Totalitarianism and fascism - Jean Barrot

TOTALITARIANISM AND FASCISM («Bilan»: Contre-revolution en Espagne, 1936-1939)

The horrors of fascism were neither the first nor the last, nor, whatever anyone says, the worst (1). They had nothing to envy of the "normal" massacres of wars, famines, etc. For the proletarians they were the most systematic re-edition of other terrors experienced in 1832, 1848, 1871, 1919, ... Nonetheless, fascism occupies a prominent place, if not the first, in the spectacle of horrors. This time, in fact, many bourgeois and a good part of the political class were hit, as well as the head and body of the official workers' organizations. For the bourgeois and petty bourgeoisie, it is an abnormal phenomenon, inexplicable, except through recourse to psychological causes: a degradation of democratic values. Liberal anti-fascism makes fascism a perversion of Western civilization, thus achieving the opposite effect: the sadomasochistic fascination of fascism made famous today by "retro" junk. Western humanism will never understand that the swastikas raised by the Hell's Angels send back to it the upside-down image of its own ghost of fascism. The logic of this inversion can be summarized as follows: if fascism is absolute Evil, then we choose evil, we invert values: a typical phenomenon of a disturbed era.

The usual "Marxist" analysis evidently does not linger on psychology. The interpretation of fascism as an instrument of "big capital" became classic after Daniel Guérin. But its seriousness masks its central error. Almost all "Marxist" studies maintain the idea that, despite everything, fascism was avoidable in 1922 or 1933, and reduce it to a weapon used by capitalism, which the latter could have replaced with another, if the workers' movement had exerted sufficient pressure in this sense, instead of merely demonstrating its sectarianism and divisions. Surely there would not have been a "revolution", but at least Europe would have avoided Nazism, camps etc. Behind very correct considerations on classes, on the State, on the link between fascism and big industry, this idea serves to avoid seeing that fascism is part of a double defeat: defeat of the revolutionaries crushed by social democracy and parliamentary democracy; hence failure of the democrats and social democrats to effectively manage capital. The coming to power of fascism, and even more so its nature, remain incomprehensible outside the previous period, the previous class struggle and its limits. They cannot be understood separately. It is no coincidence that Guérin is deceived at the same time about the Popular Front, in which he sees a "failed revolution", and about the meaning of fascism.

The paradox and the secret of the anti-fascist mystification lie in the fact that the democrats mask the nature of fascism all the better the more they display an apparent radicalism, shouting about fascism everywhere for over fifty years. This practice is not new.

"Fascism here, fascism there. Action Française is fascism. The National Bloc is fascism [...]. Every day, for six months, "L'Humanité" had a fascist surprise in store for us. One day a huge six-column headline: Down with the fascist Senate! Another time, it causes a printing house to refuse to print a communist newspaper: Fascist coup de force [...].

There is no more Bolshevism and fascism in France than there is Kerenskyism. "Liberté" and "L'Humanité" have a lot of trouble, the fascism they invent is not susceptible to development: the objective conditions of its existence have not yet been realized [...].

We cannot leave the field open to reaction: it is useless to christen it fascist to fight it." 2

In an era of verbal inflation, the mere fact of evoking "fascism" has become a sign of radicalism, while attesting to a confusion and a theoretical concession to the State and capital. The essence of anti-fascism consists in fighting against fascism to promote democracy , that is, in fighting not to destroy capitalism but to force it not to become totalitarian. With the identification of socialism in a total democracy, and of capitalism in an ever greater fascistization, the antagonism of proletariat-capital, communism-wage labor, proletariat-State is postponed to another world for the benefit of the antagonism "democracy" -" fascism", presented as the quintessence of the revolutionary perspective. Anti-fascism only succeeds by mixing two phenomena: "fascism" proper, and the evolution of capital and the State towards totalitarianism . By always tracing the second phenomenon back to the first, one passes off the part as the whole, the cause of both is masked, and what one believes one is fighting is strengthened.

The evolution of capital and its current totalitarian forms cannot be grasped starting from the denunciation of a latent "fascism": but rather fascism starting from the evolution of capital towards totalitarianism, of which fascism was a particular case, and in in which democracy has played, and plays, an equally counter-revolutionary role as fascism. It is a linguistic abuse to speak today of a painless, non-violent fascism, or one that would not destroy the traditional bodies of the workers' movement. Fascism was a movement limited in time and space. The situation of Europe after 1918 gives it its original features which will never be repeated.

What is at the heart of fascism, if not the economic and political unification of capital, a trend that became general after 1914? Fascism was a particular way of realizing it in countries (Italy and Germany) (where the State had proved incapable of making order reign (including among the bourgeoisie), although the revolution had been suffocated. It is in the essence of fascism to be born in the streets, of having caused disorder for order: a movement of the old middle classes which resulted in their more or less violent reduction, which regenerated from the outside the traditional State incapable of resolving the crisis of capital.

Crisis of the State at the time of the transition to the total domination of capital over society: this was exactly what it was about. Workers' organizations were needed to tame the revolution, then fascists were needed to put an end to the disorder that followed. A crisis that was poorly overcome at that time: the fascist state was only apparently effective, because it was based on the systematic exclusion of wage earners from social life. But a crisis relatively overcome by today's sprawling state. The democratic state gives itself all the means of fascism, if not more, since it integrates workers' organizations without destroying them. Social unification goes beyond that achieved by fascism, but the latter as a specific movement has disappeared. It corresponded to the forced discipline of the bourgeoisie under state pressure, in an original context.

The bourgeoisie even borrowed the name from workers' organizations, which in Italy were often called "fasci". It is significant that fascism is defined primarily as a form of organization and not as a program . His only program is to unite, to bring together the elements that make up society, willingly or by force:

"Fascism steals its secret from the proletariat: organization [...]. Liberalism is all ideology and no organization; fascism is all organization and no ideology" (A. Bordiga).

Dictatorship is not a weapon of capital, as if it could replace it with less deadly ones, but a tendency of capital, which is realized when necessary. "Returning" to parliamentary democracy after the dictatorship, as in Germany after '45, only means that the dictatorship is useless (until next time) as an integration of the masses into the State. The problem is therefore not that democracy ensures gentler exploitation than dictatorship: everyone would prefer to be exploited Swedish-style rather than tortured Brazilian-style. But do you have a choice? This democracy will itself transform into a dictatorship if necessary. The State can only have one function, which it fulfills democratically or dictatorially. You can prefer the first way, but do not bend the State to force it to use it. The political forms that capital gives itself do not depend on the action of the workers any more than on the intentions of the bourgeoisie. Weimar capitulated to Hitler, opened its arms to him. And Léon Blum's Popular Front did not "avoid fascism", because the France of 1936 did not need to unify capital and reduce the middle classes. There is no political choice to which the proletariat could be invited or forcefully invited.

