of the Central Council of London - 1850. Our translation)

Notes

1. In this sense all the varieties of leftism who pretend to realise "the democratic bourgeois tasks", "the socialization of the economy", "the nationalizations",... are behind on the movement of capital itself. Capital, through its own movement has realised the most radical reformist programmes, from the programmes of Trotskyists to the most daring reveries of self-management (cf Castoriadis, Gramsci, to Ratgeb/Vaneigem). So leftism is not only reactionary in relation to communism, but more so, it is retrograde in relation to the movement of value, to the movement of capital!

2. On this question we refer our readers to the text "Contribution to the so-called question of the party" published in Communism No 2.

3. Some texts as fundamental as "The Jewish question", "The German Ideology", "The thesis on Feuerbach", "The Grundrisse", "The sixth chapter",... had to wait decades before being published and even then they were published only partially or were completely distorted. Revolutionaries had to wait for the important work of integral republication of the masterworks of Marx by Riazanov to see the appearance of those essential texts (work that gave Riazanov the "privilege" of disappearing in the thirties, eliminated by Staline). For example the "Grundrisse", that had to wait until 1939 to be published is German, revealed in an irrefutable way that the masterwork of Marx constitutes an indissociable totality, while all Marxologues of yesterday and today work desperately hard to dislocate it, to cut it up, to oppose one part of it against another.

4. On this question we refer our readers to the text which replaces the Marxist problematic of alienation back to the centre of the revolutionary programme: "From the alienation of man to the human community" that appeared is our French-language review "Le Communiste" (No 14) and that we hope to publish soon in Communism.

5. On this essential question of method, we refer our readers to our text (so far only available in French) "Critical notes on dialectical materialism" published in "Le Communiste" No 13.

6. The numerous works published or republished and that pretend representing the life and work of Karl Marx are mostly popularizations, distortions, falsifications and even plagiarisms for the sake of one or another bourgeois current. However, we would like to mention the following books that distinguish themselves from the mainstream of these bourgeois ideological productions:
- "Karl Marx" by Karl Korsh
- "Marx and Engels" by D. Riazanov
- "Karl Marx" an essay of intellectual biography by Maximilien Rubel
- "Karl Marx - the history of his life" by Franz Mehring. But nothing can compare with the unwearying study of the complete works of Marx and Engels of such intrinsic value that no "summary", no "synthesis" can possibly restore the totality of the Marxist conception of this world. We therefore stress the very importance of the regular militant study of the works of Marx, each day more operational, more alive in our struggle against capital.

7. "In the same way, Marx and Engels magnificently synthetised the communist programme in the famous Manifesto of l848, which, even if it had been ordered by a formal "party" - the Communist League - has a validity, a contents that bypasses the narrow framework of this little group of communist militants to such extend that today nobody would ever think of restricting the universal significance of he Manifesto to the simple programme of the League. The Manifesto is a direct achievement of the party in its large historical acceptation." Cited from "Contribution to the so-called question of the party" - Communism No 2.

8. Of course, both terms of this contradiction class non-class should not be conceived as pure abstractions excluding one another automatically, but as a tendential movement of confrontation until victory - solution of the contradiction through the affirmation of the revolutionary pole - i.e. affirmation of the revolutionary cllass as the dominant class and negation of the proletariat - negation of the negation.

9. Bakunin and his friends in the I.W.A. (James Guillaume,...) do not have anything to do with the "anarchists" we know today in Europe. From the French Anarchist Federation (i.e. French freemasonry) to the governmental CNT in Spain: from the "anarchist" Babar in Belgium supporting the papal trade-union Solidarnosc to the green pacifists everywhere, all this libertarian shit is as remote from Bakunin as Stalinist Marxist-leninists are from Marx. If Bakunin developed wrong positions especially as far as the dictatorship of the proletariat is concerned, this was undeniably from the proletarian and revolutionary point of view, while today his many 'grandsons' flounder openly in counter-revolution.

"And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or struggles between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did was to prove that 1) the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat 3) that the dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society..." (Marx)

After the march for equality end against racism of 1983, after the motorcycles of "Convergence" that left from five French cities to meet at the carnival-parade gathering more than 30.000 people in Paris on Dec.1st, 1984, now the spotlights zoom on "S.O.S. Racism" and on a new musical happening at the Concorde. Every year it's the same bullshit with a different topping.

The people who organized last year's march could rely from the very beginning on the help and the support of the French State, of the democrats, of humanist and religious associations, of the Trotskyist Communist Revolutionary League as well as still other nationalists. They pretend that they don't act with a precise political goal, but simply "want to show what happens in the social ghettos, how people from all horizons live there and express their hopes". The slogans of the march were: "For a multicultural France", "Together for equality", "Neither rejections nor assimilation, for a new citizenship".

As for "S.O.S. Racism" with the badge "Touche pas a mon pote", they hold on to a more simple discourse, they claim to be against all racism and their actions are limited to press-conferences, investigations and counter- investigations, legal proceedings and other mobilisations of sensibilization.

All these initiatives are part of the sinister attacks capital leads against our class.

Since the Socialist Party was democratically elected into government in 1981, all workers have "benefited" from governmental action: increase of unemployment (of which no single bourgeois no longer contests the need), expulsion of all "irregular" immigrants, reinforcement of the democratic forces of law and order (new crusade of Pierre Joxe - the French home secretary -, to modernize the repressive system), reestructurations (=intensifying exploitation) without forgetting the action of Badinter - the minister of justice - who grants particular care (as witnessed by the mutinies in prisons) to the black sheeps of socialist France.

Today, with "S.O.S. Racism" as yesterday with "Convergence", the State receives a new support to actively repress the proletarian movement, particularly concerning the explosive sector of young immigrants.

In France it was mainly during the summer of 1981 that those young proletarians of the suburbs of Lyon and Marseille, rebelled against the boredom and the misery of their lives. It was not an isolated rebellion: at the same time, the Brixton riots, where whites and blacks, men and women, young and old were united to fight the cops and to burn down and ransack, followed within a few months by new rebellions in twelve other English cities, showed that this struggle is the struggle of all exploited.

S.O.S. Capitalism

To prevent the violent assertion of the community of interest that unites all the workers of the world against the bourgeoisie, capital revives racism, systematically imposes it on all relations between citizens, as one of the means to oppose workers one against the other, to atomize them.

The bourgeoisie has not invented racism, it is the product of the division of society in classes. Capital, in its wild race for profit, always gives birth to categorial differences between workers, the most important being the one between national workers and immigrants. By exploiting those differences the bourgeoisie develops and generalizes the racist ideology and turns it into a material force of its preservation: racism permits to avoid the polarisation of society into two antagonistic classes.

But the indispensable complement to racism is anti-racism. Anti-racist wants to maintain a society where harmony reigns between all citizens who, despite their differences of culture and colour, should be able to benefit from the same rights. But what rights do workers have?

Yesterday, when the immigrant was valorizing capital, was sweating value, he represented no problem to society; on the contrary, society used to welcome immigrants with open arms (which is a formula, because when it wasn't hunger that forced them to travel thousands of miles to find work, it was directly the State who, under the threat of guns forced them to exile!).

But today, it's the crisis, there are too many proletarians so it has become necessary to eliminate part of them: the bourgeoisie "discovers" it has an "immigration problem". And our anti-racists shout: "Beware, no racism! Equal rights for all!".

As long as proletarians behave as honest and responsible citizens, if they accept to participate to the national effort to save the economy, if they accept to participate to the elections, to the unions if they accept everything, including loss of jobs, evictions and even the sacrifice of their lives in always more deadly extermination wars, then they can benefit from all imaginable rights (which in certain countries are duties!): vote, self-expression, associations,...

But if workers, and no matter what colour they are, don't respect capitalist logic (or if their mere presence hinders this logic), if they say no to sacrifices, shit to national economy, if they struggle against wage decreases, if they organize themselves against expulsions and bullying, then immediately, in the name of these same rights and of democracy, in the name of civilisation, a flood of repression pounces upon them. These proletarians, who break social peace and organize themselves against society to obtain by force the satisfaction of their needs, are nothing but provocateurs, rioters, enemies of democracy!

By claiming "equal rights for all", anti-racists do nothing else but submitting proletarians a little more to the "laws of French people". These laws regulate as everywhere else, the relationship between buyers and sellers of goods, they do nothing else but submitting the workers to the necessity to get rid of the surplus of this commodity, labour power, when it exceeds the needs of valorization of capital. To claim "equal rights for all" means submitting the workers to the legal repression by the State, to all anti-workers measures,... that are very democratically decided by the elected parliament of the nation! Need we recall the "legalisation of all immigrant workers without working permits" that allowed the French State, supported by all leftists, to expulse ten of thousands of immigrant workers!!! Those are the kind of perspectives anti-racists propose.

Class solidarity

Our struggle has nothing to do with the right of being legally exploited and repressed. The rights are nothing else but the legitimation of bourgeois democratic terror. Let's not be fooled by their speeches about "solidarity" between French and immigrants, by their flatteries about good immigrants who "have contributed to the wealth of the country". That solidarity is social peace, it means the reinforcement of individual submission to capital for all proletarians.

To Impede wage decreases, lay-offs, police repression, expulsions, evictions, fascist aggressions, we don't need neither pity nor charity, but our own class force organized beyond all divisions.

Organizations such as "S.O.S. Racism" only prepare the denunciation and isolation of combative workers who, to defend themselves against expulsions, beatings,... use direct action against all the forces of law and order: police, fascists, unions,... without justifying themselves as good citizens would. Only the struggle on the ground of class war against bourgeois legality represents the common interest of all workers.

The repression of part of the workers is a defeat for the whole working class: against the anti-racist priests, we must organize against all sacrifices, towards active solidarity with all the struggling proletarians!!

Down with equality!!!

Capital is killing us!!!

Let's live for our struggles!!!

The proletariat has neither nationality nor rights!!!

Introduction

In this issue of our english-language review "Communism" we're starting a new heading "Workers' Memory" - just like we've been republishing for several years already in our French and Spanish reviews other important and often old texts from the workers' movement that today are difficult to find. We consider this to be an essential part of our struggle to revitalise the communist movement. Our aim is not to simply republish something that once existed - we are not curators of some "proletarian" museum - nor to try to proove that we are the rightfull heirs of a communist current of the past; on the contrary, often our criticism of our predecessors' activities will be very severe in view of the many insufficiencies, the many concessions to social-democracy that often persisted.

The only school we learn at, is history; i.e. not the different representations of history that society may have produced, but the history made and lived by our class and by the exploited classes from the past - the history of their heroic, vital but also limited struggles that the proletariat will be finally capable of bringing to their ultimate term: communism.

Communism for us isn't a condition that has to be created, nor an ideal to which reality should conform. We call communism the real movement of abolition of the present situation. The conditions of this movement result from the premises that already exist in today's society.

This means that today's proletarian struggles are directly linked, in their very substance, in their determinations, to the struggles our class waged throughout the past. More so, one of the premises of today's struggle is the struggle of the past: it is only because of today's struggles that the proletariat can "exhume" the many experiences - of incommensurate value - of the elder generations of proletarian militants; and it is only owing to these experiences that today we can go beyond the limits that locked up and defeated the movement yesterday. Our class struggles (and we refuse to mystify that class knowing how it were real men and women who fought to give strength, to give body to our class!) made possible for all the fundamental determinations of the communist movement to become clear: it is through the sweat and blood of millions of anonymous militant workers that our class experienced how we got defeated each time we abandoned our autonomy to engage in compromises, in policies, in fronts with our class enemy; how we got defeated each time we submitted ourselves to the forces of democracy and nationalism!

In order to "exhume" the revolutionary struggles of the past, it is important not to confound or identify the very essence of these struggles, their intrinsic subversive character (antagonistic to capital) with the different formalisations that were produced by this movement in an attempt to centralise it, to built it up into a force capable of acting organically as a whole so as to kill the capitalist monster. The history of the revolutionary uprisings of our class throughout the years 1917-1923 is not just the history of the Third International!

We musn't neglect the many efforts made by the bourgeoisie to ignore, to falsify the history of society by concealing all signs of communist struggles. It is only normal that the bourgeoisie falsifies and hides the historical process where the proletariat acts as an autonomous force of the destruction of capital: this way the bourgeoisie expresses the terror it feels when it's getting confronted once more with the terrible forces created by its own domination and by its system of misery. The lies and filth poured on our struggles are not just the result of the bourgeoisie's machiavellian conspiracy against the communist movement, but first of all they are the result of the class interests of the bourgeoisie that make it incapable to see or understand a reality that is going beyond its proper system of commodity-production, that is antagonistic to its proper logic of profit and value.

Lies and filth on the miners' strike; lies and filth on the proletarian struggles in South-Africa; lies and filth on struggles in Perou, in Argentina,... In the same way all informations on struggles from the past are systematically deformed, hidden, falsified! Deformed the positions of the KAPD, hidden the revolutionary struggles of our class in Patagonia, falsified fundamental texts by Marx, Engels and other revolutionaries... not to mention the documents that remain locked up in Moscow until... the year 2000, by what time the Kremlin promises to publish the complete works by Marx and Engels!

This way the communist movement gets travestied as a movement for democracy, for peace, for progress! Never will the bourgeois show how communism destroys democracy, destroys progress, destroys frontiers while building up its own community according to its proper needs - today's only need being to fight for the destruction of what is destroying us! -

Republishing texts, criticizing struggles from the past like we start doing here in this new heading, is part of this fight.

oOo

Little is known, in Britain itself but even more so on the continent, about the British left. As a proof for this stands the fact that the british left is almost always identified with the "Workers' Dreadnought" (1) and that the latter is often identified with Sylvia Pankhurst, who, undubitably, took a prominent part in its activities. Even so, we hardly know anything about the real activities and positions of neither the "Workers' Dreadnought" nor Sylvia Pankhurst.

In this article, as a first contribution, we'll try to outline the main landmarks in the development of the Pankhurst group, followed by the reprint of "Communist Party: Provisional Resolutions towards a Programme" published in the 3rd of July, 1920 issue of the ''Workers' Dreadnought".

Sylvia Pankhurst if often remembered for her part in the campaign for Universal Suffrage. Her group, uptill 1917, was called "The Workers' Suffrage Federation" which published a paper: the "Women's Dreadnought". This group stemmed from radical feminism. Under the influence of the deepening sufferings caused by the war and of the struggles that responded to this, Pankhurst soon became interested in the "social" question and the group started participating in different strike movements.

It was only at its annual conference in May 1917 that the Workers' Suffrage Federation decided to change the name of its newspaper to the "Workers' Dreadnought". But even so, in spite of this new name and in spite of the adoption by the conference of a programme referring more explicitly to the cause of "socialism", the group remains clearly on social-democratic and pacifist positions: "Peace! Socialism! Votes for all! Stop the Hideous slaughter by ending war! Down with profiteering! Secure food and necessaries for all! Not votes for some but Adult Suffrage! Down with the House of Lords!"

At this stage the "Workers' Dreadnought" is merely a radical appendix of the left fraction of the bourgeoisie: in an editorial on the Labour Party, the W.D. calls upon this party to become "an out-and-out Socialist Party, with a vigorous policy of attack on the present system..."

It'll be only later on, mainly through the radicalization of events in Russia, in Germany and likewise in most other countries (2) and because of the W.D.'s capacities to remain attentive to the real developments of the proletarian struggle, that the W.D. manages to turn its back to its own past, to the policy of reform of the capitalist world and move from a critical point of view on the question of parliament and the Labour Party, to a subversive position on these issues. Leftists prefer to obscure this evolution and its importance for the revolutionary movement (in Britain, but also internationally); they praise Pankhurst only as a reformer, refusing to admit how she broke with her original feminist and reformist engagement, adopting a line of principled struggle against reform and reformists.

We can witness the first weak signs of this evolution from 1918 onward. In an editorial of January, 26th 1918 Sylvia Pankhurst, who had been one of the very first in Britain to hail the events in Russia, defends the Soviet system and supports the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks (3). She argues that the parliamentary system would be unable to cope with the task of establishing socialism, and that the Soviet system is far more democratic than any parliament. This very ambiguous position on the role of parliament and on the real meaning and function of democracy (and the non-understanding of communism as being the negation of democracy) continues to coexist with the "Votes for all" slogan on the front page of the paper untill July 1918 when "Socialism Internationalism, Votes for all!" was dropped and replaced by "For International Socialism" and when at the same time the annual conference voted to change the name of the organization to "Workers' Socialist Federation" (W.So.F.).

The next important step was made in an article of November, 2nd 1918 on the Labour Party and parliament. Sylvia Pankhurst states in a much more radical tone that "the expected general election interests us only so far as it can be made a sounding board for the policy of replacing capitalism by socialism and parliament by the workers' councils" and as a matter of fact in December of the same year, Pankhurst turns down the offer of a parliamentary candidature for the Hallam division of Sheffield and campaigned instead for the abolition of capitalist parliaments and the establishment of councils of workers' delegates. From now on the "Workers' Dreadnought" will start taking a clear and definite stand on parliament, on parliamentarism as well as on the Labour Party, positions on which it will find itself soon in contradiction with Lenin and the Third Communist International. This, in return, will force the "Workers' Dreadnought" to take more and more its responsibilities in view of the development of the communist movement, and the subsequent tasks that devolve upon its militants. As a matter of fact, untill then, one of the main characteristics of the Pankhurst Group was that the group based itself on its own direct experience, without really trying to analyse more thoroughly the very foundations of the communist movement (nor of capitalist society), and without really trying to link up with other expressions of the communist movement, from the past as well as from other origins or countries (4); untill then the W.So.F. had mainly been a simple group of activists, correspondents, readers,... around a newspaper, this paper being a mere reflection of the workers struggles of that time.

Towards a united party?

On the 14th of June 1919 the W.So.F. holds its annual conference. On recommendation of a delegate from the CI (founded a few months earlier) the group adopts the title of "Communist Party" and its Executive Committee is instructed to take steps towards linking up with other communist groups in Britain. The new communist party declares itself in favour of the power of workers councils and of the CI; against parliament and against the Second International. A few weeks later, the newly founded party decides NOT to call itself "Communist Party" for the moment so as not to prejudice the unity negotiations with other groups: the old name W.So.F. is restored: "As instructed by the Annual Conference at Whitsuntide, the National Executive Committee has entered into negotiations with other organisations for the formation of a united Communist Party. The Committee recommends that the use of the name Communist Party adopted at the W.So.F. Annual Conference be delayed during the process of these negotiations, in order that the new united party, which is hoped will eventuate, may adopt the title Communist Party as its own."

These negotiations will continue for one year. During this year the W.D. gives a more international dimension to its debates and Pankhurst's activities themselves got more and more determined by as well the need for clarification of her own programmatical positions and at the same time the need for an international centre of struggle: this all led up to her moving closer to the left fractions of the communist movement.

Pankhurst assisted the Conference of the Italian Socialist Party. In W.D. of November, 8th 1919 we find a report on the Congress of the Italian SP, which mentions the Abstentionist Fraction, followed by a discussion with Bordiga (the official spokesman of the Italian Abstentionist Fraction) regarding his position on the relationship between Party and Soviets. Against Bordiga, who underlines the importance of the party as a safeguard of the positions and historical interests of the proletariat, the W.D. takes a more "educationist" stand in favour of workers learning through the soviet experience. We haven't got this article in our possession, so we can't really criticize it: nevertheless we want to stress the reactionary illusion that lays behind all "educationist" theories. This theory, according to which communists should "educate" workers i.e. make them see and understand their class situation and consequently the need for communism, is just another variety of the democratic theory of councilism: the conception of the conquest of consciousness of a large majority of workers (through councils) as a determinant condition for revolution. Historically this theory has always served to never understand a revolutionary situation nor the particular tasks that derive from such situation, has always served to... wait, to delay,... to stop the movement pretending that the masses are not ready yet for revolution, that the masses won't understand,... in fact, the REFUSAL of violent struggle, the REFUSAL of armed insurrection, the REFUSAL of a communist revolution and the triumph of democracy! As far as the "Italian" position on the question of the party is concerned, we just want to mention that Bordiga, as one of the most reputable spokesmen of the Italian left, SUBMITTED his action, somewhat against his own formal positions on the question of the party, but for the sake of (formal!) discipline, to the orientations of the Third International.

Straight after having assisted to this conference, Pankhurst travelled to Berlin to attend the meeting that set up the West European Secretariat of the Comintern (February 1920); she then travelled to Amsterdam for the first meeting of the West European Sub-bureau of the Third Communist International. This sub-bureau played a most important role in the struggle of the left fractions against the social-democratic positions that to a large extend characterised the Third International from the very beginning and that were to draw it irresistibly towards the reformist quicksands and to make it an instrument, from the 2nd Congress onward, in the hands of counter-revolution (5). The Amsterdam Conference of the bureau committed those present to "no compromise with the bourgeoisie or social patriotic parties, with parties of the Second International or with agents of capital within the labour movement." On Pankhurst's initiative the Bureau voted a resolution that recommended the preparation of the proletariat to a general strike in case a revolution should come about in one country. The bureau declared itself against working in parliament or trade-unions. Just before its closing down, the bureau issued a statement against affiliation to the Labour Party. It was for all these reasons that Moscow disavowed the Amsterdam bureau it had set up six months earlier in an attempt to break russian isolation by preparing a conference of West European communist parties. The suppression of the bureau was announced on May, 15th 1920. Its activities were transferred to Berlin, where the KPD was powerful enough to control the orientations of the bureau.

What kind of unity?

During the unity-negotiations, most of the socialist groups of Britain declared themselves in favour of the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the soviet system and affiliation to the Third International. But as soon as these general principles require a more concrete application, i.e. when it comes down to refusing parliamentary action and affiliation to the Labour Party, these points prove to be real obstacles to communist unity in Britain. As we have witnessed so often, the more radical groups defending the interests of capital, agree to nearly everything insofar it allows them not to change the very basis of this system.

If the South Wales Socialist Society agreed with the W.So.F. on the matter of parliament and affiliation to the Labour Party, the other two main participants to the unity talks, the Socialist Labour Party and even more so the British Socialist Party, by far the most important group, rejected the W.So.F.'s programme, favouring parliamentary action and, as far as the British Socialist Party was concerned, affiliation to the Labour Party.

On June, 26th of the same year, the W.D. announces the foundation of the Communist Party around the W.So.F.'s programme, i.e. against parliamentarism and against affiliation to the Labour Party. What had happened is that Pankhurst preferred to initiate the formation of a communist party, be it a small one, on a principles basis (6) rather than sacrificing these principles for the sake of the ephemeral immediat succes brought by the foundation of a much larger, but unprincipled and in fact submitted to capital's needs, "communist" party. Already on February, 21st 1920 in an article on the problems of regroupment in Britain "Towards a Communist Party" Pankhurst stated that she was ready to go ahead to form a "left-wing" communist party if no principled regroupment with other parties could take place! Now, nevertheless, apart from the W.So.F. seven other small communist groups supported the formation of the new Communist Party, that declared itself the British Section of the Third International (BSTI) at a conference in London on June, 19th 1920.

So the "Workers' Dreadnought" now became the "organ of the Communist Party" and started publishing the Party's provisional programme. It are these provisional resolutions that we're publishing. It is obvious to us that, except from the position on parliament and affiliation to the Labour Party, that the "Workers' Dreadnought" as far as all other questions are concerned (workers' democracy, councils, nationalizations, unions, judges in communist courts (!)) remains locked up in a social-democratic vision of the communist movement. On other occasions we will criticise these positions; here we just want to show how in spite of these many social-democratic positions, that to a large extend reflect the still dominant influence at that time of social-democracy on important fractions of the proletariat, namely in Britain, that the "Workers' Dreadnought" nevertheless moved dynamically towards a more and more internationalist practice of rupture with these forces of conservation of the capitalist system. This evolution of the "Workers' Dreadnought" itself is a clear disavowal of its own pretention as communists to be the "licensed" holder of "the knowledge", "the consciousness", "the communist ideology or science" without which the proletariat, the real movement could not get anywhere!!!

Five weeks later, on the first of August, 1920, the British Socialist Party, together with part of the Socialist Labour Party formed the Communist Party of Great Britain (already in the denomination itself we can distinguish Pankhurst's internationalist orientation from the nationalist position of the official communist party, the CPGB): they adopted a programme of affiliation to Labour and of parliamentary action.

At this same time, the Comintern declared itself openly in favour of tactical "devices" always more clearly in opposition to the general principles of communism. In April, 1920 Lenin had completed his pamphlet "Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder" (as a preparatory text for the second Congress) that laid down the tactics of affiliation and parliamentarism as the right policies for british communists to bring about the revolution. In his pamphlet, Lenin tried to justify and explain, very dialecticaly, how it is right for the proletariat to vote into government its future butchers, the british Noske! Pankhurst's position was that "as social-patriotic organisations of other countries, the Labour Party will inevitably come to power through the natural course of development of society. The task of communists is to organise the forces that will overthrow the social-patriots, and we musn't delay this action in our country, nor hesitate. We musn't waste our energy by increasing the strength of the Labour Party: its rise to power is inevitable. We have to use our forces to create a communist movement that will defeat this party. The Labour party will soon be forming a government. The revolutionary opposition must make ready to attack it." (Quoted from Lenin's "Left-wing Communism").

Pankhurst went to Moscow to defend the communist positions at the second Congress of the C.I. (July/August 1920). She didn't stand alone: delegates from different other countries also defended the same programme of intransigent struggle against capital. We know the left positions got defeated at this congress: to the contrary, the infamous 21 conditions that, amongst other things enjoined trade-union work and parliamentary activity as conditions for membership of the C.I. were adopted (7).

Just like left groups in other countries, the CP (BSTI) now faced a choice: maintaining its communist principles at the risk of returning to a state of relative isolation, or abandoning these principles for the sake of remaining in the mainstream of the international proletarian movement, knowing that this movement, and its main formal organ, the Third International, instead of clearly defining and fighting the class enemy, started to compromise, to negotiate, to trade,... with it. In the face of the prestige of Lenin, of the Third International and also because in the end the "Workers' Dreadnought" group surely reckoned that all thing considered, that the points of agreement between itself and the Third International, that the positive positions of the C.I. prevailed over the points of disagreement - and after much internal acrimony (1/3 of its members resigned!) - the CP (BSTI) at the Leeds Unity Convention on January 1921 decided to abandon its principles on parliamentarism and on the question of affiliation, and to enter the CPGB. On January, 22nd the "Workers' Dreadnought" announces that is is no longer the "organ of the Communist Party" now that the united CP has been formed. Pankhurst, who at that time was in jail on a charge of sedition, did not take part in these final unity negotiations: from prison she recommended that the CP (BSTI) enter the CPGB as an opposition group. And as a matter of fact, the "Dreadnought" declared itself to be an independant organ, giving an independant support to the Party from a left wing point of view. Released from prison in May 1921, Pankhurst apparently pursued this struggle without compromises, since she got expelled from the party only four months later (on September 1921) following her repeated forthright condemnations of CPGB and Comintern policies. But starting from then, the "Workers' Dreadnought" didn't succeed in maintaining its activities, became less and less influential to finally disappear in 1924.

Notes

1. We know of at least one other group (from Glasgow) that during this same period took up positions (in its papers "The Spur" 1914-1921 and "The Commune" 1923-1928) close to those of the "Workers' Dreadnought"; this group sent delegates to the 3rd Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, where they were contacted by the german left (KAPD).

2. Indeed, it was an international wave of revolutionary action that was challenging the old world - important class movements took place in Patagonia, in Mexico, in India, in China, in the Middle East,...

3. We don't know exactly what informations communists in England or elsewhere got on the events in Russia. The need for the bourgeoisie to destroy and falsify all historical process where the proletariat acts as the real subject of history (and no longer as pure object) and the isolation which confined most revolutionary action to national boundaries (i.e. the inexistence of an international center of struggle) explain the ignorance that often prevailed as to what was really happening in Russia and everywhere else. Often revolutionary action is taken in solidarity with what is supposed to be happening elsewhere, proletarians referring in an enthusiastic way to what they want to happen, to what they can see as a necessity!As far as the Constituent Assembly goes, it seems that the Bolsheviks only dissolved it in January 1918, after having organised elections for it (elections after the victorious October insurrection!!!) when this assembly started organising openly the counter-revolution. Even so, the Bolsheviks only decided to dissolve this assembly because they were being forced to by more radical fractions of the proletariat. (On this subject, see L. Shapiro: "The Bolcheviks and their opposition 1917-1922").

4. This also explains the preponderant influence of Sylvia Pankhurst on the evolution of the group: she - just like the group - "came" to communism when communism was strong enough to impose itself, but moved away from it again as the communist movement got defeated.

5. We cannot analyse in this introduction the very complex process of degeneration of the CI. The CI, founded very late (the first congress took place in March, 1919) as an attempt to break the isolation of Soviet Russia, soon revealed itself to be nothing else but a centre for the defence of the interests of the russian bourgeois state abroad. This was the result, not of some betrayal, but in the first place of the many weaknesses - i.e. the social-democratic orientations that persisted and that had never been criticized but on a formal basis - that characterized the Third International from the very start. This situation materialised the weaknesses of the whole communist movement of that period. If we insist on the revolutionary contribution of the left fractions (that emerged in most countries: Bulgaria, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, England, Belgium, United States, India, South-Africa, Poland, Germany,...) it is precisely because of their efforts to denounce and clarify the counter-revolutionary nature of the very fundamentals of social-democracy, of the Second International as an organ, from its very origins, for the reform of capital. In this introduction we just mention some of the facts that illustrate the process of degeneration of the CI.

6. We can draw a parallel here with what happened in France with the first and ephemeral Communist Party founded in May 1919 by Péricat and Lepetit but that soon disappeared at the end of the same year.

7. It was the Italian left that insisted that another condition be added to the 20 already existing conditions, which stipulated that no party could claim membership to the Third International if it didn't accept these conditions! Pretending fighting this way against centrist and right-wing parties, reality has shown that these conditions were actually used against the left positions. As a matter of fact, these conditions stated clearly that to be a communist, one had to vote, to agree to parliamentary and union activity, to support "all movements of emancipation in the colonies'',...

FED UP!

After years and years of apathy, during which we've been submitted to the worst attacks on our own living standards, for the first time we have managed to react and demonstrate. Above all this movement expresses our disgust at the individualism that is being imposed upon us, at the "every one for themselves" mentality that is destroying us!

But we mustn't fool ourselves: our struggle did not surge up only against the "Devaquet" law; this law was only the spark that set off our movement as a response to the disgust we feel. The disgust we feel for studies that only lead to unemployment, ever growing misery and harsher repression, at the expulsion and killing of immigrant workers...

Our solidarity with immigrants under threat of expulsion; with desperate junkies being subjected more and more to the rackets of the dealers and the State; with proletarians being held hostage in the jails of democracy; with the unemployed... Our solidarity with these people has nothing to do with the solidarity that is being worshipped by the media and by show business. Solidarity does not mean begging for money or food, or enjoying yourself at a rock concert; neither does it mean asking for pity of the respects of our rights by those who everyday decide on more terrible measures to use against us.

Real solidarity means to fight against them!

This society and its politicians try to put us to sleep with the worst lies. And they know that they can rely on the faithful support of the media (that are so much appreciated by Harlem Desir - the main organiser of SOS racism -and other stars of the bourgeois spectacle) which is always eager to launch a new hysterical campaign for more repression when some manager, "a good family man like all of us", has been shot down in the street. Meanwhile they relegate the massacres of our class - like the burning down of immigrant houses by fascist pigs, the cause of so many deaths in Paris recently - to the "miscellaneous" column.

Leftists of all kinds have tried to confine our movement by limiting it to "students and school pupils", now they're trying to make it a "political" movement by demanding the resignation of such or such a minister.

BUT:- 1) Everyone knows that the "Devaquet" law has been withdrawn, this was only to demobilise us so as to attack us more easily afterwards. The bourgeoisie make the laws only for their interests, and we can expect nothing from this. Only our STRENGTH can bring down laws.

Everybody can see that this movement concerns all of us, unemployed as well as workers, students as well as pupils, young as well as old... because for a long time already we have all suffered the same attacks, without responding to them. To try to lock up our movement, to try to limit it to students or pupils only means to crush it!

It is ridiculous and dangerous for our struggle to shout "Chirac, Pasqua: resignation" while for the last few years it has been Mitterand who has been developing and using the sane anti-working class politics. Before "cohabitation" it was Joxe, Deferre, Fabius and Hernu who decided on lay-offs, on the expulsions of immigrants, on the modernisation of the police, on such military operation as "Manta" as well as war campaigns in the Lebanon and elsewhere.

It was the left, the "Communist" Party included who expelled and repressed immigrants, who cut off the financial resources of many unemployed (they called them ironically the "new poor") causing more than a hundred of them to die from the cold during the winter of '85. It was the left who froze salaries, and who sold more arms than ever all over the world (furnishing arms to both sides in the Iran/Iraq war!).

To shout on top of that "that we're not in Chili" means either to say that torture and massacres are all right elsewhere, or to have the worst illusions! The State here just like everywhere else, represses violently all those who seriously oppose this society of death, and this repression can just as well come from the right as from the left! Leftists that try to make us support the left against the right, try to break down our movement, try to make us support those who oppress us.

It's no use to pretend to be 'a-political': politics (the state) is always getting involved with us, and even violently. In order to be against the politics of capital, we have to organise ourselves against it and against all parties and unions, whether they are left or right.

It's no use to be against violence! This society is violent everyday. We have to defend ourselves against it and to organise ourselves so as to paralyse and destroy our executioners.

Therefore, our first task is to reinforce our movement by involving all those who suffer in this society, by involving all those who are being exploited!

Today our only real victory, is our organisation, our growing unity. It is our capacity to create a balance of forces so that fear and demoralisation move definitively from our side to theirs.

Yes, we're sick of this miserable society!

Yes, we want to finish off the bourgeoisie and its hypocracy!

Yes, we want to destroy this daily terrorism that is destroying us!

Yes, we want to struggle against our oppressors just like our clans comrades in Algeria and South Africa; just like the deserters on the battle fronts, just like the exploited everywhere!!!

This strike is a fine rejection of all those who claim that what makes the movement remarkable and exceptional is the perfect democracy which governs it. It is a fact that General Assemblies and ballots have previously taken place with monotonous regularity. But when the proletariat rises up in revolt, 'concentrating the revolutionary interests of society in itself', IT IS BY NATURE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC. 'It immediately finds in its own situation the content of and the motive for, its activity - crushing its enemies and taking such measures as the necessities of the struggle impose - and it is the consequences of its own actions which push it further.' It is clearly the fact that proletarians share an identical situation and identical interests which constitutes a negation of democracy: then you shout rebellion, contact your mates, organise yourselves, begin strike action and get moving! Arguing details in General Assemblies, spending your time on votes, delegating your powers - that's not acting or organising or fighting. And you can bet right now that the unions will use a ballot to democratically bury the fight.

UNIONS: from the run away train to getting the trains running

The determination of the strikers was so great that, after a few days hesitation, the unions rushed to catch the run-away train, and recognised the strike. As everyone agreed, the situation had become hot, explosive. It was up to the unions to defuse the bomb. In fact, these strikes, which are widely supported and affect some of the key sectors of social life, have come after a long period of social peace, during which the too few struggles that have taken place (remember Talbot, Longwy, La Chiers) remained too isolated to obstruct the austerity measures.

The distrust which proletarians now have towards the unions is shown by the strikers setting up autonomous organisational structures outside of the unions. These unions never hesitate to act like the pimps they are - the better to get us fucked - reintroduccing themselves into these structures and getting control of them. That filth Maire, feeling the wind change has given up his fine talk about privileges and how we have to adapt to the crisis. That pig Krasucki (which isn't very nice for pigs) calls for the extension of the movement - which he organises in practice by trying to get the trains running for the return of the holiday makers! And that moron Bergeron (not very nice for morons) is getting all worked up and keeps going on and on about how he had seen all this coming, and if only people had listened to him, if only they had negotiated... Faced with such scab politics the strikers are organising themselves locally in various strike committees and on a national level in two 'coordinations', one of the train drivers and the other of the rest of the railway workers. But the fact that the unions, having at first spat on the struggler are now claiming that they support the movement, is making the coordinations hesitate to fully assume the reason for their emergence - i.e. to be the strikes centre of action and organisation. They are beginning to limit their role to putting pressure on the unions and controlling them. The whole weight of the past of non-struggle is making itself felt here and it threatens heavy consequences for the future of the movement. The movements strength can only assert itself distinctly outside of and against the unions.

What a huge step backwards if we once again rely on politicians, these part masters in the art of fucking us over. The unions don't just constantly negotiate the price of social peace on our backs but more than anything they sabotage our struggles by shutting them into such and such sector, factory or area and, when it's necessary, by violently and physically opposing any real attempt to sabotage the national economy.

We feel the same disastrous weight when the national coordination of the Gare du Nord excludes the 'non-drivers' who want to fight and the other proletarians who want to break their isolation - when victory can only come from an extension of the movement. Extension towards the PTT (Post and Telecommunications), towards other sectors whether private or public... And this is not an abstract or far off task. No, it is possible today to form groups to go out and pick up other workers before setting up pickets in front of the factories.

The ball is in our court - counter attack!

To thwart the schemes of the state, which is trying to set the unemployed against employed workers, we must call the unemployed to fight with us now, and we must show in practice that the needs of our lives are identical. It's because there are still trains and buses running that the government can get away with opposing users to strikers. Indeed, so long as it's possible to go to work the 'user' will claim the right to be transported and the freedom to work. NOT ONE TRAIN, NOT ONE UNDERGROUND MUST RUN unless needed for the strike. The alternative method of transport - road traffic - must be systematically disrupted by the numerous means we have available. It's only this way that the users will be able to negate themselves as users, rediscover themselves in the struggle in solidarity with their class comrades. Scabs must know that vengeance exists and that they won't avoid it! We cannot let those bastards act as if life carries on as usual, as if we weren't in the process of changing the world. We don't give a damn about:-

placing the struggle within the legal framework of workers rights and respect for users;

bowing down like sheep to the wishes of the majority of workers (when you are a majority in a depot you are the minority in the section. When you are a majority in the section you are the minority in the area...);

negotiating the application of austerity measures in the interest of enterprise, business and the national economy;

DOWN WITH SACRIFICE! UNCOMPROMISING STRUGGLE! LETS ORGANISE OURSELVES!

11 January '87.

Introduction

Most of the time, within the communist movement itself, ready-made ideas
inherited from the dominant ideology prevent a full understanding of the
revolutionary program. On many essential questions, it is not the communist
position, confirmed by the experiences of countless working-class revolts
that is put forward but rather the social-democratic, lassallean "tradition"
(whether or not radicalized by the leninist terminology), that is, what
the bourgeoisie itself understands about the revolutionary movement. And
so, on the fundamental question of democracy, the great myths of the French
Revolution - that archetype all bourgeois revolutions, Freedom, Equality
and Fraternity, are fully upheld by pseudo-marxists: considering that the
bourgeoisie has betrayed its own ideals, they assign the task of realizing
them to the proletariat! And of course the leftists keep fighting for the
total achievement of democratic rights, for "perfect" democracy. For those
idiots, democracy is but a form of government, the very ideal, in
fact, so far as government is concerned, which when eventually applied
in full, will usher in a new Golden Age. And so these sycophants have to
democratize the education system, the police and all State apparatus -in
short, they seek to democratize democracy. Democracy is always presented
as the ideal to be attained, and all our miseries and capitalist oppression
are seen as the result of a bad or incomplete application of this sacrosanct
democracy. For the pseudo-marxists (from trotskyists to councilists), democracy
is the pure form, the ideal that capital cannot realize, but which the
proletariat eventually could, in the mythical form of "workers' democracy".
And so, they simply oppose bourgeois democracy (restricted and betraying
the ideal) to the ideal to be realized: workers' democracy (trotskyist
councilist version), people's democracy (stalinist version) or again, direct
democracy (libertarian version). Here they are again, those eternal reformers
of the world who, having first defined the ideal to be attained as the
positive pole of capital -Freedom, Equality, Fraternity- can see in today's
reality nothing but the result of wrong application of this ideal by big
bad capital, its negative pole. All those people can not understand that
there is no such thing as a "democratic ideal" or, to be more exact, that
the democratic ideal is just the ideal image of the reality of capitalist
dictatorship. And in the same way that the solution of the celestial
family lies in the terrestrial family, so the solution of celestial democracy
(the democratic ideal) lies in the terrestrial reality of its application,
that is, in the terrestrial reality of capital's worldwide dictatorship.

Contrary to all those apologists of the system (even, and above all,
in its reformed form), marxists tackles democracy not as a form of government
more or less properly applied, but as a content, as the activity
of management -politics- of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore
democracy (whatever its form: parliamentary, bonapartist,...) is nothing
but the management of capitalism. As Marx put it, the bourgeoisie has really
and definitively achieved freedom (to sell one's labour power or
else... to die), fraternity (between atomized citizen) and equality (between
purchasers and sellers of commodities). The bourgeoisie has totally democratized
the world, since in its own world (that of circulation and exchange
of commodities) pure democracy is realized. Chasing the myth of a "good"
democracy, as all democrats (even "workers'" democrats) do actually serves
to reinforce, as an idea and so in its realization, the best "possible"
management of capitalism what ever form it might take -parliamentary, "working-class",
fascist, monarchist,...- it reinforces the foundation of the system: wage
slavery. Indeed, as this text will show, democracy is not one (or the "best")
of the forms of management of capital, but is the foundation, the
substance
of capitalist management, and this, because the content common to the substance
of the capitalist mode of production -twosided character of the commodity
labour power- and the substance of£ democracy -make the individuals,
and so their labour power appear as a commodity. The capitalist mode of
production is therefore the first and also the last mode of production
that has to present the individual as a citizen, totally isolated, atomized
and alienated in civil society -the community of atomized individuals (that
is a des-humanized, non-species community)- because the capitalist mode
of production, in order to develop, needs the proletarians (free from all
ties to the glebe) to own only their labour power, and so always be ready
to sell themselves for a wage (the value of which is determined, like any
other commodity's, by the average time socially necessary for its reproduction).
This whole process of atomization and subsumption of human beings produces
one of the most disgusting symptoms of capitalism: individualism.

The content of every bourgeois state (whatever its form) is therefore
democracy, for democracy is the capitalist organisation of atomized
proletarians so as to make them spew out more and more value. Marx
had already guessed this essential content of democracy when he criticized
Hegel's ideas about the state:

"Hegel starts from the state and makes man the subjectified
state; democracy starts from man and makes the state objectified man. Just
as it is not religion which creates man but man who creates religion, so
it is not the constitution which creates the people but the people who
creates the constitution. In a certain respect the relation of democracy
to all other forms of the state is like the relation of Christianity to
all other forms of religion. Christianity is the religion par excellence,
the essence of religion - deified man as a particular religion. Similarly,
democracy is the essence of all state constitutions - socialised
men as a particular state constitution. (...) Man doesn't exist for the
law but the law for man - it is a human manifestation; whereas in the other
forms of the state man is a legal manifestation. That is the fundamental
distinction of democracy."

Marx - Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Law.

Through Marx, the whole filiation and invariance of communism asserts itself
more and more clearly, breaking with bourgeois socialism, breaking with
reformism, breaking with democracy. From time to time, however, communists
under the heavy weight of bourgeois ideology, did fall back to democratic
ground. That is what the Italian Abstentionist Communist Left criticized,
when writing that:

"Though they were the destroyers of the whole democratic
bourgeois ideology, it cannot be denied that Marx and Engels still gave
too much credit to democracy and thought that universal sufferage could
bring about advantages which had not been discredited yet."

"Avanti" 1918, The Lessons from the New History.

Yet despite its mistakes the communist movement has always asserted its
anti-democratic
character more and more strongly, be it with Babeuf, Dejacque and Coeurderoy,
be it with Blanqui (and his famous "London toast") and (at certain times)
Lenin, be it with the Communist Lefts (from Italy, of course, with Bordiga
and the Communist Left from Italy in exile; but also the KAPD - Gorter/Schröder
wing). The question is getting clearer and clearer: how to remove from
the communist program all bourgeois leftovers, all concessions to bourgeois
socialists, to democrats?

"What stumbling block is this that endangers tomorrows revolution?
The deplorable popularity of all those bourgeois disguised as tribunists...
is the stumbling block against which yesterdays revolution crashed. Curse
be on us, should the indulgence of the masses allow these men to rise to
power on the ever closer day of victory."

Blanqui - 1851

"Political freedom is a farce and the worst possible kind
of slavery (...) So is political equality: this is why democracy must be
torn to pieces as well as any other form of government."

Engels - Progress of Social Reform on the Continent.

But with the Italian Communist Left the very content of democracy (and
not only the parliamentary, elective form of government that is called
democracy) is tackled from a communist standpoint:

"The workers movement has sprung up as a negation of democracy
(...) There exists a fundamental opposition between the institutions of
the democratic state and the creation of working class organisms. Through
the first, the proletariat is tied to the democratic fiction; through the
second, the workers assert, in opposition to the bourgeois government,
the opposite historical course which leads them to their liberation."

Bilan - Organ of the Italian Fraction of the internationalist
Communist Left

In the same way as Bilan brilliantly analyzed fascism not as the negation
of democracy (which means "justifying" the anti-fascism, interclassist
front) but, on the contrary, "as a purifying process of the democratic
state", so October -the monthly organ of the International Bureau of the
Fractions of the Communist Left- drew the essential, fundamental lessons:

"The idea of proletarian dictatorship gets spoilt whenever
it is linked, directly or indirectly, to the democratic principle."

Octobre No 5 - 1939

It is to continue this fundamental work of destroying democracy that we
carry out with our militant activity. With this text, with the whole of
the material we have already published, we wish to give revolutionary militants
a global analysis that can facilitate the communists' continuous critique
of democracy, including, above all, so-called "workers' democracy" (1).

Genesis of Democracy

From the very origin, democracy expresses its two-sided character like
the two-sided nature of the commodity (use value and exchange value) which
develops alongside it (see below). Democracy is both the "power of the
people", of the majority, of the "plebs" and the dictatorial expression
of the dominant class over the dominated majority.

Once the natural community is dissolved through exchange, democracy
appears as the mythical expression of a "new community", thus re-creating
artificially the primitive community just destroyed: the people
('demos' in Greek) being the whole of the citizen, a whole based
upon the negation of class antagonisms for the benefit of an a-classist
mass called the people, the nation,... In this sense, democracy really
exists. Yet it also exists only ideally (in the realm of ideas)
as a myth/reality camouflaging, and so reinforcing materially, the dictatorial
power of the dominant class. Thus as soon as it emerges, democracy develops
its two-sided character: both unification of the people within a
restricted, non-human community (which we called fictitious community),
and destruction of any attempt to re-create a true community
of interests, that is, reconstitution of a class opposed the
dominant one (which is organized into a state). And, whereas all the exploited
classes in the past organized their struggle on the basis of limited, contingent,
non-universal historical interests, now with the proletariat (first class
to be both exploited and revolutionary) there appears the first and last
class that has one universal, non-contingent historical interest: the liberation
of humanity.

If we consider the archetype of what is usually praised as democracy
-Athenian democracy- we see a society diviided into antagonistic classes
in which the most exploited productive class -the slaves- is quite simply
excluded from civil society (the slaves not being regarded as human beings,
but only as an animal productive force), and in which only the members
of the dominant class -the citizens- can get at the famous Athenian democracy,
since managing "public affairs" (res publica) requires a lot of free time,
or, in other words, requires a lot of riches (i.e. slaves). In this sense,
the specialisation and the specialists of "public affairs" (division of
labour, hence division into classes) brings about politics: a popular sphere
devoted to the management of the city on behalf of the whole of the people,
of the nation (hence the necessity of mediation -see below). Politics
and democracy therefore go hand in hand. Politics, as a separated sphere,
as the essential activity of the dominant class, exists only because democracy
exists, even if in a rudimentary form. Politics exists only through democracy,
since it in only in class societies -societies in which people are separated
from each other, from production, and so from their lives- that there is
a need to conciliate the classes (and so to negate their antagonism)
and at the same time to impose the dictatorship of the dominant class.
This kind of society thus requires a social mediation -politics-
to "unifying" the separated (more precisely, "adding" them to each other)
to "unifying" everything that society has separated, and this, for the
sole benefit of the dominant class. Democracy implies politics; politics
is democratic in its very essence.

"Where the political state has attained its full degree
of development man leads a double life, a life in heaven and a life on
earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives
in the political community where he regards himself as a communal being,
and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, regards
other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything
of alien powers. The relationship of the political state to civil society
is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth. The state
stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the
same way as religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, ie.
it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated
by it. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being.
Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual,
he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he
is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious
sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with
an unreal universality." (...) "The splitting of man into his public
and private self and the displacement of religion from the
state to civil society is not just one step in the process of political
emancipation but its completion. Hence political emancipation neither abolishes
nor tries to abolish mans real religiosity." (...) "The power of religion
is the religion of power." (...) "The members of the political state are
religious because of the dualism between individual life and species life,
between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious
inasmuch as man considers political life, which is far removed from his
individuality, to be his true life and inasmuch as religion is here the
spirit of civil society and the expression of the separation and distance
of man from man." (...)

"Political democracy is Christian inasmuch as it regards
man - not just one man but all men - as a sovereign and supreme being;
but man in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, man in his contingent existence,
man just as he is, man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, sold,
and exposed to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements by the entire
organisation of our society - in a word, man who is not yet a true species
being. The sovereignty of man - but of man as an alien being distinct from
actual man - is the fantasy, the dream, the postulate of christianity,
where as in democracy it is a present and material reality, a secular maxim."

Marx - On The Jewish Question

As we see in this long quotation from Marx, the emergence of the separated
sphere -politics- really corresponds to the antagonism, the opposition
between the "uneducated, unsocial" bourgeois individual, organized into
a non-human community -addition of individuals, of atomized citizens- and
the constitution of a real community based upon common historical interests
-the constitution of the proletariat into a class, hence into a party-
negating the free thinking individual (and individualist) in order to posit
the species-being of humanity: Gemeinwesen.

The bourgeois society, synthesis and product of all class societies
of the past, is above all the society of politics (and so of democracy)
the one in which all the citizens have, as buyers and sellers of commodities,
the same right and duty to manage the city and the society, that is, commonly
speaking, "to politick". And whereas in the Athenian democracy, politics
was a privilege for the dominant class (since democracy had not extended
yet to the whole of society) at the expense of slaves, under capitalism,
the realm of complete democracy, each proletarian must "politick", that
is, must be mediated/objectified through politics. The wage slaves
are even deprived of any communal life (even as excluded slaves), in contrast
to their Roman and Greek ancestors who where collectively excluded from
the political sphere, from democracy. The wage slaves are totally atomized
and subsumed through democracy. The ancient slaves, as well as the
serfs could at least share a common feeling of exclusion (and thus rebel
-see Spartacus and the numerous peasants' revolts), the wage slaves, as
citizens -violent negation by democracy of any attempt to reconstitute
a class force- have no feeling anymore, except of being mere commodities
in the sphere of circulation -political commodities- and as such, of being
free and equal. The ancient slaves were still -though negatively, since
they were slaves- tied to a community, the degenerated remains of primitive
communism (see Spartacus' City of Sun: the "realization" of the myth of
the return to the primitive communism), whereas the modern proletarians,
subjected to democracy, have nothing anymore.

Against this process of subjection of human beings into, and through,
democracy and its hireling called politics, the communist revolution is
no political revolution (as the bourgeois revolution was), but a social
revolution through which the proletariat accomplishes the ultimate
political deed: dissolution of the separate sphere that politics is. This
way already Marx's prospect in 1843:

"The bourgeois society is the end of politics; it derives
from this that the proletariat, if it doesn't want to operate within the
existing state, upon the enemy ground, must not "politick". More precisely,
it
must claim only one political act, that of destroying the bourgeois political
society, at the same time a military act."

Marx - Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State

Since the communist program is in its essence anti-democratic it
is therefore anti-political. It rejects the bourgeois, politicist view
of a "revolution" which would be a change in the state apparatus (lassallean,
social-democrat, leninist tradition) for the benefit of the necessary destruction
of the State that is, the destruction of politics.

In his controversy against A.Ruge Marx developed this point of view:

"... a social revolution possesses a total point of view
because - even if it is confined to only one factory district - it represents
a protest by man against a dehumanised life, because it proceeds from the
point of view of the particular, real individual, because the community
against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting, is the
true
community of man, human nature. In contrast, the political soul of
a revolution consists in the tendency of the classes with no political
power to put an end to their isolation from the state and from power.
Its point of view is that of the state, of an abstract totality which exists
only through its separation from real life and which is unthinkable in
the absence of an organised antithesis between the universal idea and the
individual existence of man. In accordance with the limited and contradictory
nature of the political soul a revolution inspired by it organises a dominant
group within society at the cost of society."

Marx - Critical Notes on the Article "The King of Prussia and
Social Reform. By a Prussian".

Through this refusal of a revolution "with a political soul", refusal of
a mere change in the form of the state, as the bourgeois revolution was,
the communist revolution "with a social soul" can be characterized as a
revolution which, as the ultimate political act totally destroying the
whole state apparatus and its foundation -the law of value- is the radical,
social transformation of the whole society, the dictatorship of the proletariat
for the abolition of wage labour.

"But whether the idea of a social revolution with
a political soul is a paraphrase or nonsense there is no doubt about
the rationality of a political revolution with a social soul.
All revolution -the overthrow of the existing ruling power and the
dissolution
of the old order- is a political act. But without revolution socialism
cannot be made possible. It stands in need of this political act just as
it stands in need of destruction and dissolution. But as soon as its organising
functions begin and its goal, its soul emerges, socialism throws its political
mask aside."

Marx - Ibid

Marx had also perfectly understood the essential connection between the
commodity and democracy, even as early as the ancient societies:

"Aristotle himself was unable to extract this fact, that,
in the form of commodity-values, all labour is expressed as equal human
labour and therefore as labour of equal quality, by inspection from the
form of value, because Greek society was founded on the labour of salves,
hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour
powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and
equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human
labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality
had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however
becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal
form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is between
men as possessors of commodities."

Marx - Capital Vol 1

It is therefore only the capitalist mode of production, which is above
all the mode of commodity production (where the universal commodity is
money as universal equivalent), that democracy, already present once the
class societies emerged, can develop fully as the content -the substance-
of capitalist dictatorship. Capitalism is the system that concludes and
synthesizes the cycle of value, which goes from the dissolution of natural
community to capitalism ruling the whole planet; the system that produces
and requires the proletarian/citizen, the singular individual as mere purchaser/seller
of commodities (and as such, free equal and free). It also produces and
requires proletarians as a mere commodity, among others, this occurs through
the sale of their labour power. The capitalist mode of production is therefore
the mode of production where the proletarian individual is deeply atomized
and, at the same time, "unified" within a fictitious unity: the people,
the nation,... It is, above all, the mode of production of commodities,
and so, of democracy. This mode of production, and only this one, universalizes
and fully achieves democracy. So the proletariat has no democratic task
whatsoever to realize. The whole of its movement is that of the destruction
of democracy. That is what Marx used to reply to the bourgeois socialists
of his time -today's lefties- who wanted to "depict socialism as the realization
of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French Revolution":

"With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual
is posited: voluntary transaction; no force on either side; positing itself
as means or as serving, only as means, in order to posit the self as end
in itself, as dominant and primary; finally, the self-seeking interest
which brings nothing of a higher order to realization; the other is also
recognised and acknowledged as one who likewise realizes his self-seeking
interest, so that both know that the common interest exists only in the
duality, many sidedness, and autonomous development of the exchanges between
self-seeking interests. The general interest is precisely the generality
of self-seeking interests. Therefore, when the economic form, exchange,
posits the all-sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual
as well as the objective material which drives towards the exchange, is
freedom: Equality and Freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based
on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive,
real, basis of all equality and freedom."

"... exchange value or, more precisely, the money system
is in fact the system of equality and freedom, and that the disturbances
which they encounter in the further development of the system are disturbances
inherent in it, are merely the realization of equality and freedom, which
prove to be inequality and unfreedom."

Marx's - Grundrisse

"In the sphere of circulation of commodities, there are no classes,
everybody is a citizen, everybody appears as a buyer and seller of goods,
equal,
free and owner. Even when we buy or sell our labour power, we are in
the paradise of human rights and liberties. Each one is aiming at his own
private interests in the reign of equality, liberty and private property.

Liberty: because the buyer and the seller of commodities
(inc. labour power) do not obey any other rule than their own free will.

Equality: because in the world of commodities everybody
is a buyer and a seller, and everybody gets a value equal to the value
contained in the goods they are selling, exchanging equivalent for equivalent.

Property: because each one appears, in the world
of exchange, as an owner of their commodity and they can only dispose
of what belongs to them."

Communism No 1

That is exactly what Marx explains in Capital:

"The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within
whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour power goes on, is in fact
a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom,
Equality, Property..."

Marx - Capital 1, The Transformation of Money into Capital

Circulation is therefore the paradise of bourgeois rights, the sphere where
democracy rules most perfectly through money. In circulation, money is
the community of capital; money is the mediation which unites all individuals
as buyers and sellers, and dissolves any other community. Money,
like politics, is an essential mediation of democracy. No money, no democracy;
no democracy, no money.

Money as the Community of Capital

It was Marx who defined the most clearly the bases to understand the radical
opposition between the human community (which primitive communism was already
pregnant with, though limited by and subjected to the dictatorship of nature
and scarcity) and the expression, getting stronger and stronger alongside
the cycle of value, of the constitution of another community involving
all human kind for the benefit of value, and not of human beings.

After he has developed the several attributes of money -money as measure
of values, money as medium of circulation, money as material of wealth
(see Capital, chap.III)- Marx goes on to the third attribute which "presupposes
the first two and constitutes their unity", how is "the God among commodities"
how "from its servile role, in which it appears as mere medium of circulation,
it suddenly changes into the lord and god of the world of commodities.
It represents the divine existence of commodities, while they represent
its earthly form." (...) "Money is therefore not only the object but also
the fountainhead of greed." Once it reaches this stage of autonomy, money
-"not only the object, but also the fountaainhead of wealth"- posits itself
bath as the most dissolving element of the ancient communities (it
is the new God winning over those preceding it) and as the one and 45 only
community. Money is therefore the dissolving element which makes everything
democratic, which enables democracy to grow freely.

"Money is itself the community, and can tolerate none other
standing above it. But this presupposes the full development of exchange
values, hence a corresponding organisation of society."

Marx - Grundrisse

Under capital, money is the new community, it is the mediation which unites
things and people. Marx speaks of "nexus rerum": what unites things:

"As material representative of general wealth, as individualised
exchange value, money must be the direct object, aim and product of general
labour, the labour of all individuals. Labour must directly produce exchange
value, ie. money. It must therefore be wage labour."

Marx - Grundrisse

Money as community of capital is therefore the unity of those singular
individuals, those citizens, negation of classes, as wage slaves.
Where the wage system exists, the non-human community of money exists;
where the wage system did not exist, money dissolved the ancient community
in order to impose itself and impose wage labour.

"Where money itself is not the community it must dissolve
the community."

Marx - Grundrisse

Under capitalism, each individual exists only as a producer of exchange
value, of money, and money itself is both the social mediation -addition
of singular individuals monetarily worthy of being part of civil society-
and the very substance of alienated human beings, since they only exist
as money as exploited human.

"It is the elementary precondition of bourgeois society
that labour should directly produce exchange value, ie. money; and similarly
that money should directly purchase labour, and therefore the labourer,
but only in so far as he alienates (veraussert) his activity in the exchange.
Wage labour on one side, capital on the other, are therefore only other
forms of developed exchange value and of money (as the incarnation of exchange
value). Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community,
since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same
time the social product of all."

"But as we have seen in money the community (gemeinwesen)
is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external, accidental thing
for the individual, and at the same time merely a means for his satisfaction
as an isolated individual. The community of antiquity presupposes a quite
different relation to, and on the part of the individual. The development
of money in its third role therefore smashes this community. All production
is an objectification (Vergegenstandlich-ung) of the individual. In money
(exchange value), however, the individual is not objectified in his natural
quality, but in a social quality (relation) which is, at the same time,
external to him."

Marx - Grundrisse

Thus money is both the universal commodity (as material representative
of wealth) and the "non-commodity" (as mere medium of circulation). In
the capitalist mode of production -which is the mode of production for
exchange value, and so for money (M-C-M'), the latter being community of
capital, the inhuman community of alienated individuals- people are subsumed
by money (and the same is true of politics), and in so far as they are
members of this fictitious community, that is, as circulating commodities,
they are free and equal, they are citizens, they are among the atoms of
a realized democracy. The capitalist mode of production is the mode of
production of democracy of politics, of politics, of money. Complete democracy
requires the development of money (and so of value). And the communist
movement, since it destroys the mode of production of, and for, money (M-C-M',
M'= M + delta M), also destroys democracy as the community of capital,
as the community of money. Democracy is therefore the community of capital,
the very foundation/ substance of capitalist dictatorship -the dictatorship
of money, of the law of value. And this fictitious community (fictitious
in opposition to the truly human community to be create: the proletariat
organized and directed into communist party) is materialized through a
serie of a-classist groupings (which negate the classes and their antagonism)
having all democracy as their substance. Be it the people, the nation religion,
politics or money... all these "communities of capital" through which,
and in which, the citizens are organized and the proletariat disorganized,
are in the last instance, nothing but forms of the fictitious community,
of democracy, of dictatorship of the law of value, of money and of capital.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat against Workers
Democracy

In the preceding chapters of this study, we have seen that democracy is
fundamentally linked to all the essential categories of capitalism: commodity
production, money, capital, etc. Continuing on from this it only remains
to deal with the all too famous "workers"' democracy which essentially
comes down to considering the proletariat, its movement and thus its dictatorship,
as having the same content and criteria as those of capital... or more
precisely, as having the characteristics of capitalism purged of its most
"unacceptable" features. And pretending that "workers"' democracy is the
only true democracy, democracy realized at last. For all these democretins
the bourgeoisie (because it is the incarnation of evil) is incapable of
fully realizing ideal democracy (which is false because as we have seen
this pure democracy is achieved in its "garden of Eden" -the circulation
of commodities). For these democrats, it thus falls on the proletariat
to fully realize this sacrosanct democracy and its cortege of rights...
its majoritarian and humanitarian fetishes. These "fine talkers" inject
the democratic poison into workers' struggles in the following ways: the
need to vote before struggling, the need to bend before the will of the
majority, to submit to democratic discipline... that is to say, bourgeois
discipline.

The entire history of the workers' movement testifies to precisely the
opposite of these policies of sabotage. If one takes the example of the
Russian Revolution, it is clear that all the class positions, the real
break (to be sure insufficient) with the bourgeois Social Democratic tradition
were always the work of minorities and each time needed to be asserted
by force against the majorities, against the dominant ideas (2).

• For example: the taking up of internationalist positions by Lenin and Zinoviev
  in 1915 ('Against the stream'), by breaking with the numerous majority
  of Social Democracy in Russia and worldwide, since it had once again shown
  its counter-revolutionary character.

• For example: The April Thesis imposed dictatorially on the Bolshevik parti,
  the majority of which followed a reformist and defensist viewpoint.

• For example: The fundamental question of necessary military preparation
  (the 'plot') organised secretly and against the great majority of the Bolshevik
  party which was already widely gangrenated by social pacifists and partisans
  of the constituent democracy (old Bolsheviks: Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev,
  Kalinin,...) and it was Trotsky who explained that at the heart of the
  Bolshevik party existed two principle tendencies:

"One of them was proletarian and led to the path of world
revolution; the other was democratic, which is to say petit bourgeois,
and led in the final analysis to the subordination of proletarian politics
to the needs of the reforming of bourgeois society."

Trotsky - The Lessons of October

• For example: The dissolution imposed by force of bayonets, of the first
  and last sitting of the famous Constituent Assembly, democratically elected
  and bailed out once again by the majority of the Bolsheviks:

"The theoretical critique of democracy and bourgeois liberalism
reaches the height of intensity, by the expulsion of this pack of democratically
elected scoundrels who make up the Constituent Assembly as carried out
by armed workers."

Bordiga - Lenin on the Path to Revolution

All these acts, which materialized more and more as the revolution -the
defense of the historic interests of the proletariat- went on. They had
to be imposed by force (as much military as exemplary), they had to be
practically taken on by minorities which to all intents and purposes, never
corresponded to existing formal parties. On the contrary, it is always
very democratically and by very large majorities that counter-revolutionary
positions and the rapid slide into the bourgeois swamp are imposed. To
become convinced of this, it is enough to see that it is always more democratically
that the bourgeois positions took precedence, throughout the congresses
of the Communist International, so as to arrive at the very democratic
and systematic unanimous vote inaugurated during the Stalin period itself,
and especially when it was a matter of condemning with the right hand what
the left hand had done.

"Stalin was able (...) to carry out his triumph by making
democracy at the heart of the party function in full at the time of the
struggles against the opposition in 1926/28."

Verceci - "October"

And if the example is also taken of the "lost revolutions" in Germany during
the period 1917-1923, on the essential role played by the antiquated democratic
notions at the heart of the proletariat, the acts multiply. Those things
which were presented as revolutionary positions as vanguard communist positions,
principally born by R. Luxembourg and the Spartacus League, were nothing
but a "bowing down" before the fetishism of the masses (and therefore of
democracy), nothing but a pale substitute for social democratism, lightly
radicalised to suit the circumstances.

It was to follow the masses and their ideas that the Spartacus League
refuse to break with social-democracy. They entered and stood surety for
the foundation of the USPD on the same positions as those of the SPD and
with men such as Kautsky, Bernstein and Hilferding (3).
Meanwhile, the real communist force organised in the heart of the ISD (Radical
Internationalists of Germany) refused this entryism and accused even Luxembourg
and Liebknecht of reiterating the "betrayal of 1914". To the necessary
class split, the demarcation between the forces of revolution and those
of counter-revolution, the centrist swamp replied: "The slogan isn't scission
or unity, new party or old party, but reconquest of the party from below,
by the revolt of the masses who must take into their hands the organisations
and their instruments." (Quoted by Broué in "Revolution in Germany").
Faced to this return to social-democracy (had it ever been left!) by the
Luxembourg group, the communists proclaimed: "The 'International' group
is dead" (Arbeiterpolitik), and founded the IKD (International Communists
of Germany) as the kernel of the future communist party.

In the same way, in each revolutionary phase, under the pretext of the
"immaturity of the masses", Luxembourg and her successors Levi and Zetkin
etc. were to oppose insurrection (the basis of the marxist conception of
the destruction of the state) by the progressive conquest of the masses
and of the state, dear to all social-democrats.

"It is from below that we must undermine the bourgeois state,
in acting so that the public, legislative and administrative powers are
no longer separated, but merged, and by placing then into the hands of
the workers and soldiers councils."

Luxemburg - Speech to the founding Convention of the KPD

All the gradualism, administrationism, educationism,... "workers" derivations
of reformist democracy, are contained in what was to become the Luxembourgist
ideology: the conception of the conquest of the consciousness of the majority
of the workers, of the workers' councils conceived as "the parliamentary
of the proletarians of the towns and country" (Luxembourg, -Die Rote Fahne-
1918), of the "boss-less" factories,... basically of a new bourgeois soup
dragging the proletariat towards massacres reiterated many times, refusing
organisation for fear of the riposte that they would be cutting themselves
off from the mythical masses.

From the occupation of the "Berliner Lokalanzeiger" by armed militants,
condemned by Luxembourg, to the denunciation of the "March Action" by Levi,
there is one same conciliatory line, that of the refusal of confrontation
(always under the pretext that it would be tantamount to putshism), of
the refusal of armed insurrection, of the refusal of communist revolution.

In the same way, in the most famous polemic between "mass and leaders",
Luxembourg made herself one of the most ardent defenders of the masses
against the leaders of the freedom of critique (cf. "Marxism against dictatorship"!!!).
This pseudo contradiction between masses and leaders betraying the masses
is a pure product of democracy and of its pathogenic functioning. It is,
in effect, in democratic organisms (elective or not, federalist or centralist,...)
that this type of problem can arise, for it presupposes both a mass of
untutored, amorphous and atomized individuals ready to be betrayed, and
the exceptional individual, the leader who, at the end of a certain time,
may betray or may not (for libertarians they betray by definition).

For we authoritarian marxists, the masses have only the leaders they
deserve. It wasn't the Noskes, the Scheidemanns, the Kautskys,... who
betrayed the "good" social-democratic masses. It was precisely because
these masses were social-democratic, impregned by more than 20 years of
class collaboration, pacifism, nationalism, democratism,... that Noske,
Scheidemann and Kautsky were able to express clearly the original content,
the substance of social democracy... i.e. bourgeois socialism. The
'betrayal' of the revolutionary program doesn't suddenly date from 1914,
but goes back to the years around 1875 when there came together the Lassalians
and the already barely revolutionary marxists (Bebel, Liebknecht,...) at
Gotha to round the social democratic party of sinister reputation. At this
stage the Lassalians were already well integrated into the Bismarckian
state. The autonomisation of leaders (and therefore of bureaucracy) can
only exist at the heart of organisations, parties, etc. where the only
things which link individuals are some general humanist and well meaning
ideas. This allows the democratically elected leaders (with all the cult
of personality, careerism and the struggles between different sects or
cliques which this implies) to carry on with bourgeois politics in the
name of immediate or mythical good of 'their' poor masses. Whether this
means of functioning is called federalism or democratic centralism, it
is a matter each time of conferring powers of attorney on leaders who worshipped
as much today as they will be denounced as traitors tomorrow (for example
Kautsky, who defended essentially the same positions both before and after
1914!). These leaders are thereby empowered to say loudly what the masses
are thinking at that immediate moment. Now the 'immediacy' of the masses,
of the majority, can only be the immediate reality of their submission
to capital, which is why the dominant ideas at the heart of the masses
are the ideas of the dominant class, ideas which the "leaders" can only
repeat. Bernstein didn't betray social democracy when he said that "the
movement is all and the goal is nothing" he was only theorising the real
practise of the German social democrats. Luxembourg in opposing Bernstein
didn't struggle against the counter-revolutionary practice of social-democracy,
she only struggled to maintain this practice in liaison with revolutionary
ideas,
with the "goal". This was in order to maintain a completely formal coherence
between "reform and revolution", that is to say, in order to liquidate
revolutionary preparation to the profit of immediate reforms.

For Luxembourg, the only preparation, the only domain where one could
speak of revolution is that of pure ideas, of consciousness, of the "education
of the masses":

"I think, on the contrary, that the only violence that will
lead us to victory is the socialist education of the working class in the
daily struggle."

Luxemburg - Discourse on Tactics, 1898

"Educationalism", the act of wanting to win over each proletarian individual
intellectually to socialism, led Luxembourg into never understanding the
revolutionary situation and the tasks it throws up, into always trying
to procrastinate, to put a brake on the movement under the pretext that
it wasn't yet massive enough, not "conscious" enough. And Luxembourg "educationalism"
only served to disarmed the real proletarian fighters, in order to make
of them parliamentary puppets and pacifists:

"Socialism, instead of making indomitable rebels from out
of present conditions, would end up making docile sheep; domesticated and
"cultivated" to be ready to be sheared, (...) We cannot therefore link
the revolution to the education of the proletariat, because then the revolution
would never come."

Avanti - The Problem of Culture. (Polemic at the heart of the
PSI where the abstentionist left regrouped around Bordiga clearly defended
anti-cultural and anti-educationalist positions.)

Contrary to the legend upheld as much by trostyists as by councilists R.Luxembourg
does not represent communism but on the contrary the multiple and despairing
attempts to push back its preparation and its realization. It particularly
cruelly represents the disintegration of the workers' movement by democratic
poison, all the more so when the latter is classified as "workers'". There
is a class divide between the German communist left (whose real direct
line is IKD-KAPD) and luxembourgism, the base on which the Levis, Radeks,
Zetkins, Brandlers,... constructed the KPD, single issue fronts, and other
politics of fatal remembrance (4).

For Luxembourg:

"It is not a question today of a choice between democracy
and dictatorship. The question placed by history on us today is: bourgeois
democracy or socialist democracy. For the dictatorship of the proletariat
is democracy in the socialist sense of the term. The dictatorship of the
proletariat doesn't mean bombs, putsches, riot, "anarchy", as the agents
of capitalism dare to pretend, but for the edification of socialism, for
the expropriation of the capitalist class conforming to the feelings and
by the will of the revolutionary majority of the proletariat, and therefore
in the spirit of socialist democracy. Without conscious will and without
the conscious action of the proletariat, there is no socialism."

Rosa Luxemburg - Die Rote Fahne

For the revolutionary communists, there is a class divide between "worker'"
democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat and:

"We could reply that provided that the revolution sweeps
away the heap of infamies accumulated by the bourgeois regime and provided
that the formidable circle of institutions which oppress and mutilate the
life of the productive masses is broken, it would not trouble us at all
that blows would be struck home by men not yet conscious of the outcome
of the struggle."

Bordiga - Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle
1946-48

Luxembourgism is just the liberal version of leninism (and later of stalinism)
and it is not for nothing that it served as a caution to all humanist "anti-stalinist"
democretins, from M.Pivert to Cohn-Bendit, from R.Lefevre to D.Guerin,
from Sabatier to Mandel, without forgetting the "new" apologists, the ICC.
More still than its leninist cousin, luxembourgism ideology inscribes itself
in perfect continuation with the social democratic tradition which, under
cover of the name of Marx, is nothing but a vulgar mixture of Proudhon
and Lassalle. Lenin and above all Trotsky, despite a similar assimilation
of the dictatorship of the proletariat to "workers'" democracy, had at
least tried to break with democratic conceptions on trusting solely in
the "saving virtue" of violence, terrorism and terror (5).

Luxembourgism is thus one of the most representative ideologies of the
myth of "workers'" democracy, and of its fatal practice of complete abasement,
of pacifist defeatism before the forces of the bourgeoisie. But it is not
the only one. Let us cite too the austro-marxists who, with Max Adler and
his theorisation of the system of workers' councils as the realization
of "workers'" democracy, find themselves very close to Luxembourg and Gramsci,
but equally the whole of the currents demanding "workers' control", "self-management"
which is in fact only the application of "workers'" democracy to the economic
sphere, that is to say the perpetuation of capitalist exploitation in the
name of the proletariat (cf. Socialisme ou Barbarie, the IS,...). And here
we are touching on a fundamental point: the liaison between "workers'"
democracy signifying "politically" the application of democratic parliamentarian
rules at the heart of the proletarian "mass" organs (assemblies, unions,
councils,...) that is to say the submission of the proletarian tasks to
the application of a majority, and therefore, most often, to bourgeois
ideology; and "workers'" democracy signifying "economically", the management
by (atomized) proletarians of their own exploitation. In effect, "workers'"
(or "direct", for libertarians) democracy signifies in the first place
the application of democratic rules (submission of the minority to the
majority; one individual, one voice) at the heart of the proletarian organisms
(as much those regrouping workers' masses as those distinctly revolutionary
in membership). These organisms (especially the more passive one) are not,
for the demo-cretins, based on a political content, on a program and a
will to struggle, but, on the contrary, on vulgar sociological criteria,
on the "economic" adherence of the individuals. ("A worker is someone who
does such and such jobs or still more vulgarly, someone who earns...").
It is therefore a matter of an addition of "atomized worker" individuals,
that is to say, of atoms of capital. At the heart of these assemblies thus
constituted the democratic vote sanctions the addition of individual opinions
and therefore sanctions the fact that ideology and dominant opinions, at
the heart of these assemblies remain those of the ruling class i.e. of
the bourgeoisie. To start from the isolated individual, sociologically
a worker, from the addition of his particular opinions, is necessarily
to arrive, not at a position of our class (denying the individual for the
benefit of the collectivity in struggle) but to a sum of bourgeois positions.

"To start from individual unity (?) in order to draw social
deductions and to construct the plans of society, or even in order to deny
society, is to start from an unreal presupposition which, even in its most
modern formulations, is basically only a modified reproduction of concepts
of religious revelation, of creation, and of the spiritual life independent
of the facts of natural and organic life."

Bordiga - The Democratic Principle, 1921

Workers' experience shows us that it is at the heart of these organisms
(councils in Germany, Soviets in Russia, "unions" in the USA and Latin-America,...)
that existing positions, confused or openly bourgeois, impose themselves
most easily and often even maintain themselves after the victorious workers'
insurrection. Let us rapidly give the example that it was the "bloody dog",
but nevertheless "worker", Noske who was democratically elected to the
head of the councils in Germany and that, in almost all proletarian centres,
his SPD colleagues controlled the majority of the councils. In the same
way, in Russia, it was necessary to organize the insurrection on the eve
of the congress of the Soviets so as to put the latter before the fait
accompli! (cf. the polemic between Lenin and Trotsky).

The democratic principle opposes itself to (and never takes account
of) workers' needs, to the necessities of the struggle, i.e. to the proletarian
content which these assemblies could have if their constitution did not
depend on the sociological and individual adherence of the proletarians
but, on the contrary, on their will to struggle... The delimitation occurs
through the struggle and the very reality of the classes' antagonisms demonstrates
that it is most often minorities (an eminently relative term since these
minorities become, in revolutionary period, millions of proletarians in
struggle) who practically assume the revolutionary tasks and "make the
revolution".

"Revolution is not a problem of organisational forms. Revolution
is on the contrary a problem of content, a problem of movement and action
of revolutionary forces in an unceasing process, which cannot be theorised
by fixing it in various tentatives of unchangeable 'constitutional doctrine'."

Bordiga - The Democratic Principle, 1921

"Workers" democracy thus affirms itself as the last rampart of capital,
the ultimate bourgeois solution to the crisis of capital, for it tends
at each moment to make counter-revolutionary ideas at the heart of the
proletariat come to the fore, and not the communist aspects; it takes on
the task of making the vanguard sectors wait and therefore draw back under
the pretext that other, more massive sectors are lagging behind. At each
moment, "workers'" democracy thus brings to the fore the heterogeneity
of the proletariat produced by capital, to the detriment of the aspects
of communist unification and homogenisation. Democracy thus directly opposes
itself to the worldwide centralization of the proletariat, to its organic
unity, to its constitution into a world party.

Complementarily to "workers'" democracy applied in the political sphere,
the workers having to decide what are their tasks, when they are historically
determined, there is the "workers'" democracy applied to the economical
sphere in the shape of "workers' control", or more fashionably, of "self-management".
And if the communists have always struggled against self-management, against
apprenticeship by workers of capitalist management (dear to Proudhon, Sorel,
Adler, Gramsci,...) at the heart of capitalism, remains for us to destroy
their myth even after the victorious insurrection.

"We don't want the conviction to spread among the mass of
workers that in developing the institution of councils it is possible to
take possession of the enterprises and to eliminate the capitalists. That
would be the most dangerous of illusions. The enterprise will be conquered
by the working class - and not merely by its personnel, which would be
a very small matter, and not very communist - only after the whole of the
working class seizes political power. Without this conquest, illusions
will be dispelled by royal guards, carabinaries (ltalian Secret Police)
etc..., i.e. by the mechanisms of oppression and force which the bourgeoisie
has at its disposal, through its state apparatus."

Bordiga - The Lessons of Recent History

And as Bordiga perceived it, if before the insurrection the conquest of
the factories by the workers can only be used to turn the latter from their
destructive tasks to the profit of the "worker's" reform of the system,
even after the victorious insurrection, the conquest of the factories by
the workers, "workers' control", self-management are not "very communist"
measures which only reinforce ever-present bourgeois tendencies.

This politics comes in a direct line from two fundamental and complementary
social democratic deviations: politicism and economism -managementism-
which are in fact only the application of democracy in the revolutionary
process. It would be a question of seeing the insurrection, the revolution
as being primarily and uniquely a political act (Marx spoke of a revolution
"with a political soul"): the taking by even a violent conquest of the
political power, of the state apparatus, in fact "occupation" of the bourgeois
state, then, as a function of the circumstances (else where always unfavourable!),
the taking of such or such economical measures in the interest or not of
the proletariat, with or without its consent (cf. the introduction of the
Taylor system and of the 8 hour day since the beginning of the Bolshevik
dictatorship). According to this conception, which is as much that of political
mediation as is "workers'" democracy, the communist revolution is no longer
a social revolution having to completely destroy the bourgeois state and
capitalist relations of production, having in the same process to destroy
wage labour and transform production into the reproduction of human life;
the "communist" revolution is nothing more than a change of political staff
(same as in the bourgeois revolution), who get together to make some economic
measures reforming the mode of production. Such is the real basis of the
conception of "socialism in one country" which allows people to believe
that "workers political power" can maintain itself thus (and for the USSR
today we are talking of more than 60 years) on the basis of the capitalist
system itself, and especially when reformed. From this, of course, the
period of transition from capitalism to communism is no longer anything
more than "the transitory mode of production", "workers democracy" in politics
and "workers' management" in economy, the socialist mode of production
(the soviets plus electrification) which would be a wise mixture of capitalism
and... "workers'" democracy whilst waiting for the final redemption. And
of finding here all the "marxologist theoreticians" of the "socialist stage",
of "state capitalism necessarily serving as a prelude to communism",...
in fact, of vulgar apologists of the capitalist system in its soviet form,
Russian or Chinese...

For us as for Marx, on the contrary, the period of transition is, and
cannot be other than, the dictatorship of the proletariat for the abolition
of wage labour, i.e. a whole process destroying the fundamental bases of
the capitalist system (value, money, capital, wage labour) to immediately,
in and by this same process, affirm more and more massively and consciously,
human community, the human collective being. The period of transition can
only be understood as a unitary process, a totalitarian movement of positive
destruction/affirmation, destruction -negation- in so far as it dictatorially
undermines the foundations of capitalism (extraction of surplus value based
on the difference between necessary labour and surplus labour), affirmation
-negation of the negation- for the more thhe process of destruction is generalised
and therefore ceases to exist, the more fully will appear a new communal
way of life, a communist way of life. Each endeavour which aims at separating
in time or space the two terms -destruction and affirmation- of the process,
of the transitory movement, inevitably ends up breaking it, returning in
one way or another to wage slavery. That is evidently where politicism
and economism end up, like all conception of a "transitory means of production",
i.e. a phase of "workers'" democracy intermediate between capitalism and
communism.

To replace or identify dictatorship of the proletariat with "workers"
democracy, beyond the alteration of the terrorist character of the workers'
dictatorship, signifies the perpetuation of political mediation, the perpetuation
of capitalist social relationships -wage labour- self managed, democratically
controlled by proletarians themselves. This is through denying the "semi-state"
(Marx) character of the proletarian state, that is to say the process of
extinction of the political sphere and the extension of human community.
Such a self managed society is the realized utopia of capitalism, a world
whose motor remains that of value valorizing itself -capitalism- but having
evacuated from it the revolutionary, destroying side -the proletariat-
in order to only maintain the reproductive pole of capital. "Workers'"
democracy thus expresses most fully the dream of all reformers of the world:
capital without its contradictions, "present society purged of the element
which revolutionize and dissolve it" (Marx - Bourgeois Socialism - The
Communist Manifesto). As Barrot rightly said:

"Democracy served to harmonise the divergent interests in
the framework of the bourgeois state. Now, communism knows no state, it
destroys it; and nor does it know opposing social groups. It thus automatically
dispenses with every mechanism of mediation which would decide what it
would be fitting to do. To want communism and democracy is a contradiction.
Since it is the end of politics and the unification of humanity it installs
no power above society in order to make it stable and harmonious."

Barrot - Le Mouvement Communiste (Editions Champ Libre)

The paradox between communism and democracy is only the expression of that
between the revolutionary proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The immense
weight that social democratic and libertarian tradition weighs on the communist
movement has for a long time induced the proletariat to conquer the bourgeois
state, pacifically or not, to occupy it, to reform it; that to the rot
of the bourgeois democracy, it was necessary to oppose the purity of "workers'"
democracy, briefly, that to all the bad capitalists, it was necessary to
oppose and realize its benefits, the benefits of democracy -democracy as
the positive pole of capital.

Against all these returns to bourgeois socialism, revolutionary marxism
is always demarcated by the need to destroy capital social relations, the
totality of the system.

• It is not a question of defending the labour pole against that of capital.

• It is not a question of liquidating the "wicked" capitalists in order to
  use the "good" productive forces.

• It is not a question of criticizing the barbaric bourgeois democracy to
  the benefit of civilizing "workers'" democracy.

What interests us is the destruction of the entire system whose positive
poles -democracy, progress, civilisation, sciences,...- only exist as function
of and thanks to the negative poles -white terror, war, famine, pollution,...

"We marxists have our theoretical papers perfectly in order
on this point: To the devil with freedom! To the devil with the State!"

Bordiga - Communism and Human Knowledge, 1952

Notes

1. We refer the reader interested by this question to Marx's classics (above
all: "On the Jewish Question") as well as to Bordiga's work (especially:
"The democratic Principle") -of which we can send you an english copy-
continued by the Communist Left from Italy in exile, i.e. Bilan, Octobre,
Prometheo and more recently by Camatte and the review Invariance (first
series). As for ourselves, we have written and republished a serie of texts
on this question:

• "Fasciste ou anti-fasciste, la dictature du capital c'est la démocratie"
  - in Le Communiste No.9.
• "Against the myth of democratic rights and liberties"
  - in Communism No.8.
• "L'Etat démocratique" (Bilan No.12) - Le Communiste No.12.
• "La dictature du prolétariat et la question de la violence" (Octobre
  No.5) - in Le Communiste No.17.

2. The reader is referred to the text "Quelques leçons d'octobre"
in Le Communiste No.10/11 (in french).

3. The USPD or "Independent Social Democratic Party" so called "majoritary",
which on the basis of the same program -the old Gotha Program- wanted to
give back to social-democracy a virginity, which the 3 and 1/2 years of
imperialist war relentlessly defended by the SPD, had disintegrated, to
say the least. The entry of the spartacists into the heart of the USPD
entailed the impossibility of the constitution of a force on communist
base. A good many spartacists were rejoining the positions of the ISD (which
materialised later, in 1918) and by the time of the founding of the KPD
(S) it was anti-democratic, anti-union and anti-parliamentary tendencies
which dominated the formal centrist leadership (Luxembourg, Levi, Jogishes,
Dunker,...).

On this question we refer the reader to Authier and Barrot's book: "The
Communist Left in Germany", as well as to our text "The KAPD in revolutionary
action", in Le Communiste No.7.

4. as the text said, the IKD's were founded to oppose the Spartacus
Leagues' social democratism, indicating by the name "communist" the class
split with the social democrats of every shade. The VKPD -Unified Communist
Party of Germany- was constituted in 1920, after the exclusion of the majority
of the KPD(S) -a merger against the nature of the IKD's and Spartacus League-
thanks to the manoeuvrings of Levi and Zetkin, thus excluding the "leftists",
that is to say all truely revolutionary tendencies. It was in the wake
of this exclusion that the KAPD -German Communist Workers Party- was to
constitute itself in 1920 which was to prolong the inheritance of the ISD's
and IKD's. The remnants of the KPD(S), in fact essentially the staff and
the leadership, were to fuse with the "masses" of the USPD so as to form
the VKPD, a mass centrist party, if not squarely bourgeois.

5. We have already on different occasions, indicated that if for us
the use of violence, terrorism and terror are class methods, and as such,
part of the communist program, violence and terror never in themselves
constitute a class demarcation. Terror and terrorism are indispensable
but insufficient. Contrary to Lenin and Trotsky who, in believing that
terror was the essential delimitation, ended up massacring and putting
down the revolutionary proletariat (strikes of 1921-23, Krondstat,...)
we defend these methods of workers' struggle when they are put into action
in the historic interests of the proletariat. In this sense, they are "subsidiary",
that is to say determined by the class that uses them. On this question
we refer the reader to our text "Critique du réformisme armé"
in Le Communiste No.17 and No.19.

"(The communists) propose to unmask
in advance the insidious game of democracy, and to begin their attack against
social democracy without waiting for its counter-revolutionary function
to be revealed with a flash in actual fact."

Workers' Memory, from Communism #4

"This signifies the rashest defiance of everything that stands for law and order and the worship of the Homeland, which is the worship of institutions under whose protection groups of more or less genuine workers attempt to vent their hatred and class resentment with unspeakable abuse" said the bourgeois of the "Union", 1921.

"Proletarians of all countries, unite! In a single unit, in a powerful embrace of exploited brothers, let us march down the road that leads to the emancipation of the slaves of capital" replied the Rio Gallegos Workers' Society of the Various Trades, in 1921.
* * *

It is only to be expected that the bourgeoisie should try to hide, to falsify and suppress the memory of every historical process in which the proletariat has acted as an autonomous force. However, in so doing it admits to its own terror at being confronted yet again by these forces which arise out of the savagery of bourgeois domination. It is only to be expected that the proletariat should fight to unearth its history and to strengthen itself through it. In so doing, it clearly illustrates the need to return to past experience and to expose its class enemies in order to prevent repeating mistakes for which such a high price in blood and humiliation has already been paid. It is impossible to realise our aim - the destruction of capital - without repossessing our history. The bourgeoisie is aware of this and therefore tries to prevent our experience accumulating. In turn, the proletariat is conscious of these bourgeois attempts and therefore fights to reconstitute its experience. Every revolutionary advancement brings to light a past which had seemed to be buried forever. Social-democracy did such a perfect job at the beginning of the century that all the major workers struggles of the past century were either misunderstood or completely distorted; what was sold as marxism was actually bourgeois politics directed at workers, represented most famously by Kautsky. The major working class struggles at the end of the last century and at the beginning of this one permitted the rediscovery of facts, texts and viewpoints indispensable for the reconstruction of the communist programme.

After several years of counter-revolution, and especially after the sixties, the problem arose once again due to the revival of the proletarian fight. In Latin America, as everywhere we are beginning to rediscover the history of the world's proletariat. In every country facts are coming to light after centuries of capitalist exploitation. A lot of myths, like that of Latin-American feudalism, are being shattered - capitalism alone must take the responsibility for centuries of abject poverty and extermination. History exposes the true nature of many political parties continuing to maintain a working-class veneer more importantly, even though very basic, the working-class is realising that it has a rich history of heroic struggles. The myth of the Latin-American independence liberation has collapsed and been shown up for what it really was - a war between imperialist interests and powers. From the start of the 19th century onwards the so-called progressive Latin-American bourgeois were also shown up for what they really were -organised assassins of the proletariat (miners, agricultural workers, Indians, Gauchos, slaves, craftsmen and homeworkers) - and the conflict between civilisation and barbarism, progress and anarchy resumed its true character of class antagonism.

Today it is no longer possible to hush up the efforts that the Latin-American proletariat made to establish class organisations. The first socialist organisations and newspapers (utopian socialism) appeared in Latin-America in the 1830s and 40s from just about all different quarters. In the following decades workers' strikes in urban industries became more and more significant, adding to the miners' - proletarianized 'peasant' (1) -permanent struggle against the local and metropolitan bourgeoisie. The first section of the 1st International were set up in 1865 and had a significant boost in the following decade by the arrival of the combatants of the Commune. From then on, the number of workers' associations increased and major demonstrations, strikes, street confrontations and insurrectional attempts took place one after the other.

Of all the buried chapters of our history, the most important are those recounting the most intense moments of the struggle and the formation into classes, that is the revolutionary period of 1917-1923. Over the whole world the proletariat showed itself to be the "protagonist of its own history". 'Dictatorship of the proletariat' and 'communist revolution' were, for the first time in world history, no longer merely the slogans of a handful of revolutionaries but had become widespread among the working-class of all countries. Up until then the communists had stated that the revolution would have to be world-wide for it to happen at all, but they were unclear on how it would become generalised throughout the world. The victorious insurrection in Russia served as an example to them and added fuel to the fire (a fire which was already smouldering in many countries), giving them a practical answer to their questions, on the one hand by uniting the proletariat by drawing up a clear perspective (of which the organic formalisation in the Third International was only one of the aspects) and on the other hand by uniting the whole counter-revolution (the socialists first of all) against the insurrection. The world proletariat, for the fist time in its history appeared as a single unit, a single movement with a single perspective: revolution.

It was this sane cry, this same perspective of communist revolution which was heard and which spread to an area as far away as Patagonia.

Incredible? certainly, anything that is capable of stating revolution seems impossible after having been filtered by more than 5 decades of counter-revolution. Only the recent awaking of the Latin-American and world proletariat has permitted the discovery of such facts and will permit many others to be disinterred and reinterpreted.

How can it be that such important historical facts are either unknown or distorted? How has it proved possible to camouflage history in this way? The simple answer is that, outside the area directly concerned (Argentina, Chile, Latin-America), the counter-revolution has managed to perpetrate the myth of a Latin-America populated by peasants (campesinos), fighting for land or national revolution.

Therefore the proletariat has remained unable to identify its own worldwide class and recognize its own struggle. In Europe, for example, even groups defending the working-class positions take up obviously counterrevolutionary positions with respect to Latin-America. These are identical to those taken up by the Latin-American socialists in 1917-23 and later by the stalinists (agrarian and anti-imperialist revolution, national revolution continued by the proletarian revolution, etc).

In Argentina (and in Chile), where the myth of the peasant (campesino) was more difficult to impose on the proletarians, who recognized the struggles of the agrarian proletariat to be their own, 2 incorrect explanations of the nature of the struggles were put forward (as always):

- the explanation by the Argentinean army, the Patriotic League, etc. was the following: the army has had to take action against foreign bandits who were killing and raping, burning down the "estancias" (2), etc.

- the explanation by trade unions, socialists, stalinists, etc. was as follow: the army has tortured, beaten and given the order to dig mass graves for 1500 workers who will be gunned down for demanding nothing more than their rights.

The monumental four-volume book by Osvaldo Bayer (3) has enabled us to discount both explanations. Bayer's is the only reliable work or the subject. It is impossible to find fault with the documentation and the depth of the theme dealt with and he has been of great use to us. Nevertheless, the author's interpretation arises from a conception which differs to our own and therefore we will not reproduce it in this article.

Patagonia, past history and protagonists of the fight

Patagonia is an immense territory situated at the tip of the southern point of Latin-America (from the Atlantic to the Pacific) divided into small antagonistic states by politics of capital, coloniser as well as independentist, on the basis of the existence of a natural border, the Andes Cordilla. During the conquest capital defined it as "land unable to yield any return" thanks to which the indigenous communities were able to remain as such for a bit longer. But plans for future integration were the very reason why it was decided not to exploit this area. Integration was achieved during the first half of the 19th century. The bourgeoisie, expanding over the productive area known as Argentina (a bourgeoisie originating from all over the world but very patriotic, of course), decided to send its army to civilise the area. This resulted in the total extermination of the indigenous communities. This was the prize paid by every indigenous organisation which hadn't developed methods of exploitation and major collective labour which could be directly used by capital as a basis for its transformation into a subsidiary (and not "pre-capitalist") means of production of capital.

Colonisation is a capitalist undertaking which, based on the best possible profits obtainable, decides to appropriate some sort of productive forces (mines, men, land). But there, there were no mines, the men proved themselves inadaptable to the structure of the wage-labour and most of the land was pasture. There was no doubt about the capitalist decision: kill the men, appropriate the land and then bring in other men already used to working for the capitalists for a wage.

Once this process had been accomplished, as in many other parts of Latin-America (4) the great majority of the population was composed of workers from all over the world.

The result of this combination was a high degree of "internationalism" of the 2 protagonistic classes in Patagonian confrontation. The fundamental determination of capital is its valorization - it decides which homeland to defend subsequently. It is for this reason that the "Argentinian patriots" in Patagonia consisted of English limited companies, German, Belgian, North-American, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Uruguayan, Russian, Chilean, and a few Argentinean capitalists. The workers also came from all over the world - Chileans, Spaniards, Argentineans, Russians, Paraguayans, Italians, Germans, etc. - but they had no homeland to defend. Theyy had only the internationalism of their class to brandish high, which is what they did.

Across these millions of almost totally unpopulated hectares of land there were only cows, sheep and capital. This was the scene that gave rise to the feudalist and pre-capitalist theories or even the idea of the definitive "subsumption" (5) of labour to capital. But none of these ideas were correct since the pre-existing labour-process had been completely destroyed. Patagonia was not the same as Rio Grande, Provencia Oriental, Entre Rios or even Buenos Aires, where the "estancia" had been preceded by a century of "vaqueria" (6) (the definitive subsumption of labour to capital).

In a few decades, on these lands fertilized by Indian blood, capital got all the activities necessary for production, commercialisation, stocking, internal and external transport working, using no more people than was necessary for its valorization (the industrial reserve army were made up of the "chilotes" (7) and the European unemployed).

The rapid growth of the wool, leather and meat industries was controlled by the same capital at all its stages. At the end of the last century the same owners were to be found in the estancias, the banks, the refrigorating industries, the warehouses, the insurance, electricity and telephone companies, the shoe factories, the shipyards, the department stores, the maritime goods, passengers, inland and overseas companies, etc.

