FED UP!

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

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

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

Real solidarity means to fight against them!

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

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

BUT:- 1) Everyone knows that the "Devaquet" law has been withdrawn, this was only to demobilise us so as to attack us more easily afterwards.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, we're sick of this miserable society!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ball is in our court - counter attack!

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

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

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

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

DOWN WITH SACRIFICE! UNCOMPROMISING STRUGGLE! LETS ORGANISE OURSELVES!

11 January '87.

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blanqui - 1851

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

Engels - Progress of Social Reform on the Continent.

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

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

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

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

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

Octobre No 5 - 1939

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

Genesis of Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

Marx - On The Jewish Question

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

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

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

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

Marx - Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marx - Ibid

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

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

Marx - Capital Vol 1

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

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

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

Marx's - Grundrisse

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

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

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

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

Communism No 1

That is exactly what Marx explains in Capital:

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

Marx - Capital 1, The Transformation of Money into Capital

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

Money as the Community of Capital

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

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

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

Marx - Grundrisse

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

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

Marx - Grundrisse

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

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

Marx - Grundrisse

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

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

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

Marx - Grundrisse

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

Dictatorship of the Proletariat against Workers
Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trotsky - The Lessons of October

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

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

Bordiga - Lenin on the Path to Revolution

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

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

Verceci - "October"

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

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

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

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

Luxemburg - Speech to the founding Convention of the KPD

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luxemburg - Discourse on Tactics, 1898

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

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

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

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

For Luxembourg:

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

Rosa Luxemburg - Die Rote Fahne

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bordiga - The Democratic Principle, 1921

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

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

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

Bordiga - The Democratic Principle, 1921

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

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

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

Bordiga - The Lessons of Recent History

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

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

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

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

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

Barrot - Le Mouvement Communiste (Editions Champ Libre)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bordiga - Communism and Human Knowledge, 1952

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Workers' Memory, from Communism #4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patagonia, past history and protagonists of the fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1920-21 direct action and general strike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the workers' unity was destroyed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strike without perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

5. that means inclusion, subordination and domination.

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

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

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

9. Owners of the estancias, individuals or societies.

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