Hitler is mocked for retaining only his propaganda methods from Viennese social democracy. The "truth" of socialism was more there than in refined Austro-Marxism. The problem common to social democracy and Nazism was to control the masses and repress their needs. It was socialists and not Nazis who annihilated the insurrections (this did not prevent the current SPD, in power in 1979 as in 1919, from creating an official stamp in honor of Rosa Luxemburg, whom it had killed sixty years ago). Dictatorship always comes after the proletariat has been defeated by democracy, trade unions and left-wing parties. Conversely, socialism and Nazism equally contributed to a (temporary) improvement in the standard of living. Like social democracy, Hitler made himself the instrument of a social movement whose content eluded him. He fought for power, like the SPD for its role as mediator between workers and capital: but both equally served capitalism, which got rid of them once they had carried out their respective tasks.

ANTI-FASCISM, THE WORST PRODUCT OF FASCISM

After the "fascism" between the two wars, the term fascism experienced a triumph. Which political group has not accused its opponents of using "fascist methods"? The left does not stop denouncing resurgent fascism, the right does not give up calling the PCF a "fascist party". Meaning everything, the word has lost its meaning since good international conscience qualifies all strong states as "fascist". Thus the illusions of the fascists of the 1930s are taken for reality. Franco referred to fascism like Hitler and Mussolini, but a Fascist International never existed.

If today the Greek colonels and Chilean generals are called fascists by the dominant ideology, they are in reality the capitalist state itself. Noisily pasting the fascist label on the State has the same effect as denouncing the parties at the top of the State. In both cases, criticism of the State is made to disappear behind the denunciation of those who direct it. Leftism believes it is demonstrating extremism by calling out fascism, while thus avoiding criticism of the state, and proposing another state form (democratic, popular) in place of the existing one.

The term fascism loses its meaning even more in advanced countries, where the communist and socialist parties will have a central role in a future "fascist" state rising against a revolutionary movement. In this case it is much more correct to speak of the State tout court and not of fascism. Fascism triumphed because its principles became generalized: unification of capital, effective state. But at the same time, fascism has disappeared as such, as a political movement and as a state-form. Despite some similarities, the parties branded as fascist (in France, for example, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français, Poujadism, somewhat of the Rassemblement pour la République nowadays) do not set out at all to conquer, from the outside, an impotent State.

Always insisting on the fascist threat prevents us from seeing that real fascism was already itself unsuitable, and failed: instead of cementing German national capital, it ended up dividing it in two. Today other forms reign, far both from fascism and from that democracy with which they fill our ears, to establish it or to defend it

With the Second World War, the mythology is enriched with a new element. This conflict, a necessary solution to the economic problems (crisis of '29) and social problems (proletarians in agitation, although not revolutionary, and therefore to be disciplined), could appear as a war against the totalitarianism embodied by fascism. This interpretation has a hard life, and the constant memory of the Nazi massacres by the victors serves to justify this war, giving it a humanitarian character. Everything, even the atomic bomb, would be justified against such a barbaric enemy. This justification, however, is no more valid than Nazi demagogy, which claimed to be fighting against Western capitalism and plutocracy. The "democratic" camp included a state just as totalitarian as Hitler's Germany: Stalin's Russia, whose penal code provided for the death penalty from the age of twelve. Everyone also knows that the Allies resorted to the same methods of terror and civilian extermination whenever they needed it (strategic bombings, etc.). The West then waited until the Cold War to denounce the Russian camps. But each capitalist country is faced with specific problems, depending on the era. Great Britain did not have an Algerian war to tame, but the partition of India caused millions of victims. The USA never had to organize concentration camps 3 to keep the proletarians quiet and get rid of the supernumerary petty bourgeoisie, but they did wage the Vietnam War. As for Russia, whose "Gulag" everyone denounces today, it was content to concentrate in a few decades the horrors that the older capitalist countries had spread over several centuries, and which also caused millions of victims, if only with the trafficking of Blacks. The development of capital entails all its consequences, including the two main ones: 1) obedience of the workers, therefore soft or violent destruction of the revolutionary movement; 2) competition with other national capitals, therefore war . The fact that power is in the hands of "workers'" parties changes only one thing: workerist demagogy will be even more accentuated, but it will not spare the workers from the most severe repression, if necessary. The triumph of capital is never more total than when workers mobilize for it, believing they are "changing lives".

To protect us from the excesses of capital, anti-fascism naturally imagines nothing other than state intervention. An apparent paradox, it manages to become the champion of the strong State, as the PCF says:

"Which State is necessary for France? Is the current State stable and strong, as the President of the Republic claims? No, it is weak, it is powerless to bring the country out of the social and political crisis into which it has thrown it. It generates disorder" 4 .

Dictatorship and democracy both aim to strengthen the State , the former on principle, so that it is strong, the latter in order to protect us, which leads to the same result. They are the opposite but common creators of totalitarianism. It's about making men participate in society, "from above" according to dictators, "from below" according to democrats.

Between dictatorship and democracy, can we speak of a struggle between two sociologically differentiable fractions of capital? Rather, it is a question of two ways of framing the proletariat, either by forcibly integrating it or by associating it with the intermediary of "its" organizations. Capital opts for one or the other solution depending on its needs at the moment. In Germany, after 1918, social democracy and the trade unions were indispensable to control the workers and isolate the revolutionaries. On the other hand, after 1929, Germany had to concentrate, eliminate part of the middle classes, and discipline the bourgeoisie. The workers' movement itself, defending political pluralism and immediate workers' interests, blocked the situation. Only in Nazism did it appear as the factor of social and political unification. The "workers' organizations" support capitalism well, but they pay attention to their autonomy: as organizations, they first of all seek to perpetuate themselves. This made them play an effective counter-revolutionary role in 1918-'21, as demonstrated by the failure of the German revolution, where in 1920 we witnessed, among other things, the first example of anti-revolutionary anti -fascism ante litteram 5. Subsequently, the weight acquired by these organizations in society and also in the State made them play a role of social conservation, of Malthusianism, which had to be eliminated. They carried out an anti-communist function in 1918-'21 because they were the expression of the defense of wage labor as wage labor: but this same reason then dragged them to put the interest of wage earners before everything else, to the detriment of the reorganization of the total capital.

It is understandable why Nazism had as its objective the violent elimination of the workers' movement, contrary to the RPF, the RPR etc., which makes all the difference. Social democracy had done its job of domesticating the workers well, but it had done it too well . He had thus taken too large a place in the state, without being able to unify the whole of Germany behind him. This was the task of Nazism, which was able to appeal to all classes, from the unemployed to big capital.

Similarly, the Chilean Unidad Popular (see "Chile") had contained the workers' push, but without gathering the whole nation around itself; it had to be overthrown by force. On the contrary, there has not been (yet?) mass repression in Portugal after November 1975, and if the current regime claims continuity with the "carnation revolution" it is not because the strength of the workers' and democratic organizations prevents a coup of the right-wing state. The parties and unions have never prevented anything, except when the coup d'état was premature (Kapp putsch in 1920). There is no white terror because it is useless, since up to now the Portuguese Socialist Party has unified the whole of society behind it.