Apart from the local police and the Chilean and Argentinean army, the politico-military forces upon which the bourgeoisie could rely in the class confrontation were the following: a collection of political and military machinery, decentralized relative to the State, such as the Patriotic Leagues (Argentinean and Chilean para-military organisations), rural societies, commercial and industrial leagues, the local as well as the Buenos Aires press, the free labour association (an army of strike-breakers, as indicated by its name), the democratic and anti-imperialist Yrigoyenismo and other forces which were claimed to be part of the working class. On the workers' side there were innumerable associations and local workers' federations. Nevertheless, the movement was centralized around and directed by the workers' society of Rio Gallegos which, opposed to all the patriotism of the times, stated in its statutes as early as 1910 that "the society will commemorate no other day apart from the 1st of May, since that is the day of protest of the workers of the whole world". In 1914 the first strike took place, the first men were imprisoned for subversion, the strike became generalised, scabs arrived from Buenos Aires, pickets started to confront strike-breakers and there were confrontations with the police, etc. Up until then the Patagonian ports had done no more than to show solidarity with the strikes decided upon in an agitated Buenos Aires. In April 1917 the first attempt at general strike was declared by the Rio Gallegos workers' society.

But after the revolution in Russia the tone of things altered. In 1918, general strike was decided upon in Puerto Deseado. The strikers derailed a train, shot and surrounded a black-leg, etc.

At the end of the year and at the beginning of 1919 strike was declared by the workers' organisations in Chilean Patagonia, the centres of which were Puerto Natales and Punta Arenas. In Puerto Natales the workers took over the town. The workers' measures increased and the first news of the revolutionary strike in Buenos Aires was reported in Rio Gallegos in the following way: "General revolutionary strike. Everything completely paralysed. Shooting between strikers and police. Many deaths and injuries. The movement is intensifying. Several railway trains and stations have been destroyed by fire. The situation is serious. We have never seen anything like it!".

One can imagine the emotion amongst handful of workers meeting at Rio Gallegos and calling, for a general assembly of the whole area. As a result, the police campaign gained momentum, the whole of the working-class leadership ended up in prison and the premises were ordered to be closed. But the governor, Correo Falcon, and superintendent Ritchie had not won yet. The workers' federation secretly organised a new leadership and began to distribute pamphlets calling for strike. But the detentions continued and two days later, something happened which seemed incredible in the area: the proletarian women took to the street and confronted the police, unarmed. The pamphlets were circulating throughout Rio Gallegos and even penetrated the prison: "Soldiers and police officers... there is no need for you to remain the people's executioners. Unite with the people, as your colleagues did in Rosario". The repressive forces found the organisers of the movement, put them into prison and broke up the struggle. The white guard was organised and the governor of Santa-Crux and superintendent Ritchie organised the forces destined to save the "Chilean" bourgeoisie in its time of difficulty. The workers' council which had taken over the town of Puerto Natales was liquidated, the Chilean army took the situation into its own hands and the leaders of the councils were executed.

The bourgeoisie had won battle of 1919, but in 1920 the world economic crises spread to this cattle-rearing region. The world market for wool and meat was saturated and prices fell; produce rotted in Argentinean ports. Capitalism began to put its crisis policies into operation: reduction of wages, unemployment, austerity. The working-class retaliated with major strikes by the rural proletariat in Santa Fe, Entre Rios, Cordoba, Chaco, Patagonia and the Buenos-Aires province.

The Argentinean army and the Patriotic League were the decisive elements against the "foreign subversion" (according to the expression used by "Forestal", a London-based firm) the Argentinean Patriotic League described its action in the following way: "in the name of collective interests (against) ... the outbreak of anarchist agitation by bandits ... who wanted to use their weapons to liberate some detained agitators. This state of affairs makes it necessary to take the important step of mobilising the brigades and, divided into defence sections, we are ready to repel the aggression."

Before completing this presentation of the protagonists and antecedents of the struggle, we should quickly mention the political positions and organisations which were of importance in the fight:

- the Rio Gallegos Workers' Society was affiliated to the 9th congress R.A.W.F. (Regional Argentinean Workers' Federation) [this is an English translation of the union's acronym, which was generally referred to as the FORA - libcom] or Trade Unionist R.A.W.F. Nevertheless, the affiliation was a purely formal one. In reality, the R.A.W.F.'s position was openly counter-revolutionary and all its policies centred on critical support for Yrigoyen's "democratic and anti-imperialist" regime. The revolutionaries of the time referred to the R.A.W.F. - with good reason - a chameleon or as the R.A.W.F. of ministries (ministrialist), because on the one hand it changed its political position as one changed one's shirt and on the other hand it withdrew from all the major strikes at the crucial moment and its leadership took cover in ministries.

- the truly proletarian forces, that is to say the communists, had proved unable, as all over the world, to organise themselves around a single centre. The most significant revolutionary force was the predominantly anarcho-communist communist R.A.W.F. This was the only organisation to attempt to support the Rio Gallegos Workers' Society. The Argentinean Communist Party, the A.P.C., despite being one of the first set up in the world (Jan.1918), was already dominated by the right-wing faction. Its leadership already contained the unfortunately famous Ghioldi, Codovilla (eternal travellers to Moscow) who maintained the leadership on the basis of the Third International (I.C.) opportunistic policies against left-wing faction (the majority in the first three congresses) which went in to publish the newspaper "la Chispa" (8). The Patagonian workers could hope for nothing from this party. If the proletariat had indeed united by the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik policies which conserved capital and repressed the workers along with the opportunism of the I.C. only served to divide it again. Of these two contradictory aspects in 1920-22 only the first reached Patagonia. It was only in 1922 that articles began to appear condemning the working-class policies of the Bolsheviks. This explains the fact that up until then the Patagonian workers, whether they regarded themselves as pure anarchists, communist-anarchists, communists or even socialist had all identified themselves with the Russian revolution, which showed them the way, and used everyday expressions such as "if Lenin catches you!". As workers, material necessities and the example of the Russian revolution tended to unite them in a single party of communist action.

But the absence of a basic plan of action and solid organization resulted tragically in perpetual changes in the Rio Gallegos workers' Society with consequences which we shall consider subsequently.

1920-21 direct action and general strike

In April 1920 the governor, Correo Falcon, declared that "Elements with progressive ideas originating from the federal chief town and other parts of the country have begun a campaign aimed at disrupting public order on this territory." Indeed, the Rio Gallegos Workers' Society had succeeded in reorganising itself and in July declared strikes in the Patagonian ports and Hotels.

The bourgeoisie was very much in favour of a repressive solution to the problem. Detentions first began in Rio Gallegos and then in Santa Fe. All workers' meetings were prohibited and beatings and prison sentences were given to those who chose to resist this prohibition. Superintendent Ritchie demanded that troops be sent. The workers' society retaliated by calling for all workers to come out in sympathy for the strikers. And across this barren land (one must not forget the sparseness of the working-class population and the communication difficulties from one estancia to another, etc.) the incredible happened: the strike to free the prisoners became unstoppable.

The bourgeoisie retreated and freed a few prisoners, hoping to break the strike. But the strike continued and by the 1st November the bourgeoisie was left with no other choice but to free them all. But this was already too late, the workers' organisation and communication had improved and they decided to continue the strike, this time to try and gain improvements in the agricultural workers' conditions.

The representatives of the "estancieros" (9) promised to make "sacrifices" and to grant wage increases as well as a series of improvements. But it was again too late: the rural proletariat had already formed its own avant-garde and guaranteed an extension of the fight. Two armed contingents had gone into action. Their historical leaders were "El Toscano", (due to his Italian origins) whose real name was Alfredo Fonte, and "68" (his prison number, also an Italian) whose name was Jose Ricardi. They went from farm to farm, calling for strike and agricultural workers joined the march. They took everything necessary to continue to the fight as they went: provisions, horses, weapons and money. With every action the movement was strengthened both in men and in arms. The land-owners, bosses and administrators of the estancias were taken hostages. All that remained necessary was to disappear in order to throw the police off the scent.

The situation was now such that the whole of southern Santa Cruz was paralysed. The owners attempted to negotiate once more and the "irigoyenists", in the role of "workers' advisors", called for an improvement in harmony between capital and labour. The strike continued, was strengthened and spread. Half a million animals rotted on farm without being able to be sold, the refrigorating factories were unable to function and the ports were completely paralysed. Police repression and detentions were unsuccessful in halting the movement.

The bourgeois newspaper then announced the founding of the "Association of free labour": "The initiative has been taken by an important group in the region to found an 'Association of free labour' so that the worker, tyrannised by the absurd sectarianism maintained by combat groups and other meant of dissuasion, may be completely free to change his direction whenever he chooses, depending on current events and his own interests." In the name of Democracy and Freedom of labour, it was decided to send a group of scabs to Buenos-Aires. Considering that the trade unionist R.A.W.F. (to which the Rio Gallegos Workers' Society was affiliated) was in control of the sea workers' organisations, one could have supposed that they would have at least prevented the arrival of the scabs. But that was too much to hope for: the chameleon R.A.W.F. was positioned on the opposite side of the barricades. The scabs disembarked.

Accompanied by a police escort, it was attempted to bring them to the workplaces. But the workers greeted them with rifle shots, bullets which reminded the proletariat that they are sections of the working- class which refuse to take part in the democratic game, who understand perfectly that democratic freedom is the freedom for the oppressors to maintain exploitation and that statutes and other legal procedures are made to disorganise the workers as a class.

The scabs and their escort were so frightened that they returned to Rio Gallegos immediately. An indignant Correo Falcon ordered superintendent Ritchie to pursue Toscano's and 68's avant-garde, using cars and the police, but they found no trace of the "bandits". The bourgeoisie used this term to separate the armed groups of workers from those "fighting peacefully for their economic interests", hoping in this way to divide the proletariat, to discredit the class's violent action and to isolate the working-class vanguards.

The working-class understood the root of the problem perfectly and saw a qualitative change in the new forms of struggle in the confrontation with capital. It knew that the "bandits" were in fact its class brothers, that they were all "bandits". "Long live the bandits from the South" were the headlines of the workers' press in Buenos-Aires. "Bandit" became synonymous with "worker aware of his class enemies". The Workers' Society which, considering its filiation, should have been opposed to the support of such initiatives, called for "a show of solidarity by continuing the indefinite strike unfalteringly",

The bourgeoisie began to use new weapons to break up the growing unity and centralisation developing in the working-class struggle. The owners made new proposals: very generous ones this time. Terrified by the proletariat's increased organisation and armamentation, the bourgeoisie retreated, preferring to lose a really considerable amount of surplus-value than the whole of capital, including possibly its own head.

The unionist R.A.W.F. defended, in front of the workers, the need to accept the owners' proposals, it came as a big surprise to them when the Workers' Federation answered: "No! the strike will go on!". The chameleon R.A.W.F. had revealed its true nature. As always in these situations, the newspapers championed the cause of "workers' democracy". They proposed that the parties concerned, the agricultural workers, should be consulted and tried to break the class unity using the pretext of majority. They denounced the commission that had taken the decision to continue the strike in the name of the assemblies: "Is the commission a sufficient authority to reject the proposals that had been made, without consulting the workers, who are the only ones actually concerned in the conflict?".

Nevertheless, and despite the attempts of the unionist R.A.W.F., the assembly came down in favour of continuing the strike. The unionist R.A.W.F.'s standpoint was not only utopian and reactionary, but frankly authoritarian, because the armed workers' groups were either unable to participate in the vote or they were liquidated on entering the town. The worthy predecessors of Argentinean trade unionism weren't in the least bit embarrassed to admit that they were against all working-class action: "Convinced that fanaticism is dangerous, we were insulted, even threatened, when we attempted to avoid the worst that threatened us at that time. We see the same situation today a direct consequence of the illogical frequency of strikes and the absurdity of boycotts, and we are forced to support it!". These men were those supposed to put the Patagonian workers in contact with the rest of the Argentinean workers. Obviously the workers remained unsupported, despite efforts of solidarity made by the communist R.A.W.F.

At that time, Correo Falcon (the governor) played a card which could still teach us a thing or two about democratic freedom and rights and about the services rendered to the employers by the unions: "The Workers' Federation of this town is directed by elements which have nothing to do with the workers themselves. This has recently produced a profound split between the bad and the good elements since the later have withdrawn their support for the leadership of the agitators, given that no economic or social improvements have been made for the worker... groups of men excited by sovietist speeches have thrown themselves into the fields, cutting innumerable barbed-wire fences..., it is to be expected in this situation that the police should act energically to protect property and the freedom of labour, since that is their principal duty... As long as the situation remained calm and the workers weren't calling for disorder and lootings, they could hold all assemblies and meetings they wished, considering that they were exercising their rights without affecting the property of others. But as soon as they used these rights to break the peace (of exploitation) and to put constitutional guarantees (the bourgeois domination) at risk, they necessary had to be restrained."

The first armed confrontations took place at "Puerto Deseado" on the 17th of December 1920. One worker was killed and many other were injured or taken prisoner. The workers came through badly but they didn't weaken. As they didn't possess a printing-works, they wrote out pamphlets by hand: "To the working-class people. Comrades: Thirty comrades have been imprisoned by the capitalist tyranny, but we shall carry on fighting for the cause with ever increasing enthusiasm. Down with tyranny, long live the strike!".

At the end of December, superintendent Michieri issued the following ultimatum: "You have 24 hours in which to either go back to work or to leave the Argentinean Lago, otherwise I guarantee to have you beaten and drowned in a bloodbath and sent to the other side of the Cordillera."

Anything serving as logistic support for the strikers - small shops, bars meeting halls, etc.- was wrecked. Whoever turned up at any such place was immediately arrested and beaten up. Superintendent Michieri's troops were successful until they confronted 68's and El Toscano's men, who were unintimidated by their uniforms. They ordered Michieri to stop and the superintendent and his men responded by shooting. This method had always worked up until then, but this time the workers answered bullets with bullets, without hesitation. As a result, several policemen were killed, officers of the Patriotic League were injured and others surrendered and were taken prisoner by the workers. The superintendent, with two bullet wounds, was taken hostage.

When the workers' forces, at that time between 500 and 600 men, decided to continue on their route, superintendent Ritchie's reinforcements arrived from Rio Gallegos. There was a fresh confrontation and the workers lost a comrade, but it cost the police deary. One officer of bourgeois law and order was killed during the fight and another was executed; Ritchie's forces were obliged to flee many of them with bullet wounds as souvenirs, Ritchie himself with one in his right hand.

The patriot's commission returned defeated to Rio Gallegos. The atmosphere of terror for the bourgeoisie was reinforced by the fire in "La Ambrense" warehouse, which was stocked full with tanks of naphta and oil. Bayer commented that "the strikers had chosen their target well. All night long there was one explosion after another. the terror is acting like an ice cube down the backs of all those who believe in private property. On the other hand, for the poor man it is a real show, all this banging of fireworks, many people believe that it is time to leave because Santa Cruz resembles Russia in 1917."

Correo Falcon's appeal was pathetic: "The situation created by subversive elements makes it necessary for all men who respect the law and freedom, which the National constitution grants us, to unite. This is not a working-class movement, but something much worse: a subversion of order, of all the principles of equity and justice. Elements which have neither homeland nor laws are murdering ... we must preserve the respect for our Constitution and our laws and hold high the sacred teaching of the Homeland." And all the patriots assembled, faced with the serious situation, from the Argentinean Patriotic League to the British Legation in Buenos Aires, from the Chilean government to the radical Yrigoyenist democrats, from the Rural Society to the chameleon R.A.W.F. The English government and the new German republic made pathetic appeals to the Argentine chancery to protect property and the citizen.

How the workers' unity was destroyed

The Rio Gallegos Workers' Society continued to appeal desperately to the Buenos Aires unionist R.A.W.F., which, on the contrary, was making separate agreements, wherever it had any influence, to get men back to work: "maritime workers' federation". The situation in Rio Gallegos became unbearable. Soto vacillated, because of his partial and intuitive rupture with counterrevolutionary ideology and anarcho-trade unionism, and finally opted for halting the strikes in the towns. Soto had never approved of the movement's qualitative leap toward direct action and the offensive. He considered it necessary to explain that the workers, when faced with repression, had to defend themselves armed, but up until then "the workers from the country had been acting within the limits of their indisputable right to strike in order to be able to sell their labour force at the price they required". Soto's position, (centrist and very confined to right-wing ground) against which the communist avant-garde fought, differed from that of the trade unionist R.A.W.F., obviously on the completely opposite side of the fence. Acting upon Soto's advice, whose influence was total and this time disastrous, the Rio Gallegos Workers' Society stopped the strike. The agricultural workers continued, completely isolated.

The true leadership of the strike was now in the hands of the strongmen - 68 and El Toscano -. It was decided to ssend 68 to Rio Gallegos, to combat Soto's defeatist standpoints. He entered the town under cover and left it accompanied by 30 men who already began to take action as they went, taking hostages (administrators, landowners and some policemen), commandeering weapons and horses. Other workers joined them and 68, who had left alone, returned with 150 men. Other superintendents and their inferiors attempted to confront the 50-150 men workers' detachments but they were defeated every time. The red flags continued to blaze in the countryside.

It was under such complex circumstances for the workers that "Yrigoyenism" took the lead, in the name of the whole of the bourgeoisie. They replaced Correo Falcon, the governor much hated by the workers, by an yrigonenist appointed to "defend the workers against the bosses". Argentinean troops disembarked under the command of the yrigoyenist Varela, who admitted that "the workers are right". The bourgeoisie had understood perfectly that the military situation had become very difficult and that the army wouldn't be able to crush every working-class uprising over the whole country. The available forces sent to Patagonia would have been incapable of confronting the workers if they had continued on the path to revolution as their red leaders, 68 and El Toscano were proposing.

The executive power gave the following instructions to the governors and the military: "Avoid blood-shed ... interpret the President of the nation way of thinking, well-known to be working-class orientated." Where open repression had failed, the bourgeois working-class policies were to succeed: disorganise, disarm and divide the enemy. All that was yet to come was Act II - the massacre.

Commander Varela seemed to listen to the workers' demands: freedom to all prisoners, amnesty for all those who had committed criminal acts, etc. Proposals were made to 68's and El Toscano's men and in a general assembly the majority accepted and agreed to give their weapons, the hostages, the horses and return to work.

As always in history, a revolutionary minority refused to be taken in by the myth of working-class democratism. Two hundred men, lead by El Toscano and 68, appropriated the weapons and disappeared. But the pro-workers tactics of the bourgeoisie had won and the avant-garde was cut off from the rest of the class. It will be too late when it will finally be recognized that it was "the faith in this military man that lost us fight."

Strike without perspective

Productive activities were resumed. In the estancias sheep-sheaving was going on apace and in the ports merchandise was being loaded and unloaded. The prisoners were freed and all subversives were issued with a pass, signed by Varela himself, which stated that: "this person is at liberty to travel around this land in the search of work and must not be prevented from doing so by military or police authorities". The land-owners protested at this and therefore Varela acquired the blind trust (absurdly blind) of the workers.

Radicalism had achieved its objectives and Patagonia was converted from what had seemed to be an unsuppressable state of insurrection to a recuperation of all that had been lost (for the capitalists). Promises were made for a better future and the whole of Patagonia (apart from a handful of workers who had understood their tactics) thanked and honoured the governor Iza and commander Varela for their "progressive work in the workers' favour". As one can imagine, the exploitative conditions didn't change and the promises remained nothing more than empty ones. On the 21st of March, only a month after the agreement, a strike broke out in Swift's refrigorating factories but was rapidly quelled. It was only the first sign of what was yet to come.

The classes prepared themselves for a second confrontation: the Patagonian workers did all they could to avoid remaining isolated again and to gain the solidarity of the whole class by generalising the struggle over the whole area. As a result of their drive, a congress was organised for the whole of Patagonia (Argentina and Chili) with the participation of the Workers' Societies of Puerto Madryn, Comodoro, San Julian, Puerto Santa Cruz, Puerto Descado, Rio Gallegos and the Magellan Workers' Federation. The trade-unionist R.A.W.F. openly sabotaged this attempt to centralize the fight across borders. It was totally opposed to the Rio Gallegos Workers' Society, and the R.A.W.F. objective was to remove all their external support and to set up free unions for "good" workers, etc. Each step taken by the trade-unionist R.A.W.F. was a step nearer their preparation for working-class defeat, backed-up at length by all of the bourgeois newspapers.

The first skirmishes, demonstrations and repressions took place between the 21st of March and the 21st of July in Rio gallegos and Puerto Santa Cruz -Patriots against internationalists, police corps supporting the "free" workers against the proletariat. The situation was also explosive in Chili, especially in Puerto Matales and Punta Arenas. The workers from both countries managed to coordinate and carry out some common acts of sabotage and boycott, despite the counter-revolutionary policy of the trade unionists.

In September 1921, the Workers' Federation began its offensive on two fronts. In its newspaper "The first of May" they denounced the role played by trade unionists of the R.A.W.F. and launched a campaign for proletarian internationalism. At the same time, a group of men - including Soto - covered the countryside in preparation for the new strike. On the 1st of October, under the heading "Patriotic Celebrations" ,the workers' newspapers wrote: "Last month patriotic celebrations took place. They consisted of a multitude of flags, rosettes, gatherings, balls and drinking sessions,... It seems impossible that there are comrades amongst us who support such events. Farewell to the red flags unfolded on the 1st of May." There then followed an account of world proletarian confrontations especially in Italy, where the workers predicted success for their class brothers and said: "who are the instigators of these celebrations? A few tradesmen who buy and sell products throughout the world and compete with others from their own homeland - in truth, their only homeland is profit.. A banker, who speculates in every world stock exchange, who has a stake in every world money market (in reality his homeland is money), a proprietor who employs workers of every nationality (as long as they cost as little and work as much as possible) - in reality, his compatriots are all "beaast of burden" - the cheapest and the most profitable possible (*). When will we understand - we, the proletariat, who have never land nor property nor anything material that ties us to one place more than another - that the confused notion of the 'homeland' is an irrelevancy to us? When will we realise that the homeland is perfectly established and fostered by the privileged of the bourgeois class?".

The workers' anger had already exploded in the countryside. A while before El Toscano had reappeared. Without waiting for the Workers' Society's decisions and vacillations to be sorted out, he declared a general strike in the countryside and began his plan of action: To cries of "Long live the revolution", a handful of comrades set up what they called a "red council".

Nothing was achieved by a meeting in early October with Soto. He didn't approve of El Toscano's methods and thought that everything should be agreed upon by the assemblies. There was a total split and El Toscano and his handful of men were left without any support and were imprisoned shortly afterwards. Soto and his men had signed their own sentences and marched irreparably to death. Only towards the end of October, when open repression had begun, did the Workers' Society call for a general strike. Several groups of hundred of workers were set up and covered the countryside, cutting communications and barbed wire fences taking horses, weapons and provisions. But this was all in the absurd hope that the Argentinean army would adopt a "working-class orientated policy" again. The army arrived in the area in mid-November and distributed itself in small groups throughout the region.

The internationalism of the massacre had already been organised: the Chilean governor sent the Magellan battalion and machine-gun company; the English, German and Spanish governments called for bloody repression and the Argentinean military patriotic league, the Chilean league and the Buenos Aires press urged the defence of institutions and the Homeland. The trade unionist R.A.W.F. added its own contribution towards the bloody orgy. The death penalty was decreed and the executions began.

Indeed, they were executions rather than confrontations, since the workers were politically unarmed, with neither leadership nor perspectives despite a superior number of guns. The trade unionist fluctuations of the Workers' Society had cut them off from the only possible solution: a generalised offensive. If any confrontations at all did take place the army, lead by Varela, had succeeded so well in the previous year that the workers' forces surrendered immediately to the Yrigoyenist commander. This is the only way in which it can be explained how groups of 400, 200, 250, 600, 350, 80 men surrendered to military detachments of a few dozen men without firing a single bullet. It is not known how many men were shot. Bayer puts it at 500-600, but the workers' newspapers talk of thousands.

The massacre had numerous repercussions in Argentina and Chili. The now disorganised working-class tried to retaliate. Desperate appeals appeared one after the other in the workers' newspaper. For example, the Magellan Workers' Federation said: "Workers pointed out by estancia administrators are shot in the back and others are hanged from telephone posts and then their bodies are burned. Such savage mass murders are committed in the name of the god Capital or of the Homeland. We want it to reverberate throughout the whole world like the sounding of a bugle, like an alarm, that in the so very free and democratic Argentinean republic military troops threw themselves like bloodthirsty animals at Argentinean Patagonia killing, killing!". There were a few confrontations, but no generalised counter-attack by the class. About a year later, commander Varela ended his wretched existence with 17 injuries: 15 from a bomb which blew off his legs and 5 bullets in his chest. It was a desperate act, powerless to alter events, carried out by an anarchist, as brave as he was lacking in perspectives. Revenge followed from both sides and culminated in the breaking up of the Argentinean proletariat's "general revolutionary strike" by the socialist party, the 'communist' party, the old R.A.W.F. trade unionists who were all united in the new A.T.A. (Argentinean Trade-union Association).

The Argentinean army believed that the Patagonian workers had realised the "first attempt at revolutionary war". The trade unionists rewrote history saying that the workers had been fighting for democratic rights and rightful economic demands.

As for ourselves, we reject all attempts to separate working-class interests into economic and political. The revolutionary struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing other than a generalisation of demands: the facts about Patagonia prove it. They confirm that the working-class only defends its immediate interests in fighting for communist revolution. The Protagonists understood this. Their demand was for revolution and their example the Russian revolution: "Comrades, let us continue as yesterday a strong and straightforward fight, this is how we shall achieve our demands like the comrades across the seas who managed to overthrow the vile tsarism. Long live the Workers' Federation!".

Bayer remarked that not one of the Argentinean trade unions have portraits of the Patagonian fighters, or of the workers of German origin who executed Varela, hanging up in their meeting places. On the contrary, there are portraits of the three army generals San Martin, Rosas and Peron. Is it still possible to doubt whose class interests the Argentinean unions are really defending?

Notes

1. 'peasant' or 'countryfolk' (in Spanish: 'campesino'): intelligent bourgeois expression to hide social class distinctions behind phrases such as 'inhabitant of the country-side' (like 'citizen'). One must note that the proletarianisation in Latin-America during colonisation was so violent that nothing like the 'allotment peasant' (petit-bourgeois), to which Marx refers concerning France, remained.

2. Capitalist agrarian development firm set up over a large territory.

3. The first 3 volumes published by Galerna and the fourth by Hammer.

4. Not everywhere, because where there was a pre-existing (before colonisation) developed society based on class exploitation (the Incas, Aztecs, etc.) capitalism didn't have to import the whole of its workforce in order to submit it to exploitation.

5. that means inclusion, subordination and domination.

6. "vaqueria": cow hunting to sell the leather, the meat had no exchange value.

7. contemptuous expression used by the bourgeoisie to refer to the Chilean proletariat.

8. "la Chispa", in English: "the Spark", in Russian "Iskra".

9. Owners of the estancias, individuals or societies.

* Verbation! We don't know whether or not these comrades had read Capital, but they had certainly understood it.

Introduction

In this editorial, we'll try to make a first step forward in the public definition of what we consider to be the end of a stage in the life of our group and at the same time the beginning of another stage.

We don't want to wipe out the past and pretend starting from scratch again. On the contrary, our aim is to try to synthetize the ten years of life and activities of our little group of militants by drawing lessons, political conclusions and directives.

A communist organisation is not a little communist society within capitalist society. It is neither an oasis of perfection in the midst of capitalism even though in its bosom the real proletarian vanguard might crystallize itself. A communist group is a living expression of the contradiction that makes the proletariat go always further by moving from breakings to breakings (the communist struggle is a permanent movement of negations, breakings, overtakings,...) but it is clear that there are always and there always will be different expressions and materialisations of the lack of breaking with capitalist society.

Vulgar materialism or idealism (usually both combined together) are constant deviations, existing in every communist organisation ever since the first attempts of struggle against Capital and the State. Expressions of this kind of deviations (alterations) can be found in different ranges of revolutionary action and more specifically in communist publications. Our group is convinced that only permanent criticism and self-criticism, as well as the biggest attention we pay to the criticism from our contacts, correspondents, and the proletarians in general, can help us fight such deviations. And the whole of these criticisms must be centralised through the internal and international polemics we have always had. It is these permanent criticisms assumed by all militants and centralized also through a series of organisational mechanisms that help us going forward.

A little time ago, our group announced through its press the publication of a criticism of some previous articles (1) such as "Pour un front de classe" (in "Le Communiste" No3) and "La nature catastrophique du capitalisme" (2) (in "Le Communiste" No7). These criticisms materialized for us a new step forward that allowed us to break more clearly from political economy and from the politics of the Social-democratic left. This, at that time (1982) resulted in the split of some comrades who later on constituted a grouping without perspectives (it was to disappear a few years later) called "The Internationalist Communist Fraction". During the recent phase lived by the ICG, the same tendency, characterized by idealism and dualism proper to social-democracy, reappeared and materialized through different practices and expressions which have led us to a phase of clarification also ending up in exclusions.

The central problem of the article "Pour un front de classe" was to see in the proletariat, before anything else, its heterogeneity, and to relegate to a position of secondary importance the community of interests, of perspectives, the social project, the programme: and so all this to the detriment of the essential determinations that make up a social class. The same deviation is also present in the idealist line against which we recently had to fight, but of course this only is an example. We will talk about the characteristics proper to both expressions of idealism later on in this text. Nevertheless, this idealist line has expressed itself in different articles of our reviews and even some texts that we still consider to be globally correct and that orientate our activities are impregnated with expressions reflecting an idealist conception. For example, "Les tâches des communistes" (in "Le Communiste" No21) where one can read: "And once more, even if this might make the new philosophers of the democratic ultra-left roar, the difference between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is the will to struggle (sic) against alienation and all the capitalist shit" (3).

The same deviation expresses itself in the article "L'Europe des Versaillais" (in "Le Communiste" No25) - see the self-criticism below. Also the pamphlet on "Spain - May '37" published together with the group RAIA contains as well big problems always in relation to this idealist line we are criticizing. Here also, the party is presented as an external being, foreign to the proletarians who are fighting; the "lack" of the Party is not expressed as the real weakness of a worldwide balance of forces, nor as the weakness of the level of preparation and centralization of the struggles, but as the immediate absence of an organization, genius but not existing (the "Rambo" party, possessor of lessons, positions,... to be given to the proletarians, but this party never existed and of course never will exist!). This way, the internationalist and historical dimension of the party is wiped out. For us, even in these moments of defeat (the thirties) there exist militants organised in the historical line of the party (like for example the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in France and Belgium regrouped around "Bilan", or still the Communist Left of Mexico that published "Comunismo") and although they may be very clear, they cannot possibly avoid the deep defeat of THEIR PARTY in Spain. In the same way, Marx's lucidity about the Paris Commune (after its foundation, because before it, Marx position was oscillating) did not prevent its failure. And Trotsky's position about "the lack of the Party" during the Commune is ridiculous because insurrectional struggles of our class always are expressions of our Party.

"Be that as it may, the Paris insurrection, even if it comes to be defeated by the wolves, the pigs and the dogs of the old society, is the most glorious achievement of our party since the insurrection of Paris in June" (Marx to Kugelmann - 12/4/1871).

Of course in spite of this affirmation we do not give up anything from our specific organisation as communists. This specific organisation does not accept the discipline of the workers in general, does not dissolve itself in any consultative democracy. Every fundamental struggle of our class is our struggle. Therefore we see in every weakness, in every lack of centralization, of leadership,... the problems of our own Party; and this leads us to the total rejection of pompuous groups and positions that instead of recognizing our class' weaknesses as their own and fighting against them, imagine that what's missing for the class to realize the insurrection, are their advices, and this is what they call "the Party". In their analyses of history, they claim that the proletarians can do nothing without these infaillible advisers they call "the Party" but who in reality only correspond to the idyllic image of the bourgeois intellectual sitting near his book and judging the past through his own little brain.

These examples are not restrictive! Our group has constantly fought and will keep on fighting inside as well as outside of the organisation against the multiple expressions of the idealistic line that is rottening the whole of the workers' movement. Against those who mix up the flag and the movement, who think and claim the historical party not as the party in history but as an ideal to be reached, who think that the transformation of the world essentially depends on their voluntary activity and who activate themselves to create any kind of committee under any kind of pretext and without any perspectives; against those who theorize the abolition of the family in capitalist society, who identify dialectic materialism with a method of knowledge, who believe that communism develops itself independently from the contradictions of capitalist society, who do not define the proletariat by its real practice as an "exploited and revolutionary class" but only by what they would like it to be, i.e. exclusively "revolutionary"; against those who see the communists' organised actions as actions of incitement, of stimulation, of creation (!) of the movement instead of as actions of leadership of the movement rising spontaneously from the putrefaction of this society; finally, against those who mix up the communist organisation with a school of thought, who identify concepts with reality, the communist programme with the Consciousness or with an ideal... in brief, against the whole of these political deviations of genuine idealism we affirm practical materialism, communist materialism (4). Idealism always explains history from the individual, from his will and ideas; historical materialism on the contrary explains how the social material conditions produce the individual, his will and his ideas. Ideology itself always is a practice, a social and material product as such, a material force. Ideology is matter. As materialists we never start from the ideas one may have about the world but we always start from social life, from the historical arch that relates primitive society to integral communism... in brief, from real life.

But like we've said before, a communist organisation is never completely impervious to this kind or deviations proper to the world of Reason imposed by the bourgeoisie. Therefore it is useless to try to find guarantees so that these deviations should not express themselves anymore in our group. Such guarantees do not exist; neither in organisational mechanisms nor in the purety of the Idea. For us criticism and self-criticism is a very important part of our activity and we haven't any other "guarantee" for the development of our struggle but centralized discussions and fraternal criticism. History of class struggle is full with mistakes, attempts, set-backs,... To transform those weaknesses into strength through criticism and self-criticism, such has always been the invariant practice of the most determined elements of the Party; today it is our practice.

Against idealism

The anddle of the sixties witnessed the re-emergence of the proletariat as a social force on the scene of history. After many years of counter-revolution, the old mole once again showed all those "who only believe what they see" that the communist revolution wasn't dead and that the old mole never stopped digging in spite of the forced sleep that social peace had inflicted on it. The struggles led by our class all over the world were giving force and confidence to all those who had never stopped defending our project: the abolition of classes. To the terror of the bourgeoisie facing once more the spectre of revolution corresponded - for the proletariat - a reinforcement of the links in and through the struggle. The main victory for all those who were struggling was this proletarian solidarity that developped itself as the confrontation to the capitalist enemy got organised. During such periods, the organisation into force, the tendency to constitute ourselves into the party, to give a center to our struggles, are not the privilege of such or such a group: it is reality itself that requires and impels the grouping of revolutionaries.
Wherever the proletariat had been more radical, struggling for its own dictatorship, the flowing back of the struggle during the seventies materialized itself in a dreadful defeat, in a phase of open terror from the State; and in those areas where there had only been less significant struggles, without much perspectives of generalisation, the seventies re-imposed social peace with all its awful characteristics: competition, sectarism, anti-organisationalism, individualism,...

Today the few breaches opened up in the wall of social peace aren't large enough for the historical and international reappearance of the proletariat. And although the fact of plunging always deeper into the crisis does not give credit to the bourgeois perspectives, neither does it lead to the revolutionary transformation of this old world.

In this climate of general defeat, when everyone tries to save himself above all, the gap between the minority of the proletarians in struggle and the majority of the working-class that keeps its mouth shut and continues to accept all sacrifices, is more spectacular than ever. This reality, proper to the counter-revolution and generally produced by the defeat of an important wave of struggles, expresses itself ideologically in the idealistic conception that considers the proletariat as an object on which one must intervene through a small group of intellectuals who see themselves as "subjects" because they have the "will" and/or the "consciousness" of the revolution. Here as well counter-revolution produces counter-revolution: the whole lot of theories splitting up the communist movement by putting on one side "workers" and on the other side "the revolutionary intellectual" only are the monstruous reflection of today's reality which, just like a photography, i.e. in a non-dynamic way shows on one side the atomized worker and on the other side the small groups that are theorizing.

But we know that a photography of reality is just like the tree that's hiding the forest: to limit reality to what one can see here and now, means to hide the whole dynamic or a being (communism) which can only express itself through all the richness of its historical affirmation - yesterday - today -tomorrow. To give up this point oof view implies the projection - in a mechanical-like manner - of today'ss weaknesses of the proletariat onto the future. For us, classless society means the existence of a collective unitarian being - the Gemeinwesen - which is being univocally expressed during each wave of proletarian struggle by the tendency towards the setting up of a unique worldwide centralization, clarifying and determining our struggle against these divisions. The latter (once more: produced by counter-revolution, imposed by democracy and State-terrorism) tend to dissociate, to atomize proletarians and to turn them into free individuals, far away from the "communists", also transformed here into free individuals, "importers of consciousness"!

Within our group, we have suffered from this idealistic, dualistic, social-democratic illness that consists (by refusing to take into consideration the social and material determinations of the community of struggle, interests, programme, needs, revolutionary perspectives,... of which our group is an historical product and factor; community of struggle invariably cristallized during each period of struggle, in the ineluctable tendency of the proletariat to constitute itself into a class and to centralize as a party) consists in theorizing on one side the class as being determined by the "here and now", the heterogeneity, the contengencies, by immediacy, conformism, by the will to struggle... just for a fair place in this society, by the lack of consciousness, etc. and on the other side, the party as being determined by the "yesterday-today-tomorrow", by homogeneity, by the globality, the will, the consciousness,...

The ICG isn't an island of communism right in the midst of capitalism; in a social context where competition and individualism are at their height and despite the fact that the ICG is a pole of struggle against this shit, it is impossible for our group not to reflect within itself some of today's weaknesses the proletariat undergoes in the difficult process of constituting itself as a class.

For several years and in spite or the overwhelming weaknesses of this particular period, we have been assuming what we really exist for as a revolutionary group: developing internationalism, drawing lessons from the defeats of our class all throughout history, fighting for the international organisation of our class by impelling the regrouping of revolutionaries all throughout the world (this got nothing to do with certain debates in the anglo-french "revolutionary milieu"!). But all our efforts to assume these invariant tasks, do not cure us from the determinations described above: anti-organisationalism and individualism are poisons that we must fight against including within our our own group. The idealistic tendency that we've been fighting against all throughout the passed few years, and against which only today we can clearly delimit the class-frontiers that separate us from it, was aimed at liquidating our community of struggle because of its anti-party contents.

Like always our old enemy never stops reappearing in some new disguise, but idealism betrays itself because it always ends up in considering the "party", the "communists" as something pure, external to all social determinations.

The invariable point of view of idealism is as follows: on one side you've got the workers, atomised, plunged into the shit of this society, and, on the other side you've got the "party", pure thing being strictly determined by the efforts to revolt, the will to fight and/or the facts of consciousness and will. This sometimes leads to the rejection of all practical activity for the sake of only intellectualism, and at other times to the apology of every single struggle no matter what the perspectives may be. In fact, in most cases, it's a permanent and practical oscillation between activism and theoricism. Indeed, those who see the party as a divine perfection, sole possessor of the theory that will save the proletariat, fall into activism much more often than one would imagine.

Every single struggle becomes the object of a race in order to make the idea of communism that supposedly is lacking for the struggle to be revolutionary, become "real". Idealism invariably drifts towards immediatism and ouvrierism. Like all bourgeois ideology, idealism is not just a conglomerate of ideas, it is practise, a practise of sabotage of our efforts to constitute a common organizational framework; it is an individualistic practise!

The theory of the "communist" individual is the starting-point of this deviation that negates the proletariat as the real subject of history. This ideology comes from the disappointment minorities feel in the face of the weaknesses of the proletariat. To get over their disillusion of a revolution that is not "coming", those minorities think they can substitute simple facts of will and consciousness to the historical weaknesses of the proletariat and they believe that an association of rebels or theoricians who call themselves revolutionaries can change the world. As communists we know that in spite of our will and consciousness, the balance of forces goes beyond our will-power and can never be reduced to the mere existence or non-existence of such or such a group. When the proletariat doesn't express in its struggles its ineluctable tendency to organize itself into a force, to centralize itself as a party, the international organization of the existing revolutionary forces feels the effects of this and becomes even more difficult.

Today's phase is a sectarian one, it reflects the increase of general competition endured by the proletariat and corresponds to a discontinuous phase of ups and downs historically linked up with the periods of embryonic reconstitution of the proletariat. We try as hard as we can, with all our will and all our consciousness, to fight against sectarism proper to today's phase but we never forget that communism will loom up from the guts of capitalism, from the shit of this world. All the consciousness and all the will-power of revolutionary minorities isolated in the midst of an ocean of social peace will never be sufficient to destroy capital.

The limits of today's revolutionaries - those revolutionaries for whom internationalism isn't an empty word and who really practically try to organize a community or struggle and action against all frontiers, all nations,... are the limits proper to this period. All those non- materialist (in the sense that they deny the material power of the relationship between classes) who think they'll be able to substitute facts of consciousness and will to the real balance of forces in this world, are building up sects that are each time "purer" than the previous ones, dreaming that they are constructing with their brains the bed of the revolution where the proletariat will just have to lie down in order to realize communism. And logically, they'll blame the proletarians for not applying their ready-made recipes to change the world. Whatever the form of this deviation, those who want to substitute their personal consciousness and/or revolt to the real movement of abolition of the established order, always sink into the apology of the individual. This has been materialized in our group by a series of individualistic practices, all tending more or less to gather the proletariat aroundd their own clique, making impossible any kind of work or discussion in common (cfr. their fury to defend their "freedom of thought" in the group that has led them to a practice of sect whose idealistic and tautological starting-point was: "Anyone who's not on my side, is against me!"). This means more than just disorganizing the group, it is the reinforcement, within our group, of individualistic competition!

"Competition isolates individuals from each other; not only the bourgeois but even more so the proletarians... Isolated individuals only form a class through their fight against another class; otherwise they are just enemies competing with one another." (Marx: "German ideology")

The political struggle within the ICG against this deviation isn't new and certainly isn't finished. Since 1979, date of birth of our organization, this struggle has been materialized by different organisational splits that have all led either to indifferentism or to activism, when it wasn't just to the renunciation of all militant activity. Each time we've seen that the "big programmatical disagreements" put forward, were only the ideological screen behing which to hide the real discouragement in front of the necessity to carry on the hard struggle against the current within a group with many different experiences, origins, cultures and histories; to hide an irresponsible and individualistic practice, an incapability to assume the militant tasks; to conceal a real break with the organizational framework. These "big programmatical disagreements" only are a screen to cover up a series of successive disappointments in the face of immediate activity and this has become clear by the incapability of these comrades to maintain the priorities centrally decided by our group. The outcome of such kind of split from the community of struggle and from organic centralism, always is the individual. He then settles his own priorities, day by day, calling into question every centralized activity; one day proposing the exclusion of comrades who didn't assume such or such task and the other day trying to form with them an organization in the organization; developing one day the illusion of the immediate abolition of the family, and coming back the next day to the worst social-democratic caricatures about the dualism between militant life and private life, when everyone decides for his own private life, with its inevitable complement: political officialdom!; at last, deciding (always individually) to stop assuming the tasks decided collectively and centrally, because the individual - this opportunist -submitted to his humour of the day, suddenly considers that there are other -much more inportant - things to do.

For our group, all this expressed itself, for example, in the non-assumation of a central review in Italian, as had been decided centrally (5), in our weak interventions (i.e. with lesser forces than we would and should have invested) in the railway strike in France, in the slowing down, if not in the complete paralysis of some of the central tasks (amongst which the elaboration of our "thesis of orientation", etc.).

In the face of these ruptures with the organic discipline of our group, our organization could only sanction this situation where the individual had already - de facto - "recovered" his sacred freedom of thought and action.

We don't wish that the militants who've been excluded from our group, will end the same way as those who split away from us before, but we want to warn them about the fact that the sectarian and individual practices that provoked this split, can only lead to the reproduction of the same deviations within their own group. The countless problems we meet while trying to set up an international community of struggle right in the midst of a period of counter-revolution, cannot be resolved by a split based on the first ideological argument one can think of. Sooner or later, this incapability to assume together with us the inevitable and essential debates linked to communist action, will lead to a practice of sect (6).

There is one more thing we have to say to express the entirety of our criticisms: we do not of course deny that there exist also real programmatical disagreements, but most of the time they are not expressed by those who pretend they are developing them. Indeed, it is not ideas that determine their practice; but it is their practice that determines their ideas. That's why, for example, the worst activism without principles can be covered up by an ideological discourse theorizing the "purest" ideal about the party. This has been confirmed by the experience of our class as well as by our own experience. Organizational liquidationism always hides behind the idealization of the party and/or of the communist society to be: from this point of view, the perfection and the purification to be reached, always makes today's organizative activity of seconday importance, the same way as the idealization of the perfect "revolutionary" systematically leads to the despise of today's comrades. In this sense, the ideology of individualists, sectarians and liquidationists is important and has to be analysed because it can cement their activity and therefore reinforces their practice. But ideology can never be the starting-point of our explanation and understanding... nor of our actions.

The real true starting-point of the whole of these practices (sectarism,...) is bourgeois society, competition between proletarians. And as for all ideologies, their ideology as well cannot be considered as the key to the understanding of their actions (cfr. national ideology: capital and its war produce national ideology, but without it there would be no possibility to send proletarians to be slaughtered and thus there would be no war. So, as ideology, it becomes a material element of cohesion whose consideration is essential on a second level of abstraction).

Self-criticism of the editorial published in our French review "Le Communiste"

Last year we published in our review in French "Le Communiste" an editorial "l'Europe des Versaillais" that started of a violent polemic in our group and that was to have a lot of repercussions right from its publication up until today. We had planned its publication in our Spanish review as well but straight away most comrades contested the very foundations of the idealist and voluntarist orientations expressed in this editorial. All these criticisms were centralised by the group (i.e. were circulated, discussed,...) and consequently we decided not to publish the editorial in "Comunismo", and to determine the main orientations for another text. The result of this, is the text "Against State-terrorism" published also in this issue of "Communism". Above all, these criticisms opened up a healthy process of clarification in our group as well as the progressive decantation of the different positions: all this ended up in some exclusions and resignations. Some time later on, we received a pamphlet published by one of our ex-comrades who's claiming to turn and transform his "exclusion" into a "split" sway from the ICG. In his pamphlet, the ex-comrade operates such a rewriting of history that he doesn't hesitate to present the publication of the editorial in "Le Communiste" No25 as being the mistake of someone else while in fact this text was published under his entire and exclusive responsability and with the modifications he'd decided to introduce!
But let's stop talking now about problems of responsibility that involve more specifically the internal organisation of our militant activities and let's concentrate ourselves on the decisive questions raised by this editorial. Because, if we've been able to save to our readers in spanish, arabic or english the lecture of an article that we consider as erroneous, and although a detailed criticism of "l'Europe des Versaillais" has since been published in "Le Communiste", we still think that an explanation in the other languages is important (7).

Let's start with some significant quotes from "l'Europe des Versaillais":

"The crisis of their world (that leftists consider to be an agent of revolution) proves to be the most powerful weapon of counter-revolution: Europe isn't at the moment a centre of class struggle. We've often said that the force of the State in Europe today isn't imposed by the force of the bayonets, even so when the murder of terrorists or delinquent proletarians, the raids against revolutionaries in the early morning hours, the thousands of years of prison distributed by judges,... are the normal way of life of the terrorists who govern us! The strenght of the State neither resides in the massive recruitment of proletarians in popular or patriotic fronts like this was the case during the black years before the second world-war. Even if the State in Europe doesn't skimp the means to mobilize this big whore called public opinion against Kadhafi, even if the leftists and sionist rackets carry on mobilizing for peace, for the Nicaraguan revolution... or for the next elections, nevertheless all these classical ways of governing begin to smell musty. The smell of politicians and other democrats has become so strong and repulsive that even the show-business of electoral campaigns, of anti-racist and anti-apartheid concerts do not mobilise anymore.

"Of course we do not deny that all these demonstrations, to which we can add religion, cretinization through television and other medias, through leisure, continue to exist and reappear permanently. But the spearhead of submission today, in Europe, is the submission to national economy and to economy as such. Workers' associationism today still is an exception, the competition in order to survive remains the rule. Above all, what really seems to matter today, is to make one's existence depend on the existence of production, to make one's survival depend on the survival of our exploiters, i.e. what is dominating today is the supposed community of interest between each individual proletarian and capitalist economy. This is were State terror is the strongest: "You'll be richer if your boss is richer, you'll eat more if you're factory doesn't close down because of strikes, you'll eat more if only the workers of other factories eat less,... In this Europe of sacrifices, to struggle costs more, a lot more than the individual immediate interest within the realm of the economical and political competition between proletarians. Today, this individualism is the main force of non-struggle dominating proletarians. While waiting till those who are married with the economy will make up their mind and will start making their counts, calculating in terms of life the price of sacrifices, we address ourselves to those who do not accept this jungle, those frozen waters of selfish calculation. We intend our activities for those who, in the face of the terrorist blackmail by the State, refuse to pay the ransom. The strenght of non-struggle is important, that's why we must, more than ever, join our forces, associate ourselves, centralize ourselves. Not to weep about the difficult period or about the terrible blows we're receiving from our enemy, nor to put together our "realism" - eternal source of opportunism and anti-communism. In the face of this real capitalist force, words cannot change much, neither can explanations or reason (all proletarians know what life is about!). Only the association of minorities of internationalist communist militants, reinforcing communism wherever it exists, or more precisely, clearing the way for communism, is useful. In brief, the association of those who consider it costs less to "change the world" than to be changed by it." (end of the quote from "l'Europe des Versaillais" Le Communiste No25 pp.3 and 4).

One can easily detect in this text a very strong reasoning in which there's a mixture of true elements about the lack of constitution of the proletariat into a class, and a whole series of interpretations that ignore and deny the material determinations that push the workers (that "compel" them, that "force" them, according to Marx) to constitute themselves into a force. Once this determinism has been eliminated, the text despises the revolutionary potentiality of the proletariat (which is logic) and sees the revolution only within the "communist militant minorities"! Let's put it this way: we do not deny or ignore (if anything) the decisive role of internationalist communist militant minorities (but even this can only be understood as a product of the material determinations of this society; human beings with their consciousness, their will, make history but only as far as they themselves are produced by the material conditions that are their presuppositions and that they cannot decide upon nor change through their will-power!). So once more, what we are really criticizing, is the old social-democratic dualism that separates our class into on the one hand the workers, on the other hand, bourgeois intellectuals who possess the consciousness. The editorial reproduces the same dualism, but, of course, in a more modern and radicalized version. This kind of separations lead to an idealistic and voluntary conception, seeing the revolution as a product of the will and consciouness of "revolutionaries" and/or of the "party". We do not deny the terrible situation of the proletariat. Of course we agree that "workers' associationism today still is an exception", that "the competition in order to survive remains the rule"... and only euro-centrists will deny that Europe "is not at the moment a centre of class struggle". But we cannot admit, under any circumstances, the liquidation of the whole of social determinations that constitute the fundamental motor of revolution, while substituting to this, the voluntary activities of such or such "revolutionaries". We cannot accept the ignorance of the dialectic of the communist movement (8) and its substitution by idealism for which the world is "revolutionized" by "revolutionaries". If reality really went that way, there wouldn't exist any revolutionary possibility; if revolution depended really only on "revolutionaries", then how can one possibly explain that will, consciousness, perseverance, attitudes, steadfastness,... (all elements that are very relative and that are so difficult for one or several groups to maintain during long periods of counter-revolution, as proved by history) of those "revolutionaries" will change the balance of forces as it exists today, in the way we described before. For us, things are clear: the development of capital (and this of course includes the development of counter-revolution) means the development of all its contradictions: the limit of capital, is capital itself, and its development necessarily implies the development of its own limits and antagonisms, and it is all those material facts, and only them, that create also the objective conditions allowing for man to change reality.

This brings us back to the question or the "crisis". Without going into any considerations about the meanings of the word all throughout the history or communism and Marx's work, we can see that the editorial, instead of taking this term in the contradictory sense we give it - the sharpening of the contradictions and of the material determinations - simply refers to this term in the way it is used by leftists and stalinists: in the sense of increased misery that provokes revolution.

The editorial's criticism of such vulgar and linear materialism, by affirming that the crisis develops competition between proletarians and this counter-revolution, was made from the same unilateral point of view and only in terms of mere antithesis: as if capital had no limits, as if the crisis didn't worsen the conditions for bourgeois domination (a ruling class can maintain its rule only if it can present its project as the only one, as the one that coincides with the interests of the whole of society!), as if the crisis didn't turn every worker into a potential unemployed, as if it didn't increase day after day the general discontent, as if it didn't exarcebate the whole contradictory development of life.

If we call "crisis" the sharpening of all the contradictions of capital after the end of a phase of expansion that follows war (9) and if the "crisis" each time more explosive during its cycles that always repeat and develop themselves until covering all countries, we can see the absurdity of the central thesis of "l'Europe des Versaillais": crisis is neither an automatic weapon of revolution nor of counter-revolution, as claims the editorial. It was the sharpening of all social contradictions that provoked the wave of struggles of the second half of the sixties, but at the same time this has produced an increase in competition to which the article refers in a unilateral manner. The development of the pole of revolution and the pole of counter-revolution, not only simultaneously but also, sometimes, in a cyclical way (one after the other) or even successively, is proper to the crisis (10).

The best explanation of all this, is war. War is the most important concretisation of the crisis of capital (11). War materializes all the contradictions of capitalist society because it means the progression of counter-revolution (that is only possible through war) but, at the same time, as we've witnessed all throughout the revolutionary history of our class, war produces revolution. The most important revolutionary proletarian struggles of history up until now have been struggles against capital at war. That is to say that the affirmations in the editorial about the crisis not only fall in the idealistic antithesis of mecanist materialism, but also ignore the abc of dialectics: contradiction within unity, the being creating its own negation. Even more so, once the social determinism has been ignored and once the transformation of society is imagined according to the ideas of "revolutionaries", they then "return to society" and blame the proletariat for its condition as an exploited class. "Above all, what really seems to matter today, is to make one's existence depend on the existence of production, to make one's survival depend on the survival of our exploiters, i.e. what is dominating today is the supposed community of interest between each individual proletarian and capitalist economy." Who could this phrase refer to if not to the proletariat itself. Here the cult of the individual reaches the extreme: it talks about the proletarians who "make their existence depend on the existence of production, their survival on the survival or their exploiters", as if this was a voluntary option amongst others, and not - as it is in reality - the central social determination of the proletariat as a class. This determinatlon can only be destroyed through the self-destruction of the proletariat, through social revolution. The point is not that such or such individual "makes his existence depend on the existence of his exploiters" (which is always true in this society), even so for revolted individual: but the point is that up to its self-suppression, the proletariat will only survive on the basis of the enlarged reproduction of capital (what else is alienation about!).

To conclude, we can see why the editorial of our previous review in french is a perfect little recipe to make a good idealistic soup. In crisis, it only sees counter-revolution; the proletariat is only defined by the pole of non-struggle; the communist minorities are the only carriers of communism; class struggle doesn't exist anymore (in Europe). So then, we just have to leave it up to those who have "understood" (consciousness) and/or those who "want" another world. This way the party defined by these pure categories of thought, becomes just a structure to be constructed brick after brick and that will turn up like a new messiah whenever, at last, workers will decide to start moving!

Negating the determinations that make this centralising unique and worldwide force surge up "from the soil of modern society" (Marx) and reducing all this to facts of will and consciousness, leads in one way or another, to the idea of a party to be built up and where the individual presents himself as the only guarantee of the revolution. One of the characteristics of the counter-revolution is to present the individual as the unique guarantee of the truth.

"It's in those moments... that the old and lifeless molecule called "individual" covers itself with a kind of crust called consciousness and begins to chatter claiming it will go wherever and whenever it wants to go, raising its immeasurable stupidity to become the supposed motive power, the causal subject of history". (Bordiga)

Errors and guarantees against them

We already can hear our enemies shout: "It's a scandal! This group isn't serious, it first publishes a position and later on criticizes it, this shows a lack of guarantee for the struggle!!!". But also, there will be militants, groups, readers, who struggle with us against capital, comrades, who will ask the same question: "Can we still place our confidence in this group after this kind of error? Will such a group be able to lead the proletarian struggle tomorrow?". We address our answer only to our comrades of course: our press isn't addressed to the others and we don't owe them any explanations.

In the face of an error such as the publication of the editorial criticized here, there can only be one kind of proletarian answer that expresses the solidarity of the comrades who see in such weakness also the weakness of the class, the weakness of the present theoretical expression of the struggle, as well as of the modest attemps of international centralisation.

Let's now get to the centre of the problem: about the passed, present and future guarantees. We've said it many times: no statutes, no formal rules, no administrative procedures, no leaders as genius as they may be, can possibly constitute a guarantee against errors. The guarantee can only be found in our programmatical coherence. But such a fundamental affirmation is not sufficient, f.i. it does not allow us to decide which text to publish, and whether to publish it.

There are two ways to never criticize oneself, to never criticize a text: to approuve unanimously everything to be published and thus to never put back into question something that has already been published, because it has become sacred. The other way, more caricatural, which is "Programme"'s formula (Parti Communiste International) who explains the change in positions by... a mistake by the reader (cfr. "The reader might have understood that... but in fact we meant that..."). In all these cases, we are in the midst of democracy!

Against this, we've organised, within the group, the centralised discussion and criticism of all the published material. And we are not talking here about formal criticisms that would consist in defining praisingly "the big step forward made by our group" but we talk about discussions, criticisms that aim at finding the weaknesses, recognising them and above all, rectifying them!

We try of course to improve as much as possible the quality of our publications and to reinforce our activities. To do this, the only solution we have found is our programmatical reinforcement, the international and theoretical discussion and homogeneisation within the precise framework and limits decided by the international central structures of our group and applied in each case and in each publication by a "responsible dictator". And we want to stress here that for us such a "responsible dictator" never is a simple delegate of the rank and file or of a local group as this is the case for federalist and democratic groups, but on the contrary, he is responsible for the central coherence and for the communist orientations. Concerning this "responsible dictator" we have strongly been influenced by the explicit and openly assumed dictatorship claimed by Marx and Engels as the only way to run a journal. "The editing was organised by Marx. A big daily paper that must be finished at a set time cannot ensure the continuation and consistency of positions without such an organisation. But more than this, in our case, Marx' dictatorship imposed itself incontestably and it was willingly recognised by all of us." (Engels)

It is true that publishing our central reviews doesn't imply the same requirements as for a daily paper; our group publishes reviews in different languages, written by comrades in several countries between which communication is slow and difficult. Anyway, we consider that there is only one way of assuming such a task: to never leave any uncertainty about the fact that, in the end, the responsibility of the decision must be CONCENTRATED AND CENTRALISED.

Maybe the word "dictatorial" will seem repellent. But we must never forget that it is the most powerful and bloodthirsty force of the dictatorship of capital (democracy, commodity production, value, money) that always presents itself as the expression of man's will. "Dictatorship", "dictatorial",... are words rejected by bourgeois humanism to better disguise the essence of its class-domination. This domination is clearly based on the dictatorial law that implies that whoever is not working, must starve! For us anyway, independently from the humanitarian titles it takes to better hide its worldwide bourgeois character, the capitalist dictatorship recovers the bloodthirsty domination of money which, as a commodity, exerts itself violently against our class.

We ourselves, just like Marx and Engels, prefer to call things by their rightful name. The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exerted without contradictions and this also implies the possibility to come in contradiction with the wishes or the will of other proletarians. There exist no other "communist" form of centrality but the organic one in which the organicity of the whole imposes itself (through its corresponding concretizations) against the free will of each particularity (12).

So, when we refer to such or such a comrade as a "responsible dictator" for such or such a task, we do not refer to some kind of bourgeois "leader" who must be feared and respected to avoid his terrible fits of anger, but we refer to comrades who are permanently showing their capacities in the struggle we lead against this society, and as such, they have won our confidence in their ability to guarantee the appropriateness of such or such action, publication, decision,... and this way they also express the results of our activities, of our struggle. All this has nothing to do with the adulation of some "remarkable proletarian chief" nor with the sanctification of such or such a text. Quite to the contrary, the capacity to be at the "avant-garde" of the proletariat expresses itself also through the fact of being able to call back into question the way things have been expressed before, expressions that often remain marked with concessions to bourgeois ideology. The whole strenght of Marx was to question what he had stated about the "progressive" bourgeoisie in 1848; and it was the strength of Lenin to reject what he had defended about the possibility of a pacific revolution in september 1917.

The fact that the editorial called "l'Europe des Versaillais" has been published in our review, is related to our way of organisation in the group, based on confidence and responsibility. If we have developped our criticisms of the editorial inside our group before making them public, this is due to the fact that we always push all our comrades and contacts to criticize everything we publish, and we then centralize these criticisms: this way we put these criticisms in the service of the revolutionary struggle. We proceed exactly in the same way when we criticize the weaknesses of working-class struggles because these weaknesses necessarily hinder our constitution into force. Our reviews are part of the centralisation of our activities, and such centralisation cannot be paralysed by the stupid democratism proper to leftist groups and to the centrist organisations of the so-called "revolutionary milieu". Their democratic centralism gives the illusion that all militants participate in the decision-making (and old social-democratic myth, that is nothing else but a "workers"' version of the bourgeois principle of popular sovereignty and of universal suffrage!) while in fact the real decisions are taken in small committees end behind the back of those who're stupid enough to consent to such masquerades! (13)

Our centralism is organic, i.e. the necessity of the struggle, of our programme, of workers' associationism implies a high level of confidence between revolutionaries, which is not based on the faith in some "genius leader", but only on the militant practice that we all have in common and that is continuously being reinforced through permanent criticism.

Within a revolutionary group, to decide means and implies responsibilities, in the most direct sense of the word: responsibilities in the face of comrades, in the face of the class, and it is on the basis of this responsibility and of mutual confidence at all levels - from the writing of a single text (that tries to express the clearest level of abstraction, and this is the result of our collective experience) up to the dictatorial responsibility for each one of our publications - that the historical and international centralisation of our activities organises itself without any bureaucratic control.

Each time a comrade writes a text - result and synthesis of the discussions inside the group - we do not bring it before a democratic court gathering all our comrades! NO!! We have confidence in the comrade's ability to synthesize the experience drawn from discussions and from the whole of the group's activity and we leave him the care to decide whether and how an article must be published (15). If the latter publishes a text that's going against our programmatical experiences, he will of course be criticized or even sanctionned; this was the case with the editorial of "Le Communiste" No25. We're aiming at the fact that more and more all militants recognize themselves in the centralised initiatives of other comrades and this may imply the need for very hard decisions against those who break with this confidence by their irresponsabilities. Of course, our practice, that aims at organic centralism, sometimes complicates our organisational efforts and "explains" such mistakes as the one we're criticizing here (16). It would be much easier to reduce our activity to a translation of texts of some "leader" and so, to play the show of an internationalist organisation, just like stalinist groups do. We prefer the "risk" of organicity, but not so because we might have some kind of choice between different kind of conception of the struggle, but because the communist movement, its aims, its programme, its means, its methods,... imply relationships between men that are not based on servile obedience to chiefs, on monkeys following the director of the circus like little dogs, or on the division of the work between those who think and those who write or translate, between intellectuals and manual workers, etc. In our group each militant must become the carrier of the totality, this means at the same time tending to be able to assume all tasks, and, on the other hand - knowing it is impossible to do everything - that each moment of his activity containns the totality of the project of the abolition of classes.

This is how the terrible contradiction that the bourgeoisie never ceases to put forward (in its efforts to "reason" the world - that-is to say, to impose and submit it to its Reason! can be and tends to be resolved: we are talking about the contradiction between "freedom" and "necessity" whose score has been settled for good by Marx who opposed to the "free" individual with its golden chains, the proletariat as it has, is and will always be historically constrained to act according to its being. Our decisions derive neither from democratic consultations nor from blind obedience; they derive from the history of our class and from our own experience within this history.

Therefore we can only insist on the necessity to understand that the sole and unique way to concretize our programmatical coherence is through the permanent care for criticism and the centralisation of this criticism. In a famous text against religion Marx defined the power of the critical attitude and activity. But those who think that this definition of criticism applies itself only to churches and priests, forget that everything that is tending to stop moving, to congeal... transforms itself into religion. It is normal that groups like the International Communist Party or the ICC transform themselves into sects, the former's activity for years has been defined from the fateful date of 1975 that should have sounded the knell of worldwide revolution, while the latter masturbates itself about the confirmation of "the right line developed by the Xth Congress" concerning the fourth wave of struggle etc.

May the proletarians, deceived by those group's easy stories and impressed by their scientific nonsense, look in a critical way into reality and they'll soon realize that beyond the difficulty of destroying the illusions of the idea of revolution with which those centrists recruit workers, the biggest social deflagration the world has ever known is preparing itself. We don't need all those who never stop talking about their "idea" of communism. We need revolutionaries hardened in the heat of criticism, able to maintain, against the current, the organisation of all expressions of struggle against this world, and hence, also able to criticize themselves.

"Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flowers." (Marx -Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right).

Permanent criticism and self-criticism are demonstrations of our class' force. They do not aim at opposing some arguments against others. Criticism is the genuine movement of destruction of the old world. Therefore it has nothing to do whatsoever with the various debates of ideas proposed by well respected leftists. The whole history of the proletariat is based on the lessons it has been able to draw from the errors of the past; communist criticism isn't based on the idea that there would be a world to convince with a load of "communist" arguments, but only on the destruction of capital through organisation of the movement of the abolition of classes "like it is really happening before our eyes".

"Criticism is not a passion of the head but the head of passion. It is not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it aims not to refute but to destroy" (Marx - Ibid.).

To conclude, we call upon the comrades who read us to help us improve our publications, to participate in the real criticisms between members of the same class, propulsed by the same movement to destroy this old world. On several occasions we have received such criticism from proletarians who really care to help our group to go forward. We insist to receive other contributions. These comrades who send their excellent criticisms, are the living expression that our publications are not "private" but, on the contrary, are the collective product of a class that is living and struggling, and of whom the Internationalist Communist Group is only an organ of centralisation.

Proletariat against the individual (19)

The central and never-changing characteristic of idealism is to define reality as something pure and perfect. Whatever form it may take (councilism, bordigism, leninism,...) idealism never conceives the revolutionary "solution" starting of from the very decomposition of capital (the revolutionary action of the proletariat is this same decomposition changed into its positive negation.)

Idealism is incapable of discerning the limits of capital in capital itself. That's why, according to all those reformers of the old world, they have to define the pure redeeming being that from the outside of the real world, from the outside of capitalist putrefaction, will come to the rescue of workers by telling them what to do! According to Lenin it is bourgeois intellectuals that constitute the force - the Party - that will import consciousness from the outside into our class.

The idealist deviation of "blanquism" was expressed by the fact that they also conceived their activities as an outward intervention by a group, a nucleus of very determined combattants carrying out revolution on behalf of the proletariat.

In the editorial that we've just criticised in the previous chapter, we can find these same saviours of the working class, those men who define themselves as "pure" communists, the unique origin of revolution. So whatever form they may take, idealists (making revolution rise from the outside of the movement of putrefaction and decomposition of capitalist society) always conceive and define the tasks of communists as being determined only by their own will and consciousness. But since - according to idealists - communists must be related in one way orr another to the working-class (since the working-class has to be educated, has to be convinced of the need for revolution) so they create the forms of organization "for the masses", they make speeches according to what the workers are ready to accept, they publish "open letters" for those who are not yet ready to follow them, they create different structures wherever they can find proletarians so as to stimulate their consciousness... and, in the end, they only reform society. It is logical, from the point of view of those for whom the proletariat does not exist any longer as the class historically determined to violently impose communism, that for them the only subject of revolution would be those pure beings, defined through their consciousness and their will, and who act in order "to show the road to revolution" or still "to reinforce - progressively - communism wherever it allready exists!" In this understanding, communist militants are identified with the class and have become themselves the movement. But the reduction of the class to only those who are willing to fight (consciousness!) betrays an individualist - anti-social, anti-historical - conception of class-struggle. Since the very beginning of our group's existence, we've always affirmed that a class can neither be defined "statically" (without movement) or "sociologically" through the place individual workers take up in the immediate process of production, nor by the idea individuals may have about themselves, by what they are thinking or imagining... but can only be defined by the social and historical conditions that determine the proletariat to impose its own social project.

The proletariat, while being completely excluded from society where it only has its labour-force to cash in on, finds itself at the center of all material production in society, and it is this contradictory situation that pushes it to become the acting negator of the capitalist social relationship. It is in the proletarian condition that both, the complete capitalist dehumanization as well as the revolutionary struggle against this dehumanization, exist. The being that bears this tremendous historical and social determination, is the proletariat. For the proletariat, the necessity and the possibility to overthrow this system and to establish a human communist society, are one and the same!

On this subject also, our position differs radically as well from those who defend the workers-condition as from those who, although they criticize workerism, nevertheless reproduce the same shit by adopting its pure anti-thesisk, i.e. the defence of the abstract individual ("the fighter", "the communist") and his freedom, his choices, where all references to the historical and material conditions that determine our class to revolt itself, will have disappeared.

Even if the more "revolted" and more "voluntary" individuals (as they are defined by classical idealism) are also part of the revolutionary class, nevertheless they are only part of it, a contingent and immediate expression of it, and they do not represent the proletariat constituted as a revolutionary class. Of course, revolt, the refusal of submission, are at the basis of all struggle, but it is wrong to restrict the communist movement to a simple "revolt" (or even more so to "moral" revolt!). As we've already stated, communism is a movement of which the determinations go far back in time, in the histoy of class-societies. And these historical determinations (f.i. the attitude in front of the State) are much larger than the narrow framework (and the narrow perspectives that derive from this) of individual revolt against the ignominy of our situation as an "immediate class".

Communists organise themselves and direct their class and their struggles not to defend the partial interests of certain fringes of the proletariat, but to defend its general interests, the general aim of its movement. All their activities (and therefore those who they appeal to) are determined according to this goal. Such activities require a voluntary, conscient, organised, practical break with all immediatism, with all voluntarism... "to make the proletariat move"... "to organise oneself at all costs, no matter the perspectives"...!!! In this effect, our activities have nothing to do neither with those "who know" or "who wait" nor with those "who refuse". Because what we have here, is a very voluntary appreciation (only those who have the cultural, intellectual, material means to "refuse" can do so during a period of social peace f.i.) and this, as such, does not constitute a social force. "Refusal" is contingent, linked up above all to the particular nature of individuals and not to the essential universality of the proletarian condition.

The class situation of the proletariat is a contradictory situation that pushes it, often in spite of itself and in spite of the immediate consciousness it may have about the struggle it is launching (that's also why the organised, conscious, voluntary activities of direction assumed by communist minorities struggling for the internationalist centralization of the struggle, are so important!) to revolt itself against its condition as an exploited class. This struggle is a first step towards a reversal of the situation, towards a negation of the contradictory conditions that determine the proletariat. But such a reversal is dialectical and not statical or gradual. The positivist conception sees communism as a positive out-growth that already throws out its roots in the capitalist mode of production, developing itself within its bosom, and finally superseding it.

It is the whole question of reification, of the dynamic of the struggle, of the reversal of praxis and therefore also the whole question of the party that is being dodged by this "theory" of revolt. It is the anarchist ideology with its logic of individual struggle (cfr. Bonnot, Ravachol,...) that corresponds to this worship of revolt. For communists, even when there exist no open revolts, when the proletarians have abandonned the struggle and return back within the realm of democracy, nevertheless the fundamental antagonisms of capital do not disappear. We do not send back to back the proletarians (even when atomised) and the State, we do not send back to back for instance the workers in Poland when they returned to work and Walesa, or the english miners and Scargill!

The whole militant activity of the Party-Marx (against Proudhon, against Lasalle, against Bakounin) in order to bring to light the "real social condition of the proletariat", the "fundamental causes that have provoked the misery and the exploitation of the proletariat", the whole criticism of political economy that has allowed for our Party to practically show "that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that this dictatorship itself is only a transition toward the suppression of all classes" is being denied by the anarchist and individualist conception that places the individual - and not a social class - at the centre of the struggle against this society. We are here at the heart of the marxist critique of capitalist society, as it opposes itself historically to the "utopian" and idealist currents.

Individualism is much more than just a theoretical poison produced by today's situation of proletarian withdrawal. Individualism is a practice. And this counter-revolutionary practice also attacks the communist movement. Revolutionary organizations are not save from this terrible reality. Actually, it would be more right to say that a revolutionary organization means the permanent struggle against the narrow-minded trust each one puts in himself just too easily. More than once, we've met comrades who just could not accept a real contradictory debate and who, in the face of criticisms, preferred to break with the organization so as to recover their sacred liberty of thought and action. Of course, these breaks were always justified because of "programmatical disagreements" but what really prevailed each time was the refusal of the contradiction and the will to be all alone with ones consciousness without having to render any account to anybody except oneself or to some monkeys that accept to play the game.

One can find the ideology of the individual in the Bakouninist theory of the organization within the organization (20). We ourselves have suffered from such disorganizing practices within the ICG. Its theory bases itself on the idea that the struggle for the Party, the struggle for the internationalist centralization of our forces, would be a permanent struggle of "fractions". But a confusion is being introduced here between the historical activities of the communist left fractions in order to break with counter-revolutionary organizations... and a practice of sect that consists, within a communist organization, in the gathering of the "masses" around oneself, on the basis of ones' own ideas!

The heart of the contradiction that, from rupture to rupture, allows for a communist organization to move forward, is not - in the end - the debate of ideas; it really is the clash between practical differences. Therefore one cannot on the one hand claim organic centralism and on the other hand create an organization within the organization so as to fight against the different decisions of the organization, while pretending that this is part of the historical practice of the communist fractions.

We have to denounce very clearly this practice of the organization within the organization (theorized by Bakounin) against which Marx has always fought. The tactics of the organization within the organization, of occult direction, of hidden authoritarianism... leads directly to federalism as a political conception. Marx has always denounced this classical idealist pretention to establish beforehand a formal elite supposedly guaranteeing the revolution. One can easily find this kind of conception with Kautsky, with Lenin, and even more so, with Stalin, Zinoviev and Bordiga. The individualist postulate that starts off from the idea that ones' own ideas are right, and therefore that all means (fractionism, federalism, lies,...) are also right in order to impose these ideas, is a reactionary postulate, a postulate of sectarism.

This has nothing to do with organic centralism! And only our practical attitudes, our practical activities allow us to check the ideas one may claim to have about organic centralism. Against all individualists, we reaffirm here that in communist organizations there is not any more liberty for fractionism than there is for the circulation of ideas. The constitution of a fraction within an organization and that leads necessarily to a break with this organization and to the constitution of another organization, is not a question of liberty, but of necessity, and such a necessity can only be justified in the case of a break with counter-revolution. But the aim of fractionism, of anti-organizational practices, or federalism, of the organization within the organization... and all this within a communist group, is not to clarify the contradictions and debates, but rather to drown them, to hide and to obscure the opposed practices behind debates about ideas!

So, what's really at stake here is not the struggle against counter-revolution but the struggle against revolution! Such sectarian and individualist logic that manages to scuttle so many of the real efforts to centralise the revolutionary forces today, can only result in the myth of the man of genius!

Its logic is quite simple: since - according to this theory - the invariant task of communists is to guarantee the communist positions by way of the fraction inside the organization, so one soon arrives at the need for the fraction inside the fraction... and in the end one arrives at the individual, the leader! It is clear to us that in reality this kind of logic can only lead to one thing: the reproduction of democracy with behind it its whole load of bureaucrats and followers. Since the real starting point here is the individual with his brains... so their can be no doubt about the means that will be used to impose his views: any means will do, including lies,...

It is clear to communist militants that only collective activity, the organization and the respect of programmatical discipline that materialize itself also in organizational discipline (21), the permanent confrontation in struggle... are the only ways that allow us to check constantly the progress in our fight against this society of the bourgeois individual with his bourgeois freedom! Sectarianism and individualism within a revolutionary organization must be firmly opposed because they destroy the confidence between militants, and this confidence can only result from the fraternal critique of the activities we have in common. Of course it's always much easier to put forward just any disagreement and to try to assemble some followers! (If a fraction had to be constituted for each disagreement that exists, necessarily, in a group, for sure there would at least exist 10 fractions for each militant!).

Sectarianism inside an organization necessarily reproduces free thought, the individual, division of labour (between those who've understood and the others),... reproduces democracy! It is much more difficult, but also much more passionate, to affirm our contradictions while putting forward what is really uniting us as members of the same community of struggle against the State. Revolutionaries are not philosophers that compete for a prize. Communism surges up from the real historical and material determinations; consciousness can only be the necessary product of a movement, of a force that rises spontaneously from and within history, from the soil of modern capitalist society. Consciousness is not the motorforce of history, with all due deference to idealists! Only the proletariat, while confronting its enemy, while organising itself as an international and centralised force, while constituting itself as a party, is the real subject of history!

Once more we want to ecpress our hatred of the democratic individual. Once more we want to express our hatred in front of this miserable bourgeois chimera with its scientist pretentions that always and everywhere rises up again to destroy the real links of class' interests that unite revolutionaries all over the world!

To the individualists and to the worshippers of consciousness, we oppose our certitudes about the revolution, our determination to struggle and our efforts to act for the affirmation of what is uniting us, proletarians, who try to constitute an organ of struggle that is an integral part of the historical communist movement that incorporates us and transcends us!

Free of everything, i.e. not possessing anything, free even to believe that he can do whatever he wants to, the individual, in the end, is nothing else but a commodity that sublimates itself by presenting the laws of free circulation that govern him, as the result of his own free and personal choices. He refuses to see that these laws have been imposed on him by the bourgeois in order to create the market or labour-forces. Free to be exploited by whoever he wants to, the individual simply "forgets" that this liberty is synonymous of his own exploitation and nothing else!

For us proletarians who know that we have nothing to win from this world of commodities, the individual is and always will be a traitor to our class, a scab, an enemy!

Conclusion

By bringing these clarifications in this editorial, we only address ourselves to our class and to its militants. We are not answerable to any kind of "revolutionary milieu". Let things be clear: we denounce this "milieu" for the baleful part it takes in the present situation. We despise this milieu, and in particular its democratism and its pacifism. This democratism and pacifism only recently revealed itself once more with the recent initiative by the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party and some other groups as well, to create a front, a publication because... "what matters today is to react in a more unitarian way to the repression that the different constituent groups of the revolutionary milieu have to endure" while it is clear that - since always tens and tens of thousands of communist militants (who do not belong to the european revolutionary milieu" it is true) are massacred, tortured, emprisoned, kidnapped... all over the world!

There can be no 2 programmes, one for communists and another one for proletarians! We do not cooperate with our enemies, and of course those are our enemies who on the one hand spit on the thousands of proletarians that Capital is keeping as hostages in its sinister cages, while proposing on the other hand the common resistence of "communist militants" against the State. Misery of idealism! This means that those groups are ready "to offer" their miserable solidarity only to those who they consider to be "communists". To put forward such ideological categories, stands in opposition to the invariant attitude of communists that has always been, for instance in the case of the communist left in Italiy, to manifest their solidarity with all those who fight against the State. That's how the italian left used to proclaim its solidarity with persecuted anarchists and "terrorists".

As we've been trying to show all along this article, it is idealism that is at the basis of all the distorsions of our positions operated by our detractors, whether they once belonged to our group or not. Idealism considers "the idea", "consciousness" to be the first determinations of action; it makes the idea of communism dominate on the real communist movement. And this is not justa mistake, a theoretical error, but it is first of all a practice, a totality that is entirely in contradiction with our militant activities! The idealist conception that is at the basis of all the deviations that we've mentioned, reinforces the anti-organisational practices. And it is those practices, those anti-militant forces, transcending the reality of our own existence as a group, that we have to fight without respite. This editorial constitutes another link of this struggle.

The internal fights against the whole of these anti-militant practices have seriously delayed the activities of our group. During the last year especially, we've lived a real phase of difficulties concerning he centralisation of our main tasks. For more than a year, we've had to fight against this stupid practice that takes the idea of communism, the idea of the party as the real starting point!

This is why as well the general "thesis of orientation" that we intended to publish, as the publication in different languages of our central reviews, have seriously been delayed. This real decentralisation of our activities constitute a weakness that we must now transform: to do this we'll use - by the publication of different texts - the lessons we draw from the struggles and debates that have animated the life of our group for the last few years.

For us, in any case, the struggle continues, and the idealist line whose promoters have now been excluded from our group, will at least have allowed us to make another step in the clear derinition and the necessary breaking from centrism, this counter-revolutionary force that appears in the guise of communism, but that in reality is just another attempt to destroy from the inside through anti-party activism - the necessary revolutionary centralisation!

An expression of the idealist line excluded from our organisation materialized itself through the publication of the article "L'Europe des Versaillais" in "Le Communiste" No25 and that we've criticized in this editorial. One can find another expression of this same idealist line in a pamphlet "Split with the ICG" that is being published, with our material help, by some other militants excluded from our group. We strongly recommend the lecture of this pamphlet because it expresses wonderfully well the idealist deviation we're criticizing. The first ones say we're bureaucrats and leninists, the latter say we're modernists and anarchists. We can only propose them to go and play their game of ideological ping-pong together. For sure, lots of tables remain vacant in the "revolutionary milieu".

February 1988
Notes
(1) All the examples described in this editorial come from our french-language review, because it's through this review, and mainly through this language, that most of the problems and contradictions (that have led to the exclusion of the comrade in charge of this publication) have been cristallised for the last few years. This is due to the fact that french is the language of most of our comrades and it is understood by almost all of the group, thus it is the only possibility for arabic speaking comrades to discuss with spanish speaking comrades. On the other hand, for the moment, the main countries of the group's presence are countries where french is the first language (a text published in french is criticised much quicker than a text published in spanish, in english or in arabic). The eruption of these contradictions mainly through "Le Communiste" - central review in french of the Internationalist Communist Group - is also due to the fact that the comrades who assumed the responsability of this review have shown on different occasions:
- insufficient breaking off from this society in general and from what in Europe claims itself to be the "revolutionary milieu" in particular. This expressed itself particularly through the publication of texts that did not convey the general level of agreement developped by the group against this "milieu" as against its predecessor: social democracy! These texts only were shy criticisms of such centrist groups as the International Communist Party, the Internationalist Communist Current, and so on.

- real difficulties of these comrades to forge and assume our collective discipline.

(2) An explanation of this is the publication of those texts in which, far from trying to reflect the group's positions, the responsible comrade published his own positions and to do this, he used dupery and swindle!

(3) Internal discussions have allowed us to criticize this position and to centrally decide a change that expresses itself by the fact that the spanish version doesn't contain such an aberration: thus we affirm once more that what really makes the difference between proletariat and bourgeoisie, is the necessity of struggle against alienation and against all of capitalist domination. (cfr. "Comunismo" No22, p.18)

(4) Here it seems important to stress the same expressions Marx uses against the most subtile and developed theorizations of idealism: the humanist "materialism" or the young hegelians. It still is today the most developed philosophical expression (conscious or not) of the apology of the human being and of the individual.

(5) We won't be able to respect this decision in a near future because the comrades who could carry it through, do no longer belong to our group for the reasons explained in this text.

(6) We use the word "sectarian" not in the sense of the total opposition and the entire independence of the proletariat to this society, but on the contrary, in reference to the traditional meaning of the word as it refers to religious sects. Sectarian is the practice of groups that base their activities on "the politics of differences" and that have no other activities but to defend the social system they've builded up in their mind.

(7) The readers who understand french, can ask us and we'll send them "Le Communiste" No25 and 26.

(8) In this sense the editorial of "Le Communiste" No25 is in total contradiction with the quote published on the front page of the review: "For us communism isn't a state that has to be created nor an ideal according to which reality should adapt itself; we call communism the real movement that abolishes the established order. The conditions of this movement result from factors existing today." (Marx - German ldeology)

(9) In opposition to this use, the word "crisis" can be used in a much more generic and abstract and/or much more specific sense. Indeed, even if today the crisis is referred to mostly in the economic sense of the word (in opposition to the "political" crisis - i.e. in the sense of the crisis of domination of one bourgeois fraction or of the whole bourgeoisie - or in opposition to the "social" crisis - i.e. in the sense of the crisis of a social system as a whole - or still in opposition to the "revolutionary" crisis in the sense of a social and/or political crisis with the possibility for the revolutionary class to resolve this crisis in a revolutionary way) we must stress that for Marx the word "crisis" recovers different things: from the general contradictions of Capital itself (- and in this sense Capital is, right from its birth and until its death, in a state of permanent crisis -) till the end of a cycle of expansion that ends in a depression and, in this sense, the word "crisis" has a much more contingent meaning (short cycle of 8 or 10 years that coincides with the rotation of fixed capital).

(10) A good example is the period preceeding the insurrection of 1917.

(11) It is in the most extreme situations that the contradictions within the unity (one being) become the clearest.

(12) Despite all the problems and risks contained by the following parallelism, we'll take an example in the sphere of biology: the necessity of the organic body to be fed which is imposed by the digestive system without any democratic consultation between your big toe and your right ear! The necessities of the whole (our organic body) are never represented by the addition of its different atoms!

(13) A typical example of this are the huge congresses of workers' associations where hundreds and thousands of delegates talk about everything and nothing... to applaud in the end, as a great resolution, something that had been decided a long time before by... some leaders!

(14) Contrary to democratic centralism where each decision taken by a majority also means an approbation for those who are right - as if having the majority could be a valuable criteria! In communist centralism, a decision and its execution never imply in any way a judgment on the contents of the discussions. If there exist disagreements, the discussions will continue (in spite of the decision taken!) and develop themselves and the duty of the central structures of the organisation will be to stimulate this. Only further discussions and their centralisation will allow to check the decision and, if necessary, to criticize and change it.

(15) We cannot see any other way to set up an international proletarian structure and to have it assume the programmatical centralisation in spite of the necessity for a real geographical decentralisation, for an increase in publications in different languages and countries, and with the impossibility for easy communication and therefore in the absence of regular international discussions!

(16) Many times our enemies have reproached us the differences of position existing between our central reviews. Obviously this kind of problem doesn't exist in social democratic or stalinist organisations that only recognize a formal centre and where the different sections limit their activities to the translation of the already existing articles while they themselves only write articles about local problems. To us it seems unavoidable - in view of the general state of weak centralization that characterizes today's struggles -that all vanguard forces should reproduce, in one way or another, these same problems of international centralization. Those who think they are so superior to us and to the proletariat in general (indeed, do they not pretend to have solved already in their heads what the proletariat hasn't managed to solve yet in reality!) only sow confusion and serve the counter-revolution.

(17) As we've already stated, idealism is the perfect complement of vulgar materialism: for example, the idea of the external saviour, the party of bourgeois intellectuals,... is complementary to the social-economic and anti-party understanding of the proletarian class.

(19) We use the word "individual" in reference to the atom-citizen of bourgeois society, essential component of democracy! We use this term in the sense of the contingent individual, as it is subsumed by a class of society... and as it is historically opposed to the personal individual, the human being, component of a real community of struggle and of needs.

(20) cfr. the "Programme of international brotherhood" that was written in 1872 by Bakounin. It is one of the texts in which Bakounin defined his federalist strategy of the "organisation within the organisation": occult direction, construction of the Party from the top, hidden authoritarianism, different speeches in public and in private, different tactics inside the organisation, internationalism assumed only by the top of the pyramid,...

(21) We want to insist here on the organizational materializations of this discipline, because today, while all anti-organizational theories are more than ever in fashion, the anti-organizational practices also find their ideological justification in some kind of mystical discipline towards the "historical programme" and such an "historical framework" of course never takes a concrete and practical form but always remains locked up in the realm of the idea, of hegelian speculative philosophy.

They do not describe as terrorism:

• state terrorism, the terrorism of their "own" government,
• or the terrorism of allied governments, or even that of states of the opposite bloc that they consider legitimate,
• and most of all, the permanent, generalised terrorism of the police, justice, prisons, the factories, the trade unions, the armed forces, the systematic "disappearance" of militants, psychiatric hospitals, etc...

All these kinds of terrorism, directed against the population of the whole planet, who are deprived of and separated from the essentials of life and the means of production by private property and wage labour, are not considered to be terrorism. These are examples of "natural", "legitimate" violence; the monopoly of violence "against chaos". Under the reign of the ruling ideology, the bourgeoisie and its ideologists, for example journalists and sociologists, do not even have to say that state terrorism is not terrorism. This "truth" is a religious one, institutionalised and reinforced by the "religion" characteristic of the whole of world capitalist society. It is "natural" in this society, as natural as the fact that in a slave society, a slave is not a human being but a mere object.

Nothing is more "natural" for this system than millions of people terrorised into starvation by forces of repression, deprived of the power to get their hands on the means of subsistence. Nothing is more "natural" for this terrorist society than the fact that the cannibalistic application of human rights to combative proletarians is so effective that the number of "disappeared ones" in Latin America alone approaches one hundred thousand and the number of tortured and imprisoned people in the world can be counted in their millions. Nothing is more "natural" for capital than the fact that the main industry of the planet is the production of the means of collective terrorism, death and destruction, while the majority of its population have nothing to live on. Nothing is more "natural" for official democratic terrorism which exists everywhere than that defending its laws implies years in prison, torture or death for those who lake attempts against its sacred private property or its national economy by grabbing what they need, by paralysing production or organising against the right to work, for example by organising pickets and attacking scabs.

The citizen, receptacle and producer of this social "naturalness", defender of the laws and democracy of the national economy, is therefore prepared to lake one more step along the inevitable path followed by modern society. To be a citizen leads to participating in national mobilisation for the defence of state terrorism, collaboration and informing, and capitalist war.

During the capitalist epoch, numerous ideological forms have been used to strengthen the State's main advances towards generalised terrorism: the defence of civilisation, the fight for socialism of democracy, against fascism or communism, against chaos and disorder... But the best, the most appropriate form, for the principle of the democratic state's monopoly of violence, is direct attack on any questioning of this monopoly, any violent opposition to slate terrorism. The pinnacle and purest form of democracy is its total political monopoly, the state free of all ils enemies. This is the key to the whole social democratic program (1).

That's why anti-terrorism is the ideology par excellence of the terrorist state, though nonetheless it has to be served tip mixed with other values appropriate to all states (democracy), or particular to each, such as the defence of the Islamic revolution, of the free world, of socialism or of national liberation. Every anti-terrorist campaign, no matter who originates it. serves to maintain and reinforce State terrorism and transforms its instigators, regardless of their intention, into objective agents of state terrorism.

oOo

The international crisis is forcing capital to violently impose austerity and prepare for war. In this situation, the universal reinforcement of state terrorism expresses itself around three main tendencies united by an indivisible coherence;

1. A general tendency, especially among the major powers, to terrorise their populations with a vague, monstrous enemy; "International Terrorism". Behind this terroristic tendency hides an attempt to dragoon and mobilise the population into local wars in which "their" state is involved. This is concretely expressed in:

• supporting, leading or manipulating, directly or otherwise, spectacular terrorist attacks on the population which "prove" that the war in Middle East exists in Paris, for example.
• creating, at the same time. a category in itself: cruel, blind, fanatical terrorism.
• magnifying repression: police presence in the streets, random checks, controls and interrogations.

2. Cleverly alternating between open terror against working class resistance, and the legitimation on the international stage, of states who use or will use this open terror. For example in Latin America, while some national expressions of the state systematically murder and abduct their opponents is a day-to-day activity (Mexico, Peru, Colombia for example, not to mention the well known cases of Guatemala or El Salvador), with the complicity of their governments, others take advantage of a change in political system to clear their names (Argentina, Uruguay...) and assure immunity for torturers and murderers. In order to achieve this, they use the whole parliamentary and judicial apparatus, including the famous rights of man, and thereby create a precedent for the others.

3. Two things work alongside each other: the conditioning of public opinion, and political repression: to create an amalgam of guerilla actions against the population that they provoke themselves, and acts of proletarian resistance, with the aim not only of isolating combative proletarians but of gaining the active support of the population against any beginnings or the reemergence of the proletariat as a class.

This is to say that along with the state's anti-terrorist campaign, they try:

• to terrorise the population
• to get the population involved in defending "its" State
• to create a Devil and get people ready to fight it
• to openly crush the proletariat with its passive acceptance and even its collaboration (2).

"It is the cannibalism of the counter revolution itself that will develop among the masses the conviction that there is only one way to concentrate, shorten and simplify the death agonies of the old society and the birth pangs of the new; revolutionary terrorism." (Marx).

As we've often said, against this terrorist society, against generalised state terrorism, the liberating violence of the proletariat is not one option among others but a necessity. And not only in the sense that without it, the barbarism of this society would have no limits, nor in the sense that it is the only way of ending this endless barbarism, but also in that it is inevitable, that the violence of the oppressor predetermines and pushes the development of revolutionary violence (3).

It is this last point that totally contrasts our viewpoint to that of reformism.

In fact the "terrorists" of Lenin's or Plekhanov's terminology (4), expressions of the left wing of social democracy, also recognised the necessity of a violent struggle against the state. But for these two, violent proletarian struggle against the state was not an inevitable product of society and the day-to-day working class struggle against capital, but something that had to be introduced from outside. For social democracy the key problem is consciousness, for terrorist ideology, the question of examplary action. In both cases it is a matter of introducing from outside by means of an act of willpower, the need for a violent political fight against the state. For us, this is idealism, voluntarism.

As far as we're concerned, proletarian terrorism, the terrorism of the oppressed, is not the result of any external will. consciousness introduced into the class from outside, or of any kind of conspiracy, outside agent, instigator or manipulator. In other words, of any ideal (in the sense of made of ideas) mediation. On the contrary, it is the inevitable material reaction against exploitation and oppression; the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Between these two analyses of social reality there is a class line. The social democratic/terrorist explanation is unavoidably idealist and voluntarist; ours is based on the dialectical materialist evolution of society.

More than this: revolution contains neither violence nor terrorism but their abolition; not the elimination of this or that agent of violence, but the foundations of a society based on violence and terrorism. If the proletariat is driven to take up the use of violence against this society and all its agents, it is not because it is a positive expression of violence, but rather, because it is the negative pole of this society, against which, in the last instance, all violence is directed. As the destructive pole of the whole of society, the active negation, it cannot help but oppose generalised. institutional violence. Its centralisation into a violent force toward the end of establishing its class dictatorship is nothing but the development of this active negation, in which all the conditions for and forms of violence are negatively determined, and as negations, by the violence of this society (5). Therefore, nothing is more absurd than to pretend that class violence comes from revolutionaries or that their function is to create or import it. Revolutionaries don't "make" violence just as they don't "build" the revolutionary party. They don't "make" revolutions.

On the contrary, their function is to act as the most determined elements in this inevitable process which this society spontaneously engenders, in other words to take over in practice the leadership of the Party and the revolution.

To say it again, clearly and explicitly; the communists' acts of will do not aim to bring violence to the class, but to lead class violence towards the movement's correct objectives. This is the only way of shortening the interminable death agonies of this society and the birth pangs of the next. They act precisely so that the tremendous revolutionary energy that this society generates in the proletariat will not be squandered in thousands of more or less separate acts of individual terrorism, without a concerted strategy, some of which even weaken the movement. They act in this way to organise red terrorism in a single direction towards the insurrection and the class dictatorship, in order to prevent the continuous massacre which results from a war without leadership.

We take the opportunity here to make clear that there is no question of making concessions to the social democratic "movementist" ideology which leads towards classifying violence into, on the one hand. minority or individual violence, and on the other hand, and opposed to it, collective class violence. Individual violence is also class violence, and there is not one act in this society that is not stained with class. The murder of a boss, a wildcat strike, a picket that fights scabs, - all terrorist acts par excellence - (6) can be distinguished from and opposeed to all acts of state or para-state terrorism (reformist groups with a "terrorist" ideology).

Many of these acts may not correspond to the general interests of the movement, may be tactically inappropriate or lead to a dead end. This is unavoidable because of the circumstances in which the proletariat is forced to develop its violence. In most cases, the exploited is pushed around, cornered, and oppressed beyond endurance... and the anger of liberation generally expresses itself without tactical considerations. For this reason revolutionaries do not carry out, support or promote any individual act. even if they recognise them as belonging to their class. Revolutionaries may be for or totally against the advisibility and the meaning of an action. But thought they neither condemn an action nor applaud repression, it is not that they are indifferent. They offer active solidarity against state repression, and in parallel they defend the general objectives of the movement by attempting to concentrate all these forces exploding through the holes in the system, sometimes foolishly and irrationally, to lead them towards their real objectives: the struggle against capital and the capitalist state.

oOo

If violence depended on the consciousness it produces, as the social democrats pretend, it would be very simple. Only violence produced consciously by the "revolutionary party" would be proletarian, all actions of individuals or isolated groups would be bourgeois or "petty bourgeois", and the correct position would be to condemn them. This position was always the one taken by social democracy, and it continues to lead many so-called revolutionary groups (including the "communist left") to actively applaud the work of slate agents. This was the position of the whole of social democracy. Stalinism and Trotskyism when van der Lubbe burnt down the Reichstag in Germany (7).

