Communism - central organ of the Internationalist Communist Group

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Online archive of Communism published by Groupe Communiste Internationaliste / Internationalist Communist Group.

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Submitted by Fozzie on March 9, 2024

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westartfromhere

11 months ago

Submitted by westartfromhere on March 10, 2024

An early issue of this review had an article entitled something like, West Bank, Gaza... the bourgeoisie is preparing a massacre. When the internet archives—now defunct—of the reviews and other materials of the group was uploaded, the title of this article appeared on the contents list but was never published. It would be of interest now, in hindsight of the ongoing massacres in the region, to be able to read this article.

westartfromhere

11 months ago

Submitted by westartfromhere on March 10, 2024

Right, The West-Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem,... in response to the proletarian struggle the bourgeoisie is once again preparing a massacre!!

Fozzie

11 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on March 10, 2024

Their website seems to have been down for at least a year and the archived website shows publications ceasing circa 2018?

westartfromhere

11 months ago

Submitted by westartfromhere on March 10, 2024

The West-Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem,... in response to the proletarian struggle the bourgeoisie is once again preparing a massacre!!

For a group that claims, "not to falsify our own publishing history. CW", it is a gaping omission.

An unscrupulous merchant, as all merchants are, has a copy of issue number 5 for sale here but curiosity does not stretch that far.

Fozzie

11 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on March 10, 2024

Ah good spot, I have nicked the cover image at least. I'm sure a copy will turn up eventually without someone laying out £20.

Guerre de Classe

10 months 4 weeks ago

Submitted by Guerre de Classe on March 15, 2024

I discovered in my library a hard copy of this review.
So I scanned the text "The West-Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem,..." and I'm OCRizing it.
Into a few days it will be available on Libcom...

westartfromhere

10 months 4 weeks ago

Submitted by westartfromhere on March 15, 2024

Thank you. Look forward to reading.

Communism #1 (Nov 1983)

Death To Democracy!

Debut issue of the English-language GCI-ICG journal Communism.

Submitted by Fozzie on March 10, 2024

Contents

PDF courtesy of Spirit of Revolt archive.

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Communism #2 (May 1985)

Communism #2 cover

2nd issue of the GCI-ICG journal.

Submitted by Fozzie on March 9, 2024

Contents

  • The miners' struggle: the need for autonomous organization against the unions
    Our leaflet
    Correspondence:
    Answer to a F.P.W.A. leaflet
    Prisons against the proletariat
  • What reduction of working-time?
  • Contribution to the so-called question of the party

PDF courtesy of Splits and Fusions archive.

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The miners' struggle: the need for autonomous organization against the unions - ICG

The miners' struggle: the need for autonomous organization against the unions - Communism #2

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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!

* * *

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)

________________________________________

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).

________________________________________

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".

Comments

Prisons Against the Proletariat - ICG

Prisons Against the Proletariat

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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.

Comments

What Reduction of Working Time? - ICG

The Internationalist Communist Group on labour time, and the reduction of the working week in France.

Author
Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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).

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Contribution to the so-called "Question of the Party" - ICG

Contribution to the so-called "Question of the Party"

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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).

Comments

Communism #3 (May 1986)

Marx Birthday cake

Texts from 3rd issue of GCI-ICG journal.

Submitted by Fozzie on March 9, 2024

Towards a Synthesis of Our Positions - ICG

We are publishing here a first attempt to summarize our fundamental positions. We want to insist on the danger of using this text as if it were a new bible, as a formal and eternal reference. We consider this text as a photograph taken at a certain level of experience of our group, knowing that we'll produce other materials, other texts which will be at quite different levels of abstraction and concretisation.

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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!

Comments

South Africa: Class Struggle vs. Race Struggle - ICG

From Communism #3

Submitted by libcom on January 3, 2006

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!

Comments

A Foot in the Birthday Cake: Marx in spite of and against everybody - ICG

A Foot in the Birthday Cake: Marx in spite of and against everybody

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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)

Comments

Racists and Anti-Racists Against the Proletariat - ICG

The text below is reprinted from our French review "Parti de Classe" No 6. It was leafleted in Paris by comrades during an anti-racist demonstration.

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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!!!

Comments

Workers' Memory, comments on "The Communist Party: Provisional Resolutions towards a Programme" (July 1920) - ICG

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.

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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'',...

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Communism #4 (Winter 1987-88)

Texts from the 4th GCI-ICG journal.

Submitted by Fozzie on March 9, 2024

Leaflet: FED UP! - ICG

Leaflet: FED UP!

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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!!!

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Leaflet: Some considerations on the state of our forces and the forces of the state - ICG

Faced with new threats to their living conditions, the railway workers - with some other groups alongside - have again taken up the wildcat strike. Without asking anyone else's opinion. These 'irresponsible people' haven't even waited for the unions to start negotiating the exact terms of the new measures taken against them before moving into action.

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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.

Comments

Communism Against Democracy - ICG

Communism Against Democracy.

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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."

Comments

1917-1921: Generalised revolutionary struggle in Patagonia - ICG

An article by the Internationalist Communist Group (ICG/GCI) about the events in Patagonia 1917-21.

Submitted by libcom on January 12, 2006

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.

Comments

Communism #5 (October 1988)

Communism 5 cover

Texts from 5th GCI-ICG journal.

Submitted by Fozzie on March 9, 2024

Contents

Comments

Guerre de Classe

10 months 4 weeks ago

Submitted by Guerre de Classe on March 15, 2024

I discovered in my library a hard copy of this review.
So I scanned the text "The West-Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem,..." and I'm OCRizing it.
Into a few days it will be available on Libcom...

Fozzie

10 months 4 weeks ago

Submitted by Fozzie on March 15, 2024

Excellent - thank you.

Editorial - ICG

Editorial from issue 5 of the GCI-ICG English langauge journal Communism.

Submitted by Fozzie on March 17, 2024

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.

Comments

Against terrorism of all existing states - ICG

The media are extremely effective tools for moulding world public opinion, and are basic instruments of cretinisation used at all levels of society in the interests of world capitalism. What they call "terrorism" are acts of violence against persons or things, the responsibility for which are not claimed by states they consider legitimate.

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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.

Comments

Human Activity Against Labour - ICG

"The point is not to free labour, but to abolish it."

- Karl Marx -

Submitted by redtwister on December 15, 2005

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.

Comments

Communism #6 (September 1989)

Communism 6 cover

6th GCI-ICG journal.

Submitted by Fozzie on March 9, 2024