Whether it is called that or not, anti-fascism has become the obligatory form of workers' reformism as well as capitalist reformism, fusing them, claiming to realize the true ideal of the bourgeois revolution betrayed by capital. Democracy is conceived as an element of socialism, an element already present in today's world. Socialism would, in fact, be total democracy. The struggle for socialism would consist in gaining more and more democratic rights within capitalism. Thanks to the help of the fascist scapegoat, democratic gradualism was renewed. Fascism and anti-fascism have the same origin and the same program; but the former believed he could overcome capital and classes, while the latter believed he could achieve "true" bourgeois democracy that could be indefinitely perfected with the addition of ever stronger doses of democracy. In reality, bourgeois democracy is a stage in the seizure of power by capital, whose domination is perfected by the extension of democracy in the twentieth century, accentuating the isolation of individuals. Born as an illusory solution to the separation of human activity and society, democracy will never be able to solve the problem of the most separated society in all of history 6 . Anti-fascism will always lead to an increase in totalitarianism: its fight for a "democratic" state consolidates the state 7 .

For these various reasons, the revolutionary analyzes of fascism and anti-fascism, and in particular of the Spanish war which is the most complex example, are ignored, misunderstood or regularly distorted. When things go well, they are considered an idealistic point of view; when things go badly, indirect support for fascism. You see (it is said (how the Communist Party of Italy played into Mussolini's hands, refusing to take fascism seriously and, above all, to ally itself with democratic forces; or how the German Communist Party allowed the advent of Hitler, negotiating the SPD as the main enemy. In Spain, on the contrary, here is an example of a resolute anti-fascist struggle, which could have won, without the defection of the Stalinist-socialist-anarchists (delete unnecessary mentions). This "evidence" is based on a distortion of the facts 8 .

ITALY AND GERMANY

In the first place of the falsehoods, there is a deformation of the case in which at least a part of the proletariat fought against fascism with its own methods and objectives: the Italy of 1918-'22. His struggle had nothing specifically anti- fascist : fighting against capital obliged us to fight, among other things, fascism, as well as parliamentary democracy . This experience is original, since it is an important movement directed by communists and not by centrist socialists adhering to the Communist International (like the PCF) or by Stalinists rivaling the Nazis in nationalist demagogy (like the kpd, which spoke of "revolution national" at the beginning of the 1930s). Conversely, this characteristic allows anti-fascism to reject everything that was revolutionary in the Italian experience of the time: the Communist Party of Italy, directed at that time by Bordiga and the left, would only have demonstrated sectarianism, favoring the coming of Mussolini to power. Now, without romanticizing this episode, it is good to remember it, because it clarifies, without any ambiguity, how the subsequent defeatism of the revolutionaries in the face of the "democracy"-"fascism" war (that of Spain as well as that of 1939-45) is not an attitude of purists who want nothing more than "the revolution" and await the Great Day without moving. It is based, more simply, on the disappearance, during the 1920s and 1930s, of the proletariat as a historical force, defeated after having formed itself (very poorly) into a party in the post-war period.

Fascist repression intervenes only after the proletarian defeat . It does not destroy the revolutionary forces, which only the traditional workers' movement can defeat with both direct and indirect methods. The revolutionaries are defeated by democracy which does not hesitate to resort to all means, including military ones. Fascism destroys only elementary movements, it annihilates the workers' movement itself which has become an obstacle. It is false to present the rise of fascism to power as the product of street fighting in which it defeated the workers.

In Italy, as in several other countries, 1919 was the decisive year, in which the proletarian struggle was defeated through the direct action of the State and its indirect diversion through elections 9 . Until 1922, the State granted the most extensive facilities to the fascists: indulgence in judicial proceedings, unilateral disarmament of the workers, even armed support, not to mention the Bonomi circular of 20 October 1921 which sent 60,000 officers to command the fascist assault groups. Faced with the fascist armed offensive, the State called... to the polls. During the factory occupations in 1920, the State was careful not to attack the proletarians head-on, leaving their struggle to exhaust itself, with the support of the cgl, which put an end to the strikes. As for the "democrats", they did not hesitate to form a "national bloc" (the liberals + the right) for the May 1921 elections which included the fascists. In June-July 1921, the PSI concluded a useless and mystifying "pacification pact" with the fascists.

We can hardly speak of a coup d'état in 1922: it was a transfer of power. Mussolini's "march on Rome" (who was content to take the train) was not pressure on the legal government, but a sham. The ultimatum launched to the government on 24 October was not the threat of a civil war: it was the signal addressed to the capitalist state (and very well understood by the latter) that the National Fascist Party was now the best force capable of ensuring its 'unit. The state gave in very quickly. The state of siege decided after the failure of a compromise attempt was canceled by the king, who commissioned Mussolini to form the new government (including the liberals). All parties, except the socialists and communists, moved closer to the National Fascist Party and voted in favor of Mussolini in parliament. The dictator's power was ratified by democracy. The same scenario was reproduced in Germany. Hitler was appointed chancellor by President Hindenburg (elected in 1932 with the support of the socialists who had seen in him... a bulwark against Hitler), and the Nazis were a minority in Hitler's first ministry. After hesitating, capital supported Hitler when it saw in him the unifying political force of the state and therefore of society (that capital had not foreseen certain further forms of the Nazi state is a secondary matter).

In the two countries, the "workers' movement" is far from having fought against fascism. Its organizations, totally autonomous from the proletarian social movement, functioned only to preserve themselves as institutions, ready to accept any political regime, right or left, that tolerated them. Between 1923 and 1930, the PSOE and its trade union center (UGT) collaborated with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. In 1932, the German socialist trade unions, through their president, declared themselves independent from all political parties and indifferent to the form of the state, and tried to reach an agreement with Schleicher (Hitler's unfortunate predecessor), then with Hitler, who made people believe them that National Socialism would let them exist. It came to the parade of German trade unionists behind the swastikas on May 1, 1933, transformed into "German Labor Day". The Nazis then sent the same trade unionists to prison and camps, which would later give the survivors the label of resolute, early "anti-fascists".

In Italy, the union leaders would have liked to conclude a tacit agreement of mutual tolerance with fascism. Between the end of 1922 and 1923, they made contact with the PNF. Shortly before Mussolini took power, they declared:

"At a time when political passions are exacerbating and when two forces foreign to the unions [the Communist Party and the PNF] are bitterly disputing power, the cgl feels the duty to warn workers against the speculations of the parties and political groupings that aim to drag the proletariat into a struggle from which it must remain absolutely extraneous, if it does not want to compromise its independence" 10 .

Conversely, in February 1934, there was some armed resistance in Austria 11 on the part of the left of the Socialist Party against the forces of an increasingly dictatorial state that was moving closer to the fascists. There was nothing revolutionary about this struggle, but it arose from the fact that there had been almost no street fighting in Austria after 1918. The most determined proletarians (although not communists) had not been defeated, and moreover they had remained in social democracy, which thus retained some revolutionary ambitions. Naturally, this resistance arose spontaneously, and failed to unify.