This position is from start to finish coherent with the voluntarist vision, and in the last analysis, police vision, common to the whole bourgeoisie and all slates, who are unable to understand the inevitable upsurges of uncontrollable expressions of proletarian violence and therefore are always trying to find the "agitators" behind them.

The reality is much more complex, precisely because proletarian violence in its elementary forms, prior to being organised and structured, "expresses itself" in all manner of forms, and explodes in multiple locations. Marx and Engels (who were never supporters of or apologists for revenge, individual murders, planting bombs in public places, etc.) recognised in these kinds of things class war. For example Engels, after listing a series of acts of this kind, said:

"Six attacks have been made in four months, and all have as their common cause workers' rage against the exploiters. What is the nature of the social relations that produce these events? I hardly need say it. These acts of violence show that class war is declared and that the fight is taking place openly and in public."

In today's world, there are thousands of examples of this kind of desperate elementary struggle against capital with no coordinating strategy (like a strike which does not attempt to generalise and whose participants are not conscious that it is a confrontation with the whole state). And although these actions in both content and form are proletarian and clearly opposed to those of the state or its agents, the proletariat doesn't recognise them as such and fails to make the distinction between them and individual terrorist actions carried out by different groups or agents of the bourgeoisie.

This objective and inevitable aspect of the current period, when the proletariat is atomised and unable to see itself as in international class and consequently unable to constitute itself as such, greatly facilitates the state's politics of "amalgam" and the consolidation of its terrorist anti-terrorist campaign.

However, we make clear that we do not say that terrorist actions of individual proletarians or groups permit the strengthening of the state like all the pseudo-working class pacifist groups do. On the contrary, WE SAY that the generalised decay of society and the explosive development of all its contradictions, which inevitably leads to the terrorist reinforcement of the state, continues to progress because the proletariat does not act as a revolutionary force (the only real limit to this tendency), and the expression of this general confusion in the proletariat prevents it from seeing the difference between its violence and its enemy's. and allows the slate to utilise its amalgam technique and reinforce its anti-terrorist campaign with the applause and collaboration of crowds of atomised proletarians (8).

In relation to this, it is not enough to talk about unavoidable material conditions, or of factual coincidences which make anti-terrorist politics possible and credible. It is necessary to discuss those deliberate, conscious, state police actions which have the aim of materialising this amalgam. Although we do not have a police vision of history, we know that the police participate in history. We would be blind if we didn't recognise the conscious, deliberate acts of manipulation, the direct interventions made by the state to give credibility to its general strategy of repression, confusion and amalgam. More than this, it is obvious that where the general interests of the bourgeoisie are involved, and taking into account all the historical lessons it has drawn from its experience, it acts in a more centralised, conscious, police fashion than one might have thought. For example the "death squads", wherever they work or have worked, are a general requirement of the state and would have been created in any case by some faction of capital. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that this general need has been consciously and overtly satisfied by the central apparatus of the state. Though we must avoid the danger of falling into a police vision of history, we should also not succumb to the idea that the "death squads" were organised by uncontrolled, autonomous bodies or by the famous "extreme right". In fact, in every case, they were organised by the whole of the State and in particular by the government, ministers, generals and top brass.

Knowing the general weakness of the proletariat in acting as a class, an independent force, the first thing that helps the state's amalgam technique is the formal coincidence between what the proletariat more or less confusedly sees as its enemies, and sometimes attacks, individually or in small groups, and the targets of nationalist groups, Stalinists, foquists. pseudo-revolutionaries and pseudo-communists (9): some parts of the slate, factories or other establishments, some particularly unpopular bosses. If we leave aside the fact that in most cases these actions, far from contributing to the movement, disorganise it (the aim of this article is not to demonstrate the disorganisation and passivity that is produced by spectacular exemplary activism), it is quite clear that it is these kind of actions, which try to get proletarians to become cannon fodder for imperialist wars, permit the central organs of the state (10) (and we repeat, seeing the general inability of the proletariat to put forward in the view of the whole population a clearly autonomous political line) to amalgamate any acts of proletarian resistance with the actions of bourgeois groups. The repression which follows, based on this amalgam, not only allows the state to present its viewpoint in general and equally in almost every case, but also liquidates the little bits of proletarian autonomy that were emerging: physical elimination, imprisonment... and those who escape are isolated, and have great difficulty avoiding the swamp of opposition nationalism (11).

When we take into account the total absence of any difference between the programmes of nationalists and their governments, we can see how easy it is to infiltrate and manipulate them towards the most central aims of the state, and towards the idea of oven collaboration with it (12). In some cases, the central repressive forces can even permit them to work in the general interests of the state against tendencies towards proletarian autonomy (13). But sometimes all this does not satisfy the central apparatus of the state, the bourgeois fraction that controls the government. Their particular factional interests and their general class interests drive them not only to finance, support and give logistic aid to this or that terrorist group, but even to organise "terrorist" actions (14) against another bourgeois fraction or, more likely, against the proletariat to terrorise it into supporting its general policy of repression. It is known, but not widely enough in our opinion, that the secret services of the major powers - like the CIA and the KGB - systematically participate not only in the creation of pseudo-para-police organisations, but also in direct outrages and armed actions against the imperialist class enemy. We don't lose any sleep over the successive attempts of the CIA to get rid of Fidel Castro or the systematic series of accidents which dispose of people like Torrijos or Samora Machel. That's their problem. In the same way, we don't believe the story they tell that the first world war began because of the Sarajevo assassination.

What's important for us are the direct attacks which are launched against our class, and what our enemies succeed in doing: mobilising our class for interests that are not its own on the basis of an endless succession of outrages centrally organised by the various national expressions of the international state.

Today's news is full of revelations about the direct complicity of the state's central apparatus in terrorist actions throughout the world. It is impossible to fully enumerate these. On top of this, we don't have, and don't need, all the details about the complicity of the legalised criminal conspiracies that all governments are made of. But we can give some examples. The anti-terrorist Mitterand, and the whole socialist government, planned the attack on Greenpeace down to the last detail. There is no doubt about it. The anti-terrorist Reagan was not content to give logistic and financial support to Nicaraguan guerillas, he also sponsored the perfect little saboteur's handbook produced by hit enemies. The fact that this man organised the bombing of Libya's two major towns is quite coherent with his defence of anti-terrorism. Israel preceded Reagan on this terrain. The bombing of a town is not considered a fact or war by that son of a bitch, Western public opinion, but merely an anti-terrorist action. The bombing of some PLO positions in Tunis (and who can say they only bombed the PLO?) was carried out with everyone's blessing. A bomb that killed a handful of soldiers guarding the military presence and the power of the US imperialist bloc is terrorism - the bombing of a town in response isn't, it's anti-terrorism. All the international channels of disinformation bombard us with this nonsense. And of course, in the other bloc, it's the same message but the other way round! It's so crass and absurd it seems impossible that anyone could believe it, but they do! The media is incredibly good at its job: they say what they're told to. In the West they say the occult figures behind terrorism are the Libyan, Iranian and Syrian governments. But today, none can deny that the Iranian terrorist leaders are unofficially armed by the USA, the leaders of Western Christian anti-terrorism, on the express orders of Ronald Reagan. But at the same time, although the heads of Syrian terrorism are armed by the French state (there are enough economic interests involved), the latter cannot accept the British state's view. And it doesn't Mop there. The French government leader, who was in charge during the second leg of the anti-terrorism campaign (the first being initialed by Mitterand at the beginning of his term in office), wasted no effort, and used every trick in the book of political amalgam, with the support of specific laws.

For example, he began his mandate with a general policy of challenges, detention and interrogation of proletarian militants - specifically directed against our group - justified by a so-called "outrage" that never even happened, but that the media treated as an established fact. He tenaciously defended military and commercial relations with Syria and the other Middle Eastern states, and then, after a lot of speculation about the latest wave of exceptional criminal outrages, he announced that it had been organised by the Israeli secret service. We do not doubt that this is possible, and we do not doubt that behind these outrages are the French secret service and/or their successive alliances and bust-ups with the other secret services of the Middle Eastern states.

In reality, we're not interested in who is behind each outrage. The interwoven economic interest that determine them in the last instance are too complex. This brief and by no means exhaustive survey only serves to put forward the point that behind all the anti-terrorist campaigns, the state openly pulls the strings, by stirring up or organising "terrorist" actions to achieve the objectives we've already mentioned and to reinforce general state terrorism, to make it quite clear that there is complete and total coherence between this terrorism and state anti-terrorism, and that all this is against proletarian violence, which is the only real and final brake on the generalised terrorism of today's society.

Faced with the omnipresent terrorism of the state. with the terrorism of all existing states, the dominant reality amongst the proletariat continues to be atomisation, passive contemplation of our enemies' inter-terrorist spectacle, in all its morbid and macabre detail, organised by the international channels of communication and cretinisation. Of course there are heroic proletarian acts that give rise to here a battle, there a strike which goes beyond all expectations and terrorises capital, there are various violent demonstrations which attack the centres of the state (as these lines were being written, there was a major new upsurge of proletarian struggle in many Algerian towns) etc... But these actions have no continuity, no common perspective, no coordinating plan. More than this, the different sectors of the international proletariat which engage in battle one after the other, don't yet feel that they develop one war for the same interests and against the same enemies (15) (we are not even talking of a class conscious of its universal project), and after a struggle, they return to the usual state of atomisation and powerlessness against capitalist barbarism. We have no doubt that these explosions will get bigger and become more important in the near future. But the problem is, how this intermittent community of actions and struggles which occasionally coincide, will transform itself quantitatively and qualitatively into a community of action and leadership with international perspectives, how it will coordinate and centralise itself, bow one can ensure its continuity, how it will give birth to the indispensible leadership, without which we will be on course for another defeat for the movement. The task of revolutionary militants is to answer adequately and practically to this gigantic historical challenge (16).

Notes

1. Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Programme".

2. The so-called sanctions imposed on states which are accused of supporting terrorism, the ludicrous measures taken in the name of human rights "against" the South African state, the juridicial spectacle of the trial of those guilty of "excesses" in Argentina, are of course completely coherent with this state policy.

3. One should not look at this statement in a linear fashion. We are not supporters of the ideology that applauds state terrorism in order to "sharpen the contradictions" (this is vulgar materialism) because it is clear to us that counter-revolutionary terrorism can wipe out the proletariat as a class, by means of the accumulation of class defeats, though inevitably it will reemerge after a long period.

4. We reject the terminology which defends the existence of terrorism or terrorists in general. For us terrorism always has and always will belong to a class: there is revolutionary and counter revolutionary terrorism.

Nevertheless, there is an ideology posing as "revolutionary theory" which apologises for certain terrorist activity. This ideology is always linked to populism and reformism, and is still the basis of numerous pseudo-revolutionary groups around the world (most of which are clearly bourgeois and linked to a national state project). It was skillfully identified and criticised by Lenin in "Revolutionary Adventurism" (Works, vol. 6). The invariant characteristics of this voluntarist, idealist and mechanical argument are: the ideology of the "transfer of forces" according to which each terrorist act "sucks" energy from the state into the militants, the ideology which justifies the "invisible", "invincible", "elusive" individual as against the vulnerability of the "mass", the ideology of incitement and exemplary action... in the end a vision of history which substitutes the struggle between individuals, some of whom personify the state (the theory about which "contraption" will be the "heart of the state"), others personifying heroes, "revolutionaries", that is to say the struggle of organisation against organisation, where the proletariat is reduced to a mere mass of spectators, for the contradictions of capitalist society and the inexorable accentuation of class struggle (See our text in Le Communiste Nos. 17 and 19: "Critique du réformisme armé"). In Latin America, rural and urban foquism are obvious examples of this reformist, bourgeois ideology.

5. All determinations of proletarian struggle and, in the same way, its programme, are the practical negation of the system.

6. We take this opportunity to combat the ideology that associates terrorism with bombs and assassinations; the bourgeoisie is terrorised by all class actions that really show the emergence of the proletariat as a force.

7. The position of the real communist left was of course totally different. See "Bilan, A propos de l'affaire van der Lubbe", in Le Communiste No. 22.

8. Atomised "proletarians" who collaborate with the state. The attentive reader will notice an incoherence with our usual terminology. We wanted to describe a particular section of society (who have nothing to lose, and who do have an objective interest in social revolution) and this is why we didn't say citizen, people and population, like we usually do. We could also use the term "anti-proletarian", the most complete expression of which is proletarians killing each other in imperialist wars. It is the proletariat's capitalist negation, is against its revolutionary negation: the destruction of all social classes, and the communist self-abolition of the proletariat.

9. Like for example: the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Front or M19, the Sandinistas in the past in Nicaragua, the Montoneros and Tupamaros in the past in Argentina and Uruguay, ETA in Spain, the Red Brigades in Italy, the PLO everywhere, etc...

10. For us all these groups are an integrated part of the world capitalist state. We call the heart of the state in particular the government and the current heads of the repressive forces (which often change hands, e.g. the Sandinistas).

11. See "Exil, révolution et contre-révolulion" in Le Communiste No. 25.

12. For example, the endless nuances put forward by the Red Brigades: from the open collaborators to the "real" fighters, including the repentant, the disassociated, etc... See also the result of the arrangement between the military, the Montoneros and the Tupamaros who came to an agreement to right in common cause against "those who rob the nation" etc., "against economic inequality", or for a program of national "well-being", or again, the work of mobilisation for war carried out by the Montoneros during the Falkland war.

13. A good contribution on this theme and in particular about the Italian example can be found in the pamphlet "Prolétaires, si vous saviez - Le laboratoire de la contre-révollulion - ltalie 79/80".

14. As we explained at the beginning, for us every state action is terrorist: this is why we put sporadic and irregular terrorist action in inverted commas. Not to do this would be a concession to what we denounced at the beginning.

15. A sentiment that existed clearly and universally at the beginning of the century, in 1917-21, and to a lesser extent between 1967 and 73.

16. See the "Propuesta Internationale" in Communism No. 4, which is a contribution toward this aim.

The word "labour" is the bourgeois word for "human activity"

Language, like any sphere of bourgeois society, is determined by capital. Language is fundamentally the language of the dominant class and therefore is fundamentally bourgeois. It can be described as the supremacy of bourgeois ideology, pervading all means of communication. Bourgeois language is a verbal exchange developed by way of symbols that best allow the perpetuation of class domination. So, the dominating mode of communication can, to a large extend, impose its own limits upon us. Since it is now out of the question to recreate a language based on a new understanding of human relations, we are therefore perpetually compelled to unmask the treachery of words, and to re-define them in the same way that we are compelled to re-define concepts.

The word "labour" is the perfect, total example of the falsification of the human consciousness. Whereas man always defined, expressed, realized himself through his vital activity (what is life if not activity?), whereas man's realization can be achieved only through the materialization of his vital activity (creation of objects, ideas,...), the commodity system has confined this activity to its "labour" form. Capital has universalized this form and, as wage labour, it dominates the planet. Hence today, while labour has become the only way of survival for the vast majority, the only way for the proletariat to exist, the "labour" form becomes man's central vital activity, the universal activity around which everything evolves. As labour has become man's essential activity, the bourgeoisie teaches us that man's very essence is labour.

That is why the word "labour" (1) -which actually designates one particular form of human activity- now sounds like a perfect synonym for "activity", since for most people labour has really become the totality of their activity. Thus, "acting" means "working", while "being active" stands for "being hard-working", that is very efficient. The cynicism and hypocrisy of the bourgeois language is at its highest in phrases like "making money work", which suggest an hermaphroditic wealth that begets itself as if it were not the sweat and blood of those from whom surplus-value is extracted, the only source of enrichment for the capitalists that "make money work".

So when talking of "labour", it should be clear that using this term determines a category, a well-defined form of production of human activity, intrinsically linked to the commodity system; labour must be understood as the production of human activity, as an activity alien to man, to the manifestation of his life, and to the consciousness he has of his life; it is man confined to his situation of worker.

"Labour is the act of alienation of human activity" (Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

Labour is nothing but the expression of human activity in alienation, the expression of the manifestation of life as the externalization of life (2). The alien character of labour appears in different ways, first through the object produced: in fact, this does not belong to the worker. Whereas the result of human production should appear as the greatest manifestation of the individual, as the affirmation of man, as a mean of recognition by others of man's own human character, labour alienates man from his product, which confronts and stands opposed to him. The worker is deprived of the object that he produces. Compelled to sell his labour-power, he puts his life into the object and his life no longer belongs to him. The externalization of labour consists in the necessity for the proletarian to sell his labour-power in order to produce a commodity totally alien to himself. The worker can get no satisfaction from the result of his work. Even if the object produced had an immediate utility for him, he might not enjoy it; he is dispossessed of its realization which is subjected to the laws of commodity production. The absurdity of this state of things reveals itself in all its cruelty when workers doing piece-work at 35°C (95°F.) without air conditioning or ventilation are told that the factory for which they work also manufactures air conditioners marketed with the following slogan: "Use this air conditioner and dog-days will be over!"

But the proletarian has not only become alien to the object of his activity, he has also become alien to his activity itself. Labour is indeed external to worker, and yet, since it is the only activity that provides him his means of subsistence in the capitalist system, he is forced to submit to it. Thus labour is par excellence unfree activity, it can only be forced and imposed.

"The alien character of labour emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical of other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague."

(Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

So when he works, the worker does not affirm his own essence, but rather negates it. In the same way that he puts his life into the object and gets deprived of it, so he surrenders his existence to the activity of production of this object.

"If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarized the estrangement of labour itself."

(Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

Labour, the act of production in the capitalist system, thus transforms the worker's activity into passivity, his strength into powerlessness; eight hours a day of absurd activity directed against human essence and senses; self-alienation as the above-mentioned alienation of the object.

Loss of himself, loss of the object, and now loss of fellow men. Alienated labour makes man alien to the species (3). It alienates individual life from the species-life. The difference between man and animal lies in the fact that the latter identifies directly with its vital activity, "it is this activity". But man makes his vital activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious vital activity." (Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts oof 1844). As man's vital activity becomes alienated labour in the commodity system, the relation is reversed: the worker is now forced to make of his conscious vital activity -a mere means of subsistence- a means of existence!! Whereas the conscious vital activity should be man's expression of the realization of an objective world in which he sees his own reflection -this production being his active species-life, and a relationship between humans- alienated labour turns man's life activity into a mere production of riches.

"The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that species (life) becomes for him a means."

(Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

Labour alienates man from himself, from his species-being and so from the other man confronting him.

"What applies to a man's relation to his work, to the product of his labour and to himself, also holds of a man's relation to the other man, and to the other man's labour and object of labour. In fact, the proposition that man's species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man's essential nature."

(Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

This consciousness of human species of fellow man is shattered by capital. The expressions of class solidarity help draw the sketch of man's species consciousness: the man understanding that his own interests fit in with those of the community, the human being seeking to satisfy his needs and desires through the enjoyment of the collective being.

The abolition of labour expresses itself through the political form of the emancipation of the proletariat

We have just seen that man is alienated by labour, that he no longer belongs to himself, he must therefore belong to someone else. If the activity is a torment for the worker, it must be a source of enjoyment to another. Through alienated labour, man not only produces a relation alien to his object and to his production; he also creates the domination of the non-producer over his object, over his productive activity and over himself.

There is no reason at all why activity should be confined, alienated, externalized in the "labour" form, -no reason but one: the interest of the dominant class. The profit that the bourgeoisie gets from its domination keeps it from seeing further than its own egoistic interests. The social class that will set humanity free from alienated labour can only be the one that suffers the most from it. The universal emancipation of man depends on the emancipation of the proletariat, for in its relation to production, this class encompasses the whole boundage of humanity.

"A class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of the civil society, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetrated on it; a sphere that can claim no traditional title but only a human title; a sphere that does not stand partially opposed to the consequences, but totally opposed to the premises of the German political system; a sphere, finally, that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, thereby emancipating them; a sphere, in short, that is the complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society existing as a particular class is the proletariat."

(Marx - Critique of Hegel's philosophy of right)

This historical task of freeing humanity from labour, of resolving, once and for all, all antagonisms between man and nature, among men, between man's activity and his enjoyment, between the individual and the species therefore rests with the proletariat organized as a class, hence as a party.

Down with labour !!!

Now it can be more easier to realize why the unions' and the lefties' watch-words about "the right to work" and "job-security" are highly reactionary and utopian. The proletarians know that in the capital system working is the only way to provide for their needs, and that, in this sense, unemployment clearly means... death. Evidence of this is the thousands of human beings dying from starvation every day. The worker's demand for a job must therefore be understood as the demand for the possibility for him and his family to eat, to dress and to reproduce. Yet demanding work for all within the bourgeois system amounts to pretending that this is possible, thus denying the catastrophic nature of capitalism, its lack of control of the movement it begets. The communists know that demanding work for all is utopian, and they use the fact that capital has never been able to achieve full employment, even in its most prosperous periods, as evidence for this. The watch-word "the right to work" is reactionary, for it corresponds to an idealistic view of the ruling system; it denies the contradictory nature of capital which creates work only to create unemployment, that is, zero work; the nature of capitalist dictatorship is wealth begetting poverty. All "economists" and ideologists of labour try to tell us that working is necessary, because they mistake commodity production for social riches. Nothing is more hypocritical than trying to present labour as the only source of wealth. We define labour, as alienated, externalized activity, as the loss of humanity.

"Labour itself, not only in present conditions but universally insofar as its purpose is merely the increase of wealth, is harmful and deleterious."

(Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

Instead of the reactionary watch-word "an equal pay for an equal working-day", Marx was already impelling us to inscribe the revolutionary watch-word: "Abolition of wage labour". In the same way, instead of claims "work for all", we put forward the invariant watch-word from the communist program: "Down with labour!!"

Labour, leisure and communism

"In all revolutions up till now, the mode of activity always remained unscathed and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with labour and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves."

(Marx - The German Ideology)

Communism destroys the mode of activity specific to the capitalist system: labour, the essence of private property. And while it abolishes labour, it abolishes the organization of leisure as an indispensable complement of alienated labour. By leisure, we mean the time given to the proletarian for the reproduction of his labour-power. Just as wages represent the maintenance of the worker and must be considered only as the necessary "greasing" for the pistons to function, so leisure has only one utility, as an outlet for the tensions accumulated during the labour-activity. Leisure has nothing to do with free time, since for the worker the point is to prepare his forces to be more efficient to allow ever more intensifying exploitation. Leisure corresponds to the necessity for the worker to be in fine fettle on Monday mornings. Because of his work, man no longer knows the true sense of his vital activity and during his "lost" hours he will only reproduce an activity "mirroring" alienated labour, so that this part of his time, of his so-called "free" activity, does not contradict the "working" part. Externalized inactivity can only correspond to externalized activity; externalized leisure to externalized labour. Capital matches working time against leisure time, it separates the two activities but also renders them complementary. Schooltime already prepares for this separation: "You should work hard and play hard, but never do both at the same time!" But human activity is a totality. In this sense, the communist society has nothing to do with any sort of leisure society, the idealization of the "positive" pole of bourgeois society. To the separation labour/leisure, communism opposes vital activity as enjoyment, enjoyment as activity.

"Activity and enjoyment are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are social activity and social enjoyment."

(Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

In primitive communism, the same term was used for "work" and "play". In the same way, communism abolishes oppositions between working time and leisure time, between production and apprenticeship, between living and experiencing. This description does not come from any idyllic anticipation, from any idealistic vision of the future, but it does result from the very movement of history and of the world. This movement is in no way subjected to chance; it is the fantastic development of the productive forces that makes communism a possibility, a necessity for today.

The abolition of labour as externalized human activity is an essential part of the communist programme and the proletariat will accomplish this human task through its affirmation as the dominant class so as to negate all classes. It is against the 40 hours working week, the torturing alarmclock, the distressing search for a job, the redundancies, the time spend packed like sardines in the underground, the hellish pace of work, private property, the exploitation of man by man,... that we will use our strength, our knowledge and our determination for the building of a labour-free society, a communist society affording the community the free disposal of its time for the realization of Human activity.

"Another source of demoralization among the workers is their being condemned to work. As voluntary, productive activity is the highest enjoyment known to us, as is compulsory toil the most cruel, degrading punishment. Nothing is more terrible than being constrained to do some one thing every day from morning until night against one's will. And the more a man the worker feels himself, the more hateful must his work be to him, because he feels the constrain, the aimlessness of it for himself."

(Engels - The condition of the working-class in England - 1854)

Notes

1. The word "labour" is latin origin, it comes from "tripalium" which means "instrument of torture".

2. For the definition of "externalization", see the article: "From man's alienation to human community".

3. The species should be understood as man understanding himself as man, the consciousness that the human individual has of the human species.

Alienation and primitive communism

Contrary to the petty Puritanism of those bourgeois scientists who, for centuries, have been describing the primitive societies as unspeakable monstrosities, as beastly societies, not human yet, evoking pictures of barbarian dragging their women by the hair and unchristian love, "Quest of fire"-style,... revolutionary Marxism analyses these primitive societies as being natural communities, as being primitive communism. Where those narrow-minded pen pushers see nothing but barbarism, we see the expression of "what is human in man" (Marx), that is, societies which ignore the separations between labour and leisure, education and pleasure, man and nature, life and death,... real communities where there is no class, no state, no private property, no family,... where the communal being of man is nothing else but man himself, where the atomised individual, so cherished nowadays, does not exist, where the community corresponds to the interests of the species.

"In natural and primitive communism, even if humanity is kept within the bounds of the horde, the individual does not seek to steal from his brother's welfare, and he is ready to sacrifice himself fearlessly for the survival of the great phratry." - Bordiga, "In Janitizio we do not fear death" -

And despite all the trash spread around by our "professors", it is getting clearer and clearer that these primitive societies, this natural communism, were societies of abundance in which, moreover, there existed rites for the redistribution of riches, for the destruction of surplus (e.g. the "potlatch" amongst the Iroquois...) (2).

Yet, if we regard primitive communism as an embryonic prefiguration of the future human community, it is nevertheless true that this community was still imperfect and limited (we do not intend to revive the myth of "paradise lost") because it was strictly subordinated to the external natural conditions, inclement weather, melting ice, earthquakes,... which at times, caused scarcity and therefore the necessity to produce stores, to accumulate. The dissolution of natural community through exchange - brought about, on one side, by the accumulation of surplus for exchange, and on the other side by scarcity (the first and essential scarcity being historically that of women) - first takes place on the outskirts of the community, and then causes more and more strongly the gathering and hunting societies to become agricultural/stock-breeding societies, which means: production for exchange, emergence of value and then of money as a medium of exchange, expropriation of men, division of labour, division into classes etc., in short, the destruction of primitive communism and the emergence of class societies and the State as the organ defending the interests of the ruling class - a process summed up here in a few lines, but which actually lasted thousands of years.

Alienation, in the Marxism sense of dispossession, or more precisely extraneousness (3) appears along with the dissolution of the primitive society, but, in these societies, prior to this extraneousness there existed an alienation: natural alienation. This natural alienation is of course qualitatively different from the alienation/extraneousness such as it is developed in class societies and culminates - absolute domination - in the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, natural alienation derives from the necessity to explain, to understand natural phenomenon which seem unconceivable and unearthly, and which determine the whole life of the community. That is why all the cults, myths, divinities,... in these communities refer to the essential elements of human life, of reproduction of the species: fecundity, sun, life, moon, fire,...

"Religion, as the word tells it, is a relation between the beings. It appears only when the activity of men has been fragmented, just as their community has been fragmented. It makes use of the rituals, the magic, the myths of previous societies. Before that, there was no religion." - Camatte, "On alienation" in "Capital and Gemeiwesen -

That is also why these myths, these rituals,... expressions of the primitive communal life, represent much more an outline of human consciousness than of a false, mystified consciousness: religion.

"The myth, in its innumerable forms, was no delirium from minds which had their physical eyes closed to reality - natural and human reality in an inseparable way as in Marx - but it is an irreplaceable step on the only way towards the real conquest of consciousness which, in class forms, is built through large and distant revolutionary rending, and which will develop freely in the classless society only (...). Well, these myths and these mystiques were a revolution; the respect and admiration that we show for them, as struggles constituting rare and remote movements forward through which human society progressed, are in no way lessened, for us, by the fact that their formulations are awkward and those of our doctrine have another texture." - Bordiga, "Comments on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" B

Though these phenomenon are by no means understood consciously, the primitive man finds a solution for them, a mystical reason; but this mystification is not external to life, is not inhuman - reality is merely distorted, mystified by the very limits of the primitive man. The alienation has still a human character. The representations of primitive life - which have become, in value societies what they call "art" - even when distorted by the mystique, are not yet totally separated from life itself, "art" is not yet the lifeless representation of survival, because there still exists an art of living.

The dissolution of the community, just as it means separation among men, brings about all the separations; alienation becomes purely inhuman. The stronger the development of the several kinds of class societies, the stronger the dispossession of man, his material dispossession, hence that of his consciousness.

"In the form of exchange, of money and of classes, all sense of the perenniality of the species disappears, while the sordid sense of the perenniality of saving arises, embodied in the immortality of the soul which acquires its felicity outside nature, with an usurious god managing this odious bank. In these societies that pretend that they have raised themselves from barbarism to civilization, one fears personal death and one prostrates oneself before infamous mummies, even like the mausoleums in Moscow." - Bordiga, "In Janitzio we do not fear death" -

Reification and capitalism

The worldwide domination of capitalism is radically different from all the previous modes of production, with its universal essence as a precondition to the unification of the history of humanity. Capitalism is not just the product of the simple linear succession of the modes of production, which preceded it in such or such geographical area; its presupposition is the world market. Thus the capitalist mode of production is the first worldwide mode of production - the only one that destroys and unifies all the other modes of production which co-existed before (feudalism, slavery-system, Asiatic mode of production,...) and at the same time makes of communism a possibility and a necessity. Capitalism thus synthesizes and simplifies the class antagonisms, which have made the entire human prehistory; the fundamental contradiction now lies between capitalism and communism, between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

In this contradiction the proletariat is the negating pole, the art of destruction. And whereas capitalism sums up the history of the ruling classes, the proletariat sums up and makes possible the everlasting struggle of the exploited classes (cf. Spartacus, T.Munzer, the Anabaptists, the Enrages, the Levellers, etc.) (4). Therefore, as Marx says, if "the propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement", it is the proletariat only that embodies, that personifies, in destitution, the revolt against this destitution, "a revolt to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outsight, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature." - Marx, "The holy family" -

Capitalism, which concludes the cycle of value (in generalizing to the whole world the commodity production - formula M-C-M'), sets the serf free from his last fetter - the tie to the glebe -; but, just as it frees him from this tie to the ground, it breaks the last link that still bound man to nature, and which, moreover, enabled him to subsist, since, in the feudal social relations, one part of the serf's labour-power was owed to himself, the other part being owed to the lord. The free serf - that is, the modern proletarian - is thus left with his labour-power and his children as his only property (5).

"Light, air and the simplest animal cleanliness cease to be human needs. Filth, this corruption and putrefaction which runs in the servers of civilization (this is to be taken literally) becomes the element in which he lives." - Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manusccripts" -

It is in, and through, this total destitution that the proletariat finds out its destructive power; having nothing to lose, it has everything to win. As Lenin said: "What we want: everything". Here we find again, in the utmost atomisation of the "proletarian citizen", in his "liberation", the base of the community of capital, the negation of classes: democracy (6).

"Feudal society was dissolved into its basic element, man; but into egoistic man who was its real foundation. Man in this aspect, the member of civil society, is now the foundation and presupposition of the political state. He is recognized as such in the rights of man. But the liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty is rather the recognition of the frenzied movement of the cultural and material elements, which form the content of this life. Thus man was not liberated from religion; he received religious liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property. He was not liberated from egoism of business, he received the liberty to engage in business." - Marx, "On the Jewish Question" 1843 -

The emancipation, the liberation achieved by the bourgeois society is thus the liberty to be fully exploited, the complete dispossession of the proletarian is his liberty to be forced to sell his labour-power, in order not to starve. This constrained act of sale/purchase of human labour marks the completion of the historical process of dehumanisation. Alienation/extraneousness is total; man is nothing but a mere commodity, a dead thing. Man's alienation is wage-labour, alienated labour, alienation of labour. It is this act of sale - commodity exchange - that totally separates the workers, the producer from the means of production. He is compelled to sell himself, in order to be able to value himself with means of production which are alien and external to him though they actually are nothing but crystallized human labour.

"The worker puts his life into the object and this life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the less he possesses. What is embodied in the product of his labour is no longer his own. The greater this product is, therefore, the more he is diminished. The extraneousness of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, assumes an external, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force." - Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" -

The product of labour is, therefore, an object alien to the worker, which dominates him. The worker does not dominate the machine; it is capital, the social relations, the wage slavery that dominate the worker's life in a totalitarian way. Thus the capital social relations appear too as an external, alien, somehow "natural" power that dominates the proletarians and which, furthermore, seems eternal. What is more, alienation of labour also means that work is not a natural need to which worker submits willingly, quite the contrary, since it is the only way for him to satisfy his vital needs. Thus the historical struggle of the proletarians against alienation is their struggle against work (7).

"The external character of work for the worker is shown by the fact that it is not his own work but the work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person. It is the loss of himself." - Marx, Id. -

Yet, at the same time, this "loss of himself" makes it materially possible for the worker to become aware of this loss, to struggle, to destroy this wage slavery system.

"That is to say, it is true that the worker is objectively transformed into a mere object of the process of production by the methods of capitalist production (in contrast to those of slavery and servitude) i.e. by the fact that the worker is forced to objectify his labour-power over against his total personality and to sell it as a commodity. But because of the split between subjectivity and objectivity induced in man by the compulsion to objectify himself as a commodity, the situation becomes one that can be made conscious. In earlier, more organic forms of society, work is defined 'as the direct function of a member of the social organism' (Marx, "A contribution to the critique of Political Economy"): in slavery and servitude the ruling powers appear as the 'immediate mainsprings of the production process' and this prevents labourers enmeshed in such a situation with their personalities undivided from achieving clarity about their social position. By contrast, 'work which is represented as exchange value has for its premise the work of the isolated individual. It becomes social by assuming the form of its immediate antithesis, the form of abstract universality.' (...). Above all the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity. As we have seen, his immediate existence integrates him as a pure, naked object into the production process. Once this immediacy turns out to be the consequence of a multiplicity of mediations, once it becomes evident how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of the commodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relations with capital. Inasmuch as he is incapable in practice of raising himself above the role of object his consciousness is the self-consciousness of the commodity, or in other words, it is the self knowledge, the self-revelation of the capitalist society founded upon the production and exchange of commodities." - Lukacs, "Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat", Merlin Press -

This long quotation explains the permanent and tendency-like process that goes from "the self-consciousness of the commodity" among the atomised proletarians, from "non-class", up to the constitution of the class into "class for itself", the conscious class organized into a party (8).

Thus we have seen that the essential characteristic of the capitalist mode of production lies in the fact that:

"In the first place, it produces commodities. But that does not distinguish it from other modes of production; it is rather that the prevailing and decisive feature of this production is to be a production of commodities. That implies first that the worker himself appears only as seller of commodities, hence as a free wage labourer and therefore that labour appear essentially as wage labour... The main agents of this mode of production, the capitalist and the wage-labourer, are as such mere embodiments, mere personifications of Capital and Wage Labour." - Marx, "Capital", Book One -

It is therefore the commodity that determines life; in order to exist under capitalism, everything must posses the characteristic of a commodity, that is, the quality of exchangeability: to possess an exchange value (9), in addition to its support, use value. The human labour power thus becomes something alien to man, a commodity, a mere dead, inhuman thing: this is objectification. From this, it ensues that for the proletarians:

"The relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things." - Marx, "Capital", Book One -

Under capitalism, man is but what he brings, what he possesses as value to exchange. Money totally replaces the community, for the only thing that men have in common is their possession of a more or less great sum of money. It is money that connects the separated, extraneous beings; their relation is totally inhuman, is monetary. It is under the form of money that capital appeared historically. Money is the universal mediation; everything must become money (see Marx - Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money -). An example of this community of money is marriage which - beyond the discourses upon crazy love and love at first sight - is nothing but the sharing, with a monetary contract, of... misery. "Money is itself the community and can tolerate none other standing above it" (Marx).

Thus the worker appears as the owner of the commodity-labour power, and he sells himself, as a thing, with it. The process of extraneousness is therefore twofold: it appears first through the separation between the human forces and the products of their creators' labour, and then with their autonomization; the consequence of this is: the man is dominated by the material objective form of his own labour (10). Thus the fetishist character of the commodity is unveiled: every social, human relation under capitalism must assume the characteristic of a commodity (11), and therefore appears as a relation among dead, non-human things.

"Because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. (...) There it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. (...) This I call fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities." - Marx, "Capital" Book One -

The general characteristic of the capitalist mode of production lies in the fact that the production of relations among men settles not only for things, but, above all, by means of things. The commodity (and its fetishist character) being the obligatory mediation of all production, all the relations among men, and especially those between proletarians and bourgeois, are being veiled, mystified extraneous. The general form of this phenomenon is reification. And this relation among reified men is itself represented by a personified relation - personification of the capitalist production relations - with, on the one hand, the capitalist, and on the other hand, the proletarian - both being expressions of the bourgeois social relation.

"Economy does not deal with things, but with relations among persons and, in the last instance, between classes; now these relations are always connected with things and appear as things." - Engels, "About Marx's Critique of Political Economy" -

We shall have to decompose artificially, into two parts, the whole process of reification, in order to grasp its distinct yet inseparable elements:

A) Reification is the process through which the capitalist production relations (which determine the relations among men, essentially between capitalists and proletarians) bestow a definite social form, or definite social characteristics, upon the things by means of which men enter into mutual relations. This is objectification.

B) What enables the owner of things having a definite social form to appear in the personified form of capitalists, and to enter into concrete production relations with other men. This is personification.

In other words, under the capitalist mode of production, the relations among men assume the general character of a commodity - exchange value, exchangeability - and therefore become reified relations, relations among things - sale of labour power for a wage. But these reified relations which have become external, dominating things (simply because they seem to have proprieties "of their own") are themselves personified by the capitalists, "living" representatives of a relation among dead things. "The capitalist is merely capital personified" (Marx, Capital). And of course, the fetishist character of the commodity reaches its highest point with value, which begets itself, with money begetting money. Money possesses the inhuman gift of begetting "in itself" still more money, just as an apple-tree begets apples. The entire process is obturated; reification is absolute; nothing is left of man. This is the realm of things: money, machines, labour, leisure,... capital. This is the realm of death.

The reification of the production relations is thus reinstated in the central position that Marx already attributed to it in his theory of value, in his "necrology of the capitalist mode of production": Capital.

"Already implicit in the commodity (...) is the reification of the social features of production and the personification of the material foundations of production, which characterize the entire capitalist mode of production" -Marx, Capital, Book Three-

And of course, the entire "work" of "Marxist" economists consists in separating "the objective and scientific analysis of capital" from the remnants of "Hegelian philosophy" - the central question of reification - which, according to them, still obscure the analysis. This falsification has only one purpose: trying to prove that Marx's gigantic work is but a mere analysis - biology - of capital, and not the implacable demonstration ("the terrible missile") of the unavoidable catastrophic collapse of capitalism, of its violent destruction by the personification of the entire human poverty: the proletariat which, by this very act, liberates humanity from the realm of necessity and man from alienation.

"Vulgar economists who do not understand that the process of 'personification of things' can be comprehended only as the result of the process of 'reification of production relations' among men, regard the social characteristics of things (value, money, capital,...) as natural characteristics inherent in things themselves. Value, money,... are not considered as expressions of human relations "connected" with things, but as the direct characteristics of things themselves, characteristics which are 'directly intermingled' with their natural, technological characteristics. There lies the fetishism of the commodity that characterizes vulgar economy and the common views of the agents of production, entrapped in capitalist economy. Here lies 'the reification of social relations, the immediate interconnection of the material production relations with their historico-social determinations'." - "Capital", Book Three, quoted by L. Rubiin -

We therefore had to restore the theory of reification at the very centre of the totality that Marxism - "the theory of the conditions of liberation of the proletariat" (Engels) - is. This essential conception, according to which the very motive power of human liberation lies in the fact that the proletariat is itself totally made extraneous, totally dominated by a monstrous heap of lifeless objects - expressing that life is objectless -makes it possible for us to understand annd describe what integral communism will be.

Integral communism: the world human community

The vulgar comprehension always shows contempt for communism, on behalf of immediacy, that is, on behalf of domination by capital. Revisions are always justified by "new conditions", by "special cases", by "changes in the evolution of capital", failing to understand that our movement, the workers' struggle, is not subordinated to such or such incidental change in the domination of capital, but to communism in a direct and invariant way. It is only from the standpoint of communism that revolutionaries can transform reality. It is the totality of the historic cycle - from natural communities to integral communism - that determines the revolutionary program, which the working class will carry on. This movement is taking place under our eyes; it is the negation of capitalism by the proletariat, which, in negating itself - negation of the negation - realizes the human community. That is why the whole of Marx's work, as well as that of all revolutionaries, is also the description of communism. That description of communism is the description of what the humanity will be historically compelled to achieve - the human community - and at the same time, the description of the concrete action of the proletariat, of the communist movement, which will impose communism. Thus it is also the description of the new community in its prefiguration: the party. Marx's classical description of communism was as follows:

"Since human nature is the true community of men, by manifesting their nature men create, produce the human community, the social entity, which is no abstract universal power opposed to the particular individual, but is the essential nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth". - Marx, Comments on J. Mill -

Once the human community, the "true community" is defined, it is easier for us to comprehend the fictive character (12) of the commodity of capital, of a pseudo-community, of a real community of extraneous, self-estranged men.

"To say that man is estranged from itself, therefore, is the same thing as saying that the society of this estranged man is a caricature of the real community, of his true species-life, that his activity therefore appears to him as a torment, his own creation as an alien power, his wealth as poverty, the essential bond linking him with other men as an unessential bond, and separation from his fellow men, on the other hand, as his true mode of existence, his life as a sacrifice life, the realization of his nature as making his life unreal, his production as the production of his nullity, his power over an object as the power over him, and he himself, the lord of his creation, as the servant of this creation". - Marx, Comments on J. Mill -

And, as we have seen, from the negation of capitalism by the proletariat negating itself, Marx draws the positive description of communism:

"Communism is the positive abolition of private property, of human extraneousness, and thus the real appropriation of human essence through and for man. It is therefore the complete return of man himself as a social, i.e. really human being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development."

"Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution."

Communism means the realization of the human species, means the destruction of the petty, infamous bourgeois individual: "Communism suppresses the individual to realize the human being." (Le Communiste No.9) (13)

The suppression of the particular individual on behalf of the species also means the disappearance of egoism:

"Need and enjoyment have thus lost their egoistic character and nature has lost its mere utility by the fact that its utilization has become human utilization." - Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts -

All the separations disappear along with the abolition of private property, classes, money, labour, the State (and all its apparatus: justice, schools, armies, churches,...) but also of the basic structure of the bourgeois society: the family (with its hypocritical panoply: cuckolds, prostitutes, lovers,...), to be replaced by a human community which assumes, in a communal way, the entire life and reproduction of the species.

"We have the right to follow the century - old thesis - no wage, no money, no exchange, no value - with thesis quite as century - old and original: no god, no state, no family." - Bordiga, The Immuable Tables of the Communist Theory -

In this sense, love is no longer what we "know" today - the fusion of two atomised beings (a fusion which means their non-existence) sharing their misery and their anguish but the assuagement and development of all the desires, impulses, longings, needs,... of the social man.

"In a non-monetary communism, love will have, as a need, the same importance and meaning for both sexes, and the act which consecrates it will achieve the social formula according to which the other's need is my need as a man insofar as the need of one sex is being fulfilled as one need of the other sex." - Bordiga, Comments on the Economic and Philisophical Manuscripts B

"I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential being and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. In the individual expression of my life, I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true being, my human being, my communal being." - Marx, Comments on J.Mill, 1844 -

Likewise, time under capitalism is one of the monsters, which consumes us every day, for the reason that time is the measure of value; it is time that quantifies value. Under capital, time is the only social measure; it is the standard according to which our non-life is calculated. Everything is determined by labour-time; and as the famous saying goes: "Time is money". Marx already conveyed this idea when he wrote: "Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time's carcass".

"The pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives." - Marx, The poverty of Philosophy, 1846 -

Under capitalism, time is the measure of our loss; we are losing our time to win our survival. On the contrary, communism will abolish all measure by time, for it will abolish what time measures: the value production. All the decisions leading to communism counteract the law of value; hence destroy the foundation of the capitalist production relation (14).

"In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production, but the time of production devoted to an article will be determined by the degree of its social utility." - Marx, The poverty of Philosophy -

Communism will not take, as a basis, labour-time (=capital), but the available time, the free disposal of one's life, hence of time. It will no longer be necessary to fight in order to 'take one's time for living', since our lives will take place all the time.

It remains to be known whether, for us communists, communism means "the end of the history", means the realization on earth of the celestial paradise which all priests promise us. Here as elsewhere, let the classics answer:

"Communism posits the positive as negation of the negation and is, consequently, for the next stage of historical development, a real and necessary factor in the emancipation and rehabilitation of man. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not itself the goal of human development, the form of human society." - Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts -

Causing once more idealists as well as vulgar materialists to fidget, Marx here asserts that communism is but a transitory society, is not the end of history, but, on the contrary, the beginning of the human history, of the conscious history; it is just the end of the prehistory. Communism is the suppression of class antagonism and its consequences. It is not the suppression of all contradiction, that is, of all movement. The social humanity will still be in movement, a movement no longer determined by class contradictions but for the very first time by new contradictions, human contradictions at last. Communism is the dawning of a new era, is the reappropriation by the humanity of its history, its consciousness, as well as all of its riches.

From the primitive man's natural alienation to the citizen's extraneousness under capitalism: that is how the cycle of class societies is completed, the cycle of the still more alienated quest for abundance. Whereas communism, being "the supremacy of man over his conditions of living" (Marx, The German Ideology), abolishes alienation...

"The suppression of alienation can only be accomplished by the establishment of communism." - Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts -

Notes

(1) The general framework of study, the central question of the Marxist method, that is, how Marxism abolishes philosophy (and economy, science, art as well) by realizing it, is to be found in our text "Notes critiques sur le matérialisme dialectique" in Le Communiste No.13.

(2) For readers interested in these questions, we refer to Engel's classic "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" as well as to the text "Abundance and Destitution in Primitive Societies" (published in the review "La Guerre Sociale" No.1) which, though sometimes verges on the apology of the natural community, is nonetheless a very good illustration of the essential human character of primitive societies - and that from the communist standpoint.

(3) This essential concept in Marx, restored by Camatte, enables us to express more accurately the worker's complete dispossession, man's total externality to his production.

"We therefore translated 'Entfremdung' with extraneousness, thus modifying the word coined, with good reason, by Hippolyte. In effect: it cannot be translated with alienation, for this would mask reality, or more precisely, veil the moment which alienation has reached. Now the term implies that man has become a stranger to himself, to his Gemeinwezen, and that his activity estranges him more and more, and removes him farther and farther from his human reality. This is a very important stage in the development of the capitalist society. The ultimate one is reached when atomised social relations, made independent by capital, dominate the human being whose activity was their original generator. There it is reification, which inevitably produces the complete in mystification of reality." (Invariance)

(4) It is obvious that the proletariat only can carry out this old project of the humanity, the communists from the past had their eyes turned to the past, and intended to revive the ancient community (cf. Spartacus' City of the Sun) because they had not the material possibility yet to impose the new human community, integral communism.

(5) Hence the word 'proletarian': from prole = child - that is, he who only possesses his children.

(6) On this subject, we refer our readers to our text "Fasciste ou anti-fasciste, la dictature du capital c'est la démocratie" in Le Communiste No.9, and "Against the Myths of Democratic Rights and Liberties" in Communism No.1.

(7) See our text "A bas le travail" in Action Communiste No.4.

(8) The extreme position of the proletariat as a "non-class" reveals its existence "for capital" only, its complete atomisation, its dissolution into the people. The utter domination of the counter-revolution through purified democracy - fascist or anti-fascist - has almost completely achieved this negation of the classes during the period before WW II (see Bilan). As for us, we prefer to use the concept of "non-class", instead of the "classical" term "class-in-itself", because it shows more precisely that the distinction between "class-in-itself and "class-for-itself" expresses, on the one hand, the inexistence of the proletariat as a revolutionary class - a class in the full sense of the term, that is, organized into a party - and, on the other hand, its affirmation as such.

(9) Here, of course, we distinguish the form that value takes under capitalism (exchange value) from the substance of value: abstract labour.

(10) On all these questions, we refer the reader to the book by F. Jakubowski "The ideological superstructures in the materialist conception of history", which is not devoid of critics.

(11) The first sentence of "Capital" already synthesizes this reality: "The capitalist mode of production presents itself as 'an immense accumulation of commodities'".

(12) When we define the community of capital as a fictive community, we mean that it is fictive as a community, as "the essence of man" but is completely real as a community of atomised citizens, as a non-human community. The fictive community of capital exists; we must therefore destroy it.

(13) When we assert this central position of revolutionary communism, in direct relationship with Marx's and Bordiga's works - The human being is the true Gemeinwezen of man - we consider, like Bordiga, that "in this grand construction, economical individualism is abolished, and the social man emerges, whose limits are those of the human society, or better, of the human species." Yet this essential, impersonal, anti-individualistic conception -man exists only as social man, as human species - also means the realization of the "particular" man, of what is human in each man. The suppression of the individual - the narrow-minded, stupid and egoistic individual - means the realization of the social man, hence the complete realization of each "particular" man. "The danger with Bordiga lies in that he maintains his thesis on the negation of the individual up to communism included; in negating man as a unity, communism eventually appears as the triumph of the species only." - Camatte, Bordiga and The Passion for Communism -

(14) We are not dealing, within the framework of this article, with the question of the "labour coupons" in the period of transition - a highly incidental proposal made by Marx in his critique of the Gotha program. Nevertheless, we can briefly assert that the very problem of labour coupons must be set aside, since they still are a form of measure of labour made extraneous by time. On the contrary, integral communism means the suppression of labour, hence its measure. The immediate measures decided by the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat should be directed towards communism, should run counter the law of value, hence directed towards the abolition of labour - for example, the drastic shortening of llabour time. These measures, instead of being the implementation of a new mode of calculation of labour by time, such as the labour coupons, shall counteract capital's logic and shall therefore correspond to the reappropriation by the proletariat of the whole of the social production - for instance, measures such as: free transports, free lodgings, free health cares,... Marx's proposal - the labour coupons -though quite anachronic in view of the prresent technological development, had at least the great advantage of being put forth from a communist standpoint, in contradistinction to capitalist development; that is not the case, far from it, of all his "successors" and "interpreters" for whom communism is but capitalism seasoned with some democratic reforms...

On this subject, we refer our reader to the debate between Bilan and the Group of Internationalist Communists from Holland (G.I.K.) in Bilan No.19 and 20, and to the text "Communism and the Measure by Labour Time" in La Guerre Sociale No.1.

(15) Contrary to Hegel who, being a perfect idealist, puts an end to his dialectic, hence to history (a finality of the human history which has been attained with the ideal embodied by the German State), Marx maintains the dialectic and history up until the end as the motive power, and therefore do not consider communism as the end of the movement, the end of all human development.

From Communism #6

Social-democratic peace is nothing else but the peace of tombs.

The tombs of all the proletarians who struggle against the State.

International Solidarity with the Proletariat and its prisoners in Peru!

* * *

We are publishing here a translation of an article that was first published in our Spanish review "Comunismo" (No.22 - June 86).

Although the events that the article talks about are not of recent date, the article remains very "up to date" as this was shown, cynically, a few months ago when the very commander of the massacres of June 86 at the El Fronton prison, M. Agustin Mantilla, took office as the Home Secretary of the new Peru government. This is how the bourgeoisie celebrates the massacres of the proletariat and how it honours and promotes its bloodthirsty butchers! M. Agustin Mantilla, "homme de main" of Alan Noske Garcia (the Peruvian President belongs to the social-democratic APRA party) is also known to be one of the organisers of the different para-military death-squads!

The article remains up to date still today, because internationalist solidarity with proletarians locked up in the State prisons all over the world has always been and always will be at the very heart of our struggle. There can be no communist militants who remain indifferent towards the repression of our class, towards the tortures, the imprisonments and the killings of our class comrades.

We still want to inform our readers and sympathisers that this article has been used by different groups from the "revolutionary milieu" (1) to slander our group and its militants by qualifying us as "a leftist group supporting terrorism and the Stalinist guerrilla of Shining Path in Peru". While these groups of the "revolutionary milieu" remain locked up in their democratism and their social-pacifism,... remain locked up in their overall social-democratic vision of the class struggle... they actively reinforce (consciously or not, it hardly matters) the bourgeois campaign on "anti-terrorism", designating our group and other internationalists for prosecution by the international police-gangs.

We ask our contacts not to accept such lies and slanders and to denounce such campaigns from these groups.

oOo

"Patria mia dame un presidente como Alan Garcia" ("Motherland give me a president like Alan Garcia"), the posters implored, in several Latin-American countries.

Alan Garcia, the first president from the APRA - a party that had for decades represented Latin-American bourgeois anti-imperialism - had edged his way through international conferences with progressists and trotskyists from all sides - (let us not forget the flirt between Haya de la Torre and Trotsky himself), and thus appeared as the trump card of Great Motherland nationalism and social-democrat anti-imperialism in Latin-America.

But international social-democracy (as numerous facts of the workers' struggle have shown) can offer nothing to the proletarians but State terrorism, repression, torture, shootings, massacres,... And the same can be told of any anti-imperialist, nationalist project, of any variety of Great Motherland nationalism, which is always essentially bourgeois.

Mister Garcia could not be, and has never been any exception. Cheered up by international social democracy and all the progressist bourgeois, Mister Garcia, once he had taken over the presidency, could play the cynical part of deceitful, politicking duelling, typical of any anti-imperialist bourgeois and populist nationalist. He built his fame among his international partners upon one or two purges in the repressive apparatus (so as to perfect repression, of course), upon anti-imperialist boastings, like when he announced that he would not devote more than 10% of the country's foreign currency to the payment of the external debt. Some even talk of "Garcia doctrine" about the payment of the debt! It is obvious that all that idle talk never stopped his regime from being on very good terms with the main international financial circles or international institutions like the IMF, the World Bank or the Interamerican Bank for Development. In all these institutions, there existed a kind of unanimous obligingness towards that man who was doing his best to deceive Peru's and Latin America's proletarians with the myth of debt repayment; and when the tension grew between the creditors and those in debt, they all agreed that Alan Garcia should pay a much larger sum in bribes. At bottom, they were aware that the 10% story suited them very well, but first and foremost, the myth had to live on.

Since there was nothing else for them to do in front of a proletariat that was marching on, they did the same about repression. They went chattering, they sacrificed a few scapegoats among the civil servants, and of course, they went on repressing. The number of people tortured, imprisoned, murdered in prison (an impressive massacre took place on the 4th October 1985 in Lurigancho, where dozens of prisoners were shot and burnt alive), disappearing,... not only did not decrease, but actually increased.

And of course, people like Willy Brandt, Mitterand, Guillermo Ungo, Felipe Gonzalez, Olof Palme,... participated and were accomplice in this. As a matter of fact, they were still welcoming and paying tribute to their fellowman Alan Garcia as being a true progressist and true anti-imperialist. Actually, Alan Garcia does embody international progressism, nationalist anti-imperialism and social-democratism: bloodthirsty against the fighting proletariat, one thousand times murderer of all the social struggles. The international press - that loathsome dissembler of all crimes committed by the State - was doing the rest: Alan was America's "Felipe Gonzales", the fairest and youngest of all the presidents of Latin-American democracy; he even was photogenic and his image could be sold as that of a "good family man". Welcome to the show! Meanwhile, repression was more sanguinary than ever; but, internationally, they mentioned it the least often possible, and when they did, the right or the left of the world bourgeoisie justified repression like this: "the point, actually, is to repress a tiny group of fanatics, of polpotians,...".

The impressive and sanguinary massacre of subversive prisoners that took place on the 18th of June 1986 in "El Fronton", "Lurigancho" and "Santa Barbara" in Peru, is a logical consequence of all this international preparation. It is the golden prize of anti-imperialist progressism. The fact that at the same time in Lima, the congress of the Socialist International was taking place, with peace as the major theme of it (as Willy Brandt even declared when he got to Lima: "We are ready to lend a helping hand for peace and for a solution to the economical problems that affect the world") might be interpreted by some as a mere coincidence, or as the result of Shining Path's revolt (Shining Path's appreciation that in those conditions the terrorist State repression against them, would be more difficult!). For us, beyond all these interpretations, there is an obvious link of unity between the social-democrat scheme of peace and the massacres of imprisoned proletarians. Since Reagan had several times emphasized that the Peruvian guerrilla was the most threatening of the world, the social democrats had to show once more that when the system is in danger, they can be more sanguinary than all the sanguinary ones in the world. The competition between the right and the left, beyond the different economic interests that they represent, reveals itself in the mechanism of control and of repression of the proletariat. What does it matter, that later they establish one or one thousand commissions of inquiry to charge those responsible for the "excesses" (!)... such cynical play is part of the natural mechanisms of bourgeois domination and oppression. Even though they plan and decide of the military operations, they always find alibis, and to preserve the credibility of the State, they sacrifice such and such of their colleagues whom they find "guilty" of these "excesses", of these "violations of the human rights". About Vietnam, for instance, the Yankee State, which considered napalm and chemical warfare as parts of the murdering game, nevertheless preferred to condemn a few scapegoats for these "excesses". And Mitterrand - about whom they forget cleverly that he was among the leaders of the massacres in Algeria - who affords himself the luxury of an inquiry to "seek out those who commanded bomb-layers for the "Rainbow Warrior" whereas he himself was the commander! And all the inquiries made by Alan Garcia from the Socialist International about the imposing massacre of prisoners in Peru have the same purpose: to yell over a few "excesses" in order to render daily terror commonplace.

The position of the international proletariat can be none other than one of international solidarity with the proletarians from Peru because, through this attack, these are its own interests that are being attacked, because the women, men, children, old people,... who belong to its own class and share the same interests are killed and terrorised - and this, whatever flag they were struggling beneath. Its attitude can be none other than that of increasing its action against all the fractions of capital that confront it, whatever they be - imperialist or anti-imperialist, conservative or progressist, populist or elitist, open accomplices or hiding (that is, all those who will mourn the dead in the name of the democratic rights of "man"); against all the bourgeoisie that we have in front of us in every part of the world. Yet this international solidarity must be organised and directed: it is the task of revolutionary militants, and it cannot on any account depend upon agreement with the ideology of a group like Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path"). In other words, those who, disagreeing with, or being opposed to the ideology of this group, remain unconcerned and do not admit this reality of a brutal attack against the struggle of the proletariat and act consequently... are neither internationalists nor revolutionaries. At bottom, they become more and more the accomplices of what is happening in Peru, of the police vision of history or of the more common version which likens everything that stands in opposition to the State in Peru to that group which is internationally renowned as "marxist-leninist-maoist". Against this position, we affirm that the proletarian resistance (urban and rural) against extreme poverty is very strong, that for dozens of years the proletariat of this country has been struggling fiercely against all the fractions of capital, especially during the Velasco era (who used to call in Fidel Castro to break the strikes that neither the left not the right of Peruvian bourgeoisie could break). We also affirm that, like in other identical situations on the continent, the sanguinary repression (there are more than 6000 disappeared) is organized accordingly, and accuses every proletarian of belonging to such or such military group designated as the Public Enemy No1. In this complex process, thousands of proletarians do not heed the Sendero Luminoso organisation. And even within this one political organisation that is a confused mosaic of several tendencies and positions, expressions of complete rejection of its official ideology are not lacking!

We make all these assertions without ignoring that the Sendero Luminoso organisation enjoys a high reputation among the fighting proletarians, and that all the lies spread around about it (accomplices in the drug traffic, cutting of the hands of poor peasants,...) are believed in Peru only by those who are interested in maintaining the status quo. Contrary to other groups which took up with armed struggle in Peru or in other Latin American countries, like the Monteneros, the Tupamaros, the Chilian MIR, the Bolivian ELN, the Sandinists, etc... and which always had an ideology openly nationalist and, accordingly, a legalist and reformist practice (the Tupamaros uncovered swindles and brought the evidence to the judges!) of defence of the national institutions, etc., which have always been the armed wing of the big democratic, electoral carnivals and, what is more, stuck on all the popular myths like allendeism, peronism, sandinism, the Torres government in Bolivia, etc. the Sendero Luminoso has always had an uncompromising position, especially towards velasquism which was considered as something to support by nearly all the guerilleros of the continent, whereas the Sendero Luminoso defined it as the worst enemy, as a grand bourgeois, reactionary, fascist government. Whereas the other groups were the armed wing of the classical bourgeois left - which besides they never clashed with but always flattered and flirted with... so enabling them to become an even more consistent expression of old national populism - the Sendero Luminoso appeared as something completely different, confronting both the left and the right. All the populist (and more generally the left-wing) fractions, once they had taken over the government, or shared it, they still starved and repressed the proletariat - and the guerilleros had no alternative whatsoever to propose (though they be so militarist, their program is the same) and what happened is that the real proletarian struggles (that have lost their organical, organisational and theoretical unity with the classist expressions they had during the first decades of this century) didn't have their own direction, but were canalised by no matter what bourgeois fraction, even by the right-wing. In Peru, even when the great nationalist, populist myths prevailed, the Sendero Luminoso was never the accomplice of the government, even though this is obviously not a sufficient reason for us to consider this group as a proletarian vanguard organisation (which is, for us, impossible in the case of a "marxist-leninist-maoist" organisation), or, more humbly, as a mere proletarian organisation. The Sendero Luminoso just happened to be in tune with the main proletarian struggles in uncompromising opposition to the State.

There were two decisive moments in this story. The first under Velasco, when Sendero Luminoso had just appeared (2). The second after the fall of Morales Berinudez: that is when the process of democratisation began, culminating with the return of Belaunde Terry and then of Alan Garcia - and at that moment, the Sendero Luminoso, its nucleus consolidated, took to armed struggle.

The Velasco era is decisive because it expresses most strongly the attempt of the last decades to establish a radical bourgeois reformism (the real reforms of this progressive military government go much deeper than those of Allende), an attempt to which, in several ways, Stalinism, social-democracy and Trotskyism (Hugo Blanco himself) have submitted. Sendero Luminoso is at that time one of the only groups that denounce and struggle against the regime. After Velasco's death, the regime "turns to the right"; left-wing bonapartism turns into right-wing bonapartism, according to the well-known categorization Trotsky made himself. This is the beginning of an era during which the whole left passes into the opposition, so that it can regain a credibility and prepare the conditions required for another era of "democratisation". This era also marks the beginning of a general process of national unification. The electoral carnival is prepared and results in the constituent assembly in 1978 and the presidential elections in 1980. This was another attack, in a different form, against the proletariat - the same old lies in a different wrapper: the trotskyist and some other left-wing reformists form a coalition that wins a majority in the ballot. The orders of the left become a reality, the Constituent Assembly becomes effective, and the trotskyists present "red proposals" and other unheard-of clowneries (as if a change in the relation of forces could be realized through elections!). The electoral carnival was getting to its apogee while the situation of the proletariat was still worsening.

We could have thought that the ideology so obviously Stalinist of Sendero Luminoso would have led them to take part into that carnival. And yet they did not, for there are other reasons that must be taken into account (the material interests of the men and women belonging to Sendero Luminoso) - and neither in this case did Sendero Lumminoso become the accomplice of the government; on the contrary, it declared war to the elections: on the 17th May, Sendero Luminoso burns down the ballot-boxes in several places of the district of Avacucho. All these facts led the Sendero Luminoso not to agree with "the people" that opposes such or such repressive regime, as it was the case for the other guerrilla-groups, but to side with the proletariat at the important moments of national unity. That is perhaps why Reagan considers the guerrilla in Peru as the most threatening of the world.

In the process which leaves no choice to the proletariat but that of a still more violent struggle against the bourgeoisie and its State, when all the other left-wing groups are objectively united against the working-class' interests under the pretext of condemning terrorism in general and in defence of democracy, Sendero Luminoso is still in tune with important workers' struggles, and still incorporates the militants who break up with all the other organisations. And moreover, Sendero Luminoso appears more and more as the only structure capable of giving consistence to the ever-growing number of direct actions of the proletariat in the towns and on the countryside.

What we tell about Sendero Luminoso is not a subjective opinion, we do not think that we are mistaking objective reality for what we wish reality should be. We are not making an apology of Sendero Luminoso; on the contrary, we think that the emergence of a group like that endangers the classist autonomy, threatens the development of proletarian positions and the organisation of a true communist vanguard (to be sure, some comrades and groups have internationalist positions, but their social practice is not very consistent at the moment) and yet we must admit to it as an objective social reality.

We have no elements to consider Sendero Luminoso (or the CPP, as it defines itself) as a bourgeois organisation serving counter-revolution. From what we know of its practice within class struggles (and contrary to all the marxist-leninist-maoist groups in the whole world) we cannot tell whether it was ever directly on the other side of the barricades.

We nevertheless maintain that their conceptions are a danger to the struggle of the proletariat ant that, far from preparing the proletariat for the insurrection, it carries it away into a blind alley of "prolonged popular war", with no proletarian, revolutionary perspective. Everything that Sendero Luminoso has written is based upon the strictest stalino-maoism. We totally reject its "Mariateguist" ideology, its programmatic non-breaking with the old Communist Party of Peru, issuing directly from Mariategui (despite the numerous organisational splits) which speaks for itself, its description of the Peruvian society as "semi-feudal and semi-colonial",... We think that its ideology is absurd and only serves counter-revolutionary confusion. Its conception of social war as being popular and going from the countryside to the towns contradicts the interests of the proletarian revolution; its vision of the peasantry as a class distinct from the proletariat is openly counter-revolutionary and divides the proletariat. We also reject as counter-revolutionary the position that considers the struggle as a moment of a revolution which is "at the present stage anti-imperialist and anti-feudal", as well as its vision considering that the main contradiction lies within the "people", between "democracy" and "reaction"; also, the concept of "bureaucracy": all these positions are a falsification, a total negation of the actual opposition between capital and communism. We also reject its reformist project of a Republic of New Democracies... and we will stop this list here.

For those who think that this is not enough: on an international level, the CPP-Sendero Luminoso is part of the "Internationalist Revolutionary Movement", a mixture of several Stalinist and Maoist organisations from all continents, with a document which, from the first line to the last, is a gross falsification of the international communist movement, of what is happening and has happened in the whole world. Nonetheless, we must say that some militants in Peru, linked to the Sendero Luminoso, assert that this organisation does not acknowledge as militants those who live abroad, nor those who may have participated in international conferences with this bunch of counter-revolutionaries from the International Revolutionary Movement. But even about this, information are contradictory. By the way, this may be reflecting real differences existing within the Sendero Luminoso organisation. This seems to us the most plausible hypothesis, given the information that we have and that come from different sources, not so much about the internal differences pertaining to this group (3), but, rather, about the real heterogeneity of a social movement which does at all correspond neither to what Sendero Luminoso is telling about it, not to the frontiers that this organisation is trying to impose on it. In fact, we are sure that there are internationalist comrades who have never been Stalinist, or have broken away from Trotskyism and all other ideologies of the bourgeois left, and who continue to reject, like us, the ideology of Sendero Luminoso, but who find it awfully difficult to appear as a different alternative within the real social movement of struggle against capital and the State in Peru. The main reason for this is that the right, the left, the media, the means of repression, and also many proletarians amalgamate any violent action against the regime with Sendero Luminoso. In all these cases, and above all in actions like the struggle in the prisons (where there are many who do not belong to Sendero Luminoso - even the official press admits that (4)), there is always a risk that the coincidence between the action and the repression makes the revolutionary nucleus lose their organisational and programmatical autonomy. We have not enough information to assert clearly that in this process, a whole of struggles and actions are (or are not) directed by the central nucleus of Sendero Luminoso or preserve an organisative and programmatic autonomy towards this group (or towards others which have a similar ideology) or again, whether they are indirectly directed by Sendero Luminoso.

Anyway, we think it means to be accomplice of the State and of the international press to identify with Sendero Luminoso and its ideology the proletariat that today is being bloodthirstily repressed in Peru. It means to be accomplice of the State not to show solidarity with and to dissociate oneself from the repressed proletarians in Peru under the pretext that they are Stalinists, Maoists or whatsoever.

Let's increase our social struggle against worldwide capital wherever we can; this is the expression of our solidarity with the proletariat in Peru.

Let's not forget that this effective solidarity also means the merciless critique of all blind alleys, of all bourgeois alternatives like popular war or peasants' war.

Once again, the facts tragically call for the constitution of a true revolutionary international, one and only organic force on a worldwide scale, against all the democratic, Marxist Leninist populist alternatives, for the communist revolution everywhere, for the destruction of the capitalist system in the whole world!

Notes

(1) The "solidarity" of a group like the ICC becomes clear when they can only analyse such State repression as "an expression of the decadence of capitalism", as "part of the barbaric nature of capitalism"... when they analyse State terrorism against our class, the torturing and disappearing of our class militants, as "a struggle between the left and right fractions of the bourgeoisie". Most other groups of the "revolutionary milieu", having a very similar analysis of class struggle anyway, just stupidly repeated what the ICC told and wrote everywhere on our account!

(2) This is not a text upon this group, nor a complete description of its contradictions; this would require a specific, serious study. Yet it seems important to us to explain in a few words the origins of this group. The classical Stalinist party of Peru splits in 1964 over the agrarian question. From then on, the pro-Russian faction will be known through its review Unidad and they'll be called CPP "Unidad", while the pro-Chinese faction will be known as the CPP "Bandera Roja". The latter will split into several currents. In 1965, two groups emerge: the Marxist Leninist CPP and the FALM. In 1968, there occurs a very important split, which will give birth to an important reformist mass organisation: the CPP "Red Motherland" (CPP "Patria Roja"). Meanwhile, the struggle within the CPP "Bandera Roja" continues, and leads, from the sector of Aji Prop Abimal Guzman (the present president of Sendero Luminoso, "Gonzalo") to the struggle against the direction of Paredes up until 1970, when the split formally occurred. The two fractions still publish a review called "Bandero Roja". If the sector of Guzman has begun to make itself known as Sendero Luminoso it is due to the fact that one of its important rank-and-file organisations was called the "Students' Revolutionary Front for the Shining Path of Mariategui". After nearly one decade of quasi-uniquely theoretical work - even if there were always references to a phase of reconstruction of the party" - the pro-"armed struggle" line was created in 1980. Let's add that this group has been joined by several groups or individuals that come from "Political-Military Vanguard", from "Red Motherland" and from the majority group "Communist Proletarian Vanguard".

(3) The non-formally Stalinist Maoism is the most official line, but there also exist more openly Stalinist positions, like for instance some pro-Enver Hoxha trends.

(4) For instance, the director of "Equis X" Juleo Cabrera Moreno, an infamous democratic journalist, states this in his own way: "It has been proved that, from the beginning, a large number happened to be there though they had nothing to do with the Communist Party of Peru (Sendero Luminoso). But in prison, driven by the tortures and the continuous abuses, they started upholding the dogmas of Sendero Luminoso".

"The proletariat claims only one war: the civil war against all bourgeoisies." - Communism - 1937 -

The chemical bombing of Halabja, which resulted in 5000 official deaths, but in a much more terrifying reality (between 10000 and 15000 deaths in the medium term) raised a general outcry of indignation from "good citizens". They all exclaimed in horror at the "excesses of excess" that is war. This, with its 8 years of uninterrupted massacres and horrors had become banal, "natural". Its length is the result of capital's need to destroy excess proletarians (the successive waves of adolescents sent off, guns in their backs and facing the machine guns and canons prove this clearly enough). But the war also had the aim of crushing the proletarian struggles, which were developing in this area. Those that took place in Iran are generally better known because they led to the fall of the Shah, but Iraq has obviously not been spared workers' revolts. In Iraq, as in Iran, workers' struggles have been going on since 1980, in different forms from strikes to riots, from deserting on a massive scale to localized short-lived attempts at insurrection. War with its retinues of reinforces national union, its open repression (mass executions, dispatches to the front-lines,...) has kept these struggles at "bearable" level for the world bourgeoisie. All the world bourgeois, from the left as from the right, have always allowed and encouraged this interminable war in the name of Islam, Socialism, Democracy (or all of these combined).

The need for the war also means that the bourgeoisie only "reacts" to "excesses" such as the bombing of "civilian populations" (sic!) and then only because such bombings show up the goal of all imperialist wars too clearly: the systematic massacre of all those who have committed the double crime of being part of a surplus work force and of refusing to accept the logic of bourgeois society. We spit on those kind gentlemen who demand a clean war, in which we don't see the terrible spectacle of proletarians, men, women, children and the confused elderly pinned and mounted in death for the valorisation of capital.

Evidently, the massacre of Halabja, like the war, is no more an excess than it is a mistake. It is the cold application of bourgeois needs. They knew very well that they would carry out such a massacre. And for the Iraqi bourgeoisie it was not a question of bombing Pasdarans, the shock troops of the Iranian bourgeoisie, not the Kurdish nationalists, but proletarians! The target was not chosen by chance, but is a direct product of the failure of the policy for national unity lead by the different fractions of the local bourgeoisie, by the Iraqi Ba'athists, by the "revolutionary" Muslims, or by the "liberators of the Kurdish people". This failure materialised by the general lack of compliance with such policy and by repeated confrontations with the police and army.

Struggles in Haljabja

(extracts from letters we received from this area)

"(...) Over the whole area riots, demonstrations and other popular activities against the government and its supporters had been going on for over a year. Halabja was not like it used to be. It was full of refugees from the villages that had been wiped out, as well as of people who had left military service. There was at least one deserter in every house, and sometimes as many as four or five. People weren't just hiding in their friends' houses, but were also being taken in by strangers...

Even the curfew at night didn't stop many young people, most of the deserters and even children from gathering in the streets of some parts of town.

The government hadn't only destroyed the villages, which had been places of refuge for deserters and centres of activity for certain groups, Kurds, the CP,... but also the area of Kani Ashken. Previously, people had organised attacks against supporters of the State, using this area as a base. Members of student, youth, union, peasant organisations no longer slept at home, using police stations or Sarah (the police headquarters) instead.

As for the soldiers, no one was afraid of them anymore. They just politely requested people to go back home and even had tea at their houses, even where there were deserters in hiding. They came to our house several times and just pretended to search the place. They knew full well that we were hiding people, but they didn't say anything. The Jordanians, the officers and, of course, the militia, the secret police (Amn) and the Ishkbarats (Intelligence) were the worst. There were collaborators amongst the townspeople as well.

Almost every night we heard shooting between the police and the CP and other organisations. Sometimes there were confrontations between the militia and armed townspeople, many of the deserters having kept the weapons that they had got from the army and the various clans. Almost everybody was armed as anyone could join up with one of the clan armies and be given a weapon. Joining up with an army enabled them to get legitimate identity cards.

The place was in total chaos. It was all very difficult to understand - the government was trying to eliminate tthe subversive elements, the "traitors" and the "troublemakers" who were actually all going around completely legitimately, within the structure of the pro-governmental organisations. (...)"

The proletariat has fought against all mobilisation and recruitment campaigns, destined to lengthen the war. The bourgeoisie knew very well that for this reason in particular, the region was packed with deserters, mainly in Halabja. Three days before the bombing, Saddam Hussein himself announced, only a few kilometres from Halabja, that "all those who do not defend their nation, their land, are considered to be traitors and we will not hesitate to annihilate them by any means available to us. In this way we are only acting in our duty to punish all those who betray their nation."

Also, when the Iraqi army began to leave the town, the workers got wind of the plans for the bombing and began to leave the town to find refuge in the neighbouring villages and mountains. But the nationalist Kurds of the Patriotic Union of Kurds (PUK), a large majority of which are members of the Marxist Leninist Komala (DPIK) prevented them from leaving - with the help of the Iranian Pasdarans. The pretext given was that Halabja was a "liberated town" and that this liberty should be celebrated and defended. Put the Iranian pasdaran were aware enough of the fate awaiting the workers to have supplied themselves with gas masks and evacuated their partisans. After the bombing, the survivors of Halabja were packed into camps in the border region, a tactic that assured their continuing exposure, on the frontline, to further bombings. They are enduring extremely hard living conditions, subjected to repression, disease, famine,... So after the Iraqi State has been forces to bomb "Iraqi populations" (which it had already been forced to do in bombing some of its own regiments), after the Kurdish nationalists, helped by Iranian pasdaran, have objectively participated in this massacre and after they have all pretended mourning the "innocent victims", they are now torturing and starving the survivors.

Chemical weapons against the proletariat

(extracts from letters we received from this area)

"(...) The Iranians began to bomb the town and people ran for shelter in basements around the area. Some of the basements were packed with 10 to 15 families, that is 300 people per 100m2.

We stayed in G.'s basement for 3 to 4 days. There were 3 rooms in it. Every now and then we went out in small groups to find something to eat, so that we wouldn't pass out from hunger. People had to sleep standing up and the children were terrified, really traumatised... We carried back the dead from beneath the ruins; missiles and bombs fell on the mosques nearby and every time we went out we came across other people retrieving their dead. Once we saw a man who was crying for the dead and we heard someone tell him to stop crying for them, that he should cry for himself instead because no one will even know where to put his body by the time he gets killed! We were in this situation until about noon on Tuesday 15th March, when the Iranians entered the town. When we came out of the basement we saw Pasdarans and Peshmergas. It was just like a film. People spent the rest of the day looking after their dead and wounded. It was a relatively calm day, an intermission.

At mid-day on the 16th March we were having our lunch and obviously feeling completely numbed - body and soul - by the whole situation, when the first missile ripped apart a part of our bathroom. There was loads of smoke and debris. H. screamed at me that the others had been killed, but fortunately they had just been knocked out by the blast and only had a few minor injuries. Thank God the bomb fell on the water tank, otherwise we would've all been blown to bits. We ran over to the basement on the opposite side of the street to take cover. Half an hour later the planes came back from all directions - there must have been at least twenty of them, believe me - and in a few minutes Halabja was in ruins. Shortly afterwards we smelled gas. It was just like the smell of garlic. Some of us ran to get some water and we gave the others wet towels, cloths and clothes to put over their faces. After having run out a few times I began to cough and to itch all over. (...) Only a short while after, the gas began to permeate the rooms - and then the basement. Some people collapsed immediately, dead. So there was no other choice left to us but to leave Halabja and walk in the direction of the Goullen Valley. When we got there, there was a huge crowd of people, thousands of them, all lying on the ground. (...)"

Since the Iraqi forces have devastated all the neighbouring villages (Said Sadeq, Karadakh and the Shar a Zour region) in pursuit of surviving deserters and forcing the inhabitants to take arms against the "Iranian invasion". The refusal to obey these orders has resulted in massive executions. The Iraqi army shot 400 insubordinates, among them many deserters who had been granted amnesty during the proletarian struggle, including the 1984 riots in Suleimania that had forced the State to back down. This example illustrates how the two sides share the job (whilst still in confrontation) of forcing the proletarians to participate in their imperialist war and of repressing the recalcitrant by massacres whenever possible.

Facts have shown thousands of times that when workers refuse to sacrifice themselves for their enemies and when they refuse to defend their interests by becoming canon fodder, bourgeois terror is only limited by THE FORCE OF OUR CLASS. This resistance is the reality of our class' betrayal of the nation and is an essential factor in the defeat of the bourgeoisie. The practice of systematic massacre is not limited to Halabja and was no more the first, than it will be the last massacre organised by the bourgeoisie against our class.

In both camps, the proletariat has violently expressed its refusal of bourgeois order. And each time that it could, the bourgeoisie responded to these struggles by naked violence. The rest of the time they put policies of reform into practice in order to anaesthetize the proletariat while carrying on with assassinations.

Struggles in Iraq

There were at least 3000 executions in Iraq between 1977 and 1979. The State refused to return the bodies of those shot, fearing the potential martyrs that they represented and above all riots as a result of these massacres. A special cemetery was built to bury the thousands of dead. Some of the bodies could be recovered by their families return for a payment, and then only months later when the bodies were decomposed and the marks of torture could no longer be seen.

It is estimated that in 1983 there were 50 000 deserters in the region of Sulaimania alone, many of them armed. Numerous struggles took place against mobilisation and the war economy. The State then decreed an amnesty, on the condition that there would be a return to "normal life" into which the deserters would be integrated, promising that they would not be sent back to the front. On the basis of this, some of the deserters came forward and were promptly arrested by the local authorities and sent back to war despite the promises. This set off a very radical wave off struggle, which threatened social peace. Saddam Hussein himself had to intervene and tell people that the local authorities had misinterpreted the agreement and that everyone should go home. He went as far as arresting those "responsible" and even hanged one of his closest colleagues in Sulaimania in order to calm the workers' discontent. But now that the struggles are less strong in this area, the deserters who were amnestied are subjected to the implacable law of the society against which they rebelled: death! When the deserters met up in massive numbers in the southern marsh region, the Iraqi State destroyed dozens of villages, bombing and drowning the inhabitants and the deserters, killing about 2000. The several hundred survivors, a majority of them armed deserters, were forced to flee towards the central region of Nassria and Amara near Bagdad, where they continued to carry out acts of sabotage, attacking convoys of weapons and arms depots. The Iraqi army could not control them and had to bomb hundreds, thousands of their own soldiers (at this stage they already carried out chemical bomb attacks, particularly in the region of Sulaimania and Arbil).

The disobedience has got to such a scale that the Iraqi regime now has to threaten all officers who fail to bring their troops to the front line with the death penalty, as traitors, their families are used as hostages to prevent the officers from deserting, and their own wives are forced to execute them if they fail in their mission, and this also on pain of execution as traitors to the homeland.

Struggles in Iraq

(extracts from letters we received from this area)

"(...) Things came to a head towards the month of March 1987 and in May the governmental forces were toppled. The people had taken over and the police and army had to go into hiding, only being able to move around in tanks and in armoured divisions. Helicopters circled overhead, calling for calm and care in the face of the enemies of the nation. Battles were raging in the areas around the town and the Iranians were getting closer. The town was bombed by Iranian artillery and there were many casualties. Everybody was aware of the danger they were faced with, but were in favour of neither the Iranians nor the Iraqis. They all knew that plans for defence and counter-attack were being set up all over the place, not in support of the Iraqis, but autonomously. Preparations were taking place area by area. For several nights and days everything was overrun and on the 13th and 14th everyone was in the streets. In the beginning, the soldiers called for calm but after a while they joined the crowds. We could never have imagined it, joy and sadness, pleasure and hatred... Even the people that we had not trusted in the past were with us, side by side, sometimes more energetic and more violent than we were. Disorder and harmony!

Helicopters bombed the town and everyone panicked, people running to hide in the nearest houses by the dozens. Everybody was discussing what should be done.

The State crushed each riot with brutality, executing the leaders and arresting those who had taken part - in short, everyone who failed to escape the State's onslaught.

For a few days things were quiet, but on the inside people were steeling themselves, their hatred growing. Troubles arose during many of the martyrs funerals, in fact, at any, even the smallest, gatherings. The clans and other different factions were fighting amongst themselves and the rest of the population was fighting against them all. The nationalists were calling for support to free the town, whilst the State called for calm and watchfulness against the invading Iranian enemy and against traitors...

Several times Saddam sent envoys, army commanders, who promised change and safety for all, but no one believed them. They made their intentions very clear by refuting their speeches and actively contradicting their demands. They killed the governor of Sulaimania who had come to make more promises and who had refused to answer the people's demands to be told what had happened to those who had been wounded and taken prisoner during the last riots.

Sirwan was a town that had been occupied by armed deserters during this time and the State completely destroyed it, killing everyone. They left no trace of it - the rubble and the bodies mixed together! Many other similar attacks on towns and populations convinced people that there was no way that the State would leave Halabja unpunished. (...)"

Struggles in Iran

But the most violent repression is not the exclusive preserve or the Iraqi State and occurs daily in Iran, in perfect continuity with the practices of the Shah's government and his sadly famous Savak. Khomeiny, the new head of State, clearly demanded this continuation and even the development of policies of terror in saying: "Today it is the duty of every believer to do the work of the Savak in denouncing opponents and suspects (...). In this way, we shall have a Savak of 36 million Iranians."

And this policy is not new. Since the fall of the Shah, the different fractions of the bourgeoisie have shared out the job of crushing the workers' force, which had been developed in the struggles. The wave of struggles that had swept Iran, severely disrupted all the State structures, shattering the army, police and forcing known members into hiding. The State was incapable of confronting the workers' movement militarily, even with the help of he few structures still standing principally the Shiite clergy and the leftists. First, it was necessary to dissolve the armed proletariat into the "revolutionary people of Iran" and to rebuild solid State structures. All fractions shared in this job. Initially the "liberal-islamic" governments of Bazargan and Beni-Sadr were formed and measures aimed at calming the workers were put into practice, such as increasing wages and benefits, executing some of the torturers from the old regime, developing Shoras (councils), etc. The State was supported in this by all fractions, even the most radical. In this way, the Mujahideen participated in the government that they strove to give credibility to... in a critical manner. This is particularly noticeable in the fact that they actually formed Bani-Sadr's protection service.

Since then they have created their own army (the Iranian National Liberation Army) in order to be able to participate fully in cornering the proletariat in the systematic massacring through imperialist war. The Mujahideen organised in Iraq is made up of between 20000 and 50000 soldiers and carried out its biggest offensive in April 1988. They are attempting to make the Iranian proletarians return to war, but this time against Khomeiny, in the name of the defence of the Iranian homeland.

The Fedayen, more "radical", also accepted the Bazargan regime in order to "strife at the heart of the system" also... in a "critical manner", of course. The fact that they were "radical" meant that they were the first to be repressed, going underground agian in July 1979 in an attempt to give themselves some credibility. The Fedayen then fought for "liberated national zones", participating in nationalist struggles in Kurdestan and for the Turkmenes in the province of Mazardan. In this way they were also working for the State, by dividing the proletariat into "nationalities" and, via the support of bourgeois fractions, influencing workers subjected to the imperialist war in defence of the State, by accepting national liberation struggles. Once the leftists had performed their function of dividing the proletarians and the military force had been reconstituted thanks to the stabilisation of the official army and to the development and militarisation of the Islamic "revolutionary" committees, repression was set in full swing. The Shoras were "islamicized" (the ideological name for statifying them, for making them defend the interests of the bourgeois State) and since 1980, those who resisted this were repressed.

The leaders of the petroleum workers who took an extremely active and central part in the struggles leading to the fall of the Shah were arrested. Some of them were executed secretly and the Shoras were destroyed, as were those of the railways, the centre of independent Shoras and the "revolutionary" Islamic Shoras alike.

The pasdarans, the shock troops of the bourgeoisie, with a strength of approximately 25000 men (enjoying all privileges and ready to go to any lengths against the working class to preserve their privileges), as well as the Islamic associations, ideological services and mosque committees undertook all aspects of the running of society themselves. Bani Sadr's liberal government tottered and made a final attempt to restore credibility by going underground on the 13.6.81 while calling upon "the people to resist despotism". On the 2lth June 1981 Bani Sadr is deposed. The policy of taking over the whole of society began to accelerate from then on. The purges in education, which had started with books, spread rapidly to teachers, branded as communists and counterrevolutionaries. Tens of thousands of them were fired and replaced by Islamic councillors acting as ideological guides, directors of information and agents of propaganda. They organised the denunciations, arrests an executions of pupils and students with "negative opinions". Thus 114 pupils were executed in secret in September or October 1981. This execution lead to armed demonstrations in Tehran, which the Mujahideen Khalq tried to take over. Those who were supporting the regime in a critical manner the day before, were calling for struggle against the same regime a day after. But their basic policy - the defence of order, work and the State against the working class - has certainly never changed.

Through its unions, its schools and its forces, the "Islamic revolution" has reconstituted state structures and is developing its armed offensive against our class.

Since 1980 repression has become massive. Proletarians have been executed by the dozen for crimes of "war against God and his prophet" and for "insubordination to governments of the Islamic Republic". After two years of "revolution", "International Amnesia" talks of 4000 people executed. But the reality is without doubt 10 times that, because the only executions that the State in Iran admits to are those which give it a "revolutionary Islamic" image. The others, like the above-mentioned school kids, are more often kept quiet because they risk sparking off anger and struggles from our class.

Increasingly, wages are falling very rapidly, redundancies rain down and bankruptcies are developing apace. The workers, who strike, if they are not executed, are sent to the front line. When a strike breaks out, like that of the steel workers in Esphahan on 12th May 1982, the Pasdaran intervene, attack the pickets, threaten their families, abduct and execute the strikers if they can. This explains why striking workers arm themselves so quickly to defend themselves against the State.

Obviously, this situation was made possible by the start of the war in Sept. 1980. This date appeared extremely favourable for the Iraqi bourgeoisie, because the State in Iran was so destabilised and in terms of competitive imperialism, it was "normal" to take advantage of this. But it is this reasoning and the fact of wanting to profit from the class struggle to beat an enemy in imperialist war, which allows, whatever the consciousness of the bourgeois protagonists, the waging of imperialist wars against the proletariat, against the class struggle.

Imperialist war, determined by the contradictions between classes (as they are also expressed in the sphere of the economy) attempts to momentarily resolve these contradictions by crushing the proletariat. They do this notably by subsuming it under interbourgeois polarisations in order to cause it to leave its class terrain and participate in social peace - the peace of the graveyards - in imperialist war. Thus, the Iraqi invasion has allowed the Iranian State to draw the workers into the nationalist hysteria.

All the bourgeois organisations, left and right, have closed ranks, supposedly against the invader, but actually against the class in struggle. The conditions of life engendered by this war have, little by little, transformed this weapon against the struggle of our class into a contributing factor in those struggles. But the sight of daily executions of "devils" and "Kharjit" (heathens) has shown up the weakness of the national unity, which allowed so many struggles to be crushed in the past. Many victims of this repression are members of small groups who have ruptured with leftist organisations (Fedaye, Mujahideen and Paykar) and are attempting to organise themselves, especially in towns such as Tabrez, Sanadesh and Tehran.

The peace of the graveyard in Iran and Iraq

There is a blockade operated by the world bourgeoisie. It evidently does not apply to arms sales; both countries continue to receive unbelievable amounts. It applies more, for example, to information. This is particularly noticeable because the systematic deformation of events doesn't just take place in the countries at war but across the whole world. This is normal, the bourgeoisie lives with class blinkers on all the time, blinkers which stop them from conceiving of the reality of social confrontation between two classes, such as can lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat for the abolition of wage labour.

It is for this reason that Iran is spoken of as a fanatical nation, where everybody goes to war with a flower on their rifle and the cry of "Allah Akbar" on their lips. But the reality is completely different and the bourgeoisie, even the ayatollahs, are compelled to recognise that things are not so rosy! Despite a greater and greater number of workers being pushed, with a rifle in the back, to put on uniforms, there are many who refused to participate in this butchery. There are a greater and greater number who refused all sacrifices for the war economy.

The regime in Iran has been forced to recognise that some combat zones have to be depleted of troops so they can be brought back to urban centres to repress social troubles. In the same way, a high-up dignitary of the regime has been forced to recognise that, despite the disastrous state, it seems difficult to impose more austerity measures. These measures would fall directly on a fringe of the population who are already disadvantaged and are preparing to dissociate themselves from the "revolution".

Many things suggest that if the Iraqi Army was able to take the Fao peninsular easily it was thanks in part to the fact that some shock troops had to be sent back and, more directly, because the remaining troops showed little enthusiasm for being shot full of holes for the good of the nation.

The social unrest in the towns where the Pasdaran have to be sent is a direct cause of defeat at the front. Each strike is an act of defeatism. The breaking of national unity obliges this nation's cops to leave the front, stopping them from exercising the same repression against the proletarians in uniform. These strikes show the unity which forms the different moments of the struggle of the proletariat which is revolutionary defeatism in practice, which in practice aims for the defeat of the State, "their own" State, which in practice aims to wreck the State structures of control and repression. Contrary to what the Iraqi high command would have us believe, the Iraqi Army has not "taken the Fao peninsula, step by step, after unbelievably violent combat". The Iranian troops ran away, leaving behind arms, equipment and shoes. In addition, the Iraqi army also arranged for this flight to be possible by leaving a bridge intact which connected the peninsula to Iran. The Iranian soldiers, smaller in number, demoralised and above all, badly integrated militarily, fled during the bombardments, which preceded the attack. It is this, which explains all the remarks by foreign observers that, unusually, corpses were few in number. A more massive presence of Pasdarans would have allowed them to compel the proles to put up with these intensive bombardments without budging, and this "in the name of the revolution", by threatening to shoot anyone who tries to flee. This is anyway the practice of the entire bourgeoisie in wars: those who refuse to fight are assured of death by the bullets of the cops who surround the proles in uniform. Those who come forward and fight against their class brothers have a small chance of survival, but only as long as there is no collective force confronting the State!

It is exactly the same in the factories. The proletarians who are fighting in the factories, as well as struggling directly for better living conditions, are creating the basis of the unity needed for a definitive proletarian victory. These proles have directly improved the lot of their brothers at the front, enabling them to flee; at the same time each struggle by workers at the front, by immobilising the cops, gives greater possibility for action to the workers remaining in the enterprises. By their common actions, proles at the front and in the factories destabilise the State, showing their unity and giving a basis for organisation. They are working in this way for the defeat of their own bourgeoisie, a defeat heavy with consequences: it discredits the State and national unity, it undermines the morale of the troops (whether they fight on the production front or on the other front), it directly shows the unity of proletarian interests, the need to unite against all fractions of the bourgeoisie across all frontiers.

"National" defeats, therefore, directly improve the conditions of struggle of the proletariat in the defeated country and these, by virtue of this simple fact, serve as an example, which allows the defeatism in the opposite camp, not just by its passive example, but by the reality of its propaganda and its actions. These are not directed against its "foreign" class brothers but against the world bourgeoisie.

The development of struggles in Iran, the decredibilisation of the State, the fact that it is always very clear that the bourgeoisie, by means of its interposed ayatollahs, has taken, since the day after the fall of the Shah, anti-working class measures demanded by the world crisis... all these things explain the power struggles within the bourgeoisie. The "hard" faction lead by Khomenei, think that only the development of the war is going to allow it to hang on to the degree of control of the proletariat, which it has now. This faction advocates the return to large-scale human wave tactics for fighting Iraq. But it seems that this tactic has been abandoned because it was pushing the workers into revolt too rapidly. The other faction thinks that the social situation forces the State to look for a credible alternative to the war. This means without doubt putting forward a bourgeois fraction which is at the same time credible and able to impose social peace, imperialist peace, the peace of the graveyard, in return for stopping or suspending the war.

In Iraq, the situation is relatively different. It is true that the deterioration of living conditions has brought about very important struggles in the army and the region of Kurdistan principally, according to the information, which has filtered out. We can see that the Iraqi State, faced with the waves of desertions, has been forced to threaten its officers into organising bombardments of its own army, and to create battles between their own troops. But the power of the State has managed, more or less, to contain the struggles within certain regions, which then, shaped practically by this control, and isolated from the rest of the movement, are crushed section by section. Deserters are obviously forced to choose for their refuges, regions poorly controlled by the State. These are zones where it is possible to impose a balance of forces with the State, like when it was forced to retreat from Sulaimania. This constraint is already in itself a factor in the unification of the movement. The chronic difficulty of unifying, in time and space, the different moments of working class struggle never stops appearing. It is the chronic difficulty of the movement giving itself a real direction, not just of leaving bourgeois organisations but more and more of centralising itself, of organising outside and against them.

More than this, it seems that through the war, the State in Iraq has succeeded in reorganising its shaky economy. This goes some way to explaining its advances in the imperialist war. Once again, if the State is succeeding in this reorganisation, it is directly against the working class and imposes a powerful development of exploitation. This same development is a double weakening of the proletariat. On the one hand, it recredibilises and directly reinforces the State, on the other, it permits victories in the imperialist war. These victories are further factors in national unity and permit the isolation of the most determined proles, leading to the defeat of the whole of our class.

The prolongation of the war is a stabilising element, but equally, it can push the proletariat into struggle, as it has done already.

That which has been a factor squeezing out social contradictions - the war - may yet express itself more and more strongly as a factor in the class struggle. An illustration of this contradiction for the bourgeoisie is the bombing of towns. This is supposed to lead to the development of national unity against "the enemy, which massacres innocent populations", but it became a contributing factor in the class struggle. In Iran, whenever the Pasdaran arrive in a recently bombed part of a city, they are forced to cordon it off so as to isolate the victims, since the sight of them makes proles wild with rage against the State, which pursues and develops this war. The cordons of "guardians of the revolution" are rapidly insulted, then attacked, the cries of hate of the workers are expressed less against Saddam Hussein than against "their" direct oppressor: "Down with Khomeini" cry the bombed proles of Tehran!