The revolutionary criticism of these events is not summed up in an "all or nothing", as if it wants to fight only for "the revolution", and only alongside pure and hard communists. We must fight, we are told, for reforms, when revolution cannot be made; a well-conducted struggle for reforms also prepares the revolution; He who can do more can do less, but he who cannot do less will never be able to do more; those who don't know how to defend themselves won't know how to attack etc. All these generalities ignore the problem. The controversy between Marxists, since the Second International, does not focus on the necessity or uselessness of the participation of communists in reformist struggles, which are, in any case, a reality . It is a question of knowing whether this or that struggle places the workers under the control (direct or indirect) of capital and in particular of its State; and what positions the revolutionaries should adopt in this case12. For a revolutionary, a "struggle" (a word used by the left and the official far left) has no value in itself: before 1914 the most violent actions led to the establishment of parties and trade unions which later revealed themselves to be the enemies of the Communism. Every struggle which, despite its initial spontaneity or energy, places workers under the dependence of the capitalist state, can only have a counter-revolutionary function. The anti-fascist struggle, which claims to seek a lesser evil (capitalist democracy is better than capitalist fascism), resembles the attitude of someone who throws themselves into the river to avoid the rain. Furthermore, by placing itself under the direction of a State, it must then accept all its consequences, including the repression that it exercises if necessary against workers and revolutionaries that go beyond anti-fascism.

Instead of attributing responsibility for Mussolini's triumph to Bordiga and the Italian Communist Party of 1921-'22, we would do better to question ourselves about the perpetual failure of anti-fascism, whose balance sheet is disheartening: when it avoided, or even just slowed down , totalitarianism? It was believed that the Second World War would guarantee at least the existence of democratic states: parliamentary democracies are the exception today. In the so-called socialist countries, the collapse of the traditional bourgeoisie and the demands of state capitalism have led to dictatorships that generally have nothing to envy of the Axis countries. Some people have illusions about China, but little by little the information completes the Marxist analyzes already published 13 , and reveals the existence of concentration camps whose reality is still denied by the Maoists... like that of the Russian camps in the 1930s by the Stalinists. Africa, Asia, Latin America live under the system of the single party or military dictatorship. We are moved by Brazilian torture, but democratic Mexico did not hesitate to shoot at demonstrators in '68, killing 300 people. The defeat of the Axis would have at least brought peace... for the Europeans, not for the millions who died from incessant wars and chronic famines. In short, the war that was supposed to rid us of war and totalitarianism has failed.

The anti-fascists' response is very prompt: it is the fault of American or Russian imperialism, or both, and, in any case, say the most radicals, of the survival of capitalism and therefore of its series of misdeeds. Agree. But the problem lies there. How could a war waged by capitalist states have any effect other than strengthening capital?

Anti-fascists (especially "revolutionaries") draw the exact opposite conclusion, calling for a new impetus of anti-fascism, always to be radicalized so that it goes as far as possible. They never cease to denounce fascist "survivals" or "methods" (for example in the Federal Republic of Germany), but never to deduce the need to eradicate the root of evil: capital. On the contrary, they conclude that we must return to "true" anti-fascism, proletarianize it, restart the Sisyphean work of democratizing capitalism. Now, one can deplore it, one can also preach humanitarianism or join a charitable organization, but nothing will change the crucial point: 1) capitalist states, that is, all states, are and will be increasingly forced to appear repressive, totalitarian ; 2) all attempts to put pressure on them to bend them in another direction more favorable to the workers or to "freedom" lead, when it goes well, to a null effect, and, when it goes badly (almost always), to the strengthening of the all-too-widespread illusions about the State as the arbiter of society and as a more or less neutral force capable of placing itself above classes. Leftists can continually repeat the classic Marxist analysis on the role of the State as an instrument of class domination, and then call to "use" the same State; equally they can read Marx's pages on the abolition of wage labor and exchange, and then paint the revolution as a great democratization of wage labor.

Some go further. Since, they say, making part of the revolutionary thesis their own, capital can currently only be "fascist", fighting for democracy against fascism necessarily means fighting against capital itself. But on what ground are they fighting? Fighting under the direction of one or more capitalist states (since they are the ones who have and maintain the direction of the struggle) means banning oneself in advance from the struggle against capital. The struggle for democracy is not the shortcut that would allow the workers to do the revolution without realizing it. The proletariat will destroy totalitarianism only by simultaneously destroying democracy and every political form. Until then, there will be a succession in time and space of "fascist" and "democratic" forms, with the spontaneous or forced transformation of dictatorial regimes in democratic regimes and vice versa, with the coexistence of dictatorships and democracies, one serving as a bogeyman and self-justification for the other.

it is therefore absurd to say that democracy would provide a more favorable framework for revolutionary activity than dictatorship, since the former immediately resorts to dictatorial means when faced with revolutionary danger; and this is all the better since the "workers' parties" are in power. If we wanted to be logical in anti-fascism, we would have to reach the conclusion supported by certain left-wing liberals: it is the revolutionary movement that pushes capital towards dictatorship, let us therefore renounce any revolution, and be content to go as far as possible along the path of reforms, without ever frightening capital. But this prudence is itself utopian, because ultimately the "fascistization" that it would like to avoid does not derive only from revolutionary action, but from capitalist concentration. We can discuss the opportunity and results of the participation of revolutionaries in democratic movements until the beginning of the twentieth century (see "The Commune of 1871"): in any case, it has been excluded since capital dominates the whole of society, since there is then only one possible politics: democracy becomes only a mystification and a terrain of practical quagmire. Every time the proletarians thought they could use it by turning it against capital, democracy abandoned them or turned into its opposite. In this sense, the communists whose analyzes on the Spanish war we reproduce were certainly against fascism. Revolutionaries reject anti-fascism because one cannot fight exclusively against one political form, without simultaneously supporting the others, and this is what anti-fascism does. Strictly speaking, anti-fascism is not the struggle against fascism, but the privileging of this struggle, which makes it inoperative. The revolutionaries do not reproach anti-fascism for not "making the revolution", but for being powerless to stop totalitarianism, and for strengthening, voluntarily or otherwise, the State and capital.

Not only has democracy always surrendered to fascism, almost without a fight; but fascism, when it no longer corresponds to the state of the political-social forces, itself regenerates democracy. Since, in 1943, Italy had to move into the camp of future winners, abandon fascism and therefore its leader, the "dictator" Mussolini found himself in the minority at the Grand Council of fascism and bowed before the democratic verdict of this 'body. One of the high fascist dignitaries, Marshal Badoglio, appealed to the democratic opposition and formed a coalition government. Mussolini was arrested. This is what in Italy is called the "revolution of 25 July 1943". The democrats hesitated, but the pressure of the Russians and the Communist Party made them accept a government of broad national unity, in April 1944, directed by Badoglio, which included Palmiro Togliatti and Benedetto Croce. In June '44, the socialist Ivanoe Bonomi formed a ministry that this time excluded the fascists. He oriented himself towards the three-party formula (pci-psi-dc) that would dominate the first post-war years (14). We are witnessing a transition desired and partly orchestrated by the fascists. Just as in 1922 democracy understood that the best way to safeguard the State was to entrust it to the dictatorship of the Fascist Party, in the same way in 1943 fascism understood that the only way to protect the integrity of the nation and the perenniality of the State was to hand the latter over to the democratic parties. Democracy transforms into fascism and vice versa, depending on the circumstances: these are successive forms, and often combined, to ensure the protection of the same State, guarantor of the same capitalist content. We note that the "return" to democracy does not in itself entail a resumption of the class struggle or even just demands, since the workers' parties that have returned to power are in this case the first to fight in the name of national capital. Thus the material sacrifices and the renunciation of the class struggle, justified by the need to "overcome fascism first and foremost", were imposed after the defeat of the Axis, always in the name of the ideals of the Resistance. The fascist and anti-fascist ideologies are both a closet where we put what is convenient for the momentary and fundamental interests of capital.

Since then, every time we shout "Fascism will not pass!", not only does it always pass, but through grotesque vicissitudes in which the demarcation between fascism and non-fascism follows a constantly shifting line. The French left denounced the "fascist" danger after 13 May 1958, but the secretary of the SFIO collaborated in the drafting of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.

Portugal and Greece have offered new examples of the self-transformation of dictatorships into democracies. Under the impact of external circumstances (colonial question for Portugal 15 , Cyprus conflict for Greece), a part of the military preferred to sink the regime to save the State : this is exactly how the democrats think and act when the "fascists " they are getting closer to power. The current Spanish Communist Party expresses this need very precisely (it remains to be known whether it is within the will and possibility of Spanish capital):

"Spanish society wants everything to be transformed so that the normal functioning of the State is ensured, without trauma or social convulsions. The continuity of the State requires the discontinuity of the regime" 16 .

There is a movement of passage from one form to another from which the proletariat is excluded and which it cannot influence in anything: if it tries to do so, the proletariat integrates into the State, and its further struggles are proportionately more difficult. , as demonstrated by the Portuguese case.

CHILE

Recently, it is probably Chile that has revitalized the democracy/fascism pseudo-opposition the most. This example unfortunately illustrates well the mechanism of the triumph of the dictatorship and the triple defeat of the proletariat.

The Chilean Popular Front of the 1930s was openly against the "oligarchy". The fight against oligarchic parliamentarism, presented as a limitation of the most conservative forces, facilitated the evolution towards a more centralized presidential system, with strengthened state power, capable of promoting reforms, i.e. industrial development. This Popular Front (which essentially lasted from 1936 to 1940) corresponded to the conjunction of the increase of the urban middle classes (bourgeoisie and employees) and the growth of workers' struggles. The latter were organized around the socialist central, decimated by repression, the CGT of anarcho-syndicalist inspiration, influenced by the Industrial Workers of the World, quite weak (from 20 to 30,000 members in 1932, out of 200,000 union members), and above all the trade unions animated by the Communist Party. In the 1920s, the white-collar unions had conducted strikes as severe as those of the blue-collar workers (except in the two bastions of worker radicalism: nitrate (later replaced by copper (and coal). Although it insisted on agrarian reform, the Stalin-radical-socialist coalition failed to impose it on the oligarchy. It did not even do great things to recover the country's riches exploited by foreigners (at that time, nitrate), but it achieved an industrial leap never known by Chile, neither before nor after. Thanks to institutions similar to the New Deal, with most of the investments provided by the state, a state capitalist structure was established, which developed heavy industry and energy. Industrial production increased in that period by 10%; from then 4% in 1960; and in the 1960s from 1 to 2%. A trade union reunification between the socialists and Stalinists took place in 1936 and weakened the CGT even further: the Popular Front destroyed what remained of the subversive movement. As a coalition, this regime lasted until 1940, when the Socialist Party withdrew from it. But it continued until 1947, with the radicals and the Communist Party, and the intermittent support of the fascist Falange (right-handed ancestor of the Chilean Christian Democracy, whose leader, Eduardo Frei 17 , moreover comes from there). The Communist Party itself supported it until 1947, when it was outlawed by the radicals.

As leftists of every era say, the Popular Fronts are also products of the workers' struggle: but of a struggle that remains within the capitalist framework and pushes it to modernize. After 1970, Unidad Popular also set itself the objective of reviving Chilean national capital (which the Christian Democrats had failed to defend in the 1960s), integrating the workers into it. Ultimately, the Chilean proletarians were defeated three times. Firstly, by allowing their economic struggles to be placed under the banner of the left-wing forces, by accepting the new State, because it was supported by the "workers'" organisations. In 1971, Allende answered this question:

"Do you think it is possible to avoid the dictatorship of the proletariat?

- I think so: this is why we work" 18 .

Secondly, by allowing themselves to be repressed by the army after the 1973 coup d'état. If the proletarians were unable to oppose the coup d'état, contrary to what was claimed by the leftist press which spoke of "armed resistance", it was because they had been disarmed materially and ideologically by Allende's government. The latter had repeatedly forced the workers to return their weapons. He had himself initiated the transition to a military government, appointing a general as Minister of the Interior. Above all, by placing themselves under the protection of the democratic State, incapable by its nature of avoiding totalitarianism (since the State is first of all for the State (democratic or dictatorial (before being for democracy or dictatorship), the proletarians condemned themselves from the beginning that they could not resist a right-wing coup. An important agreement between Unidad Popular and the Christian Democrats stated:

"We want the Carabineros and the armed forces to continue to be a guarantee of our democratic order, which implies respect for the organizational and hierarchical structures of the army and the police" 19.

Yet, it was the third moment of the defeat that was the most ignoble. We must give the international far left the medal it deserves. After having supported the capitalist state with the intention of pushing it further forward, the left and the leftists played prophets: "We warned you, the state is the repressive force of capital." The same people who six months earlier underlined the progress of the radical elements in the army or the penetration of the revolutionaries into all political and social life, later repeated that the army had remained "the bourgeois army", and that they had well said...

Evidently, trying first of all to justify their inextricable failure, they used the emotion and shock caused by the coup to undermine the attempt of some Chilean proletariat (or other countries) to draw the lessons of the events. Instead of showing what Unidad Popular had done, and could not have failed to do, they resumed the same policy, bending it only "to the left". The photo of Allende holding an automatic weapon during the coup became the symbol of left-wing democracy finally resolved to effectively fight against fascism. The ballot paper is fine, but it is not enough: rifles are also needed: this is the leftist lesson of Chile. Allende's death itself, physical proof, if any were needed, of the failure of democracy, is disguised as proof of his will of struggle.

"If then, in practice, their interests turn out to be uninteresting and their strength impotence, the fault lies either with these wretched sophists who divide the indivisible people into different enemy camps; or with the army, too brutalized and too blinded to understand that the pure aims of democracy are one's own good [...]. In any case, the democrat always emerges without blemish from the most serious defeat, just as he entered it without fault [...]." 20

As for questioning the nature of Unidad Popular, on the content of this famous struggle (for the vote yesterday, for the vote + the rifle, it would seem, today), in short, on what capitalism and communism are, on the State, this is another bargain, a luxury that cannot be afforded when "fascism attacks". One might also wonder why the much vaunted industrial "cords" have hardly moved. But it's rally time: defeat unites the anti-fascists even more firmly than victory. Conversely, faced with the Portuguese situation, any criticism will be avoided, under the pretext of not doing anything that could hinder the "movement". And one of the first declarations of the Portuguese Trotskyists after April 25, 1974, will be to denounce the "ultra-leftists" unwilling to participate in the game of democracy.