It is this reality, which has caused a slowing down in the bombing of towns and certainly not the crocodile tears of the bourgeoisie of the whole world. They receive a first direct dividend from the explosion of each bomb, a second from each surplus prole killed and a third in the form of repression of the class struggle. The terrible events of this region remind us, with the utmost brutality, of the lessons for all time that the proletariat draws from its struggle.

Nationalism and peace mongering are always against the proletariat. The proletariat opposes to the first of these its internationalism, to the second, its revolutionary defeatism, like it is doing in Iran and Iraq, despite its enormous weaknesses and difficulties, produced notably by its isolation.

Nation and national interest always mean the exploitation and massacre of proletarians

Proletarians do not have a country. The nation always constitutes the force of disorganisation of the internationalist unity of the proletarian movement. The nation is the prison of the proles. The struggle of the proletariat is always antagonistic to the national interest.

In exactly the same way that inside each country capital wants to tie the proles to the interest of such and such a factory or such and such a sector of production, in the same manner, on the world level, the bourgeoisie try to tie proles to the national interest to, in this way, prevent the realisation of proletarian internationalist unity.

But when the bourgeoisie in a country sees the need to annihilate the strength of the proles, it never hesitates to use the forces of another region for this task. In the same manner, on a world level, when a movement surges in one country, the bourgeoisie uses the forces of another country to crush it. For capital, therefore, frontiers do not exist when it is a question of crushing struggles. All States hold the international passport of capital when it comes to the repression and crushing of the world proletarian movement. Nations have no meaning except as a hindrance to the proletarian movement; they constitute a shock troop for breaking our struggles and organising capitalist domination. Each time the proles surge in a revolutionary manner, the nation opposes it as a force of crushing brutality. What kind of repression, what kind of massacre has not been organised in the name of wars of national liberation? When and where has the victory of the nation ever meant victory for the proletariat? In reality, the bourgeois of all countries love their nation and never hesitate for one second to chop off the heads of "traitors" who call into question the interest of the nation.

The history of the world proletarian movement suffices to show that proles have no interest in common with their nation and have nothing to gain and everything to lose in supporting such and such bourgeois fraction, or such and such country in a war. The war between bourgeois fractions, between countries, is the war of profit production, the war of exploitation and massacre of proles, it is an anti-communist war by its very nature.

Those who struggle under the banner of the defence of the national economy, those who support such or such "progressive" regime or still such or such "socialist" country... only affirm themselves as the enemies of the proletariat. Their only aim is to weaken every attempt by the proletariat to attack capital.

All nations of the world actively participated in the massacres in Iran and Iraq, as they always have in all past wars.

The exploitation of the proletariat, the attack against its movement in England, in France, in Cuba, in Russia, in Nicaragua, in the USA and in all countries of the world, the massacre in the city of Halabja, the massacre of proletarians in Tel-el-Zatar (1976), in Sabra and Shatila (1982), in Sanandadj (in the summer 1979, when the Fedaye, the Komala,... and all other leftist groups handed over the population, after having disarmed it, to the attacks by the Iranian Pasdarans)... all these massacres are part of the same movement of extermination of our class.

The different fractions of the Kurdish, Iranian and Iraqi nationalist movements, and each one of them according to its own point of view and its political interests, shed tears for "the martyrs" of Halabja. Each of these political formations, according to the particular place it is holding in the capitalist social relationship and in the process of attack against the proletariat, defends such or such belligerent. Others still, behind some hypocritical pretext, demand the creation of a progressive and democratic State in both countries, on each side. The CP of Iraq for example, that only ten years ago was still very busy reinforcing national unity, this national unity that proved to be so vital for cracking down on every revolutionary upsurge! Wasn't it the same CP of Iraq that appealed upon proletarians to support Saddam and the Iraqi State because "Iraq was on the road to socialism"? Wasn't it the same CP of Iraq that participated in the massacre of thousands of proletarians under the pretext of struggle against American imperialism and against the Shah of Iran.

The bombing by the Iraqi air force of the city of Halabja, already bombed in April 1974, as well as of the city of Kaladiza, will always remain alive in the memory of our class. These facts, and too many others as well, are the indelible mark of blood of the anti-proletarian politics that the different parties in Iraq are carrying out.

Everywhere in the world, those bastards, who have participated a thousand times in the massacres of proletarians, have shed their tears about the Halabja bombings. The Kurdistan Patriotic Union (of Talabani) doesn't hesitate to denounce this "most atrocious crime" in which it objectively participated!

It's chief Talabani came to Europe to try to frame the proletariat while using the death of our class' brothers in Iraq as a commodity... turning the massacres into another useful spectacle for the sake of the bourgeoisie. He has been trying to take profit from this event in order to develop a Kurdish nationalist campaign against "Sadam Hussein, the fascist" and making the workers from Kurdistan participate, alongside the Iranian Army, in the war against the proletariat.

Those bastards have turned their coat in this imperialist war tens of times... so as to confront the proletariat in the most efficient manner. Talabani had been secretly negotiating with Bagdad for a long time already. The result of these talks was that the members of Talabani's Party could keep possession of their arms and enter freely into Iraqi cities... to repress the proletariat. This is how, in 1984 in particular, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan participated directly in the repression of insurgents in Soulemania, firing at the demonstrators from the top of the roofs. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan systematically participates in the repression of all workers struggles, denouncing deserters in exchange for the liberation of some of their own imprisoned leaders, opposing strikes, shooting at demos, participating with the army and the police in the hunt for deserters and for all individuals and groups who were opposing war and hiding in the mountains.

Now that these organisations, like the Communist Party of Iraq, or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan... have spent all their credit and illusions with the proletarians, certain Marxist-Leninist fractions have started to present themselves as the real and true nationalists and how they want to save the movement of national liberation from the hands of these "traitors". In reality, their programme is nothing else but the historical programme and policies of the national liberation movements and of anti-imperialism. The only difference between them and their predecessors is that at the end of their declarations, they add some words like "proletariat" or "communism". According to those Marxist Leninist organisations, it is only the proletariat and the exploited masses who are capable of really solving the problem of the national minorities through the establishment and the victory of socialism in Iran and Iraq: this shows the real face of their would-be internationalism. The upholders of this political line are called Komala (Communist Party of Iran) in Iran, and the "Road to Revolution" party (a fraction that split from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) as well as other elements that have recently left the CP, in Iraq.

The aim of these fractions and the reason why they are massacring our class' brothers are the same as those of the Vietnamese nationalists when they were fighting against imperialism and for the creation of a Vietnamese socialist State. The only results for the proletarians in Vietnam, was to be sent back to the production-process, exactly in the same way as before independence, or probably even worse, because the new young nation, exhausted by many years of war, needs even more manufactured products, more labour, more sacrifices... so as to be competitive regarding other nations in modern society. Yes, this is how the "free socialist nation" has become another new prison to make workers sweat blood. And no one doubts that in such a nation, that has been liberated by the blood of millions of martyrs, the proletarians wouldn't even dare to go on struggle again, because after all... these struggles only reinforce the imperialist enemies of the beloved fatherland, don't they!!!

The socialist government of Vietnam - the supreme reference of all Marxist Leninists that respect themselves - is keeping thousands and thousands of proletarians locked up in its gaols so as to "protect the interests of the revolution". This situation is not particular to Vietnam. Everyday, our class can witness that in Castro's Cuba, in Mao's China, in Ortega's Nicaragua, or in any other "socialist" country with some revolutionary and popular government... workers produce as an exploited class for their class-enemy, the bourgeoisie, its nation, its national economy.

For those Marxist Leninists, each reference to the internationalist character of the proletariat and its revolution, can only be an infantile dream, because, as they express it so clearly "each particular situation asks for a different and realistic political solution." According to their views, the proletariat would have to follow, step by step, the programme they've conceived in their heads, to be able to achieve its aim. We state very clearly, in front of these people, that the position and the real politics of the proletariat are always, and always will be, the same, everywhere, i.e. the intransigent struggle for its class interests, and never for the sake of its historical enemies: the nation, wage-labour, the democratic rights and liberties, democracy! The interests of the proletariat are antagonistic to all the political programmes that give life to this system of exploitation. The aim of the proletariat is the realization of the worldwide communist revolution, and such realization does not proceed by stages. The communist revolution will take place in spite of and against all stages: as a matter of fact, it will have to destroy these stages if it is not to perish.

Through the different stages, the bourgeoisie is trying to link the proletariat to the defence of its own bourgeois interests. What those nationalists call another stage on the road to victory is nothing else but another force of retardement of the communist revolution, and such a burden weighs very heavily upon the shoulders of the proletariat. All, those famous "workers' achievements" are nothing else but additional chains that imprison the proletariat.

The only achievement that the proletariat recognizes as its own, is its class' reinforcement, the reinforcement of its internationalist organisation and of its revolutionary army. Proletarians must know that the "achievements" that nationalists are preparing them, are nothing else but the different prison camps for the production of plus-value, it is their massacre on the altar of value.

Revolutionary defeatism

Proletarian internationalism takes upon itself the only possible answer to the worldwide bourgeoisie, to the capitalist State: this answer expresses itself, today like yesterday, by the rupture with social peace, by the reinforcement of all struggles wherever they may rise... this is the only way to impose the revolutionary and final solution to capitalist crisis and war. Communist revolution, class war against bourgeois war.

The proletarian answer to imperialist war, is:

* the organisation of sabotage actions against the economy, against production, against arms convoys... the sabotage of all social peace

* the organisation of all actions that aim at undermining the sending of troops to the war-front, undermining the morale of the troops

* the organisation of desertions from the front and from the army

* the encouragement to fraternisation, to rebellion and mutiny, to the pointing of guns at ones' own officers

* the organisation of the most decisive and offensive actions so as to transform the imperialist war into civil war for communism.

But of course, revolutionary defeatism cannot be conceived of in only one country. The communist calls for sabotage actions are related to the international nature of the working class and therefore they're directed towards the worldwide proletariat. Proletarian defeatism means the uncompromising struggle against one's "own" bourgeoisie, and so on each side, in all countries.

These activities have been assumed - in different manners and on different levels... ranging from the mere flight from the battlefields, individual desertions... to the organisation of sabotage activities, of fraternisation with those in front... - by proletarians from both sides. But most of the time, these actions have remained isolated: this is why and how the bourgeoisie has been able to defeat these revolts!

For those struggles to get out of their local limits and to become more general, the task of the proletarian vanguard-fractions is to fight for the organisation of these defeatist movements so as to materialize the internationalist unity that stands at the basis for the transformation of this war into an open war between the organised proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

This once more substantiates our claim that revolutionary defeatism cannot reinforce itself in a lasting way in only one country or one region, but must necessarily extend itself - a question of life and death - beyond all frontiers.

Internationalist solidarity

If in Iran and Iraq numerous proletarians have been trying to break with the whole of the nationalist and bourgeois parties, in Europe also these breakings have materialised f.i. with the circulation of many leaflets denouncing these organisations and their nationalist campaigns. In Europe also, there are militants who are trying to organise these breakings! Undoubtedly these breakings remain still locked up in daily reality and do not manage, because of this, to centralise into a unified direction.

The whole of ripostes and breakings that have been taking place spontaneously, do not yet transform themselves into a more important force and do not yet materialise in the setting up of an international center for the coordination and direction of the struggle. These weaknesses are still worsened by the fact that for years and years many militants from our class have been submitted to extremely rude forms of repression that have decimated or simply wiped out the different communist nucleus. This simply corresponds to the situation of our class that is being decimated in this war in exactly the same way. The inter-bourgeois polarisations, as well as the terrible conditions of survival that militants have to endure, make it extremely difficult for communist militants to assume the continuity of subversive activities as well as the theoretical reappropriation of the invariant determinations of the communist movement. Nevertheless, we think it is more than likely, although we do not have enough information about this, that these kind of activities are being assumed, on different levels, in different areas.

In Europe, this has expressed itself (once more, with many weaknesses, because of the balance of forces on the world-level that is very un-favourable to our class) through the circulation of leaflets against the war, and sometimes through the beginning of clashes between nationalist militants and internationalists.

In Vienna, a leaflet was distributed, on March 27th 1988, that said:

"All the nationalist organisations support the Islamic State and against all those who really participate in the Iran-Iraq war, who are killing proletarians, we call for internationalist solidarity. Down with both sides! The proletariat has no interests in this war! We must fight the sending of arms!" - A group of Kurds from Vienna -

Here is the content of another leaflet that was distributed:

"The war of destruction between Iran and Iraq only serves the interests of the worldwide capitalist system; it has been lasting for over 8 years with the aim of reinforcing the capitalist State on each side so as to perpetuate and develop the repression against the workers' movement of that region, while using workers as cannon-fodder. Down with both capitalist States in Iran and Iraq. Let's unmask those organisations that support this war. Long live the internationalist solidarity of the proletariat!"

Still another leaflet states:

"Workers and exploited! The only way to get rid of this bloody war is to reinforce the unity of our struggles, against both sides, while transforming this war in a civil war for bringing down both States. Down with Iran. Down with Iraq. Down with all organisations in this region! Long live the unity of proletarian struggles on both sides!" - Some revolutionaries in exile -

Of course, these are only quotes. In spite of the fact that some "revolutionaries", with their ideological vision on how the revolution "should-be", will only see the weaknesses of those leaflets (and we do not deny that such weaknesses exist) we want to stress the importance of such actions, and we want to encourage those militants who manage - in spite of many difficulties (repression, isolation,...) to affirm the internationalist interests of our class beyond all national boundaries!

Today's situation

From the very outset of the war, the situations in Iran and Iraq showed quite some important dissimilarities. In Iran, the war started at a moment when the Islamic State was still trying to defeat and liquidate the important struggles that had been going on for several years already. At that stage, the Islamic regime had not yet discredited itself too openly: the very radical speeches against "capitalist decadence" and for "international revolution" still prevailed. On top of that, Iran could easily present itself as a "victim", as an "aggressed" country, "aggressed" by Iraq, as well as by the whole international community of Nations. All this favoured the initial campaigns for national union and mobilisation in Iran. This explains the first "victories" gained by Iran over Iraq. In Iraq, the situation was quite different: fierce repression had been keeping the workers' struggles at an all-low level for years, but at the same time, the regime of Saddam Hussein had lost all of its credit. This explains why it will be more difficult for Saddam Hussein to create a real national consensus around his war and why there has been no mass mobilisation in Iraq in favour of the war. Quite to the contrary, from the very outset of the war, the Iraqi army command had to face sabotage-activities, desertions and all other kind of proletarian resistance against the war. This is also why an important part of the battle-troops is composed of professional army personnel. It will only be the important support that Iraq is getting from most other nations (USA, France, UK, URSS,...) and the fact that after years and years of massacres, struggles in Iran also will start to redevelop themselves... that will allow for Saddam Hussein not to be submerged by Iranian attacks on several occasions.

So throughout these long years of unslaughter, important struggles have been developing on both sides, making up for a certain homogenisation of the situation of proletarians on both sides.

So the possible development of defeatist struggles across the borders and spreading to the whole region had become a real and potential danger for the bourgeoisie of the whole world. It is mainly this situation that has determined the worldwide bourgeoisie to impose a cease-fire and to prepare the peace-negotiations between Iran and Iraq.

The process of peace

Peace must serve the purpose of pacifying once more the explosive social situation that 8 years of uninterrupted massacres have created. This pacification must be obtained through the celebration of "victory" (in Iraq mainly), through the need for the reconstruction of the national economy,... and this will unavoidably mean the repression of all proletarians who refuse the dissolution of their class' interests into the interests of the "people". With the end of the war against the external enemy, both countries can once again assign all their energy and all their forces of repression directly against the subversive elements of society who do not recognise the benefits of such a costly peace!

The bourgeoisie is using this peace to crush the workers' struggles. The bombings of several cities and of whole areas in Iraqi Kurdistan have shown this in a most atrocious way. Of course, while the bourgeoisie is bombing our class brothers in one area, at the same time it is talking about amnesty in some other area... all this poison just to defeat our class!

In both countries, the cease-fire has allowed the bourgeoisie to go ahead with mass executions. If more especially we can hear talking so much about the Kurdistan area, this is mainly due to the fact that this is one of the regions where all throughout the war, in spite of the bombings, in spite of repression from all governmental and nationalist forces (Komala, Pasdaran, PDKI,...) proletarians have continued to refuse to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the nation, be it Iranian, Iraqi... or Kurdish!

Peace and war are seen to be two distinct instants of the same human submission to capital's dictatorship. The proletarians - rebellious victims and revolutionary subjects of social reality - are the organised men and women who attack the bourgeois peace to as great an extend as war because it sees only a false alternative in the different instants... "work and die" or "march and die"! Through this understanding of the reality of what they are submitted to by capital, proletarians can fight against war, against work or, better still, in their fight against work they also fight dialectically against war and peace.

Against capitalist war and peace: revolutionary defeatism

Introduction

Our reviews

We publish our central reviews (in French, Spanish, Arabic, etc.) as part of our efforts aiming at centralizing militant activities and proletarian struggles at an international level. Our reviews are not simply brochures giving information or publications of propaganda and we do not want to "convince" individuals for whom the necessity of the struggle against the order of capitalist exploitation and bourgeois state oppression is exclusively a "theoretical question". We are proletarians who are exploited and oppressed like any other proletarians, who are forced, by the totality of our situation, to fight, to organize ourselves against the bourgeois order.

Our reviews are means, products and parts of this fight and are for proletarians who, starting out from our common situation of being exploited and oppressed, starting out from the class hatred against the exploiters and oppressors and from the class solidarity for our brothers, are trying to find the way of common fight.

Another important feature of our central reviews is the fact that - due to their general level of globalisation and abstraction - they become an explicit reference in the history of our class, i.e. just like communist militants today use the material that was passed on to them by previous generations of militants, in the same way today's material that we elaborate will also be an element of clarification and reinforcement for communists tomorrow. In this sense, the existence of our central reviews does not depend on the present situation of the proletariat.

But it is easy to understand that as far as our real possibilities and the concrete means to publish such reviews are concerned, we depend entirely on the present (and past) situation of our class. As a matter of fact, it is clear that it would be irresponsible to decide to publish a review in this or that language (arguing about the historical necessity of it) without considering the real (immediate and potential) possibilities one has for turning such a publication into a REGULAR means for the centralization of communist activity.

Why the English language review is a special case?

For the reviews in French and Spanish, and in a nearly uninterrupted manner since the creation of our group (1978) practically all the concrete possibilities have been existing to publish them: continuous militant activity of the group using these languages; a relatively large number of militants and contacts involved in these activities and real possibilities to distribute them. For the English language review, at least some of these aspects are non-existent, or questionable (*).

During the last years we had to realize that the situation - with regard to these criteria - has become much less favourable, much more difficult for us... and of course, such a recognition of the real state of affairs, of the real state of our situation, our forces, should be linked up with the general state of isolation and weaknesses that we live in and that our movement is going through (has been going through for the last decade... and more!). We had to check very carefully and very precisely what necessities we are facing and what possibilities we do have.

For sure, wherever we have travelled, wherever we have met other comrades whose language we did not speak and who did not understand French or Spanish, we nearly always managed to communicate in English. Comrades in other countries, such as Germany, Norway, India, Taiwan,... nearly always relied on English to get in touch and communicate with us. This undoubtedly is due to the fact that English today is the privileged language, the first international language for the communication of capitalist transactions (in finance, commerce, science,...) and that consequently in most countries the imposition of English as a second language is considered by the local States to be a worthwhile investment.

So the necessity of an English language review, as a means for ourselves to contact militants in many different areas of the world, as a means and agent for the centralization of international struggle, has clearly imposed itself on us as an absolute necessity.

Compared to this necessity, our possibilities to assume such a publication, on this particular (high) level of abstraction, are really weak. They are weak in regard to the requirements for such a review (its quality) as well as in regard to the very limited means that we really dispose of: inside our group there are no comrades for whom English is the mother tongue, and outside the group, there are only few sympathizers that we can count on to help us with the translations.

Finally, we agreed that in spite of these difficulties, we really need the English language review, as it is a means of opening some (though limited) new perspectives, too. The group should act, also concerning these questions, in historical perspective, and judge the importance of its actions on the basis of this historical approach. The aspect of concrete English language activity is weaker (but not non-existent), but the potential perspective is much more important.

We need the review in English to maintain and improve our contacts with fighting proletarians and to have chance to make new contacts by the means of circulating our review, wherever it is possible. We cannot just wait for a greater demand for a review in English, we should contribute to the development of a real demand for if. We want the review in English to be a possible means of breaking out of the general state of isolation and weaknesses that we live in and that our movement is going through.

We are expecting all our comrades ("readers") to contribute to the task of reading, criticising, and spreading this review, as well as to the task of translating, writing, etc.. We need the comrades' contributions and we consider it our task, among others, to organize these contributions. We are aware that this will be one of the main conditions for our activities with the means of this language to become more real.

(*) This, of course, does not mean that as far as the French and Spanish reviews are concerned, we do not encounter such difficulties. But it is true that for reasons related to the "personal" history of the militants of different origins who are responsible for these publications, that the difficulties we are mentioning regarding the Communism review have less effect on the group's capacities to assure regular publications in these two languages. To have a better understanding of how we organise the political centralisation, the homogenisation of the contents of our publications in different languages, we refer to the editorial we published in Communism No.5.

The capitalist necessity for war

Capitalism cannot live without war. It is not by chance that war permanently exists in this or that part of the world, it is not by chance that it is generalizing. The reason is: this society cannot live without war.

War is nothing else but an inevitable expression of private property of the means of production, freedom of trade and competition.

Moreover, looking through the historical development of Capital and the consequent exacerbation of all the contradictions, we can see that this system only grew up thanks to successive wars and that the cycle it needs to survive is: crisis, war, reconstruction, expansion, new crisis,... and so on. Concretely, capitalist progress and development are made possible through barbarity and war.

Briefly explained, the reason for this is that the mass of capital grows more quickly than its possibilities of valorization. Thus comes a time of overproduction of capital, which leads to the situation that part of the worldwide social capital is excluded from the valorization process, by and on the benefit of another part of the same worldwide social capital; the conditions for a new valorization process will only be regenerated from and on the basis of a violent devalorization of a part of capital; or, to put it in a better way, on the basis of the fact that part of capital stops working as such (bankruptcy or physical destruction of the means of production).

Closing down factories or putting part of constant capital on the rubbish heap, as it happens daily through the "normal" application of the law of value, are never enough. That's the reason why regularly a generalized depression takes place and leads to a generalized devalorization of all existing capital, capital that does not meet any possibility of profitability and must "normally" lead to generalized bankruptcy of the less profitable capitalists. This is a question of life or death for the latter (as well as all the others) to resist this inexorable law of Capital. That's how, for example, the profitability of a sector can be altered on the basis of protectionism,... which only leads to pass its own sentence on other capitalists. The organization of capitalists, on different levels of centralization, aiming at leading and aiming to lead this war with the best possible conditions (societies, cartels, national States, imperialist blocs,...) periodically gives birth to war: this war is a partial solution to the problems of worldwide capitalism. Beyond the fact that wars develop as interimperialist struggles to seize means of production and markets; beyond the fact that in the consciousness of part of the bourgeois this war looks like a war against other bourgeois (which it is as well); war, as a matter of fact, through the destruction of an important part of world capital, improves the general conditions of valorization of the whole of the international social capital.

This is the reason why it is a reactionary utopia to want to stop war while keeping this society that generates war. To stop the run for war, it will be necessary to give up the economic capitalist development; to stop the barbarity that capitalist progress means, it will be necessary to stop the development of bourgeois economy, that of national production, etc. Capitalism is reproduction, growth, development,... this is the reason why only the destruction of capitalism will suppress wars.

The more Capital develops, the more the whole of its contradictions and atrocities develop; more progress and growth means more depressions, crises, necessities of new wars. The criminal role of those apologists of development and progressive clerics becomes clear.

As to peace that follows war, far from being the real negation of war, it only exists as part and product of the latter, as momentary and unstable formalization of a given correlation of terrorist forces, a correlation that other terrorist forces will inevitably consider as unfair and imposed by violence, and thus a pretext for a future war.

The proletariat and the communist revolution: the only alternative

The only and unique total and radical negation of war is the total and radical negation of the worldwide bourgeois society. This negation is the international communist revolution.

While the bourgeois solution to the crisis of society can only be a partial solution, the communist revolution is the general solution par excellence. While only war -with peace, reconstruction and, in the best case, the expansion they mean- can boost a new infernal cycle towards a new depression and a new war, social revolution appears as the unique alternative able to break once and for all from the permanent barbarity of war.

But, as bourgeoisie only is the class that represents Capital and embodies its historical agent, proletariat is the historical agent of the revolutionary negation of Capital, the historical class of the social revolution.

Bourgeoisie is the one that enforces all determinations of Capital and cannot escape from any of them. The struggle for the maximum profit, the competition, the commercial war and war as such are as essential to this class as breathing is to human beings.

On the other hand, whatever illusions proletarians may have about improving their lot in this society, or about war, proletariat as a class is historically forced by its own social situation to deny the whole of capitalist society, to impose through revolutionary violence the destruction of the society based on the dictatorship of profit, competition and war; it is historically forced to make the worldwide revolution.

Communist revolution is not an alternative among alternatives, it is the unique alternative to this society of misery and permanent war. In this sense the contradiction: war/revolution is just an expression of the contradiction: capitalism/communism, an expression of the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

This is where our Party's invariant position against war and for revolution comes from. This position is expressed in our thesis 26 (Cf. Theses of programmatical orientation):

"Workers have no homeland, one cannot take away from them what doesn't belong to them. Any form of defense of the nation, under whatever pretext, is an attack against the worldwide working class. Under the reign of bourgeoisie, all wars are imperialist wars opposing two or more factions or groups of interests of world capital. Proletariat launch and claim only one war: the social war against the whole bourgeoisie. Independently of the direct intentions of the protagonists, the essential role of wars is to affirm Capital and to smash objectively and subjectively the subversive class within this society. In this sense, wars are never merely wars between National States, between the forces of "national liberation" and the "imperialist" forces, or wars between "imperialists", they are essentially wars of Capital against communism.

Opposed to all interbourgeois antagonisms between "progressive" and "reactionary" factions, "fascist" and "anti-fascist" factions, "left wing" and "right wing" factions,... the logical consequences of which are imperialist wars, the proletariat has no other solution but the intransigent struggle against all sacrifices (against all truce, all national solidarity): revolutionary defeatism, turning its weapons against its "own" direct exploiters, against its "own" direct oppressors. The proletariat's aim is to transform (for the international centralization of this community of struggle against Capital) capitalist war into a revolutionary war of the world proletariat against the word bourgeoisie."

The development of the antagonism between war and revolution

The more Capital developed, the more it developed its barbarity, its historical antagonism against humanity, and, by this, the historical agent of this antagonism: the proletariat. The more national economy progressed, the more it transformed itself into an economy of war; the bigger the growth of the notorious Gross National Product is, the stronger the military production is, not to mention that all big progresses are made within the military sector. All this meant even more sacrifices for the human beings (but isn't it precisely this humanity we are asked to sacrifice on behalf of the economy and the nation?!?), even more negation of the human necessities of the proletariat.

War in itself, the open declaration of the hostilities, contrarily to what pacifists say, is by no means a change of nature of bourgeois society; it is by no means a break from its progress; it is only the most natural result of economic development, of competition, of social and interbourgeois peace.

On the other hand, from the point of view of humanity, war means a qualitative step in the antagonism between Capital and the human being, between bourgeoisie and proletariat, between war and revolution. To schematize, let's say that the reasons are:
"¢
because war means the destruction of the means of life and of life itself, which is just another exacerbation of the general antagonism between the capitalist rapport of production (that overwhelm and... humanity) and the productive forces of humanity.
"¢
because war means that the realization of bourgeois interests means denying the proletariat as a class; the affirmation of economic nationalism and imperialism means the slaughter of the proletariat.
"¢
because war supposes a general level of general exacerbation of relative and absolute misery of the proletariat as well as an exacerbation of all social contradictions; because the more Capital needs social peace and national adhesion, the more it requires national unity, the more obvious the contradiction becomes between the interests of the nation, of capitalism and its war and those of the proletarians sent to the slaughterhouse.
"¢
because war is always the war of destruction of the proletariat, because those sent to kill and die are proletarians, because in the affirmation of people in war, the subject of the communist revolution itself is destroyed.- because of all these reasons, the proletariat is more than ever forced to fight, to take over and to recognize its historical antagonism with bourgeois society, because in a period of open war, the smallest defence of interests of the proletariat (although it's about its bread, its life, the life of its sons and comrades) is considered to be an attack against the national state (which, in fact, it is), a betrayal of the fatherland (idem),... and because the struggle against its immediate enemy, "its" recruiting officers, "its" bourgeoisie, "its" state has only one alternative: the revolution and directly is on the terrain of the universal struggle of the proletariat against war and for revolution.

This is confirmed and concretized all throughout history. The highest moments of the universal revolutionary struggle have always been linked to the struggle against imperialism, since the proletarian movement in Paris during the Commune up to the international revolutionary wave of struggle of 1917-1919, not to mention the war and revolution in Spain in 1936-1937. This can be seen also in the fact that when counterrevolution is total and national, war can carry on its work of general destruction, as it did during the Second World War, for instance.

Interimperialist war, war against the proletariat

Imperialist war is often opposed to war against the proletariat. Even revolutionary militants are frequently involved in controversy to determine if the function of war is the struggle between bourgeois, between national States or against communism.

As we said it before, we consider this a false polemic, a false opposition. In reality, every national war in the capitalist system is at the same time an imperialist war and a war to destroy the proletariat. This needs some more explanation.

The point is not that each faction of the bourgeoisie, when going to war seeks to destroy the proletariat or to provoke a general devalorization of capital to improve the general condition of valorization. These factions generally go to war to destroy the enemy they are in competition with, to take over their competitors' means of production and/or markets, to prevent the devalorization of their own products by taking over part or the whole of their enemy's means of production. But, while considering all this as objective facts and beyond the consciousness of those who enter into the war, it is important to see that they realize the immanent tendency of capitalist production to destroy the productive forces of Capital (means of production and labour force), provoking this way the devalorization of capital that will later make reconstruction and valorization of the rest of world capital easier, destroying at the same time the real subject of communism.

To put it more clearly, let's consider the basis of capitalist society. Capitalist society cannot exist through simple reproduction, as we have already said it; it cannot exist without the development of the productive forces, without the constant revolution of the mode of production. The slightest historically-empirical observation enables us to understand that technological progress is part of the life of Capital. Nevertheless, from the point of view of the whole, from the point of view of the social capital, it does not improve the conditions of profitability; on the contrary, inasmuch as it is concretized by (or as it takes shape in) an increase of the organical composition of Capital (we don't take into account here the case of a development of the technical composition of Capital thwarted by a reduction of the composition in term of value), technical progress would tend to a reduction of the world rate of profit if there where no conditions thwarting this law (such as the increase of the rate of exploitation). The question will then be: why do capitalists impulse technical progress if it tends to reduce the average rate of profit and to devalorize the existing capital (an increase of the productivity of labour does not only reduce the value of what's going to be produced, but also the value of what has already been produced, according to the fact that the value is not the time of labour required to produce something, but the time of labour required to produce it again, to reproduce it?

The answer is: the essence of Capital is competition, anarchy and opposition of capitals; Capital only is a whole of opposed and struggling capitals; it is not "Capital in general" that economically decides, but each capitalist, each specific faction of capital; of course, all of them are interested in technical progress since on the basis of that they can make "extraordinary surplus value". Indeed, each individual capitalist or (which, at a certain level, is the same) each faction of Capital increasing the productive force of labour it exploits, obtains a time of labour of the produced commodities lower than the time of labour of the mass of the same article produced within the average world social conditions. That is to say, what is wrongly called "the individual value" is then higher than its social value. Of course, the real value of a commodity is not its individual value but its social value (which is not measured by the time of labour needed in each case, but by the time of labour socially required for its production), thus, the faction of Capital that uses the more performant technique obtains the same products, and therefore the same value as its competitors with less work: that's where the extraordinary surplus value comes from.

Capitalists don't bother developing productive forces,... they have to! The same way, and although they do so to get a higher particular valorization, willingly or not, (in reality they don't want it!) capitalists provoke a general devalorization of Capital. This is why long before we did, other revolutionary militants understood that the contradiction of Capital lies in Capital itself.

Among the general tendencies necessary to Capital, it is important to distinguish, on the one hand, the tendency to war of devalorization and destruction of the historical enemy, and on the other hand, the forms it takes, that is to say, that the form in which the coercive law of competition imposes itself appears like a motivation in the consciousness of the different factions of Capital (trusts, cartels, coalition, National States,...).

That is the reason why, while the whole of bourgeois society is busy with interbourgeois problems -interimperialist problems-, while before and during wars the media inform about the relation of forces between the two opposed camps or talk about governmental and diplomatic chitchat trying to formalize this relation of forces into this or that kind of agreement or peace treaty or convention, we stress the fact that imperialist war is a war of affirmation of capitalism, a war against proletariat, against communism.

War is as much interimperialist as capitalist and against proletariat. In the face of this objective reality, both classes have their own interests and their own class point of view. The bourgeoisie (and the public opinion it makes) is on the belligerent and interimperialist terrain (terrain from which come the discourse of the Pope and the other pacifists, and more generally, the diplomatic agreements); the proletariat, and mainly the most decided and organized elements of this class, i.e. the communists, are openly on the terrain of the revolutionary struggle against war.

Our material against war

All along the historical struggle against war, the proletarian vanguard never ceased clarifying all the aspects we have schematized here in a general and abstract form. Since the Manifesto of the Communist Party claiming that the proletariat has no country or the Roig de San Martin's order at the end of last century claiming that "to be a patriot is to be an assassin", through the explicit claim of revolutionary defeatism in the "first" and "second" world wars and all the work done later by the communist factions for the programmatical reappropriation, revolutionary theory of the proletariat affirmed itself each time more in that sense.

The International Communist Group, as part of the large work done by our historical Party since its origins up until now, has always centred its efforts on revolutionary defeatism and has impulsed in this framework theoretical clarification; we have published historical material of our class, we have taken position against all wars of Capital and, in so far as we were able to, our group participated in different actions and meetings trying to organize the revolutionary minorities leading the proletariat in its struggle against Capital.

Once again we claim the general coherence of the material we published in this sense in our central reviews, not only because we think they can contribute to explain the Gulf war and what they call now (April 1991) peace in that area, but also because they still are essential for the understanding of the future.

Beside the Theses of Programmatical Orientation of our group that are an attempt to put forward the evidence of the relationship between the contradiction capital-communism and imperialist war-social revolution, material we have published (without being exhaustive) can be divided into three groups. They are as follows:

1) fundamental works about capitalism and wars;

2) revolutionary defeatism and organization of the community of struggle against Capital and war;

3) analyses of military forces and positions against war and for the revolution.

1) Fundamental works about capitalism and wars:
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Against the myth underlying national liberation (in French and Spanish only);
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Worker memory: causes of the imperialist wars; position of the Hennaut's tendency, position of Jehan's tendency and our position (idem);
"¢
Capital, totality and imperialist war (idem);
"¢
They talk about peace (idem).

2) Revolutionary defeatism and organization of the community of struggle against Capital and war:
"¢
Contribution to the gathering of revolutionaries (idem);
"¢
International proposition: to groups and militants fighting for the world revolution (in Communism No.4);
"¢
Invariance of our international activity and some practical elements to concretize this proposition (in Communism No.4);
"¢
About an international meeting, "some remarks about the worldwide relation of forces between the classes" (only in French and Spanish).

3) Analyses of the military forces and positions against war and for the revolution:
"¢
A new jump in the course to war (only in French and Spanish);
"¢
The army and the military politics of the United States (idem);
"¢
Falklands: against imperialist war, world communist revolution;
"¢
War and peace against the proletariat (idem);
"¢
Iran-Iraq: class war against imperialist war (in Wildcat No.10);
"¢
West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem,... in response to the proletarian struggle the bourgeoisie is once again preparing a massacre (in Communism No.5);
"¢
Massacre in Hallabja (in Communism No.6);
"¢
Against the peace and the war of this fucking world (only in French and Spanish).

Of course, this classification is arbitrary and more than a text could be in two or in all sections. On the other hand, even if we consider the whole of these texts as the fruit of our Party, of the historical Party of the proletariat, some were not written (or exclusively written) by our small group.

The framework of our analysis of the Gulf War

The recent war in the Gulf has been an unquestionable demonstration of the validity of the analysis done by revolutionary Marxism.

Against all bourgeois discourses claiming that, at last, the epoch of eternal peace has arisen, once again capitalism has showed its truly warlike nature.

The imperialist war once again confirmed itself as war of Capital for its conservation, as war against proletariat. That is to say, it proved itself to be at the same time war for big money and destruction of productive forces, to be an international window for arms industries and to be the moment of the massacre of proletarians.

About the immense forces in the Gulf war, the analysis of the military power of the USA (and more particularly the general reorganization of the army, done in this country to take over the role of super-gendarme of the international bourgeois order even better) is important enough to call the reader to read our text "The army and the military politics of the United States". In the Gulf war it appeared as a whole what we described as the reorganization of the army and the military politics of the United States, it found in this war its rightest confirmation and application. Since we wrote the text, the only thing that has changed within the most powerful military force of the world is the growing importance of conflicts of the so-called "medium-intensity" (such as the Gulf war) in relation with other so-called conflicts of "high-intensity" (unlikely to happen -momentarily- with the end of the Warsaw PPact, and determined by the interimperialist contradictions within the Warsaw Pact itself) and the conflicts of "low-intensity" (diminution of the relative importance of guerrilla groups); but even this variation is nothing but an application of the general flexibility that we analyzed in our texts.

While taking up this subject starting from the area of war, it might be useful to read some of the articles in which our group, against the current, insisted on the importance of the development of the contradiction between "war and revolution" in that region. While no one saw anything but a war between two countries, in these articles we put forward that in Iran and Iraq, it was a capitalist war against the proletariat. We insisted on the fact that it was a war against the revolutionary action of the proletariat in the area (especially in Iran, where the bourgeoisie played the radical card of Khomeini to stop the proletarian revolt that had managed to disarm one of the strongest armies of the world), we said that it was a war to affirm counterrevolution. All along these texts we have always presented peace as a moment of war, and for this reason, when Iran and Iraq signed a peace treaty and everyone thought the question was out, we kept on insisting and calling revolutionaries to carry on and organize the work of the community of struggle of the proletariat against war and peace in Iran and in Iraq, and we made an international meeting with this aim.

We did so as much on the basis of our global conception (peace and war as expressions of the same totality against the proletariat) as on the basis of information we had thanks to contacts (confirming that the military mobilization carried on). It is essential to read the Manifesto written by our comrades in the area in 1982 (in Le Communiste No.24) as well as "Iran-Iraq: class war against imperialist war" (in Wildcat No.10), or "Massacre in Hallabja" (in Communism No.6), because, on the basis of our comrades' information we put forward that beyond the contradiction between imperialist forces at war in Iran and Iraq and at different moments of the past, the principal contradiction between capitalist war (and peace) on the one hand and proletariat on the other hand reaches impressive levels of exacerbation.

Starting from this framework of analysis for years, our group considers the Iran-Iraq area as a key area for the development of the contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, capital and communism. In this sense, the realization of an international campaign against capitalist war, and more particularly against war and peace in Iran and in Iraq, has been the central axis of our internationalist activity (cf. "The invariance of our international activity: some practical elements to concretize this proposition" in Communism No.5 and "Massacre in Hallabja" in Communism No.6).

Although at the level of analysis there is nothing to add, seeing the development of the Gulf war, its quickness, the continuation of internal interbourgeois wars in the area, it could be interesting and useful to make a consequent description, starting from our class point of view and against all media lies.

Open war against the proletariat

The first thing we want to underline is, opposite to all that was said, that the Gulf war was a war against us, a war against proletarians.

Once more in the history of capitalism tens and hundreds of thousands of proletarians were sent to butchery, to massacre on behalf of the peace of the homeland, of democracy, of the liberation from imperialism and/or dictatorship. Once again behind the proletarians killing each other there lay nothing else but a problem of money, a lot of money, a problem of value fighting to valorize, of capitalist war, of war of capital.

Everything was set up for the generalized best massacre. In August '90, the Iraqi State cleared up the prisons. Proletarians considered to be the most politically dangerous ones were slaughtered. It was a current practice during the war with Iran. It was interrupted when the two countries signed a truce. Then the State granted an amnesty to most of the so-called "common law" prisoners as well as to lots of ex-deserters. It offered them some money to justify it and sent all of them (most of whom were not prepared to fight) to the front.

On the battlefield in Iraq and in Kuwait these proletarians (remember that immigrant proletarians were the first to be recruited by force in the Iraqi army and sent to the front) were literally buried, obliged by guns pointed in their back to stay in the trenches dug in the desert. In front of them there were minefields to prevent desertion and surrender, in their backs there were the elite troops (the republican guard) assuring summary execution to anyone who tried to go backwards or to run away.

Once the land offensive had been unleashed, the Coalition Forces crew over their victory and claimed they had put three quarters of the regular forces of the enemy out of the fight (although there were only ten percent of the republican guard amongst the latter). According to our point of view this clearly is the cynical confession of the fact that the massacre was concentrated on proletarians wearing uniforms. These cries of victory confirm that tens of thousands of human beings without any possibility to defend themselves were sacrificed by the Iraqi State and the Coalition Forces. For the Iraqi State still shooting at its own troops that were massively deserting the day before, this deployment of forces was essential: these tens of thousands of beings transformed into cannon fodder would hold up (even just a few days) the irremediable advance of the enemy. For the Coalition, these troops keeping still, buried and without any sophisticated weapons were a very easy target on which the whole of the killing material could be checked with very few risks for themselves.

Long before the official launching of the combats, the Iraqi civil population had been taken as hostages (the other "hostages" -the bourgeois- managed to be released) and undergone for months a situation of generalized shortage because of the total blockade (health care and food included) organized and controlled by the whole of the Coalition countries with the support of the United Nations. Here as well, the Iraqi State will take over the blockade subordinating life to the requirements of its war, imposing an even higher level of militarization on the whole of society and, doing so, ever more strongly submitting proletarians to the interests of the nation. By the way, let's notice that it's this situation of food embargo and blockade that most of the pacifists claim. As good humanists, it is to this situation they proposed to go back, once the bombing had started, in order to go right to the end with the blockade.

About bombings themselves, no one tried to hide the hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs dropped on the Iraqi and Kuwaiti territories, sowing death and destruction. On the contrary, media make all they could to convince the whole planet that it was just a "surgical operation" destroying only military targets. Starting from the same hypocrite distinction between civilian and soldier (those enrolled by force for instance are "naturally" considered as military targets), the aim of the propaganda is to make the proletariat of the rest of the world accept the development of "such a far away" massacre. We know these are our class brothers who have been oppressed to the extreme by war, who have undergone this nightmare and have fallen under tones of death material dropped on them day after day.

Given the political-military weakness of the block led by Saddam Hussein, the proletariat of the Coalition countries didn't directly suffer from the bombings or from other atrocities inherent in wars (only the troops of elite count a few deaths), but nevertheless, it endured a violent attack against the conditions of the reproduction of its life (and thus its struggle) materialized as well in an increase of the exploitation rate as in the generalized increase of repression. In most cases, the increase of the exploitation rate took the shape of exceptional price rises -without wage compensation- under the pretext of the rising of oil price (due to speculative questions and not at all to shortage). It also took the shape of levying taxes to finance the national effort of war. The generalized increase of repression was especially directed at any struggle making an attempt on national unity and at any insubordination to war politics. In the United States, in Turkey, in North African countries, in Thailand, military speeches of the governments were accompanied by draconian and terrorist measures of persecution of the deserters, by the imprisonment of tens of thousands of proletarians who rejected the criminal imperialist politics of "their own" bosses, of "their own" National State. Lastly, during this short period, the State intensified the measures of police control of the whole of the population in many countries while it did everything to detect, catch and terrorize anyone who fought against "their own State", i.e. internationalist militants.

The big swindle was that at the same time the World State was organizing the most incredible concentration of deaths and terror machines in the Middle East, and presenting itself elsewhere as the champion of antiterrorism and, under this pretext, pursuing revolutionary militants!!!

In Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria,... war allowed direct repression to rain on the proletarian struggles. In Turkey, the end of 1990 and the beginning of 1991 were marked by a lot of very radical and hard strikes in the mining area (Zanguldak), but also in the metallurgical industry and the car industry. In Tunisia, while rejecting the gendarmes of the World State represented by the Coalition, proletarians' massive and regular demonstrations -expressing the generalized discontent- were violently repressed as being pro-islamist demonstrations: another attempt to divert and channel these demonstrations, while giving credit to the Ennhada movement, always extremely loyal to the government. A similar situation existed in Algeria, where the government, to prevent another "October '88", mobilized, just as if it was also participating in the war, troops were stationed and concentrated in big cities, reservists were recalled, and young soldiers doing military service were obliged to prolong their presence and fight for the Algerian colours. On December 14th, 1990, in Morocco, the State crushes a proletarian revolt (40 deaths).

In France, England, Belgium,... bourgeoisie doesn't waste time and intensifies its racist and xenophobic politics. In England, for instance, Iraqi refugees (whose majority fled from the jails of Saddam Hussein's state terrorism) were imprisoned into detention camps (real concentration camps) and anyone coming from the Middle East was suspicious, put on files and prosecuted for being a potential terrorist. At the same time in Belgium, more than 6,000 Moroccans were threatened with expulsion.

On the other hand, with war, companies having rentability problems, saw the volume of their sales falling down and took profit of the situation to make the proletarians responsible for it. Pan American, Air France and British Airways, for instance, made thousands of redundancies.

In the United States, the generalized silence of the population towards the war politics of the government, the consensus so often commented in the press, didn't prevent this government from violently repressing a lot of demonstrations against war (although most of these demonstrations were led by pacifists) or from arresting some 15,000 persons according to Cuban media. While during the first days of the aerial war one suddenly noticed for the first time for years an alarming deficit, the State violently repressed groups diffusing leaflets against war in recruitment centres and to soldiers sent to war whether they liked it or not. In the United States, an association of soldiers' defense called "Horreo Counseling Network" denounced the fact that "many hundreds of North-American soldiers staying in Germany were forced to embark to the Gulf, bound hand and foot when necessary".

The framework of our analysis of the interimperialist struggle

From our point of view, imperialist antagonisms are of course less important than the immanent tendencies that push Capital to war against proletariat; that is the reason why, on these pages, the reader will find few paragraphs dedicated to the analysis of these antagonisms. It is nothing but an application of our class position that makes us take the side of the camp fighting against war; it is a materialization of our invariant line: to focus everything on what constitutes the central dynamic of this society and its negation.

Nevertheless, as we said before, protagonists don't make war because they feel like killing proletarians (although there are no doubts that in many cases they make agreements, on the basis of a military bourgeois front, to do so; especially when it is a matter of quelling a proletarian revolt), they make war to confront their competitors. To do this, and seeing the importance of the capitalist confrontations in the Gulf, we find it necessary to briefly analyze the imperialist contradictions that determined this war, without pretending those lines could be a sufficient explanation.

We have already put forward that the development of the Gulf war (or of other wars to come), as war against the proletariat didn't surprise us, considering our framework of analysis; we shall see now that there is nothing to be surprised at as far as the development of interimperialist contradictions leading to the Gulf war is concerned.

Analysts of international politics (as well as groups claiming to be revolutionaries) were almost all totally bewildered by the changes of alliances, by the disappearance of this or that block or unity, and by the affirmation of the polarization that had led, in the Gulf, to a war between the Coalition led by yankee imperialism on one side and by Saddam Hussein and his allies on the other side.

According to our point of view on the contrary, the reconciliation of the imperialist forces, relegating other contradictions to a position of secondary importance and making the Gulf war materialize, didn't surprise us, either.

Indeed, in capitalist society putting yesterday's alliances back into question is something permanent and particularly when the crisis is aggravating; the disruption of imperialist shares made in any kind of peace framework is implicit in the essence of Capital itself and in the kind of unity the latter realizes. As we say in the "Theses of Programmatical Orientation", the bourgeoisie is in general opposed to the proletariat, because while, in the midst of the proletariat, unity is the product of a total community of interests, bourgeois unity is always unity against others, unity of opposed interests unified against others who, in these circumstances, look like the first to confront.

Our thesis number 19 says:

"This is how the world character of capitalism gives birth to the proletariat as world class, without any regional, sector-based or national interests to defend. Opposed to the proletariat, the bourgeoisie did not only realize its revolution affirming its particular interests, but its own essence (competition) forces it permanently to violently tear one another and confront each other at all levels for the distribution and re-distribution of the means of production and commodities. Unity among the bourgeois (limited companies, agreements between monopolies, National States, constellation of states,... World State) is always realized to face commercial war and/or class war in the best possible conditions. This unity may explode at any moment and burst into different particular factions. That's the reason why the more "unified" and generalized the action of the bourgeoisie is, the more it contains the division; peace is only a stage of the war to come. For the proletariat, however, any action, even the most partial one, contains universality: one single action of our class against capital, even if it is regional or sector-based, contains the affirmation of our proper interests in every part of the world and the struggle for the universal social revolution."

The so often commented changes in the East are nothing else but the exacerbation of the crisis of Capital. Perestroika or any pseudo-alternative of the economic politics of Capital are nothing else but different names to hide the old bourgeois politics of austerity and belt-tightening proper to crisis periods (under the high universal patronage of the International Monetary Fund!!!). In the same way, the death of the Warsaw Pact and the interbourgeois struggles in some East European countries, which undoubtedly conditioned the redistribution of the imperialist forces and allowed not only the Gulf war but also the present cease-fire, are a confirmation of our analysis.

We can say exactly the same about the changes of alliances amongst the different forces of the Middle East or amongst the Occidental powers that invaded the Persian Gulf. Changes of alliances that we comment on Communisme No.32 and Comunismo No.27, where we described the sudden transformation of the big ally of the Western States, Saddam Hussein, into a machiavellian and fascist monster; while the same Western States were flirting and dancing with the terrorist regimes of Syria and Morocco on behalf of a fight "against dictatorship". That is to say that the States of England, France, the United States,... are not the only ones which, on behalf of the struggle against the violation of the international right (right that they create -considering their terrorist power- and which is nothing else but the ideological expression of this relation of force), form the Coalition and this way easily legitimate any violation on behalf of this right, but also the State of Syria maintaining its occupation in Lebanon, the Israeli State maintaining occupied territories for years in open violation of the same right, the State of Turkey assuring terrorism in Cyprus, the State of Morocco doing what it wants against all international norms in Western Sahara. All those powers form a Coalition that cannot present itself with its own legitimacy, a Coalition that can only appear as any bourgeois unity, that is to say as a circumstantial and without principles unity against an as much circumstantial enemy.

At the same time, it is beyond doubt that if today this circumstantial contradiction internationally prevails, it is because the old war contradiction (NATO-Warsaw) solidified during the other war, or, which is the same, in the other peace (Yalta agreements) was not so important any more and could be considered as something of secondary importance (or even less). Our framework of analysis, always based on the essence of Capital, always distinguishes itself from superficial analyses that could only consider war as a war between two stiff blocks, a "capitalist" one and a "socialist" one, or a "pro-Yankee" and a "pro-Russian" one (1). All those who play with these journalistic stupidities are disarmed as much in their explanations of the interimperialist wars that are taking place in the East, as in the polarization that made the Gulf war possible. Those for whom the world was effectively cut into two or three (we have always fought against these ideological prejudices in our central reviews as well as in our Thesis -see thesis No.27) are today obliged to doo "political" gymnastics about the changes of nature of the Eastern countries, or about the end of the Eastern block. On top of all that there are those who could see essential differences in the social nature of Western and Eastern regimes, considering them either as "socialist" or as "state capitalist" (2).

According to us, this change of alliance, this modification of intercapitalist blocks is by no means extraordinary, it is just the inevitable consequence of the essential determinations of Capital and can be seen all throughout the history of this mode of production. This is what can explain, for instance, and against all these ideologies, that the same imperialist power (although called socialist) may sell weapons to both camps of a local interimperialist war (just like Czechoslovakia did during the Biafra-Nigeria confrontation); this is the explanation for the changes of alliances in Ethiopia as well: there the imperialist penetration insured by the State of Cuba supported first "the liberation struggle of the people of Eretrea" and later, on the basis of an agreement with the State of Ethiopia (agreements determined by the advent of a pro-Moscow government) and on behalf of "the defence of territorial integrity of Ethiopia", considered yesterday's allies as its worse enemies and sprayed them with napalm and bullets. There are thousands of examples of this kind, but to show the invariance of this feature of capitalism, let us take an example from the past century: after a while, the capital originated from Europe became autonomous and waged war against the factions that wanted to maintain the status quo. In every case, capital breaks from its national origins: the capital originated from England (and Europe, in general) and solidified as North-American capital, confronted England in a war for independence, and creole capitalists in South-America allied with England to wage an imperialist war of independence against Spain.

Reasons for the launching of the imperialist military action

Of course, our framework of analysis given, we are not very interested in speculations about how the alliance broke, who allies with whom, which government changes imperialist camp, which imperialist block allies with which, which one takes the initiative for war,... It could only be interesting in relation with the forces of the different alliances to control and channel the proletariat, or in as much as the justification of alliances and wars, once transformed into forces by parties, unions, means of (dis)information,... are ideological forms able to give a framework to the proletariat. It is from this point of view that in the midst of a generalized war campaign we put forward the limits these polarizations could contain:

"This is not the place to put our oar in the generalized speculation about future launching of a war. We just want to stress that the present repolarization of the world and the coming confrontations do not seem to be mature enough for the constitution of new blocks and new mystifications to realize the supreme aim of the bourgeoisie: to lead the worldwide proletariat to war.

We do not underestimate the adhesion aroused by Saddam Hussein of important parts of the international proletariat because of their hatred for the gendarme States of the great powers, but it seems to us that the "Baghdad Butcher" is far too discredited in the eyes of his own troops and population (just like Kadhafi and Arafat are) to reach the supreme aims of Capital. Nevertheless, we do not exclude the development of the polarization and military conflicts in the short term, but we want to warn of the danger of an international bourgeois polarization "clearer", more "attractive" and thus more dangerous for the worldwide proletariat, if Saddam Hussein's flags are to be taken by factions of Capital less discredited in the eyes of their own population."

That is to say that, as we were claiming the need for Capital to generalize war (a need which is always more violent seeing the exacerbation of the crisis and the necessity for devalorization), we were also defining the limits of the interbourgeois polarization of the "Gulf war" from the point of view of its capacity to give a framework to the proletariat (no capacity meaning no generalization of the war). Taking into account the development of the antagonisms during the latest decade, we considered Saddam Hussein's camp very weak (the man as well as the party) and we estimated that it was impossible for him to create an international alternative to the judeo-christian imperialism, as he claimed to be able to do. All this was confirmed by the total lack of support to Saddam Hussein's regime, on the internal, as well as on the international level, and above all, by the total lack of fighting spirit of "his own troops".

The imperialist initiative of the State of Iraq to invade Kuwait was not the produce of a force but of a whole of weaknesses. This did not surprise us, given that generally these bourgeois factions have the biggest problems to accumulate, as well as to control their own population. They feel compelled to break the framework of imperialist peace by this or that kind of armed action, which unveils them as aggressor and therefore gives the advantage to their adversary in the military confrontation (since the old Clausewitz systematized it in his book "On war", everyone knows that defence is strategically superior to offence). This can be checked all throughout this century's big European wars called first and second world wars. The most disadvantaged imperialist powers in the prior peaces, the ones which were therefore less favoured by the share of the productive forces and pre-existent markets, were those that took over the initiative of the first invasions, which led them to grant a strategic advantage that proved fatal for them.

The same applies to the Iraqi State: its situation in the interimperialist competition was a disaster and worsened by the deterioration of exchange materialized in a commercial balance-sheet getting more and more unfavourable, as well as in a huge external debt ($70 to 90 billion in August 1990). In this sense, the breaking off the agreements on the OPEC prices by part of the States the most submitted to the imperialist politics of the Western powers, as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, was seen by the Iraqi bourgeoisie as an aggression on the whole of their accumulation cycle. Invading and annexing Kuwait (and seeing the new conditions imposed on Saudi Arabia), the Iraqi State wanted to change this situation and not only did it want to reappropriate new productive forces (raw material, fuel, and an exit to the sea), but also to increase the percentage of petrol production controlled by the Kuwaiti bourgeoisie, to improve the relation of forces in the OPEC, as well as the relation of forces (idem) of the latter in the world, and revalorize this way its first source of foreign currency. Simultaneously, the Iraqi State wanted to find new reasons to justify the permanent militarization in the eyes of the proletariat and to solidify a new opposition "against imperialism". It was looking for a national adhesion that it never achieved although it had crushed by military force the big wave of revolutionary defeatism that had swept through the country a short time before (cf. our texts about the Iran/Iraq war).

It is clear, that from the point of view of world Capital, this invasion questioned it in a way which was too generalized to be acceptable. Loosing the control of such an important part of the means of production meant that a huge percentage of petrol passed under the control of other factions, it also was a great attack against the accumulation cycle of an important part of the world bourgeoisie. Add this to the geo-political interests of the great powers of Capital (any negotiation between the opposing forces -cf. the denial of the negotiations betweeen Saddam Hussein and the military power of the United States through their embassy in Kuwait, negotiations in which the United States committed themselves not to use their military force) and it will easily be understandable that the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi State was to be considered as an aggression on the other imperialist powers' interests.

From the point of view of the United States these facts formed a whole of circumstances perfect to confront the great difficulties of the Capital management of that productive area and to strengthen its military power. In relation to this, we want to stress the following points:
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In the face of the generalized crisis of accumulation in the productive area of the USA that could be seen for months and about which the economists were talking as "vertical fall", war appeared as the old Keynesian solution to increase public expenditure (without a high increase in the deficit in this case, given that it was financed by other forces), to increase effective demand and thus reactivate national economy (and seeing the importance of the latter, the world economy).
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Geo-politically, war was the dreamed situation to affirm the United States' role as a big international gendarme. On the one hand, they presented themselves more than ever as the ones keeping the flag of international right flying, and on the other hand they conquered in practice a strategic situation of unquestionable geo-military value.
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In the same way, the national and international militarist mobilization under the US flag against a much weaker enemy strategically strengthened the role of that State in the face of all its possible adversaries and solidified at the same time the army by providing it with new real motives to make war (against dictators, terrorists, invaders,...). This point is very important considering the general deterioration of the image of gendarme given inside as well as outside the country by the war of Vietnam and other later wars.
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It was the ideal situation to try to impose a kind of Capital order (against others) on one of the most coveted areas in the world, an area that has been a receptacle of contradictions for decades. Indeed, the consolidation and the general recognition of the State of Israel with Jerusalem as internationally recognized capital (in return for this or that kind of minor concessions so that, as the world bourgeoisie says, "the Palestinians have their State") are only possible under the general and military protection of this imperialist colossus, the State of the USA.

This short enumeration is not exhaustive and we are not interested in going into deeper details. But it is clear that in the decision made on launching this imperialist war itself we have to take into account the more particular interests of a whole of bourgeois factions directly involved, such as those so politically proud of "restoring the American honour", such as the military "lobby" including key-men of the Pentagon and directors of big arms industries (that is to say big industries as such!!), the Jewish "lobby", etc.

We are not interested either in analyzing the other international factions of Capital and their alignment with the United States. About the more general reasons for the war let us say that it is evident that if the invasion of Kuwait had been transformed into an occupation, it would have seriously affected the cycle of international Capital because a new balance of power on the petrol price would have led to a redistribution of the surplus value internationally extracted in favour of the bourgeois controlling the raw material, probably against the ones distilling it and surely against the ones industrially depending on it. The fact that the UNO appeared much more a real agency of the USA than the usual web of intrigue where interimperialist antagonisms are diplomatically expressed, is due to this general fear that pushed all the factions to coincide about the restoring of the imperialist order prior to August 2nd. In the same way, it is clear that the old alliances that this occasion strengthened (NATO), weighed as much as the without-principles-unity against a common enemy (cf. the fact that the States of Israel and Syria can be found in the same military block, for instance).

In the medium and the long term, a petrol power as big as the USSR would have benefited from the occupation and it did not have any reason to align against Saddam Hussein. If, in the beginning, the Russian State legitimated the Coalition imperialist force, it was:
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because of the objective weakness of its own imperialist power. Given its internal contradictions, this weakness, it could not present itself as a unified force.
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because the governing faction seems to represent each day more clearly the most dynamic interests of world Capital. Opposing to the protectionist interests of the local productive area, when necessary. Nevertheless, as this legitimation of the Coalition against Iraq could be verified as an objective transfer of imperialist rights against its traditional rival that was solidifying itself as total gendarme for the first time (tendency to change from a shared international hegemony to a near-monopoly), the violence of criticisms of the militarist factions (linked to the army leadership, the internal security and the navy) and the military-industrial establishment redoubled. Even the press echoed it. It was said that the situation in the Gulf put the security of the USSR in danger and the Soviet armed forces journal even wrote that the direction of foreign policy was "the less intelligent ever developed by a Minister of Foreign Affairs, tsarists and Soviets included". This compelled the government to try -unsuccessfully- to boost a little the image of the State as being one of the great protagonists of the imperialist decision made on sharing the world. This is the explanation for the tragi-comical show played by the government of the USSR unceasingly proposing peace treaties and cease-fires. But none of these attempts could reach their goal because there was no military force decided enough to impose a cease-fire agreeing with its contradictory interests.

The big business of war

Finally, we would like to stress - as one of the reasons for the launching of any kind of interimperialist action - the importance of the interest of big business that gets large profits out of the war, i.e. the interests of different types of bourgeois factions from different countries, who benefit from the war and from the reconstruction that will follow.

Capitalist war is not only profitable to Capital in general for the different reasons we have mentioned, it is not only profitable to the bourgeois faction that becomes victorious in the interimperialist contradiction, but it also brings about profit for a whole set of particular capitals which make important commercial deals during and after wartime.

Of course, one thinks straight away about the bourgeois factions which are directly linked to the military, such as capital that is involved in arms' production and military sectors as such, all these, without exception, benefit from the increasing of the military budget; but there are also other factions that directly benefit from the war this way. For instance, all the big car factories produce also different kinds of war-vehicles (to transport troops, armoured cars, etc.). To produce these products other kinds of raw material are required, the producers of which also directly benefit from war. To stick to the example of the car industry, we can see that the producers of metal, plastic, rubber, computers,... also get involved, as well as banking services, accountancy services, etc.. For each of these numerous sectors, tens if not hundreds of big and smaller factories will get involved in this lucrative market and will compete with each other in order to increase their parts and benefits of the war market.

And of course, the Gulf war also mobilised and militarized hundreds of thousands of men and kept them far away from their sources of supply. All this shows clearly how big the problems of logistics were. And this, of course, has attracted a lot of different sectors of capital, which also increased their turnover spectacularly, e.g. the sectors involved in tinned food, water supplies, etc..

This is why the news of the outbreak of the war was cheerfully welcomed by the different bourgeois factions. We don't know if this is true, but certain newspapers reported that in Houston, Texas, for instance, -an important center of the oil refinery- the day after August 2nd, not a single bottle of champagne could be found in the supermarkets, since the bourgeois of that town had already celebrated the war that would reactivate- so they figured -their enterprises. What we are sure about, however, is that a few months later, the stock-exchanges of the whole world welcomed the beginning of the war with euphoria! As Thomas McCarrol wrote in an article of El Pais (January 27th):

"The day after the launching of the air-raids on Iraq, the people present at the New York Stock Exchange started the day with a minute of silence to honor the North-American troops fighting in the Gulf. But this moment of meditation was the only break of the whole day. The opening was soon to be followed by a wave of outcries: BUY! BUY! BUY! When all this agitation calmed down, the Stock Exchange had lived one of its most active days! The Dow Jones climbed 114 points, the second most important rise of its whole history... The Stock Exchanges of the whole world shared the same euphoria... In Germany the Frankfurt Stock Exchange marked the highest daily rise of its history and rose by 1.6% while the Japanese Nikkeï in Tokyo rose by 2.4%."

No need to be an expert in bourgeois balance-sheets to understand the meaning of these historical records related to the outbreak of the war. No need either to be an economist to see that the notorious CNN, as well as the other television networks, during all these days of war and massacres of our class, showed a real "weapon fair", an incredible industrial and electronical market, which for the first time in history and on such a massive scale displayed numerous arms, machines, missiles, means of transportation, high-tech equipment, etc. All this meant billions of dollars of increase in the sales of North American industry; and this is also the reason why the economic results during the first days of the war, were extraordinary! (3) This is what Julian Martinez writes in El Pais, on January 27th, 1991:

"The results of the first days of the war could not have been more optimistic for all sectors related to the defence. In Wall Street, nearly all values related to military industry have risen. For instance, during the first few days of the war, some of them gained 37%, like General Dynamics, which produces the powerful Tomahawk missiles, the F-111 fighterplanes as well as the M1 tanks. General Dynamics's rival, Mc Donald Douglas, increased its profit by about 25%, thanks to the TV news which showed fighter planes F-15, F-18, Apache helicopter and also Tomahawk missiles. Enterprises that produce bombs, orientation equipment, and electronic systems for air navigation increased the value of their shares. It is expected that when the army and the Marines get into action, the companies producing new arms will also benefit from the boom in the Stock Exchange [one can easily notice here how each sector of Capital has its own particular interests, even in this particular kind of war -our comment]. The constructor of "the star" of the war, the famous Patriot Missile, is particularly satisfied with the enormous publicity its product received all over the world. The factories and the enterprises which produce components of this missile -Raytheon and Martin Marietta- increased tthe value of their shares in Wall Street."

No need to be a scholar to know that if these marvellous expectations did not come true, it is because the situation of the world economy is disastrous and because the Gulf war was not important enough to reverse the process of economic crisis. The level of war and destruction that Capital needs to regenerate itself and to eradicate -on this basis- its existing depression, is much bigger!

As far as the big business of the after-war period is concerned, it is worth mentioning that in the middle of the war, while they were still busy heaping up thousands of corpses and destroying not only military targets (as they pretended), but also the complete industrial infrastructure, as well as the communications and sanitary networks, the large international trusts were already competing with each other over the distribution of the tremendous contracts for the reconstruction of the war zones -just like gigantic vultures fighting over carcasses and litter! The amount of the multinational contracts that were signed for the reconstruction of the industrial infrastructure of Kuwait, was estimated at about one hundred billion dollars, and the financial arrangements for the reconstruction of Iraq were estimated to amount to more than two hundred billion dollars!

The capitalist vultures did not wait a second to share the carcasses. They did not even wait for the ex-allies to transform themselves into enemies. When finally the hour arrived to share the profitable dividents from the biggest of all capitalist trades -war and reconstruction- they all rushed, without any hesitation, onto their preys.

In "Le Monde Diplomatique" of March 1991, J.D. writes:

"More and more plans are being elaborated for the reconstruction of Kuwait and for the reinforcement of the Saudi power. At the heart of the industrial-military complex, stands the Bechtel firm, which already has important political and financial experience in the region. The same is true for Motorola, Mc Donald Douglas, General Dynamics, ATT. Forty-five billion dollars could possibly be "picked up" in Kuwait only. In Saudi Arabia, the promises are just as juicy, because Ryad says it will reinforce its airforce and buy a few hundred more tanks. Even though nobody is talking about the reconstruction of Iraq, everybody is thinking about it. Only the stubborn liberals disapprove that these contracts do not respect the Right - the right of competition. And in all these cases, Washington imposed its views: Saudi Arabia is not to be entrusted to some French firms as this has been suggested in the beginning, but to E-Systems from Dallas. The modernization of the phones? The French and the Swedish were on the lists, but when the American Secretary for Trade and, later on, Mr. Bush himself intervened, now ATT and Motorola have better chances. As it seems, the British Prime Minister would have expressed his dissatisfaction! Such a loyal ally...

But after all -if one neglects the number of those who were killed- perhaps this war will turn out to have been only an even operation for the USA. Besides the fact that this war is being paid for by a large number of countries, the US will also benefit from the large amounts of private dividends that will wipe out the public expenditures. Thanks heaven, the defence of international law is safe,... if not, one would easily get inspired about some simple truth, and this is total sacrilege in these days of international sacred union."

This means that the international sacred union had only some validity against Saddam, and, as "Le Monde Diplomatique" seems to regret it, today again the law of the jungle is surpassing all other considerations between capitalists. Those who are the most powerful in the military field, those who invested most in this big war business are the ones who will get the better dividends from this war.

The media as instruments of power and war

In this chapter we will pay special attention to the role played by the media. We do not think that during this war they played a role which is at all different from their ordinary one when they assume a central function in order to mobilize proletarians for the sake of Capital. No!, if in this chapter we are especially dealing with this aspect, it is only because today they are assuming in society as a whole, and they assumed during the Gulf war in particular, -compared to other State apparatus- a more important role than in the past.

As a matter of fact, the type of the process of citizenization, (we published an article on this process (4) which is dominating the proletariat today, coincides with a phase of massive desertion by proletarians of the old bourgeois apparatus, such as parties and unions, which serve the purpose of framing up all proletarian revolt. The influence such bourgeois organisations may have had is slowly but surely eroding. This process also implies that life is becoming more separated, compartmentalized, more individual, more family-like, more locked up inside each house or apartment... This means that the media -and especially television- become essential means of communication, and transform themselves in decisive means -directly related to their own armed forces- for the framing up, the mobilization and the militarization of the proletariat.

Before, the main intermediary between the worker and his mobilization for the State, his war-like militarization, was the party (the "workers'" party, preferably), the union, the "workers' movement"(5). The press and radio were only supports to increase the efficiency of these organizations. But the more individualism is developing, the more television as well as all other means for the production of ideas are transforming themselves to become central intermediaries for the mobilization of proletarians for the fatherland, for sending them to the army and to the butchery! We must not forget that -because of the citizenization process and the generalized isolation- that for many proletarians who do not have any fellow-workers to talk to and to discuss with, the television (but the radio and the newspapers, as well) seems to become the unique (fictitious) ("human") relationship with the outside world.

On the whole, the campaigns orchestrated by the different means of communication try to hide the real and fundamental causes of what is going on, and they make this or that individual be guilty for all what is wrong; therefore, in view of the needs of the foreign policy of their own State, these campaigns depict the actions of the enemy as being barbarous, criminal, dictatorial, terrorist,... and at the same time, they justify the criminal actions of their own imperialist camp as humanitarian actions, as a struggle against dictatorship and for democracy...

During the Gulf war, even more so than during previous wars (Vietnam, Falklands, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan) the Heads of States and the Commanders in Chief of the Allied Armed Forces were particularly attentive to the means of communication: this time they were transformed into real instruments for brainwashing, for militarization and national mobilization.

During the North-American invasion of Grenada and Panama, the Pentagon had already requested and obtained from the press that they would use the word "intervention" rather than "invasion", but during this war, the journalists went a lot further still when they started talking about "our boys" or "us" when talking about the troops of the U.S. coalition. In the same manner, several generals from the Pentagon succeeded each other daily on the television screens of different international networks, which became nothing less than the true spokesmen of the Pentagon (the real public relations offices of the imperialist command). So the journalists started adopting progressively the language of the generals and that's how the bombings became "surgeon attacks" and the civilians killed became "collateral" losses, while the areas that had not yet been bombed, became "lucrative" objectives. In the face of an American POW that had been beaten up, they talked about "war crime" (!!!), but at the same time the terrifying bombings that were killing the population in Baghdad were being presented as "incursions" by "our freedom fighters".

Nothing was left uncontrolled! Each word, each image was checked, analysed, censured... and even sometimes, when there was no image to go with the message that the military and political command had decided to broadcast, they did not hesitate to produce such a suitable image -out of nothing- in their laboratories.

The big bosses of the broadcasting firms, the speakers, the journalists and all the other shitbags accomplished faithfully and wholeheartedly the adaptation and presentation of reality according to the wishes and needs of the military command. The lack of independence, the hypocrisy, the submission and the cynicism of all these press people have already often been denounced... but we think that it would be more proper to speak about the complete and total militarization of this particular instrument of domination, about its achieved integration, by the imperialist State, into the full military action. And as a matter of fact, each time journalists accomplish more perfectly their true role as intermediaries of the military action, as the obeying officers of their superiors, as the indispensable conveyor belt that aims at turning each proletarian into a patriot, a soldier, an assassin!

In the face of such an always growing symbiose between the army and the television networks, between the generals of the armed forces and the professionals of the spectacle, between the military command and the journalists, we should ask ourselves whether the revolutionary and insurgent proletariat should treat these agents of the means of communication in the same way as it has always treated the officers of the armies, who send the proletarians to the butchery, i.e. by turning their arms against them!? We will get the response from the future history of the war and of the struggle against war, but it is clear that as far as we are concerned, this answer lies already in today's war.

We could multiply here the always more impressive examples of what those craftsmen of the spectacle have achieved to "model" the information according to the needs of the fatherland and of war. We will not go into any more details about the lies that they believed themselves, e.g. when the bosses of the Pentagon declared that about 90% of the military potential of the Iraqi army had been annihilated (after "only" 24 hours of bombings), a piece of information that the media quickly broadcast over the whole planet! We will not go into any details about the praise from all the press people for the "heroism and sacrifices" consented by the pilots of the Coalition (indeed, how courageous it must have been to drop bombs with an absolute power of destruction, from a height of 10,000 meters!). And it is not worthwhile either to insist on the sheer hypocrisy and the total partiality that completely dominated the propaganda on the use of chemical weapons by Baghdad (in reality, Baghdad has only used such weapons against its own troops and population) while nothing was ever said about the use of napalm and fuel bombs by the Allied forces. Nor will we insist on the total partiality with which the "daily horror that Israeli citizens had to go through" was described (mentioning only the Jews; the horror for the Palestinians surely was not the same -as a matter of fact, a government decree stated that there were not any gas masks available for them!- while the horror that came pouring down on the population of Iraq was systematically omitted!

No, all this is only normal for these shock troops of the Western Christian army. We would rather like to denounce here some elements in this manipulation of the news. We already knew that they created images, and that a large number of them -shown on television- were created in computer laboratories. This was the case for instance for those images that showed missiles hitting their military target exactly in the middle: in fact, these images had been shot several years ago in the United States. But undoubtedly, this is when the modern Goebbels of the little screen excelled: when they tried to accuse their opponent of not only wasting oil, but also of exterminating nature and the environment (6). This is when they built up the pitiful story about a bird covered with black liquid, the bird that they had found dying in the sea. This story, and these images showing that dying bird, representing the destruction of nature -something only "bad" people could possibly desire and provoke on purpose- were circulated around the world. And probably public opinion has been more influenced and upset about this dying bird... than it has ever been about any other victim being shown on TV (and of course, they do not talk about these real deaths). This shows how extreme the manipulation can be, this gigantic collective idiocy produced by Capital. Everything seemed to work out just fine... until a specialist turned up to explain that this kind of bird does not live in the Persian Gulf area, but lives on the European coasts... and that's how it became obvious that this story as well was nothing else but a pure strategic laboratory invention, launched with some political-military goal.

But we do want to mention - as a significant example of this war -the sudden general discovery of the massacres committed by the regime of Saddam Hussein, massacres that we have denounced for years, against the stream, in spite of the fact that our contradictors accused us of "exaggeration" or even "invention". For several years we have denounced the tens of thousands of deaths that (during the war and after the signing of the cease-fire between Iraq and Iran) were caused by the bombings that the Iraqi State carried out against its own population, while we also denounced the systematic destruction of tens of cities and small villages. Speaking about the tens of thousands of deaths, about the hundreds of cities destroyed, has been considered to be an enormous exaggeration on our part, including at the time when we called for an international meeting that we had organized against the war and the peace in this region. As a matter of fact, nobody talked about all this, while all of a sudden, during the war, the Western bourgeois press "discovered" the massacres that it had been hiding for years! It was the "Figaro" newspaper (accusing its allies of yesterday and excusing those of today) that wrote (8th of March, 1991):

"Neither in Iran [sic!], nor in Syria [sic!] or in Turkey [sic!] did the Kurds experience such a brutality in repression. This brutality reached a peak at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, in 1988. In March of that year, while Saddam was winning every battle against the Khomeini troops and was forcing them to accept a cease-fire, he finally finds himself free enough to clean up Kurdistan. 'The Kurdish rebels are like ants, we will crush them,' warns an Iraqi general. And just like on ants, Saddam will use chemicals on the Kurds. More than 5,000 will get killed in the city of Halabja alone, the city will be completely destroyed and will be rebuilt 30 kilometers further away; altogether 4,000 cities and villages will be wiped out, erased from the map, and their population will be transferred to other areas that are easier to check for the Iraqi army. The poor and miserable families are packed in sordid townships with large alleys where armed vehicles can take up position at any moment. In the middle of the desert, the Iraqi State has installed real concentration camps, disguised as military basis, to imprison the most rebellious amongst the population. According to Sami Abdulrahman, the General Secretary of the People's Party of Kurdistan, 50,000 Kurds have disappeared in this sand-goulag."

This is only one example among many others. In reality, the whole of the main information agencies of the Christian Western world, mobilized for this new crusade, all of a sudden discovered what they had decided to ignore for years, and at the same time the heads of the Kurdish nationalist opposition parties were for the first time well received in the Western imperial centers of power, and indeed, in the Pentagon itself. Their declarations were widely echoed by television and by the other different means of production of the reality of public opinion.

On the balance of forces between the different blocs and on the short duration of the war

The deployment of military troops by both sides does not leave any doubt about the fact that a longer lasting military confrontation was expected. On the other hand, the analysis by military experts all concluded about the same perspective of a longer lasting war and -as far as the Western Coalition was concerned- a more murderous one! The tens of thousands of plastic bags that the American authorities had delivered in the area to "go back home" (as it was worded in certain songs by American soldiers) do not allow for the slightest doubt about this.

If the war - in its phase of more general confrontation between the Coalition armies and the troops of the Iraqi State - has met a definite limit (while we're writing this text, the war between different bourgeois factions inside Iraq is still going on), this is surely due to the complete lack of support that the imperialist policy of Saddam Hussein has encountered and to the ensuing weakness of his imperialist bloc and this has allowed its enemy to reach its objectives with much less damage than was initially estimated.

We already announced the weakness of the imperialist bloc directed by the Iraqi State, precisely because Saddam Hussein has been completely discredited in the face of his own troops and population (cf. the editorial of "Communisme" -French central review- No.32). Today we ccan affirm clearly that this constituted the main obstacle -and indeed the real break- for the continuation of the war.

We do not think it is necessary to go into any other explanations about the decisive importance of the adhesion of the proletariat to the imperialist war... since without such adhesion there simply cannot be any war like that, as all the burden of bourgeois war, from the battle ground unto the production lines, lies on the shoulders of the proletarians.

In Iraq, nearly ten years of war and of struggle against war did not take place in vain. Those hundreds of thousands of workers in uniform were no longer ready to sacrifice themselves for the national cause of the war. From the very beginning of the war, the only non-official information that we received from Iran and Iraq stated that those who had been forcefully sent on the battlefronts, tried to escape from there and that there had been many desertions and executions. Comrades from that region also confirmed - a long time before official sources fromm both sides could no longer hide the fact that the Iraqi troops were not ready to fight any more, and before the mass surrenders were shown on television- that the butchery was looking more and more like a war of extermination and that the common Iraqi soldier was trapped between two enemy fires: the fire of the Coalition and the fire of the Republican Guards.

To put it clearly, from the point of view of the Iraqi State, everything had been going wrong from the very beginning: there had been no decisive international support on the military and political level (the small support the Iraqi State did receive -like from the PLO e.g. - did not have any real significance); it failed in its attempt to make Israel get directly involved in the war and to build up this way a general front against it; there was very little credibility of Saddam's so-called anti-imperialism with the international masses, and this resulted in the complete lack of positive response to Saddam's different calls, including the lack of response concerning his call for terrorist attacks,... Even the Republican Guards did not show any full disposition for fighting and here also desertions were more massive than initially expected.

In view of the composition of the Coalition forces - composed of all the bigger international watchdogs of imperialism (USA, France, England,... and also with the complicity of the Soviet Union) and also in view of the intrinsic secular hate that the world proletariat feels for them (in general, it is these powers which always intervene to put down proletarian revolts and which always support the local bourgeois when the national State can no longer cope with an insurrectionary situation!), Saddam Hussein hoped to be able to raise the banner of the struggle against imperialism, as some others had already done -with more success though- before him. Saddam Hussein is not Nasser, nor Peron or even less so Che Guevara; Saddam is nothing else but an already ancient agent in that region, having the same interests as those who he is pretending to fight today. He is the agent of France, of the Soviet Union,... and above all, he is a tyrant having lost all credibility in the face of his own population that he has bombed without mercy; he is a tyrant incapable of achieving national unity which is the indispensable condition for the realization of an international front capable of forcing the big powers to negotiate.

Of course, there have been some demos in several countries, like in North-Africa or in Europe, in the Far East or in Latin America, where the crowds -amongst other claims- shouted some slogans in favour of Saddam, but without any real conviction and more as a provocation in the face of their own State (like in Spain, e.g.) when it was being considered to be too submitted to the Western Christian bloc. In quite a few cases also, the slogans in support of the Iraqi State, were nothing else but the result of the manoeuvres and manipulations by the local national State so as to take away all credit from the struggle against the war by assimilating this struggle against the bourgeoisie and its State as a struggle in support of the external enemy.

Even the bourgeois organizations of the radical left of the Western countries, always eager to sell their anti-imperialist speeches - and indeed, Saddam and Arafat hoped these would take their side - had only little autonomy in the face of their own national State (probably this is due to the general down graded situation of these organizations) and they all just claimed some vague pacifist rethorics: indeed, it was difficult to distinguish between the speeches held by a Stalinist, by a Castroist or by a Trotskist and the speeches held by the pope!

There were some "remarkable" exceptions to the cause of international Trotskism: for the Argentinian MAS e.g. it was no problem to take up the imperialist side of the butcher of Baghdad. The leaflets of this group, defending one imperialist camp against another, while hiding systematically all references to the murderous past (and present) of the Baghdad regime, for sure are part of the anthology of this war. We will just quote a small part of one of the leaflets of this group:

"When the war breaks out, there will be two clearly defined opposite military camps. One will be the aggressor camp, under the lead of the yankees and the support of Gorbatchev, as well as a long list of lackey governments. Through war, these will pursue, on a higher level still, the aggression that they triggered 5 months ago, through their military blockade and their economic genocide. The other side will be the side of Iraq. On this side we will find the Palestinians of the Intifada, millions of inhabitants from the Arab and Islam countries, as well as thousands of militants amongst the workers and the people who everywhere in the world, oppose the aggression. The Movement for Socialism (MAS) calls on all workers and on the people of Argentina, to support the Iraqi side. We are in the same boat as during the Falklands' war (THIS IS CLEAR! It is the same boat that they share with the Argentinian head of State terrorists who are guilty of killing and torturing, and of the disappearance of tens of thousands of our comrades - our comment!) when received the support of the majority of the people of Latin America and of large parts of the people of the Middle East, including the Iraqi people."

(quotation from a leaflet "Yesterday the Falklands, today Iraq; Yankees, out of the Gulf" calling for a "day against the imperialist aggression".)

The military superiority of the coalition forces - against the myth of technology

Let's get back to the essential, to the real limits of the war, since there existed an undeniable superiority of the Coalition forces. From all sides they tried to make us believe that the impressive triumph of the Coalition forces is due to their technological development, to the astonishing efficiency of their military equipment, etc.

The bourgeoisie tries to make us believe that nothing depends on us, that everything depends on technology, that the latter is opposed to us (even though it is our own product) as an alien power that is oppressing and controlling us. The interest of the bourgeoisie is obvious. With such propaganda, they are telling us: "I'm almighty", "you can do nothing", "In the face of the State, you don't stand a chance".

But when thinking about this, one soon realizes that all this is nothing but a big lie. During the Vietnam war, the North-American State had a complete technological superiority, but was unable to win the war. The same happened to the Russian army in Afghanistan. Even more so, the same technology that supposedly destroyed one of the best equipped armies of the world, cannot manage to defeat a few hundred of guerilleros in other parts of the world, like in Peru, for instance.

Every military strategist, from Clausewitz until today, knows that the keyfactor in all wars, is the human factor, the adhesion of the part of the population to the military policy, and it is this factor that determines the moral of the troops, the efficiency of the production front, the logistic capacities, etc. And it is sure, from this point of view, that there was -as we just wrote- an enormous difference between the two sides. On one side, a well disciplined army, ready to go to war, and on the other side, hundreds of thousands of men, forced to go to war at gunpoint and here every soldier was a potential deserter. On one side, a very mobile army with a nearly unlimited capacity to deploy itself, the soldiers of which -at least a large majority of them- are frree citizens who signed a contract to sell their capacity to kill ("workforce") (7); on the other side, a kind of formation and deployment on the battleground where the officers and the pretorian troops have to maintain a permanent pressure on their subordinates in order to prevent massive desertions.

All this determined a type of war with positions that favoured even more the Coalition. Indeed, the type of army and armement that was being used by the Coalition proved to be very appropriate to attack and destroy the fixed positions of the enemy. The situation is completely different when an army of this kind must transform itself into an army of occupation and for maintaining law and order, and when it is confronting a kind of popular war, facing autonomous military units. In such situations, the strategic advantage that derives from the support for the war effort by large parts of the population, disappears as time goes by. This is exactly what is happening today to the Israeli State for instance, since it is caught up relatively powerless in a war of occupation without any perspectives for a positive evolution - quite to the contrary of what happened during its blitz-victories in the past. If the North-American command of the Coalition forces interrupted its military actions before destroying the whole of the Iraqi military potentials, it is because they know that after all Saddam Hussein is a good guardian of bourgeois order. Even though it would have been relatively easy for the Marines to go further as far as Baghdad, it would have been much more difficult for them to pacify the population in this region, in the face of an Intifada a hundred times more powerful.

The technological superiority of one of the imperialist sides, and the never ending bombings that lasted for days and days without any possibility for the adversary to do anything about it, functioned exactly on the basis of these two fundamental conditions: the lack of eagerness to fight and the kind of war of positions that this determined (and also the acceptance of the classical bourgeois diplomacy by Saddam Hussein and the consecutive liberation of all the important persons belonging to the enemy camp by Saddam Hussein -because without this for sure the bombings would have encountered less national and international support). After weeks of bombings that accentuated even more the generalized weaknesses of Saddam's troops, the initial difference in the moral of troops between both sides became even bigger, and Saddam's imperialist army decomposed without having fought one single important battle (in spite of the press' exaggerations about the "Khafji battle") (8).

On the other hand, these intensive bombings disintegrated the whole regional system of political control of the Iraqi State! The orders from Baghdad did not get through any more to the troops, nor did they reach the remote villages of the southern provinces; it took days and days for news from different geographical points to reach Baghdad, and this -in such a situation of lack of national unity- was fatal to the Iraqi military command.

So tens of thousands of new deserters united with the numerous deserters from the Iran-Iraq war, as well as with those who had never submitted themselves and those who had organized themselves from the very beginning of the war and who were just waiting for the right moment to desert or surrender. Desertion became even more massive as officers themselves deserted and as the lack of food became more and more widespread. That's how the Coalition got a much easier victory than expected: besides, it did not really know what to do with such a victory, because it was no longer possible to hide that the cohesion of the enemy had been exaggerated for the sake of propaganda, and also because it had not prepared to round up such a high number of prisoners. The Coalition military Command was very embarrassed having to take care of more than a hundred thousand men... so embarrassed that on several occasions the American officers ordered to shoot on the Iraqi soldiers who came running towards them - in spite of the white flag they were waving as a sign of surrender. For sure the Allied Command would have preferred desertions to be less massive on the Iraqi side, and the imperialist war to last a bit longer - so as to account more easily (as well as in the face of the ordinary American citizen, as of the parliamentarians of the bourgeoisie) for the 500,000 men they sent to the Gulf together with all other military and logistical efforts.

The struggle of the proletariat against the war

Historically, the proletariat has proved its enormous creativity in the struggle against war: the sabotage of military trains, the execution of officers, internationalist propaganda, revolutionary defeatism, massive organization of deserters, the constitution of unitary workers' and soldiers' associations, strikes, demos,... In the face of the highest level of barbarity of capitalist domination, everything is valuable and every action against "the holy union" transforms itself into an action of internationalist solidarity against the war.

We could draw up a list of the proletarian actions against the war that occurred in different countries. But it is more important to draw up a much more global balance-sheet of the forces that existed during the struggle against the war, and we must cry out the truth that imposes itself and that we must recognize: the proletariat has been incapable of stopping the war, and especially on the side of the Coalition; capitalism reached its objectives of national mobilization and of the submission of the proletarians to the interests of the national States. Indeed, it is more important to stress this, than to mention the number of national flags that were burnt, the international leaflets that have been circulated, the schools that have been occupied (like in Italy and in Spain), the occupation of/or demos against recruitment offices, the number of deserters that have fled.

For us this general situation is logical, since counter-revolution is dominating on a nearly generalized scale, and in such a context we are rather glad that some violent actions against the war did take place. But the situation is really tragic, and every apology of some acts of resistance as if the proletariat finds itself in a revolutionary period, can only serve counter-revolution. We have to start out from this very elementary truth, that cannot be hidden: hour after hour, day after day, week after week, we were unable to stop one of the largest massacres in history, one that can be compared to the massacres in Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Dresden during the second world war. The massacre of our brothers took place while the bourgeoisie placed the world proletariat in front of the television screens so as to show them the horrible spectacle!

In relation to the weakness that we already talked about concerning the army of the Iraqi State, we must stress that the strength and coherence of the Coalition armies is shocking, especially as far as the passive but massive support by the rear-guard for these armies is concerned. The strength of the armies of the main international watchdogs of Capital lies within the weakness of the struggle of the proletariat in these countries.

It is obvious that the fact that nearly all deaths were only on one side, and that on the side of the Coalition the war did not cost much in terms of life or in terms of survival (the increase in misery cannot be compared to what happened on the other side), all this facilitated national unity, the submission of the proletariat to its own State, and the coherence of the armies of the US-led Coalition. The existing correlation of counterrevolutionary forces could only be put into question if the proletariat of the Coalition countries had also had to support the burden of the war, and if, on top of an intensification of the austerity-policies in those countries, thousands of plastic bags "bringing home" the "heroic freedom fighters" had arrived at the airports of the Coalition countries. In today's circumstances, when the "bourgeois" and "proletarians" are together celebrating the allied military victory, sharing the same criminal satisfaction about the fact that the victims remained in Iraq and Kuwait, in such circumstances it is counterrevolution itself that can fortify the perception of the proletariat as an organic and single body, by the exacerbation of the misery it causes!

So we must assume this sad reality where the international proletariat is standing, incapable of stopping the war (and we must remember that the most important limit to the Vietnam war, was the North-American proletariat itself!) or even of assuming really important actions of struggle against it! We do not want to devalorize the actions of some proletarians who refused, e.g., in certain harbours, to load arms to be sent to the Gulf region, nor the violent actions against this or that center for recruitment in the USA, but it is tragic that there was no uprising amongst the troops that were sent to fight on behalf of the Coalition; it is tragic that there were only a few tens of deserters (while on the other side, there were several tens of thousands!), that there were no important attacks against official buildings of the Coalition forces; it is tragic that the military production, as well as production in general, did not get paralyzed, so as to fight against the criminal politics of our "own" States. And finally, the most tragic of all is the terrible state of atomized individuals to which large parts of the proletariat are reduced today, sitting in front of a television screen, or participating in some pacifist demo that reinforces the national mobilization and the military actions of the imperialist State.

Without any doubt, one of the most difficult problems to solve, as well in the past as for the future of the worldwide revolution, is this tragic difference between the development of the struggle in one or another country: this is how the bourgeoisie can afford to send troops from one country to repress the insurrection that is going on in another country, as it happened so many times in history, transforming the proletariat in one country into the accomplice of the State repressing the proletariat elsewhere. There is no doubt about the fact that the trajectory of the States of the Coalition and more specifically of the North-American State, as well as the present affirmations (practical and military, as well as in all official speeches) as the international police force of the State of "International Law", designate these States to be the watchdogs against insurrectionary movements in other countries. In the struggle against this, the responsibility of the proletariat in these specific countries is obvious. But this also requires the necessity for a general staff of the international proletariat, the importance of the centralisation of the proletarian community of struggle based on the communist programme. In relation to this, the critique of the complete failure -through opportunism, centrism, euro-centrism, federalism, nationalism- of the Third International (that, from the 2nd Congress onward, adopted the tactic of national liberation that objectively divided the proletariat and this way became the accomplice of the bourgeoisie) is essential.

The situation in Iraq

On the Iraqi side, defeatism was general. We already described how the Iraqi State sent tens of thousands of proletarians in uniform to the front, to serve as cannon-fodder. But in the face of this situation, the proletariat did not remain passive. Struggles occurred even before the beginning of the bombings by the Coalition armies. In Mossoul, in the North of Iraq, in Kurdistan, people rioted against the famine that resulted from the "war restrictions" that had been imposed jointly by the Iraqi State and the Coalition. In Sulaimaniya, in the North also, demos against the war were organized by women. The Republican Guards intervened and fired at the crowd. 300 women were arrested and executed a bit later. But in the South of Iraq also, the situation remained very tense in the face of the perspectives of the bombings and the launching of this war, in which proletarians knew they had nothing to win.

So even before the launching of the terrestrial offensive, the general situation in Iraq was very explosive, and for this reason, for fear of an insurrection, Saddam Hussein made thousands of leaflets to be thrown down by airplane, recalling the Halabja massacre. This is how he wanted proletarians who were ready to rise up against him, to remember that the State would not hesitate to bomb or gas them if they refused to submit themselves to his war-plans. Saddam Hussein did not have time to execute his threaths since the Coalition offensive was launched even before he could put down this defeatist resistance.

This is how, from the very moment that the warplanes from the Coalition had started dropping their tons of bombs on the South of Iraq at first, crushing the proletarians who were hiding in shelters or in caves, these proletarians started moving up to Baghdad, fleeing the areas of famine and desolation; they were immediately joined by thousands of starved deserters. In the face of this situation, the Iraqi State had no other solution but to move more reliable troops from the North into the area to prevent these thousands of proletarians from fleeing to Baghdad. But while moving these more loyal troops to the South, the Iraqi State destabilized even more the situation in the North, where the uprisings were the most violent, straight after the terrestrial offensive.

This resistance of proletarians in Iraq and the defeatism they were capable of -even before the launching of the terrestrial offensive- were the first cause for the ending of the war between the Coalition and Iraq. Even more so since on the front, right after the beginning of the war, tens of thousands of other proletarians surrendered and refused to sacrifice their blood for the imperialist crusade of Saddam. During these few days when the Republican Guards had to confront an enemy that was really armed, one could easily see that their eagerness to fight was much weaker than when they were fighting proletarians who refused to go to the battlefields. On this occasion, tens of thousands of proletarians got completely "out of control", and at the same time when they were fighting for their own survival while attacking private property, they were clashing with their enemy of always, their "own" State.

From the first days of March 1991, the news agencies of the whole world had to mention the attacks and arson of official buildings and Baath' party buildings, but as we already mentioned, the struggle did not start nor did it end here: as a matter of fact, a real tendency for generalization existed. The press mentioned only certain attacks by the proletariat against the State in Iraq, in order to better justify the Coalition's massive massacres as a "public health operation". The Coalition wanted the actions against the war, the desertions of proletarians, the uprisings against famine,... to be depicted as struggles against a detested tyrant, and not as a more general struggle against capitalist war. For the State organized around the Coalition, the biggest danger lies in a possible contamination of these defeatist struggles within its own army. In the face of a generalization of the desertions and struggles in Iraq, the soldiers of the Coalition could easily have become aware that they were not fighting against thousands of fanatic "Saddamised" terrorists, as they had been made to believe, but that they were in fact participating in a butchery that had been organised against the masses of proletarians in Iraq and in Kuwait.

The worldwide bourgeoisie had a feeling of general terror when considering the possibility that the defeatism against the State of Saddam Hussein might affirm itself as revolutionary defeatism. This is one of the reasons that made Bush decide -in spite of the many international calls for the destruction of the complete military potential of Saddam- to stop the war only a few days after having launched the battle against the Republican Guards. This is how he tried to ensure the integrity of this anti-proletarian and repressive organ, the Republican Guard. General Kelly declared explicitly:

"It is a defeated army that is going back home. A beaten army always constitutes a political threat."

The Washington Post itself reproduced declarations by Iraqi bourgeois opposition leaders that were in contradiction with the general analysis which pretended that what was going on, was a national or religious problem. For instance, this paper reproduced the following declarations by Muhammad Bahr Ulum:

"This is not a religious problem, but the first popular uprising in 20 years against the reign of Saddam Hussein. His defeat in Kuwait has broken the reign of terror."

And as a matter of fact, while they were trying once more to make us believe that the struggles that erupted after the war are about religious problems, or even about national questions -as far as the Kurdistan area is concerned- we know, as far as we are concerned, that these struggles are much more the direct continuity of the struggles that occurred before and during the war.

And for this reason, the Coalition's interest was for Saddam Hussein to assume himself the continuity of repression organized by the means of the Republican Guards.

Uprisings took place nearly everywhere, as soon as the war stopped. Bassorah, in the South, Mossoul, Arbil, Kirkouk, Sulaimania, in the North, were in a state of insurrection. The rest of the defeated army, the deserters, the inhabitants of the cities, united themselves to cry out their anger and hatred of the State in the face of those who had sent them to war. In the South, clashes were particularly violent, but the Republican Guards were prepared for it: they had already been concentrated in this region because the State knew very well the explosive situation that prevailed here. In the North, Saddam hoped for some respite since he knew he could count on the nationalists. He hoped that they would be capable of framing up and defeating the proletariat, and he knew for sure that they would not engage in any action against him. Indeed, from the very beginning of the war, Saddam Hussein and the nationalist parties had reached some secret agreement via the PLO and its beloved leader, Yasser Arafat, guaranteeing the pacific coexistence between these two bourgeois factions for the whole duration of the war. This is why repression first hit struggles in the South.

But the uprisings in the North took place in spite of all official "opposition", and in spite of and against the KDP, PUK and all other Kurdish nationalist organizations. From the very start, these factions were recognized as being "war-participationists" and their attempts to frame up the insurgents by putting forward nationalist perspectives, did not work out. Other groups rose up, such as "Communist Perspective" in Sulaimania, an internationalist organization that resulted from the lessons of the preceding struggles. And other groups as well, all more or less formal, and which all clearly designated the nationalists as enemies as dangerous as the`Republican Guard. The insurgent proletarians refused to let nationalists enter the cities. The latter then tried to encircle the cities, meeting this way many soldiers on their way home from the front. These soldiers did not want to fight any more, but on several occasions, the nationalists forced them to join their ranks and fight. As one can see, a nation-to-be uses the same terrorist methods as the nation it is fighting against. Here, Saddam Hussein and Talabani stand hand in hand to send proletarians to the front at gunpoint. The encircling of the cities by the nationalist parties, allowed them to make the world believe that they were "in control" of these cities; but the only control that they actually assumed, was the control of the repression of proletarians returning home from the front. These pieces of information that have been reported directly to us by contacts, sympathisers and comrades from that region, are corroborated by the fact that Talabani e.g., the boss of the PUK, has not been able to return to Sulaimania even though this city was considered to be his stronghold before.

It is exactly in this city, that the insurrection was particularly violent: here proletarians took revenge for years and years of massacres and organized terror that they had been submitted to. They attacked the terrifying secret police of Saddam Hussein, killing some 2,000 Baathists, who were hiding in the buildings of the political police. The anger of our fellow proletarians turned against everything that represented the Iraqi State, as they burnt, looted and entirely demolished all buildings belonging to the police, to the Baath' party, courts, etc. During all this time, the nationalist parties tried to oppose this, arguing that the material that could be found in these buildings, would be useful to the future Kurdish State!

To put down this generalized proletarian revolt, Saddam Hussein sent his most loyal troops to clear the region, after Bassorah and the other insurgent cities of the South had been crushed! As soon as the Republican Guards got closer to the North, and as the first reports about their atrocities arrived, as soon as the proletariat realized that the Republican Guards had succeeded partially in crushing the South and that white terror was coming up North, towards the Kurdistan region, as soon as the insurgents realized that the Coalition armies had left the Republican Guard nearly unharmed and in any case sufficiently powerful to organize the terror against them, they withdrew from the cities towards the mountains, with their arms, luggage, children, trying to escape by all possible means the repressive hell that was about to hit them. We already gave some examples of the violence with which the insurgents struggled against local authorities and it is easy to understand that they expected the worst of the Republican Guards. For tens of years they had been submitted to the repression by the shock troops of the Iraqi regime, and they knew they should not expect any mercy of them.

The whole of the information was transmitted to us directly by comrades from that region who had participated in these struggles. We do not possess yet all the details about the different clashes and confrontations that we have mentioned (one can easily imagine all the difficulties for these comrades to communicate with us, in view of the horror of the defeat that they are submitted to today!), but of course we will continue to centralize all the information that these comrades will give us. As soon as the war started and at the very moment when the bombings started, these comrades also circulated an "appeal against the war" that was produced by our group, in Arabic. Other material produced by our group was also circulated, before and during the war.

A few days after the "anniversary" of the Halabja massacre, while the struggle was fully going on, particularly in the North of Iraq, in the Kurdistan region, our group sent a leaflet there, in Kurdish, which was also circulated in the area. Here are some excerpts from this leaflet that was called: "No Kurdish nation! No Islamic republic!" and that focused mainly on the critique of nationalism, in all its forms.

"The Halabja massacre and all other filthy nationalist actions are the arms of democracy (...) The proletarians and the exploited from Kurdistan, as all the exploited of the world, can only abolish misery by turning their guns against the Kurdish nationalists and by treating them the same way as they have been treating the Baathist State. The bourgeois are our enemy, wherever they may be. So, what can be the difference that the nationalists make between "the external enemy", the "momentaneous enemy", the "main enemy", small or big? (...) The Halabja massacre is the direct result of the law of this class society, as history has proved us a thousand times. As soon as the revolutionary movement fights against Capital and its nationalists, as soon as Capital loses control, the only response by the bourgeoisie will be the massacre of proletarians!

History has given us many examples: Kronstadt and Petrograd in Russia, Dresden in Germany, Sabra and Shatila by Israel and the Arab States, Halabja by the Baathist party... without mentioning all the examples that have been hidden from us.

The official media of the whole world, together with all types of Marxist-Leninist groups, have collected money in the name of the Halabja massacre by spreading their lies about these events. In this job, all their lies have been cautioned by the dogs Talabani (PUK) and Houshiar Zebari (KDP) (...) The nationalist bourgeois have prevented the population of Halabja from leaving the city before the chemical bomb attacks, while letting their own relatives and militants go (...) Capital itself engenders war, misery, illness and repression. The Halabja massacre is the direct product of money and work. This massacre has been perpetuated with the help of the Western countries. They arranged themselves to put all the blame on Saddam Hussein, while putting their horrible pictures in their papers. (...).

Down with the State!

For a classless society!

Towards the victory of the struggle for communism!"

oOo

Taking into account the insurrectionary movements that spontaneously shook many Iraqi cities, before, during and especially after the war, one can easily understand why the Coalition powers did not have any interest in completely destroying the Republican Guard, once they were sure about their own victory. If the Coalition army had destroyed the Republican Guard, then it would have been up to them to confront the insurgents and to ensure social peace and this would have implied a very high political and military cost for them. On top of this, none of the other bourgeois factions in Iraq represents a valuable alternative for the main power involved in the Gulf war: the imperialist giant called USA.

Kurdish nationalist autonomy is being considered to be too destabilizing for the whole region, and besides -as soon as the outcome of its military confrontation with Iraq was clear- the Pentagon stopped flirting with the Kurdish nationalist leaders. In the same manner, Washington is considering the establishment of an Iran-like Islamic republic to be dangerous and contradictory with the other imperialist interests in that region. This is why, during the decisive days when the fall of Saddam Hussein seemed most likely, all observers were surprised once more by the support the Coalition powers gave to the Iraqi leader whom only a few days earlier they had called "the new Hitler". For us, this stands as an additional proof for our analysis of Capital, as far as the fragility of inter-imperialist alliances is concerned. For sure, the Coalition would prefer the same Baathist party to maintain law and order in Iraq, but headed by somebody with more credibility than Saddam Hussein.

The war and its perspective

It is the proletariat that constituted the real limit of the war, and above all, the proletariat in Iraq that broke national unity and assumed defeatist struggles. But the limit was also made up by proletarians from other countries who did not participate in the imperialist crusade that Saddam and some others -under the cover of anti-imperialism- had called for. The disequilibrium between imperialist powers was such that it became impossible to continue generalized war.

Nevertheless, from the point of view of the US and of its allies, the whole operation did bring about a positive political and military outcome, especially because of the lack of struggle and of proletarian autonomy against the war. A bourgeois outcome of course, not only in relation to the commercial business of the war (who would still buy Russian tanks today?) but also and especially, because of the national and international mobilization and because of the reconstitution and consolidation of the spirit of the most important military power in the world!

From the latter point of view, the war has reached the capitalist and imperialist objectives that were searched for. However, from the most global point of view, from the point of view of the general need for destruction, which will only serve to open a new phase of reconstruction and expansion, there is no doubt about the fact that the Gulf war was completely inadequate. However lucrative the commercial deals are, the ones that many different factions of Capital contracted during the war and during the period of reconstruction in this area, the destructions caused by the war were very small compared to today's necessities for the destruction of capital.

Capitalism needs war still a lot more. This is why we insist that much on the actual limits of the war, because the tendency for a more generalized war remains acute. And nobody can guarantee that today's limits of this war will also be the limits capable of preventing the generalisation of another war tomorrow. The difference between today's blocs and the lack of adhesion to one of them, cannot be a permanent limit for other wars to come. As a matter of fact, because of the rapidity in the changing of interbourgeois alliances -engendered by the depression and today's crisis- and also because of the experience from this last war that will push the weaker factions of the bourgeoisie into making concession to an even higher degree so as to reinforce their bloc and engage into military actions - one can foresee the coming of more equally balanced polarizations, in terms of military power, that will be much more dangerous for the world proletariat. In the future war, there will not be on one side a giant and on the other side a dwarf, but there will be two opposed giants, and not only in military terms, but also in terms of the power that derives from the different myths about the "causes to defend the nation".

Here we have to mention that the weakness of Saddam Hussein does not exclude the possible coming of much more radical factions that will be capable of raising the banner of "third world" ideology or radical anti-imperialism in a much more coherent manner. These factions would also be capable of giving rise to a popular mobilization of the entire nation for waging war in a much less conventional way and therefore in a much more murderous way in regard to the troops of the main imperialist watchdog. Neither can we discard at all the possibility that there might be a more general decomposition of the stronger bloc in this war and the birth of new polarizations between the main industrial powers, including from within the bossom of each country. We cannot either discard the possibility that the standards of international trade will completely explode, opposing e.g. the bourgeois factions in favour of the complete application of the law of international value to other more protectionist factions. Such a polarization would be the most logical and profound one to develop during the coming years: however, it will only become a material force if it manages to crystallize itself in a discourse capable of mobilizing the masses and of inducing the proletariat to kill and die for the fatherland. Such a polarization will appear with completely different discourses and ideological justifications (we discard the reappearance of the old fascism/anti-fascism form) which, however, are not ripe yet.

Our action against war, for the centralisation of all international forces

We are not creators of parties, nor do we create "Internationals". We start from the existing reality of which our group is also a product. However, by reappropriating the historical program of our class and Party, we try to transform ourselves to become active factors, i.e. organised, disciplined, conscious agents.

The community of struggle against capitalism and war is an objective reality that emerges from the interests of the proletariat in opposition to the interests of Capital, its economy, its wars. With its strength and its weaknesses, the common action of the proletariat forges it as a class, as a unified force. The ICG is an expression of this process and it fights, on the highest possible international level, to centralise this force, so as to build up an international direction according to the interests of the proletariat and the historical program of communism.

We repeat here each one of our calls for revolutionary defeatism and for the organisation of the community of struggle against the war. This is why we advise our readers, who have not read all our publications, to read more in particular the following issues of the French language review "Communisme" (before "Le Communiste"): 7, 25, 27 and 29 in which we have developed a whole series of appeals and propositions. In very concrete terms of activity, our group proposed in all these texts:
"¢
the coordination of the internationalist activity together with the whole of organisations and proletarian groups that fight against the war, to turn back our arms against those who send us to war, for revolutionary defeatism.
"¢
the organisation of the circulation of information about struggles of this kind, and especially about the Middle East, in view of the very explosive character of the contradiction between war and revolution in this area.
"¢
to reinforce and centralise the different networks for the survival of proletarians in struggle, prisoners, fugitives, exiles,...
"¢
to circulate the different texts and material in different areas of the world, such as texts about the struggles and other internationalist activities, as well as more historical texts that lay out the never changing perspectives of communism.

Whatever might be the immediate developments of the war situation in this region, the Gulf war has re-actualized the contradiction of always: war or revolution, capitalist civilization or communism, and therefore it has given more validity than ever to our plans and proposals.

During the war itself, we experienced the general weakness of our class in everything we have tried to organise or to encourage. While it was important to take up and circulate different information, while deserters and fugitives, in different places, had to be backed up, or also, in order to assume on a larger level some direct action of propaganda and agitation against the war, we were objectively very isolated, mainly here in Western Europe, since we already mentioned how defeatism in Iraq did allow for more centralised action.

As there do not exist any larger class organs to participate in in order to promote and reinforce revolutionary defeatism, as there do not exist any forms of coordination of proletarian action against the war, we had to limit ourselves, here in Europe, to the organisation of some action of propaganda, and this is how, with our own forces as well as with some of our close contacts, we circulated leaflets and reviews, and we produced and put up posters. For us, communist militants, it is a real tragedy that our class was led to die and to kill, without putting up any massive or significant resistance; it is a real tragedy that - in the hour of truth - when it was necessary to prevent the depparture of troops and assume massive and violent action against the enemy "in our own country", we found ourselves to be alone, we, the comrades of the ICG together with some other militants and close sympathizers, and with a balance of forces that was completely paralysing.

Denying this sad reality, denying the impressive force of counter-revolution today, comes down to being its accomplice! From our point of view, this terrible reality does not discourage us. It confirms the invariant road we are following, the struggle of always, against the stream and far away from all popularity.

Today capitalism is stronger than ever. Nevertheless, it has not been able to avoid depression, crisis, and neither will it be able to avoid complete bankruptcy tomorrow, nor a new merciless commercial war that will finish in a new war altogether. Capital has bypassed partially one imperialist contradiction, but it continues to exacerbate the whole of the general contradictions of its system. Sooner or later, the contradiction WAR or REVOLUTION will polarize once more the entire world. Everything that is being done to diminish or postpone the contradictions, in fact only delays the moment when these contradictions will explode, when they will again come to the forefront of the international scene, but with much more power still!

Sooner or later also, with this new and inevitable explosion, the proletariat that has been so absent as an international autonomous class during the ultimate convulsions, will again stand at the centre of the historical scene, and again the contradictions of capitalist society will fuse in the contradiction between war and revolution, between capitalism and communism.

Revolutionary defeatism in Iraq

In the last chapter, we wrote that as long as comrades in Iraq can manage to get information to us, we intend to continue to centralize information from the region. Since then, we received new information directly from comrades and proletarians, some of them writing from the front line of action. They want to make it understood, as soon as possible, what situation they have been faced with. The new details confirm and reinforce our previous conclusions: proletarian revolutionary defeatism and autonomous struggle against all capitalist factions, including nationalist and islamic factions, was extremely significant.

We have attempted to put the main points down in this chapter. We apologize for the relatively disorganised and sometimes bitty presentation - bear in mind that some of this information was obtained by very indirect means, by communication with comrades and proletarians, some of them in the midst of armed confrontation with the State.

oOo

We have already mentioned that significant proletarian struggles against the State had already broken out before the star of the war: food riots, anti-war demos, etc... we have now got further information on the situation and the state of mind of soldiers and proletarians in general, before the allied bombing began.

As a result of the Iran/Iraq war, it is difficult for the State to control the area, particularly the cities. Ten years of war have literally armed the majority of proletarians. The marshlands, for example, have become an area of convergence for deserters and other proletarians. Soldiers who have been fighting for ten years will no longer put up with a system now demanding taxes or a boss or foreman giving orders. Moreover, in glorifying soldiers returning from the battle front (indispensable war propaganda), the State indirectly encouraged insubordination and resistance to its control over daily life. It responded in a confused manner to try to maintain social peace, but was unable to halt disobedience and generalized disorganisation.

In Baghdad itself, before the bombings, everyone was preparing to flee the city and there was a flourishing trade in forged laissez-passer documents, organisation of hide-outs, etc. Everyone had organised their desertion well in advance of the first bomb dropping on the city: privates, but also some officers who had ripped off their stripes and were sometimes the first to leave. The biggest barracks in Baghdad began to empty as the first shells fell and not a single shot was heard in defence of the barracks. There were desertions and officers were executed. Soldiers and other proletarians made up a corps of shock troopers fighting the Baathist forces. During the war, they managed to gain control of two areas of the city: Al Sourah and Al Sho'ela. Within Baghdad, these areas became magnets for further deserters. Hundreds of soldiers from all over the country escaped from the main barracks in Baghdad and went to such supportive districts, whose inhabitants enabled them to return to their homes, by providing them with rest, food and civilian clothes.

As the threat of a new war became more and more real, resistance to it took on various forms - from passive reaction to violent and armed action against army recruiters. A decisive role was again played by the core of armed proletarians, who responded so significantly to the Iran/Iraq war. Before and during the war, they directed resistance against the military at various levels and were now able to transform initial passive resistance (refusal to sign up, to accept superiors' orders, to go to the front - often supported by the family and friends) into conscious military confrontation with recruiters and others supporting the army.

As always, executions of a few officers carried out by the most resolute minority were initially not openly supported by proletarian conscripts. Although they sympathized with this kind of action, state campaigns against defeatism were still maintaining state terrorism. However, they gradually overcame their fear and executions of officers reached massive scales. Soldiers carried out mass lynching of "their own officers" and it got to a stage where the hierarchy required for cohesion of the army no longer existed. Officers were terrified and lost the balance of power. Soldiers did whatever they wanted and the officers were reduced to apologizing and asking forgiveness. They tried to pretend that they were also against the war and had nothing to do with re-mobilization.

The situation within the army became so chaotic that when the Allied military offensive began, officers ripped the stripes off their uniforms for fear of being recognized and executed on the spot by the masses of deserters. To be seen wearing stripes meant suicide.

At various strategic points in the South defeatist units went even further - attacking official party headquarters, ooccupying food warehouses and distributing the food to starving proletarians. They destroyed the secret police headquarters, killing hundreds of policemen. Uprising developed in Basra, Naseriyah and Diwaniyah. Historically, deserters and other proletarians in hiding from the State are concentrated in this area. In previous issues we wrote about military offensive carried out by the Iraqi State on the marshlands a year after the Iran/Iraq war, which resulted in the death of thousands. At that time government figures estimated 10,000 deserters hiding in the area. Now they talk of 1 million, 55,000 of which are armed deserters.

In this part of Iraq, uprisings started as the Allies' land offensive began. The proletarians' situation became increasingly unbearable due to massive bombings of Basra, Ammarah, Naseriyah, Najaf and Karbala. Organised minorities centralized their activities and struggles took place around all these cities. Contrary to everything that has been said about the religious nature of the movement, religion played no part in the proletarians' struggle. Najaf and Karbala are sacred cities for shiites but the uprising had nothing to do with islam, despite what the bourgeois press try to make us believe. Proletarians used sacred sites to hang Baathists. Mausoleums were riddled with bullets and angry proletarians pissed in the mosques. Difficult, therefore, to talk of "religious fanaticism"!

The Allies had reached the gates of Najaf and Karbala at the time of the uprisings there. It is clear that they halted the land offensive to permit the Iraqi Army to carry out an attack on the insurgents.

As the Iraqi Army descended on the cities, chaos ensued and deserters fled in all directions. Some asked for asylum and aid from the Allied troops but were told "we'll give you something to drink if you're thirsty, but only in exchange for your weapons." They were then sent back, unarmed, to the city to be massacred - one example of collaboration between Saddam and the Allies against the uprising.

We have already described how Saddam recalled his troops posted in the North when large units of armed proletarians from the South began to advance towards Baghdad, thus increasing the disorganisation of the State in Kurdistan.

Thousands of militants from various regions converged in the North - Turks from Kirkuk, Iranians who had fled the war and repression at the time in Iran, etc... As cities such as Halabja and Qal'at Dizah had been decimated by Saddam a few years before, they took refuge around Suleimaniya (there were more than 70,000 proletarians organizing themselves into radical groups for self-defence, struggle against state control, against Kurdish or other nationalists). This mixture of proletarians, with varying horizons and experiences, produced a situation in which Kurdish nationalist held very little sway, their usual slogans "Freedom for the Kurdish people" and "Rights for the Kurds" having little effect on the march uprising in Suleimaniya.

In order to counter the large scale uprisings in cities such as Arbil, Kirkuk, Mosul and Suleimaniya... that started with the launching of the land offensive, Saddam signed an agreement for peaceful coexistence with the nationalists. Yalal Talabani; leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Massoud Barsani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), announced publicly in April and May 1991 that they had reached an agreement with Saddam Hussein. Even more recently, Talabani confirmed that during the war his organisation deliberately avoided taking any action liable to destabilize the State "out of national respect", guaranteeing a mutual respect for territory under the violent monopoly of whichever force. We now know that the "People's Mujahedin" of Iran also took part in these agreements and that their shock troops were used against the proletarian uprising.

In the North, proletarian struggle was outside of and opposed to the official nationalist opposition parties, such as KDP and PUK, from the outset. The internationalist and defeatist proletarian vanguard denounced them as participating in the war.

We now have further information on the context and conditions in which confrontations with the State took place, particularly during the March uprising in Suleimaniya. Before coming on to this, we would like to mention further news we have about a women's demo in Suleimaniya during which 300 women were arrested and later killed. The demo turned violent when a militant woman from Iran tried to take a soldier's gun off him and was shot dead by another soldier on a watchtower. This militant has now become a symbol of proletarian struggle against war and State, a recognized martyr reflecting the image of struggle in Suleimaniya. It is of no consequence to proletarians from Iraq that she was from Iran - what counts is what she did. We have not told this story as an anecdote, but because it expresses the anti-nationalist content of the movement, rising out of a struggle in which proletarians no longer walk in the gutter bourgeois ideology digs to make proletarians confront each other as Iraqis, Iranians, Kurds, shiites...

oOo

Despite the media's insistence on the entirely spontaneous nature of the uprising in Suleimaniya, it is now clear that it was the result of intense organisation undertaken by vanguard minorities. Their militant activity was intense in the six months before the uprising. A group called Communist Perspective was formed and their publication, "The Proletarian", was distributed mainly amongst militants. Links between militants had been severely limited over the years due to repression and the memory of recent massacres. Militants organised themselves in secret. When riots broke out during the occupation of Kuwait, comrades from Communist Perspective organized debates with other militant minorities. In the course of analyzing the situation and "what should be done", the Shura ("Shura" means "workers' council" in Persian and Kurdish) movement was born. Initially there were about 300 militants (from both Iran and Iraq) who decided to organize themselves, homogenize their positions, deal with technical and medical problems, commandeer weapons,...

In Suleimaniya, they decided to attack on the 8th of March at 13h00. Groups were formed and given specific targets - barracks, police stations, secret police and information headquarters, the "United Nations Hotel" (a hotel used by the United Nations, but which turned out to be a secret police base), main entrances to the city and surrounding areas to prevent nationalists and journalists from entering,... All proletarians were delighted with this course of action - tensions had been running for the a while and everyone was expecting something to happen. The army could sense the growing hatred and tension and was forecasting that something would blow. Nevertheless, the offensive on Suleimaniya took them by surprise - the city was attacked from all sides simultaneously.

Our comrades have given us specific examples of how the groups of internationalist insurgents were themselves overtaken by proletarian mass action, driven by their class interests and hatred. This occurs in any insurrectional process and is illustrated by events as a few hundred armed revolutionaries advanced into Suleimaniya and were greeted by the masses of proletarians, all carrying weapons. The proletarians' sole objective was to violently impose their own interests on their oppressors and, in order to do so, much to the surprise of the revolutionary insurgents, they had managed to arm themselves not only with light hand guns, but also heavy artillery, and were preparing to use them against the State.

In the course of the attack of the city, more and more proletarians joined the fighting. When the barracks were taken over, arms were distributed to proletarians prepared to fight. They were given orders to attack milk stores (milk had been rationed), prisons and to release prisoners. Anyone in military uniform was massacred on the spot.

The uprising was particularly violent, proletarians taking revenge for the years of massacre and organized state terrorism. They attacked Saddam's secret police force.

After two days of fighting the hide-out of political police fell into the hands of the insurgents. Fighting was very violent as the highly trained soldiers defended the building. Victory was won as increasing numbers of proletarians joined the battle and hundreds of Baathist police hiding in the building were killed.

The occupation of Suleimaniya got underway starting with the reappropriation of machines, secret documents and weapons and this explains the comments of some nationalist leaders reported in western newspapers:

"Disorder benefits none, there are undoubtedly agitators amongst those sowing the seeds of disorder... they are destroying everything, not only attacking and killing members of Saddam's secret police which is understandable but they are also burning all police files and registers of property and civil status... It is clear to us that agitators, Baathists are responsible, because, as you imagine, we will need all this later - every state organisation needs these documents!"

What these bourgeois fail to understand or better put, arose not to admit, is that the aim of the revolt was not to reorganise the state and capital's administration, or to liberate the nation, but like every significant proletarian insurrection, the struggle is against the State itself and aims to attack all of its manifestations - military, police, public buildings, parties and security and property documents.

On hearing that the Baathists had hidden in a park outside the town, proletarians descended on it shouting:

"Long live Shura, abolish the State!"

"We want soviets!"

Slogans supporting "Kurdish autonomy" are practically non-existent. Proletarians organised into militia to prevent Peshmergas (fighters of nationalist organisations) from entering Suleimaniya. It is clear to all the insurgents that the nationalists are working hand in hand with Saddam.

The nationalists went on to Kirkuk to take control of the city. They arrived first, but were closely followed by militants from the Shura, armed to the teeth. In Kirkuk the PUK and KDP are in the majority and with the balance of power in their favour, they fought against the government and the Shura.

The agreement between Saddam and the nationalists to quell the rebellion, includes a proviso that "Arabs" (deserters from the South who took part in the uprisings in the North) be returned to "their own" area.

After the uprisings "Free Kurdish Radio" made daily broadcasts threatening those in possession of arms or Shura leaflets with execution.

A rift developed between Communist Perspective and the Shura, due to disagreements on positions. However we do not have any details of this. The split demobilized and distanced many proletarian sympathizers, although solidarity was maintained between the groups in the face of nationalist repression.

Briefly, the Shura can be described as an internationalist proletarian organisation, opposed to Kurdish or other nationalists. It fights to strengthen the revolutionary movement, not only in Iraq, but throughout the world. It defines capital as a worldwide social relationship which can therefore only be abolished worldwide by a world revolution (9).

After the uprising the movement died down a bit and the Shura went underground again to escape massacre.

The army and the nationalists retook Suleimaniya in mid-April. The alliance between the government and the nationalists was perfect - the nationalists denounce the militants of Shura and give the State all information they have: names, addresses, activities,...

The Shura called for denunciation of nationalists throughout the world. The Kurdish nationalists organised a radio campaign, claiming that they had liberated Kurdistan, that the cities were free thanks to the PUK and KDP and that their example should be followed to clear the city of anarchists, troublemakers, etc.

On the 30th and 31st of May there were more riots in Suleimaniya. Looting was organised and many soldiers gave up their arms out of fear of being massacred. Government and nationalist forces called for reinforcements. Despite their hatred of nationalists, the proletarians did not kill them and the PUK imposed a curfew by shooting at anyone out on the streets after 7pm. In this way, the PUK remained in control of the situation.

Significant proletarian uprisings also took place in Raniyah, Kirkuk and Arbil. Deserters and armed minority groups played an important part. These minorities described their position as being against all bourgeois factions (governmental and nationalist) and were concentrated and trained in the area of Karadakh. Confrontation between nationalists and internationalists was open. Internationalist comrades know that defeat is synonymous with massacre and that nationalist militias act without mercy.

oOo

It is an absolute lie that the Allies only bombed military targets and "collateral" civilian targets during the Gulf war. There are two possibilities: either their lies about the Allies' force and technological strength were even greater than we had thought and wrote about in the previous chapter of this text, or military installations were not the targets of the bombings in the first place. We now know, thanks to internationalist comrades in Iraq, that 80% of the bombings were carried out on civilian targets. We also know that Iraqi military installations are practically intact and that chemical weapons and nuclear research centres were left untouched. Baghdad still has the same capacity for producing chemical weapons and building nuclear warheads as before the war.

As for the bloody battles in which Allied "heros" and soldiers of the Republican Guard were engaged, only 5% of the Republican Guard were killed in the war. Proletarian struggle took a far greater toll on the state cracktroops than the whole of the Allied offensive.

As it was to be expected, the maintenance of bourgeois order was much more of a preoccupation and determining factor to the Allies than their conflicts with "damned Saddam". Today (July 1991), the Republican Guards still play essential role in the region. There is no doubt that, over and above their desire to liquidate Saddam, the Pentagon and the most powerful forces of international capitalism in general, consider the Baath party to be a good guarantor for order in the region (this not excluding alliances with nationalist and religious factions - on the contrary). It is clear that the decision not to attack critical sectors of the Republican Guard and to stop the war were motivated by the absolute necessity for a local force capable of guaranteeing social peace. This was illustrated by pictures broadcast by the media, which they themselves considered surreal, showing North American marines protecting soldiers and the Republican Guard from proletarian anger and subversion.

In the same way, fundamentally, humanitarian missions are concentrated efforts to disarm the proletariat. In the camps the U.N. works with the nationalists and nothing is done without their agreement. Food is only given to those who surrender their guns! Nationalists make constant radio appeals in a sometimes threatening, sometimes reassuring tone of voice, calling for wanted militants to give themselves up. They read out their names, say they know where they are hiding and promise them an amnesty and food in exchange for their weapons... "Humanitarian" aid is thus sold to those ready to accept State discipline and submission to order... The Allied forces repay them with a bit of bread and medical attention.

Neither the government, the nationalists, nor the Allied forces managed to control the situation. This is why they had to form an alliance. The government sent several patrols out in every northern city and gave them orders to find proletarians from the South and send them back. But the situation was so tense that soldiers threw down their weapons and expressed their solidarity with the proletarians every time one of them refused to show his identity card.

Out of ignorance - or as a deliberate policy of disinformation - the proletarian rebellion in the North has become identified with Kurdish nationalism and that in the South with Iranian State Islam.

Without underestimating the repressive ideological strength of nationalists and religious forces, we must stress that all struggles described in this article were organised apart from and against them. They never call for struggle against the State and actually constitute some of the state's most reliable defenders.

* 20th April 1991 *

Notes

1. These ideologies prevent them from being able to explain the contradictions and the imperialist wars that made in the past the Russian bourgeois State oppose the Chinese State, and the latter oppose the Vietnamese State, or this one oppose Cambodia...! And instead of understanding these contradictions as being part of the general imperialist contradictions in the struggle for the raw material, for markets, for good deals,... they give us this wishy-washy soup in which the determinants are analyzed from the point of view of the ideologies of the different bourgeois dictators (heirs of Stalin against heirs of Mao, the latter ones against Ho Shi Min's, these against Pol Pot's,...). The materialist explanation of opposed economical interests is substituted for this ideological soup, as if there had ever been in history one war that might have been explained on the basis of the ideas of its protagonists!!!

2. It may seem incredible from the Marxist point of view but there has been a lot of simple-minded persons to consider these divisions stable and fixed once and for ever and to materialize this belief in the programme of their organisations. A centrist organisation like the ICC for instance, does not only consider state capitalism as a new characteristic "dominating the social life" in "the phase of decadence", of which the example of the so-called socialist countries is the best demonstration; the ICC does not only accept the bourgeois ideological division between developed and under-developed countries, but has also fixed these divisions in its platform for years and not only do they talk about three worlds like all the politicians, but also claim to be able to explain all the contradictions and the imperialist wars thanks to the famous question of the blocks (just like the bourgeois press does). Therefore, it is quite easy to understand why, just like the bourgeoisie and its politicians, who spend their time talking about the collapse of communism, the ICC spends its time explaining the collapse of the blocks. While, in fact, what it should try to explain is the collapse of its view of the world.

3. Only a short time before the launching of the land offensive, a military analysist of the Salomon Brothers Company declared: "The whole of the military industrial sector is making profits... while only a very small part of the defensive potentials that have been moved into the Gulf area have gone into action... when the exhibition on television will start, showing the tanks, all the land equipment, the Marines with their material, then the values of the producing companies will undoubtedly rise on the stock exchange market."

4. See "1984... 1985... 87... 89... pire que prévu - La citoyennisation de la vie" in "Le Communiste" No.27.

5. It is obvious that we absolutely do not deny that parties and unions, as real apparatus of the capitalist State, continue to have a fundamental role to dominate the proletariat and to ensure capital's capacity to send them to war. We simply want to stress the fact that they are no longer (as this was the case for instance at the end of last century and until the second world war in some countries, or even until recently in some other countries still) at the center of the "collective" life of the worker, a center for discussion, for meeting, i.e. a reference in regard to the relations with the outside world. Today, nearly everywhere, because of the particular form of counterrevolution, this fiction of "collectivity" does not exist any longer and proletarians have been individualised up to a point never known before!

6. It is obvious that all ideological construction bases itself on reality and on the deformation of that reality. In this case, reality means that for Capital, and therefore for all imperialist sides, nature is only of little importance (because for all of them, only the law of capital exists as an immutable law, i.e. the law of the highest rate of profit that dominates the whole environment). And that's why poor mother nature becomes always -in wartime as well as in times of peace -- more degraded, be it in the middle of huge industrial areas, or in the middle of the always growing desert.

7. As for any other kind of sale of the commodity "workforce", the free decision is determined by the freedom to face starvation; in this particular case, by the alternative: to go to war or to starve! In the United States, since the misery of the lower strata of the proletariat is so violent and since the possibilities to find a job are nearly inexistent, the only way to survive is to join the army! This reality affects more particularly blacks, Portoricans, and also the "sans réserves" of Mexican, Central-American... origins, and that is why there is a much higher proportion of these fractions of the proletariat in the army than there is in the civil population. But in spite of this, in spite of the contradictions that derive from this and in spite of the enormous possibilities for revolt that exist in this army, it is sure that the coherence of any military body is much superior when this body is composed of wage-labourers rather than when it has been composed through forced conscription (as all major wars in history have shown us!).

8. In the beginning, when this city was conquered by part of the Iraqi army, North American television talked about a "mosquito bite on an elephant skin"; but the next day, after the Coalition forces had reconquered the city, the battle all of a sudden became "an important military victory for the Coalition!"

9. This is a description of what Al Shura was initially. However, a widespread "Shura movement" developed with about 54 shuras (workers' councils) in Suleimaniya, some pro-C.P., some marxist-leninist and some along the lines of the original Al Shura and Communist Perspective.

On August 1st 1991 there was a loud bang during the night in Tehran and we heard that a food storage warehouse had been blown up in protest at delays in distribution of welfare food allowances. People had been waiting two months for their social security food supplies. Apparently, nighttime explosions are quite common, public buses being the most frequent targets.

Tehran has 11 million inhabitants and the traffic and activity in the city at night is busier than most European cities during the day. Nearly every Iranian we met asked incredulously "why did you come here?," saying they hate the system and describing how hard life is in Iran. However, it was difficult to find any written expression of the class struggle. Comrades living there confirmed that this is the case and explained that there are Pasdaran ("Revolutionary Guards" - government soldiers) specially employed to whitewash anti-government and anti-religious graffiti. We were unable to find any political leaflets or publications either.

The Pasdaran's most visible concern was with the Islamic dress code for women. Any man in Iran, whether an official Pasdaran or not, can make himself a self-appointed guardian of Islamic moral values and can reproach any woman he considers to be flaunting too much of herself. They are on the street, in the shops, in hotels... always watching to see whose scarf has slipped too far back or who is not wearing the mandatory socks or tights under her overcoat. Women "unsuitably dressed" are barred from offices, museums, will not be served in shops or restaurants.

The only advantage for women in this male-female apartheid is that they rarely get asked for their identity cards and rarely get searched. The examples given here actually represent a major relaxation in the dress code. Previously, women were stoned for showing a strand of hair and black chardors were obligatory. Now people have gradually pushed back the limits imposed on them and wear "Western" clothes covered by European-style raincoats instead of a chardor. They can show their fringe under the headscarf and men are now allowed to wear short-sleeved shirts. This change is also reflected in the distinct decrease in public Islamic fervor. Up until 1987, Friday prayers were held in a major, very long and wide street called Revolution Street. Thousands and thousands of people would go and the street was closed to traffic. We went back there one Friday, to find a Mullah preaching himself hoarse to only eight people, whilst cars and buses drove up and down. The government knows it can only reverse this trend at its peril.

The atmosphere in Tehran is very tense. Many people have told us that "Iran is pregnant with revolution," and this is certainly the way it feels. People are impatient, tempers easily frayed, and they smile and laugh only rarely. Homelessness, unemployment, food prices, the number of drug-addicts and, very visibly, the anger of proletarians are on an upward spiral. Almost everybody we spoke to told us "Life is very difficult here... Everything is expensive... Our revolution wasn't to bring these bastards to power..." As one taxi driver said: "Sometimes I am forced to take on so many jobs that I don't see my wife and children for a whole week and this is certainly the case for most of my colleagues."

In July 1991 there was a demonstration in which people demanded more food. They used a slogan "We have become beggars, the Mullahs millionaires." The demo spread over Tehran, Asfahan and Hamadan. Seven women were killed in Tehran when they discarded their headscarves. Further demos occurred on August 18th 1991, and spread over Tuysarkan, Hamadan, Zinjan, Tehran, and Asfahan. The same slogan was used and there were clashes resulting in 2000 arrests and 5 deaths in Zinjan, 5 arrests in Asfahan, and a further 50 deaths in Hamadan. In Tehran a demonstrator set fire to the City Hall and killed the mayor.

As a result of increasing class struggle, the government has become roughly divided into two main factions - something totally contrary to the philosophy of the supposedly united "Party of God." Rafsanjani realizes that liberalization and increased tolerance is necessary to avert another revolution. Khameini and his followers still favor the hardline approach.

After spending days enquiring about the relative safety of various routes, we went to Sulaimania.

The border between Iran and Iraq is not marked, with often only a single Pasdar sitting at an apparently arbitrary place. He is not so much interested in preventing people crossing or scrutinizing travel documents as he is in assessing their "bribing potential," searching for hidden dollars and goods obviously intended for sale in Iraq. He then frightens smugglers into bribing him to let them pass. This is a further example of the changing social climate, whereby previous "guardians of Islamic morals," prepared to kill anyone threatening to corrupt the Muslim State, are now more interested in personal financial gain. We were not bodysearched - fortunately, as we had leaflets hidden in our underpants and dollars in our shoes.

The first town we entered, Nizarah, is a devastated area, now full of refugees from Sulaimania, Kirkuk, and Arbil provinces. There are several Red Cross and U.N. camps but people overflow in their thousands to the mountainsides. Their only shelter are lean-tos that they have built out of branches and leaves.

Between the border and Nizarah, there are two checkpoints manned by Peshmerga from the Kurdish Front. They levy taxes on smuggled goods and search for Arabs travelling in the area, most of whom are deserters and anti-government militants. In their attempts to keep "Arab" and "Kurdish" communist militants divided, the Peshmerga want to force Arabs out of Kurdistan (except those they can make use of). It is dangerous for Arabs travelling around Kurdistan and to gain any degree of protection they have to be able to prove that they are Peshmerga for the Kurdish Front (KF). The only Party in the Front that will accept them is the Iraqi CP. Any Arab found by Nationalist Peshmerga without KF documents is taken prisoner and then handed over to the Iraqi authorities, most likely to be shot. However, despite the risks involved, some Arab comrades working with the Shuras do manage to travel to and from Kurdistan, holding meetings with Kurdish comrades and taking information back to militants in Baghdad.

When Talabani was in Iran one day in his car he passed many of the refugees fleeing into Iran. At first nobody realized it was him, but when he stopped nearby one old woman recognizing him bent down, scooped up a handful of the mud she was walking barefoot in, and asked him to lean out of the car window so that she might throw the mud in his face. He remained composed. "Of course," he replied. "I will do whatever the Mothers of Kurdistan request of me." The woman dropped the mud and cried limply, "What have we done to deserve this? Why are you doing this to us?"

Since government-Kurdish Front negotiations, the checkpoints around Sulaimania are manned by Iraqi soldiers and Peshmerga of the Kurdish Front (mainly KDP and PUK) working together. The soldiers sent to man checkpoints and to go on patrols in the Sulaimania district are young conscripts and are terrified of the Kurdish Front. Firstly, they realize that a breakdown in negotiations may result in them all being killed in new fighting. Secondly, they know that if they try to desert, the Kurdish Front will round them up and send them back to their army units - to a certain death. Thirdly, and most importantly, the lack of a centralized and well-organized proletarian group in Kurdistan means that there are very few places to which the soldiers can turn for solidarity and mutual support.

At the end of July there was further fighting and Kirkuk came back under the control of the Shuras and other insurgents. Militants found government documents marked "Confidential - Top Secret, June 1991" (when KF-Baathist negotiations were still in progress) in one of the secret police stations. These give orders to shoot "troublemakers from Shuras, Iraqi Communist Party, and Islamic organizations, and to kill, on the spot, any soldier who appears to have deserted or who cannot account for his gun...."

On arrival in Sulaimania, we went straight to see some Shura contacts. We were waiting for a comrade, who was to take us to one of the Shura bases. Suddenly, he rushed into the house, grabbed his gun, cocked it, acknowledged our presence with a hurried "Hi" and rushed out. We all followed, thinking that fighting had started up again. Out on the street we saw a man pointing a rifle at a group of women crouched on the ground. The comrade ran up behind him and shouted "Drop it or I'll shoot." People started running out of their houses, armed with pistols, and surrounded the man. He was forced to give up his rifle - but in the scuffle a few shots were fired and overheard by Kurdish Front Peshmerga out on patrol of the city.

They got out of their jeep and asked A. to show them his license for the rifle. Our comrade replied with derision, "You can wait all year and I wouldn't even show you a license for a bullet." He turned to the crowd and said: "The Kurdish Front want to take our rifles off us and hand them back to the Baathists, just as they returned our commandeered tanks to them." The Peshmerga were livid but they could sense the animosity of the crowd. After a short discussion amongst themselves, they climbed back into the jeep and drove off. Our comrade then took us to see one of the Shuras. They told us that we had arrived at a bad time and that the length of our stay would be determined by the danger of the ever-changing situation in Sulaimania. They had heard that 250,000 soldiers were going to advance on Sulaimania, so it was vital for them to constantly keep up to date with events. They warned us that long discussions may not be possible, as they would have to leave to assess the situation at regular intervals, especially during the day.

There were 56 Shuras in the beginning, each one set up largely according to district. Existing Shuras would call for people to set up further ones in their own areas. However, many of them had widely conflicting viewpoints and so people would tend to join the Shura most closely representing their own ideas.

All leaflets and publications produced by the Shuras and other organizations have, to a greater or lesser extent, democratic tendencies. The movement, as far as "practical activities" are concerned, has been overridingly anti-democratic. However, this dictatorship of the proletariat has gone largely unmentioned, even in publications written by comrades who were amongst the most radically active during the uprising. For example, when secret policemen were taken prisoner by the Shuras the organizers of one Shura consulted the PUK on how they should deal with them, as some members wanted to put them on trial, and convict them accordingly. While they were deciding how best to organize this, radical Shura members took matters into their own hands, breaking into the building and killing all the secret policemen themselves.

During the uprising insurgents had taken control of all government buildings except for the main secret police station. The secret police were shelling the city at random, killing many people, but it was clear that they could not defend the headquarters for much longer. A major mistake was made by the Shuras, mainly due to lack of centralization of information. The pro-nationalist Shuras sent for the Nationalist peshmerga who were in the mountains near Sulaimania, asking for their help in toppling the last Baathist stronghold. These Shuras hailed the Peshmerga as heroes who had saved the day. But the proletarian Shuras, for example Communist Perspective Organization, had been unaware of plans to involve the Nationalists, and were furious.

There is still a major problem with lack of centralization of activities and information today. Some members of proletarian Shuras, who had not heard about very strong anti-nationalist activities had been carried out by other Shuras and had therefore not been able to coordinate with them. In some parts of the city Shuras were welcoming Nationalist Peshmerga as "our brothers," whilst in other areas, Shura people shouted "Down with the Baath regime, Nationalism, and the Kurdish bourgeoisie!"

However, the movement was generally "spontaneous" and pro-working class, with slogans about the poor and exploited of Iraq, etc. Nationalism was initially very weak. The things that enabled the Nationalists to hi-jack the movement were:

1. The Shuras did not have a clear political direction. For example, instead of writing "working class" or "proletariat" in their leaflets and slogans, they used terms such as "the people" of Kurdistan, etc. They did not understand that "People power" - as opposed to "Proletarian power" - is the rule of people as citizens particcipating in capitalist society. It thus signifies the rule of money and profit, contributing to the health of Capital.

2. The Shuras did not have organized and centralized strategies during the uprising and did not take enough precautions against the Nationalists. For example, it did not occur to them to take over the banks and it was only when the Nationalist Peshmergas did so that they realized their mistake. As a result of occupying the banks, the peshmerga strengthened their position enormously, having the means to buy and distribute food and other goods, thus increasing people's dependence on them.

3. All Shuras and organizations had democratic tendencies. Even proletarian Shuras were demanding the right to freedom of expression, demonstrations, publications, etc. It can be seen in all their activities that they did not have a practical grasp of the State as a social relationship, attacking concrete manifestations of the State in the form of Baathist party offices, etc., but neglecting to target anti-communist movements, such as Nationalism, as well. This represented counter-revolution within the Shura movement itself.

4. The western media and western aid agencies built up the Nationalist movement with propaganda and practical help. The Nationalists were able to use the local media to denounce the Shuras as "immature troublemakers and looters."

A dangerous consequence of the militants' open participation in the uprising is that most of them are now well-known as communist militants and, in their present defeat, are at great risk. We reminded them of the massacre of the militants of Sanandaj in Iran in 1980. We warned them to be very much on the defensive, if offensive action against Kurdish Front bases is no longer possible. Because of the geography of the Sulaimania province, winter makes it practically impossible to flee from attack. The only way to flee Sulaimania is into the mountains, and the city itself is surrounded by a 60 mile wide ring-road. This was built as a military strategy for greater control of the city, in response to mass desertion and strong militancy in the region.

During discussions two main areas in which comrades in Europe could be of help were highlighted:

1. Financial. They are planning to send some comrades to live abroad, within easy access of Iraq but where they would be able to form a point of contact. We were very happy to hear this and agreed that we need to support such moves toward centralizing and developing communist activity.

2. Written material - they said that the political climate in Iraq is such that the demand for proletarian publications is very high. They clearly have a lot of practical obstacles in their way with regards to writing leaflets, etc. and want us to send them leaflets so that they can photocopy and distribute them. They also asked for books documenting proletarian history that still remain banned in Iran and Iraq, their working class-oriented reading matter being restricted to Marx and Engels.

We told them that the reason we came was (besides giving financial help and obtaining information) to make a step towards centralizing our activities, to build a basis for continued contact, to develop communist activity through shared experiences and to give direction to the movement. They agreed with all of these points. In discussions, the Shuras members and us agreed on most main points. However, on the whole, they had not thought out clear political principles and our discussions were largely one-sided, with us talking and them listening. They often contradicted themselves which made things quite confusing. They explained how it had been practically impossible to be actively organized for years, up until 6 months before the invasion. They had had to deliberately avoid meeting up with comrades for discussion to prevent the secret police from knowing he had contact with them. Any gathering of more than 3 people was highly suspect in the eyes of the police. Possession of a pot of "TIPEX" (white-out), let alone a typewriter was punishable by hanging, if you had no license for it. Even secretaries had to hand in their typewriters to a private police office every day after work... It was therefore logistically very difficult to produce leaflets, etc. However, 6 months before the invasion, the state appeared to lose its grip and it became comparatively easy to contact comrades, etc. Discussions were then about practical issues of how to arm themselves, how to organize physical attacks and later, how to set up Shuras. Clearly, they have not had much chance to develop opinions on "political theory."

This is one of the reasons why they are so desperate for written material. They kept interrupting, asking us to send them communist literature on our return. "Before the war, which was obviously planned to crush and manipulate the expected uprising, the working class was beginning to start and lead activities to destabilize the State. Events, particularly because of the war, are developing at a much faster pace than the proletariat is prepared for," said a comrade.

The main discussions

Here, in summary, are the main points of discussion.

1. Since the existence of capitalism the world has consisted of two opposing classes, and despite competition amongst themselves, all states are united in a common interest - exploitation of the proletariat.

2. Communism cannot be built in one country. The Iraqi state cannot be abolished by armed uprising confined to Iraq. Uprisings like the one in Iraq are products of the historical experience of the working class, revolution being a continuous - and not isolated - process.

3. We do not advocate guerilla warfare alone as a means of bringing about communist revolution. However, we are under direct armed attack by capitalist forces and on occasion our class needs to retaliate and if possible, go on the offensive. Obviously, sometimes it is against the interests of the struggle to take up arms and expose ourselves further to capitalist attack. We are an historical class fighting the capitalist class in the form of a social movement, not as one machine against another.

4. Nationalism is a capitalist policy to crush the communist movement, its aim being to hide the true nature of the class struggle. Neither workers nor capitalists are national, they both belong to international opposing classes. "Nationalist" workers have been brainwashed.

We disagreed that nationalism is a planned capitalist policy. The nation exists as a result of the capitalist mode of production. Nation and Nationalism, the differentiation made between Black and White, Men and Women, Queer and Straight, Arab and Kurd, etc, reflect the needs of capitalist society and are not cynical policies. Patriotism is a real characteristic of the bourgeoisie. In this regard, international capitalists seem to be opposing each other, but this only constitutes the competition they need. It is their nationalism which unites them as an international class against the proletariat. Nationalism is not something imposed forcibly by the state on society. It is an integral part of the capitalist social relationship and is not confined to the ruling class. Millions of workers have died and are still dying in defense of the Nation. We cannot say that they have been brainwashed and are sacrificing themselves out of a robotic subjugation to the state. Their sincere patriotism results from the capitalist social relationship and class contradictions.

They contradicted themselves many times, but still insisted that nationalism is a planned capitalist policy rather than a movement evident in human beings subjected to capitalist social relationships.

5. A large proportion of our time was taken up with stories of events in Sulaimania.

6. Party and Class.

Party: All communist struggle and activity aiming to destroy the capitalist way of life since its emergence represents activity by the party of the proletariat... so that your participation in the uprising, our journeys, etc, represent, whether we like it or not, activity by the party, albeit only very weakly centralized. The ICG, for instance, is a centralizing force of existing class struggle. The reason why past revolutionaries were defeated is not because of the absence of the Party, but because of the balance of class power between proletariat and capital.

Class: For us, being "proletarian" is not synonymous with being a "worker." The proletariat as an international class is determined by its struggle against capitalist society and has a deep meaning which cannot be defined solely on the basis of income, degree of exploitation, etc. In short, the communist movement consists of the anti-capitalist activity of the proletariat. They agreed that, although it is an international class, globally the proletariat is very weak and does not centralize itself internationally as a "class" and a "party." We discussed how the power of the proletariat in any one country is dependent on the our power throughout the world. The same interdependence is true for capitalism - if Bush catches a cold, Saddam sneezes.

7. We had a discussion about Marxism and Marx. A comrade said he considered Marx's work to be a product of class struggle and Marx to be a fallible militant. We all agreed that capitalism had portrayed Marx's work as the be-all and end-all of communist theory and Marx as the God of the working class. Communism is a dialectical and social movement and did not start from, nor does it stop at, Marx. It is a movement that digs a grave for idol worship. To illustrate these points, we talked about class struggle before Marx, e.g., the Qaramita and Mazdaq revolutions, and how individuals and organizations existed in Marx's lifetime, who were not members of the 1st International, did not know Marx and yet had very similar programs to him, e.g., El Productor in Cuba.

8. Peace and War. They totally agreed with the statement used by the ICG in our leaflet: "They drag us to work as they drag us to war." They agreed that the existence of capitalism signifies war in itself, and "peace-time" can never exist for the proletariat. However, they criticized us for saying "Neither peace nor war," which we explained was a reaction to the very strong peace movement in Europe, which sees war only as military conflict, not as illnesses, accidents, isolation, work, etc.

9. We strongly criticized and rejected the contents of their publications (and some comrades totally agreed). They by no means reflect the nature of the movement in Iraq, nor even the eyewitness accounts they related to us. They tried to justify the weaknesses of their articles by explaining that they wanted to write them in a language that people would understand and that the situation appeared to demand. Our reply was that we wouldn't be surprised to hear such excuses in Western Europe, where "social peace" reigns and "getting the communist message to the masses" has assumed a disproportionate degree of importance. However, to hear this in Iraq, where the issue of the class struggle forms part of everyday conversation, was disappointing. The bourgeoisie does not only try to crush us by the use of prisons, massacres, torture, isolation... but also makes us feel we have to modify the language of communism, so that "people will understand." However, the result is to distort our history and our positions. We pointed out all the leaflets in which they had made demands for the "the right of free political discussion, the right to hold political meetings." Some comrades told us that it is impossible to find an ideologically sound, or in the communist point of view, a good leaflet produced in Sulaimania.

We asked them where and when they have seen a State grant communists "the right to destroy all States" (!), which can be the only historical program of our movement. In many places they have written "people" instead of "proletariat," which is not a mere word, but reflects ideology and we pointed out the danger of this. They explained that as far as they were concerned, "people" means proletariat and that the bourgeoisie are not "people!!" The most striking thing is the contradiction between what they say and what they do. In practice they are against democracy, the nation, free rights... As we mentioned earlier, the past political climate prohibited them from reading communist literature, active discussion, etc. Another reason was that they underestimated the movement, thinking that the "people" would never understand concepts such as the "proletariat."

Leading up to the invasion of Kuwait

* About 8 months prior to the invasion of Kuwait, the government announced that those entitled to welfare benefits would be allocated 250 grams oil, 250 grams sugar, 500 grams rice, 1 bar of soap, and 5 kilogram of flour per month per person. Before, the daily wages of government employees (teachers, bank employees, etc) were enough to buy 2 kg of rice and the daily wage of the average worker was enough to buy 14 pieces of bread. Before the Iran-Iraq war, monthly social security food tokens had provided far greater amounts than this per person. Benefits had stopped during the war and this recommencement, albeit at a much lower level, was desperately needed. However, tokens were only distributed for 2 months and now people do not receive any of their allowance. People, desperate for food, started selling their TV, fridge, radio, etc. 80 kg of flour used to cost only 6 dinars, but rose to 400 D. in the North and 800 D in the South. Most of the rotten, rusty factories that had been closed for years were reopened. The cheapest food, potatoes, became a meal for the rich. 1 Kuwaiti Dinar (1000 Fils) was worth 950 Iraqi Fils in 1980, but in 1991 the Iraqi Dinar had been so devalued that 1 Kuwaiti Dinar was worth 10 Iraqi Dinars.

* Shortly before the invasion the government stopped the conscription of farmers and their sons and announced an amnesty for many prisoners, on the proviso that they return to and start working their land for agricultural production.

* Conscription (from the age of 17 to 45) was reinstituted as soon as Kuwait was invaded. However, vast numbers of soldiers deserted, especially in Sulaimania and in the Marshlands. Many of them couldn't desert, because they didn't have any money and had been sent there without their official papers. In general, most people, in the hope of getting rid of the Baath regime, did not want the government to withdraw from Kuwait. (Another sign of the hopelessness and desperation of the movement.)

* At the beginning of February the Clan Army leaders in Kurdistan tried to calm the populace, spreading rumors that a Republican Guard Unit had been set up in Sulaimania. They warned that any popular uprising would result in the decimation of the area in which it arose by the Republican Guard.

* On the 5th of March 1991 (just before the uprising) there was a meeting between the Clan Army leaders and a representative of the Baath Party in Sulaimania. The Shuras have the documents recording the minutes of this meeting, in which the Government gave the Clan Armies free reign to kill all those involved in any uprising.

* The night before the uprising, militants (who were to go on to form Shuras) paid a visit to the Jash (Clan Army soldiers) and asked them to help them by giving them weapons. They were given 2 pistols and a Kalashnikov going on to use them to attack houses belonging to the Jash and disarm them. Some of the Jash immediately and willingly came over to fight on their side.

* One organization, Communist Perspective Organization, was set up about 6 months before the uprising. Shortly before the uprising, another one was formed, called "Uprising Group." This was based purely on direct action and did not publish any leaflets, etc.

Communist Perspective Organization had developed their political positions and organization before the uprising. They had coordinated their activities with other militants and had clear political objectives. Some of them had already been arrested for militant activity before the uprising.

The militants who took weapons from the Jash had been in contact with Communist Perspective Organization and had asked to work with them in practical anti-State activities. Communist Perspective Organization wanted, above all, to avoid becoming a populist organization only serving to coordinate anti-government attacks, regardless of individual insurgents' positions. They only wanted to work with proletarians dedicated to the same aim.

* The allied bombing was in progress and the uprising had not yet started in Sulaimania. Deserters came back to Kurdistan from the South and told people that an uprising had started in Kut, Ammarah, Naseriyah, Samawah, and Hellah.

* On 2/29/91 deserters reported that Basra had been taken over by insurgents and that army units, complete with weapons and tanks, had come over to their side. There was also an insurrection in the Al-Thawra area of Baghdad. The comrades and people we saw also assured us that the movement in the South is far from being lead by the Shiites. In a rare moment of honesty - and against the best interests of capitaalism - the media divulged that:

"All the damage was the result of anarchists and saboteurs... They were anarchists, criminals. They drank whisky inside the shrines, and made love to women..."

(London Independent, July 1991)

* On the 5th of March insurgents took control in Raniyah. Their main slogans called for people to set up Shuras.

* 3/6/91 - City of Chwar Korna joined the uprising.

* 3/7/91 - Militant groups and individuals made preparations to attack government offices and installations in Sulaimania. Some insurgents who were unaware that militants had been planning an uprising for months and that much of the points of attack had already been organized, tried to inspire others to join the rebellion. They did so by spreading a rumor that the police headquarters had been occupied by the Peshmerga, thus inadvertently spreading very useful propaganda for the Nationalists (which was very successful!).

* There were armed insurgents in every area of Sulaimania. Some had been given weapons by Jash sympathizers, others had forced the Jash to hand over weapons if they refused to fight with them. 2-3 hours after the fighting started on the 7th, some insurgents "decided" to form Shuras, which actually came about as a result of communist militant activity, past and present, and the influence of the 1979-80 Shura movement in Iran.

Particular motivating factors to form Shuras were:

1. A need for more organization and practical direction of the movement by militants, to prevent nationalist peshmerga appropriating the struggle to their own cause. however, at the same time, another group of rebels were, also in the name of Shuras, calling for the peshmerga to return to fight in the uprising. They thought that they could follow the Leninist idea of using the local nationalist bourgeoisie to fight "the greater evil" of the Iraqi state. Most of these insurgents now work with the Kurdish Front.

2. A need to prevent massive looting. Opportunistic sharks were clearing the city of, for example, hospital beds and electrical equipment and taking them to Iran to sell. As hospitals came under the control of the insurgents and increasing numbers of rebels were wounded, such items became vital to the struggle.

3. They saw a need to organize militant action - where their main targets should be and how they should attack them. For example, 48 conscript soldiers were picked up and then hidden by one of the Shuras, to protect them from indiscriminate killing by the Nationalists. They were later released in a safer area. They also aimed to develop their activity and spread it to other parts.

* The same day nearly 30,000 people, some armed and some not, converged on the Shura headquarters at Awat School, where Shura members talked to the crowds through loudspeakers. "These are our headquarters, a base for councils of the exploited. Set up your workers' councils. Make the Shura your base for long-term struggle. Bring looted goods and food here and we will distribute them. Class consciousness is the arm of freedom. Revolutionary people, revolutionary exploited, the achievements of the revolution have cost us our own blood! Keep it going! Don't waste it!"

Shura supporters captured six hundred secret policemen and brought them to the headquarters. Some Shura members went to consult PUK leaders in the mountains regarding the 600 prisoners. Noshirwan, a military commander, said that they should not be killed: "they could be useful later." The Shura members themselves wanted to parade the policemen, listing their catalogues of torture in front of the crowds before killing them. However, the crowds were livid at Noshirwan's suggestion and even prevented the Shura from parading the men, pouring into the building and killing them all themselves.

* By the time the city came under control, there were 56 Shuras in existence, including the Refuse Collectors, Cement, Cloth, Cigarette, and Sugar factory workers' Shuras.

* Communist Perspective's Shura (CPS), which included some of their members and many sympathizers, were in close contact with the above 5 workers' Shuras. They held meetings in which they discussed how the workers had taken over the factories, killing Baathist managers and employees, etc. Communist Perspective Shura stressed that factory machines should be protected and not destroyed in the heat of the uprising. They anticipated a time when the uprising would be cut off from any external supplies and would have to support itself for food, clothes, etc.

* 3/10/91 - Shuras were set up in Arbil and took control of the city in 3 hours; there were 42 Shuras.

* 3/12/91 - Shura's representatives from Sulaimania went to Arbil and held meetings regarding the centralization of work. The Awat Shura told all the other Shuras that a central committee should be formed. This was set up and they started to produce Shura membership cards, to be able to identify those attending their meetings and armed Shura militants. However, there was some conflict and unity broke down as a result of three different viewpoints:

1. Members of the central committee must be politically pro-working class.
2. The Shuras represent "the people" and anyone should be allowed to sit on the central committee, not only communist militants.
3. The members should be democratically elected and anyone opposed to the Baath regime should be allowed to vote.

* The peshmerga arrived in the city shortly before it came under the complete control of the insurgents. They occupied all the commandeered government vehicles, the bank, and took over government properties, thus influencing people to concentrate on looting rather than the struggle.

* 3/16/91 - The anniversary of the Halabja Massacre. A memorial was organized by the Shuras, Kurdish Front, religious parties, Iraqi Communist Party, RF, and some small leftist groups. There were more than 10,000 Shura sympathizers, and the first speeches were made by various Shura groups. The CPS spoke about working class struggles in Turkey, Brazil, etc, how the proletariat and communism are against all nationalist movements, and the conflict in Kurdistan is the same as all others, between labor and capital, bourgeoisie and proletariat. The main slogans used were:

"Bread, Work, Freedom"
"Bombs, tanks, planes will not chase us from this city."
"Only workers can bring about a different life."

The Kurdish Front, nationalist Shuras and the religious people shouted them down, mocking and ridiculing their political positions.

* 3/17/91 - The Kurdish Front had not been paid the respect they felt they deserved at the memorial day and realized that the Shuras had widespread mass support. They started to broadcast lies on the radio about the Shuras, saying that many of them were ex-Baathists, looters, troublemakers and emphasizing how the Shuras despise religion, in an attempt to alienate any Muslims from supporting them. They tried to spread rumors that the Shuras had collapsed because of their inability to lead the people and run the city and they announced the establishment of a Kurdish Peace Force.

* 3/18/91 - On hearing this, the Shuras arranged a meeting and decided to send 5 representatives to see the Kurdish Front, to discuss the rumors and solve the problem. However, many Shuras did not agree with this and organized demonstrations, using loudspeakers denouncing the reactionary and dangerous policies of the Kurdish Front.

CPS made it clear that they are not only against the Kurdish Front, but also against the Kurdish Nation and, along with the members of Hasta and Militant Front (Shura), disrupted the meeting...

This dispute clarified the positions of various Shuras and their individual members and they divided into three main factions:

1. Communist Perspective Shura
2. Radical Leftist Organizations
3. PUK and KDP, or Kurdish Front

* 3/18/91 - Fighting began in Kirkuk. CPS and Leftist Shuras went to support the struggle. Many peshmerga went and returned with looted expensive cars, etc.

* 3/20/91 - Kirkuk was taken over and six Shuras were set up.

At this time the radio reported that Jalal Talabani was in Sulaimania and called for all inhabitants to go to the Peshmerga headquarters to hear "what good news he has to give you." The only people that went were their supporters and when they realized that support for the Shuras had increased and spread to other cities, they started rumors that government and Mujahadeen Khalq army units had arrived in Chamchamal. They frightened people into leaving en masse; first, because there was a great fear of the Mujahadeen Khalq and secondly, because they heard that that evening Jalal Talabani had been at Sheikh Salari Havids' house and had told him to advise all peshmerga families to leave as soon as possible. That same day the peshmerga and their families left the city and told people "The Army is coming.." as they went. Thirdly, the Shuras' propaganda against the Kurdish Front and the Nationalists had been grossly inadequate and insufficient to convince people of the Kurdish Front's lies and quell their fear, particularly in the light of past massacres.

On the same day the Shuras organized a demo, telling people through loudspeakers, "We will stay and fight... those who are leaving are cowards and the gravediggers of this city..."

70% of the city left. 5000 soldiers and 60 tanks arrived the following day. Sulaimania was taken over after a fight, but there were no subsequent "gratuitous" killings carried out by the Peshmerga against the population. However, in Kirkuk and Chamchamal, revenge was wreaked on insurgents, including old people, children and even hospital in-patients...

* The cities of Kirkuk, Sulaimania, Chamchamal, etc, were recaptured soon. This was done mainly by the Iraqi Communist Party, CPS, and other Shura militants. Tanks and military vans were burned down. Nevertheless, the end result was the same, as the State (Kurdish Front, Nationalists) returned and took over remaining property, "to keep it in a safer place," i.e., to give it back to the government. Some Shura members got "very angry" (in an entirely ineffectual way) and argued with the Kurdish Front, telling them that issues of life and death were at stake and should not be played like a game of chess.

* 5 days after the start of the uprising in Sulaimania, Shuras were holding daily meetings in Amin Zaki Bak School, attended by about 1000 people. Representatives from all the different Shuras came and raised various points for discussion. There were many arguments and some representatives stormed out of the assembly. The main points put forward were:

1. The need for solidarity with Shuras in the South.
2. Religion should be separated from the State.
3. The need for political freedom (Democracy).
4. Rule by the Shuras or by Parliamentary Democracy?
5. Self-determination for the Kurdish nation.
6. Equal rights for men and women.
7. The Allied Forces must pull out.
8. Class struggle or Nationalist struggle?

* 3/21/91 - one of the Shuras was keeping 9 secret policemen hostage but killed them without consulting the Kurdish Front.

* 3/23/91 - The Shura in Kirkuk took over the radio station and broadcast to the city. They also distributed all the food they had found in government supermarkets, and divided the houses of secret policemen up amongst the homeless.

* During the second uprising in Kirkuk, the insurgents went to take over the oil and gasoline plants outside the city. We were told that there was a battle lasting about 2 hours around one factory. The insurgents were being shot at as they approached, but they outnumbered the factory's defenders. After a while, the shooting stopped and people were surprised to see nationalist Peshmerga coming out of the building, signalling for the people to hold their fire, which they did. The Peshmerga explained that the factories must not be looted as they are needed by the Kurdish state. (There you have it!)

* 4/3/91 - A demonstration was organized by CPS, SWE and proletarian Shuras. They counteracted rumors spread by scaremongers about the imminently advancing Iraqi forces and the collapse of the Basra uprising, attempting to curb the tide of people fleeing Sulaimania. Slogans used were "We will stay and fight!," information was broadcast about the strength of the Shuras, not only in Sulaimania, but throughout Iraq and people were encouraged to stay and support the movement.

That afternoon fighting started up again in Sulaimania. The army only held out against the rebels for a very short time, being rapidly disarmed following a fierce attack. Yet again, the Kurdish Front returned captured heavy artillery to the army.

* 6/29/91 - At the same time as the Nationalists were holding demonstrations in Duhok and Panjwin against the withdrawal of the Allied presence in Kurdistan (in contrast to Shura-led demos demanding that they get out) offices, shops, and police stations continued to be attacked in Arbil, Sulaimania, and Dehok, the insurgents commandeering further food and weapons whilst under fire by the Peshmerga. Similar struggles were also taking place in the Al-Thawra district of Baghdad.

* July '91 - the Iraqi Communist Party Peshmerga, Shuras and other radical leftist group members went to Kalar (a town on the main route to Sulaimania) as they had received information that the Mujahadeen Khalq, who had massacred the whole population of the town of Tchiman shortly before, was advancing on Sulaimania. Kalar is very small and is split down the center by a dual carriageway. The insurgents hid themselves on the roofs of the houses and told everybody to be quiet until the unit entered the town. But when a woman saw that the soldiers were dressed in Kurdish clothes and had hung a portrait of Jalal Talabani on the tanks, she happily (stupidly) rushed out towards them. They then realized that the houses were inhabited and turned the tank guns on them and fired, first aiming at and killing the woman... the insurgents then started shooting, managing to blow up the tanks and kill all the Mujahadeen. Some of them didn't believe that they were Mujahadeen until they searched the bodies and found their papers.

* 7/13/91 - Food Aid had been given to the Kurdish Front to distribute to the "needy." Naturally, the Peshmerga had shared it out amongst their closest friends and were living well while the poor waited, for over a month, for food and medical supplies.

By the 13th people could not be fobbed off any longer... They attacked the Kurdish Front headquarters in Zakho, injured and disarmed many Peshmerga and distributed the food supplies, going on to burn down the headquarters and the food warehouses. Some of the Peshmerga fled to Raniyah to get help and on their return searched houses for suspected "ringleaders," imprisoning them, making them pay fines, and releasing them after shaving their heads as an extra humiliating touch.

* 7/17/91 - There was a violent demo in Arbil which the Peshmerga again tried to bring under control, extolling the virtues of peaceful demonstration, suggesting people wait for the outcome of negotiations with the government. However, they were ignored and the Shura led attacks on government buildings under a slogan "Bread, Work, Freedom."

* 7/18/91 - Some of the Shuras held a meeting in Sulaimania and decided to support the struggle in Arbil by carrying out similar activities. They tried to keep their plans secret but Kurdish Front spies had infiltrated the Shuras, and knew that continued uprisings were inevitable but were determined to avoid a repeat of Arbil, where the movement left them behind. They thought of ways in which the struggle could be given the direction they desired:

1. By preventing the Shuras from organizing themselves.
2. By manipulating the movement into a purely violent struggle (guerrilla warfare, guns against guns, instead of class against class) a very successful policy, diverting people's attention from the true nature of the struggle.
3. By broadcasting propaganda denying that they had supported the Iraqi Army, preventing looting and aided police in Arbil thus denouncing Shura members as liars, as they had published accounts of such Peshmerga action in Arbil.

The Peshmerga changed tack, shooting soldiers and burning their vehicles, but soon realized that they had nowhere near as much support as the Shuras, whose influence was increasing daily. They tried yet another tactic, calling for a stop to the bloodshed, parading the streets as if on a victory march and then announced "The agreement has been signed. We have autonomy for Kurdistan, democracy for Iraq!"

* 7/20/91 - CPS, SWC and other leftist organizations organized another demo in Sulaimania. Their principal banner was again "Bread, Work, Freedom." Shura members heard that Barzani had given the Kurdish secret police permission to infiltrate the demos. The demo remained a peaceful march through the city, with the Shura members taking a back seat, only talking quietly to individuals, denouncing the Kurdish Front as the enemy, calling for formation of anti-nationalist Shuras, but this time from the sidelines only. The Shuras made the mistake of underestimating the degree of mass support for them, largely as a result of insufficient contact with Shura militants in central and southern Iraq. The Kurdish Front attacked them during the demo, destroying their banners, beating them up and imprisoning some of them. The Shura missed their chance of rallying massive public aggression against the Kurdish Front, which could have been sparked by a few militants turning their weapons on the Peshmerga. Instead the Shura members turned and ran - and they still cannot find words strong enough to express their regret for such a gross error.

* In the beginning of September Communist Perspective Organization received a letter purportedly from the Shuras, asking to arrange a meeting with them in Halabja. On the day of the meeting, CPO members were waiting in their headquarters for them. However, when a comrade saw approximately 400 armed Peshmerga advancing toward the area, the comrades realized they had been set up. They positioned themselves on the roof to defend themselves and many Shura and CPO sympathizers joined them.

The PUK had intended to disarm them and had written the bogus letter in order to be sure that active CPO members would be in the building at the time... The Peshmerga realized that they were ready to retaliate and told them that they just wanted to talk, but CPO replied that there can be no point of common discussion between them and the Peshmerga. When the Peshmerga realized that the crowd were on the CPO's side, they turned back, telling people that nobody can to them, they are very aggressive...

Slogans that were used by the Shuras

1. Bread, Work, Freedom. Shura's Government.
2. Long live rule by the Shuras'.
3. All power to the Shuras.
4. The only alternative to the Baathist regime is the Shuras.
5. Freedom of speech, opinion, and organization.
6. Unconditional political freedom.
7. We should be armed to safeguard the Shuras' rule.
8. Equal rights for men and women.
9. We demand Workers' Councils, not parliamentary democracy.
10. Halabja, Budenan are the Hiroshimas of Kurdistan.
11. For a 35 hour working week.
12. Revolutionary people! Set up and join Shuras.
13. The right of dispossessed villagers to return home.
14. Rise up and fight! Break the institutions of fear!
15. The occupying forces must get out of Kurdistan.
16. Long live self-determination for the Kurdish Nation.
17. Long live solidarity with all workers' Shuras.
18. No rebuilding police stations, Jash, and public militias.
19. The Shuras will heal the wounds of Kurdistan's exploited.
20. All administrative organs should be democratically elected.

Translation of leaflets distributed by various Shuras

"Do the Kurdish Front and Nationalists share common interests with the Baathists? If not, how can it be explained why, when we attacked the secret police headquarters, the Kurdish Front seemed to share their pain and called for us to 'Calm down... you have got them surrounded in any case...' Why should it be that the KF shot soldiers, but spared the lives of secret policemen? And how is it that the day after the attack on the headquarters, the policemen were in position on the roof of the building fully armed? We saw how Peshmerga handed back commandeered tanks and artillery to government forces. Does this not mean that the KF is in fact protecting the State and its Baathist Regime? The answer is yes and we must recognize them as the enemy of the people."

(NEW LIFE - SSFA)

oOo

"The proletariat must distinguish itself from nationalism and the Parties of God and proletarian socialism cannot survive if it does not realize this separation. Nor can it remain standing without a powerful autonomous organization that can effectively take on the tasks of the proletariat and the exploited in general. In their daily struggles, proletarians and the exploited masses must express their autonomy, must show everybody that they have a social movement of their own, a different social perspective and that they are not followers of capital and its free market. They are not linked up with any American strategy (the New World Order), nor with any Arabic or Kurdish nationalism or any other Parties of God.

On the contrary, they must show that they oppose all of these and that they have a completely different aim - dictatorship of the proletariat and universal liberation. This is why it is essential for proletarians in their daily activities, in assemblies, in strikes, in their claims and watchwords... to put forward their political interests. In this process socialist proletarians, radical factions, and the avant-guards of the movement have the practical task of assuring the formation, propaganda and organization of proletarians within a different framework. We have to confront the miserable conditions of life, the economic blockade... If we are told that our unity and protests are inappropriate and serve the interests of the Baathist power, then the socialist proletariat's answer is clear:

We do not want to sacrifice ourselves to inter-bourgeois antagonisms, and whilst against the economic blockade, proletarians are demanding wage rises for those contributing to production... Proletarians must fight against the pressure of the imperialist United Nations police force in Kurdistan and in the South, because these forces are not only not helping people, but on the contrary, put into practice capitalist policies to destroy revolutionary forces.

There is no doubt about the fact that current working class struggle throughout the world, and particularly in Iraq, has shown that the proletariat cannot achieve anything whilst divided. This is the reason why we must stick together and fight to set up general assemblies, to organize a centralized movement that can give strength to proletarians to "mount the world stage" and become truly active, representing the needs of their struggle... Only as a centralized and united movement will the proletariat be able to confront the bourgeoisie and get their message across to proles throughout the rest of the world. It is only in this way that, in the face of other tendencies existing within the movement, socialist proles and socialist groups will be able to develop and realize the communist content of proletarian struggle..."

(WORKERS' VIEW #1, CAG)

oOo

"The contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the working class, the development of proletarian perspectives and social change were all at the heart of the March uprising. Since then, struggle by the exploited in Iraq against the capitalist way of life has been apparent in repeated agitation against the state.

Widespread reinforcement of self-organization and the creation of workers' shuras signifies an important qualitative step in the revolutionary development of proletarian political activity.

Workers were fully involved in setting up shuras in many liberated towns. In Arbil, cigarette factory workers, weavers and chicken farmers set up shuras and subsequently a center for workers' shuras was established. The aim was to have a headquarters through which the activity of various shuras could be coordinated. Similarly, in Sulaimania, cigarette, electricity, clothes and municipal workers including "Tahir" and "Hmurabi" factory workers formed shuras at "Nassir" camp. Chicken farmers and the unemployed in Sulaimania set up a joint shura with petrol workers in Kirkuk.

The main point of discussion during the first workers assembly was the need for self-organization and its importance in class struggle. Speeches were made about the Shuras and their formation.

In subsequent meetings, workers, who were thrilled to take part, elected representatives in free and direct voting. Economic and political suggestions were made and basic aims and principles agreed. Municipal workers from Sulaimania read out a report, which was later published about links between workers and political parties.

These meetings showed workers what strength can be found in unity and they began to feel that Big Brother was no longer watching them. From time to time, from every corner, workers would stand up and describe the poverty and misery of life imposed by capitalism and the repression and intimidation they suffered under bosses and capitalists. They gave accounts of barbaric and inhuman behavior and the unbearable life of workers. Following on from previous world-wide historical experience, the bell of liberty, equality, and workers' government rang throughout Iraq... The creation of shuras is not only expressed in workers' power against the bourgeoisie by way of determined self-organization, but also gave them a useful and necessary instrument with which to acquire the unity of political and social demands and establish widespread political organization.

The sight of a liberated town gives an idea of the scale of battles fought by workers for freedom and true equality. As a socio-political force, workers emerged from the depths of society to a serious social and political role. As large militant organizations and workers' power bases, shuras have become a reality, setting a precedent in the history of the Iraqi working class. However, they result from the experiences of more than 10 years social change within Iraq, as well as from the history of workers' shuras throughout the world.

As the despotic Baathist regime weakened, workers were able to breath more easily and began to carry out more large scale class activities...

The shura movement spread like gospel amongst the workers... The movement developed in spite of the weaknesses of our movement. However, it was weakness of organization, the isolation and separation of radical socialist avant-guard militants and a lack of communist vision and socialist perspective that allowed reformists to take over. As a result of this, the brutality of the state's counter-offensive, the reinvasion of the towns and the short duration of the uprising, the workers did not have enough time to overcome their weaknesses with regard to the shuras.

The "exploited" had organized themselves into shuras in most camps, villages, and towns in liberated areas of Kurdistan, but the weakness of workers' shuras had a bad influence on the creation and running of such "poor people's" shuras.

The bourgeois opposition parties tried desperately to put their policies into practice, for fear of the class demands and economic, social and political program of the shuras enabling the workers to take power. The opposition parties made use of the institutions and organs of repression of the former regime.

In the south of Iraq, the reactionary "Shiite" movement set up its own "Islamic shuras" in order to discredit and manipulate the only radical workers' shuras. In Kurdistan, the Nationalists didn't hesitate to use all necessary force against workers' associations. They shot at striking workers, threatened their leaders, protected and armed the bosses and broadcast workers' demands as originating from "anarchists" and "troublemakers." This antagonism between Nationalist forces and workers' shuras determined the political climate in Kurdistan.

Now, following the reinvasion of towns by the Barbaric Baathist regime, social and political perspectives are as before with famine, misery, poverty, unemployment threatening the lives of workers more than ever. However, the dissatisfaction that sprung up well before the uprising will continue to spur on a battle against this world, carrying the memories of the uprising with it.

The military counter-offensive on the regime, the alliance between Kurdish Nationalists and central government can not be erased from workers' memories and activities..."

(PROLETARIAT #6, CPO)

oOo

The situation of the Shura members is now fairly precarious. They have to keep up to date, hour by hour, on the activities of the Nationalists and the Baathist Army. The Shuras now have information networks from city to city, which largely involve individuals travelling at short notice around the area. They are worried that the Kurdish Front might secretly allow army divisions into Sulaimania or that they may have inside information about the movements of government troops.

A few members of the Shuras know from experiences in the Sandaj revolution that when the Nationalists scatter and desert a city without warning the inhabitants, a massacre is imminent. They are therefore on the lookout for mass movements of Kurdish Front forces.

One day a man in Kurdish clothes was shot dead, who was known to be a secret policeman. The documents he had on him showed that he had permission from Masoud Barzani to pose as a peshmerga. It is unclear who killed him, but it was definitely not the Nationalists.

On our way back, one of the interesting things we were told was that the agreement between the Baathists and the Kurdish Front was signed ages ago. It was kept secret because the issues of "compromise" and "autonomy" have become a farce and the PUK and KDP are aware of the mass support for the Shura movement. Proletarians are fed up with compromises and want to continue the fight instead.

* August 1991 *

The so-called discovery

12th October, 1492 means for the inhabitants of the continent which is now called America (after the colonizer), the beginning of an endless tale of suffering: exploitation, oppression, state terrorism, repression of any kind of resistance,... still existing today.

"The capital", says Marx in The Capital, "was born running with blood and mud from every pore, from head to foot."

What is called "the discovery of America", as well as the conquest and colonization, which followed, is nothing else but the process by which, at one very precise moment in the past, the capital placed its terrorist conditions of reproduction. Whereas in Europe the primitive, bloody and terrorist accumulation of the capital took centuries, during which producers were evicted and deprived of their means of production (meanwhile, the other pole of the globe was experiencing a concentration of the capital), it was done in a few decades on the American land and the global process only lasted one or two centuries (1).

During the history of the human race, this barbarity, inherent in the development of the capital, and carried out successfully through civilization, is one of the most horrifying events that has ever taken place.

It is no use making comparisons between atrocities, just because the death of one single human being who resisted the capital's civilization should move each of his brothers, who all over the world struggle for the suppression of the system.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that some genocides are given publicity whereas others remain systematically hidden, at least we want to claim that the slaughter of human beings which the capital brought about with the conquest and colonization of the American continent is even worse than the one of the two World Wars together, including, of course, all the murders in the concentration camps built by the European and North-American progressive bourgeoisie in the course of this century!

Denying the festivities that the upper classes of Europe and the whole American continent are preparing to commemorate the 500 years of such a "glorious epoch" means opposing ourselves in practice to the ideology that the capital is forcing on us and means stressing the fact that the terminology used is a sign of it. "The discovery of America", in the language used every day at school, at work, in the shops, in the street, etc., may seem to be no more than the mere, innocent and neutral description of an event. Nevertheless, if we take the time to think about it, we can realize that it is, on the contrary, precisely the subjective and interested vision of the colonizer, the exploiter and of the European dominant class which carried out a successful conquest and colonization: from its point of view and only its, a continent was discovered. The natives who lived on that land never discovered America! Unfortunately, what they discovered at that time was rather THE BARBARITY OF THE EUROPEAN CAPITALIST CIVILIZATION. The very grammatical subject of the "discovery" (who discovered?) doesn't hide very well the historical subject, which shows clearly that it is, in fact, an interested and partial vision of history.

In the eyes of the capital (the genuine historical subject of the "discovery" and of the conquest and colonization that followed), it was, indeed, the discovery of an enormous productive labour force to be used for its valorization and to enable the capital to set up itself as a mode of reproduction of human race. In the eyes, let say, of the members of a primitive communist society that lived on a land called later America, it was a military, political and cultural INVASION; the beginning of the end of its community, the beginning of slaughter, work, exploitation and oppression.

What was, on the one hand, the development of the social form of the reproduction of the European white human race and of its Judeo-Christian culture with its specific forms of exploitation and cannibalism was, on the other hand, and according to the faculty for adaptation to that form of exploitation, either submission in complicity with the local exploiter classes (only the societies in which the exploitation of man by man had existed could adapt themselves to that form of exploitation), either a general physical extermination.

A few months before the 500th anniversary of that fateful day when the capital started imposing the barbarity of civilization on the whole American continent, the dominant classes in Europe and in America are preparing the festivities for 1992 and have got the nerve to talk about celebrating the "discovery" and the "meeting between two worlds", as if two civilizations had met on a voluntary basis to improve their respective way of life, whereas, in fact, the capital led a terrorist and bloody fight to impose itself on the human beings who then lived in "America".

Therefore it is easy to understand why, among the exploited of that continent, a still vague movement started to reject and deny this campaign carried out by all the characters of capitalism: the Church, the Spanish and American (North, Central and South American) governments, the political parties, the media, the cinema..., was born.

Rejecting and denying

Considering the latter as something which represents the movement that rejects and denies such festivities, here is one of the first documents, written almost two years ago, which deals with that.

"The Farmers and Natives Organizations in the Andes, The National and Native Organization of Colombia (ONIC), The National Association of Users Farmers - Unity and Reconstruction (ANUC) and the Union and National Unitarian Federation of Farmers and Breeders of Colombia (FENAGRO), The National Federation of Farmers and Natives' Organizations (FENOC-1), The Confederation of The Native Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and The ECUANRUNARI Movement of Ecuador, The Farmers' Confederation of Peru (CCP) and The National Agrarian Confederation of Peru (CNA), The Single Union Confederation of Farmers of Bolivia (CSUTCB) and The No Land Movement of Brazil, who met in Bogota (Colombia) on 14th, 15th and 16th July, considering that:

1.- Whereas the 500 years of the wrongly called 'discovery' and conquest of America are near, the governments, churches, institutions, media, advertising agencies and the big transnational building entrepreneurs have taken a series of initiatives to 'celebrate' what they call 'the meeting of two worlds'.

2.- There was no meeting on that fateful day, 12th October, 1492, but rather a military, political and cultural invasion led by the European continent and more particularly by the Spanish State, which submitted our population to a brutal genocide and cut down the political, economic, cultural and mental evolution of our ancestors. So, what could have been a fruitful exchange of different cultures led to one culture, the conquistadors', dominating the other using arms and evangelization on a discriminating and unfair social basis poisoned by racism.

3.- Death, in all its forms, was the expression of the European civilization on the American land from slaughters to the physical extermination due to over-exploitation, including tortures and exports of illnesses and epidemics. 90 million people died as a result of the killing of the Indian communities: one of the worst crimes against humanity, which is still going on today, but in more subtle ways, which are not, for all that, less brutal and ruthless!

4.- On behalf of the European civilization, supposedly superior, the conquerors ruined a large part of the scientific and technical progress, of the artistic and cultural expressions, of the languages and the social organization of the indigenous peoples to take over everything by evicting the farmers from their lands, by plundering the resources and seizing the fruits of the work of the conquered.

5.- The 'discovery' also meant that Latin America would be, for centuries, enslaved to the interests of the great European powers of that time and to the United States of today. This conditioned the existing drama of poverty, misery and under-development against which our peoples are struggling; this drama being worsened with the oppressive burden of the external debt.

6.- Therefore, it is natural that, as the main victims of these outrages and of the deprivation of our homeland, we want to claim that we reject such "festivities" and want to take the opportunity to think over that fifth centenary and to transform it into a self-discovery of our America, into a reason to bring our support to all the oppressed, or the appropriate time to do so.

We decide to

ratify the meeting of the Farmers and Natives' Organizations of South America, Central America and the Caribbean, convened on 7th and 12th October, 1989, in Bogota (Colombia).

This meeting aims at centralizing and unifying the various dynamics impulsed by people's organizations in the countries of America about the 500-year domination and exploitation, as well as making an opportunity to think over the big challenges of today and give a common answer to the theme."

Our position

The Internationalist Communist Group doesn't hesitate for one single moment to oppose openly all these festivities which our secular enemies are preparing and appeals to the international proletariat to resort to direct action against them.

Billions of dollars have been invested in the festivities and in the campaigns through which they will build the public opinion they need and through which they will harass the exploited of the five continents and more particularly those from America. We appeal to the avant-garde proletariat to take action against such campaigns; we call on them to make of every factory, every school, every mine, every office... the place to denounce parties, trade-unions, governments, media, which take part in the campaign, to make it the sphere of activity against all the previous capitalists as well as against the capitalists of today, who, all, with no exception, have Indian, half-cast, black, white,... blood on their hands.

The ways direct action will be led depend, of course, on the possibilities and on the balance of forces in each place at a time when the international weakness of the proletariat facing its historical enemy is acknowledged; any general recipe would be no more than a mere vain statement. The fact that we don't call on a generalized sabotage or on an insurrectionary and revolutionary strike doesn't mean we don't agree with that kind of action, but it is because, first of all, the proletariat having no international guidance or conscious common action at the moment, it would only be a dream and also because throwing rotten eggs or a few Molotov cocktails during the festivities, going on strike here or occupying places there don't deserve yet the name of sabotage, neither do they imply there to be any general leadership. It will rather be a modest expression of the present rejecting movement that we are struggling for to generalize it and hardenit.

We intend to radicalise it in the deepest sense of the word, that is to say to go back to the roots. And, as we have already said it, the root of the problem is our old-aged enemy: the capital, our well-known enemy, the bourgeois society on the whole, which forced the human race to submit itself to it. That is why hardening the movement against the so-called festivities is, and can only mean, a struggle against the whole capitalism. Moreover, we talk about "generalizing" both in the quantitative and qualitative expansion of the proletarian participation in this struggle, in the sense of the confrontation against all the capitalist forces, and finally, in the sense of the historical relation between this struggle led by the exploited and the oppressed of the five continents during colonization to resist the capital, and the nowadays proletariat's struggle, the everyday struggle against austerity, against capitalist exploitation and the struggle for the suppression of that criminal system. That's the reason why denouncing the festivity campaign and confronting it is not a different struggle, but is rather an additional aspect of the social war between the exploiters and the exploited.

If the struggle is divided, if its contents which is to be a struggle against capitalism, turn out to be a struggle for peaceful coexistence between classes (whether it be on behalf of the meeting between two worlds or of Latin-American unity against yankee imperialism), that would be a reactionary obstacle. That's why,through our struggle against these festivities, we launch an appeal to face and denounce all the bourgeois, left-wing or right-wing forces, which will try to make of the historical struggle against capitalism a mere contradiction among its own factions, between the "imperialists" and the "others", or, which is even worse, among nations: between Europeans and Americans, between inhabitants of South-America and inhabitants of North-America.

Against the bourgeois left-wing

Let's take as an example the point 5 of the document mentioned above. Even if it describes part of the reality, the fact remains that it divides and alters the aims by mixing everything and eventually dissolves the main contradiction into another one, which opposes debtors and creditors of capital, that is to say a contradiction between bourgeois factions, as we denounced it in our central review in French (2).

This is being done consciously or unconsciously, considering as grammatical subject what is not the historical subject: Latin-America; and suggesting continuity between the previous exploited and submitted in all America and this non-subject which is Latin-America. There is no doubt that this position corresponds to the Latin-American bourgeois' interests (and consequently, to those of capitalism), the very bourgeois who stand as a victim of a genocide in which it deliberately took part.

This conjures up an old story: a South-American journalist, who was considering Juan Ramón Jimenez responsible, harassed him saying: "... you, the Spanish, the colonizers,... responsible for the slaughter,... the obscurantists,... your grand-fathers..." He answered quite rightly: "It will be yours, mine, the poor, are overseas in Spain, well buried."

And this is true not only for the Latin-American exploiting class of Latin and European origin, but also for the bourgeois of Indian origin, seeing that in many cases the indigenous dominant classes contributed to the barbarity of colonization. In fact, as we already said above, the natives who didn't live in a society with class exploitation resisted wage labour to the death and/or were exterminated (or killed themselves in many ways, including conscious and deliberate collective infanticide); that's why most natives of today, who are exploited proletarians, are descendants of societies in which exploitation already existed; and besides the fact their own exploiters may have sold them to capitalist bosses, they could accept wage labour capital imposed on them because they were used to working for others, to producing overwork for their "own" native bourgeois. For example, in the Inca Empire, the "mita" and the "yanaconaje" were forms of overwork appropriation that the capitalism later was going to subsume in its being, thanks, in many cases, to the caciques, who watched over labour force.

Latin-Americanism clearly expresses the counterrevolutionary interests of the left-wing bourgeoisie, who, on this occasion, and as every time a proletarian movement expands, tries to turn the class war into an international war of capital (between nations).

The only bourgeois solution to that is:
"¢
to hide the real continuity which exists between the previous indigenous communities the capital exploited and slaughtered to deprive them and make proletarians of them, and the today proletarians all over the world;
"¢
to hide the real continuity which exists in the Latin-American States, between the local bourgeois and the previous criminals, presenting the enemy as external (or showing an enemy abroad).
"¢
to substitute false continuity for the real one, such as asserting that all Europeans and North-Americans are privileged (so as to divide the common aims and interests of the proletariat) and presenting them as the heirs to the colonizing states.

We must acknowledge that the enormous lie according to which there are no poor people in Europe and in the USA, is, objectively, for the proletarians in Latin-America, as strong as a popular prejudice; and the bourgeoisie knows how to use it. Only the proletarians' struggle against their own bourgeois will change this fact. As for now, movements still crop up separately (unlike in the end of the last century and in the beginning of this one when there were unity and various levels of coordination between proletarians in the south, north and centre of the American continent). As far as we know, even the struggle and reject movement of the 500th anniversary festivities makes no exception: the organizations which started working against these festivities in Latin-America were not aware of the indigenous proletarian movement in North-America until there were very important struggles in Canada and some others in the USA which stressed, once more, the same history and the same current interests among the exploited, both in the north and in the south.

To what extent is the protest movement against the festivities infested or dominated by the left-wing bourgeoisie? It is difficult to respond to that point so far and, in fact, the very happening of the festivities and the denouncing of them will tell us about the proletariat's autonomy from that left wing or, on the contrary, the proletariat's subordination to it. That's why the determined struggle against the festivities must always imply the denunciation of the pseudo anti-imperialist left-wing bourgeois.

What seems to us to be objective is, that in all structures and organizations which existed before or which have been developing for two years to denounce the festivities there is an important position of struggle in this respect. In the various spheres for discussion and reflection that have come out both at international level and in each country, we can see that proletarians and proletarian organizations coexist with old leftist or unionist structures (among which many signed the first communique mentioned above). So, we notice that a lot of left-wing capitalist structures, from the Cuban State to the many American intellectual groups or unions of the different countries, which, at the beginning seemed to be opposing the festivities, submitted (in many cases sold themselves), little by little, more or less barefacedly, to the 1992 festivities, and, in many cases, today, they even come to condemn (sometimes, they quell) those who don't sell themselves.

In the first place, with this article we aimed to expound our position on the whole, as a group, against the festivities and, more particularly, we aimed to set out our stand on several topics we received to be denounced and thought about. Nevertheless, seeing the diversity and contradiction they contained, we have chosen, in this first text, to limit ourselves in explaining that our position in the struggle stands against the festivities (denouncing also, on the whole, the left-wing bourgeoisie).

Against the festivities

We will end by reiterating our stand and our appeal to struggle against the 500th anniversary festivities. Nobody knows exactly the real figures of the immense slaughter the world capital will be celebrating, but no one doubts they were dozens of times bigger than those which the imperialists who won the "First and Second World War" attribute to their enemies. Recently, some old information has been published and new studies realized. Researches carried out at the Bekerley University, for instance, prove that of the 25,200,000 inhabitants of the central region of present Mexico in 1519, only 1,075,000 survived a century later, which means a level of extermination (repression, labour, illnesses...) of 24,125,000 human beings. According to a compilation of information made by Adolfo Colonbrees and published in his work: "To the five hundred years of the shock of two worlds", Aztecs, Mayas and Incas counted, at the beginning of colonization, 70 to 90 million of human beings; 150 years later, they were 3,500,000. Let us add, that, seeing that most natives succumbed because of capitalist exploitation, the bourgeoisie brought, as a substitution labour force, the Black from Africa, which cost, according to Jose Chiavenato in "The black in Brazil", 100,000,000 black human lives to our species.

We must also add that all those, calling themselves Marxists, who praise progress and civilization, are making themselves accomplices of all this. In our opinion, it is clear that wavering between supporting resistance to exploitation (the essence of the historical communist position even during precapitalism) and supporting the whole of the progress of Capitalism (the essence of the historical position of counter-revolution, social-democracy), Marx and Engels will come to support, on behalf of civilization, bourgeois positions such as, for example, the war launched by the Yankees against "lazy Mexicans" (3). The Theses of our programme clearly fight against such positions. They denounce progress, civilization (see thesis 32, a.o.) and they claim that the present struggle of the proletariat is not the successor of progress and bourgeois revolution (as social-democracy says), it is the successor of all the exploited classes of the past. We also include, among those whom we denounce as accomplices, the so-called followers of "Communist Left". Indeed, all those who defend that capitalism was in a progressive phase till 1914 or any other date, all the supporters of the theory of ascendance and decadence of Capital, inevitably support the criminal work of the capitalist civilization. Therefore, we are neither astonished by the fact that in the face of the gigantic generalised campaign of the Bourgeois State for the festivities of the 500th anniversary those people didn't say a word, nor by the fact that they have made themselves the accomplice of the festivities.