In a word, the international far left has united to prevent us from grasping the meaning of the Chilean events, to snatch the communist perspective even further from the proletarians, thus facilitating the return of Chilean democracy on the day when capital will need it again.

PORTUGAL

Although it remains susceptible to future developments, the Portuguese case is an insoluble enigma only for those (most) who ignore what a revolution is. Even sincere but confused revolutionaries remain perplexed by the collapse of a movement that had seemed so strong to them a few months earlier. This misunderstanding is caused by a lack of clarity. Portugal illustrates what the proletariat is capable of, demonstrating once again that capital is obliged to take it into account. Proletarian action is not the engine of history, but it constitutes the keystone of the evolution of all modern capitalist countries on a political and social level. However, this irruption onto the historical scene does not automatically coincide with revolutionary progress. To theoretically confuse the two things means to take the revolution for its opposite. To speak of a Portuguese revolution is to pass off as a revolution a reorganization of capital. As long as the proletariat remains within capitalist economic and political limits, not only does its elementary movements fail to fundamentally change society, but even the reforms it has acquired (political freedoms and economic demands) are doomed to an ephemeral existence. What capital grants to a workers' push, in its relapse it can take back totally or in part: every movement is condemned if it limits itself to pressure on capitalism. As long as the proletarians act like this, they are only banging their fists on the table.

The Portuguese dictatorship had ceased to be the appropriate form for the development of national capital, as demonstrated by its inability to resolve the colonial question. Far from enriching the metropolis, its colonies unbalanced it. Fortunately, to overthrow "fascism", there was... the army. The only organized force in the country, it was the only one capable of enacting this change: as for carrying it out successfully, that was another question. As usual, blinded by their function and their claim to power within the framework of capital, the left and the far left diagnosed a profound upheaval in the army. After seeing the officers only as colonialist torturers, the leftists suddenly discovered a popular army. With the help of sociology, the "popular", therefore probably socialist, origins and aspirations of the military were demonstrated. It would have been sufficient to cultivate their good intentions only requiring (it seemed) the clarification on the part of the "Marxists". From the Socialist Party to the most extreme leftists, everyone united to mask this simple fact: the capitalist state had not disappeared and the army remained its essential tool.

Since the machinery of the state was opened to worker militants, it was believed that the state was changing its function. Because he used populist language, the army was thought to be on the side of the workers. Since relative freedom of expression reigned, it was believed that "workers' democracy" (the foundation of "socialism", as everyone knows) was on the right track. There were certainly a series of demonstrations of strength in which the State revealed itself as it had remained. The left and leftism drew the conclusion that even stronger pressure should be exerted on the state but above all not to attack it, for fear of playing into the hands of the "right". They carried out exactly the program of the right, adding to it what the right is generally incapable of: the adhesion of the masses. The opening of the state to "left-wing" influences did not mean its weakening, but rather its strengthening . It put popular ideology and working-class enthusiasm at the service of building a Portuguese national capitalism.

The left-army alliance was precarious. The left brought the masses, the army brought stability with the omnipresent threat of weapons. A firm control of the masses by the communist and socialist parties would have been necessary. To this end, the latter would have had to make economic concessions that were dangerous to the vitality of a weak capitalism. Hence the contradiction and subsequent political rearrangements. The "workers'" organizations are capable of dominating the workers, not of restoring the profitability it lacks to capital. It was therefore necessary to resolve the contradiction and re-establish discipline. The alleged revolution would have served to weaken the most resolute, to discourage the others, and to isolate, or even repress, the revolutionaries. By then intervening brutally, the State demonstrated that it had never disappeared. Those who wanted (or said they wanted) to conquer him from within, did nothing but support him at a critical moment. A revolutionary movement is not impossible in Portugal, but it depends on a broader context, and, in any case, it will only be possible on different bases from those of the democratic capitalist movement of April 1974.

The workers' struggle, even "vindictive", contributes to putting capital in difficulty, and constitutes the necessary experience in which the proletariat is formed in view of the revolution. Prepare the future: but this preparation can play both ways, it is not automatic, it can undermine as well as strengthen the communist movement. In these conditions, insisting on the "autonomy" of workers' actions is not sufficient21. Autonomy is no more revolutionary a principle than "dirigisme" on the part of a minority. The revolution does not demand democracy any more than dictatorship.

It is only by taking certain measures that the proletarians can maintain control of the struggle. If they limit themselves to reformist action, it must eventually escape them and be taken over by a specialized, trade union- type body , whether it is called a trade union or a "base committee". Autonomy is not in itself a revolutionary virtue. It proves nothing in itself. Every form of organization depends on the content of what it is designed for. The emphasis cannot be placed on the self-activity of the workers, but on the communist perspective, the realization of which alone effectively allows workers' action not to fall under the direction of traditional parties and trade unions. The content of the action is the determining criterion: the revolution is not a question of "majority" (see "La Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes" and "Political and social revolution"). Privileging worker autonomy leads to an impasse.

Workerism is sometimes a healthy reaction, but it turns out to be catastrophic when it is fixed at this stage and theorized. From that moment on, the decisive tasks of the revolution eluded him. In the name of "worker democracy", the proletarians are locked into the enterprise and the problems of production (without seeing the revolution as the destruction of the enterprise as such). The question of the state is obscured. At most, "revolutionary syndicalism" is reinvented.

SPAIN: WAR OR REVOLUTION?

Everywhere democracy capitulates to dictatorship. Or rather, he opens his arms to her. And Spain? Far from constituting the happy exception, Spain represents the extreme case of armed clash between democracy and fascism without the struggle changing in nature : it always saw two opposing forms of capital development, two political forms of the capitalist state, two state structures that they disputed the legitimacy of the legal and normal capitalist state in a country. On the other hand, there was violent conflict only because the workers rose up against fascism. The complexity of the Spanish war derives from this double aspect, of a civil war (proletariat-capital) that transforms into a capitalist war (with the support of rival state structures by the proletarians in both camps).

After having given every facility to the "rebels" to prepare, the Republic was about to negotiate with them and/or step aside, when the proletarians rose up against the fascist coup, preventing its success in half the country. The Spanish war would not have started without this authentic proletarian insurrection (it was much more than a riot). But this fact alone is not sufficient to characterize the entire Spanish war and subsequent events. It only defines the first moment of the struggle, which was effectively a proletarian uprising. Having defeated the fascists in a large number of cities, the workers had power in their hands. Such was the situation immediately after their insurrection. But what did they do with this power? Did they return it to the republican state, or did they use it to go further in a communist sense? They relied on the legal government, therefore on the existing state, the capitalist state. Every subsequent action of theirs was done under the direction of this State. Here's the central point. From that moment on, every movement of the Spanish proletariat, in the armed struggle against Franco and in the economic-social transformations, placing itself within the framework of the capitalist state, could only be of a globally capitalist nature. It is true that attempts to overcome took place on the social level (we will talk about this later): but they always remained mortgaged by the maintenance of the capitalist state. The destruction of the state is the necessary (but not sufficient) condition of the communist revolution. In Spain, real power was exercised by the State and not by organizations, unions, communities, committees, etc. Proof of this is the fact that the powerful CNT had to give in to the Spanish Communist Party (very weak before July '36). This can be confirmed by the simple fact that the State knew how to make brutal use of its power when it needed it (May '37). No revolution, without destruction of the state. This Marxist "evidence", forgotten by 99% of Marxists and rightly remembered by "Bilan", emerges once again from the Spanish tragedy.