We shall end this article on the 1492-1992 festivities by repeating our call for social war against capital:

Long live direct action of the proletariat against all the forces of Capital, which are the only ones having true reasons to commemorate five centuries of exploitation and oppression !

Notes

1. There might have been preexisting forms of trading capital in America but, anyways, this is not the right time to enter into arguments to know whether or not this antediluvian capital succeeded in leading this barbarity, or to assess how long it would have taken to come, in an autonomous way, to a generalized submission to exploitation.

2. On that subject, see: "La cuestión de la deuda: basta de versos" in Comunismo 19, June 1985, "Deuda externa: las fantasías sin salida" in Comunismo 21, February 1986 and "La question de la dette: assez de prose" in Le Communiste 27.

3. This position is clearly explained in an editorial, which was not signed, in Neue Rheinische Zeitung: "Democratic Pan-Slavism", a reaction to "An appeal to The Slaves" of Bakhunin in which it is said, word for word: "... Will Bakhunin reproach the North-Americans for waging a 'war of conquest', which, of course, meant a severe blow to his theory based on 'justice and humanity', but which was carried out successfully to the advantage of civilization only? Or is it by chance that the wonderful California was snatched from the lazy Mexicans, who didn't know what to do with it? Is it a misfortune for the wonderful Yankees to exploit the gold mines there, to increase the means of transport, to make, in a few years, of the most appropriate coast of that peaceful ocean, a place with a high density of population and a busy trade, to build big cities, steamboat lines, a railway line from New-York to San Francisco, to really open for the first time the Pacific Ocean to civilization and, for the third time in history, give a new orientation to world trade?"

As we can see, it's the traditional bourgeois position in favour of progress and civilization, against resistance to work and exploitation, which Marx and Engels support here.

Some tried to exonerate Marx saying that he was not the direct author of that article but, as we know, the editorial staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was under the sheer and mere dictatorship of Marx. (Engels MEW t.XXI p.19). Moreover, Engels undertook to stress, in a letter to Herman Schüler on the 15th May 1885, that this was, indeed, Marx's position: "As well as the article against Bakhunin and Pan-Slavism, Marx's work and mine of that time can hardly not be separated, since there is division in work."

Two reasons have led us to republish this article on the "Myth of Democratic Rights and Liberties":

• the contents of the article that remains very crucial in all struggles today insofar as it denounces the democratic rights and liberties as they are systematically being used against the strength, the unity and the autonomous organisation of the proletariat;
• the fact that this article, published in the first issue of Communism, was a rather bad translation of the original Spanish text, while today we can publish a much better version of it. As we explained in the introduction of Communism No.7 in April 1992, we depend nearly entirely on our contacts and sympathizers to help us with the translations of our texts into English. We are satisfied that today we can republish this article and we call upon our sympathizers to continue to contribute to the task of improving the quality of our reviews and of spreading important text of the communist movement.

* * *

The proletariat, in its tendency to organize itself as an autonomous class, needs to meet, to develop its press, to unite, to carry on strikes, to occupy factories, to organize direct action, to liberate confined comrades, to get arms. These tasks have been assumed with different results in all bourgeois periods of its historic fight, independent of the type of bourgeois domination: Bonapartist or parliamentary, republican or fascist.

The bourgeoisie's policy toward the proletariat consists in showing these needs as identical to all democratic institutions and liberties (free press, free association, amnesty,...). It is not only the classical liberal bourgeois who try to convince us that democracy is the best, but also all the pseudo-working-class parties (socialist, Stalinist, Trotskyist,...) which base their counter-revolutionary policy on the statement that the working- class will reach socialism through the conquest and the defence of all those rights and liberties.

In fact, there is a basic opposition between the mass of bourgeois democratic liberties and the needs of the proletariat to get organized on its own class field. The positions the proletariat conquers in this field can never be confused with so-called "working-class liberties".

In the same way as two opposite classes exist, there are two fundamental conceptions of workers' struggle. One is bourgeois, where one criticizes the lack of equality, of democracy, where one should fight for more rights and liberties. The other is proletarian, based on an understanding of the fact that the roots of all those liberties, rights and equalities are essentially of anti-worker type. This leads to the total practical destruction of the democratic State with its equality, rights and liberties. These two opposite conceptions show the contradiction between, on one hand, passive criticism - to improve, reform, and in this way, reiinforce the exploitation system - and, on the other hand, active criticismm, our criticism - the destruction of that exploitation system.

When the "right" tells us that the "left" is dictatorial and anti-democratic, that when the "left" reaches the government it does not respect the human rights and that our interest is therefore to wave the flag of democracy, to fight under its protection for pure democracy, is it a myth or do they have an objective interest in democracy? When the "left" tells us in the name of "Marxism" that the "bourgeoisie" and "capitalism" do not respect democratic liberties, that we have to defend them against fascist attacks, that we have to crave them wherever they do not exist, that this is the way to socialism, is it only a mass of opportunistic slogans or are they really fighting for democracy?

The bourgeoisie always tried to use the proletariat (taken as atomized workers, as "citizen") as a social basis, as slaves to serve its own dominant class interests. In this way, we already understand how the bourgeoisie always tries to make the workers fight for a different interest than their own (this partly answers the question). But do the bourgeoisie of left and right want democracy or not? The tale of liberties and human rights, is it only a mystification without any material basis or is there an objective reality that produces this democratic mystification? Do we have to infer that no bourgeois faction has any interest in having these rights and liberties of the citizens applied? (The corollary of this would be that the proletariat could avoid the bourgeoisie's domination if it really fought for the defence of democracy). Or do we have to conclude to the contrary that the fight of capitalists for the paradise of democratic rights is really the supreme will of the bourgeoisie.

Of course, the revolutionary marxist criticism we develop here is based on this last thesis: the mass of human rights and liberties correspond exactly to the ideal form of the reproduction of capitalist oppression. Let's see what this ideal form of democracy is and where it comes from.

The paradise of human rights and liberties

The party of order, the general party of Capital, or in other words, all the bourgeois parties, is totally unable to face the proletariat organized as a class and therefore as a party. This is why that main secret of capitalist domination is to stop the organization of the proletariat as an autonomous force and there is nothing more efficient for the bourgeoisie than the mass of human rights and liberties to drown the working-class, to dissolve it in the false concept of the "people". When the proletariat stops existing as a class, when each worker is a good citizen, with his liberties, rights and duties, he accepts all the rules of the game that atomize him and drown him in the mass where his specific class interests disappear. As a good citizen, he does not exist as a class, this is the condition for democracy to work.

But the reign of democracy as both "left" and "right" promise in the name of socialism and/or liberty, where there would be no classes but just citizens and free people, like any ideological form of the bourgeoisie does not come from nowhere and does not remain just as a pure idea outside the real world. On one hand, this world, "earthly paradise" of human rights, obeys a very precise material reality: the reign of the circulation of commodities from which all the defenders of Capital draw their principles and conclusions; on the other hand, all the mental forms, ideologies, which derives from this reign are accepted by society and are therefore objective. The dissolution of the working-class in the dead world of citizenship is nothing immaterial, even if it is based on the mystical world of commodities. One could think that the millions of pages written by marxologists and other capitalist lawyers,... the capitalist State constitutions, the charts, the speeches,... only passively serve the bourgeoisie, that it takes them into account or not according to circumstances. But this vision forgets that these very papers reflect and strengthen reality, that they belong to dominant ideology, which becomes a material force that reinforces and reproduces the whole social system. The laws and other official papers are just ideological products of capitalist dictatorship which have the task of defending it.

In the sphere of circulating commodities there are no classes; everybody is a citizen, everybody appears as a buyer and seller of commodities, equal, free, and owner. Even when we sell our labour-power, we are in the paradise of human rights and liberties. Each one is aiming at his own private interests in the reign of equality, liberty, and private property.

Liberty: because the buyer and the seller of commodities (including labour-power) does not obey any rule than their own free will.

Equality: because in the world of commodities, everybody is a buyer and a seller, and everybody gets a value equal to the value contained in the commodities he is selling, exchanging equivalent against equivalent.

Property: because each one appears, in the world of exchange as an owner of his commodity and he can only dispose of what belongs to him.

As free and equal owners, all citizens contract relationships giving rise to a natural brotherhood, which is the lawful reflection that guarantees liberties, equality and the identical possibility for each man to own commodities. Any buying or selling of commodity is the result of free will, a contract between men who, because of commodity, are owners, free, equal and like brothers.

It is this fetishised world of commodities, where there is no place for classes but only for men and citizens, that brings about the rights and liberties that enable them to decide on the regulation and improvement of this world. It is not only authorized to vote and to choose as a citizen, but it is also possible to have one's delegates in democratic organs for which the liberty of gathering, press, association, expression, etc. are guaranteed. The citizens can associate as electors and elected (in the bourgeois parties) or as buyers and sellers of commodity (in the trade-unions). Nothing is more natural for the citizens than to found political parties, to try to work in the government, in the ministries, the parliaments, or the "soviets". No need for any nobility certificate as a citizen, anyone, whatever his social position (of which the laws never speak) can become a deputy, a minister or a president. In the same way, as buyers or sellers of commodities, they can associate, form unions, refuse to buy or sell if the deal is not good enough. To this corresponds another mass of rights and liberties as the ones which rule private societies and the pseudo-workers' trade-unions. The buyers and sellers of labour-power, associated as such (never as workers or as capitalists, since nobody owns anybody else's work in the world of circulation of commodities) can even interrupt the delivery of the use-value: it is the liberty of strike. In the same way, the citizen who buys this commodity can decide to buy another one, it is the liberty of work. Or the citizen can decide to stop buying this commodity: it is the liberty of industry (under this reign, there is no lock-out). Let us not forget the rights of prisoners, nor general amnesty, which can only exist on condition that everybody behaves himself as a good citizen, a good buyer and a good seller, as "Amnesty International" and other humanists say.

Some people will point out that nowhere such rights and liberties can be found, that everywhere there are prisoners, everywhere the right to strike is limited, that in this country the right of property is limited and that in that country only one party is allowed, etc. All this is obvious. Nevertheless, in all these countries, there is a faction of the bourgeoisie that will criticize the lack of democracy of different governments, and to do so, it must have a democratic ideal as reference. This is exactly what we want to explain and denounce.

It is the only way to break with the bourgeois criticism of democracy and to recognize the enemy in all the defenders of a pure and perfect democracy. Indeed, as well as democracy being the product and the reflection of the mercantile basis of capitalist society, it is also the reference of all bourgeois criticisms which only aim at correcting the imperfections of democracy and where all the forces of counter-revolution concentrate in periods of revolutionary crisis.

But is it possible that the bourgeois ideology could really imagine such a society, where there would be no prisoners because no-one would steal because no worker's group would organize itself, where any strike would be strictly legal, where any association would group buyers and sellers to make sure the commodities would be exchanged at the right price? Of course, yes. More than two hundred years ago the democrats had no problem in recognizing that the democratic republic should correspond to the "people of gods" as Rousseau said. Today the bourgeoisie, in its decomposition, is still unable to understand the limits of its historical perspective and holds on to its mystical ideas. If it found the need and the capacity to integrate all the religion it used to fight yesterday in the name of science, how can we doubt that it does not "honestly" long for the democratic paradise it has always fought for?

Man imagines god as a perfect image of himself, purified from all his contradictions. Capital imagines a perfect and everlasting reign because it is convinced that it is the positive pole of society, also purified from its contradictions (wealth/misery, growth/obstacles to the development of productive forces, "development"/"under-development", equality/oppression). It sees itself as identical to its positive pole (wealth, growth, equality, liberty, democracy,...) For example, it has a completely a-historical and mystical conception of the valorization of Capital, as if it could exist without periodical massive destructions of social productive forces. Even if it calls itself socialism or communism, Capital always builds its own categories, its own analysis, its own vision of the world, ignoring the unity and the deadly contradiction between wage-labour and Capital. One can therefore not be surprised that in this democratic world, no one is exploited, no one is imprisoned, that one can find only capital, wealth, equality, justice, growth and liberty.

The contradictory unity of reality

Let us now leave the world of ideas and of capitalist categories, of circulation and of citizenship, and let us return to the everyday world, the one of production and of Capital's valorization. The seller of labour-power is a worker, whether he believes in god or in democracy. In the factory he is nobody's equal, he is free of nothing, owner of nothing, not even of what he manipulates. If he wants, the worker can imagine that his citizenship is only interrupted, that his equalities, liberties and properties have been left in the cloak-room and that he will get them back when he gets out. But he is completely wrong. In his eight (or more) hours of work, he consumes raw material and machines to produce use-value that remains the property of Capital and in the other sixteen hours, during his holidays, he consumes food, beer, football or television to produce another use-value: his labour-power, which will be used in valorizing Capital. Outside of the mystical and ephemeral paradise of circulation and of free elections, the worker remains a worker, whether he likes it or not; even when he fucks (whether by pleasure or to produce a family) he is only a labour-power that valorizes Capital. As such, he is neither equal, nor free, nor citizen, nor owner at any moment of his life. He is only a paid slave. Even before he tries to organize himself to defend his worker's interests, he has already all equality, property and liberty against him.

But to penetrate the real meaning of the mass of bourgeois rights and liberties, one must not only shift from the circulation sphere to the production sphere (in their contradictory unity) but also reach the essence of the class contradictions in the society. In this way we understand that the first liberty of the proletariat is to be free from all property. In fact, the ancestors of the proletariat have been liberated by physical violence of any other property than that of their children and of their own labour-power. This liberty of all properties is the most important one. It determines all the other ones. Thanks to this liberty the proletariat is only free to sell his labour-power, but also free to die of hunger (he and his children), if he does not find a buyer. The equality under the reign of circulation of commodities gives the worker the right to receive a value equal to the one of his labour-power and it is precisely this equality that takes away from him the product of his own work and warrants capitalist exploitation. Brotherhood is not a meaningless bourgeois slogan. It means, practically, the brotherhood of the bourgeois against the proletariat; under the form of national and democratic fraternity, it helps in tying the hands and feet of workers to their exploiters and bringing them to the massacre of their class-brothers on imperialist battle-fields.

True liberty, property and fraternity of democracy implies therefore a permanent situation of anti-proletarian violence. Repression is one of the indispensable elements of imposition, reproduction and extension of democracy. A long time ago, Marx used to denounce the sacred trinity "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" as equivalent to "Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery". Even more, the tendency to reach the paradise of pure democracy -where no one would complain of this liberty, equality, fraternity, property - implies a higher level of realization of democracy, which also implies the full use of the terror machine of the democratic State in its various forms. Therefore, for example, there is no organic change between the liberal and the fascist form of State, but only a process of purification of the State in its tendency to reach an inaccessible democracy.

Let us examine some other democratic rights and liberties. The right of election means that every 4, 5, 6, 7,... years, the worker can dress as a citizen to go and choose his oppressors freely. That supposes of course, on one hand a free electoral campaign, that means the liberty for each bourgeois faction to invest in it following its means and, on the other hand, the liberty for others to imagine that society might change with the coming of such or such party at the head of the bourgeois government. The so-called rights and liberties even give the workers the "privilege" to choose between the self-named "worker parties": to choose the one that will be the most capable of directing the State of Capital and to organize the massacre of the proletarians who would tend to ignore the directives of the big "worker" parties and who would refuse what the majority has decided.

The liberty of press and propaganda simply insures the free market in such a way that only the economic potential and the financial capacity of the different parties would assume the control and domination of public opinion and would guarantee the free application of the majority principle. In front of this economico-political apparatus of the dominant class, the workers have as alternative: either the liberty, right and duty to resign themselves, or the force and the will to organize themselves as a class, for which no right or liberty will ever be conceded.

The so-called "workers' liberties"

"We theoretically agree that democracy is the domination system of bourgeoisie" so would the socialists, the Stalinists, the Trotskyists, etc. answer: "but what we must do now is to fight for the rights and liberties that serve the organization of the working-class: the right of association, of union action, of strike, of amnesty for political prisoners,... wherever these rights do not exist, and to defend them each time fascism attacks them". "What you don't understand," they would say, "is that we cannot fight for socialism without these rights."

Evidently, all these capitalist parties generally hide that "theory" - until last Judgement Day when they will all brandish it again - but let us examine the practice of the rights and liberties contained in the program these so-called parties call "minimum" or "transitional" (of all these rights we will only examine those that are supposed to be "workers' rights").

"The rights of reunion, of association, of unionism, the liberty of press are rights granted to the workers, they are conquests of the working-class". So speaks the bourgeoisie (of left and right). After having produced value everyday for Capital, wearing out their force, their arms, their brains, their sweat, their blood,... their lives, the workers do not only have the right to go and watch football or get drunk at the bar to divert themselves, to be in a good shape and be good at work the next day, but also, the bourgeoisie gives them the right to discuss, to unionize and to send "delegates" to negotiate the price at which they will sell themselves. It is very logical that a seller tries to sell his commodity at high price and Capital admits that the trade-unions change unreasonable claims of the workers into "righteous salary claims". These "righteous claims" are those that permit an increase in the exploitation rate, big enough to compensate the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. And it is even considered "legitimate" by all the bourgeoisie as long as it does not touch the national economy. There is no doubt that the trade-unions are the best specialists to formulate these "rights" and "legitimate" claims that do not hit the profit of Capital.

What else can we find in these rights granted by the bourgeoisie? NOTHING, absolutely nothing more.

In front of a real workers' association defending the workers' interests, fighting for a real reduction of work time, for a real increase in relative wages, Capital has no interest in accepting the right of association, of reunion, of press, of unionization, because these rights would necessary attack the profit rate and the national economy. And then, democracy would not have any other alternative than to use its cops, union troops,... The parties never hesitate in using white terror against the workers' class movement, and always in the name of democracy and liberty, of the right to work, of the respect of the trade-union's decisions... Without any doubt, the same thing will happen every time the workers' association will become a school for communism, every time the question of socialism will stop being a question of words and a struggle will be carried on, not only for the increase in wages, but for the abolition of wage-labour.

It must be very clear that workers' associations, their press, their reunions and actions,... that are based solely on the immediate and historical interests of the proletariat, must fight openly against Capital and its national economy. And in the name of the respect of legal unions, of the struggle against subversion, of unity against provocateurs, of the defence of national security, these so-called liberties are precisely what will be used as a repressive force against the class organizations.

And this practice is very coherent with democracy. Repression is democratic because it strikes when the workers leave their uniform of citizenship to act as a class, when they stop accepting being a well disciplined army for the valorization of Capital, for which the bourgeoisie had given them these rights and liberties.

This proves that contrary to what the bourgeoisie says, no right is granted to the working-class when it acts as a class. These rights are only granted to citizens, sellers of commodities. Repression of all those who do not accept to behave as good citizens is the logical answer to the bourgeois desire for a democratic paradise. There is no democratic paradise for those who do not respect democracy. As soon as the proletariat organises as a class, tries to attack the Capital dictatorship, democracy shows its terrorist face; as long as its dictatorship holds on firmly, democracy can show its liberal face to the stupid mass. The nice face of rights and liberties is therefore reserved only for the citizen, the one who bows down peacefully in front of the daily violence of the capitalist production system: wage-labour.

The same thing happens with the right to strike. The left wing of the bourgeoisie tells us that it is antagonistic to the capitalist juridical superstructure. No right is ever given to the class, to the workers in their struggle, they are only given to the sellers of commodities. As long as workers continue to accept simply being a force for Capital's valorization they have all the rights to act as any seller of commodities: to claim the right value for their commodity, to refuse to sell, to stop delivering use-value, etc. And of course, on the other hand, we find the rights of the buyer: the liberty of work (which means unemployment, strikebreaking, lock out, etc.)... With this liberty, workers are the ones who remain everyday more exploited, and more enslaved.

And when they make a true strike without caring for any right or liberty, when they really attack the bourgeois interests, no right or liberty exists any more; they are accused of being provocateurs, or agents coming from abroad,..., the true class strike is declared illegal, wildcat, anti-union,...which in fact it is. Consciously or not, any class struggle fights against the legality of the reign of commodity and fights for its destruction.

And to do so, it cannot accept workers behaving like sheep, nor scabs, nor unions, nor the right to work, nor the right to strike. On the battlefield, when the workers use direct action against the trade-unions at the service of Capital, they have no right at all. One must be blind or naive to believe that the legalization of strikes, which does not come from us but from our enemies, gives us any guarantee of winning or protects us against State repression. On the contrary, the legalization of strikes is a way for the bourgeoisie to reduce the class strength of strikes.

Another example is the "amnesty for political prisoners" requested by Amnesty as well as by all the social-democrats, pacifists, Trotskyists, humanists, priests of any imperialist side, but only at the condition they are made prisoners by a State of the other imperialist side. Each State keeps its own prisoners and, at the same time, asks for the liberation of its neighbour's in the name, of course, of human rights.. Besides, the humanists only claim to care for political prisoners at a time when international conventions such as the "European Juridical Space" relegate all actions of proletarian violence to the rank of "common law delinquency".

The height of their campaign, is that they all - committees for Chilean, Argentinean, Salvadorian exiles, support groups for RAF, the IRA, etc. - aim at getting the signatures of humanisst social-democracies such as the German one, which does not retain many political prisoners since it has already eliminated most of them one by one. And just as in any imperialist war, each State is ready to negotiate some human flesh against investments or commodities. And they keep talking about "amnesty" and "human rights". In this obvious trade of human flesh, the bourgeoisie cleverly puts together all prisoners, concealing the class character of the imprisonment of our comrades who were caught while fighting the bourgeois State. When a junta gets evicted, when a new president takes office, when such or such a party wins the elections, then they allow a "wide popular amnesty". And they pretend that the best way to show solidarity with our imprisoned comrades would be to collect signatures from democrats, to participate -by sending donations and telegrams- in the campaigns organised by "Amnesty", the parties, the parliamentary governments,... We know that all this confusion is the exact opposite to the solidarity needed by all our imprisoned comrades. The only solidarity is class solidarity, which does not exist through humanist speeches, nor through the game of human rights on the side of the USA, the USSR or Cuba and which cannot be obtained by protest letters addressed to capitalist butchers asking them to torture a little bit less. But it exists through the struggle against the bourgeoisie in each country. Only the direct action of the working-class with its own means (strikes, sabotage of the national production,...) will allow to impose its strength, to liberate the present workers who are imprisoned, but also to lay down the basis to organize class power, the proletarian dictatorship that will blow away the history of all States and all prisoners.

As with all other rights and liberties, the legal amnesty has nothing to do with workers' struggle to free comrades from jails, because as long as the capitalist exploitation system lasts, there will be prisoners and particularly, proletarian prisoners. One must not only know that there is no legal guarantee against prison and torture, but also that prison and torture will always be used in the name of the defence of these rights and liberties. In the same way that, under capitalism, every worker is potentially unemployed, any worker who does not accept the rules of the citizenship game is, potentially, a prisoner. Repression, torture, murder are only applications of democracy.

Moreover, the meaning of an amnesty is that the prisoners are "forgiven" for what they did. That means of course that they would deny the actions for which they have been condemned, or at least, that they would express that the actions that were valid yesterday are no longer valid today. In this way, the amnesty allows, in the name of "christian forgiveness", the recuperation of actions that, originally, attacked the bourgeois State, and became, with the coming of another bourgeois faction to the government, "actions that are exaggerated but understandable within the struggle against dictatorship..."

A good example of this is the amnesty conceded by the "Young Spanish Democracy". It forgave some "antifascist militants" above all in order to hide the fact that many imprisoned workers were fighting at the same time against Franco and against his antifascist cousins: in one word, against the whole bourgeois State. Some of the "anarchists", of the "incontrolados", are still in the prisons that became "democratic" again.

For us, the liberation of our imprisoned class comrades can only be made by reclaiming their heroic actions. We do not hope for any grace or pity from a class that shows us daily that it never hesitates in accumulating millions of dead bodies to develop its civilization. We know that only our organized and armed force can pull our comrades out of the fascist and antifascist prisons. And this is true, precisely because our force is the continuation of these actions for which our comrades fell. This is why, not only do we not ask for an amnesty, but to the contrary, we claim the reasons for which they have been imprisoned. K Marx held this position when he answered to his judges:

"We do not ask for any excuse nor any pity; do not expect any from us tomorrow."

In front of Capital, all proletarians are subversive. The fact of refusing to submit to its law means, consciously or unconsciously, fighting for its destruction. This is why, with all the victims of Capital ("political" or "of common law"), we say:

"We are all subversive. We are all guilty of wanting to destroy this inhuman world."

For all these reasons, the communist position on press, strikes, association, amnesty, liberties, about legality, is to assert without doubt that the organization of the proletariat is based on no right, no law, no liberty conceded by its enemy but on the contrary, is based on illegal action: the revolutionary organization for the destruction of wage-slavery. As Marx said:

"We never kept this secret: the field on which we fight is not the legal one, but the revolutionary one."

That does not mean that we abandon a strike when it becomes legal, or that we do not publish and distribute revolutionary press when it can circulate legally or that we refuse to get out of prison when a judge sets us free. That would simply be reacting antithetically on the same legal field.

One must not identify illegality and clandestinity. Any real strike is illegal but not clandestine, even if there are secret preparations for it. The organization of workers in class movements - revolutionary councils, soviets,...- stands on a completely illegal basis but develops public activities. The best example of this is the destruction of the bourgeois army by the proletariat. When the soldiers unify with the rest of the working-class, after a long work of communist secret propaganda, when they start using their weapons against the officers and destroy the capitalist army, they do not do it in a secret way, but openly, though it is the most illegal action one can imagine. To fight on the illegal field means assuming all tasks independently of all democratic rights and liberties, which are only decisions of our enemy and therefore a strategy of the bourgeoisie to fight us.

Correlation of forces between classes and juridical formalization of an unavoidable situation

Let us listen once more to the lawyers of Capital:

"We are Marxists and we know very well that all these rights are bourgeois democratic rights, but the bourgeoisie is incapable of conceding them or maintaining them, we must impose them and obtain them by force. We must fight today for the right to strike, for the constituent assembly, for the amnesty of political prisoners, the liberty of association, of election, of press, etc." Some others will say that: "One must fight for the autonomy of the working-class to carry on the permanent revolution"

or that

"it is only a step".

Have we ever seen a class that could stay autonomous, that could fight for its own class interests, while fighting at the same time for the purification of democracy, in other words for the interests of its class enemies? This question finds no answer from the Trotskyists and the Stalinists. In their democratic vision of history the proletariat would not be the first class of history to be at the same time exploited and revolutionary, but rather the least autonomous and most servile class of all history. While in their past revolts the slaves used to attack the slavery system and their masters, the serfs used to attack all medieval institutions, the church and the lords; these "Marxists" say that the proletariat should struggle for bourgeois purposes, with bourgeois means to prepare its own revolution!

But what is the relation between a proletarian advance and the concession of such or such a right or liberty by the bourgeoisie?

Let us take an example: the situation in Argentina in 1973. For years, glorious workers' struggles took the prisoners out of their jails. At the same moment, the "bureaucratic" and "anti-bureaucratic" Peronists, the Trotsko-Morenists of the PST asked the workers to wait for the amnesty order, without knowing if it included the grave delinquency (crimes, offenses,...) cases. The workers' struggle emptied Villa Devoto and permitted many comrades to re-enter the struggle. How should we interpret these facts? For the classical bourgeois parties, the coming out of prisoners is always a consequence of what they legally concede; for those bourgeois parties that call themselves "workers' parties", it is the opposite: the amnesty orders are the great workers' victory. Both kind of bourgeois parties agree to characterize the juridical formalization as fundamental. There is a difference between these two tendencies, but they are both tendencies of the same class: the bourgeoisie. They only disagree on the way to kill the workers' movement, to integrate it democratically and to justify juridically the situation.

But for all communist revolutionaries, on the contrary, the victory is not to obtain decrees but expresses itself in the organisative fortification of our class, in the practical affirmation of its autonomy and in the fact that the prisoners could join their class brothers in the street. What about the amnesty? It is only a juridical manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie to try to integrate in its democratic legality what is happening in the streets and that it can not avoid any longer. Its aim is obvious: to turn a situation that is favourable to its historical enemy to its own advantage. The coming out of prisoners is disguised in amnesty by means of its juridical formalization.

There is the same opposition between the right of press and the existence of an autonomous workers' press. In general the liberty of press guarantees the liberty of undertaking and the financial aspect is predominant. But in certain circumstances, the liberty of press can be extended to the workers' press as long as the latter does not have much influence and that, through its free circulation, it can be controlled by the bourgeoisie. But in a world where everything is commodity, where everything tends to dissolve in the world of exchange, of money or consumption, let us not have any illusion: the workers' press will never develop on that ground.

The same thing happens with the right to strike. Let us leave aside the well-known case of strikes that do not attack the profit rate of the bourgeoisie. A strike is only recognized legally when the bourgeoisie is in a weak position and has no other solution to try to break a strike than to legalize it. Both cases are bound but any way, legalization never brings anything new to the proletariat in its struggle. Its force is only its organized and conscious force, before and after legalization.

Another question for those so-called "Marxists" to think about: for what other reason would the bourgeoisie give any right to its historical enemy (the proletariat)?

If it were true that these rights and liberties would help the revolution, why hasn't there been any revolution in the countries that have a long democratic tradition, in the U.S.A. for example? Why did it develop in Russia, which had known centuries of Tsarism and only a few months of "democracy"? And why did it burst out in the most "democratic" regime of the whole Russian history, the one of the social-democrat Kerensky? On what rights and liberties could the workers in Iran rely to defend their strikes and their struggle of 1978/79? In what way did the acknowledgment of the "Solidarity" union in Poland help the workers' movement to develop and extend? Didn't it happen precisely to recuperate the movement by taking it away from its anti-capitalist and therefore internationalist and autonomous aims to deviate it on the reform and democratisation of the exploitation system, with the blessing of both the Pope and Brezhnev?

Why shouldn't we ask the right of insurrection? There is an answer to all these questions, and it concerns the material class' interests that are antagonistic to the interests of the proletariat. In fact it is quite normal that the democratic right or left bourgeoisie would try to impose its own "human rights" and would make no distinction between amnesty and liberation of prisoners, the right of strike and the strike, the right of press and the existence of a workers' press. The heart of all this mystification is to consider the juridical formalization as a workers' victory while it is nothing but a weapon of the bourgeoisie.

Two ways of interpreting history

To defend its interests, the bourgeoisie needs to interpret history in its own way. It always tells us that we do not know history, that the working-class has always struggled to obtain the right to vote, to strike,... All the so-called workers' parties reduce the history of proletarian struggles to a question of conquests of democratic rights in the aim of justifying their past, present and future actions.

These servants of Capital refuse to see the class antagonisms and the specific interests of the working-class. They use the slogans of the masses which are still submitted to the dominant ideology to prove that workers have always fought for pure democracy and in this way, they kill a second time the millions of workers "democratically" slaughtered throughout the history of struggles. In doing so, they try to justify their functions as deputies in the bourgeois State apparatus. But one must replace the facts on their real basis (i.e. the immediate and historical interests of the proletariat which are strictly opposite to the ones of the bourgeoisie), all these struggles aim at destroying class society, whatever the momentary consciousness of the workers who live these struggles could be.

"It does not matter much what a worker, or even the whole proletariat, imagines he is aiming at. What matters is what he is really and historically obliged to do." (Marx)

We do not care about the flags that float over the struggles, we care only about the enormous efforts of the proletariat to organize itself and fight the bourgeoisie. Therefore it is very logical that while so-called "Marxists" consider that universal suffrage is a conquest of the proletariat, we consider that any reform of the State is a way to perfect the domination methods of the bourgeoisie. The only true conquests of the working class are its experience (in struggle) and its growing autonomy and power of organization. What remains of its struggles is the political conclusions that worker (proletarian) minorities can draw from their history. It is only through this "workers' memory" carried by minorities that the movement can avoid continually making the same mistakes.

On the other hand, the interpretation of history based on the "democratic conquests" of workers have led the defenders of this vision to parliament and its ministries. This is not surprising. One must not forget that the capitalist class is the first dominant class in history for which blood privileges are not determinant. Any citizen, even a "worker", can reach the bourgeoisie if he has good capacities to defend the bourgeois point of view: this is called social climbing. In this way, democracy can choose the best elements of a worker's origin to control more efficiently the workers' movement. Let us remember the example of the "worker" Noske, who became the leader of the Berlin insurrection of 1919, and who killed R.Luxembourg and K.Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches and thousands of revolutionary workers.

This system not only allows some "workers" to reach a position of oppressors of their ex-class brothers, but also entire "workers' parties" to be chosen by Capital to reinforce its domination (for example: the parties of the 2nd International). So it is not surprising that these parties interpret history as a succession of steps leading to democracy.

As a conclusion, we should say that the two ways of interpreting history correspond to the interests of the two antagonistic classes of our society: either the struggle of the proletariat for the communist revolution, or the bourgeois defence of the democratic dictatorship of Capital.

What do the pseudo-marxists want?

Let us now leave the questions of parliaments, ministries, governments, unions, directors, and let us examine the following question: what "working-class" does the left wing of Capital wish to see, what would be the result of its politics, what social situation is it aiming at?

To accept their orders means striking for the defence of rights, associating in the name of liberty of unions (with them and under their direction), talking in the name of the right of expression, electing "workers" deputies in the name of democracy; and why wouldn't we also go to jail in the name of the right of amnesty and of the right of the prisoners, why wouldn't we risk our lives in the sacred name of citizenship?

We are not exaggerating: how many workers, who believed them, have ended up being prisoners or being killed for having written on a wall the order of their own submission: "Long live democracy, death to dictatorship!"?

If the bourgeoisie reaches this aim, it can control in all respects its system of domination, and that is what has happened historically. When a faction of the bourgeoisie is "worn out" by the use of power, it wishes to take a rest and leaves the "opposite" faction to continue its work. The right wing would take care of the killing and imprisonment of the proletarians while the left wing would direct all the workers' claims towards human rights and democratic liberties. We could even imagine that a time would come when the workers would not even think of striking for their "shabby interests", when no "mad" group would have the evil thought of fighting against democracy or of making a revolution.

The left wing would have then helped in building the earthly paradise of pure democracy by "convincing" the workers that their aim is to obtain democratic rights. But, of course, to "convince" proletarians, words are not enough. So we will see our left humanists assassinate the "provocateurs". No faction of the bourgeoisie has the privilege of counter-revolutionary cannibalism.

Nevertheless, the earthly paradise cannot last even with the help of the bourgeoisie's left wing. Lenin was accused of being a German agent, Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by the Socialists in the name of democracy, torture was organized under Allende's regime as much as under Pinochet's.

But all the capitalists will never be able to stop the struggles, which come back, always more violently, to destroy all democratic illusions. And we, proletarians, will not strike for any right, we will strike for our own material interests, we will fight to take our imprisoned comrades out of the jails of the capitalist State, without making any concession to parliamentarism or amnesty campaigns.

The so-called "Marxists", in their fight for the purification of democracy, only long for the total submission of the working-class, that means, its disappearance as an autonomous class and its atomization as good citizens.

Democratic rights are never a workers' victory but are always a weapon of the bourgeoisie

In this text, we have considered separately, for the sake of comprehension, the different aspects of democratic rights and liberties, which, in fact, combine:

A/ Pure democracy, a capitalist ideology where there is no class organization but only citizens.

B/ Practically, the tendency to purify democracy, which leads historically to the changing of workers into citizens while left and right make them fight for democratic rights and liberties imposed by democratic State terrorism. Any class organization is an attack on democracy.

C/ The juridical formalization of unavoidable situations.

D/ The formalization tends to overturn the situation to the advantage of the bourgeoisie

Of course, none of those points are on the side of the proletariat. They are all bound: as reference frame (A) can only lead to a situation of relative democratico-terrorist stability (B) and as the strikes become too numerous, the pamphlets and subversive papers become uncontrollable, the bourgeoisie will need to legalize the situation (C). So it authorizes some publications, it legalizes some strikes... it is evident that it aims to break (D) the unity of the "agents of anarchy who do not respect democracy" and that it will find no other solution than to kill them:

"now that the strikes are legal, we must be very strict with those who do not respect right of work and who do not care for the interests of our country."

And they will try to calm the others with crumbs such as the "right to strike", "of expression", "of work",... How many times have we seen that situation?

Each time the bourgeoisie faces a difficult situation, far away from its democratic paradise (A), it formalizes juridically the situation (C), which is a decisive weapon (D) to obtain a normalized situation of democracy (B).

In this remodelled democracy (even if it has been rotten for a long time) the liberal democrats, the syndicalists, the Stalinists, the Trotskyists, the Maoists, the socialists will have the opportunity to meet and congratulate each other on the parliament lobbies:

"The rights of citizenship have been saved... The workers can return to their work and they will soon enjoy their civil rights."

One need not reach a situation of total political crisis of bourgeois society to understand all this. Nevertheless, it is in such extreme situation that the proletariat will dramatically face the alternative: either accept democracy and counterrevolutionary disaster, or throw away democracy as it has been done in only one historical but limited example: the insurrection of October 1917 in Russia.

* * *

On the 7th of March 1993, it will be two years since a proletarian insurrection took place in Iraq.

It was on the 7th of March 1991 when, largely in Iraqi Kurdistan, the long insurrectionary process that had shaken the whole of Iraq reached one of it's highest points. During this process, the proletariat had expressed itself against the war and against all bourgeois forces in the region: the Ba'ath secret police, Republican Guards, nationalists, local and religious authorities,... This struggle showed proletarians all over the world the only path to follow if wars are to be eliminated forever.

Since then, the international bourgeoisie has done all it can to repress the movement. The nationalists, democrats from all tendencies, humanitarian organisations, the UN and ba'athists, pacifists, all different kinds of religious followers,... shared the job of crushing us. By concentrating on disarming and recruiting proletarians into nationalist militias, they also sabotaged our internationalism and contributed to the local reorganisation of the State by arranging elections. Without doubt, another aspect of the action aiming to crush us was the complete black-out by the worldwide media as regards the social situation in Iraq.

This insurrectionary process has been recounted at length in various issues of our central review. A detailed analysis can be found in our French-language review Communisme (formerly Le Communiste), issues No. 33 ("War or Revolution"), 34 ("Revolutionary defeatism in Iraq") and No. 36 ("Proletariat against nationalism") and in our English central review Communism, issue No. 7 ("War or Revolution" and "A comrades' testimony: a journey to Iraq"). There is also other information on this question in the framed texts below.

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The insurrectionary process in Iraq started to materialize between the 26th and the 28th of February 1991, first due to the existence of thousands of armed deserters wandering around the city of Basra and a number of neighbouring villages and second, as the central State apparatus started to lose control of the situation. On the 4th of March, in Basra, this process reached another qualitative step as columns of tanks, retreating from Kuwait, shot at symbols of the regime. Clashes took place in different working areas of Baghdad. It was precisely these areas that were bombed by allied forces at that time. On the 4th, 5th and 6th of March, the insurrection spread to the following cities: Nasiryah, Amara, Najaf, Karbala, Hila, Kut,... The insurrection in Raniyah, on the 5th of March, marked a generalisation of the insurrection to other regions of Iraq. On the 7th of March, the armed proletariat destroyed one of the most important strongholds of the regime in Sulaimania. On the 8th of March it was Kalar's turn , on the 9th the insurrection spread to Koya, on the 10th to Shatlana. On the 11th of March the proletariat rose up in Arbil and the next day the whole area was in the hands of proletarians. On the 13th of March the last of the Ba'athist resistance was defeated in Aqra, on the 14th in Duhok and on the 15th in Zakho. On the 16th and 17th of March, whole columns of insurgents, setting off from all the cities where they had triumphed, planned to liberate the city of Kirkuk; but the Ba'athist airforce made this task very difficult and the insurrectionary movement paid a toll of thousands of deaths. In spite of these massacres, important battles were still fought and entire barracks were commandeered by the insurrection, e.g.the command of the military region for the whole of Kurdistan, near Sulaimania. Finally, between the 19th and the 21st of March, the insurrection triumphed in Kirkuk, but this city fell back into Ba'athist hands a few days later.

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In full community with the struggle that our class is waging in this part of the world, within the framework of an internationalist communist desire to break with the isolation hindering our struggle in Iraq, we've participated in the publication and circulation of an international poster, on the occasion of the second anniversary of the insurrection.

This poster, signed "Internationalist proletarians", (reproduced at the end of this text), recalls that nationalism, patriotism, pacifism, parliamentarism and, even more specifically today, international "humanitarianism", directed by the UN amongst others, are nothing else but universal weapons for repression of the proletariat.

This poster was published in several languages (English, Spanish, French, Kurdish, Arabic, German,...) by comrades of the ICG, other close contacts and groups from different countries. It was fly-posted, with the help of different contacts and groups of proletarians, on the walls of cities in England, France, Germany, Spain, Iraq,... "On the fringe of this initiative", to use the same terminology as another poster ("This poster has been produced on the fringe of an international initiative by several groups gathered under one specific signature: INTERNATIONALIST PROLETARIANS."), a similar action took place in Quebec. However, comrades over there chose to put their own signature to the poster and to develop their own slogans, thus unfortunately expressing their own particularism, rather than affirming the common contents of internationalist communist action stemming from our homogeneous class interests. We explain below how vital it is today to counteract all the particularisms that Capital constantly imposes on us in order to divide the proletariat, by asserting ourselves as a community of struggle with identical interests and objectives, rather than as a mere collection of different groups.

We would like to take this opportunity to stress the profound significance of the presence and activities of the international bourgeois coalition today in Iraq: despite differing interests, they are capable of exemplary unity of action when it comes to defending the heavily shaken bourgeois order. We also want to stress that in the face of this, in the face of Capital, the assertion of our own terrain of struggle, ie internationalism, is neither a matter of choice for us, nor merely an adjective that we add to certain local activities, but is a matter of life or death for the proletariat.

oOo

The capitalist world, its profound social contradiction and the inescapable character of its destruction can only be understood through the assertion of proletarian struggle and internationalist action. Outside this struggle, outside direct international action, talking about internationalism can only be an illusion; verbal assertion of the international character of the proletariat is devoid of meaning if it does not consequently materialize as common internationalist action, aiming to organize ourselves as a single worldwide force: the worldwide Communist Party.

It is in this framework that we often stress the universal being that is the proletariat: we are a single international class and the same enemy faces us everywhere. The whole strength of the bourgeoisie consists precisely of denying (through the combined action of the world media) the universal character of the conditions of struggle of the proletariat, so as to confine each revolt within its specific characteristics.

Denial of the worldwide character of the proletariat is not just "theoretical", but materialises and is structured forcefully by permitting the bourgeoisie to impose the terrain which suits it best in order to defeat the proletariat. In other words, by making the proletariat "forget" that it constitutes a single universal class and imposing the terrain of confrontation that suits it best, the bourgeoisie manages to dictate the framework of war it sends us to : the international unified force of the bourgeoisie against the isolated activity of our class, confined to such or such an area.

The bourgeoisie uses different methods in order to impose this terrain, its own terrain, and to succeed in isolating proletarians country by country: the repression of all direct links between proletarians of different countries, campaigns to falsify, minimise and rubbish the struggles so as to cut them off from their fellow proletarians more easily, blockades, white terror,... Bourgeois politics for the proletariat, typical social-democratic politics, materialise more particularly by keeping the proletariat of each country within its confines, transforming its "international" activity into activities by proxy, mediation, petitions, of "solidarity" by way of cheques and telegrams. Social-democracy always has its proposals for "internationalism" at the ready, as a means of preventing the struggle of the proletariat in that area against its "own" State.

Let us explain ourselves in the light of history.

The wave of struggle between 1917 and 1923 was characterised by an unrivalled generalisation of revolutionary development: from Europe to the Middle East, Latin America to India, the revolutionary movement overrode national borders, allowing the call for international organisation of the proletariat to reverberate throughout the world. The Communist International was, without doubt, an attempt to respond to the bourgeois desire to isolate the proletariat in Russia. This partial response took the form of, amongst other things, various sorts of sabotage and internationalist action against the armies sent to wage war on insurgent proletarians in Russia. Setting up the Communist International and its Manifesto in 1919 contributed to an intensification of the international insurrectional movement (Germany, Hungary, Bavaria, Austria, Portugal, Brazil) in which the proletariat waged a revolutionary war against its "own State", its "own bourgeoisie". In spite of this, the Communist International (leaving aside the historical responsibility of the Bosheviks) was not, unfortunately, a true break from the social-democratic conception of a federation of national parties. Each national communist party (with a few exceptions, such as some practical splits made by the K.A.P.D.) continued to be determined by contingencies of opinion based on struggles that were occurring "nationally", a weakness that opened the door for the bourgeoisie to first slow down, then destroy the revolution. Struggle by struggle, nation by nation, international bourgeois forces were able to impose war with their allies. The strength of the bourgeoisie thus resided in its capacity to impose the terrain upon which it is historically strongest: that of struggle launched within the framework of a nation, in which the balance of forces develops between local proletarians on one hand, and international bourgeois forces on the other. It is precisely when the proletariat showed its internationalism, when our class could structure a common and international response to social war, that the bourgeoisie felt at its weakest. Thus the international proletariat acted to support the insurrection of October 1917 in Russia, breaking the bourgeois information blockade, prolonging revolutionary defeatism in all camps and stopping the war, subsequently taking on different levels of action.

However, in this context one must take into account the immense difficulties that confronted the insurgent proletariat in Mexico or Russia, for example, in trying to communicate news across borders about what was going on. Throughout the rest of the world, the proletarian insurrections in Mexico (1910-1914) and Russia (1917-1919) were portrayed as simple anti-dictatorial popular uprisings. With this aim, Social Democracy had a ready-made theory - that of backward countries, their need for bourgeois revolution and/or "proletarian" revolution to develop bourgeois democratic tasks. This ideology not only led pseudo-anarchists and other social democrats to deny the proletarian character of the Mexican and Russian insurrections, but also led organisations such as the KAI, who had broken away from the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, to sink into the deepest confusion on the issue.

If we apply what we have just described to what is at stake today in Iraq, we can see that it is in the bourgeoisie's interest to confront each one of our class's actions by limiting it to a single region and opposing it with an amalgamation of international forces (Kurdish nationalists, allied forces, UN, humanitarian and religious organisations...) This is rudimentary for the politico-military force reproducing Capital, which aims to destructurise every assertion of our class homogeneity, by attacking all forms of our expression. On our side, we find it very difficult to act as a single unified force, but our enemies are capable of uniting all their forces, in an instant, to crush us whenever it proves necessary.

All our activity -asserting ourselves as the worldwide proletariat- must aim to break with the isolation with which the bourgeoisie tries to confine our struggle in Iraq. All of our energy must be directed at extending the direct action we are carrying out in this region by direct action in the rest of the world. We must shatter the isolation, smash the bourgeois ability to isolate some of us and repress us, whilst our class brothers remain indifferent elsewhere.

To this end we must, more than ever, assert our struggle in Iraq as a moment of the worldwide proletariat's struggle. We must declare ourselves to be a single body, a single class, united in the living conditions imposed on us internationally and, moreover, in the worldwide struggle we are waging to abolish our condition as wage-labourers.

Unfortunately, we have come across huge misunderstandings on this issue, even with comrades who are close to us and who claim to agree with our positions.

We have been confronted with a lot of difficulties around the issue of producing a common poster. There was organisational resistance, in keeping with the present sectarian period, which manifested itself in a reluctance to take part in the production and flyposting of the poster or in considering us to be wrong in taking on our own responsibility as a group in signing the poster.

There was also some doubt concerning the information given by our comrades. Some contacts demanded proof (!?) of our assertions, others purely and simply denied the insurrectional character of the proletarian explosions which took place in Iraq and only accepted the information... when the bourgeois press published it in part. Over and above great declarations of principle, we see an expression of submission to the State in all of this: information broadcast by the bourgeois media are more readily accepted than those transmitted, with all the imaginable attendant difficulties, via our militant network.

There were also misunderstandings about the task itself which was considered to be an isolated activity. However, it is impossible to grasp the significance of this international initiative without placing it in the context of its being a further action in our assertion of internationalist activity, community of struggle and organisation of international communist action.

There were other misunderstandings about the task itself, too often brought down to the level of "solidarity from us here to them over there" (according to the point of view of those in regions other than the Middle East); conversely, it was seen as a call from "here- Iraq- for those elsewhere to have solidarity with us". In reality it was an activity by the international proletariat "here" and "there" against our enemies "here" and "there".

Finally, stemming from the previous misunderstandings, this activity was considered to be a mediation, a simple advertising campaign for such and such a group of proletarians, rather than a counter-attack on the concerted activity of the worldwide bourgeoisie to isolate a regional faction of our class in order to be better able to crush it.

In general, we are faced with a parliamentary and federalist conception of proletarian unity, in which contacts, instead of pushing for united international action, keep stressing their own particular characteristics, stating that each individual group should be consulted on each of the various slogans or signatures..., without realising that this is a congressional and confederational conception belonging to Social Democracy, practically opposed to the community of struggle and that to accept such criteria by way of thousands of paralysing communications, would transform our community of struggle into a parliament (1).

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The elections for a national Kurdish parliament were a decisive moment for the action of the worldwide bourgeoisie against our class. At the time, our enemies did not let an opportunity for provocation and falsification slip them by. The media in Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq did all it could to develop the confusion between the positions of internationalist communists and the nationalists. The climax of these campaigns was, without doubt, the announcement by various nationalist radio stations- up to several times a day- that our organisation, the ICG, had called for participation in the Kurdish elections. This was despite the fact that, right from the beginning, our activities in the region had been against all nationalists and all parliaments. Once again, we stress that the very basis upon which our group arose is invariably against democracy and the nation and that any person or group placing our group in the framework of any sort of process of electoral and/or national reform, is acting directly against our programmatical basis. At best, it could be a mistake or falsification of our positions; but in most cases it must be the result of provocation incited by the Home Office or National Defence Ministry.

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As the Internationalist Communist Group we have been (and still are) faced with the following situation:

On the one hand, our comrades in Iraq claim that their strength is our strength and that it is precisely our international force that is preventing the allied counter-revolutionary forces from transforming the local reorganisation of the State into an open offensive. They have told us that the action taken by ICG and other internationalist groups in Europe and elsewhere is preventing our direct enemies (nationalists of all tendencies in Kurdistan) from carrying out systematic attacks on our comrades, because it makes the nationalists more vulnerable.

On the other hand and simultaneously, we try to lead this type of direct action in Europe and in America, yet some close comrades tell us that they don't see the point in such activities; they distrust the information we give them; they say that they would agree if they could add a different signature; they agree with one slogan but not with the other; they state that this kind of activity is pure propaganda, useless in the present situation because nowadays the proletariat "here" is not interested in what's going on "over there", etc...

In short, just at the time when our comrades insist that we maintain the pressure against nationalists, we are faced with thousands of sectarian, anti-organisative and individualistic pretexts that, in spite of their intentions, contribute to the isolation of vanguard sectors of the worldwide proletariat and to the repression of our comrades.

oOo

In line with the different calls we have made to proletarian internationalist groups, the Internationalist Communist Group has made a lot of effort to structure and centralise our activity in the region of Iraq in connection with activities we are developing elsewhere.

With our very meagre resources we have struggled to ensure an improved centralisation of various structures in the region. In the face of a total lack of means of communication with Iraq (no international post or telephone) we have undertaken serious efforts to find other ways of international internal contact.

Taking the enormous international importance of the events experienced in the region into account, as well as the exceptional interest that the proletariat there brings to our positions, we have decided to publish a new central review in Kurdish, in addition to the development of the Arabic central review and publishing the Theses of our programmatical direction in Arabic. If possible, we intend to publish, along with other groups of proletarians, a local review with the title "The Internationalist Proletarian" , with the aim of providing a wider framework for direct action and propaganda in the region of Iraq.

The flyposting and production of the poster undertaken by militants in various countries should be understood along the same lines. It was not a question of having "solidarity with" proletarians in Iraq, but rather one of acting together to assert the same struggle, interests, community, force, in a way that the bourgeoisie would find it impossible to wipe us out "bit by bit".

It is important to us that the distinction is made between false solidarity, which is seen to be a spectacular communication fictitiously linking workers of different countries and effective solidarity, resulting from common struggle.

Posters or leaflets calling for solidarity "here" with those "over there", appealing for compassion, for petitions, fundraising, for letter-writing to our torturers or asking for the help of parliamentarians...are not only harmless for the bourgeoisie, but also constitute Social Democratic politics par excellence, aiming to compartmentalise proletarian needs, such as the liberation of imprisoned comrades, the denunciation of repression in one area and the need to spread information about our comrades' struggles. They constitute bourgeois politique for the proletariat par excellence, because they transform the need for direct action against Capital into collaboration with the bourgeoisie. The extreme opposite of this is proletarian direct action, communism against Capital. Distributing leaflets or posters, depending on their form and content, is part of this activity if it takes place in a worldwide perspective, in line with the fact that the proletariat has only one kind of solidarity with its class brothers: direct action against its own bourgeoisie. Instead of calling for compassion or admiration for activity elsewhere, communist propaganda and agitation aims to facilitate generalisation of the struggle, aims to show that, here and now, the contradictions are fundamentally the same. If proletarians are active elsewhere, it is not a result of specific local characteristics, but is because of general reasons which concern "us" directly... which imply that "we" can and must act as well. Our poster is evidence that the activities of the Iraqi proletariat has illustrated the only possible way to eliminate wars for ever.

The flyposting that was carried out is much more than just flyposting to us, communists in Iraq, Iran, England, Spain, Germany, France, North and South America and elsewhere. It was a specific and modest manifestation of the worldwide force that the proletariat aims to structure. In its attempt- albeit very weak- to put the poster up at the same time in different parts of the globe, the proletariat forced its social enemy to fight on less secure grounds than it is used to. There is nothing better for nationalist, humanitarian and religious organisations than to concern themselves with "each proletariat" according to "its" national flag (this is how the bourgeoisie sees it!).

By forcing the bourgeoisie to fight on its sinking sand of directly international proletarian activity, we will prevent the crushing of our struggle in Iraq and can prepare tomorrow's struggles.

It is not a question of making platonic appeals for international support, but, with the help of all sections of the proletarian vanguard and militants from the world over, of counter-attacking politically the international bourgeoisie and its attempts to liquidate, by way of humanism and nationalism, some of our best comrades.

Let us repeat once again, today dominant defeatism combines with Social-Democracy's historical programme to deny the importance of such an initiative. The key to social-democratic policy on this precise issue is the reality of a weak level of consciousness regarding the existence of our class as a worldwide class, which it uses to wipe out any possibilities of direct action and to divide the proletariat by arguing that there are "objectively different situations in each country" as a way of justifying the impossibility of carrying out action "here and now". The bourgeoisie intervenes to impose silence on the proletariat, forcing it to resort to bourgeois intermediaries (inactivity, in reality), explaining that what goes on "here" has nothing in common with what happens "there" and that the only thing to do is to go via the common channels offered by society to show "solidarity": "make a poster here about the situation over-there", "make a poster here for the people here", send a protest letter, a delegation, or some money...

The historical opposition between parliamentarism and direct action is at play at this level.

Parliamentarism and democracy aim to broadcast their activity to the hilt, to separate decisions from action and theory from practice, advising proletarians of all countries to organise activities of "solidarity" by proxy...

The direct action and communist camp aims to carry out violent direct action against its enemy, not in this sense of immediate violence (as far as the international poster we are discussing is concerned), but in the sense of asserting our struggle on our own terrain: that of directly international confrontation, that of the assertion- unbearable for the bourgeoisie- of our community of struggle, of our common being.

When proletarians from a dozen countries act together (despite all the present constraints) and plan an activity to carry out together (if possible, simultaneously) against the same enemy, in the face of the same indifference, fighting for the same interests and objectives... they are carrying out a violent counter-attack on the bourgeoisie.

We are aware of the tragic discrepancy that exists today between the aggression that our class undergoes more or less throughout the world and the difficulties we have in reacting to these attacks. In this sense, we know that this common activity, like all the other activities that have been taken to centralise our struggle in Iraq, is really only a drop in the ocean compared to the enormity of the tasks we need to accomplish. It is obvious that we will need to undertake, against the tide, far more than these initiatives to undo this system of death that suffocates us.

In spite of this and in the context of a tragic absence of structures for international proletarian centralisation, it is important to us to stress the fact that several comrades from different backgrounds, living in different parts of the world have taken the initiative to centralise themselves against the tide of anti-organisationalism and dominant sectarianism and have thus been able to experience, by acting as one, a necessary moment of the "Growing Union" of the proletariat with a view to the definitive abolition of this world of death.

Today, we need this community of practical direct action more than ever. Its links are forged in common activity and it is from these links, against current sectarianism and individualism, that the seeds of an internationalist communist organisation of the proletariat will grow and will destroy the inhuman barbarity to which we are subjected.

Long live worldwide social revolution !

Es lebe die soziale Weltrevolution !

Por la revolución social mundial !

Vive la révolution sociale mondiale !

Note

1. Here we must respond to the old accusation made against communists taking initiatives. We are not denying the need for discussion within the proletarian community of struggle, by the comments we have made above. Of course we have to develop and centralise thousands of international discussions. But paralysing internationalist action, under the pretext that each participant must agree with each expression or be consulted about every step of the movement, actually renders any sort of action impossible, particulary in a period when there is no permanent centralising structure for action and discussion. As a very old comrade once said, a step forward in our movement is more important than a dozen programmes. Marx and Engels did not wait to consult all their contacts and comrades before taking direct action, before motivating the international movement by writing and publishing the "Communist Party Manifesto" in 1847.

AIDS, pure product of science !
The following text is not merely the result of a theoretical attempt to place the origin of AIDS back within the mode of production in which it materialised. The text is, above all, the product of a practical struggle led side by side with a militant from our group, who came from North America and who was struck down by AIDS. (Militarists say "hit by", scientists preferring to use the term "struck down by", in order to deny their own responsibility).

Our comrade started to share militant activity with us, on the basis of a radical break from drug addiction. His integration into the group coincided with total abstention from drugs. This is what he said:

"(...) Drug addiction is one of many possible expressions of a social response and position in the face of the frustrations of Capital, along with madness, delinquency and TV addiction. It is an unconscious revolt which stigmatises the refusal of the system in the flesh of its victims. Above all, it is the triumph of Capital's harnessing power: the society of drug addicts is practically the epitome of the capitalist model. Drug addiction is the triumph of individualism and anti-solidarity (each man for himself, dope for himself), the triumph of alienation (the concrete alienation of dependence on a product), the triumph of reification (suicide of a body/object, sold for drugs), the triumph of a palliative (choice between drugs or suffering), the triumph of the commodity (exchange value and use value, having the same denominator: drugs for survival), the triumph of value (a few banknotes for a few milligrams of powder and pleasure), etc... Drug addiction is a system of immediate institutionalised survival, otherwise known as the capitalist system..."

Shortly before writing this, he had learnt that he had AIDS.

It is impossible to describe the struggles of everyday life that this news gave rise to: permanent confrontation with the doctors, violent take over of the medical file compiled on him, radical critique of food (our comrade defined capitalist food as an attempt at generalised poisoning), vicious attempts, in vain, to obtain information on the possibilities publicised by the "alternative" medical vultures, as corrupted by financial interests as their "official" colleagues, struggle against the ideology of anti-pleasure, refusal to die in hospital, permanent battle not to accept -despite every conceivable pressure to do so (1) - the poison AZT, conceived by medical commerce, refusal to take part in experiments aiming to turn him into a guinea-pig,...

We lived every one of these moments together, like brothers in arms, with all the determination and passion for this one "true life" that the militant critique of the State constitutes for us. We discussed and chose, fully aware, the orientation and direction to give each of these moments of permanent struggle, with the result that our comrade did not die ill. He died fighting. He died living, as opposed to the majority of half dead-half living "beings" who populate the realm of capitalist social peace today and whose only reality is dictated by the monster Money, which dominates them.

The text we are publishing here follows the rhythm of all these moments. Most of the thoughts within it, as well as the communist point of view which animates it, are inextricably linked with the innumerable activities and discussions that we had together.

This is why this text is not dedicated to our comrade. This text IS our comrade. Our common break from the present world of death makes perfect sense. Here is how he formulated it:

"(...) The context of our struggle is paradox, is contradiction. 'We take up arms to abolish arms. We survive to abolish survival,... and at last to live. We must assume this contradiction, cross it, if we want, one day in the distant future, to live...In order to escape my 'madness' I arrived at an impasse, with two solutions: to chose to fight or to chose not to fight. I chose."

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"We continue the struggle for you, comrade, who would have put a recording of the Sex Pistols screaming 'No Future' in your own coffin. For you, comrade, whose veins were infested with a deadly substance created by torturers known as 'doctors'.

For you, who died fighting, slowly assassinated by Progress. With our common hatred of Science and the State we continue to fight with you, comrade!..."

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To make it quite clear for those who do not want to be hood-winked, nor to sing along with the State, the lyrics lies spewed out daily by the press, we want to state unequivocally that the AIDS retrovirus is a direct product of the new commercial possibilities opened up by molecular biology! Science, financed and equipped by Research and Progress in the military sector, has produced another 'cock-up' which it is attempting to conceal by reassuring reports fed to public opinion!

AIDS made its brilliant debut amongst the products of Science and the brainchildren of Progress - nuclear and chemical weapons, high security prisons, steroids, adulterated oil, bank safes, bloodletting, antibiotics,the electric chair, plastic surgery, television, parking metres, ECT, A-10 aeroplanes and Apache helicopters...

As materialists, we are going to expose some elements of the social and economic context in which Science and Medicine were struggling, in order to understand that the HIV retrovirus had every "reason" (commercial and/or "accidental") to appear... at a time when conditions were ripe to create it. This is not a question of sensationalism, but of breaking away from the predominating scientific and democratic folklore.

It is no more possible to envisage the mysterious apparition of AIDS, than it is to appreciate the reasons for the scientists' desperate efforts to obscure its origin, without a grasp of the way in which value intimately determines knowledge, the strict dictatorship of Money over Science, the total collusion between Science and Money (2), the profound unity between pharmaceutical research and commercial need, the inextricable link uniting the military domain, the politicians and the economic world.

We have set out to clarify our fundamental starting points for this text by way of the following comments:

We do not intend to contrast "good" science with "decadent, bad or corrupt" science. Science, as knowledge subsumed by capitalist valorisation, is rotten to the core. Like all of Capital's productive forces, Science is fundamentally inhuman: not only in its applications, but in its foundations.

It is impossible to put Science to good use, just as it is impossible to do so with the Police, for example. We have no more to reproach the Police than we do Science. Our critique is neither a response to "cock-ups" (be they scientific or police) nor a criticism of, for example, the scientific development and police usage of truncheons capable of firing electric shocks. Our practical and theoretical critique relates to the very existence of a force organized and armed in the defence of bourgeois Property. It relates to the essence of a consciousness whose narrow horizons consist of the need to accumulate capital. Science, like the Police, must not be reformed, but destroyed (3).

We apologize for repeating ourselves in this introduction on the subject of how, from a communist point of view, from the point of view of truly human needs, Science is beyond rehabilitation. We reiterate - to ensure that we are really well understood - that in handling this critique of the crap put forward concerning the origin of AIDS, we wish to dissociate ourselves completely from a critique limiting itself to a denunciation of the "excesses" of Science (like the bourgeois left denounce the "excesses" of the Police). The historical dictatorship of Value over Humanity has been enforced on human beings as they strive to develop knowledge, so that even Science's paradigms are rotten to the core. Such fundamental and sacred (so called neutral) concepts such as "matter", "atom"... are strictly determined by money, the narrow minded horizons of the Scientist, that slave to research (money!) and development (capitalist!), who is himself affected in every way by the dictatorship of the rate of profit.

We are not intending to write a scientific anti-thesis. We have taken up specific scientific arguments from time to time, because from our point of view - intent on the destruction of the science of capitalist death - they can sometimes reveal the reality off the commercial and warmongering iceberg hidden beneath the "tip", made up of tons of papers justifying scientific activity (4). Our analysis is therefore neither "scientific" nor "objective" in the bourgeois sense, stemming rather from the reality of existing social relationships. It is on this basis that we state that AIDS is objectively an invaluable commodity for Capital. We want to fight against being used as "medicine fodder", as salaried guinea-pigs.

Let's dive into scientific hell! The old mole is digging underground... let's follow!

Science, Capital's barbarism!

The priests of Science have got several methods of avoiding ridicule and hiding their delirium. One of these is the artificial barrier of abstruse terminology which they call "specialist" and surround themselves with when it comes to their diagnoses, "discoveries", medicines and other witchcraft.

By using another language they are aiming to discourage any attempts to question their power. They wear long white coats (5) for the same reasons. Armed with their jargon and impressive accessories the Scientist is above all a witch, a master!

Medical stupidity is still incapable of pointing out the true origins of the illnesses we suffer (for example, the junk food our wages permit us, the torture known as Work!) and these learned assassins continue to surround themselves with prestigious diplomas and other props, to convince the idiot citizens to let themselves be prodded by them.

But along with the "passive" lies of their vocabulary and ceremonies go the active lies - to protect Science you have to lie, to impose the lie as a truth, dogma and repress those who will not accept it.

Science is a power: that of the State! It is knowledge put to the service of Value. Science is under the orders of the bourgeoisie, serving its Knowledge helping the dominant class in its attempts to impose trade order. The applications of Science are above all commercial and military. Science is a monstrous trade and to impose it, one has to lie!

Galileo was considered to be an heretic by the majority of his colleagues because, by making a mockery of Copernicus's explanation that the earth revolves around the sun, he was exposing, even at that time, the institutionalized ignorance and stupidity that Science represents, thus invalidating years of University and Academic research (6). The lie was imposed on him by making him recant in front of the Inquisition in 1633. But he suffered less than millions of proletarian heretics, who for centuries have tried to flee work, denouncing it as torture but being forced to sing "Work is health", "Hey ho, hey ho! It's off to work we go!" by idiotic popular tradition and Science... or even "Arbeit macht frei".

Nothing has change since the time when those charlatans imposed their lies. Nothing has changed since official medicine advocated blood letting to cure fevers (7).

Today the picture is no brighter.

We are offered "anti-life" atomic bombs (antibiotics) in order to enable us to return to work quickly.

The author of this article, too naive at the time, suffered daily injections of the horrendous poison steroid... to treat a minor depression. To "cure" children's coughs they advocate tranquillizers in the form of syrup (good night and have a good day at work tomorrow, parents!)

The contraceptive pill, that booming commercial enterprise, is a real concentration of poisons leading to a risk of not only breast and uterine cancers, but also malformations of the genital tract in their female descendants... etc... etc.

Here we are not talking about medical "mistakes", such as surgical instruments left inside a stomach, confusion over the amputation of a limb or a mix-up of case-notes, but rather the official version of medicine, what every apprentice-torturer receives as orders by his superiors to calm down - sorry, treat- his patients (8) (they hypocritically call their victims "patients").

No, nothing has changed in the world of lies and Science. The most famous doctors who bled their patients to treat them, were protected and paid by the highest State institutions. No one was allowed to question their knowledge and power. Today, the democratic State finances the ideologies and lies of these thousands of scientific assassins in their redeeming white plumage, who bombard us, year after year, with hypnotics to numb the time we spend recuperating for work, stimulants to keep us awake at work, hormones to fatten up the low cost junk which sustains us and anabolic steroids to beat our "competitors",... Science is the Barbarism of Capital... in all its splendour!

Did HIV come from monkeys?

It is hardly surprising that, in common with their ancestors, today's representatives of Science attempt to impose their dogmas and lies upon us. Anything goes when protecting commerce and the State. Hence AIDS! To hide the fact that it is yet another monstrosity directly emanating from their laboratories, the State has not skimped on theories to cloud the issue of the laboratory origin of the virus.

A few examples.

In 1981, when a strange and hitherto unknown epidemic came to light, it was attributed to those who appeared to be particularly vulnerable to it: homosexuals. From this stemmed a surge of delirium masked by new diagnoses, emanating from the same idiots who are "reassuring" us today. One of the hypotheses argued that "sperm administered rectally had an immunosuppressant effect". More clearly put, these scientists attributed the loss of man's natural defence to the sweet pleasure of buggery! Thanks, Morality!

In 1985, scientocops fabricated an impressive web of events, beginning with a virus attributed to the African Green monkey. This was supposed to have mysteriously (?!) contaminated West Africans, thus causing a slight mutation of the virus which, after two further steps, brought about the HIV virus, responsible for the epidemic. We are not going to recount the idiotic logic of the laboratory experiments leading them to this conclusion, because in 1988, exposed, they were forced to admit that there had been some contamination in the lab and that the initial virus that they had taken as their starting point... was in fact a product of their own criminal manipulations. Hooray for biology (9)!

Again in 1985, in an attempt to distance the birth date of HIV from the years when material conditions made laboratory fabrication of the virus possible (since 1971!), American scientists "proved" that there were HIV antibodies in more than 50% of blood samples taken and deep frozen in Kenya and Uganda between 1959 and 1970. Loudly proclaimed in all world newspapers, these advances in research were refuted without publicity a few months later: the tests were found to be unreliable and new tests had proved the total absence of HIV antibodies in the same samples! Long live Science!

To distance still further the spectre of the scientific origin of AIDS, it was necessary not only to disconnect the dates at which the illness appeared from the time at which it became possible to engineer the virus, but also to conceal its geographical origin (10).

It is reasonable to think that such a scientific monstrosity originated from the historical world centres of accumulation of scientific knowledge (USA, Europe, Latin America...) and that therefore these same centres are attempting (as if by chance!) to distance the origin from themselves : "the sin must have stemmed from Africa or Haiti!"

Thus, in 1982, the Atlanta Centre for Disease control, an organization collecting medical epidemiological information for the US and influencing doctors throughout the world with its reports and recommendations, defined Haitians as a high risk group. In order to strengthen their case, the CDC argued that Haitians with AIDS do not present any of the "classical" identifying risk factors (IV drug abuse, homosexuality, haemophilia). How did they come to such a conclusion? Simply because the Haitian patients questioned in the US "declared" to the doctors that they were neither homosexuals nor IV drug abusers. One only has to appreciate the taboo of homosexual prostitution in the US as well as in Haiti, the severity of repression by the US Immigration Office, what it is actually like to reply to medical questionnaires (real state interrogation), the widespread condemnation of those admitting to drug addiction... in short, if one can grasp the precariousness of a life clinging to a string pulled by Medicine, Justice and the Immigration Office, one can understand why, out of 34 proletarian immigrants from Haiti who were HIV positive, only 4 would admit the origin of their "crime"!

On this basis, the CDC denounced Haitians and left them to the malice of public opinion. It then took 3 years for the CDC to retract and remove Haitians from the category of a high risk population, although to this day they are banned from giving blood!

This last example is interesting as it illustrates how the cover-ups that the bourgeoisie resort to are never the simple and machiavellian result of a few evil manipulators. All these lies start from a network of half-truths, which meet the needs of the dominant class and obscure the full story (the tree that hides the wood!), distortions of the truth, imposing themselves as ideology.

In defining the Haitians as a high risk group, the scientists started from a material basis (the fear of these immigrant proletarians, a fear consolidated by their refusal to admit to their homosexuality or drug addiction) and conclude statistically ("it's Scientific," they shout as soon as they have collected some numbers) that there are proportionally more Haitians than Americans with HIV!

The condemnation of Haitians has a function - exorcising the fear of millions of Americans - and responds to a need: allowing the continuity of the development of Science (and hence value!) without hindrance. Thus, to protect Medicine and Progress (indispensable to the disorganized movement of Capital), the State has to impose "truths" (ideologies), screening human worries from the horrors of reality.

But these "screens", ideologies, constitute a material force permitting Capital to prolong its inevitable agony: this crap is put forward in scientific terms, littered with absolute declarations, slowly uttered by those responsible for the medical "world", which imposes itself in the face of profanity and makes the idiot people hold Science in awe, in the same way that they kneel in front of the Pope or Yeltsin!

Paradise - be it Christian or "socialist"- uses the Pope's holy water or Castro's cigars as its props and as soon as it is faced with millions of homeless, unemployed, the 40,000 children dying of hunger daily, in short, when its absurd logic is opposed by prosaic reality, there is nothing left!

Nevertheless, it is all these lies that cement public opinion and turns every human being into a schizophrenic, someone separate from himself, sublimating his suffering to the point of defending it as his own happiness (11).

To return to the subject, when one sees the weakness of arguments concerning the origin of AIDS, one would think that this time there is little chance that anyone would fall for them! Wrong! The stupidity of these explanations does not prevent the media from expounding them!

Thus, to distance the date of the appearance of HIV from the period in which material conditions meant that it could be produced in laboratories, the researchers (of lies!) simply "discovered" a few cases of AIDS plump in the middle of the 50's and 60's in Africa. Rapidly it became apparent that tests supposedly demonstrating antibodies to the deadly virus in those old test tubes were invalid (see above). In the end it was decided to diagnose it retrospectively on the basis of vague resemblance to symptoms described in the files of the patients whose blood had been taken!!! To prove the truth of a premise, what better way than to invent it?

In the same way, in the mid 80's, justifications made to lead research of cases of AIDS dating back to the early 70's towards Africa rather than the U.S. (12) were based purely on the fact that it was unthinkable that such a disease could have passed unnoticed in that centre of Progress and Science that is the USA!

Whatever part stupidity, ignorance, lies, machiavellism, defense of interest, competition.... have to play, what drives doctors and other scientists to prolong their monstrous laboratory creation by equally monstrous lies regarding the origin of the virus, what they have in common is the twisted class point of view that makes them submit to the laws of the State, to the dictatorship of commercial expansion and capitalist progress!

The racism underlying ideologies which place the original appearance of AIDS in Africa or Haiti is merely an extension of the dominant power of this giant of Economy (and thus Science and Progress) that is the US.

But racism is not the prerogative of bourgeois Americans: all nations are racist and participate in one way or another in campaigns which denounce a "neighbour" by using AIDS to reinforce National Union. This is not a new concept: throughout history the bourgeoisie has used illness to feed the racist character of the state.

Around 1550, as an epidemic of syphilis spread throughout Europe, every nation tried to pass the buck to "foreigners". The Russians accused the Poles, the English and the Turks called it "the French disease", the French knew it as the Italian illness and the Italians blamed the Spanish...

oOo

Amongst the confusion of these demented "truths", counter-truths imposed upon us, a dominant idea aims to place the origin of the HIV virus well away from scientific labs, far away from the most well-known centres. In fact, everything points to the fact that AIDS appeared at a time when it had become technically possible to create such a virus, but public opinion, vessel for dominant ideology, vulgarizes the scientists' stories and turns itself into a shield against dissenters, making them look like paranoid enemies of Science. It all works out well for them! The world keeps on turning and goods keep on circulating! "The origin of AIDS ", the village gossip explains to me, "can be traced to a mysterious virus found in Green monkeys in Africa and which, because a negro doubtless buggered a monkey, has been transformed into a deadly epidemic. Debauchery (prostitution, homosexuality and drug addiction) then completed the work of these savages by spreading the virus throughout the planet"!

Science's horrific stroll in the garden of retroviruses

We are not going to take our turn at throwing our own pebble in the garden of scientific, journalistic or political hypotheses regarding the precise origin of the AIDS virus. As materialists, we have started by explaining the function of the crap spouted on the subject: to protect Science, defend Medicine, justify the astronomical sums spent in laboratories from which this genetic monster doubtless originates. We now want to give certain examples which show that since the early seventies, it has been technically, scientifically, biologically and materially possible to produce laboratory hybrids (13), clones, of which HIV is only a variant. There is no sensationalism in these proposals: it is a recognised fact, practised and commercially developed by an important section of medical research.

"The technology required to make new retroviruses capable of infecting man out of those already known to be carcinogenic or liable to cause immunodeficiencies or brain diseases in other mammals was already well developed and widely published by the beginning of the 70's. Many of the scientists now researching into AIDS previously worked in the oncology laboratories where the techniques were first developed : Gallo, Essex, Heseltine (U.S); Weiss, Jarret (U.K); Montagnier (France); Zhdanov, Lapin (USSR); Ddinhardt (Germany); etc."

The point of this quotation is not only to give the names of some of the assassins who doubtless managed to produce the monstrosities that we are talking about here. This statement by John Seale, member of the British Royal College of Physicians, published in the "New Scientist" of January 1987, illustrates, along with thousands of other examples, the fact that by the early 70's molecular biology had the means to invent and produce retroviruses capable of attacking the human immune system.

In 1969, in parallel with the resurgence of research into oncology, American scientists identified "reverse transcriptase". Don't panic! This Latin word is no more than the mysterious name given by modern wizards to describe an enzyme (enzyme = a protein involved in controlling the initiation, inhibition and rate of many different chemical reactions in the body; it's a biological catalyst) particular to retroviruses, allowing them to translate their RNA into DNA. Up until this time, Science had claimed with rigid conviction that only the converse was possible, ie the translation of DNA into RNA. The identification of reverse transcriptase has permitted the development of techniques for molecular cloning, ie the production of genetic monsters. This is what we are going to try and explain.

The principal dogma of molecular biology up until then was that it was impossible (and thus heresy!) to think of translating RNA genes into DNA (14). With this "discovery" (15) a whole new revolutionary method was opened up for medicine and "humanity" to, for example, adapt retroviruses specific to animal tumours to the human cell.

Retroviruses are RNA viruses whose specificity lies in their capacity to transcribe their RNA into DNA and then to transmit the DNA into a host cell. The identification of the retroviral enzyme, reverse transcriptase, made it technically possible to insert the virus at the heart of the genetic material of the cell (human or animal), permitting incredible new methods for genetic manipulation and cloning in molecular biology, as well as lucrative commercial enterprise.

Making no apology for repeating ourselves, we want to make sure that the full scale and horror of these weapons that have thus been put in the hands of licensed madmen is understood. We must emphasise that research into retroviruses is not the result of a "brainwave" by a particular scientist, but that the widespread fascination with the "reverse transcriptase" technique is directly linked to the fact that it has made it so easy to create all sorts of hybrids, retroviruses among them, something that was impossible a few years earlier. When it was realised that retroviruses could translate their RNA into DNA a whole new world of possibilities for cloning was opened up.

"In 1971, an amazing confirmation of the unique role of reverse transcriptase came with the demonstration of "infective DNA" (ie capable of infecting) within cells infected by retroviruses. When inserted into uninfected cells this DNA reproduces the virus, ie it carries the virus's genetic code."

Since then it has been possible, however clumsily, to produce genetic monsters by way of retroviruses. A few years later, between 1979 and 1981 (the incubation period of HIV!), the first cases of a rare type of pneumonia began to appear in California: it didn't take long for the white coated terrorists to announce that it was related to a new and original retrovirus. AIDS had started to grow in the horrendous garden of Science...and its emergence coincided exactly (we can never repeat this enough!) with the discovery of the existence of retroviruses and the possibility of cloning them. In order to clarify things a bit further, to make sure that the full extent of the catastrophe brought about by hideous experiments in molecular biology is understood, we want to try and explain how commercial stakes in laboratory research changed when reverse transcriptase came on the scene. Commercial interests were without doubt the driving force behind research into retroviruses and this provided a favourable climate for the "hatching" of HIV (whether accidental or deliberate is of little interest to us).

The pharmaceutical industry - real dictators, commanders and suppliers of capital for everything related to scientific research - has been actively researching ways to produce low-cost (to the manufacturer, of course!) human and animal substances. Like all capitalists, the management of a pharmaceutical company produces "medicines" (16), not to "treat", but to increase capital.

For a drug to be profitable, as with all commodities, a certain degree of human labour must be inherent in its production: the pharmaceutical industry would hardly be interested in egg white alone, presented as medicine (17)! On the other hand, production costs cannot be allowed to reach a level that would make the drug prohibitively expensive. Capitalists are not interested in products that cannot be commercialised.

Another determining factor in the race for profit between capitalists is the unbridled research into ways of producing the same commodity at a lower cost. To this end, industrialists are permanently researching different technology (a new machine, a new technique,...) which will permit them to turn the foundations of productive forces in the production of a particular commodity upside down. In effect, if a capitalist possesses a machine that allows him to produce a given article with a smaller amount of human labour than his competitors, he will not only be able to "corner the market" by selling it at a slightly reduced rate, but he will also - and above all - realise an extraordinnary surplus value, because the world market will continue to estimate the social labour time required for production of the commodity from a worldwide point of view. This means that his particular laboratory will produce, during each hour of labour, commodities which are equivalent to much more than one hour of labour elsewhere on the world market. In other words, an hour of labour in this laboratory will produce far more value (and thus a far greater appropriation of surplus-value) than other labs...for as long as it takes their competitors to get hold of the same technological advances!

There is a product (sorry, a poison!), interferon, whose present production costs are at least as high as its toxicity, which is marketed as a treatment for cancer. The purchaser pays $150 per day and only stops the treatment when the side effects become worse than the cancer! The whole business is extremely profitable for the pharmaceutical industry (18).

As long as capitalists producing this commodity have recourse to the same science and are faced with the same production problems, the situation remains static. In certain periods, it is not in their interest for things to develop, because it would be too blatant a contradiction within the global development of whichever branch of the economy (19). However now, doubtless because it is no longer possible to silence the multiple contradictions arising out of the DNA dogma and also because competition demands it, capitalists producing interferon are seeing their productive forces turned completely upside down by the discovery of reverse transcriptase and its ability to translate RNA into DNA. It is now possible to produce interferon in large quantities and the pharmaceutical capitalists are jostling one another to put the multiple applications of this "discovery" into practice (interferon is not the only one, of course!) and to put themselves in a position to benefit from this extraordinary, though short-lived surplus value!

We are briefly and as simply as possible, going to describe the difficulties that the pharmaceutical capitalists previously came up against in synthesising biological molecules.

In order to make bacteria (unicellular organisms) produce substances (proteins, that will become the active substance in a medicine) it is necessary to graft onto the bacteria a part of the genome (genetic material) of a cell normally producing the protein, although in small quantities.

The researcher is confronted with many sizeable problems, the biggest of which is the difficulty in isolating the DNA sequence enabling production of the protein. DNA is translated into messenger RNA and this mRNA is then read to produce the protein. However here, the researcher is faced with an astronomical number of different sequences (each one coding for a specific protein) amongst which ONLY ONE sequence will give the finished product, the desired protein. The mind boggles when contemplating the search for a few dozen sequences amongst millions.

It is in this field that reverse transcriptase brought to the pharmaceutical capitalist what the steam engine brought to the industrialist. In effect, reverse transcriptase is an enzyme of viral origin (coming from a retrovirus) permitting the synthesis of DNA from RNA. mRNA can be isolated much more easily than the DNA sequence in the genome first, because it is produced in far greater quantities than the DNA which only carries the desired sequence once and second, because, in the majority of cases, a single protein corresponds to one mRNA.

Therefore, our pharmaceutical capitalist who had to find the DNA sequence corresponding to the protein, with all the difficulties that that entailed, now only needs to isolate mRNA, let reverse transcriptase act on it to translate it into DNA which can then be used directly to graft onto bacteria.

It can thus be seen that reverse transcriptase, in addition to permitting the manipulations that we have mentioned above, is an enormous financial, commercial and economic (euphemistically known as "scientific" in specialist journals) asset to capitalism, permitting the emergence of innumerable poisons that will soon be sold to us as medicines.

We will now go on to demonstrate the fervour with which scientists worked to master this enzyme, the source of such profit.

From 1971 onwards, when reverse transcriptase's specific activity was identified, American oncologists threw themselves into fevered research and hunted down the famous enzyme in patients that they had under their thumbs. In 1970, Robert Gallo, of the National Cancer Institute in Bethseda, USA, identified and isolated reverse transcriptase in the white blood cells of leukaemia sufferers. In 1971, Stuart Aronson modified a specific mouse tumour retrovirus, extended its infective gene sequence and adapted it to human cells.

The same year, scientists managed to cleave a macaque virus, aiming to stick half of it onto a cleaved "bacteria digester" known as Lambda. This molecule was to be inserted into E.Coli, one of the bacteria present in normal human intestines. Imagine the damage if this genetically engineered molecule were, "by accident", to escape from the lab and find its way back to man! The official version of history is that certain scientists, enemies of Progress, prevented the project from reaching completion. In fact, they just wanted to move on! Other projects came to light and, what is certain is that, by 1971 it was possible to produce genetic jigsaws. A new kind of craftsman, armed with his scalpel (restriction enzymes), his transfer enzymes ("transcriptase" to translate DNA into RNA and reverse transcriptase to do the opposite) and his electron microscope, the molecular biologist is able to launch his attack on viruses, retroviruses and bacteria, cleaving them, assembling and reassembling them and testing them on human embryos (the most expensive) or on monkeys.

In 1972, the World Health Organisation (an agency directly dependent on the UN, and hence mainly on the USA) published an issue of their journal demanding that work be started to study the effects of certain viruses on the immune system, in particular the effects of infection on T lymphocytes (20). This is a further example to illustrate that the manipulations of viruses and retroviruses, whether hybrid or not, have not been carried out by alchemists who have strayed from the common path, but are the direct result of work by the most highly trained (to poison us better!) scientists under the leadership of the world's most prestigious medical men and women.

Does this give us a good enough idea as to the origins of this biological Chernobyl that scientists have subjected us to? No!

In the same year, experimentation upon human beings was announced at the 7th conference of the National Cancer Institute:

"The biology of cancer makes it necessary to study human beings using observational methods of the same degree of sophistication characterising animal experiments", explained Dr John Higginson, director of the National Agency for Cancer Research in Lyon. "Let it be clear that these techniques "characterising animal experiments" included the inoculation of the disease!" (21)

That year, 1972, in the "Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital" in Brooklyn, cancerous tissues were transplanted into men without their knowledge (22).

In 1974, they "successfully" grafted a gene onto a recently fertilized mouse egg: the foreign gene was transmitted hereditarily. They also managed to "successfully" grow sheep visna virus and bovine leukaemia virus in a human cell.

Our description of the infinite horrors of recombinant genetics, gene grafting, monstrous couplings of animal viruses with human cells and criminal and hazardous tests... stops here. To avoid getting indigestion we are now going to consider how ethical problems, moral anxieties and debates between the 'hawks' and 'doves' of Science and Progress raised by these experiments only represent a further step towards unrestrained experimentation. In the same way that the establishment of peace is necessary for the outbreak of war, conferences organised by scientists to decide whether all of this carries a danger of introducing genetic crap into the human system of heredity actually constitute the most efficient trampoline from which to launch research, unleashed!

It was along these lines that a conference was held in Asilomar and these hypocrites questioned the risks posed by genetic recombinations. A year long moratorium was imposed, but during a second Asilomar conference they made a ruling: it was necessary to protect the learned, the technicians as well as the human race! What a joke! Boots, gloves and helmets became regulation and varying levels of security were defined according to the degree of danger of the experiments...and everybody threw themselves back into fevered molecular biology research. Morality and ethics were redefined to serve better serve commercial and military. The learned fools of the human race, are financially dependent upon laboratories and the main laboratories are all placing their bets upon molecular biology. So, here we go!

The demand for human cells has become enormous. "Flow", "Microbiological of Walkerville" and "C of Maryland" are the three giant companies supplying labs, fighting tooth and nail to corner the market. In 7 years, "Flow" alone imported 12,000 pairs of kidneys from South Korea, vivisected from children removed prematurely by caesarian section in the third trimester of pregnancy. "Flow" is a subsidiary of the "General Research Corp.", which is involved in strategic research for the Pentagon and whose president admits that "organs have been bought to carry out organic cultures for medical research". "In Singapore and Switzerland", explains George Wald, Nobel prize winner in Medicine, hardly likely to be suspected of sympathizing with us anti-progressivists, "we have estimated the number of 'products of abortion' imported by the US between 1969 and 1978 at around 80,000" (23).

Commercially, with this 'boom' in molecular biology, the human cell has become an excellent commodity. Companies are being set up, competition is going all out, stimulating Science. Firms are springing up (Cetus, Genentech, Biogene...) and are centring their activities around products of recombinant genetics.

They are always lead by those who are known as the brains of the world, the most famous geneticists, the popes of molecular biology, the avant-garde of cancer research.

The market for molecular biology is ripe. Ever since the synthesis of the first gene in 1972, the molecular electronics sector has attracted computer firms and constitutes a major industrial and strategic stake. To mention only one of these giants, IBM is interested in attempts to replace silicon, an essential substance for information storage, with organic materials such as protein chains or enzymes, manipulated bacteria or viruses, etc,...

War and Commerce, the driving forces of Science!

Without going into all the new commercial demands of molecular biology since the blossoming of the genetic jigsaw, it is necessary to mention the jewel in the crown of research, one of the most important sources of finance for all these experiments, the real and historical motor of science: the Army.

The arms market has been interested in molecular electronics right from the beginning. The research is financed by enormous amounts of capital and projects are approved one after the other. They obviously remain secret, but all sorts of applications are tried and tested. The applications that are most dangerous to us clearly remain the property of the Army and a law was passed in 1969 to ensure that this monopoly is maintained without exception.

As with all laws, amendments are presented as a defence of the common good, although they actually sanction assassins draped in patriotic colours to produce and test the effectiveness of the genetic monsters they have created:

"... none of the funding granted should be used for open air trials of deadly chemical agents, neither of microorganisms causing disease, nor biological toxins (...), unless the Ministry of Defence, authorized by the US President, confirms that the test is necessary for national security."

The retrovirus tops the bill in all this research because, as we have seen earlier, it is - by way of reverse transcriptase - the essential and ideal vector for incorporation into other genomes.

Delegates from the Pentagon were already announcing the future direction of their research into viral "collages" by 1969:

"During the coming 5 to 10 years it will probably be possible to produce a new infective organism which may be considerably different from all known pathogenic micro-organisms."

They went on, in front of the Congress's credit commission:

"The importance of these germs is that they may be resistant to the immunological and therapeutic measures upon which we depend to keep ourselves relatively protected from infectious diseases."

Must we look any further to find the origin of the viral bomb-blast of HIV? And let us make it quite clear that it was not the result of a momentary aberration by a more machiavellian tendency (24) at the heart of the US State. Biological weapons had been envisaged for decades and the recruitment of the retrovirus dates back to 1952, when the techniques for its "rearrangement" and reproduction had not yet been developed. At this time, in Ottowa, it was envisaged as an agent for foot-and-mouth disease to destroy enemy herds.

Between 1976 and 1977, parliamentary enquiries took place in the US and revealed that a biological research programme had started in 1963 in the Fort Detrick military laboratory, using deadly infectious agents and neurotoxins. During this period, one molecular biologist, one electrician and an employee in the monkey section of Fort Detrick mysteriously died.

As we can see, the joyful achievements that we are lead to by medical research are the result of lengthy research, directly financed and directed by the State. The example of the USA is particularly telling, when one understands the avant-garde function of the local organisation of the bourgeois state in this part of the world. Progress in molecular biology directly and permanently interests American scientists and militarists.

It should be clear, at this stage of the text, that the separation between scientist, industrialist and militarist is an artificial one; research into molecular biology, more specifically centred on military applications, are inextricably linked with medical research. Fort Detrick, the military laboratory of the US army, near Washington in Maryland, is directly attached to and linked to the National Cancer Institute in Bethseda, a suburb of the American capital. To strengthen our argument we have put a short extract of a list of high-powered American scientists in this text, supported by the positions they occupy on the Administrative Councils of major pharmaceutical trusts and the links uniting them with the military domain.

As for the security standards decreed during the shameful conferences in Asilomar, these were set up by the National Institute for Health itself, defining four different types of laboratory of which the most highly protected, known as "P4", is also the best equipped...and the most "militarized": the first of these labs opened in 1977, in the same building as Fort Detrick, conceived and built by "Vickers" weapons factory.

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Here is a short illustration of the inextricable links between the industrial and military sectors. It is a list of the administrative and academic staff of the M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), a North American scientific College:

Jerry Mc Afee,
-Chemical Engineering Visiting Committee Chair
-Director, McDonnell Douglas Corp.
-Director, Chevron USA.
-Director, American Petroleum Institute...

Eugene Edzards Covert
-Director, United Technology.
-Consultant to BBN, Israël, Pratt Whitney.
-Member of NATO Aerospace Policy Committee.
-Consultant, US Army Research Office...

John Deutch
-Chairman, Defense Science Board Task Force on Small International Ballistic Missiles.
-Member of Defense Science Board.
-Member of Army Scientific Advisory Panel...

Steven Meyer
-Consultant, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)...

Alexander Rich
-Member of Corp Marine Biology Lab WHOI.
-Member of US-URSS Joint Committee on Science and Technology ('77-'81)...

All of the non-academic staff linked to the Lincoln Laboratory of the M.I.T. come from the military industrial or defence sectors (more often than not, from both at the same time). All the C.V.s look like this one:

Brent Scowcroft, USAF
-Lieutenant General USAF, 1974.
-Military assistant to President (1972-73)
-Director, Atlantic Council US.
-Director, National Bank of Washington.
-Vice-Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc...

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In short, it can be seen that Science and War merge into one, the learned and the militarists rowing together on the galley of Progress and Medicine! Cancer research is an essential support for the development of a cover permitting advances in military destructive technology. It is also a source of power, prestige and money for medical careerists (25). In the field of medical research, the scientist is King! War is the historical motor of Science: Progress never advances faster than it does in wartime and in this domain, research has no limits.

Whilst oncologists were studying the immune system, in particular between 1970 and 1975, research was being lead in parallel towards the discovery of a weapon of mass destruction:

"We know that American researchers concentrated on the question of whether or not it is possible to produce a kind of chemical or biological weapon that could kill people of one race and leave others more or less unscathed. These are what are known as "ethnic weapons". Certainly, techniques in genetics and molecular biology permit the development of these type of weapons."

This statement is no more from 'Paris-Match' than it is from the pages of a leftist rag. It is a statement made in 1983 by a renowned biologist, Seven Rose, of the British Open University's department for research into the brain.

It doubtless doesn't take many "brains" to spend one's life torturing monkeys and sheep to extract molecular hybrids. It requires even less "humanity", when crazed (but commercial) research by the pharmaceutical industry and other state agents leads to "ethnic weapons"! Scientific progress can no longer take us by surprise, in the face of the ever deepening chaos of this moribund society, only just able to regenerate itself through war.

Research into methods of destruction, orchestrated by the State, is permanent and goes back to the origins of class societies. However society has never before attained the current degree of barbarity. Where human reasoning remains, they would have us believe that a limit has been reached in the destruction of the human race and the planet that supports it: however Capital's infernal progress always proves them wrong. Just when you think that the maximum of what is organically and materially possible for man to bear has been reached, that Capital can go no further in its savage destruction of human minds and bodies, a new development comes and shatters this illusion.

Value devours everything! The State puts proletarians in the position where the sale of their labour alone is not enough to survive and forces them to sell their own organs.

The requirements of Science and Commerce push human limits ever further, profiting from the proletarians' worsening living conditions. Freedom to buy and sell is the basis of democracy: why not then trade in human organs that others freely choose to sell (26)?

Chemical and biological weapons, ethnic weapons, buying (by Science) and selling human organs (to survive)... We could go on and discuss "Zyklon" pesticides, gases which were used as weapons, the scientists, who created them with such care and attention, always able to claim after the massacre that they never intended them to be used like that. We could talk about all the poisons put in storage for many years, which the laboratories, always on the look-out for new ways of making profit, are bringing back out today, thanks to AIDS (27). We could describe the horror of the scientific executions of those on death row in the USA, etc.,but no further lists of the barbarity created by the insatiable appetite for buying and selling could be enough to open anyone's eyes. What's the point of relating additional horrors, when the very existence of worldwide capitalist Democracy produces the monstrous contradiction of starving more than 120 thousand people to death every day, whilst at the same time, the law of Value forces capitalists to destroy tonnes and tonnes of food?

This fact alone reveals the true horror of the mass-grave on which we live and no amount of "consciousness raising" can change the reality: only worldwide organisation and growing links between revolts springing from the permanent degradation of the proletariat's living conditions can put an end to the capitalist apocalypse.

The AIDS virus is not an accident!

In this short description of the context in which Scientific research has orientated itself in recent years, we have emphasized the simultaneous appearance of AIDS and the technological ability to produce it. There are more specific and very coherent articles which give a fuller account of the actual process leading to the production of HIV (28). We cannot delay ourselves further by attempting to prove what the facts prove alone: it's not a coincidence that such a spectacularly virulent and fatal virus appeared at a time when the technology existed to produce it. At least we will not die stupid as long as we denounce the true criminals at the origin of this epidemic: the scientists!

The State covers it up quite badly, and maximum embarrassment is caused by the "taboo" question of whether it's technically possible to produce HIV. In order to deny its scientific origins, Science's disciples only have one answer: "what possible interest could there be in developing a virus against which we cannot protect ourselves?!" For these medical priests, HIV does not meet the criteria for effectiveness with malicious intent,... and could not, therefore, have been produced by society!

Science continually sings the praises of the ideology of "objectivity" and luckily this has had an effect on some of them. When, in 1987, a journalist bluntly asked whether "if HIV did not exist, would it be possible to create it?", Dr.Brun-Vezinet replied "Yes, we can!". Professor Montagnier answered "Yes, we could". Dr.Chermann sat on the fence and Dr.Alizon denied the possibility... although in explaining why not, actually admitted that, if one thought hard about it, "it would be possible to produce an even more infectious agent, by preserving the viral envelope capable of recognising lymphocytes and using it to produce a much more pathogenic virus such as the 'flu virus; this could cause epidemics spreading like wildfire" (29).

It is thus impossible to deny that Science is capable of producing similar viruses, but even those who admit this to us put their white coats back on and ask us solemnly to disregard the poisons they create, to forget their commercial and military function, to ignore the innumerable cock-ups made in their labs, to clear our minds of the collusion between Cancer Research and National Defence Institutes, to stop thinking about the microbiological demons they continue to conceive...and to believe in the Holy Crusade of Science!

It's like listening to the worshippers of whichever god explaining that if you don't believe, it's because you have no faith, and if you want the faith...you have to believe. Religion promises us Paradise if we keep our mouths shut on earth; and Science assures us of a cure if we submit ourselves and close our eyes to it! Science and Religion are part of the same family: Value. The State. They have both always played a part in maintaining the status quo, either by way of preservation or adjustment of the worldwide system. One of the ways in which they try to do this is by lying outright, concealing reality because it is too powerful in decredibilising the State.

In February 1991 it was revealed that children between 6 and 15 years old were regularly raped by about 20 priests at a Catholic Convent near Montreal between 1950 and 1970. The police had known about it from the beginning, but the State had denied and covered up the facts in order to impose christian order, necessary for the coherence of the local State at the time. The same thing is happening as regards AIDS today, but the consequences of "confessing" are far heavier as there is much more at stake. Science is already accused of impotence, faced with the impossibility of curing; where would it be if the connection between society's military projects and the appearance of this worldwide epidemic were made public? The hideous Health representatives prefer to recite their moral litany, encouraging "prevention" as regards sexual excesses "which, for the most part, do not increase satisfaction, but on the contrary, lead to serious risks such as AIDS," as put by Professor Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris (30).

Today, discussions concerning the origin of AIDS have been more or less stifled by medical ideological enterprise. The most recent argument used to stave off any attempts to revive this issue consists of giving prime importance to finding practical solutions to AIDS: "Discussing the origin of AIDS is philosophizing, what we need are concrete solutions". Thus the race for research and profit is justified. The medical stampede can continue, determined more than ever by commercial competition, exacerbated as the capitalist crisis deepens day by day.

In the face of this, we had to break down the wall of silence built by the scientific State and resite the AIDS epidemic in the real context in which it appeared: the worldwide capitalist race for ever increasingly concentrated accumulation of Value.

The AIDS virus is not an accident!
Whether it is the result of an error during laboratory manipulations, a hybrid produced by a brain driven mad by Science or the direct result of crazed search for yet another weapon to add to the teeming armamentarium of those paranoid in the Defence of the Nation, matters little. Whatever the case, the AIDS retrovirus is the product of a society made ill by money, competition and commerce! AIDS is not a God-sent plague to remind us of morality. AIDS is the result of the infernal logic that human beings have suffered since Value became autonomous by way of a law submitting every human relationship, all new knowledge, all creative activity...to the strict dictatorship of the world market.

The laws of the market impose a permanent war between us all. Capitalists tear each other apart to corner the market and they mercilessly submit the very people they exploit -the proletarians- to the same war: "If you want a wage you must fight your competitors on the Labour Market!" In this war of all against all, Capital's self-limiting mechanism (the production of more surplus value than it is capable of realising) tends to be overruled by the infernal competition between market competitors; this race for profit leads them to conceive and develop "revolutionary" productive forces in all fields, permitting them to dominate one or other sector of the market by selling at lower cost.

Progress and Science thus rub shoulders with Commerce by submitting human consciousness to the same market dictatorship. Science only functions and develops thanks to massive funding of research along the lines intended by capitalists - research into developing the most effective weapon, to satisfy the cravings of whichever capitalist association, baptized "Nation". Research into machines, knowledge or techniques to yield the best production. Research to be the first to launch a drug able to relieve headaches completely or to bring about hair regrowth onto the market!

The AIDS virus is not an accident!

It is the result of unbridled research by Science, under the orders of Commerce, responding to the market needs of the pharmaceutical industry, bionics, molecular electronics, computing, etc,...

Science is not an accident either. Science is the product, and agent, of Capital. Science is the negation of human knowledge, in that its development is based on the need for capitalist development. It exists as the negation of Humankind, seeking to submit every discovery, every experience, all knowledge to the democratic dictatorship of Commodity and the State defending it.

It doesn't matter to them that the medicines they create are tested with fatal consequences on human beings who accept the tests because they have no other means to live or because they no longer have the strength to protest: the aim of Science is Commerce! The function of Science... is Ignorance: by elevating itself to the level of a divine sect next to the State that finances it, Science takes on, maintains and directs the separation between human beings and the knowledge that is vital to them. In this way the proletariat remains ignorant of the enemy, the total antagonism: Capital. It is impossible to describe the inhumanity to which the proletariat is subjected: if we have a headache, it is not because we have worked eight hours a day,... but because we need aspirin!

oOo

"... With you, comrade, we will continue to fight! Every moment and everywhere. We saw your burial as a fight, because every moment in this world of silence is a fight. Yes! Even to bury a comrade! Can you believe it? The balance of forces between our class and the hated class is even expressed in a funeral. At a different time, at a time when one of our deaths is paid for by hundreds of theirs, we could have unfurled our flags, black with anger, and celebrated your memory in a life of revolution.

However, this time, we had to fight to prevent one of those dark hyenas known as "priests" from leaning over you; we had to fight to impose your "real family" - those of us who had forged bonds of struggle together - as your funeral procession; we had to fight because, even at the time of the cremation, some 'bigwig' wanted to take up more time and place to send-off his trussed-up dead; we had to struggle against the farce of those poor idiots, dressed in grey and paid to cry, all the while hurrying the ceremonies along; we had to struggle against the ridicule of the morbid spectacle that surrounds such circumstances, where, in this anti-pleasure society, the done thing is to make the widow cry and to screw-up the living! Don't worry, comrade, your death has not frightened us. It has given us a lot more determination in our struggle to get rid of the monstrous inhumanity of Capital once and for all!

Science will not have the last word. Already some of the proletarians affected by the same poison that condemned you, have started to avenge their future deaths - by biting police and other agents of the State who have sought to control them, until they have drawn blood. Proletarian resistance will always find a suitable response to the most twisted forms of capitalist aggression!

"Is there life after death?"

With you, comrade, we answer yes. We continue to maintain that "true life" resides within the continuity of our relentless struggle to organise ourselves as a force, determined to bring down, once and for all, the pathetic leeches who exploit us, to impose a society without classes and without money."

Notes

1. At the time of going to press, the world media announced, on the basis of a 3 year study on 1749 patients: "There is no difference in the rate of progression to a more serious or final stage of the disease between those taking AZT and those not." (Libération, Le Monde,... 2.4.93)

Since the mid 80's, nearly 10 years now, the same media broadcast reassuring "medical" information that AZT was the only way to combat the fatal progression of AIDS. In retrospect, it may be easier to imagine how the "pressures" we talk about in the introduction materialized. The doctors absolved themselves of responsibility as soon as they heard that our comrade refused, against their advice, to take AZT. Those close to him were practically treated like assassins because of their refusal to support "specialist medical advice", the doctors continuing to terrorize them to the point of specifying the time scale by which his death would be brought forward if their advice was not taken... This constitutes the dictatorship of Value for the imposition of its commodities on human beings.

2. If a further example is needed to illustrate this collusion, it is enough to recall the recent publicity surrounding the contaminated batches of blood which the French Blood Transfusion Centre continued to distribute to haemophiliacs, because it was in their financial interest to do so. But let's not be fooled: the media latches onto a particular story in order to increase the credibility of the whole of Science and the State. When the press reveals cock-ups made by the Police or Scientists, denouncing one or the other as being "irresponsible", it does so with the aim of justifying the very existence of the Police and murderous Medicine.

3. It is clear that future society, communist society, will require knowledge, as a structured explanation of phenomena and will find it necessary to transmit this knowledge both geographically and down through generations... But we very much doubt that the term "Science" will be retained. It is so loaded with historical bourgeois significance that even if it is brought down to its neutral etymological origin, "exact knowledge of things", it still could not be used, just as the term "Religion" originally refers to the "natural link of human beings with nature and with each other", but which is far too loaded with bourgeois significance to ever be used otherwise.

4. The same thing goes for Scientific as it does for other information. Generally, when discussing class struggle we only have a few paragraphs at our disposal, robbed of their originality, describing the content of the struggle in terms of numbers of dead. In the same way, to write this text on AIDS we had to read between the lines, absorb opposing points of view in order to destroy them, collect true personal accounts, so much richer than any stories told in the magazines, read pages and pages of disgusting crap, steeped in Knowledge, to reveal contradictions and expose what has been obscured...A task made even more arduous by its being a poorly accessible domain, not only from the point of view of the taboo of scientific Knowledge, but also because of the mindless logic that inevitably clouds the issue around such matters.

5. This scientific disguise is used today to permit any old clown to make propaganda for whichever suncream or toothpaste. There is no doubt that science sells; above all, there is also no doubt that the common man is convinced by this circus to exchange his life for shiny, coloured mirrors.

6. Copernicus and Galileo went much further than this, without realizing it. In making the Earth turn around the Sun, they theoretically prolonged the influence that the nascent bourgeoisie had upon the lords. The Earth ceased to be the centre of the world and God, the centre of creation. The feudal lords thus lost their divine status. They began to favour the emergence of the new god of the new dominant class: Science.

7. The very conservative "Ordre des Médecins" in France, well specialised in all sorts of witch-hunts, can no longer conceal that "there is no doubt that the medicine of the 18th century killed more people than it cured". This statement appeared a few years ago in France in the "Quotidien du Médecin", a French medical journal.

8. As often happens, etymology reveals the deep meaning of a word that modern society has tried to alter. "Patient", from the Latin "patiens", means "he who is made to suffer", a derivation from the Latin "pati" (to suffer). One of the French definitions of "patient" includes the unchanged origin from the Latin: "a person who is subjected to or will be subjected to torture" (Petit Robert 1990).

9. Messing about with cells from monkeys is very common in biology. Green monkeys are used for, amongst other things, the production of vaccines, something which points to the fact that if there ever has been a link between HIV and Green monkeys, it would have stemmed directly from the manipulations of the laboratory technocrats' snowy-white and "clean" hands, rather than from the "perverted lust" of Africans, as implied by judeo-christian racist morality.

10. Some scientists even go so far as claiming that HIV originated in Space! An astrophysicist from the University of Wales, Chandra Wickramasinghe, has been working for years on the cosmic origins of certain illnesses, such as 'flu, and claims that HIV could have come from Space. However spectacular his thesis, it at least shows that he has ruled out the possibility of any other earthly origin apart from laboratory production: "The AIDS virus either escaped form a laboratory or it comes from Space." (El Pais, 24/12/1992)

11. Recently, in a Swiss magazine, we saw a brilliant example of this kind of contradiction within the proletariat. Under the threat of the deportation of all her family, an immigrant mother, terrorised by the Immigration Office, stated: "I know that there is freedom here in Switzerland, but when the doorbell rings, I tremble."

12. Out of 288,377 cases of AIDS recorded by the WHO from the start of the epidemic until the end of 1990, 50% have been in the US and 25% in 45 African countries. Even though statistics often conceal the essential from us, these ones nevertheless go some way to correct the currently accepted viewpoint that Africa is the most infected continent, an opinion which corroborates western racist theories.

13. A hybrid is a genetic monster made up of several cell varieties with different genetic origins.

14. A few months before reverse transcriptase proved its existence in Science's sceptical eyes, Jacques Monod, considered to be one of the great masters of modern science, defended the prevailing dogma of DNA in his book "Coincidence and Necessity", stating that "it has never been observed, nor is it conceivable, that the information could ever be transferred in the opposite direction". The ridicule killed him!

15. We have put "discovery" in brackets because it is necessary to realise that many researchers had been opposed to this scientific dogma for a long time (for example, Beljanski, in France, was banned from the Pasteur Institute), but they were denied research funding because they refused to submit themselves to the medical and scientific Inquisition's dogma! Today, the same people who previously defended the "holy dogma", describe the "discovery" of enzymes capable of using viral DNA, as a mould for synthesising DNA, as revolutionary.

16. The use value of pharmaceutical products is subsumed at this point by exchange value, which could more objectively be referred to as "poison" than "medicine"!

17. The example of egg white is not deliberately provocative! There is an antiviral agent (AL 721) which is very accessible and can be isolated in egg white, but which is not profitable enough for the pharmaceutical industry. They would only show interest if the amount of labour force crystallised within the product allowed its commercialisation as a commodity with a significant enough degree of surplus value!

18. Discovered in 1957 and marketed as an anti-cancer agent, interferon enabled the capitalists who patented it to make intermittent business out of it, each time justified by research. For 15 years, the labs that were experimenting on it received heavy funding. Always tested on cancer sufferers, the economic performance of interferon was inversely proportional to the state of health of the guinea-pigs: in the early 70's it had to be shelved.

But then genetic manipulations came into play and rekindled interest and funding for the product. Speculation began, shares were soaring! A publicity campaign began to establish research into it, but soon interest (financial!) dropped off again because it became public knowledge that when treatment is stopped cancer cells proliferate! Happily for the product's shareholders, HIV came on the scene and gave another justification for bringing the poison out of the cupboard!

19. This is how a good doctor, full of illusions about the purity of the world he thought he was entering into, has ended up living under-cover somewhere in Columbia, with killers hired by pharmaceutical trusts hot on his heels. This doctor developed an effective vaccine against hepatitis B, but refused to give his patent up to one of the powerful multinationals. Naive, he intended to give his vaccine to a non-governmental and third-worldist organisation so that, as he believed, the vaccine could be produced at low cost and therefore be available to the poorest populations of Asia and Africa.

20. T lymphocytes are one of the main types of lymphocytes; these are a category of white cells with a so-called "specific" immune function, because they selectively recognise the substance threatening the organism. They print antigens into their memory and can therefore respond immediately the next time they are exposed to a given antigen. Amongst these T lymphocytes ("T" because they are produced via the thymus gland), "T4" lymphocytes coordinate and direct the overall defence. Their outer membrane carries the OKT4 molecule, upon which the AIDS retrovirus attaches a corresponding part of its envelope, thus entering, as if sucked in from the inside.

21. "Tristes chimères", Rolande Girard (1987).

22. Today this practice of ruthless experimentation is under control, subjected to international legislation... and is thus generalised! In order to put someone who is terminally ill into a trial, the laboratory has to obtain permission from an "Ethics Committee" (yes, yes, "ethics"!), which is in fact a committee of the hospital establishment in which the trial will take place. In order to reassure their relatives, the labs extort "consent" in the form of a signature from the patient...unless this unofficial trial is already part of a "protocol" accepted by international legislation.

"In this way all trials will either be massive yet controlled; or ruthless yet legal. The State legislates the tautology between a citizen made ill by one world and a world which sees the illness it produces as a guaranteed endless industrial challenge. The methods used by those who are given the right to carry out research can be seen, in the long term, to be as damaging as the illness itself. Thus, radiation produces tumours, which are destroyed by radiation, which will give rise to other tumours, etc..."

Extract from "N'Dréa", published by "Os Cangaceiros", February '92.

23. A vile trade in human organs is developing throughout the world, kidneys being most in demand: nearly 10,000 people are awaiting kidney transplants. Tradesmen are therefore hunting for kidneys. An Anatolian peasant, living in Istanbul, recently had his kidney removed, having thought he had just signed a contract for a job in London. He received $4000 damages, although the cost of the operation for the recipient came to $100,000, the difference ending up in the pockets of the surgeons and middle-men. The scandal was such that the white butchers were "sentenced"... to working in the National Health Service alone, with a temporary ban on working in the private sector!

The kidney is not the only possible source of profit. In Bogota, Columbia, children have their eyes enucleated in the slums and the hospitals: Porto Rico, Guadeloupe and Miami are subsidiaries in the commercialisation of organs -the worldwide capitalist market sees gold even in the gaze of children!

24. It is wrong to label as "machiavellian" those who are only stating loud and clear what Capital demands of them. Thus, Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank and ex US Secretary of State (he ordered massive bomb attacks on Vietnam) spoke openly about the methods of struggle against what he calls "galloping demography":

"Epidemic illnesses are a natural way of reducing the population (...). We must take draconian measures for demographic reduction against the will of the population. It has proved impossible or insufficient to reduce birth rates. It is therefore necessary to increase death rates. How? By natural methods: Famine and sickness."

25. As the graffiti on the walls of the Villejuifjunior doctors' on-call room goes: "more people live off cancer than die from it!"

26. What could be more normal than the American democratic model being, once again, the sword defending private property, right down to its bodily and organic manifestations? A recent judgment by the Californian Supreme Court recognised that everyone has property rights over their body and thus accepts that parts of it can be freely commercialised. The freedom to have one's body at one's disposal can not be denied by the State. Proletarian in hardship, democracy protects you: you have the right to sell your kidney! Who could still claim that the present day salaried slave is superior to the slave of Antiquity?

27. We want to talk about AZT - zidovudine - which is extremely toxic. Peter Duesberg, a professor of Molecular Biology, not one to criticize science much normally, stated the following:

"I think that AZT is AIDS on prescription. This substance prevents the process of replication of DNA within cells, thus blocking not only the multiplication of the HIV virus, but at the same time destroying all reproducing cells, particularly those of the immune system. AZT is not only useless but fatal."

28. The AIDS virus, according to one of these theories, is a hybrid resulting from assembling the VISNA virus (a "lentivirus" responsible for a brain disease in sheep, largely in Island, and which, like HIV, is characterised by its extremely long incubation period) with part of HTLV-1 attached to it (HTLV-1 is a widespread virus in Northern Japan and causes lymphoproliferative cancers in humans). In order to defend their theory, the scientists (who are now treated as heretics and have been banned) describe a 23 point assembly that occurs when one "couples" the AIDS virus with VISNA. This would appear to confirm the close genetic origins of these two viruses; they conclude their argument by illustrating that the part of the human virus (HTLV-1) grafted onto VISNA (previously non-virulent for humans), is precisely the part of the genetic code (DNA) which programmes the production of a protein permitting the attachment of HTLV-1 onto human T-4 lymphocytes. According to this theory, as soon as the protein was attached, VISNA became virulent to the cells and thus to humans!

This theory has since been denounced as propaganda orchestrated by counter-espionage from what was the USSR. Gorbatchov even made an official apology. Is this a manoeuvre to cloud the issue or are these real capitalist contradictions? Today, Professor Gallo himself, the number 1 of AIDS research, has been denounced by the American police for having concealed details of his discovery of the AIDS virus. Will Clinton also apologize?

29. "Tristes chimères", Rolande Girard (1987).

30. In this text we have not attempted to comment on the way in which the State has used AIDS to reinforce its anti-pleasure drive. AIDS is presented as a penitence and Morality has never been so powerful in imposing Family, Tradition, Abstinence, Sacrifice, Marriage and Chastity as guardians of Order in this world.

Introduction

We have chosen to present here a text, called "The Beast of Property", written by Johann Most in 1883, for different reasons: first of all, we want to break with a myth: the myth claiming that no revolutionary organization existed outside and against Social Democracy before 1914. Indeed, all those who never accepted that Social Democracy (considered here as the whole of the parties organized in and around the Second International)1 was counterrevolutionary from its birth, created a myth, a myth claiming that before the fateful date of 1914 Social Democracy was a revolutionary organization defending the interests of the proletariat. This meant that, according to Social Democracy, any attempt to organize outside and against itself, was condemned to political death and/or sectarianism. We completely disagree with this position. Without going into details, it is important to mention that Social Democracy was engendered by the counterrevolution that followed the defeat of the Paris Commune and more generally the defeat of the whole proletarian movement of that period. Ideologizing the revolutionary program elaborated by Marx and Engels, emptying it of its necrological content2 to keep only its envelop, its form, its words, Social Democracy created "marxism" (i.e. an attempt to give a new look to the same old theories of political economy that Marx criticized) and by that, a fictitious filiation with the First International of which it took the name: Second International; Social Democracy, the party of Capital for the workers, became a major force of attraction for the proletariat which was then framed and disciplined in order to participate in the good functioning of the system. How did Social Democracy do that? It disintegrated the proletariat into a mere economic category: the workers, reducing the proletariat to "those who work", no matter if they fight against work or not, annihilating any attempt at struggling. On the other hand, Social Democracy aimed to organize the whole life of these workers: it created trade unions, schools, universities, cultural groups, choral groups, etc., so as to control every minute of the workers' life and be able to channel every fit of anger into a claim for "better living conditions", the aim of which was to make exploitation acceptable to the exploited.

In Germany the strength of the Social Democratic Party was immense, but many militants tried to organize against it. "Die Jungen" ('The Young') are one of the most interesting oppositions, because, from 1889 to 1891, the date of their expulsion from the SDP, this group, in its fight against reformism and parliamentarism, claimed Marx's revolutionary program and rejected what Social Democracy had made of it. Other oppositions fought against the counterrevolutionary nature of an organization that spoke out in the name of the revolution but defended reformism, parliamentarism, gradualism and pacifism; but very few of them were able to reappropriate the bases of the revolutionary program elaborated by Marx, very few militants recognized the difference between Marx and "marxism" (in the sense of the ideologization of Marx's criticism), and many negated the programmatical importance of the former in their struggle against the latter. This weakness led the militants breaking with the SDP to the anarchist ideology... Indeed, to briefly sum up this quite complex process, let's say that the leadership of the opposition to Social Democracy was, in most cases, confiscated by the anarchist ideology. The story of "Die Jungen" is a good example of this process. After their exclusion from the SDP, "Die Jungen" created the "Gathering of the Inde pendent Socialists" that united two divergent tendencies: the first one opposing the counterrevolutionary and parliamentarist character of the SDP, the second one opposing the exclusions and the dictatorship of the SDP as well as the "compulsory centralisation that comes with it". Up until 1893, "Der Sozialist", the journal of the newborn organization, will be the centre of polemics between the two tendencies. From 1893, and in spite of the so-called Oppositional tendency, Gustav Landauer takes the leadership of the journal. The Oppositional tendency quits. Some of its militants will go back to the SDP, the others will stop all activities. What is left of "Die Jungen" and "Der Sozialist", under Landauer's influence will turn to the social democratic version of anarchism: educationism (to educate each proletarian before taking mass actions), self-management (to form little communities producing in accordance with their needs) and pacifism (against violence and direct action). Landauer stands for "a real democracy" and rejects the dictatorship of the proletariat ("Would it be a threat... I would hate it and fight against it as if it was the plague" he said). In January 1919 (!!) Landauer goes back to the parliament (to propagate his ideas and "fight without concession" the parliamentary system). He will be assassinated in May 1919, his work done: the breaking of "Die Jungen" has come back to the bosom of the German Social Democratic Party.

In this short paragraph we wanted to recall the role of Social Democracy and the necessity to break the myth created about it. It is in this sense that we consider "The Beast of Property" as being interesting and important. This text belongs to the whole of the attempts made to break with Social Democracy, that is the first reason why we publish it.

oOo

The second reason why we present this text is that it is representative of the period in which it was written. It really is an expression of the struggles of its epoch, as well as the memory of the attempts of revolutionary militants who undertook the direction of the struggles against Social Democracy.

The text we present here was written in the United States in 1883 by an ex-MP of the SDP: Johann Most. The trajectory of this militant is interesting inasmuch as it is representative of the trajectory of many of his comrades and, in general, of many militants all over the world in their fight against Social Democracy.

Born in 1846 in Germany, Johann Most joined in 1867 the Zurich section of the International Working-Men's Association (First International). From 1869 until 1870, he lived in Austria, in Vienna (where he was three times sent to jail because of his militant activities). In 1871, he was expelled from that country and he went back to Germany where he edited social democratic newspapers. In 1874, he was elected to the Reichstag. This experience led him to break with the SDP. Indeed, instead of finding a place where he could defend Socialism and the interest of the working class, he discovered what he called later "a theatre of marionettes", being silenced each time when the defence of the working class was at stake. Most had thought that the parliament could be used as a tribune for the revolution. He quickly experienced that it was only a show. Many other militants underwent the same experience, from Karl Liebknecht to Domela Nieuwenhuis and Otto Rühle, who broke with parliamentarism at different periods but on the same basis. In 1878, Most was re- elected to the Reichstag, but the same year, he broke with the party and, at the same time, with parliamentarism.

1878 is the year when socialist activities were banned by the Bismarck government. In fact, these anti-socialist laws (they were called 'Exceptional Laws') did not prevent the SDP from taking part in the Reichstag, far from it. These were laws against militant activities, that is to say against the militant press, against propaganda, meetings, demonstrations... Therefore all these activities had to be done illegally, and the SDP refused to organize them, arguing that the party was safe and should organize legally. Social Democracy used the anti-socialist laws to clean its own organization, to get rid of the "trouble- makers" and to impose, even more strongly, reformism and pacifism as the program on the workers. These anti-socialist laws were introduced against the last revolutionary militants of the SDP. The party justified its refusal to organize illegally by arguing that it was a necessity to defend the acquisitions of the organization (schools, seats in parliament, trade-unions,...), arguing that it was a necessity to defend the achievements of the workers saying that there was a danger of losing them in confron tations with the State. The same arguments were used by the same party later, to justify the vote for the war credits in 1914.

For a lot of militants this was the last straw. Johann Most is one of them. Expelled from Berlin, he went to London where he published the first issue of "Freiheit" ("Freedom"), a journal he will publish until he dies in 1906. The SDP of Germany officially expelled him in 1880 at the Congress of Wyden, arguing that Most had anti-organisational attitudes and a bad character.

In 1881, the International Social Revolutionary Congress of London took place thanks to Most's and other European militants' initiative. These militants' aim was to re-establish a true revolutionary International. Johann Most could not attend the Congress for he was in jail because of an article applauding the assassination of Alexander II.

The Congress took the name of the "First International" but it refused any central committee or executive bureau, since no central authority was accepted except for a bureau of information. We can see the weakness of this refusal to organize around a direction, around leaders, whatever name they take, central committee, executive organ,... Because, for sure, a direction will exist anyway and if it is not the revolutionary one, it will be the one of the bourgeoisie, of democracy. The militants will learn it through their own experience and will draw the lessons. On the other hand, while this weakness is pres ent in many attempts to gather militant forces, while this refusal of any kind of leadership is clearly written in the programs of these organizations, it is visible that the practice of the same militants is quite different, as we will see later. The threat that this so called Black International posed, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, never became a reality. In Europe, it died soon, but in the United States it had sequel as we will see later.

As we have said, while staying in London, Most published the first issues of "Freiheit". By 1880, the journal pushed revol utionary con spiracy in the Blanquist sense of the term (that is to say the organ ization of clandestine struc tures prepared to attack the State at its strategical points in order to seize power) and propaganda by the deed. If it is clear to us that the need for direct action, for proletarian violent actions against the bourgeoisie and its State, as well as the need to organize illegally are essential features of the revolutionary process; nevertheless, we must make it clear that the proletarian insurrection, the communist revolution is something completely different from an isolated conspiracy. If it is very important for the revolutionary militants to be aware of the necessity of direct action and conspiracy in order to seize power, it is at the same time as important to be able to evaluate the period and the balance of forces between the classes to avoid the trap of the Blanquist ideology3 claiming that the revolution could be achieved by an isolated coup.

"Freiheit" called for the violent destruction of capitalism, denouncing all partial reforms as mere betrayals; the lesson Johann Most drew of his experience as deputy will lead the struggle of all his life. Most said one day:

"that the end is to be made to the mockery of the ballot, and that the best thing one can do with such fellows as Jay Gould and Vanderbilt [american railway magnates] is to hang them on the nearest lamp-post."

Most urged the working class: if it did not crush their oppressors, the oppressors would crush them, they would

"drown the revolution in the blood of the best and rivet the chains of slavery more firmly than ever. Kill or be killed is the alternative."

And he added,

"We are revolutionists not from the love of gore, but because there is no other way to free and redeem man kind. History has taught that. No use of trying reform. The Gordian knot can be cut only by the sword, and within a ew years the masses will write the history of the world."

It was indeed very clear to Johann Most that the only alternative to the barbarity of this society was the social revolution and he was convinced of the necessity to organize and arm in order to overthrow and defeat Capital.

In 1882, facing very strong repression in England, Most answers positively to J.H. Schwab's invitation and left London for Chica go.

When he arrives in the USA, it is the time of a deep and hard crisis: unemployment, misery, homelessness and starvation. In Chicago alone almost 34,000 workers were thrown out of work. Unemployment, added to the awful living conditions, housing, ... led to social unrest, spontaneous upsurge, demonstrations, boycotts. Strike after strike, the proletarians had to face the local police and vigilantes, the National Guard units, the state militias, the Pinkerton agents,... Bosses made blacklists and lockouts whenever they needed them and the federal troops were always there to protect them.

As to political organizations, Social Democracy represented by the Socialist Labor Party of the USA endured, around the end of the '70s, lots of divisions and disagreements especially concerning two questions: the question of self-defence and the question of political compromise. Some militants of the SLP, as early as 1875, founded the "Lehr-und-Wehr Verein" ('Education and Defense Society') in order to never again be beaten by the police or the militia without fighting back.4 Under various names, these groups of self-defence drilled with rifles and bayonets. Their purpose was to protect mass meetings, demonstrations or any kind of proletarian gathering from the brutality of the State guards. In 1878, the year of the anti-socialist laws in Germany (that is to say the year the SDP purged its ranks), the National Executive Committee of the SLP banned any armed organization and ordered its members to withdraw. One more confirmation of the aim of Social Democracy: to disarm the proletariat and to clean its own ranks from any practice of direct action against the State. The National Executive Committee dissociated itself from any armed organization "that tries to accomplish by force what could be obtained through ballot". In 1879, the State of Illinois proclaimed a new law forbidding all "groups of men wearing weapons without licence" that "associate as military company or instruct or file past, wearing arms, in whatever city, without the government's permission". The "Lehr-und-Wehr Verein" and other similar structures it engendered (such as the "Bohemian Sharpshooters", the "Jaeger Verein", the "Irish Guards",...) went underground. Moreover, the SLP proposed to unify with the Greenback-Labor Party (a liberal party) to be stronger for the presidential elections of 1880. But an "anti-compromise" opposition was born that was very virulent in favouring self- defence organizations and refusing any kind of alliance with what they called a reformist party. A little later, during the elec tions, electoral officials falsified the election results in Chicago to prevent the victory of a SLP member and even though he eventually got his mandate, it was the last straw convincing many militants to break with the SLP and turn to direct action. Amongst these militants two currents could be seen: one preaching trade union work and fighting for direct economic gains, the other willing to abandon political and economic reforms in favour of revolutionary action. Nevertheless, together they created in November 1880 a new organization in New York: the "Socialist Revolutionary Club", whose most famous members were Parsons, Spies, Schwab, Grottkau and Neebe,5 led by Wilhelm Hasselmann, an ex-member of the SDP of Germany, which had expelled him together with Johann Most in 1880.

The militants claiming that revolutionary action was urgent and should begin right now no longer believed that ballots could change the system. They urged direct action and armed struggle against the State, the Parliament and reforms. And that's what they called on proletarians to do: the direct and final confrontation with Capital. One of Parsons' phrases expresses at the same time the force and the limit of the militants in that period as far as the necessity to overthrow the State is con cerned. Parsons said:

"The State in every form is nothing else than an organized conspiracy of the propertied class to deprive the working-class of their natural rights."

We do agree with this quotation. But we would like to add that by "natural rights" we mean, just like Parsons does, the natural needs that human beings feel as soon as they are born: the need of human community, love, food, shelter and the need of reproduction of his species. These are the "natural rights" of human beings. Of course, there is an easy confusion that can be made, and that is being made and maintained by Democracy. Indeed, Democracy is the reign of the citizen, that is to say, the total negation of the existing classes (and therefore of the antagonism between these two classes). The citizen has many rights as long as he behaves as a good citizen, i.e. as long as he defends Democracy. But those rights we are talking about now (constitutional rights, right of vote, liberty, equality, fraternity,... in short the rights and duties of any good citizen who loves his country and is ready to die for it) are only the recuperation and the deviation of so called "natural rights". Let us mention that as soon as the citizen behaves like a proletarian, as soon as he defends his interest against exploitation, rights cease to exist. No right is granted to the working-class when it acts as a class. Rights are only granted to citizens. Repressive terror for all those who do not behave as good citizens is a logical response to the bourgeois ideal of democratic paradise.6

As we have said, the International Social Revolutionary Congress of London died very soon after it was founded, but it had consequences in the USA: on 21st, 22nd and 23rd October, 1881, on the initiative of the New York Social Revolutionary Club, the first attempt to centralize the revolutionary socialists on a national scale took place. The Congress took the name of "Congress of Socialists of the United States". Schwab, Parsons and Spies played the leading role. The Congress condemned the British government for the repression in Ireland, expressed its support to the "populists" in Russia for their "unrelenting warfare" against the tsar, it denounced private property and "wage slavery", endorsed the decisions of London, and declared it was in favour of "armed organizations of workingmen who stand still to resist, gun in hand". Nevertheless, a compromise had to be made between those saying that parliament could be a useful means of agitation and those claiming that nothing could ever be obtained through the ballot. The compromise which was adopted let each group decide for itself whether to engage in parliamentary activity or not. Once more, we can discern, in the formal program of the Congress, the many confusions and weaknesses that reflected the more general lack of a breaking with Social Democracy. Indeed the support for the "populists in Russia", the endorsement of the decision of London on the question of organisation,...

The Congress founded the "Revolutionary Socialist Party", a very contradictory organization to which Most tried later to give a clearer direction, and which defined itself as a branch of the IWMA recently revived in London. Like the former, it was a network of groups all over the country, linked together through the Information Bureau centred in Chicago. This organization remained inactive and virtually dormant until the arrival of Johann Most, who managed to close ranks.7

Most's life is a permanent attempt to organize revolutionaries, to give a direction to the movement, to centralize activities outside and against Social Democracy. He made tour all over America and held meetings, demos, picnics, etc., in which he defended the need to organize or invited SLP members to argue with them in front of the crowd. In each city where he held meetings and speeches calling the proletarians to organize, new groups sprang up. His aim was to gather the different socialist currents, to gather under the same flag all those who fought for the revolution. It was in the same perspective that Johann Most called for a unification congress of all the new-born groups and the already existing associations. This congress was to take place in Pittsburgh in 1883.

J. Most, Spies, Drury, Parsons, etc. drafted the charter of this Congress, this charter remained in history as "The Pittsburgh Manifesto", also known as the "Pittsburgh Proclamation", and became the charter of revolutionary militants in that period. The Manifesto opened as follow:

"Fellow Workmen: - The Declaration of Independence says:

'But when a long train of abuses and usurpa tions, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security'.

This thought of Thomas Jefferson was the justification for armed resistance by our forefathers, which gave birth to our Republic, and do not necessities of the present time compel us to re-assert their declaration?"

Was the government anything but an oppressor, "a conspiracy of the ruling classes" against the people? demanded the Proclamation. It went on denouncing the capitalist system as "unjust, insane and murderous", condemning the State, the church and the educational system as instruments of "class domination". Time had come "to totally destroy it with and by all means", it declared. Rejecting political reforms because the ruling class would never surrender without fighting, it defended the position that "the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie must have a violent revolutionary character". "So", the Manifesto continued, "we must agitate for the purpose of organization; organization for the purpose of rebellion".

The Manifesto ended as follows:

"The day has come for solidarity. Join ranks! Let the drum beat defiantly the roll of battle: 'Workmen of all countries unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to win!' Tremble, oppressors of the world! Not far beyond your purblind sight there dawns the scarlet and sable lights of the JUDGEMENT DAY!"

Besides this real attempt to centralize the militant forces of the country and even the world, the program of the Manifesto carries some reformist demands. First of all when it reproduces part of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, moreover, then when it claims for the improvement of the capitalist system through a better respect of the rights and duties, etc. These weaknesses are in fact the weaknesses of that period. Indeed, almost throughout the whole world, militants believe it is still possible to change the system thanks to the strict application of the Constitution. They think its strict application would wipe-out forever the injustices of this world. They demand equal rights for all and call for the overthrowing of a government that wouldn't respect the Constitution,... Doing so, they are in contradiction with their previous affirmations that defined any government as a conspiracy of the ruling class. The "Manifesto" also contained important theoretical weaknesses as far as the way of organizing was concerned. It proposed a federation of organizations of producers linked by free contracts, without commerce or profit-mongery, etc.

To better understand the internal contradiction and the lack of a break of the revolutionary organisations of that period with Social Democracy, it is important to keep in mind the fact that very few militants were acquainted with the polemics between Marx and Lassalle, knew about Marx's programmatical developments and analysis. Their terrain was the terrain of agitation, speeches, meetings, etc.; they did not deal with the programmatical analysis of the capitalist system, its way of functioning. This lack of comprehension had repercussions on the propositions they made for the future society, and even limited their own struggle. Nevertheless, the federative way of organization declared in the platform of the Pittsburgh Manifesto was denied later by the centralized way in which the different groups that composed the new organization centralized their activities. For the militants who attended the congress, the federative way of organization was considered as an alternative to social democratic centralism; it represented a guarantee against everything they had to confront in the social democratic parties, that is to say bureaucratism, authoritarism, blind submission, parliamentarism... Federalism is seen as a guarantee against and a response to democratic centralism of social democracy and not (which it really is) as the other side of the same coin that is the democratic way of organization. In the federative way of organization bureaucrats are replaced by elected and revocable delegates (who become soon bureaucrats as well); authoritarism is replaced by anti- authoritarism, which, claiming the refusal of any leadership, allows the society to give its own direction; parliamentarism is replaced by assembleism, which has the same basis: the law of the majority and/or the delegation that deprives the proletariat of the possibilities to decide and act giving that the latter are delegated to the so-called "higher" spheres.

The Pittsburgh Congress gathered the delegates of 26 cities, nearly twice as many as the Chicago Congress. And the Pittsburgh Manifesto was issued at the same time in English, German, French, Czech, Spanish and Yiddish.

The Congress proclaimed the death of the Revolutionary Socialist and called itself the "International Working People's Association" because it considered itself as the true successor of the First International contrary to the Second International and in opposition to the latter. And the IWPA really was the heir of the First International, even if this attempt was not, con trary to its predecessor, the expression of an international movement of centralization of class struggle. Indeed, the IWPA was created in a period that we cannot consider as a period of world revolutionary struggles and in this sense it may be considered as a voluntarist attempt. But, one cannot forget that the United States were shaken by a real revolutionary movement to which it tried to give centralization and direction. Therefore, it responded to a real need: the need to centralize struggles and militants and to give them a revolutionary direction.

From 1883 to 1886 the groups of the IWPA multiplied. From 2,000 in 1883 it climbed to 5,000 by the end of 1885 with perhaps three times as many supporters and sympathizers. Chicago remained the centre of the IWPA, which is not by chance. Indeed, Chicago was not only a pole of highly concentrated capital (mines, railways, car factories,...) due to its geographical situation (lake Michigan), but also the place where the class antagonisms were the most obvious, where the police brutality was the most notorious and the economic crisis the most cruel. Chicago had a long tradition of class struggle, but, dramatically, there was a lack of the experience of previous militants' nucleus, a lack of lessons drawn from the previous waves of struggle.

Besides the economic crisis, the acceleration of the mechanization of labour and the intensification of the division of labour changed the management of society. The machinery and the division of labour provoked more sackings and the situation worsened. In 1884, the average cuts amounted to 15 percent and the year after even more, arousing waves of discontent.

In this climate, the IWPA issued pamphlets, leaflets, journals, held meetings, demonstrations, lectures, discussions,... denouncing the capitalist system, the condition of wage-slavery, appealing the workers to wake up and fight against the misery they were living in, to fight for another society. Agitating "the Red Flag of the Commune", their placards said "No Quarter", "Down with governments, god and gold", "Exploitation is legalized theft", "Workingmen of the world, unite!". The content of the slogans of the IWPA shows the clear will to destroy the system, contrarily to the slogans of Social Democratic parties that claim the pacific conquest of the State, ballots and elections,... The IWPA (contrarily to the other organisations of the period such as the Knights of Labor, the Unions, the SLP or later the ALF) proposed to organize not only the proletarians working in the mines or in the factories, but also the unemployed, the "unwanted" , the tramps, and others rejected with disdain by reformist organizations. To all the discontented, the IWPA proposed to organize and fight against the misery of this world and those responsible for it.

During those years of crisis, many strikes broke out, nearly all for better wages and (unfortunately often with reformist slogans claiming "the right" to organize) against the repression of proletarian organization. Each time, the State militia opened fire on the strikers and the bosses answered by lockouts, blacklists, strikebreakers, etc. Apart from its work to organize and unite the working-class, the IWPA organized armed sections in many cities. These armed sections, following the model given by the "Lehr-und-Wehr Verein", drilled and instructed their members in procuring arms (guns, knives,...), in using them, in making bombs and grenades, etc. Their purpose was the "arming of the proletariat and the application of the latest discoveries of science, especially chemistry", that is to say, they were deter mined to take an eye for an eye.8 These calls of the IWPA are not to be understood as all the pacifists (intentionally or unintentionally) misinterpret them (as being calls to light class struggle thanks to throwing bombs), but as they are: a real comprehension of the terrorist nature of Capital and of the framework in which struggle against Capital is imposed on us. As Parsons said in a speech about dynamite:

"...It is the peace-maker; it is man's best friend; it emancipates the world from the domineering of the few over the many, because all government, in the last resort, is violence; all law, in the last resort, is force." (our emphasis)

If it is clear for us that dynamite in itself does not emancipate the world, that is has no emancipating virtue in itself, and that it all depends on the hand that throws it, we nevertheless want to stress the fact that at that period all around the world revolutionaries considered dynamite as the weapon par excellence. If we look back at the historical context we can see that dynamite was almost only used by the proletariat, the bourgeoisie preferred using guns and riffles... With this quotation we wanted to insist on the one hand on the militant comprehension of the nature of all governments and laws, and on the other hand, on the militant comprehension of the necessity to use violent means against bourgeois terror.

The revolutionary militants were convinced that the revolution was around the corner and did whatever they could to be sure this time would be the right time. In the USA, class struggle was so sharp and the climate was so tense that it aroused a deep fear within the bourgeoisie. Its press began to talk of "a new Paris Commune". A huge propaganda effort was launched against the IWPA and its members, who were accused of being assassins, arsonists, bombthrowers, devils,... The fear of the bourgeoisie gives an idea of the strength of the proletarian movement. Revolutionary militants in the USA tried to organize the proletarians struggling against the misery of their living conditions.

In this sense, it seems important to mention that a lot of proletarians arrived in the USA attracted by a myth created in Europe: the myth of "the land of promises", the country of political freedom and work for all, etc. Parsons said in February 1884, when someone told him that America was superior to other countries:

"America is not a free country. The economic condi tions of the workers are the same as they are in Europe. A wage slave is a slave everywhere, without any regard to the country he may happen to have been born in or may be living in."

He added that the workers had no other choice but organize and rebel or remain slaves. We can find exactly the same idea in "The Beast of Property" when Most says:

"Indeed it seems as though this young American republic had for the present but one historical mission, of demonstrating beyond controversy to the people on this side of the Atlantic as to those of the other by the presentation of bare, tangible facts what an outrageous monster the 'beast of property' really is, and that neither the condition of the soil nor the vastness of domain, nor the political forms of society can ever alter the viciousness of this beast of prey..." (our emphasis)

In "The Beast of Property", written in the year of the Pittsburgh Congress, the strongest part lies in its denunciation of reformism. First of all the denunciation of "parliamentary windbags", as well as petitions, elections and laws; the denunciation of those who mystify the Economy, all the teachers of political economy, "lackeys of the bourgeoisie", "those charlatans" who try to hide the revolutionary character of the proletariat behind a fairer distribution of richness. Most also denounces, against the current, those Socialists who claim the pacifist and gradual conquest of the power by intellectuals and scientists who will plan everything and more specifically the economy. In other words, the text spits on what Social Democracy praises, on what Social Democracy claims to belong to. "The Beast of Property" claims that the present system is worse than the previous ones: "But the climax of infamy has been reached by our present 'law and order' system...". Against these same specialists, these teachers of economy who claim this society as being the society of the welfare of humanity, Most affirms that this system is worse than the previous ones. It engenders progress indeed, into more barbarity, more capitalism, that is to say that the capitalist progress is reactionary as far as communism is concerned. Educationism and the enlightenment of the masses, cornerstones of the Social Democratic programme, are also denounced and criticised when the text says:

"Some say, general education will bring about a change; but this advise is as a rule and idle phrase. Education of the people will only then be possible when the obstructions there to have been removed. And that will not take place until the entire present system has been destroyed."

The only solution, says Most, is revolution, the communist destruction of this world, and a "society (...) organised on a communistic basis", "everything is ripe for Communism", the text says, and Johann Most does not avoid the most central point; the point that shows his permanent attempts to organize the proletarian struggles outside and against Social Democracy (and this confirms his practical struggle for the centralization of revolutionary forces, negating his own claim for federative based structures): the necessity of a "well trained revolutionary nucleus". That is to say the necessity of a revolutionary leadership! On this point, Johann Most joins all the revolutionary militants who insisted on the necessity to organize around the highest level of rupture, around a revolutionary vanguard.

The first part of the text, focusing on economy, is in fact quite confused and even sometimes wrong. This is due to the fact that Social Democracy used "marxism" as a bible to justify its defense of the system, therefore revolutionary militants (unable to differentiate between Marx and "marxism") refused to reappropriate Marx's criticisms of society. This led to the situation that the number of militants who had notions of the way the capitalist system functions were very few. This part of the text is an attempt to vulgarize "Capital". A previous attempt of this kind had already been strongly criticised by Marx when Most tried to rewrite "Capital" so as to be understood by everyone. First of all, Marx's Capital was written to be read by proletarians in an organized framework; secondly, Marx also treated the question at another level of abstraction in "Wage labour and Capital" and "Wage, price and profit". These books are excellent examples of the possibility of saying the same thing at different levels of abstraction without betraying the common content. When J. Most tried to write a new version of "Capital", accessible to everyone, he changed the content of the book, its essence, which led him to falsify Marx's positions.

Some will say other weak points exist in this text, and we will not deny it. We are well aware of the weaknesses and the limits of this text, we clearly see that they are due not only to the period but also to the weakness of the rupture with Social Democracy in the historical sense of the term. Nevertheless, the interest of the text exists and lays less in what it says than in what it reveals as an attempt to fight practically against the monopoly Social Democracy claims to hold as far as the organization (we would rather say disorganization) of the proletariat is concerned. Moreover, this text is also a witness of the class struggle movement in the USA. We intend to carry on studying the history of our class struggle in that part of the world and call on our readers to help us by sending criticisms, information, texts,...

• 1
  

  Nevertheless, Social Democracy is not only the formal parties organized in and around the Second International; it has a much larger dimension: the concept of Social Democracy, in its full meaning, refers to the historical party of the counterrevolution, that is to say that it refers to the framework in which Capital enrols the workers on behalf of "socialism".

• 2
  

  Here we talk about the necrological content of the analysis made by revolutionaries. By "necrological content" we mean the intrinsically catastrophical essence of Capitalism. Indeed, Capitalism, as everything else, carries in itself its own contradictions, its own gravediggers, its own death; in this case the proletariat. It is what Marx develops in "Capital", and it is what Social democracy (and more particularly, the "marxist" current, very fond of political economy) tried hard to transform and recuperate. And it is very logical: the aim of Social Democracy being the preservation, the maintenance of this system, it cannot see in "Capital" anything else but a biology of capitalist social relationships, an analysis of their function ing. Of course this is totally coherent, since the Social Democrat point of view is the improvement and the reform of this mode of production. On the contrary, we, revolutionaries, have a totally antagonistic view point and a totally antagonistic aim: we only care and fight for the destruction of this system; and it is also in this sense and from this point of view that Marx wrote "Capital": a necrology of capitalist social relationships.

  For more details cf. the article published in French in Communisme No. 30 "Contributions à la Critique de l'Economie" - chapitre 3 "Délimitation de notre critique de l'Economie: Le marxisme en tant qu'économie politique en opposition avec l'oeuvre de Marx"

• 3
  

  By "Blanquist ideology" we mean the ideology based on the weaknesses of Blanqui's practice.

• 4
  

  The german name of this structure reveals the numerical importance, in that period, of the immigration of militants coming from Germany.

• 5
  

  Parsons and Spies, are two of the militants that will be accused of murder after the events of May 1886 at Haymarket. They will be hanged on the 11 november 1887 as well as Engel and Fisher; Lingg will commit suicide in jail, and Schwab and Fielden will be condemned to life imprisonment.

  "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today"

  Spies' last words still echoes and it is to prevent them from fading away that we publish this text. The day will come when our comrades' prophecy will quell for ever the terror of the proletariat's torturers... we are working in this perspective.

• 6
  

  For more details on this subject, see in this review "Against the Myth of Democratic Rights and Liberties".

• 7
  

  All the proletarian attempts to centralize and constitute themselves as a force will take the structure of groups organised according to geographical repartition and also according to the language of the participating militants. Maybe the division of the United States into federated states is not alien to this fact. Anyway, the bourgeoisie will use and abuse this weakness, invoking american (sic) nationalism to divide the proletarians and design the strangers (and more particularly the militants of German origin, the more numerous at that moment) as being responsible for all evils.

• 8
  

  Militants of the IWPA call for the using of the progress of science. J.Most in his book "Revolutionary War Science" writes:

  "To be sure of success, revolutionaries should always have on hand adequate quantity of nitroglycerine, dynamite, hand grenade, and blasting charges..."

  "Proletarians of all country, arm yourselves! Arm yourselves by whatever means you can. The hour of battle is near."

  "The Alarm" and the "Die Arbeiter Zeitung" (two of the fourteen journals of the IWPA) often publish articles such as "The Manufacture of the Dynamite Made Easy" and "Explosive: a Practical Lesson in Popular Chemistry". At that time, all throughout the world, the proletarians use dynamite against their class enemy. Just remember Ravachol in France, at the end of the 19s century, or a few years later, the Bande à Bonnot, etc.

1. Introduction

The catastrophe of capitalist society is not mysterious or impenetrable, nor faraway nor something for the future! On the contrary, it is the essential and living reality of bourgeois society, a product of its own limits. These limits are located within Capital itself and patently manifest themselves all over the world.

Each large cycle of economic expansion necessarily ends in a depression. To the development of the productive forces corresponds the imperious necessity of their destruction. All accumulation of wealth produces misery to a proportional extent. The concentration and centralisation of Capital carries with it a growing contraction of the possibilities for lucrative investment.

In opposition to all those who justify this system and who, each time that a new cycle of expansion develops, pretend that never again will there be another crisis, we communists- have always insisted on the intrinsic limits of Capital. We've always insisted on the indissociable unity between accumulation of Capital and accumulation of misery, between the development of the productive forces and the concomitant catastrophe of society, between "the wealth of nations" and imperialist war.

Against the current of the various parties of order and in total antagonism to social democracy, in opposition to fatalism and to all the dominant illusions, we can only laugh at the proclamation of "a new world order" supposedly purged of its contradictions. We claim loudly -in spite of our isolation- that the coming catastrophes will be still more devastating and that all attempts today to curb the internal contradictions of Capital can only lead to the postponement and the exacerbation of their unavoidable explosion.

Once more, the validity of communist theory is being confirmed by current events: the political, social and economic catastrophe is worldwide. Everywhere the working class is being subjected to more misery, more unemployment, more war... The capitalist world is less and less capable of hiding its putrid reality.

We do not intend, in this article, to quote all the figures or statistics illustrating this catastrophe. Each one of us, all proletarians, live this social disaster every day in our flesh. We will stress only some essential aspects of the world situation so as to illustrate the depth of today's catastrophe. We will make clear the violence with which this mode of production is confronted with its own historical limits today. On the other hand, we will highlight the unavoidability of a catastrophe that is generalised to the whole of humanity, unless the latter manages to destroy all the social market and labour relations that are crushing it.

2. From the crash of the model of social capitalism to the ruin of the archetype of the United States as an economy to imitate !

These last years, we've witnessed the crash of the model of "socialist" capitalism, of "social" capitalism, of the "social project" of the "bourgeois left" (1). The Right finally triumphed and liberal capitalism could again take up its place as the sole worldwide model, venerated by all bourgeois factions.

The "war of all against all" has always been at the basis of this society. No reforms, no utopia, no attempts to "humanise" this society have ever been able to change this reality. But while in the past they tried to hide this reality, feeling shameful about it and talking at the same time about helping the poor, today they openly claim that such atrocities as "the poor getting poorer" are unavoidable. Never before has capitalism taken on the liberal discourse to such an extent. Never before in the history of this system have they asserted so openly that the growth of this society necessitates the misery of the masses, and that the famous economic development of society requires our sacrifice and the repression of all insubordination. The discourse and the recipes of the IMF -in times past considered to be the programme of the ultra-right- have become, over the last few years, the only conceivable economic politics. Even the "economic" model advocated by Pinochet (2) to get out of the crisis, has now become famous again and those bourgeois factions who do not accept it are soon edged out.

It has now become clear that reformism and humanism are just idle politicking. Capital doesn't care about those who've pretended to keep it under control; it has shown that it is the only boss who commands everything and that all those who've pretended to direct it, have been nothing else but its mere executors (3). It has become all too clear that in this society there is only one god to worship: PROFIT!

But while reality became more and more forthright and world capitalism sank into a generalised depression, the proletarian masses, anaesthetized by TV, video, papers and other brain-washers, did not see the reality of this crisis -as always, consciousness trailed behind. Capital could continue to pretend that the USA, Japan and Germany were still valid models of liberal market economic growth while in fact, everywhere, worldwide, capitalism entered into a generalised depression. The economic catastrophe of capitalism in the East was so violent and so fast that it remained possible to uphold the conception that the liberal market economy remained superior and was the only valid model free of all risks of crisis.

Neither the clarity nor the brutality of the discourse asserting that all development necessitates misery and sacrifices, could hinder the expansion of the United States as a "model" to strive for. But in the United States itself the catastrophe had reached such incredible proportions that it could no longer be hidden (4). The "model" was only intended to be sold abroad. The "model" was used for export only because in the United States itself it had irremediably crashed and could no longer remain credible in the eyes of millions of proletarians who had to face poverty and unemployment. In this country, the "model" had reached a state of putrefaction. The sacrifices that were called for for the sake of future development could no longer be justified since it had become impossible to hide that this development opposes itself to the immediate and historic interests of the human species. During a whole period of economic growth, misery increased (in relative terms, but also, in some aspects, in absolute terms) and all aspects of human life deteriorated: more homeless; more famine; less health care; massive drug addiction; increase in rapes, crimes and violence in general; generalised pollution; development of racism in all strata of society; militarisation of daily life...

But the United States remained a "model" for export, because over the last decades they were the motive force of world capital and represented the antithesis to the pretention (by now completely obsolete) embodied in the Soviet Union and its allies of checking and planifying the economy (it is in this way that the United States became the very symbol of "triumphant capitalism"). The imposition of the American "model" -in spite of blatant reality-is also due to the way this reality is being reflected by the media, and by the fact that whereas political managers are forced (by Capital itself) to produce some immediate results, the same is not true for technocrats and analysts who prepare the theories for the international media: they can afford to water down reality, to produce optimistic images to replace reality (that is their "raison d'être").

We would just like to draw attention to the fact that the "wellbeing" that politicians depict, the model of society that they are offering us today, is not some paradise, some utopia, but only an embellished image of the United States. What a prospect!

In the areas of the world where "anti-imperialism" against the United States was a powerful ideology for controlling the proletariat, the positive image of the United States was more powerful still. Not only was it pretended, in these countries, that misery in the US could not possibly be compared to misery elsewhere, since "the USA is a rich country", "a developed country" (with a GNP of such an amount of US$ per inhabitant!), but moreover, and in full agreement with the interests of the bourgeoisie of this country and of the whole world, the importance of the historic struggles of the proletariat in the United States was being tarnished or even completely negated. The myth of a "labour aristocracy" systematically allowed the overshadowing of the explosive character of the contradictions and the historic importance of the struggle of our class brothers against Capital and the State (5).

Today's worldwide economic depression that strikes more particularly the very heart of the command centre of the system -the productive space of the United States- makes this contradiction even more complete. The catastrophe of social and economic reality in the United States stands more and more deeply in contradiction with its pretention to be the only valid capitalist alternative.

Without doubt it is difficult to grasp the exact meaning of the following figures:
"¢
a black person living in New-York has less chance to reach the age of 65 than an inhabitant of Bangladesh;
"¢
the rate of infant mortality is higher in Washington than in Jamaica or in Chile;
"¢
in Los Angeles, 40.000 people sleep in the streets (1992).

It is probably difficult enough to understand the meaning of this misery as mere misery; it is even more difficult to grasp its subversive, revolutionary character.

It has also proved difficult to make it understood that before the struggles in Argentina (Cordobazo), before '68 in France or '69 in Italy, before even the important proletarian struggles in China (led astray by what is known as the "cultural revolution"), that the wave of proletarian struggles had basically started in North-America, in the South of the United States, in the North of Latin-America, in Santo Domingo, in Mexico,... MAINLY IN THE BLACK AND HISPANIC GHETTOES OF LOS ANGELES.

The revolt of our comrades of Los Angeles in May 1992 announces the agony of the myth of the United States as a "model" to imitate, and prepares the ground for today's struggles of the international proletariat. It shows not only that the USA does not constitute a valid "model", but also that this area is not safe from the wave of proletarian revolts that shake the world. All this expresses a qualitative step forward in the nature of our struggles and does away with the illusion that each time there should be some "special" reason that explains the "particular" origin of such or such a struggle.

Thanks to this revolt during which our comrades from LA attacked the State and its representatives, thanks to the strength with which they stood up against the world of property, the last illusions about the American "model", or about the supposed differences between the proletariat of this country and of the rest of the world, have fallen to pieces.

When in Poland or in Rumania revolts erupted, we were told that this was because of the dictatorship and of the bureaucratic tendencies that dominate these countries; when in Algeria, in Morocco or in South Africa the proletariat rose up and clashed violently with bourgeois power, they told us that this was because of the age-old backward situation of this historically "underdeveloped" continent; when proletarians in Venezuela and in Argentina attacked private property and the State, these struggles were faked up to look like mere looting caused by famine and supposedly peculiar to "Third World" countries; when in France and in Britain (in Vaux-en-Velin, and Trafalgar Square for instance) the same class anger expressed itself, they blamed marginals and immigrants... and today, when at the very centre of the capitalist model revolts erupt, and when these struggles spread from Los Angeles to the suburbs of Toronto, Washington and New York, then what else can the international bourgeoisie do than lie once more and claim that all this is only because of a problem "amongst blacks and hispanics"! But such an absurd story will undoubtedly be difficult to impose and it becomes obvious that even for the bourgeoisie the credibility of the American "model" starts getting into bad shape.

For the world bourgeoisie, a model of development remains attractive as long as it works. It can remain attractive even when proletarians are starving to death (and this is one of the historic conditions for all intensive growth of industry!) and when the main cities get filled up with unemployed and beggars. But the charm of such a model fades away as soon as proletarians start to rebel and challenge the established order.

This is why, when Bush was forced to bloodily repress the revolt in Los Angeles, the myth of the North American "model" disappeared as if by magic. All the big chiefs of the world industrial giant, all Presidents, Ministers... quickly announced their opposition to the North American "model" and declared that the revolt was due to the particular conditions in the USA... i.e. could not possibly occur in their own country!

It is always the same song: the proletariat supposedly never fights against capitalist misery, but always against abuses or "abnormal" developments of the system. This is how the "racist abuses that exist in the USA"... or still, "neoliberalism", or "Reaganomics", etc. where blamed for having caused the struggles that shook the USA in 1992.

These clumsy justifications serve the aim of hiding that the revolt of the proletariat in Los Angeles was directed against the enemies that oppress us, and therefore expresses the interests of all proletarians all over the world. They try to conceal that in the whole world their system is the same, that the struggle of proletarians in Los Angeles is our own, and that, while we fight against the bourgeoisie of "our" country, we stand on the same side of the barricades as our class comrades in Los Angeles.

"Hence the highest development of productive power together with the greatest expansion of existing wealth will coincide with depreciation of capital, degradation of the labourer, and a most straitened exhaustion of his vital powers. These contradictions of course, lead to explosions, cataclysms, crises, in which by momentaneous suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great portion of capital the latter is violently reduced to the point where it can go on fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide. Yet, these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow."

Marx - Grundrisse.
3. Even the positive poles of capitalism do not escape from catastrophe

In general, Capital puts forward its positive pole while rejecting its negative pole as not being its own (and generally explaining it by a "lack of capitalist development"!). Capital puts forward as being its own achievements: wealth, the development of productive forces, progress, peace, flourishing business, democracy... and rejects as being hostile to its own being everything which might bother this idyllic picture. The misery of always larger strata of proletarian masses is understood as a lack of integration of these masses into capitalist society, or still as a lack of development in the related areas. Open repression and State terror are depicted as the result of the actions of a particular "dictator", all irregularities supposedly are due to some "bad manager" or some corrupt government (6), racism (intrinsic to capitalist society!) supposedly is due to some particular "right-wing" bourgeois faction, and all capitalist misery, the ghettoes, favelas, shanty towns, pollution... are always being considered as temporary. And always Capital will put forward the need for more capitalist development, more progress as the sole medicine capable of curing these "abnormalities".

As always, revolutionary communism denounces these lies (7) and insists on the fact that war, famine, crisis, unemployment, racism... are not foreign to capitalist development, but are its authentic products!

What has changed today, with the vertiginous worldwide depression, is that Capital no longer has a positive pole to exhibit, that there are no more "model" countries to imitate.

Today (october 1992) in the United States, factories close down one after the other, misery is growing beyond all limits and social decomposition has reached a peak. This destroys the myth of an American economy being safe from crisis. But, on top of this, even such countries as Germany or Japan, which used to be considered -no longer than two years ago- as "models" of economic growth and of dynamism, are severely hit by the generalised depression.

For instance, the Tokyo stock market, supreme representative of "Japanese dynamism" and former "model" for investors of the whole world, hasn't stopped collapsing since 1989: its index that had reached 38,600 in 1989, fell back to 14,300 in the summer of 1992. This represents a drop of 63%. And as far as the other models of development are concerned, the situation is hardly any more brilliant. As a matter of fact, the whole of Western Europe is sinking into a generalised depression: the system of monetary parity, generally considered to be the most solid of all, has broken down. London is announcing closures and bankruptcies every day, the Italian economy is sinking into chaos and the other countries are trying to resist as well as can be expected. Whole sectors of the economy, the most representative corporations of capitalist progress and dynamism, go bankrupt or have to announce a fall in profits, redundancies and so on.

On the international level, the case of Pan American for sure is the most typical one because it is the main calling card of the US. But other companies in the US as well, such as TWA, Eastern or Braniff are in the same situation. On the other continents, the situation is hardly any better: Lufthansa, Air France, SAS, Sabena... are announcing ever greater losses. Aeroflot, the company that has the biggest air fleet and the highest number of flying hours in the whole world, is also facing increasing difficulties.

The same goes for the car industry. General Motors, the historic symbol of social and democratic North American capitalism (8), announces incredible losses and drastic cuts in jobs. Ford and Chrysler the same. Other sectors of industry as well are faced with identical problems. AT&T, the biggest communications company of the whole world, had to admit several thousands of million $US of losses in 1991. IBM is continuously planning new restructurations and new strategies and anticipates massive lay-offs. NCR and Digital Equipment are also sacking workers massively.

So it is hardly surprising that faced with such "models" of dynamism, development, democracy, or economic efficiency... that the growth of the world GNP for the first time is nearly zero, and that all estimations confirm the provision (for the first time ever) for a reduction in international trade in volume (about 3%) and in value (about 1.5%).

4. The bourgeois solutions to the generalised depression

The bourgeoisie can no longer hide the generalised depression of the worldwide capitalist economy. That's why they've now started to tell us another story, asserting that the end of the crisis is near, that the economic takeoff will be there tomorrow, and that next year at the latest the "recession" will be over. But no sooner have they formulated these optimistic forecasts, when already they change them and start reconsidering the delays in the prospects they've announced. This once more illustrates that it is Capital that determines the planifications and perspectives, not the other way round (9).

In as little time as it took for the world bourgeoisie to rally round the general apology of liberalism, the various managers and economists have already started to call for State intervention again. The most determined defenders of the "invisible hand" (i.e. of the automatic regulation of economic life without State intervention) started to call for such or such measures in order to increase credit to companies, to increase effective demand, and they criticise the management by former administrations blamed for provoking chaos.

This is no surprise to us. The myth of the invisible hand perfectly regulating the economy, is a myth that during a period of economic growth is always being supported by the dominant ideology. But as soon as capitalism gets into a new cycle of crisis, this myth collapses. Capitalist cycles take place according to a scheme that hardly ever varies. During periods of depression, all bourgeois factions fight against the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. They feel in their bones that the markets get narrower and narrower, and that they no longer expand at a pace required by capitalist accumulation (10). These bourgeois factions then call for political interventions to protect the process of accumulation from devalorisation; either by counter-balancing as much as possible the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and this generally results in an increase in the rate of exploitation; or by trying artificially to enlarge the markets through the extension of credit payments, by public expenditures, by the militarisation of social life... Today is only a repetition of the past.

However, if the general scheme hardly ever varies, nevertheless the situation changes because each crisis is always more acute than the previous one. The contradictions that in the past were hidden and postponed, now explode even more violently. The economic politics that have been used in the past in order to artificially increase effective demand transform themselves into additional problems. In all sectors Capital is being confronted with its historic limits.

We can take the example of companies that manage to remain on an even keel because they benefit from different forms of protection (subsidies, commercial protection, free credit), in complete contradiction however with the law of value that condemns them to close down and sack their work force. With each economic cycle, such companies move further away from a "natural" profitability (i.e. a profitability obtained through the famous "invisible hand"). Each year it takes more subsidies, more cheap credit, more measures of economic protection... to keep them on an even keel. These procedures -that result in increasing public deficit in order to finance companies that are no longer economically viable- become more and more perilous and they stand in contradiction with other sectors of Capital who do not accept that the State allocates their surplus value with the aim of helping obsolete companies to survive that have become completely devalorised. For Capital, the dilemma becomes more acute: on the one hand the "natural" necessity to close down factories, producing millions more unemployed - and this in turn will reduce effective demand even more, and is likely to provoke inevitable social explosions; on the other hand, the "choice" to postpone this economic truth again, knowing perfectly well that generalised bankruptcy will become all the more violent. This kind of problematics will generalise itself and involve an always growing number of countries or blocs of countries until the situation will become unbearable and the bourgeois faction in charge of government gets swept away by another one that will start again to hold up the flag of liberalism, but will also inevitably soon have to confront the moment of truth! This was the case, a few decades ago, in South America with industrial populism. This is what has been going on in the "East" countries such as the Soviet Union, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary... (11) over the last few years. And this is also the tendency today in countries like the United States or Britain, for instance.

The artificial increase of demand on the basis of private and public credit, of public expenditure, or of "welfare politics", has not only allowed capitalism to continue to function, but also to get out of situations of economic depression and to enter, provisionally, into a phase of expansion. The United States in particular, is a good example of national Capital having been propelled beyond its limits on the basis of artificial creation of solvent demand. In this country, even more than in all others, public expenditure has reached astronomic levels (especially in the field of military industry). In this country, they've acted as if there was no limit to the granting of credit to private industry and they've multiplied, at rates unheard of before, all possible credits to the customer without taking into account his real earnings. This policy could be used in the United States more than anywhere else since this country has the possibility to issue -to an apparently unlimited extend- the unit of value, not only as an expansive internal policy, but also because of the role played by the $US on the world market in general (as a matter of fact, in spite of the failure of the Bretton Woods agreements, the United States continues to function as the central bank of the worldwide capitalist system) as well as on the domestic market of numerous countries. This has allowed for an increase in demand without -in spite of this- immediately creating a generalised devalorisation of the unit of value (as happens in other countries when the local State issues illconsidered amounts of money). Indeed, international trade today absorbs an incalculable amount of these units of value. In the beginning of the Seventies, when worldwide capitalism was confronting the objective limits of expansion following generalised destruction caused by war, these policies were what allowed the successive economic expansions of the post-war period to be financed (12). Due to these policies, the national economy of the United States could impose itself as the uncontested motor of worldwide capitalism during this period.

We should not forget that if Reaganite (or Thatcherite) liberalism has pretended to be anti-interventionist to the point of flirting with fashionable anarcho-capitalist ideologies (13), this is because it clearly advocated the abandonment of all social illusions within the capitalist system. Its politics of no taxes on capital stood in full agreement with the cuts it operated in the whole of the "social budget". The consequences of such policies resulted in a short-lived recomposition of the main driving force of the economy, the rate of profit. At the same time a relative fall of salaries occurred, i.e. a net increase of the rate of exploitation. However, they did not have the courage to take these politics to their ultimate consequences nor to abandon at the same time the whole of the credit allocation facilities (14) because this would have caused an even worse and more abrupt catastrophe. On the contrary, they tried to combine the generalised increase in the rate of exploitation (due to a reduction of the overall income of the work force - including unemployment allocations, welfare and so on) as well as the decrease in taxes (15) with the widespread expansion of State sponsored credit. This has resulted in the hugest fiscal deficit ever accumulated in the history of world capitalism. While the official discourse was about liberalism and promised to reduce or even completely eliminate the fiscal deficit, it remained obvious that capitalist reality demanded the preservation of an economy based on public expenditure (particularly the war economy) and the application of Keynesian economic politics.

But since, in spite of this, no economic growth ensued, these economic politics failed and illusions vanished. At the same time the international bourgeois class never stopped predicting the coming of a new golden age, the coming of a new economic expansion that would put an end to today's generalised depression. Even today still, in spite of the obvious worsening of the world economic situation and mainly in the biggest examples of triumphant national economies (United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, Italy...), not one day passes by without having some politician, some economist or some journalist telling us that soon we'll be delivered from the economic crisis and get back to the golden age of capitalist prosperity.

But beyond all these nice words and promises, the procedure remains the same: lowering of the interest rates (basically through the lowering of the discount rate of the Central Banks in order to favour credit and investment) and increase of public expenditures. This can only be achieved by increasing always more public and private debt, internal and external.

This is exactly what has been done up till now and this is the source of today's generalised chaos. All speeches, all promises of expansionist economic politics, only serve the purpose of injecting some more morphine into moribund capitalism.

In 1985, in an article against the various myths concerning the external debt of "Latin American countries", we already stressed the fact that this corresponded not to a particular phenomenon but to the generalised and insoluble situation of worldwide capitalism.

"Faced with the end of the phase of expansion that followed the second world war (during the whole history of capitalism, wars, reconstruction periods, routed proletarians... have always been the inevitable antecedents that have made an ulterior "healthy" development possible), worldwide capitalism has only succeeded in postponing catastrophic depressions, while creating huge amounts of fictitious capital. The levels that were reached in this field, not only in absolute terms, but also in relative terms compared to world production, are far ahead of what ever existed before. Even more so, the most incredible anarchy and the absence of widespread control in the relationship between these two magnitudes (between fictitious capital and the production of goods) prevails on the international scale. For the future phases of depression, this preludes that such a situation will become multiplied (or expressed differently, will be raised to a power with unpredictable consequences) by the massive and brutal destruction of fictitious capital, blowing up all contradictions of this social system at a level unheard of until now. The different stages of easy and widespread credit during the post-war period, the massive debt of all governments, as well as the unrestrained creation of units of value that in fact do not represent any value, correspond to always shorter and weaker takeoffs of the world economy. These kind of drugs administered to an exhausted body have at each cycle produced a stimulating effect. But it made the system of enlarged international reproduction of Capital function as if it was a child... until the effect wears out and a higher dose of drugs becomes necessary. Then after a while even higher doses of drugs produce no more effect and finally the remedy becomes worse than the illness... and in the end, Capital appears as it really is, an enuretic and rotten morphine addicted corpse.

For the proletariat, the only real perspective for the human species, it is fundamental to expose this worldwide diabolical dynamic: against all dominating myths, it is of vital importance to reveal that debt (or rather today's generalised and insoluble debt) is nothing else but one of the most remarkable manifestations of the anarchy and of the historical end of a social system that engulfs all of mankind." (16)

So the increase in expenditure and of public debt have been the historical remedies that have allowed, in each country and for a given period, a certain growth beyond the real limits of production. These therapies have been used each time again on the world level, and we can assert that world production and trade over the last decays could only function "adequately" because of such policies... but this is precisely what has brought about the present situation of default in payment. And the worst for world capital is that even today's rhythm of growth, nearly zero, can only be maintained through an increase in international debt, i.e. by the implementation of the very economic policies that have become totally unbearable for Capital today.

A little bit more than ten years ago, the financial catastrophe was so bad that most Latin American countries, as well as many countries from other continents, threatened to stop debt repayment. Straight away, the granting of credit was cut down for a large number of them. The same happened a bit later in various African States and in several East European countries. Then for a while the world bourgeoisie cherished the illusion that growth would continue anyway, "in spite of everything", thanks to the socalled "new effective demand" that was supposed to come from the East (17). But soon these new illusions vanished as well, and once again they had to apply the policies of easy credit so as to create solvent buyers... while only necessities existed... but these policies also ran out after a few years. Simultaneously, in other parts of the world, the same limits as those that we know today were reached: the US is a very clear example of this: if we add the debts of consumers, of companies and of the central government of this country, we reach an astronomical number superior to $US10000 billion, which equals 2 years of national production in this country!

In spite of all these efforts, in spite of all these therapies to revitalize Capital, in spite of the existence of such artificial buyers, in spite of the mass of investments financed through credit, in spite of the extent of fictitious demand created by the Keynesian multiplier (18), today all these vain promises about the "end of recession" fall apart one after the other.

But could there possibly be any other unexplored possibilities to allow Capital to overcome today's generalised depression? Could there be any other bourgeois politics than those that have been implemented until now? The answer is no. Categorically no!!! (19)

5. Exacerbation of class war and of imperialist war

But worldwide Capital does not reason as worldwide Capital and is not conscious about the non-existence of a political economy that would allow itself to continue to grow beyond all limits. Capital considers these limits to be temporary, and it considers itself to be the highest and final stage of development in history. Of course it envisages changes, but it does not envisage its fall. Moreover, it does not have any capacity of worldwide, centralised decision-making; quite to the contrary, it is essentially ungovernable.

Decisions are not taken either by worldwide Capital, nor by Capital in general, but by each particular Capital, by each particle of Capital. It is because of this reason, in such situations without any capitalist general solution, as is the case today, that the decomposition of Capital into particles accelerates, that competition grows stronger still and that the generalised "run for your life" (the true rule of this society) materializes when each has to walk on the head of his neighbour in order to survive.

This "neighbour" of course is first of all the proletariat, its "own" proletariat and the capitalist will not skimp on any efforts in order to increase the rate of exploitation. But the "neighbour" is also personified by the bourgeois competitor, and each capitalist is ready to destroy this neighbour by waging commercial war until its ultimate consequences: military war.

So what matters is not what the capitalist wants or does not want, whether he's "left" or "right", whether he's the director of a multinational or of the Cuban State. What matters is what each capitalist is forced to do, in accordance with his function as a manager. As Marx would have said, he's nothing else but the creature of value valorising itself, of the social relation reproducing itself (20) and in this sense he's not responsible for what he's doing since he's obliged to act that way by Capital. We feel that this assertion is essential to fight against all illusions about the capacities of such or such a capitalist, of such or such a manager to act differently from the way Capital forces him to act (21).

This is the general explanation of what is happening at present and of what we're living daily: always stronger restrictions, increasing misery, more unemployment... it is the explanation of the always more murderous war against the proletariat. And it is also the explanation of the unceasing increase in local wars and of the intensification of inter-bourgeois wars. These wars materialize through the marked increase in protectionism, the rupture of commercial agreements, through the difficulty of bringing trade agreements to a longlasting successful conclusion, as we can witness with the GATT negotiations (22); also through the rupture of the old alliances (and we shouldn't forget that countries and unions of countries are nothing else but inter-bourgeois alliances trying to confront other capitalist factions!), through the rupture of commercial and military blocs, through the constitution of new imperialist constellations...

However, it is clear that the austerity measures -the lowering of real wages, the increase in intensity and hours of labour in order to reach the same level of production with less workers (i.e. while paying less in wages), all the measures recommended by generalised liberalism and which result in a net increase in the rate of exploitation and of profitability for particular capitalists- including when this concerns an entire country (and when the bourgeois of that country benefit from this), all these measures are prejudicial to capital in general since they reduce the worldwide effective demand. This for instance is what was practised by the Pinochet government. The violent lowering of real wages (and even more so of relative wages) and the increase in the rate of exploitation and of profit, have attracted capitals from the whole world and allowed for an acceleration in national growth. But, logically, the excess of surplus-value that was produced in this way could not be reinvested in the same country and necessarily had to be introduced on to the market of other national capitals, in order to realize itself; this shows clearly that this kind of policy is a short run policy or -if you prefer- that it will necessarily come into contradiction with the interests of proletarians but also with those of other national capitals, and that it cannot possibly bring about a solution on the level of global Capital.

The other so-called antagonistic policy by which nation States try to manage the contradiction between particular and global capital consists in increasing fictitious demand. This does not bring about a global solution either and will also lead to war. In the face of the tendency for each particular capital to increase beyond all limits the rate of exploitation and of profit, nation States always represent a higher level of globality for Capital (23). The managers of the State and their ideologists, economists and sociologists as well as being apologetic about existing social relations, all try to abstract themselves from immediate reality; they'll advocate an economic policy that imposes discipline on each particular capital not only on the basis of governmental efforts (public expenditure, budget deficit...) but also through the establishment of a series of rules for each particular capital (minimum wage, maximum working hours...). This allows the State to represent itself more easily as being "beneficial for the whole of society" (24). All populist regimes, from Hitler to Fidel Castro and from Roosevelt to Stalin, have tried to implement such policies but its most thorough theorization is Keynesianism. This policy can also only be a short term policy, since in the long run all contradictions are postponed, accumulated, exacerbated(25). It can only be a national policy and not a worldwide one since it stands in contradiction with the international competitiveness of the companies of the countries that apply such a policy and because sooner or later it will lead to the accumulation of deficits of the balance of payments and of the balance of trade as well as reinforcing protectionism. It will lead to the confirmation of its weakness in the commercial war and this unavoidably will raise the need to pursue this policy in the military field. It is clear also that people cannot just be hired to dig holes that other people will fill in -what dynamises the national economy most is a war economy! And since each national capital considers those who stand in competition with itself, who take "its" raw materials, who sell cheaper, who attack its position on the markets... to be its enemies, the drive towards war will become always more imperious. So this policy also can only lead towards imperialist war, and its most consistent theoreticians -like Keynes himself- never really felt emmbarrassed to admit that since war is necessary to save capitalism, one had to prepare for it.

All this leads to an increase in the number of local wars, to the decomposition of old alliances and nations, to the constitution of new fronts and imperialist constellations and to the generalisation of war to the whole planet. Such is the capitalist perspective.

And without mentioning the whole series of accidents and daily catastrophes that Capital imposes on the worldwide population, such as nuclear accidents or the multiplication of areas where children are born with various physical defects because of pollution and contamination that their parents have been exposed to (26). And without taking into account that what Capital is proposing as a model (life in a modern city for instance) could not possibly be generalised to the whole of humanity because this simply would jeopardize the survival of the planet earth.

"You are being one-sided" we are told. No, we are not onesided, but it is Capital that is one-sided, its own progress leads to crisis, to destruction and to war. This society is a cannibalistic society, the development of Capital feeds itself with human beings, it destroys them, kills them, swallows them. And on the level of the whole planet the present situation stands as a blatant confirmation of our conception, a categorical confirmation of communist theory.

6. War is everywhere

"New World Order", "the end of Communism", "an era of peace and prosperity", "the end of history"... they would like to make us believe that humanity has reached a level beyond which it can not develop any further! One of their ideologists even declared that:

"liberal democracy can be the final point of the ideological evolution of humanity and the final form of all human government; as such it can be the final point of history." (27)

Worldwide capitalist reality everyday contradicts the speeches by the apologists of the system: never before have there been so many territories at war, so many military and para-military clashes; never before has there been such a mass of corpses caused by capitalist war (and peace!); never before in human history has militarism taken such an important place in life and never before has the production of arms and their commercialisation been so colossal; never before -in relative and absolute terms- have such large numbers of human beings been confronted with the daily reality of war (and/or with the possibility of the launching of war at almost any time) and with all the consequences that go with it.

Today, war is everywhere; not a single continent escapes from it. War is going on in former Yugoslavia, in former USSR, in Somalia, in Turkey, in Iraq, Burma, in the Philippines, in Lebanon, Chad, in CentralAmerica... without mentioning those other imperialist wars, like the "drug war" in Bolivia, in Peru, in Colombia, in Brazil... that also directly attack millions of proletarians.

Experts in political science have listed 125 "centres of ethnic conflict" in the former Russian bloc, of which 25 have already degenerated into open armed clashes. Nearly every day a new armed confrontation takes place; nearly every day a new "nation calling for self-determination" rises up. Each caricature of a "republic" in the former USSR has its own "home-made" contradiction because such or such of its minorities threatens to promulgate its independence. Almost daily new curfews are being imposed in such or such area and more central armies are being called in to put down more local ones. One day, such or such an imperialist power -in full agreement with its expansionist interests- recognises the right to self-determination for such and such a new "State" and the next day -still in agreement with its expansionist interests- the same power refuses the same right to some other State. In this game of profits and numbers, of speculation and stock-exchange, of alliances and ruptures (28), thousands of corpses of men, women and children, thousands of wounded and disabled people... just pile up while the rest of the population in these regions survives precariously in the midst of ruins, famine and a general shortage of everything. No need to go to Somalia or Ethiopia (where the situation is getting more dramatic everyday) to attest that the population is facing starvation. In the former USSR, and in spite of all Western "aid" in order to maintain bourgeois law and order, famine is threatening and a rate of 90% of the population living in poverty is officially admitted.

It really is no longer possible to hide the destructive and cannibalistic character of this mode of production!!!

7. Catastrophe and Revolution

The catastrophe of the capitalist world is subjecting the proletariat to a hellish situation of death, famine, misery, permanent insecurity, war... And this situation can only get worse.

Everywhere, Capital is facing its own limits and this opposes it irremediably to the human species and forces the latter to destroy Capital if it does not want itself to be destroyed.

Economic growth zero; economic policies to bring the crisis to an end that have all failed; war, its generalisation and the historical opposition to humanity that is the only outcome of all capitalist efforts; and even more so the unique result of the economic growth of Capital can only be a generalised worsening catastrophe.

If today all capitalist models collapse, it's because their extension is no longer possible; because if we hypothetically project today's economic growth into the future we can see that this would lead to the generalised destruction of even the most fundamental aspects of human life; because all life on this whole planet would simply die if the model of the United States were to be generalised everywhere; because the planet and humanity could not possibly survive if New York (and other big cities) instead of having 20 million inhabitants, would have 50 million! (29)

The destruction of the ozone layer, generalised pollution of the atmosphere and of water, global warming, desertification, destruction of forests... and all other disastrous consequences for the human species are only the isolated aspects of a colossal planetary catastrophe.

Everywhere, capitalism has reached the historical limit of its possibilities of existence, and the great tragedy for the human species is that Capital is carrying on at our expense because we are not capable of destroying it.

This is the big problem for humanity: the catastrophe, as we wrote at the beginning of this article, is not for the future but very much of the living, dreadful, present.

In this sense, the problem of revolution is not the problem of such or such "party", of such or such sect, of such or such social group, but it is the problem of the whole proletariat, of humanity as a whole.

In the face of the barbarism of the capitalist world, in the face of the exacerbation of crisis and war, in the face of always increasing attacks on its conditions of living and struggle, the proletariat has always revolted and we do not doubt that in the near future it will rise up again even stronger.

We can't pretend that over the last few years there haven't been any proletarian struggles. As a matter of fact, there have been many. In certain cases, like in Iraq, Burma, Algeria, Venezuela, Los Angeles... these struggles were very radical and hit at the very centres of power of capital and its State, without allowing themselves to be controlled by the unions or by any other bourgeois party of law and order. But today's main problem is that these strikes, revolts, demos... do not have any continuity, do not have any direction, do not have any international links between them.

We can't pretend that there have been no major explosions of proletarian outrage, and we've welcomed them. But we have to admit that they've lacked organisation and that for this reason, in many cases, they could easily be defeated and this allowed the State to step up its terror again.

We can't say that proletarians during these revolts didn't recognise their interests, since -for instance- they have opposed imperialist war, they've deserted, disobeyed, killed the officers that tried to send them to the battlefields, executed hundreds of policemen and other capitalist lackeys, as in Iraq. But due to a lack of structures and international and internationalist directives, such revolts have been isolated and contained by the nationalist bourgeois forces and this has meant a defeat of the internationalist militants.

We can't say either that these struggling proletarians do not know who they're attacking since, in general, through these revolts, they attack private property and its defenders and they seize whatever they need. The big problem is that a few days later everything gets "back to normal", to the sad daily struggle for survival where everybody tries to get by on their own and Capital dominates again.

We can't say that they have not confronted the State's servants, the policemen, clerics and other religious functionaries, leaders from left and right, trade unionists and journalists... since it is against these people that proletarian rage has been directed in the first place. But we have to admit that a majority of these State lackeys still sleep soundly in their beds while many of our comrades die on the battlefields or are in prison.

There exists an enormous disproportion between, on the one hand, the catastrophe of this society and the potential for explosion of the proletariat and on the other hand the lack of basic structures of our class, such structures that would lead us not to the repetition of 10, 100, 1000 revolts... but to an international social revolution.

We lack workers' associationism, international structures for contact, organisations, directives, a class consciousness of our objectives, capacities to coordinate, to decide in relation to the interests of the whole movement, to transform common international interests into converging actions that coincide in time... In short, more than ever we're in need of structuring the real community of struggle, constituting it as an organised force, as an internationalist communist Party.

Capitalism itself does not leave any other choice to the proletariat, to humanity.

Let's act in a conscious, organised

and determined way towards this end !

Notes

1. We've used inverted commas here to designate the "bourgeois left", because, although this term is being commonly used and although we do not know any other term to express this concept, from a revolutionary point of view the distinction between the left and right of the bourgeois class is not a real distinction. Not only must we stress that there is not the slightest essential difference between the social project of "left" and "right" as far as the defence of bourgeois order is concerned (and therefore we also put the term "social project" between inverted commas) but moreover, there are not any specific characteristics that would allow us to distinguish the economic politics of the "left" from those of the "right". This explains the coincidence between the kind of methods of organisation used by the model of "socialist" capitalism and the ones applied and promoted by such "leftists" as Hitler or Mussolini. Beyond certain oppositions as far as their talk is concerned, it is obvious that there exists a full identity of their class interests, but also of their economic project (for instance, protectionism) which allows us to reject categorically all supposed distinctions between these two capitalist factions. For example, if historically we can make a valuable distinction between the various agrarian, banking or industrial bourgeois factions, since they each have clear factional interests and corresponding economic politics, nothing similar can be done as far as "Left" or "Right" are concerned.

2. Pinochet's Christian Democrat successors talk shamefully of the "economic" model and, all the while pursuing its politics, claim that they are only applying it to the "economy", that is not in the "social" or "political" sense. As if it wasn't the economy which had obliged Pinochet to apply Pinochetism on the political and social plains: poverty and open state terrorism.

3. The most spectacular example of a historical attempt to develop and check Capital, is given by the Bolsheviks, filled with their social democratic ideology, starting in 1917. The failure was devastating -and could not have been any different- and Capital again became the only real social subject, transforming the Bolshevik party and its leaders into mere puppets.

4. Cf. "Quelques records du modèle économique mondial: USA" in Communisme No.36 (June 1992).

5. In some countries, like Iran, the State does not hesitate to put forward in its propaganda the "miserable situation of the poor" in the USA. They try to use the contradictions in the USA (between wealth and poverty, for instance) to depict this country as "a satan" and try to make proletarians in Iran reject the "corrupt western way of life". Their aim is to rally the proletariat behind their own ideological model and ("Islamic") values. This was one of the ways that the State in Iran used to defeat the very radical attack by the revolutionary proletariat during the 1979 uprisings against capitalist misery and its defenders (for instance through the promotion of such "radical" slogans as "Neither East nor West").

6. Corruption is not an "irregularity", it is the normal functioning of the ruling social system. In the same way, the existence of such or such a "mafia" is in reality nothing more than one of the expressions of the bourgeois State or, to be more precise, the blanket with which it covers itself in order to exonerate itself. The accusation enables one fraction to whitewash itself (of the things that they all do) while throwing the blame onto a rival fraction. At the same time this allows them to present the State as a neutral apparatus manipulated by bad administrators.

7. It is clear that most of the time those who support such lies and illusions, are themselves taken in by them and believe what they are saying. But nevertheless, these lies remain nothing but lies and in the historic war that the bourgeoisie is waging against the proletariat, they are manoeuvres to disorient and disorganise our class.

8. The reader should remind themselves that this company has always been presented as ideal not with respect to its size and economic clout (superior to that of some countries) but also because the workers have the opportunity to become shareholders. General Motors actually has the greatest number of workers who have become legal owners of their company in the world (the figure amounts to several hundred thousand). Of course this is part of and reinforces the myth legal ownership can never assure economic disposal of the means of production, that is to say their true ownership.

9. The illusion of controlling and planifying capitalist development is a permanent feature of all bourgeois factions, including the liberals. But Capital -a monster without head and that nobody can control- doesn't care about this and laughs at all economists and planners. This confirms the theory of our historic party which asserts that it is anarchy that rules the capitalist world.

10. The lack of markets and the fall of the rate of profit are of course nothing else, from our point of view, but the manifestations as they are being experienced -more or less violently- by capitalists (directly in their wallets!) and by the whole of bourgeois society -manifestations of the immanent contradiction of Capital. Bourgeois society, that is nothing else but the process of value valorising itself, can only concretise such valorisation by provoking always more violent, more generalised and more devastating devalorisations.

11. This explains why the Gross Product of entire countries not only stagnates, but even decreases. Estimates forecast a fall of 18% of the industrial production of the former Soviet Union, and of an average 9.7% for the other East European countries!

12. The growth of the Gross Domestic Product of Japan and the main Western European countries during the post-war period, has shrunk from 5.6% for the period from 1950 to 1973, to 2.1% for the years that followed; in the United States it shrunk from 3.7% to 2.3% during the same period. We can assert that from 1973 onwards -on the world level- the growth of the GDP has been maintained thanks to this policy of credit expansion, in complete disproportion with real production.

13. These capitalist ideologies oppose themselves to all State intervention and pretend to be anti-State. They pretend to substitute private companies for the necessary capitalist bureaucracy, including in the field of policing. In spite of today's acknowledged success of private police forces and employers' militia in numerous countries and sectors -we should not forget that this has always existed- it is clear that capitalism will never be able to avoid centralising itself as a State.

14. In a more general way, we can assert that liberalism and protectionism are always relative. It is only normal that the champions of liberalism did not go as far as interfering with other more structural protections of the American or British productive space, such as the generalised protection of the agricultural sector.

15. Properly speaking, one cannot say that a reduction in taxes, as such, provokes an increase in the rate of exploitation. Whether it be the State or private bourgeois factions that appropriate surplus-value, from our point of view the result is the same and we qualify this as a simple transfer of value. Nevertheless, because of this for each particular capitalist the ratio increases between the amount of surplusvalue that he gets and the salaries that he has to pay (the particular rate of exploitation or of surplus-value), and therefore the ratio between this surplus-value and the whole of capital that this particular capitalist has invested. It is this reality that allows us to formulate things in this way and to consider that such measures increase the rate of exploitation and of profit (for each particular capital). On the other hand, it is precisely to obtain this result that these politics are being adopted. The aim is not to increase the global social rate of exploitation, but rather the private rate of exploitation of each capitalist. This is how they try to stimulate investment and the accumulation of productive capital.

16. from "La cuestion de la deuda: basta de versos" ["About debt: enough bullshit!"] in Comunismo No.19, June 1985.

17. Of course this was a purely ideological illusion based on the myth that the system that was collapsing in the East was a social system that was different from the one in the West! This illusion had no real economic basis to it: since the "buyers" did not have anything to pay with, so through what kind of magic could "effective demand" possibly increase! The closures of companies in the East did not even allow for Western companies to take up similar positions to the same extent, since the real income of the population had fallen precisely because of these closures and the unemployment that followed.

18. For instance, when they issue a government bond corresponding to $US1000, or when they issue $1000 in banknotes, and when with this paper fiction they finance civil engineering, then, according to Keynes (who was one of the most distinguished bourgeois economists of all time), not only will global production grow because of these civil engineering works, but also and even more so, because of what the workers will be able to buy with the wages they'll receive in return for their labour. The multiplier is the rate of increase in production compared to the initial investment. As we can see, the capacity to develop this fiction so that it could turn into reality, finds its limits, as all fiction does, in the development of the contradictions of reality.

19. A war of generalised destruction remains the only capitalist solution in this situation. But in relation to the analysis that we're developing at this stage, it would not be right to introduce this notion here as if it were just another plain economic policy of Capital; this would mean to impute Capital with a capacity for decision-making that it does not really have.

20. "But here individuals are dealt with in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."
Karl Marx, Capital,
Preface to the first german edition.

21. If a manager really refused to bow to the dictatorship of Capital, he would soon disappear as a capitalist and Capital would coopt someone else to replace him (as happens frequently).

22. Structures like GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) formalise the existing balance of forces between various capitals, companies, capitalist States, blocs of countries... During periods of expansion such structures work pretty well, but during periods like the present one such agreements are generally called into question. And, as we could see with the famous failure of the "Uruguay Round", such conferences are never-ending parodies that spectacularly reveal the impossibility of the various bourgeois factions accepting the settlements that they agreed upon yesterday, because today it would imply their own suicide. The repetition of such failures only preludes the passage of commercial war to military war.

23. It would not be right to state here, while analysing inter-capitalist contradictions, that the State represents Capital in general. This of course is true, in the face of the proletariat, in the face of its revolutionary project; but not on the level of our analysis here when we look at how each bourgeois State also stands in contradiction with other national States and how -including within each Statethere exists the tendency for its decomposition into its constituent parts, a tendency towards its own negation and towards its restructuring into the form of other -inferior"national units". A good example of this is what happened in former Yugoslavia!

24. It is clear that such rules are a response to proletarian struggles and that, just like all other legal formalisations, they tend to "grant" whatever is coherent with the needs of capitalist valorisation seeking in this way the renunciation by the proletariat of autonomous struggle.

25. Keynes himself didn't mind admitting that "in the long run, we're all dead!"

26. In various cities of the former USSR or Romania, for example, more than 85% of the children whose parents have had to handle nuclear missiles during their military service are born with serious genetic defects!

27. Francis Fukuyama, former advisor to the US State Department, in his book "The end of history and the last man."

28. This whole situation clearly illustrates -once again- that bourgeois politics directed towards (against!) the proletariat and called "the struggle for self-determination", "antiimperialist national liberation", "the struggle for independence"... is a particularly vicious politics.

29. The unilateral generalisation of the positive poles of Capital is of course an absurdity in itself, because the essence of capitalist development precisely contains this polarity in which the "poles" develop themselves while imposing "under-development" everywhere else. If we take these examples that make up the supreme ideal that all the ideologists of the regime long for (while pretending that proletarians share such desires) it is only to illustrate, even on such an extreme level, the full incompatibility between the ideal of Capital and the needs of the human species.

"The huge problems facing humanity today - exploitation, misery, war, famine, alienated and estranged labour, mass unemployment,... - are inherent to, and the necessary result of, capitalist progress and barbarity. They can only be properly confronted (and understood) if, instead of being seen in isolation, they are tackled in the context of their driving force - the capitalist system, the capitalist system history's last class society, a transitory society which is at the same time an integral part of an historical arch spanning from primitive communities to communism, and an integral part of the process of creating the material conditions for the institution of worldwide communist society. Communism will not mean the end of the human history. Communism, the formation of a universal community of human beings will, on the contrary, signal the genesis of truly human history, resulting from the abolition of private property, social classes, the State, etc..."

Theses of programmatical orientation of the ICG, thesis No.1

For us the analysis of the war in Yugoslavia is indispensable. This war is not only of the greatest importance for its direct consequences for the conditions of life and struggle of proletarians in the region - it is also important for the international proletariat, and because it announces and prefigures the military conflicts that are to come.

From Communism #9

- "Is that you, Mladic?"

- "Yes it is, you old devil, what do you want?"

- "Three of my boys went missing near... and I want to find out what happened to them."

- "I think they're all dead."

- "I've got one of their parents on to me about it, so I can tell them for certain that they're gone?"