"It is one of the peculiarities of revolutions that just as the people seem about to take a great start and to open a new era, they suffer themselves to be ruled by the delusions of the past and surrender all the power and influence they have so dearly won into the hands of men who represent, or are supposed to represent, the popular movement of a by-gone epoch." (22)

The armed workers "columns" of the second half of 1936 cannot be opposed to their subsequent militarization and their reduction to the rank of organs of the bourgeois army. A considerable difference separates these two phases but not in the sense that a revolutionary phase would be followed by another non-revolutionary one. There was first a phase of suffocation of the revolutionary upheaval, during which the workers retained a certain autonomy, enthusiasm, and even a communist behavior brilliantly described by Orwell. Then, this revolutionary phase on the surface, but which deep down constituted the gestation of a classic anti-proletarian war, naturally gave way to what it had prepared.

The columns left from Barcelona to defeat fascism in other cities, and first and foremost in Zaragoza. Assuming that they attempted to bring the revolution outside the republican areas , it would have been necessary to revolutionize the republican areas themselves first, or at the same time 23 . Durruti knew that the state had not been destroyed, but he did not take this into account. Along the way, his column, made up of 70% anarchists, pushed for collectivization. The militiamen helped the farmers and introduced them to revolutionary ideas. But "we have only one goal: to overthrow the fascists". Durruti had a nice saying: "these militias will never defend the bourgeoisie", they didn't attack it , not anymore. A fortnight before his death (21 November 1936), Durruti declared:

"One thought, one goal [...]: annihilate fascism [...]. May no one today think anymore about salary increases and reductions in working hours [...] sacrifice, work as much as necessary [...] we need to form a block of granite. The time has come to invite the trade unions and political organizations to put an end to it once and for all. From behind, we need to know how to administer [...]. Let's not provoke, with our incompetence , after this war, another civil war between us. In the face of fascist tyranny, we must oppose only one force; there must be only one organisation, with a single discipline" (24).

Not only does the will to fight never serve as a substitute for a revolutionary program, but activism easily integrates into the folds of capitalism (terrorism offers further proof of this 25 ). The charm of the "armed struggle" quickly turns against the proletarians, since they direct their blows exclusively against a political form and not against the State.

Under different conditions, the military evolution of the anti-fascist camp (insurrection, then militias, finally regular army) resembles that of the guerrilla war against Napoleon described by Marx 26 :

"If we compare the three periods of the guerrilla war with the political history of Spain, we see that they correspond to the three degrees to which the counter-revolutionary government had gradually led the spirit of the people. At the beginning, the entire population rose up, then guerrilla bands waged a war of snipers, whose reserves were made up of entire provinces; finally there were formations without cohesion, always on the verge of turning into bands of outlaws or falling to the level of regular regiments".

The conditions are not comparable, but in 1936 as in 1808, military evolution cannot be explained only, or even primarily, through "technical" considerations specific to the military art: it derives from the relationship between political and social forces and its modification in an anti-revolutionary sense. We note that the "columns" of 1936 did not even reach a "war of snipers" and marked time in front of Zaragoza. The compromises evoked by Durruti, the need for unity at all costs, could only give victory first to the republican state (over the proletariat), then to Franco (over the republican state).

There was the beginning of a revolution in Spain, which ran aground when the proletarians relied on the existing state. It matters little what their intentions are. Even if the majority of the proletarians who agreed to fight against Franco under the direction of the State were convinced that they retained real power despite all, and that they agreed with the State only for convenience, the determining factor remains their actions and not their beliefs. After organizing themselves to defeat the coup, starting an autonomous military structure (the militias), the workers agreed to place these militias under the direction of a coalition of "workers' organizations" (for the most part, openly counter-revolutionary), who accepted the authority of the legal state. it is certain that at least a part of these proletarians believed they were maintaining real power (which they had actually conquered, albeit for a short time), leaving the official State only a façade power. This was their mistake, for which they paid dearly.

With the exception of currents of non-revolutionary inspiration, the opponents of the "Bilan" theses on Spain admitted what we say here, but nevertheless affirmed that the Spanish situation remained "open" and could evolve. It was therefore necessary (at least until May 1937) to support the autonomous movement of the Spanish proletarians, even if it adopted organizational forms that were completely inadequate to its true nature. A movement was on the move, we needed to contribute to its maturation. On the other hand, "Bilan" replied that an autonomous movement of the proletariat did not exist, that is, it no longer existed , since it had returned to the state framework, a framework which would not take long to transform itself into a burden suffocating any radical ambition. This was seen in mid-May '37: but the "bloody days of Barcelona" only revealed the reality as it had been since July '36: effective power had passed from the hands of the workers to the capitalist state. We add, for those who assimilate fascism and bourgeois dictatorship, that the republican government then made use of... "fascist methods" against the workers. Of course, the number of victims was much lower than that of Franco's repression: this has to do precisely with the difference in function between the two repression, democratic and fascist (see "Anti-fascism, the worst product of fascism"). Simple division of labor: the target of the republican government was much smaller (uncontrolled elements, poum, cinetic left).

OCTOBER 1917 AND JULY 1936

It is clear that a revolution does not happen in a single day. it is always a multifaceted and confused movement. The whole problem lies in the capacity of the revolutionary movement to act in an increasingly clear sense and to move towards the irreversible. The often ill-placed comparison between Russia and Spain illustrates this well. Between February and October 1917, the soviets were a parallel power to the state. For a long time they supported the legal state, and in this sense they did not act as revolutionaries. You could say they were counter-revolutionaries then. It is not a question of attaching a label to them, but of understanding that they were the field of a long and bitter struggle between the revolutionary current (represented in particular, but not only, by the Bolsheviks) and the various conciliators. It was only at the end of this struggle that the Soviets rose up against the State 27 . In February 1917 it would have been absurd for a communist to say: "these soviets do not act as revolutionaries, I denounce them and fight them". Because the soviets were not stabilized then . The conflict that animated them for months was not a struggle of ideas, but the reflection of an antagonism of real interests.