- "Yep, certain. You have my word. By the way, how's the family?"

- "Oh, not so bad, thanks. How about yours?"

- "They're doing just fine, we're managing pretty well."

- "Glad to hear it. By the way, now I've got you on the line, we've got about twenty bodies of yours near the front and they've been stripped bare. We slung them into a mass grave and they're now stinking to high heaven. Any chance of you coming to pick them up because they really are becoming unbearable...?"

This is a telephone conversation between General Mladic, Serb commander of the army corps in Knin and the head of the Croat Interior Ministry (MUP) force in Split. This conversation between two men who apparently know each other well (having had the same career in the Yugoslav National Army) was reported by the BBC correspondent, Misha Glenny, in his book "The Fall of Yugoslavia".

oOo

The reality of the war, the sinister development of bombardments, of massacres, of persecutions, of internments, show clearly that this war is a war against the proletariat, against its interests and against its movement of struggle.

This reality of the war was shown, for example, in July 1991, in Banija (in Croatia, on the frontier with Bosnia-Herzegovina) when armed groups, mercenaries, commandos of killers arrived in the villages and carried out massacres. They classified the inhabitants principally according to their Serb or Croat origins, obliging the Croats who were capable of serving to join their ranks and to take the Serbs as hostages. Then the units fired on all sides and the population fled. Following this the federal army invaded the villages, beginning by bombarding them and then hunting those who had not been able to flee. The fugitives of Croat, Hungarian and Serb origins fled in the direction of the big towns or towards Vojvodina or Herzegovina.

Little by little, these war operations grew, sometimes carried out by the Croat militias, which caused hatred to be directed towards all those considered to be Croats, sometimes by the Serb militias, directing hatred towards all those considered to Serbs. For the rest of the villages it was as if an earthquake had happened. Whereas for many years "Serbs", "Croats" or "Hungarians" were mixed to the point where they could no longer define themselves as belonging to one ethnic group or another, the nationalist forces operated a systematic separation according to their supposed ethnic links.

These war operations came to be aimed more and more at the big towns. Thus for example the industrial centre of Vukovar was bombarded for three months by the federal army. The inhabitants spent days and nights underground in the caves. They organised resistance, helping each other, with all nationalities together. The Croatian National Guard and the Ustaše (fascist forces) for their part organised the internal repression. When the federal army reentered the town, a whole series of corpses were found that had been shot from behind, summarily executed for refusing to let themselves be enroled in the Croatian National Guard and/or the Ustaše.

The general consequences of this type of operation were:

- Indiscriminate massacres of proletarians, as is shown, for example, by the discovery of mass graves where the bodies of "Serbs", "Croats", "Bosnians"... are mixed together.
-
The internment of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war in numerous camps dispersed over the whole territory of former Yugoslavia.
-
For example, today you find internment camps in Serbia as well as in the parts of Bosnia occupied by the Croat militias.
-
You can also find camps on the periphery of the big Slovenian towns where the state parks "its" refugees - that Slovenia which the whole world assures us is a successful model for the transformation taking place in Yugoslavia!

- The existence of floods of refugees (more than 2.3 million in July '92 based on an estimate of the UN High Commission for Refugees) who try for better or worse to flee the massacres and throw themselves onto the roads in the hope of finding an unlikely exile elsewhere. Meanwhile, in Slovenia the government has declared that it will no longer accept Yugoslav refugees; in Sweden -a social democratic paradise according to some- the government has begun to expel refugees from Slovenia and Kosovo; in Denmark, the government has sent back more than two hundred Serb deserters...
-
The forced sending to the front of war refugees... there to join their "own camp".

- Thus the press has mentioned nearly 200 Bosnian Muslim refugees in Croatia in the Karlovac camp, who were rounded up on Monday 17 August 1992 at 4 a.m. by the Croat armed forces to be sent back to the front in Bosnia. Some had been recently freed from Serb detention centres. All the men in the camp aged from 18 to 60 years were forced onto a bus for Rijeka, on the Adriatic coast, from where they would rejoin the combat positions.
-
Since mid-July, four thousand refugee men have been "sorted", and then returned to the front via Rijeka and Split. The Croatian Vice-President, Mate Granic, recognised, on Tuesday 18 August 1992, that this operation "violated universal human rights". But he justified it by the necessity of avoiding "a social explosion" in his country.
-
Similarly in Belgrade refugees from Croatia who are over 20 years old have been sent toward the front lines "to divert the anger of the Belgraders who reproach them for their quiet life in Serbia".

- Direct, open repression against all those who resist. The state of war, the militaristic polarisation of society, allows the liquidation with complete impunity of all those who do not adhere to the patriotic and ideological values that flourish in all camps. Those that stand in the way are simply done away with!
-
The HCR estimates that more than a hundred thousand young deserters and draft dodgers have fled the war and the punishment of prison which they can receive for "high treason".

- The humanitarian campaigns as a means of blackmail in the hands of the different bourgeois fractions, the better to reinforce still more their control over the territories which they dominate, when they don't serve directly as a means of transporting arms ("in their impatience to acquire arms, the Bosnians have without doubt already obtained satisfaction and the Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina accuse some countries participating in the humanitarian air bridge of having parachuted in arms", Le Monde, 21 August 1992).

- The material disarmament of proletarians who refuse to fight on the fronts of this war which they recognise as not being theirs and which they flee from... The always sovereign HCR rejected the request of a Serb deserter who affirmed his "refusal to fight the Croats who are compatriots". In disarming the trouble-makers, in sending them back to "their" country, the bourgeoisie delivers them tied hand and foot, like peaceful and inoffensive lambs, to their executioners. And this is in the name of peace, in the name of the signed accords, in the name of the UN, that proletarians will be obliged to give up their arms and to wait passively for the hour of their execution in the abattoirs that are the fields of battle.

- The incessant bombardments and the inquisitorial and murderous militias, the forced mobilisations and the prison camps, the refugees with their miserable lot... the shortages, the rationing, the price rises, pauperisation, the unemployment which hits a greater and greater part of the population. The different states make use of the war situation to better liquidate the least productive sectors and to impose new sacrifices on proletarians.

This is the reality of war!

The social awakening
The restructuring of capital implied, in Yugoslavia as everywhere else in the world, a generalised attack on the conditions of life of the proletariat. This is what determined the objective and inevitable conditions for the rupture of social peace. In Serbia, for example, the Central Bank imposed a 40% reduction in wages for 5 years consecutively and freed prices.

In 1984, a wave of very hard-fought strikes broke out in Macedonia. One of the most important factories of the region declared itself on strike "against the bureaucratic mafia", another would go "to the limit". The strikes would last 46 days.

In Summer 1985, on the announcement of a diminution of wages and of redundancies due to lack of activity, the port of Koper (the only big port in Slovenia) was paralysed. The strikers put themselves openly on an anti-union terrain, against class conciliation (the union had accepted the stabilisation plan). Faced with the radicalisation of the workers, the union collaborated with the police and the port administration in the hunt for "ringleaders". This strike was the beginning of a vast movement of social protest which paralysed the whole country.

In Slovenia, several big enterprises were paralysed by the strike, the workers tore up and burned their union cards. In Croatia, the strikes radicalised and the army took action to prevent the extension of the struggle. In many different regions, the proletariat occupied the roads to show solidarity with the strikers. The labourers of the ports of Split and Rijeka joined the movement, so paralysing foreign trade. The reaction of the bourgeoisie was rapid: the government of Slovenia authorised strikes on condition that the workers met and discussed with the unions and informed the management in advance.

A Yugoslav journal (Studensk List, 3.10.85) said:

"... The information which we have reported this summer that almost every day, in two of our enterprises, the workers were on strike... In considering the strikes of this summer, groups of top managers (who like to visit factories on strike) have expressed their concern at the course of new circumstances, which were absent in preceding strikes. This concerns particularly the fact that the labourers involved in the strikes are expressing their general discontent, not just demands proper to their enterprise. Concretely, the labourers who are on strike are telling the top bosses of the Republics and the Federation that they take issue with the way they run the country. ..."

In 1986 a new attempt by the federal government to "close unprofitable enterprises" was launched. The unions tried to make the workers accept this restructuration plan in "enterprise management meetings". This governmental effort was refused en bloc by the working class: a new wave of strikes inundated the country.

The German newspaper Die Zeit of 17.1.86 reported the remarks of a metal worker:

"I can only smile at this theory that the strike actions were born suddenly out of some caprice or the suggestion which says that the idler and the loner are behind the work stoppages. Our patience is at an end. The working class no longer has anything to lose or to fear."

To survive, many workers only worked three or four of the seven official hours and turned themselves into "peasants" the rest of the time. Some 60% of the inhabitants of Yugoslavia lived off agriculture while only 38% lived in the countryside. The others supplemented their wages by working on the black after their jobs, 40% of family income coming from this source. The reduction of the real wage reached impressive figures: more than 40%. The statisticians of the Ministry of National Economy observed at this time an important fall in the expenditures known as consumption.

In March 1986, the government of Milka Planic fell. The reason? The impossibility of effectively completing the IMF plan in the face of growing proletarian discontent.

The new government promised to freeze wages for 6 months and to increase prices, the response was not long in coming: strikes, demonstrations, occupations, sabotage... which changed the balance of forces. The proletariat imposed its conditions: a proof of its strength was shown in an 8% increase in real wages. At the same time, the strikes and sabotage translated into a generalised loss of profitability of capital across the whole territory of Yugoslavia.

The bourgeoisie had backed down in the face of proletarian strength but the necessities of its concrete conditions of capital accumulation obliged it to take up ready made antagonistic solutions. It was thus that the federal government elaborated, with the blessing of the IMF, a monetary reform which had the aim of eliminating the non-competitive enterprises (in withdrawing the support of the local banks), and devaluing the Dinar so as to cause a redistribution of revenue, that is to say a radical and relative increase of the rate of profit.

In the course of the Autumn of 1986, all the banks in Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo failed. The pressure from the workers was so strong that no local manager would risk confronting the workers by closing enterprises decreed as non-profitable. The situation deteriorated. The enterprises were no longer able to continue functioning and they were simply abandoned. Unemployment reached enormous levels. It is estimated that for 1986 the number of unemployed was 1.2m, inflation reached 130%.

This same year, gas and electricity were cut to more than a thousand families in the centre of Belgrade who couldn't pay their bills.

The proletariat reacted to the new austerity plan which foresaw the elimination of 35,000 jobs by the end of the year -it launched a massive struggle. In the countryside, agricultural proletarians armed with axes and shovels attacked the police and the big industrial businesses.

1987 and 1988 saw the protest movement radicalising -proletarians were no longer content with just opposing the successive austerity programs, they openly posed the question of power. The demonstrations and strikes broke out of the limits of the factory and the big industrial centres and called into question all aspects of life: work, "socialism", the family, bosses, leaders, the miserable workers' housing... The elementary capitalist conditions for a return to work did not exist, the strike was permanent.

This sharpening of direct action by our class in Yugoslavia fed itself in strength and extent on the development of a cycle of generalisation of proletarian struggles on a world level. In the countries of Central Europe and the East (the countries called "Communist") there developed simultaneously a wave of intensive struggle which called into question the social order and gave the alarm signal which brought about the politico-formal changes which would later take place at the head of these states, so as to better manage these "sick economies" and respond to growing social agitation.

In Summer 1986, the "Hungarian" miners declared a strike against redundancies. In Romania in 1987 several waves of struggle finished up with the mutinies of Brasov (November 1987). In Autumn 1987, strikes also broke out in Bulgaria -to give just one example, we can cite thaat of the Mezdra factory. In Spring 1988 in Poland, numerous strikes developed in opposition to the massive increases in food prices and in August of the same year a wave of strikes broke out that Walesa and Solidarnosc could only control with great difficulty.

At the end of February 1987, in response to an increase in the prices of various commodities (as much as 20% for some), a wages freeze and an intensification of work, several strikes broke out which were described as "wildcat" by the authorities. For a month and a half, there were some 80 strikes without warning in the whole of Yugoslavia, primarily in Croatia. Faced with this movement, the bourgeoisie responded with the usual repressive measures that it always uses in such circumstances: redundancies, not paying for strike days, threats of military intervention...

But at that point the movement continued to grow. After a short interruption at the beginning of the month of April that same year, in the coal field of Labin (Croatia), a strike developed which was the longest recorded in Yugoslavia since the Second World War: it lasted 30 days. The miners demanded the cancellation of all price increases, a 100% increase in wages and a change of mine management. The bourgeoisie, faced with the perspective of possible proletarian unity in struggle and particularly taking account of the fact that at that very moment in the North-West of the country and on the Adriatic coast proletarians were launching an open struggle, conceded a nominal wage increase of more than 40% (while the workers were demanding 100% to stop the strike at Labin) and dismissed various functionaries designated as responsible for the situation. But they could not stop the example of the Labin miners spreading, notably to Titograd and Kraljevo.

In the other regions, groups of workers met to coordinate their actions! Proletarians in a Bosnian steelworks founded a new communist party which was openly against "the corrupt trade union" and called for "the expropriation of property from the state and the Party".

Unfortunately, we have no more information about this attempt at centralising the struggle. Everywhere the protests were directed against "the governmental mafia" and the foreign banks. At the same time, more than 700 steel workers in Slovenia began a strike "against corruption and bad management" with a demonstration in front of the parliament of the Republic. In July in Vukovar, 10,000 workers in a shoe and tyre company went on strike, 5,000 of them went to Belgrade to demand the doubling of their wages and the head of the old director (at that time Minister for Foreign Trade). They called for the dismissal of the management as well as the whole of the town council of Vukovar.

At the same time, there were demonstrations in front of the Croatian Parliament in Zagreb. The expedition of Vukovar strikers to Belgrade (two other struggles renewed this action around the same time) constituted some sort of new departure in so far as it was the first time during this wave of struggle that proletarians organised themselves practically to go beyond regional limits. What's more, they went not only to shout out their demands to the highest levels of the state, but above all to appeal on the spot for unity with the workers of Belgrade. Such an action necessitates, on the part of proletarians, an important confrontation with the Republic by Republic containment undertaken by the unions. This initiative implied therefore the rough outline of a rupture with the prevailing nationalism.

Then the official press never spoke of strikes but only of "work stoppages" while saying that the Belgrade government had threatened to use tanks against the strikers in the absence of an immediate return to work.

At the end of May '88, in response to a new "redistribution of revenue" law adopted on the 15th of the month by the Federal Parliament in Belgrade and which would have led to a fall in wages of between 20 and 45% depending on the sector, the strike movement affected the sectors of mining and transport (in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia). More than 10,000 proletarians in struggle demonstrated in Belgrade "against the high cost of living".

In October of the same year, there were violent clashes between demonstrators and special police units. Some workers who wanted to march on Titograd to join in the demonstrations were stopped by the police. For two days the town was cut off by the special units. Twelve thousand proletarians participated in the demo. They called for "economic reform" and higher wages. This movement led to the resignation of the government.

Things went the same way in the "autonomous" province of Vojvodina where the government went in the face of pressure from the street, specifically threatening to bring in a State of Emergency. Finally, in December 1988, the federal government found itself obliged to resign after two years of open struggle against the working class.

The government, after a period of political crisis and incapacity on the part of the local bourgeoisie to control the workforce, reconstituted itself under the aegis of Ante Markovic, a Croat, nominated Prime Minister of the Federation. The central points of his program were the freeing of prices, the interests of credit and the adaptation of the Dinar to the necessities of the market (which meant its adaptation to its real value).

To this the proletariat responded with a new wave of strikes during the first months of 1989, calling once again for a 100% wage increase.

Up to the month of March '89, for several weeks, Kosovo was the theatre of more and more massive and violent struggles. All the towns of this "autonomous province" were affected by a wave of struggles analogous to those which had shaken Algeria a few months earlier. In this case as in the other, the most obvious symbols and representations of the state were seen as targets by the insurgent proletarians: police stations came under attack. At Podujevo, the police commander ("of Albanian stock"... but this didn't matter to the insurgents, he was still a cop!) was killed and to some extent everywhere the forces of order came under fire from the roofs of houses, trains were attacked, shops devastated...

The state (in its federal and provincial forms) replied by decreeing, from the first of March, a State of Emergency in the region, and, from the 27 March, by a curfew. The day after the day when the riots reached their paroxysm, that is to say the 28 March, the parliament of Serbia voted unanimously for the complete suppression of the autonomy of the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, with the double aim of allowing the proletarian revolt to be crushed more directly and of diverting it better (through anti-Albanian and anti-Serb nationalist polarisations) and thus recuperating discontent in Serbia itself.

This explosion of anger in Kosovo, was the culminating point of a wave of practically uninterrupted struggle which, since 1985, with its peaks and troughs, shook all sectors and corners of Yugoslavia.

In September 1989, 10,000 workers demonstrated in Belgrade and Skopje and threatened to launch a general strike if the federal government didn't stop inflation. The workers, who were already on strike, demanded that the German Mark should become the principle currency which they were paid in. The local bosses in Zagreb, Split and Rijeka for their part called, under pressure from the strikers, for a minimum wage of 1,000 DM.

In December 1989, 650,000 labourers from Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia declared themselves on strike against the policies of the government and demanded an increase in wages of 100%. The enterprise bosses gave in and, contrary to government directives, granted the demands.

The multiple strikes accentuated still further the weaknesses of the Yugoslav economy. To give an idea of the level of struggles: in 1989 the rate of annual growth of retail prices was officially 1256%, the rate of annual growth of wages for the same period was 1595%! Thus, in the whole of the year 1989, real incomes increased by 25% (according to Notes & Etudes document No. 4920-r1). The analysts of this same review added: "... an evolution difficult to accept in an economy said to be 'in crisis'. Unemployment and a significant fall in living standards are the price to pay for stabilising the situation."

oOo

Having enumerated the strengths of our class we must now set out the weaknesses which characterised this wave of struggle and which became an important lever which the state could fully exploit to impose defeat on the proletariat.

Firstly, there is the non-emergence of autonomous organisations of proletarians in struggle, and this despite the duration and intensity of the struggles and despite the fact of a certain amount of discontent with the official unions. But the critique of the unions was often limited to an opposition to the "union bureaucracy", reducing the critique to the question of a "bad leader" rather than the struggle against the counter-revolutionary nature of trade unionism. In consequence of this weakness in the critique of trade unionism, proletarians did not assume the tasks of self-organisation nor the classist actions of enlarging and centralising the struggle.

This weakness in the critique of institutions in terms of "bad unions", "incompetent politicians" or of "corrupt officials" proved to be useful to the state and more than one "individual bureaucrat" was thus thrown to the angry workers to protect the bourgeois class and capitalist social relations as a whole.

Another factor of weakness, which certainly constitutes an explanatory element in the first weakness which we mentioned above, was the weight of nationalism. In effect, the movement of struggle hadn't markedly broken with nationalist containment, even during the riots in Kosovo in 1989. In the context of Yugoslavia, where the national question is the weapon par excellence with which the state confronts the proletariat, every qualitative development has to immediately and absolutely set itself the task of an effective, conscious, break which takes on the forces of nationalist containment. If proletarian solidarity beyond the frontiers of the different republics found many an occasion for expressing itself in the course of hundreds of strikes and demonstrations, this solidarity never transformed itself into concerted, organised actions against the various nationalist forces! We therefore have to be prudent in using terms like "unitary" or "showing solidarity". The reality of the existence of numerous simultaneous strikes over several years is a fact. Nevertheless, the immediate expression of the unity of struggle and of perspective, beyond local solidarity, did not express itself in a consequent manner in terms of organisation and centralisation. Even in Kosovo, where proletarians took to the streets with arms to violently attack their misery, any potential for extension was castrated by the state which was very easily able to reduce the riots to a purely "Albanian" affair.

Economic, political and social reforms

If the wave of struggles in the '80s constituted the classist response of the proletariat to the intensification of attacks that it had suffered since the start of the '80s, the bourgeois class also didn't remain inactive and confronted the new situation of crisis by a whole series of draconian measures on the economic, social and political planes.

The economic crisis only declared itself openly in Yugoslavia in 1979. Until then, the specific mechanisms of "centralised planning" of the countries of the Russian bloc as well as the particularities of "self-management socialism" of Yugoslavia, allowed the Yugoslav economy to adapt itself to the consequences of the world crisis. But it is clear that the various factors (protectionism, centralised regulation) which can allow, and really have allowed, the effects of the world crisis of capital to be kept at bay in this region, can only delay an even more violent outbreak of the same capitalist contradictions later on. This is why, for revolutionary communism, "self-management" and "economic planning" are just illusions. They are myths which aim in the first place at drawing workers towards acceptance of their condition within bourgeois society and which in reality, beyond these pretensions and beyond the short-term variations in the forms that cover up exploitation, bring proletarians nothing but capitalist misery, with always more exploitation and war.

From the start of the '80s in Yugoslavia, the growth curves turned upside down, unemployment developed, foreign debt exploded, inflation ran away (until it attained a record rate of 2685% per year, in other words prices doubled every month!). At the start of the '80s, the first shortages of basic necessities also appeared: power cuts, petrol shortages...

"The fall in the standard of living was so great that it's hard to imagine another country which wouldn't have reacted to this situation by radical political changes or even by a revolution." (H. Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis - 1989, cited by Paul Garde in Vie et mort de la Yougoslavie.)

During the whole of this period, the Yugoslav government tried to "accommodate" to the crisis situation, with austerity measures and programs of economic stabilisation, all under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund which was very attentive to the interests of capital invested in Yugoslavia.

But, as we have said already, from 1985 these measures provoked a massive response on the part of the proletariat which only added to the difficulties of the economic situation.

Among the later reforms, we can mention those of December 1989, introduced after new falls in the volume of Yugoslav industrial production, after a new increase in unemployment, the growth of shortages, inflation... and an "explosion" of wages following struggles. This new reform bore the marks of the crisis which would violently shake Yugoslavia less than a year later. While introducing these reforms to attack the proletariat head on, the Federal State affirmed at the same time its ascendancy over the constitutive republics of Yugoslavia. The new federal Prime Minister, Markovic, introduced a plan which foresaw the complete freezing of wages and a partial freezing of prices, the creation of a "new Dinar" (convertible and tied to the German Mark), a restrictive monetary policy (limitation of credit) and a new fiscal policy (big cuts in wages, increases in the budget of the central state). It is clear from these reforms that the state was looking for a way to stabilise the economy, in other words to reduce the part of value dedicated to wages and to impose increases in productivity by eliminating (by suppressing the various mechanisms of protection which share out the effects of international competition amongst all the enterprises, or, as Markovic said "to help the enterprises which give the best results and allowing the bad ones to take on the consequences of their lack of ability") the deficient enterprises (deficient in the sense that they were incapable of lastingly overturning the status quo in the opposition between the interests of the enterprise and the interests of proletarians). The federal government foresaw that 150,000 more people would find themselves without work after only a year of application of the new measures. At the same time, the official economic indicators already showed a fall of real wage income of 9% for the month of December 1989 and of 29% for the month of January 1990.

By these new reforms the Federal State affirmed its pretensions to dominate political and economic life in the various republics, together with its concern to control the social situation. This "centralist" solution (that we could also call "Serb" (1) in that it corresponds directly and for historical reasons to the interests of the bourgeoisie of that republic) already had the support of important sectors of Yugoslav society, for example within the army, within the various republics, including Slovenia and Croatia, but also internationally. But inevitably they noted that these draconian measures aimed at containing the antagonisms shaking Yugoslav society would be too late to enable the Federal State to survive. If under the effect of the crisis the bourgeois fractions of the various republics more and more saw their salvation in the affirmation of their independence in the face of the pretensions of the Federal State to suppress their sovereignty, it is above all by international intervention and notably by the imperialist policies of the Western powers that this "centralist option" became obsolete and that the usual game of nationalist confrontation in Yugoslavia set out on the path of armed conflict.

If it is clear that this question of the "autonomous republics" of Yugoslavia constitutes an ideological force of prime importance against the proletariat, we must make it clear, at this precise point in our analysis, that it coincides also and in part with the economic interests of such or such republic in particular and to the corresponding fraction of the bourgeoisie. Far from wanting to analyse their particularities as "particularisms" needed to lead proletarians on the basis of "specific tasks" as the extreme left of the bourgeoisie often advocate (as they're always looking for popularity and something to agitate about) we analyse them with the aim of throwing light on the complementarity and convergence of interests of the different fractions of the bourgeoisie faced with the necessities of confronting an internationalist proletariat which has no regional or national interests to defend.

The premises of the war

It is in this immediate context that the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia was produced. There are two essential elements of explanation. Firstly, there is just the situation of struggle, the lack of adherence of proletarians to the national economy, to the interests of the Yugoslav nation. It would be wrong to only want to see here the various struggles that we have already briefly mentioned.

It was above all this lack of adherence of proletarians to the national interest which had caused the capitalist state (in its various regional expressions, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Bosnian...) to not step back from putting into place much more radical policies for the defence of its interests. These were draconian "crisis" reforms, "democratisation" (we use here the flag used by the bourgeoisie in its campaigns, to refer to the reinforcing of atomisation, of everyone for himself, of mortal competition between proletarians, of the reign of citizenisation and terror, briefly, to an advancing disintegration of the proletariat, to the reinforcing of the democratic terror proper to the generalised dictatorship of commodities) and nationalism, war (conscription, requisitioning, imprisonment and killing of those who resist, militarisation of the whole of society...). The Yugoslav nation revealed itself to be no longer adequate as a framework for effectively dealing with the proletariat in these regions. The unleashing of inter-imperialist war in this area allowed the world capitalist state to drown the class antagonisms which were tearing its society apart in generalised massacres in which proletarians killed each other, and thus to set out on a path offering a bourgeois solution to the crisis of over-production of value.

The second element is also paramount and is directly linked to the first in so far as it cannot escape from the historical context which it is a product of, but it is really subordinate to it. This is the exacerbated competition between the different bourgeois fractions who abandon themselves to a war without mercy so as not to be among the losers in the competition which opposes them in the world market (the universal law of value which punishes capitals in the non-profitable sectors by purely and simply devalorising them). Inter-bourgeois antagonisms always fall into second place in the face of the revolutionary appearance of the proletariat, in other words the different fractions of the bourgeoisie always start - on pain of being eliminated - to make an abstraction of their particular interests and to realise their common circumstances when faced with communism and their need to defend their supreme interest: safeguarding their world of money, wage-labour and commodities.

It is this exacerbation of conflicts of interest between the numerous bourgeois fractions and capitalist entities directly on the international level, where these antagonisms express themselves by the support of different powers for such and such a fraction existing on the territory of Yugoslavia and the Balkans, coupled with the general situation of lack of adherence of proletarians to the national economy, which was the basic cause of the inter-imperialist conflagration in Yugoslavia. We want to make it clear at this point (we will return to this later on) that the "military" phase of the explosion in Yugoslavia was directly approved and encouraged by the process of international recognition of independence of Slovenia and Croatia, and that therefore the orchestration of the war and of massacres between proletarians is not simply an expression of an internal Yugoslav crisis but corresponds to the direction given to this crisis by the Western imperialist powers. The situation can only be understood in relation to all the other countries of the region, including the West.

In Serbia, following the de facto dismemberment of the old Yugoslav Federation, the "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia", presented itself as the only inheritor of ex-Yugoslavia, proclaiming itself with Montenegro on 27 April 1992. In this republic, whose international isolation is growing, the situation is extremely tense: refugees flood in everywhere, huge numbers of young men have left the country to avoid conscription, the economy (2) has been transformed into an economy of day to day survival (a third of the economically active population is unemployed), misery and discontent reign.

The austerity measures put in place on 30 June 1992 in order to alleviate the effects of the international embargo foresaw amongst other things the partial freezing of prices "preceded by an increase of 116% in the price of petrol and 76% for electricity" (Le Monde, 2.7.92). This austerity plan aimed principally to "contain the discontent which threatened to turn into a social revolt" (idem). And in its propaganda the government habitually used the international blockade as a mobilising theme to forge national unity in the face of "the enemies of Serbia without" and to denounce and repress those who are "the enemy within".

The Serbian opposition tried to strengthen itself by recuperating the growing discontent of proletarians in general and the refusal of the war in particular by organising pacifist mobilisations from the beginning of the year. Starting in December '91, they called for elections so as to get rid of Miloševic, designated as responsible and a suitable whipping boy. But there was nothing to choose between these "opponents" and the bourgeois already in place and nothing to "differentiate" them, not even the slightest nuance. What's more, they were themselves the "old" political friends of Miloševic and only "divergent" by the need to present a credible "alternative". It didn't work and no bourgeois fraction is really credible: the last legislative elections, in the Spring of 1992, were marked by an abstention rate of more than 50%!

Faced with proletarian mobilisation, many opposition groups organised a demonstration in Belgrade on 9 March, 1991. It was in response to the first armed skirmishes between Serb and Croat forces in the town of Pakrac (in Slavonia, North Eastern Croatia) and thus they objectively participated in nationalist recruitment. But the demo didn't work out as expected, it overflowed its initial aims and transformed itself into class confrontations with the forces of order (proving that the proletariat, despite the power of nationalism, was still not beaten and that it continued against the current to defend its interests). The demonstration started to move through the suburbs of Belgrade (with the nationalists who were in competition with Miloševic, those of the Serbian Renewal Movement, at its head). But more and more it was joined by workers who had waited months for their wages to be paid, then the students, then the schoolkids and the unemployed. They shouted: "Give us freedom, give us bread" or even "Miloševic = Saddam, send him to the desert". When the demo reached the centre of Belgrade it was 100,000 strong. The police tried to stop the protest and to chase after the demonstrators who were armed with clubs and stones. A plain clothes policeman was killed. It is then that the demo led itself towards Republic Square, passing through the centre - on the way the banks and shops were attacked repeatedly in a very rapid fashion. Yugoslav and Serbian national flags were burned. Proletarians attacked the police armoured cars, the street fighting went on for hours, police cars were burnt and everywhere barricades went up. The police killed a demonstrator. In the evening the army had to intervene, 100 armoured cars crossed the town and occupied strategic points. The protest lasted four days until the army left. After this riot, the opposition parties pursued their negotiations with Miloševic and they decided together on a common policy of national unity.

THE SACRED UNION WOULD BE SEALED IN PROLETARIAN BLOOD !

There was massive refusal of conscription and a great number of desertions. In December '91, after numerous "victories" for the federal army, the "Croats" were achieving their first important successes in 5 months of war, which also signified that the federal army was more and more disintegrating.

Only 15% of conscripts responded to the call for mobilisation during Autumn '91: the refusal to turn up for military service was widespread and in order to counter this absenteeism it is now forbidden for any liable man aged under 30 to leave the republic without permission. In this situation, the state decided to extend, by decree in December '91, by three months the duration of military service for the recruits of '91 for "an indeterminate time, according to the needs [for cannon fodder!] of the Yugoslav Army" and fixing at 4 months the duration of mobilisation of army reservists. Military service was for 12 months and the reservists were mobilised beforehand between 45 and 60 days. These measures aimed to bring under control the problems of recruitment, the army admitted that more than 10,000 reservists had refused to join their units.

Repression against the deserters, and all those who struggled openly against the war and organised themselves accordingly, was put in place. The federal military authorities threatened the draft dodgers and deserters with long prison sentences according to Article 121 which set out penalties from a three years in prison minimum to the death penalty if the deserter left the country. Other deserters who hid after publicly refusing to be mobilised were grabbed off the street, imprisoned for 2 or 3 days, and the sent to the front to clear mine fields with the aim of killing or mutilating them! Numerous unidentified bodies were thus regularly buried at the front without anybody being able to tell where they came from, although this could also be the work of the death squads operating in Croatia who tracked down the deserters and opponents of the war and dumped the bodies of the anti-patriots they had assassinated at the front.

All over Serbia and Vojvodina young reservists hid themselves to avoid being conscripted: 25,000 "Hungarians" left the country to avoid conscription, more than 100,000 men did the same across the whole of Serbia. Everywhere young men of conscription age have chosen exile.

From this movement against the war an opposition emerged which organised itself OUTSIDE the official "opposition" parties, but, alas, nowhere near enough AGAINST them. Women proletarians played an important role in these struggles. Not being mobilised for the various fronts, they were the ones who were going to organise opposition to the war. It was also they who snatched their sons from obligatory conscription, who organised numerous groups circulating information about movements of desertion, who took charge of the legal defence of those who refused to fight. It was also they who took on "psychological aid" for soldiers who returned traumatised from the front. When the first regiments returned from combat in Slovenia (and the massacres that had happened afterwards in Croatia then in Bosnia) some talked about the Vietnam syndrome. Since then, for sure, the situation has deteriorated: "crazy acts" and suicides have multiplied. Some doctors saw nothing wrong with sending six soldiers with serious mental problems back to the front within 48 hours, after having threatened them with "punishment" if they continued their "irresponsible" behaviour.

But the refusal to go to war was far from just being individual, collective protests became more and more numerous without actually taking on the form of a declared resistance, of a clearly organised movement. Hardly a week passed without conscripts collectively resisting orders. The biggest refusal took place at Kragujevac, a garrison town in central Serbia, when 7,000 reservists presented themselves at the call up without their arms. They shut themselves up in their camps and refused to move. The military authorities exempted ALL OF THEM, but distributed to local employers an "infamy list" of all the "traitors to the country" who will find themselves forbidden to sell their labour power. In November 1991, 200 reservists stood in front of the office of the district president in Valjevo until their commander signed their military books stipulating that they had completed their service. On 18 December, at Markušica, on the front in Slavonia, 700 reservists refused to continue to fight after having already done their 45 days of recall. A general ordered the arrest of their officers, but backed down when the troops prepared to shoot him. At the beginning of January 1992, 150 reservists deserted as a group from the front at Osijek after spending more than a month on the front line and returned to Belgrade to protest at their conditions of life. In March 1992, more than 700 reservists on leave at Gornji Milanovac revolted and refused to return to the front in Eastern Slavonia, denouncing "the incompetence of the officer corps of the army and the unreliability of information coming from the front". At the same time 4 reserve officers were arrested in Belgrade after having abandoned the front and two others were sentenced to imprisonment in Niš, while thousands of reserve soldiers had to be brought before courts martial.

All these desertions and refusals to go to war, however contradictory these actions may have been (pacifism and the lack of perspectives for going beyond the immediate situation are the most marked weaknesses!), are nevertheless a clear proof that the national cohesion is not as strong as the bourgeois killers in each camp had hoped and that the proletariat is certainly not ready to leave for the front "with joy and gladness".

At the same time as the refusal of war on the military front, other manifestations of proletarian combativity burst out on the production front: strikes broke out in the course of which proletarians began to organise themselves, by force of circumstances, into "autonomous" structures. In the universities as well new opposition movements were born (we do not have any more information about this at present).

Before the outbreak of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 100,000 people took to the streets in Sarajevo to protest against the war. In February 1992, important street fights took place between the federal army and the inhabitants of several towns in this republic. On 29 February 1992, under pressure from the EEC and the USA, Bosnia-Herzegovina organised a referendum for independence. On the same day barricades were constructed inside the town of Sarajevo by masked elements of the extremist militias of Serbia and Croatia. Armed confrontations took place in front of the barricades, 30,000 demonstrators demanded the removal of these "ethnic" barricades dividing their neighbourhoods.

At the beginning of April 1992, two big demos took place in Sarajevo. A hundred thousand people from Sarajevo and other towns in the area demonstrated against the war and for the dissolution of all the nationalist parties! Marksmen fired on the demonstrators, there were many deaths. The next day, 100,000 people again took to the streets and again marksmen fired on them. Following this, Sarajevo was completely cut off from the outside world. The town is subjected to permanent bombardment from outside. During this time in Sarajevo people organised themselves and defended their homes together. They barricaded the streets against the armoured cars and attacked them. The irregular soldiers fired on everything which moved.

oOo

We have set out here a certain amount of information about the resistance of proletarians to the war, but we must insist on the weaknesses of these struggles and, in the immediate context of the war, it seems evident that the proletariat there has been subjected to an important defeat. One of the reasons for the unleashing of the war was precisely the need for the state in Yugoslavia to crush the proletariat, to subjugate it, to defeat its struggles and disperse it. As we have indicated, the framework of the old Yugoslav nation could no longer fulfil this role effectively and its break-up was the price to pay for domesticating the proletariat. Today no one can deny that systematic massacres, bombardment, destruction and repression, rapes, brain-washing by propaganda... briefly, the unleashing of state terror has cut deep into proletarian combativity.

As this war progresses and extends itself, relayed by a warlike and nationalist propaganda, and as the bombardments become more selective and as the repression targets its victims more and more "ethnically", we can see a more active participation by various strata of the population in war operations. The imperialist war therefore took the form of a "popular war" as the proletariat submitted to nationalist recruitment and dissolved itself into the people to enrol in the various nationalist fronts.

This evolution also took on the structure of the armed forces and the system of defence which the Yugoslav state had adopted (with all the military equipment, armaments, stocks, munitions and logistic support distributed over the whole territory) which is even favoured by nature because of the mountainous terrain with numerous villages with strong communitarian traditions implanted over the whole of this republic.

This reality also makes the situation more inextricable for any external intervention. Thus the declaration of General Barry McCaffrey, Assistant Chief of the Joint Forces Command of the US Army who estimated that it would take the United Nations 400,000 men and one year to bring an end to the violence in ex-Yugoslavia, without any guarantee that hostilities wouldn't commence as soon as the foreign soldiers left.

We are forced to admit that our class has suffered a severe defeat in Yugoslavia (and we are not referring just to sectors of the proletariat in Yugoslavia, but also just as much to other sectors outside the borders of Yugoslavia who are rendered accomplices of the state killers by their passivity!) and that many proletarians have deserted from class combat to join one of the imperialist camps present there. Lack of information does not permit us to pronounce on the strength of proletarians who continue to resist the war, the nationalist campaigns and the democratic propaganda so as to safeguard by their efforts internationalist classist perspectives. We know by experience that such nuclei can exist, resisting, surviving in such conditions of war. In this movement, these comrades crystallise the innate tendency of the proletariat to transform the imperialist war into a revolutionary war for communism.

In an international context of world crisis such as we are subjected to today, the exacerbation of antagonisms between the capitalist sharks is inevitable, and the aggravation of inter-imperialist tensions, the multiplication of war zones on the "natural" terrain where these antagonisms burst out openly (3), and this independently of the will of the various bourgeois fractions, constitutes our day to day reality. But the war is also here and now, and not just somewhere else or later on. The various capitalist fractions confront each other permanently and make war so as to conquer each others markets. While confrontation glides on the financial terrain, on the military terrain it does not change its nature, it is always a question of the same economic war indispensable to the survival of the system. Social peace must reign, whatever the price, productivity must be preserved. If this cannot be obtained by reforms and other austerity measures against our conditions of life and struggle, it will have to be obtained by force of arms (4).

We must not deceive ourselves - this war in Yugoslavia constitutes another step towards generalised war. In effect it is taking place in front of the eyes of the proletarians of Europe and elsewhere who smugly watch, in the successive and interminable episodes of this war on their little screens, a banalisation, a naturalisation of war. This is then conceived as the "normal" way out for any society in crisis. And the crisis is "natural" and "normal" as well, as are poverty, unemployment and the sacrifices that follow. What's more, without any question of objecting, you accept, you shrug your shoulders ("it's not so bad here", "what's the use in complaining?"), you bend your back and soon you will be ready to leave for the front...

This should be no surprise since the majority of proletarians across the world, and particularly in Europe, are imprisoned by patriotic walls and bourgeois ideology, they are prisoners of pacifism, of "anti"-imperialism or even still of "anti"-fascism and the international proletariat is not in a position today to affirm its revolutionary being as bearer of its own communist project.

As long as we remain passive consumers and spectators of our miserable lives, as long as we remain "useful idiots" for Capital, anything can be done to us and we should not be surprised if tomorrow good citizens start to kill each other for one reason or another!! Neighbour against neighbour, workmate against workmate, proletarian against proletarian.

oOo

If we have emphasised here various aspects of the war in ex-Yugoslavia, it is certainly not for us to give ourselves up to lamentation over this state of affairs, nor to try to make people feel moved by all this suffering! Against humanism, against hypocritical lamentations, we want to shout out that the struggle against capitalist war can only become real if it is taken up here and now, from today, attacking all fractions of the bourgeoisie, denouncing all their ideologies and refusing any front with any radical bourgeois fraction under the pretext of immediate common interests.

The proletariat is against all the camps, against the Croat, Serb, Bosnian, Slovenian and Kosovar camps, against the "international community" which has never been anything other than a name for a gang of terrorist states which subjugate and exploit us day after day! The French, American, Russian, German, Italian, British, Egyptian, Iranian state... whichever they may be! We have no country! To be a patriot, is to murder our class brothers and sisters. To be a patriot is to be an assassin!

Our class solidarity with our brothers and sisters who struggle in ex-Yugoslavia is expressed first of all when we attack the bourgeois fraction that directly confronts us because in the struggle against "our own bourgeoisie" we practically affirm our internationalism, our identity of interest and struggle with proletarians in ex-Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Our internationalism doesn't consist in "doing something here for proletarians over there". Our internationalism is to be in the same fight, affirming there the community of interests and struggle which unites us with our class brothers and sisters. Fighting against "our own bourgeoisie" - this is the profound expression of our class solidarity, of our growing unity. It is the passivity which reigns here in the face of austerity measures dealt to us which permits the development of the war in ex-Yugoslavia.

The importance of this last point becomes all the more evident when we consider the practical connivance (despite all the declarations of intent) uniting all the fractions of the world capitalist state, whose different policies all objectively end up in the generalised massacre of our class brothers and sisters. The involvement of the imperialist powers in this war could not be clearer: together all fractions of the bourgeoisie concur in the pursuit of massacres. Apart from their role in the unleashing of the conflict by their consecration of the break up of Yugoslavia (recognition of the independence of Slovenia by Germany on 23/12/91 and of Croatia and Slovenia by the EC on 15/1/92); apart from the gigantic profits which they have made, as in every war, from arms sales; apart from the use of this war as a field of experimentation; apart from the hypocritical international embargo which primarily acts to encourage national unity in Serbia; apart from the useful propaganda which the war allows them to develop "at home", "in defence of the values of the free world", against "human folly" (a pole of repulsion horrifyingly waved under the noses of proletarians "elsewhere"), the war in ex-Yugoslavia plays, as we have seen above, the role of a terrifying Bogeyman: "What are you complaining about? Be content with what you have, otherwise..." and the austerity measures can be piled on without meeting any resistance. To intervene on the territory, France, Germany, Belgium, Russia, the USA, the NGOs, the UN... cheerfully play the "peace keeping" card. Because, as always, it is in the name of defending civilisation against barbarism, in the name of keeping the peace that slaughter is perpetuated. The more they talk to us about peace, the more war rages!

The humanitarian campaigns operate on the terrain of direct repression of the proletariat. In Bosnia-Herzegovina it is in the name of peace, in the name of signed accords, in the name of the UN, that they have forced proletarians to hand over their arms and to wait passively, like beasts, for the hour of their slaughter in the abattoirs that are the fields of battle. The same scenario has been put into place in Iraq.

The humanitarian business directly favours the war. Not only does "humanitarian aid" give a good alibi to the imperialist powers to intervene in a country (Somalia, Rwanda etc.), not only does it directly serve the "ethnic cleansing" operations in the territories (deportation of proletarians to other areas and camps), but on top of this, the "humanitarian aid convoys" allow the fighters of the various warring imperialist fractions to be fed while an international blockade -another specifically modern form of intervention- only attacks the living conditions of proletarians by depriving them of essential commodities and making all goods on the local market more expensive!

The peace plans are nothing but the consecration by the "international community" of what is happening on the ground. What is happening on the ground is deportations, malnutrition and famine, epidemics... briefly, everything that follows from the unleashing of state terror.

We do not fight for "peace", we are not pacifists! Peace is only a particular moment of war. We do not want a capitalism purged of its "defects", of its "bad side", of its wars, its famines, its poverty. We do not fight for the amelioration of this world. We fight for its complete destruction, its total annihilation!

Communist action against capitalist war and peace !

Those who today refuse sacrifices, social peace, the defence of the national interest... the draft dodgers, the rebels, the troublemakers... are repressed, locked up and shot by the state. This is exactly what is happening on a large scale in ex-Yugoslavia, in all its ex-republics: open and direct repression against the resisters. The state of war, the militarist polarisation of society, allows the liquidation with impunity of all those who do not go along with the values (patriotic, religious or whatever) brandished by each side. People who are a nuisance are simply suppressed by the state.

The bourgeois state persecutes all those that it denounces as "troublemakers", "agents of the enemy", that is to say all those who oppose themselves to it, to its social peace and its Sacred Union. The maintenance of its domination over society requires only the weakness of the proletariat and rests essentially on the capacity of the state to divide proletarians, to keep them imprisoned in bourgeois polarisations (which is where ideological mystifications are important), and to repress without mercy any manifestation of struggle against exploitation, in other words it's very essence. This war is not a war of Serbs against Croats, of Croats against Muslims etc. It is the war of one class against another, it is the war of the bourgeoisie which wants to crush its mortal enemy which is neither Serb nor Croat nor Muslim but international, the world proletariat.

Proletarians of all lands, unite! Rich in the historic experience of our class, we reappropriate our collective memory of struggle. Our fight carries real perspectives of life, we want to destroy forever non-life, misery, exploitation, war!

Against the sectarianism and the mistrust towards any attempt at organising militancy, towards any attempt to bring to life a centralised direction for revolutionary activity, we denounce the nationalists, the UN and other imperialist powers, we spread information, support internationalist comrades, clarify and take on the objectives and the means of communist struggle.

The publication and distribution in different languages of this text constitutes an attempt at centralising our activities, at entering into contact with other revolutionaries, at consolidating the camp of those who defend internationalist perspectives, at expressing the needs of proletarians who revolt against war and misery, and to reinforce, by the clarity of our perspectives of struggle and by our determination, the impact of our refusal.

To be a patriot is to be an assassin !

Down with all States !

Let's fight for the world communist revolution !

Notes

1. We must not confuse this centralist "Serbian option" with the "Greater Serbia" option. This latter option was taken up as flavour of the month and popularised by the Serbian bourgeoisie only after the obsoleteness of the centralist "Serbian option" showed itself to be irreversible. The "Greater Serbia" policy is therefore more a consequence of the outbreak of war (the "Serbian" response to the international recognition of Slovenia and Croatia) and not at all the cause of this war as the media would have us believe.

2. We can judge the situation by these eloquent figures, which express the tragic reality which our class is subjected to today behind their cold calculation. In mid-June 1993, the Dinar was devalued (in fact its rate of exchange was aligned with the black market): from 1DM for 68,000 Dinars to 1DM for 700,000 (!) Dinars, more than ten times, without wages increasing in the same proportion. In mid-August, the National Bank, incapable of printing enough money to fill the gap and to appear to pay the meagre wages of the proletarians still working, issued a new note for... 500 million Dinar. A junkie like this soon needs more drugs, he injects a new, bigger dose scarcely 15 days later: a new note for... 1 billion Dinar is issued. Finally, three weeks later, it is a note for... 10 billion Dinar which must be printed as quickly as possible. If the price rises paid by proletarians during the first 8 months of 1993 carry on at the same rate, the experts (!?) foresee an annual inflation rate of... 1,671,000,000%. To carry on the anecdote, each hour the Dinar loses 1% of its value relative to the DM. The waltz of the price labels became hallucinatory, the prices are posted up today in billions of Dinar while in 1992 inflation was "only" 20,000%. At the beginning of September 1993, bread, milk and other foodstuffs "of primary necessity" are rationed in almost all the towns of Serbia and Montenegro. Anyway, basic products have disappeared from the shops whose windows are virtually empty. People die in the hospitals for lack of adequate medicines. The bourgeoisie have to admit that, according to their norms, "90% of the population live below the poverty threshold". The most effected are the retired who it is no longer rare to see competing with stray cats and dogs for the contents of dustbins. This is the situation which the proletariat is reduced to, with the ease with which the bourgeoisie can impose it by force in a period of war! Miloševic wasn't joking when he said that the sanctions and the blockade offered to Serbia "the occasion for restructuring its economy"!

3. Without giving an exhaustive list we can cite Rwanda, Somalia, numerous ex-Soviet republics, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, North Korea, Yemen (North and South), Haiti, Burma, India, Tibet, Mozambique, Angola, Algeria, Indonesia, Liberia etc. etc.

4. The path to armed conflict is only another form of the permanent competition that takes place without mercy between the capitalists and of the struggle which they simultaneously wage against the proletariat.

From Communism #9, September 1993

* * *

The information which we have obtained from that war zone is very fragmentary but we can nevertheless give a glimpse of the strength of the proletariat, at any rate the subversive character which it contains and the social contradiction which it carries and which undermines all institutions, including those made up of the "reliable" and "loyal" troops of the bourgeoisie.

In the Serb bastion of Banja Luka (North Western Bosnia) three elite units, the First Army Corp of Krajina, the 16th Motorised Unit and the First Armoured Brigade, launched a mutiny on their return to the front on 10 September. The "Serbian" - in such a moment of confrontation nationality is dissolved! - mutineers entered the town with their arrmoured cars and took control of the main official buildings, notably the local radio and TV stations, the town hall and the Head Quarters of the army! The rebels immediately gave themselves a leadership, an "emergency general staff", baptised "September 93", led by non-commissioned officers and subalterns. At its head could be found a corporal!

Their demands were: an increase in their "miserable pay" (the equivalent of 1 Dollar per month for the ordinary soldiers), the arrest of "war profiteers, who instead of being on watch in the trenches are getting rich with the blessing of those in power, leading an easy life at the rear, sometimes in fashionable circles". A "black list" of 700 of these "profiteers" was drawn up and arrests began. That same evening the mayor of the town had the honour of opening the dank dungeons. For a month before the soldiers, nothing more than proletarians regimented in the uniform of the fatherland, had denounced their conditions of non-existence and threatened repeatedly to "turn their rifles on those in the rear!", in their own words. With each period of leave they feared returning to find their families reduced to desperation. A desperation which even their own death could not erase. The payment lavished on their families by the state wasn't even enough to cover the costs of burial!

This movement revealed the profound social fractures which developed as the war dragged on. Here, it is clear that the union sacrée was BLOWN APART. All the "appeals for calm and reason" were in vain. From that moment the bourgeoisie imposed a prudent silence which said much about their fears of stoking the fires of class struggle. The bourgeois had to recognise "their obsession with seeing the awakening of Serb-Serb conflicts the like of which had never been seen throughout history". Behind this journalistic verbiage in Le Monde the bourgeoisie tried to hide the spectre which haunts them, their terror at seeing proletarians taking up their real arms, class against class, against this nightmare.

In fact the mutineers took the town into their hands with the support of other proletarians. They were the formal and focused expression of a profound movement of discontent. In the town the situation was "calm", no more shots rang out in the night. That is to say that the state did not dare or no longer had the means to send "reliable" troops to put down the rebellion. The "Rambos" on duty who always appeared on the front pages of the newspapers disappeared from the boulevards, swept away by the mutiny. For the first time in several months Banja Luka had an uninterrupted electricity supply. The insurgents seized the power stations and began to provide for the region which they controlled. Against all the sacrifices imposed by the bourgeois and their war economy the proletarian defeatists of Banja Luka IMPOSED IN THEIR ACTS AND BY FORCE the immediate satisfaction of our basic needs!

Very quickly, on the announcement of the mutiny in Banja Luka, numerous proletarians in various brigades of the Bosnian Serb army sent telegrams of solidarity. Thanks to this support the mutineers declared that they wanted to take control of ALL these units. Alas, it is not with fine phrases that you generalise a movement: declarations and telegrams of solidarity are not enough. Behind the words are the acts which matter. If the proletariat wants to definitively rid itself of the butchery which has massacred it for more than two years in the region the one and only solution is the GENERALISATION in acts of revolutionary defeatism. We must finish with "Serbs", "Croats", "Muslims" and other categories with which Capital tries to crush us. The development of struggle has its own requirements: it must break social cohesion not only in the units of the army but in the whole of society. For this it needs to finish once and for all with nationalism in affirming loud and clear that proletarians have no interest in this war, nor in this dying world. We call for ONLY ONE WAR, that which is against our exploiters, whether they are Serbs, Croats, Muslims or whatever. Against them there should be no mercy. To show any would be a sign of weakness.

Improving our conditions of life -and even GOING BEYOND them- can only be imposed by a generalisation of the balance of forces that the mutineers of Banja Luka were only able to establish in too local a fashion. In fact generalisation means directly attacking and destroying everything which represents the State. Proletarians from various units solidarising with the mutineers contented themselves with declarations of intent when the situation DEMANDED something else: not only PASSING openly into the camp of insurrection but also ACCELERATING this by a radicalisation of demands and globalising them to put an end to the butchery. The situation called for the arrest of their own officers, for the use of their arms to attack the State etc...

Words have never made any difference to our misery!!!

The situation now is characterised by a state of general weakness of our class across all the struggles going on in the world. There is a lack of continuity, of liaison and of extension. Wherever struggles break out, some strikes, some riots in separate places, and Capital manages to maintain this separation, there, as it happens, is where the community of misery and struggle can be found! While at Banja Luka the mutineers showed that they had lost when they began to accept the view that their demands could only be realised by the state, in Lithuania other soldiers mutinied. By this type of action proletarians bring more and more to the fore our only response as a class faced by wars of extermination: revolutionary defeatism, the refusal to march along with the plans of nationalism, to be sacrificed for "their" new country! Wherever the bourgeoisie is able to dragoon citizenised and atomised proletarians into this mass called "the people" our class sooner or later raises its head! Elsewhere, the Banja Luka mutiny might well have been "the first movement of soldiers' rebellion among the Bosnian Serbs since the start of the war" (as the whole of the media like to proclaim it) but it was not the first manifestation of proletarian defeatism against this conflict (see the numerous examples in our main text (1).

Despite the weaknesses seen the contagion of the Banja Luka mutiny nevertheless gains ground. On 14 September the newspapers announced that not only had the mutineers hardened their movement but that defeatism had extended to other units such as the garrison town of Sokolac near Sarajevo.

Riven with contradictions, the mutiny now balances between its strengths and its weaknesses. The proletarians fall into the trap set by the professionals of interminable discussion. More and more the mutiny is emptied of its subversive content and reenters the hellish cycle of negotiations, proposals, counter-proposals, accords and other rubbish of the same type which changes ABSOLUTELY NOTHING concerning their intolerable conditions of misery. Little by little the insurgents came to find a place in the grand permanent spectacle of bourgeois politics. After some immediate demands aimed at improving their lot, the proletarians came to be poisoned by politicism and blamed their misfortunes on one faction of the State as opposed to another. In the quagmire of negotiations the insurgents forgot their strength in calling for the resignation of the nationalist government of Karadzic. At the same moment they allowed back in through the side window what they had kicked out of the front door: they called for... the anticipated general elections. Until then they had relied on their own weapons - strikes, defeatism - in order to impose the improvement of their conditions of life, then they gave way and submitted to the electoral circus.

Profiting from these weaknesses, the State succeeded, after an initial period of impotence, in returning the movement to a strict framework of negotiation in order to avoid being outflanked. The objective was to reduce it to a particular situation, to reabsorb it and empty it of all subversive content. For such and such a unit the question of soldiers' pay was to be played for in negotiations, for another it was the dismissal of certain "corrupt" officers or politicians, etc.... It was the beginning of the end. The mutineers no longer even dared to affirm their superiority in the face of the almighty State. None of the various negotiators of high rank who successively came to parley with them were taken hostage, something which would have clearly expressed the seriousness of their demands. No, once under way, the negotiations developed according to the classic schema of pacifism and conciliation. Parliamentarism and negotiations became the real terrain on which the whole force of the bourgeoisie could be successfully imposed. The movement was prolonged for more than a week. But on both sides there was the status quo. After having tried in turn, threats, flattery and appeals to patriotism, the bourgeoisie were quite obviously banking on a deterioration of the movement. The time and lack of perspective of proletarians had strengthened the bourgeoisie.

They tried to play for time and to "justify" the demands, but not the methods, of the mutineers. In taking on board some of their demands the bourgeoisie tried to fix the movement while letting it decline. They thus hoped to put off proletarians by isolating the most combattive, by accusing them of being "traitors". They appealed to them to go back to barracks, all the while waving the flag of "the fatherland in danger". Stigmatising the revolt as "helping our enemies" they made a vigorous appeal to the patriotism of the mutineers as the fighting redoubled its violence in Krajina.

In line with parliamentary logic the mutineers had scaled down their demand for "energetic measures against war profiteers". And who was this addressed to and demanded of!? To the State, to those who are the most important representatives of the class which LIVES off war: the bourgeoisie. Despite the fact that they affirmed that the existing MPs "are not fit for their jobs" which they abuse "to enrich themselves" their "black list" never included those that they negotiated with! This was another of these proletarians' contradictions.

Once destabilised and worn out the mutiny gave up its arms and fell under the two-pronged assault of promises and repression. The state awarded to the mutineers, who had repudiated their struggle, 10 days leave and a promise to satisfy their social demands, while a selective repression struck the principal leaders of the mutiny. The arrests were the final response of our enemies.

The continuation of capitalist butchery and the return to the diplomatic game (the negotiations in Geneva) could only be imposed when the proletariat was beaten!!! "For a new Geneva, calm must reign in Banja Luka!" The bourgeoisie have always known the art of running war like they run peace in their best interests - to pacify us, to lead us dociley to the killing fields, to the factory!!! Benefitting from all the weaknesses of the mutiny, from its lack of extension, from the democratic poison which corrupted it, the State crushed it to temporarily restore social peace and relaunch the war on the battle fields.

Despite the pitiless critique that we must direct against the weaknesses and expressed limits of this mutiny, communist militants shed light on such acts that show us that defeatist minorities are alive and well. Such actions express the point of view of the whole of our class. Tomorrow revolutionary defeatist mutinies will make the qualitative leap which involves the liaison and organisation of the struggle against the war WITH THEIR CLASS BROTHERS AND SISTERS on the other side of the vile frontiers imposed on us by Capital.

But already today the resistance of proletarians in Banja Luka proves to us that the proletariat is never completely ready to be massacred in some new capitalist butchery without turning a hair. Nor to accept sacrifices, austerity, misery, death...

Class solidarity with the revolutionary defeatists of all camps! Lets turn our guns against our generals, against our own bourgeoisie!
Note

1. Other collective movements of defeatism were also produced this year on other fronts, like, for example, in Azerbaijan where, to counter the wave of desertions which undermined the army on the front of Nagorny-Karabak, the bourgeoisie ordered the suspension of all leave and the enrolment of all young men between 18 and 25 into the national army starting from April '93. Sanctions against deserters have also been reinforced, thus confirming the defeatism which sweeps through the Azeri troops.

General and permanent ways of channeling class struggle

The general way in which the bourgeois order is maintained implies a permanent negation of any organisation of the proletariat as a class for the destruction of Capital and the State. Nevertheless, for the bourgeoisie today, it is not a question of openly negating the interests of the workers as it was in the early period of capitalist development. It's a question of limiting and transforming them into the normal interests of citizens and sellers of commodities. For sure, this also constitutes a negation of the interests of the proletariat, but in an underhand way. Or, to put it another way, the best form which capital has found for preventing its historic enemy from existing as a class (1) is its disintegration into atomized citizens and/or its dissolution into different corporatist economic sectors as sellers of labour power (2). The most developed expressions of these two negations of antagonistic class interests are electoralism and trade-unionism. It is clear that this permanent negation of the proletariat as a class, lived every day in the form of social peace, finds its basis, both historically and logically, in the general terror monopolised by the State. But, for a change, in this text we'll pass over the decisive role played by the citizenisation and electoralism which has already been looked at in other texts (3) and we'll concentrate on a purely "ouvrieriste" channelling of struggles.

There is no doubt at all that Capital, whenever it can, "deals" with the proletariat sector by sector in clear accordance with its general tactic of dividing the proletariat. In this context, the unions and other apparatuses of control and division of proletarians manage to maintain social peace by limiting struggles to "strikes" and "demonstrations". Not only do these "struggles" fail to challenge social peace, but the historic party of counter-revolution (Social Democracy in all its forms) uses peaceful strikes and demonstrations as the way par excellence to channel and exhaust proletarian energy.

In talking about these things we don't just want to refer to partial work stoppages for which prior notice is given and a fixed period of time is specified, something which can only delight the bosses. We want to talk just as much about "strikes" (4) which are organised by the unions with some degree of radicality (even to the point of violent action, often considered to be the action of "combative" trade-unionists) but which, in general, fail to break fundamentally with social peace as a result of their corporatism, localism and the fact that they are confined to a particular social category, placing particular demands on such and such a boss or municipal or national authority. This is generally expressed by the decision of "all the workers" to prevent those from outside the workplace from becoming involved. In other words, it is expressed by the unopposed right which the unions have to run a "struggle" which cannot be a proletarian struggle against Capital, but simply an expression of particularism and, on a global level, an expression of bourgeois competition. On the other hand, the force of the Proletariat finds itself channelled into demands which do not fundamentally attack the rate of exploitation (they conduct themselves in a responsible way with regard to "the needs of the national economy") and/or they put up barriers between the workers from such and such a sector and those from others. Obviously, in countries where capitalist competition develops on the basis of separatist, nationalist or even racist struggles these cards are played in augmenting divisions between proletarians.

As for demonstrations, the principle is the same. Even though such and such a radical expression is allowed, well-controlled peaceful marches for pacifying demands and which generally benefit from the complacency of the forces of order have no other function than making a fake protest or diverting and wasting the workers' energy (5).

With the development of Capital this type of practice became solidified, acquiring a veritable certificate of citizenship in all the capitalist organisations which are more or less stable. Very early on, from the birth of the proletariat, trade-unions and other apparatuses of the State appeared along with workers' associations (as a recuperation of these associations or as direct creations of the bourgeoisie). They varied enormously between countries but they all had the task of limiting "by the workers themselves" struggles in order to transform them into their opposite (6). In time, all the mass permanent workers' associations were recuperated and transformed into apparatuses of state domination. This is a tangible manifestation of the impossibility of peaceful coexistence between the interests of capital and those of proletarians. Contrary to what is affirmed by all the trade-unionists and social democrats in general (including the Maoists, the Trotskyists and the Guevarists who support the unions, not as struggling for the historic interest of socialism but because they defend the immediate interests of proletarians), even the immediate interests of the proletariat cannot be defended without confronting Capital and therefore the State.

While the unions consolidated their place on the side of the police and the army in their function as an apparatus for wiping out our struggles, the same practices which drive these organisations, that is to say assemblism, partial work stoppages and controlled "strikes", peaceful demonstrations... made themselves into an indispensable practice for the maintenance of bourgeois order.

What are the consequences of this process from the point of view of the two antagonistic classes? From the point of view of Capital, is there anything more normal? It is the very process in which Capital affirms and demonstrates its omnipotence and its pretention to being everlasting, recuperating everything which yesterday was opposed to it, coopting the people, the apparatuses, the organisations, the orders, the forms of struggle in order to put them at its service.

And from the point of view of the proletariat?

If before, when they heard the word "strike", almost all the proletarians felt concerned, if, in whichever town, village, factory or district, proletarians got together because life itself was the collective life of the class, if, during a few decades therefore, the life of the exploited contained everyday discussions about conditions of life, of struggle, if everywhere and however heterogeneous the class consciousness might have been, they discussed the evils of this society, the necessity of destroying capitalism, attacking the state, constructing a society without exploited and exploiters... it is undeniable that over the course of the last few decades all this has disappeared. The proletariat itself seems to no longer exist on a world level (7). In everyday life, the only things which seem to exist are individuals, the rich, the poor, the ministers, the unemployed, the delinquents, the nationalists, the terrorists, the citizens, the peasants, the intellectuals, the feminists, the students, the voters, the ecologists... The intellectuals in the service of the dominant class and/or of the old stupid ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, who speak about the disappearance of the proletariat, are not just telling lies to delight the world bourgeoisie, they are also expressing a partial aspect of a reality to which we, proletarians, are subjected.

The proletarians themselves do not feel that they are proletarians. This lack of consciousness is that of not even knowing that they are part of the same class. This one believes that he is superior to the proletarians because he wears a tie and works in a bank. This one believes himself to be a poor peasant and this other unemployed. This one believes that her mission in life is to struggle for feminism, others involve themselves, on various levels, in capitalist struggles which are racist (including the anti-racists), nationalist, anti-imperialist... And, finally, they are not even gathering, talking about life, about the world as proletarians. In the cafes, people only talk about football... and the majority of proletarians don't even go to the cafes any more. Proletarians are almost completely wiped out as human beings, and during the few hours left from wage-slavery they remain just as spectators. The combination of TV and video has completed the historic work of the state in putting on an even higher plane the liquidation of the proletariat and its dilution into individuals and families. After eight hours imprisoned at work and eight hours passed in sleeping to recover his strength to return to work, the proletarian is equally today a prisoner in the eight hours that remain.

Capital does everything that it can to attain the ideal apogee of this process by achieving a society where it is no longer menaced by its historic enemy, where the only people living are producers/good-citizens and, where possible, humanoids, useful idiots for reproducing society without asking any questions. All sectors of economic activity and research work for the realisation of this idealist goal. At the factory and in the office they replace people by assembly-line workers and then by machines. Computers and robots ideally tend towards a world where all human life has been replaced by artificial equipment. And biology, genetics and insemination research have the same objective: the creation of a "person" who isn't one, a "person" who has been programmed for this society that is to say for Capital.

As long as this humanoid doesn't leave the laboratory, as long as they are not able to produce a human body which creates value without ever protesting (8), a genetic body whose capacity for revolt has been completely removed, they will try to approach this with the greatest possible help of instruments of collective cretinisation which are video, TV, computer games, elections, drugs... and for all those who refuse there are all those psychiatric wards, prisons, asylums, tranquillizers, wars, viruses, nuclear accidents etc... And, as if this dehumanisation of the human being is not enough, they promise that soon there will be games with virtual images in which you can "really enjoy yourself" (9) with a "virtual partner", "travel around the world", "fight face to face with someone from another continent"... and all always without leaving your four walls.

It is certainly true that the successes of our enemies are considerable. Subordination is very deep, confusion is general, there is collective cretinisation and more of these than ever before. And nevertheless, the proletariat is not dead.

It is also certain that it doesn't manifest itself like in the past, on an everyday level, with hundreds of permanent associations, with networks of solidarity, with international and internationalist groups, with a workers' press linking proletarians on all continents... But, when it expresses itself, it does so in a way which is directly violent and generalized.

In effect, while strikes organised by the unions are no longer credible, while the national political system and its electoral games are no longer attractive like they were in the past (in times when people still believed that a parliamentary party or a government could change the situation), while peaceful demos and other strolls for such and such a partial demand have lost their charm... while the old state mediations have lost their capacity to act as safety valves,... the proletariat, which is supposed to be dead and buried, surges forwards ever more explosively, without accepting mediations, without being stopped by little strikes, peaceful demos, or promises of elections.

The more the non-existence of structures of containment of the proletariat is clearly affirmed, the more they take it as given that the proletariat has disappeared for ever, the greater is the surprise when generalised revolts develop in one or several or all the towns of one or several countries. To mention only the most important revolts, we can cite Venezuela, Algeria, Morocco, Romania, Argentina, Los Angeles...

It is clear that these examples differ greatly in depth and duration of the challenge to bourgeois order. We have already had occasion to analyse this in our publications, but this text is not supposed to deal with the analysis of these differences nor with the comparison of these situations but, on the contrary, with the description of their common traits.

So, for example, in our enumeration we don't cite the case of Iraq. This is not because we are not able to see the aspects of force which you can see in the majority of proletarian revolts today but, on the contrary, because in the course of the last ten years that country has known a real continuity of proletarian associationism, the action of communist groups and the presence of proletarian banners. This continuity which is exceptional and against the current of the period, creates a situation of class struggle in this country largely beyond the general schema that we are trying to draw up in this article. Without being able to see in advance to what level the situation in Iraq can contribute to a generalized and global supersession of the current level of class struggle, we can affirm that this supersession needs certain elementary conditions for it to happen. The principal condition is the receptivity of the world proletariat to things which happen in parts of the world where fundamental class battles are developing. In relation to this, we can see an enormous weakness of the proletariat which also translates into enormous difficulties for it to make its struggle known, to push other sectors of the world proletariat to take action about this situation. These difficulties also find a particular expression in the immense difficulty for us, internationalist proletarians, to centralize international direct action in this direction (10).

The type of proletarian revolts characterized by the present period: proletarian strenghts

In the past, the proletariat daily demonstrated its existence and its antagonism to the social order. Today, except for the very small revolutionary proletarian organisations (like ours), which by their existence itself, as a historical product of the proletariat and of its historical practice, affirm counter to the current the determination of proletarians, the proletariat only demonstrates its existence and denies its famous historical disappearance by those social explosions of the eighties and early nineties (11). We'll now try to emphasize the aspects which we consider as essential in these revolts.

These explosions are characterized by the firm and violent action of the proletariat which occupies the streets and violently confronts the whole state apparatus. In a streak of lightning, the streets are swarming with people, and the action is generalized in a flash. The direct occupation of the streets tends to break violently with all the categories into which capital divides proletarians : the narrow confines of the factories, mines or offices smash into pieces. Unemployed, women condemned to housework by capital, elderly people, children... are unified in direct action.

These revolts generally break out without precise and explicit aims and rarely put forward anything positive. Most of the time, they start with a general claim: "We can't bear anything more!" which expresses at the same time economic, political and social needs. "We can't bear any more repression and police control", "No, this price rise is uncalled-for", "Against the police state and the government party", "We want to eat", "We can't continue to tighten our belts to live", "We refuse the rise in the cost of such and such bare necessities"... are broadly the elements which reassemble the unified proletarian action. This is not a particular feature of the present period. In the whole history of our class, massive and violent revolts concentrate these collective negations of such and such an action of Capital and state. The fact which might characterise the present period is that there is no visible quantitative progression before the explosion, that before the saturation point of the proletarians' discontent is reached there is not a whole set of important partial struggles. On the contrary, the present period is precisely characterized by this reaffirmation of the existence of the proletariat, so fleeting that, beyond these moments, it seems that the proletariat is ready to accept everything, and that capital itself is surprised by the lack of resistance aroused by its criminal austerity measures (12).

By the very fact of the absence of daily reaction to the different attacks of capitalism, the latter is encouraged to go further and it effectively puts the proletariat in a desperate situation. Never has the international proletariat been so roughly treated, so subjugated to such unbearable conditions, so stuck in an impasse... Never has it been in such dire straits. This is another important characteristic of today's struggles which leads to a real explosion of anger because the proletariat is really put in a desperate, unbearable position.

The economy has always sacrificed human beings, as Marx pointed out. But never before have the needs of human beings been renounced so flagrantly in the name of business interests and national competitiveness. Never in history has there been so little protestation as nowadays against the absolute power of the state. Never have such clear and open demonstrations of the inhumanity which runs this society engendered so little indignation. This is the same logic which now leads to explosive situations : the proletariat bears much more than the unbearable, much more than all that we could imagine until now, and then inevitably it comes to a point where we can't objectively stand it any more whatever the lies and tales they try to spin us... Consequently the explosion is inevitable.

The very fact that the struggle takes the form of an unstoppable conflagration determines an important element of force: the surprise effect. This paralyses the enemy which has not the slightest idea of how to react (13). The old reformist social democrat has no effect on the violent and decisive action of the proletariat. Trade-unionism itself is absolutely unable to answer and to take control of the generalization of proletarian violence. The different regional structures or the divisions in districts, social services and the different state services of social mediation find themselves totally overwhelmed. The absence of concrete demands makes their reformist and liquidating task towards the movement much more arduous. If they stand in front of the proletariat, it -literally- runs over them. This absence of positive demands and the participation of the proletariat as a class, not as one or several categories, are precisely the elements of strength of the movement: the opposition to everything which comes from the state, the negation of everything which belongs to this dominated existence (this aspect has always been criticised by the left wing of the bourgeoisie), vindicates, in fact, the communist revolution.

The protagonists themselves take advantage of this unexpected effect. The generalized non-communication which normally dominates during periods of social peace, the supreme individualism which governs daily life, the "everyone does what he likes in his own home" will be smashed into pieces by the direct action in the streets (even if this is only true among an avant-garde minority and if it only happens in moments of open struggle). All those who take part in these movements discover a solidarity unknown until then, and they are surprised by the unselfishness which reigns over the barricades and also by the extraordinary efficiency that structures action. Moreover, they discover in this neighbour whom they never greeted, in this colleague whom they all regarded as an idiot, in this friend who could only talk about football... a comrade who fights side by side with them.

Each time the police stations, the HQs of government parties, the unions and other state apparatuses (supplies offices, official administrative HQ, Courts...) are attacked and burnt. Direct action is used against the government representatives and the more or less covert collaborationists are chased away. In some cases, prisons are attacked and prisoners liberated. Regardless of the more or less diffuse class consciousness of the protagonists, this demonstrates not only the reconstitution, the existence, of our class but also the general antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeois state as a whole.

There is indisputably another element of strength in these proletarian revolts: the expropriation of bourgeois property which is more or less organised by avant-garde groups. By sweeping away the ancestral prejudices and challenging state terrorism (14), proletarians take what they need and try thus to destroy all the mediations which they are condemned to by capital: money, wages, work, etc... For the first time, many of them really eat what they like and most of those who take part in the revolts eventually treat themselves to what they always dreamed of without having to pay for it: a TV set, a heater, an eiderdown or a silk suit. For once they celebrate, they drink without restriction (and the drinks are less spoiled than usual when they can't afford them because of their prohibitory prices), they eat what they like leaving previous daily deprivation aside, they dance, they sing, everyone's celebrating !

While this elementary affirmation of proletarian interests against bourgeois property takes place -a fleeting affirmation of human life announcing that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat against this society of deprivation, war, and death is possible and necessary- the first organizational problems arise. On the barricades, in the districts where the police dare not enter, action groups organise themselves (15) and the criteria come up for discussion: criteria for action, criteria for sharing out, for using violence, for selecting the shops to break open, the forms of self-defence to use...

All these protests, these struggles, these lootings... express a real tendency to assume, in an embryonic way, the civil war towards which capital pushes us. Very often the soldiers and/or policemen sent to establish the morbid order of capital refuse to shoot and join the struggling proletarians.

Bourgeois counter-offensive: stick, carrot and disinformation

Of course, everything is not all rosy and the army corps of Capital, specially trained and formed for these kind of circumstances, do not hesitate to drown the struggles in blood.

Once the bourgeoisie gets over the surprise produced by the violent extension of the movement, it prepares its counter-offensive whose key note is always the same: to separate the majority of the proletarians from their vanguard. That division relies on the real limits of the movement, on the real division that takes place in the midst of the proletariat between those who are actively involved in the struggle and those who are opposed to it. The power of bourgeois ideology is so strong that even in those intense and acute moments only a minority will participate in direct action. Proletarian sectors, more dominated by trade-unions or political bourgeois parties, not only refuse to participate but also oppose themselves to those practices and are ready to accept the official version of the events (or the version of the parliamentary opposition which always corresponds to the previous one when it is the matter of confronting the proletariat in struggle).

Based on this principle, all apparatuses of fabrication of public opinion then play their decisive role in the institutionalisation of lies: only what is convenient to the police is broadcast (16). The more decisive acts are discredited and imputed to provocateurs, agents from abroad, terrorists, international subversion... If moreover the local bourgeoisie can rely on such or such local, racial, national, ideological... division, all the means of broadcasting will make the most of this opportunity: "unrest is spread by foreigners", "it is a fight between Blacks and Koreans", the trouble-makers come from "the favellas", "are Kurds", "it is a fundamentalist uprising", etc. These are different ways to express a series of attempts to negate the proletariat. And of course, those attacks against our class are echoed, magnified and multiplied by all the international means of communication. Their most important point will be to hide at all costs, to prevent by all means anyone from recognising in these revolts general or universal causes. Proletarians all around the world must never realise that other proletarians revolt as proletarians; for the media (which are supposed to inform us) the revolts are never proletarian but "fundamentalist", "Palestinian", "anti-dictatorship", they are revolts of "immigrants", "starving people", "Arabs", revolts "typical of the Third World"...

The bourgeois counter-offensive structures itself by organising the separation between "the good and honest citizen" and "the provocateur", between the nationals and the foreigners, between the good workers and the lazy ones, between the normal citizens and the marginal ones, reserving for the first ones the carrot and for the second ones the club.

Then comes the moment for concessions: such or such minister or chairman is dismissed, there are measures against poverty or charity measures, the price rise that started the uprising is quashed, state shops are resupplied... And, at the same time, a violent repression as selective as possible falls on the proletarians. Indeed all handbooks of counter-insurrection insist on the selectivity of repression, saying that "to avoid the population being favourable to the subversives, repression must be selective and must not repress in an indiscriminate way". The intensive work of the official state apparatuses that apply in the streets active repression against the most openly combative sectors is not sufficient; that's the reason why, long before any trouble so-called unofficial apparatuses (paramilitary groups, half syndicalist/half mafia crime specialists, death squads...) are preparing themselves.

Disinformation is total: what really happens in the streets is never told, scenes or photos of "barbarism", of proletarian expropriations, of fires are mixed up with images of repression, discourses of well-informed politicians explaining "the reasons for the troubles" and reassuring us on behalf of the State, Order and Security. And to cap it all, the touch that will make all those lies so spectacularly true: the camera lingers on that poor guy whose shop, that was just big enough to make a living for him, has just been looted and burned (17). Then, progressively and cunningly what happens in the street is abandoned and we are more and more bombarded with soothing political discourse heralding the return to a state of calm, the reappraisal of this measure, the resignation of this minister, new elections... These discourses express, with the deepest commiseration, that it is obvious, understood and clear that the situation of misery is unbearable but that it does not justify such and such an action and that the movement was in fact manipulated by professional agitators etc. In those delicate moments when the relation of forces is at stake in the street, all the State agents collaborate in seeking for political solutions: police, journalists, priests, sociologists, ecologists, right and left wing parties...

The real weaknesses of our class

It is incontestable that the bourgeois are really frightened when such explosions burst forth. They do back down. We even manage sometimes to give them the biggest fright they've ever known. On the other hand, for us these days of struggle are a good opportunity to satisfy some of our immediate needs. In quarters and even sometimes in whole cities, for the first time in our lives, it really is fun!

But let's not be foolish, it does not last long. Within an few days Capital imposes its terrorist order. Often, if not in almost all cases, the massacre is enormous, the cost in human life and injuries is very high. Our best comrades are put on file and imprisoned. State terror is terrible. In Venezuela, Algeria or Los Angeles for instance, after the short-lived victory that consists in occupying the streets for a while, follows a deep defeat and we know that many years will be necessary to overturn it.

That is the reason why it would be criminal to close our eyes to this reality and to praise these sort of revolts, presenting them as "the finally found form of the revolutionary struggle" (18). And if we can't prevent different immediatists and other modernists from praising this kind of movement, our task, the task of revolutionaries is to make a militant criticism of these actions of our class.

It is very serious, it is tragic that we are powerless to prevent the massacre of our comrades. It is sad to see the strength we expressed for a few days break into pieces in the wink of an eye and to see that overnight we are again as lonely as before (19). Practical solidarity we have lived during those days disappears as quickly as it was born. It is terrible to see that we are unable to get our comrades out of jail. It is really heart-breaking to see that "everyone for himself" resurfaces as soon as we quit the streets and that individualism, selfishness and the powerless citizen again take their central place on the historic stage. Even worse: the proper story of what we have been living is negated by the dominant versions of events and the lapses of our own memory submitted to the lies of the latter.

Today's world is characterised by the consequences of the tragic lack of permanent association of the proletariat: no permanent nucleus, no meeting centre, no massive classist press, no international organisation of the proletariat able to gather the vanguard of this community of struggle that shows up here and there. Therefore, the importance of permanent militant activity, of directly internationalist communist action centred on a revolutionary program of action, of organisation, of perspectives such as the one developed by our little group of militants - in spite of our very weak forces, becomes clear.

The lack of this general form of organisation materializes itself in decisive moments of action by the lack of clear orders, perspectives and direction. If class instinct is enough to recognize where to expropriate and who to attack (generally the cops and other corps of open repression), as soon as the struggle comes to a more decisive step and the bourgeoisie shows more subtle faces, as soon as sectors of bourgeois opposition try to transform the classist content into a particular content... the struggle against capitalism is transformed into a particular political struggle. It becomes a struggle against dictatorship, against that government, this minister, against that unpopular measure or even worse: for democracy, for the autonomy of the area or for Islam...

But all this is also the result of the fact that, even when the struggle is at its peak, the lies and tales the bourgeoisie always tells have deeply penetrated our class. Nationalism, Islamist mobilisations, struggle against such or such dictatorship... are unfortunately not only bourgeois discourses, they transform themselves into a material force of disorganisation of our struggle because tens of thousands of proletarians are led into and mobilized for the defence of these ideologies. Populism, the renewal of religions and sects, racism and so-called anti-racism as political movements have developed a great deal and not only weigh down on us during the endless periods of social peace but also weigh heavily on and disorganize big battles of the worldwide proletariat. Many times the bourgeoisie succeeds in deviating the struggle from its objectives; moreover, in many circumstances it succeeds in mobilizing a part of the proletariat against another, which is a decisive step towards the transformation of the social war into an imperialist war inside a country (20). Without necessarily going as far as the case of Yugoslavia in which proletarian struggles gave way to a fratricidal war for bourgeois interests (which is, beyond the qualities of such and such a local or national faction, a true victory for world capital), in many cases what is searched for and often reached is the confrontation of one proletarian sector against another; as in Argentina amongst those who participated in the "saqueos" (looting), as in the United States where everything was done to transform the proletarian revolt of Los Angeles into a struggle between racial communities (although without much success).

To synthesize, we can say today that there has never been such a big difference between the strength of proletarian action and the lack of proletarian consciousness of this action; between the classist practice against Capital and the State and the general ignorance of the determinations of this practice and its aims; between the homogeneity of the proletariat's conditions and struggles and the total and international ignorance of belonging to the same class and of struggling for the same aims; between the practical and radical questioning of private property and the social ignorance of the communist project. It is precisely the lack of permanent mass proletarian organisations and the corresponding lack of a safety valve that make all those contradictions much more violent than in the past. This typifies the framework of the present days' struggles, their strengths as well as their weaknesses. The latter appear through the capacity of capital to transform our struggles into inter-bourgeois, inter-imperialist struggles and eventually into a conflict opposed to the subconscious project of the proletarian struggles (communist revolution), through its capacity to affirm Capital's project: imperialist war (that is to say renovation of bourgeois society by a new cycle of war, reconstruction, expansion...).

The necessity and possibility of fighting against our weaknesses

Capital can only offer more misery, more unemployment, more homeless people, more war, more daily horror... In spite of all this, social peace, the essential component of this criminal world, will carry on being broken by these waves of proletarian revolts. The manoeuvring of Capital and its state agents will not prevent the quantitative and qualitative multiplication of these revolts. International Organisations, counter-insurrection and repression services, specialists in futurology foresee them and prepare to fight them. Trade-unionists, politicians, priests, social workers prepare to fight new confrontations and do whatever they can to prevent them from breaking out, but they know that tomorrow their role will be to quell them. It is only to be expected that the enemy is getting ready.

And us? What the fuck are we doing to be ready? Not much really!

This sad reality cannot be changed just by revolutionary will and consciousness of such and such a group. Meanwhile the rest of the class is not receptive and contents itself with the world of misery it is submitted to. The minority organisation of a handful of communists, whatever their will, whatever their action and however important their function may be, cannot replace this immense lack of collective preparation. The disorganisation of our class, the lack of permanent structures of diffusion, discussion, exchange, coordination, organisation... cannot be replaced by the insignificant activity of small groups.

That is the reason why, in the short and medium term, these kind of revolts will carry on with all their strengths and, above all, unfortunately, all their weaknesses. We will not be able to prevent the future revolts, in the short term, from ending in heavy losses for our class. Disorganisation, dispersion provoked in our ranks by the enemy as soon as it reorganises massive repression and begins to shoot at us, the fact that the proletariat can't even rely on groups being able to reply to State terrorism by the elementary selective terrorism of our class, the absence of structures of international solidarity, the quasi-non-existence of proletarian structures able to diffuse what's going on in other parts of the world and, generally, the disorganisation of the proletariat as a class will allow again and again in many places the bourgeoisie to take revenge for our revolts by arresting, brutalising, torturing, killing or allowing to die in their jails elements of the proletarian avant-garde.

Even worse, the bourgeoisie will carry on hiding the class character of future revolts. It will carry on writing that these revolts belong to particular causes and the majority of the proletarians will remain indifferent, sure that these are "Islamist" revolts or revolts "against dictatorship" or "corruption". As in the past, this false interpretation will be part of reality (as a philosopher said a long time ago: "The false is a moment of the true") and Capital will do everything to transform it into the one and only truth, in order to transform class struggle into inter-bourgeois, inter-imperialist struggle.

But this situation will not last long, on the one hand because of the ever more general homogenisation of capitalism which will hinder the attempts to hide the uniformity of the conditions of struggle of the proletariat, and on the other hand because of the unavoidable awakening that will ensue from the multiplication of that kind of revolt and the defeats which follow.

Crisis homogenizes the general condition of Capital's development. Not only are capitalists' problems always the same, not only is there unavoidably more and more famine, poverty, unemployment... but, moreover, the economic politics of governments around the world become more similar every day. Besides, the room to manoeuvre is shrinking and the discourses do not change. They all accept what they call "realism" and "pragmatism" and that is nothing other than the open recognition of their own submission to the diktats of the economy. What is new is not this submission as such, it has always been like that, but the generalised admission of that submission. If the discourses of the right and left wings, from the North to the South, of imperialists as well as so-called "anti-imperialists", of nationalists and Islamists look more and more like each other, it is not because these factions are becoming more capitalist than before, nor because the kind of capitalist management called "Communism" has disappeared, but because in a period of expansion Capital can allow different forms of management while in a period of crisis, world Capital develops one sole dictatorial direction: to tighten one's belt. While in certain epochs, on the basis of a maintained increase of the real wage, Capital is able to manage the labour force in a popular way while hiding the permanent increase of the rate of exploitation (which leads to different economic politics more or less populist, state controlled, protectionist...), in periods of crisis, and above all in periods of deep and generalized crisis such as the one we are living now, the law of value violently imposes itself and forces all the bourgeois factions to fight against their own proletariat and against their competitors (21) to maintain the process of valorization. The "normal" growth of the rate of exploitation giving insufficient results, the struggle against the proletariat requires (in almost all cases) to impose a decreasing of the real wage.

The unavoidable and universal enforcement of the same economic politics against the same social class, the repetition of the same type of discourse all over the world to justify this politics ("sacrifices are unavoidable", "we must produce more and in a more profitable way", "let's defend the competitiveness of our country"...) tend in the end to unify the reaction of the enemy... and to unify the enemy itself, in spite of all the ideological efforts made to prevent that unification. The latter is, first of all, the more or less automatic and pre-conscious result of the unavoidable reaction unified in time and space. Its reproduction, the coincidence in different places of the world of this kind of revolt will for sure complicate the role of those ideologues and journalists (i.e. to hide the common causes of the revolts) which opens the possibilities of a process of effective realization for the constitution of one class against one enemy.

At the same time, the qualitative and quantitative intensification of these revolts, the repetition of the defeats will open the eyes, the ears, the spirit... of the proletariat who will compare its own experience, who will hear the experience of its neighbours, who will search for that of other regions, other epochs. In the beginning those who will begin this process will be few but, in one way or another, each of us, as militants, are the product of this kind of forced opening, of this kind of post-action thinking, of the essential supersession of the barriers which held back the previous struggle, of the balance-sheet of a wave of struggle that did not end where we wished it would end. Revolutionaries, those who really lead the class forward, those who at every concrete moment of the movement represent the interests of the whole, the internationalist and historical interests of communism... the revolutionaries do not train themselves through books, they are the complex product of concrete experiences, of attempts to generalise these experiences, of militant efforts of abstraction. They put to the test their embryonic conclusions and compare them to those reached in other places and other circumstances. It is in this context that militant books and writings have their true significance, which is to transmit experiences, to recover the historic memory of our class, to draw a balance-sheet of defeats in order to organise the perspective of victory, to develop and affirm the communist program. The process is long, hard and difficult... but there is no other way!

Contrary to the social democratic vision of a party of bourgeois intellectuals who know everything and teach it to the passive and ignorant masses, social reality is quite different. The proletariat engenders factions, groups able to synthesise the historical experience it has accumulated, and that's the only way to break from idealism, to avoid making the same mistakes again and again in different times and places.

But those revolutionary groups, more isolated today than ever in the past, will only be able to assume their task of revolutionary leadership when the future struggles push more and more sectors of the proletariat to break from the ideologies that imprison them today, when minorities will begin to be clearly seen, when their preoccupations, the preoccupations of communists, will be put forward: revolution, the struggle against capitalism in all its forms.

Only then will our enemies flying on this idyllic and soporific cloud where communism has been buried once and for all, where the conviction that the proletariat is dead reigns, where they can sleep soundly since no one will ever shout LONG LIVE THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION, suddenly feel the greatest fear of the century. They will wake up from this marvellous and stupid dream to which the society they represent keeps them submitted. The harder they fall!

Notes

1. As we have already said several times, democracy should not be seen as a simple form of domination; it corresponds to the very essence of capital, to the normal way in which generalized mercantile society functions. In the marketplace social classes don't exist: there are just free and equal buyers!

2. For clarity of explanation, we have to present as separate moments what are certainly two sides of the same process in which this negation of the proletariat as a class is realised.

3. Like for example "1984,..'85,..'87,..'89 pire que prevu. La citoyennisation de la vie" in Le Communiste No.27 and "Contre le terrorisme d'Etat, de tous les Etats existants" in Le Communiste No.26.

4. If we put "strike" between inverted commas it is because a real strike, for us, is a battle between proletarians and capital whose content as well as its form will tend to express this reality in thousands of different ways: absence of precise demands relating to such and such a category of workers, tendency to be generalized, indefinite duration, sabotage of production, confrontation with the scabs, appearance of "uncontrolled" minority groups...). Here, on the contrary, we are talking about a trade union action (that is to say the action of an apparatus of the capitalist state) having the aim of channelling, and therefore liquidating proletarian energy.

5. In certain cases, the division of labour between the apparatuses of the bourgeois state (for example between unions and the forces of order) allows even a certain dose of minoritarian violence, which of course never attacks the bourgeois order. Thus as long as the majority of the demonstration is peacefully contained by interminable union speeches, they tolerate or even promote a radical part of the demonstrators breaking away and throwing themselves at the special forces of the police who are specially prepared for this to happen. The bourgeoisie and its property remain well protected and it takes advantage of the situation to arrest radical proletarians and to put possible activists on file. Each state force carries out its function, one using truncheons, the other using diversion (which is obviously not to say that the unions don't use overt repression as well). So the force of the proletariat, incapable of leading itself towards its own goal and using minoritarian violence against its real class enemies, is squandered without calling capital into question.

6. In opposition to the decadentist myth which says that unions corresponded to the interests of the proletariat until 1914, we will take the opportunity in this footnote to remind you that since their origin, in particular during the whole of the 19th century, there were unions whose objective was identical to that of the unions today: class conciliation betraying the immediate interests of the workers... Already in 1890, the Catholic Church in France recommended the creation of unions against the proletarian struggle. We would draw the attention of the reader to the article "Mouvement communiste et syndicalisme" in issues No.4 and 6 of Le Communiste.

7. This disappearance of the proletariat is only apparent because, in the last instance, the very existence of bourgeois society has its foundation and its source of reproduction (expansion) in the proletariat itself. But it is true that the proletariat as a class, as a force, as a power opposed to capital, is negated. And this reality can only be totally put into question in practice. That is to say that it is useless, in a period like the one we are going through today, just to say: "The proletariat exists". The proletariat will only fully exist when it constitutes itself anew as a force of social opposition against the existing bourgeois order. Of course, to complete this statement, we must add that materially the possibility and the necessity of this reconstitution of the proletariat as a class, and therefore as a party, is based on the permanent antagonism of this society, an antagonism which the bourgeoisie cannot abolish, not even in the golden ages of total domination. The hundreds of sporadic and discontinuous battles which we are trying to schematize in this text already carry in themselves the development of this movement of reconstitution of the proletariat.

8. Our attention will be drawn, with good reason, to the fact that, as long as value essentially comes from human labour, a humanoid will not create value and that, for capital as a whole, this limit will be its own death. Nevertheless it is not capital as a whole which runs this world, but the life and death struggle between all the multiple particular capitals; a struggle in which each of these capitals obtains extra surplus value from each move in the direction of this humanoid and is therefore interested in the development of productive forces in this direction. To suppose that capital is able to stop its own suicide and/or the suicide of humanity is to attribute to it virtues of planning which objectively it doesn't have.

9. We don't think it's necessary to explain to our readers why we put inverted commas round these "enjoyments".

10. On this subject see the article "Direct action and internationalism" in Communism No.8 (july 1993).

11. Explosions of this type which, in some cases, only affect an area of a town, in other cases a whole town or a whole country or even extend beyond the borders, are obviously not the only forms of struggle today, but we consider that they are the most characteristic forms of present day struggles. The proletariat also demonstrates its existence and its antagonism to the world order when it refuses to be enlisted or when it deserts, but, except for Iraq, these ways in which it expresses itself are not the determining ones today. We could also mention a unionist strike overwhelmed by proletarians who leave their factory to generalize their struggle; but considering that the proletariat expresses itself in that form more rarely and with less importance than in the past, this is not worthy of our attention, least of all in this general outline of present class struggles.

12. The experts of the World Bank and of the International Monetary Fund go to the point of congratulating themselves on the lack of opposition of populations to the measures which they recommend, and this becomes for them a strong argument to convince governments and political parties to put these measures into practice.

13. We refer of course to the social mass of the bourgeoisie and of the classical state apparatuses. It is clear that for a long time the state has had its special corps (for direct as well as ideological repression) ready to carry out manipulation of information, selective repression etc... as we'll schematically explain in the next chapter.

14. If it is clear that it is not the state which creates property but that the opposite is true, because the State is nothing else but property fortified to reproduce itself, we can't forget that the human being respects private property and even goes to the point of starving to death, because he is deprived of the property of what is most essential, while on the other hand there is a tremendous amount of waste. And this only by the pressure brought on him by centuries and centuries of state terrorism, by the ideology of respect for property which this terrorism has managed to impose and reproduce through its ancient work.

15. In many cases, after a moment's surprise, special corps for the defense of private property are organised and the proletariat responds by limited forms of organisation and arms.

16. Just asserting that journalism is at the service of the State would mean that we are too condescending to journalists. In reality, journalism is one of the components of the State and contributes to drawing up its politics. On the other hand, it would be false and partial to consider that it is this state apparatus (or any other means of communication) that leads all the others. That conception, quite fashionable for some modernists or ex-ultra-left militants, is nothing but an idealist interpretation of the thesis of "the society of spectacle" which forgets the fundamental determinations of Capital. If journalism can, in certain circumstances, "lead" the police, the government, the army... it is itself more often "led" by the police, the government or the army, and we cannot forget that, fundamentally, the motor of this component remains value valorising itself and that any structure of the State is submitted to the central determination of the State: to reproduce Capital, to reproduce the domination of the bourgeoisie, to reproduce the exploited as exploited. To pretend that the journalistic spectacle leads the world is nothing but a spectacular submission to the world of spectacle.

17. In these revolts there can be unfair, incorrect expropriations, individualistic and selfish acts of little chiefs. There can also be participants acting as provocateurs to denigrate the movement. But contrary to the police and journalists' version it is never the essence of this kind of movement. It would be absurd to pretend that such problems do not exist. The transformation of the individualistic and selfish mass on which Capital is based into a compact and revolutionary class is a long process that is only (re)beginning with these revolts.

18. During the 1917-23 wave, this formula referred to the councils and the soviets (useful structures for the organisation of proletarians) considered as the form that would eternally guarantee the revolution. But no organisational form can guarantee a revolutionary content, and councils as well as soviets ended up everywhere (and clearly in Russia and Germany) in guaranteeing the functioning of Capital. The uncritical praise of these forms (councilism) was the best ally of the capitalists in the process of reorganisation.

19. Of course some contacts, some relationships produced from the movement are indestructible, and develop themselves in the preparation of new struggles. But seeing the present world wide situation, we may say that these are much too rare exceptions to characterise this period.

20. The clearest example of this kind of liquidation of a proletarian struggle is the 1930s in Spain where World Capital succeeded in transforming the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against capital and the State into an inter-bourgeois struggle, an imperialist struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, which constituted a decisive step towards the so-called "Second World War".

21. About the unavoidable exacerbation of the war of the proletariat against inter-bourgeois war, see the text "The capitalist catastrophe" in this review.

"Above all, during and immediatly after the struggle, the workers as far as it is possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacification (...).

Far from opposing so-called excesses -instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buldings with which hateful memories are associated- the workers' party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give a them direction."

Address of the Central Committee (March 1850)