"It will be the interests (and not the principles) that will set the revolution in motion. It is precisely only starting from the interests that the principles can develop: this means that the revolution will not only be political, but social." 28

The Russian workers and peasants wanted peace, land and democratic reforms that the government did not provide. This antagonism explains the growing hostility, then the clash that saw them pitted against each other. The previous class struggles had allowed the release of a revolutionary minority that knew more or less what it wanted (see the hesitations of the Bolshevik leadership after February), and which ended up organizing itself in this sense, taking up the demands of the masses to raise them against the government. In April 1917, Lenin said that:

"If we talk about civil war before people have understood the need for it, we are leaning towards Blanquism [...]. The cannons and rifles are in the hands of the soldiers, and not of the capitalists: the latter prevail now not with violence but with deception, and one cannot cry violence, it would be absurd. Let us renounce this slogan for the moment, but only for the moment" 29 . Starting from the overturning of the majority in the Soviets (in September), Lenin called for the seizure of power by arms (on the further evolution of Russia, see "La Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes" and "Political and Social Revolution").

Nothing like this in Spain. Despite their frequency and violence, the clashes that occurred after the First World War did not allow for class delimitation among the proletarians. Forced into violent struggle by the repression of the demands movements, the proletarians did not stop fighting, but they were unable to direct and concentrate their blows against the enemy. In this sense there was no revolutionary "party" in Spain. Not because a minority of "revolutionaries" had failed to organize themselves (this would mean taking things by the tail and reversing the problem - but because the struggles, despite their violence, had not clearly brought out a class opposition between the proletariat and capital. Talking about a "party" only makes sense if it is conceived as an organization of the communist movement . This movement was at that time too weak, too dispersed (not geographically but in the extent to which it dispersed its blows); it did not attack the opponent to the heart; it did not free itself from the protection of the CNT, a globally reformist organization like every union is condemned to become, despite the presence of radical militants; in short it did not organize itself in a communist way because it did not act in a communist way. The Spanish case demonstrates that the intensity of the class struggle (indisputable in Spain (does not automatically inspire communist action, and therefore the revolutionary party that animates it. The Spanish proletarians never hesitated to get killed (even at a pure loss), but without exceeding the threshold that separated them from an attack against capital (the State, the mercantile economic system). They took up arms, took immediate initiatives (libertarian municipalities before '36, collectivisations after) but did not go further. Very soon, they handed over the leadership of the militias to the Central Committee of the Militias. This body, nor any other of those that arose in Spain, cannot be compared to the Russian soviets. The "ambiguity of the Central Committee of the Militias [...] at once an important appendage of the Generalitat [Catalan provincial government] and a sort of coordinating committee of the General Staff of the anti-fascist organisations" 30 , determined its integration into the State, because the Central Committee was prey to organizations that disputed state (capitalist) power.

In Russia, there was a struggle between an organized radical minority capable of formulating the revolutionary perspective, and the Soviet majority. In Spain, the radical elements, whatever they might think, accepted the majoritarian orientation (Durruti left to fight against Franco, leaving the State intact behind him ), when they contested the State, they did so without trying to destroy the "workers" organizations that they had "betrayed" them (CNT and POUM included). The essential difference, why there was no "Spanish October", was the absence in Spain of an authentic contradiction of interests between the proletarians and the State. "Objectively", the proletariat and capital are opposed, but this opposition concerns the sphere of principles, which do not coincide with reality. In its actual social movement, the Spanish proletariat never managed to face capital and the State en bloc. In Spain there were no burning demands (i.e. felt as such) that forced the workers to attack the State to satisfy them (as in Russia peace, land etc.). This situation of non-antagonism led to the absence of the "party", which in turn weighed heavily on events, preventing the antagonism from maturing and then exploding. Compared to the Russian instability between February and October, Spain presented itself as a situation in the process of normalizing from the beginning of August '36. If after February '17 the army of the Russian state disintegrated, after July '36 that of the Spanish state recomposed itself, albeit under a new, "popular" form.

THE "COMMUNE" OF 1871

One comparison (among others) is necessary and implies a criticism of the point of view of traditional Marxism, which in this case is the same as Marx's. After the Commune, Marx drew the famous lesson: "the working class cannot be satisfied simply with taking the ready-made state machine into its own hands and making it work for its own ends" 31 . Marx poorly established the distinction between the insurrectional movement that began on March 18, 1871 and its further transformation, sealed by the election of the "Commune" on the 26th of the same month. The formula "City of Paris" covers both and masks the evolution of the situation. The initial movement was certainly revolutionary, despite its confusion, and was the continuation of the social struggles under the Second Empire. Then, however, it agreed to give itself a capitalist political framework and social content . In fact, the elected Commune only changed the external forms of bourgeois democracy. If the bureaucracy and the standing army had become characteristic features of the capitalist state, they did not constitute its essence. Marx observed that:

"The Commune made a reality of this watchword of all bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, by destroying the two major sources of expenditure: the standing army, bureaucracy and officialism" 32 .

The elected Commune was largely dominated, as we know, by bourgeois republicans. The communists, few in number and hesitant, who were previously obliged to express themselves in the republican press, so weak was their organization, did not weigh much in the life of the elected Commune. As for his program (it is the decisive criterion (we know that it only prefigured that of the Third Republic. Beyond all the Machiavellianism of the bourgeois, the war in Paris against Versailles (conducted very badly, and it is no coincidence) served to evacuate the latent revolutionary content, and to channel the initial movement into a purely military activity. It is curious to note how Marx defined the governmental form of the Commune first of all by its functioning, and not by what it actually did . It was "the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the true national capitalist government , but it was not at all "a workers' government" 33 .

We cannot delve into here why Marx adopted such a contradictory position (at least publicly, for the AIT, since in private he was more critical 34 ). In any case, the mechanism of the collapse of the revolutionary movement resembles 1936. As in 1871, the Spanish Republic had the Spanish and foreign radical elements killed (naturally the most inclined to destroy fascism), without seriously fighting itself, not using all the assets at his disposal. Without a classist analysis of this power (like that of 1871), these facts would appear to be "mistakes", even "betrayals", and yet never in their logic.

MEXICO

Another parallel is possible. In the Mexican bourgeois revolution, at a certain moment the majority of the organized workers' movement linked itself to the democratic and progressive state to push the bourgeoisie forward and ensure the satisfaction of their interests as wage earners in capital. The "red battalions" of 1915-'16 represented the military alliance between the trade union movement and the State then directed by Venustiano Carranza. Founded in 1912, the Casa del Obrero Mundial decided to "suspend the professional syndicalist organization" and to fight against "the bourgeoisie and its immediate allies, professional militarism and the clergy", alongside the republican state 35 . Part of the workers' movement refused and violently confronted the state-backed Casa del Obrero Mundial . The latter "attempted to unionize all the working sectors of the constitutionalist areas with the support of the army". The "red battalions" were used against other ("reactionary") political forces that aspired to the leadership of the capitalist state, and at the same time against rebellious peasants and radical workers.

It is curious to note that these battalions were organized according to professional categories (printers, railway workers, etc.). In the Spanish war, some militias also bore the name of their respective professional categories. Similarly, in 1832, the Lyon insurrection gathered textile workers into groups, according to the hierarchy of work: workers gathered in departments and commanded by the foreman. These events bring about the armed uprising of wage earners as such , who defend the existing work system against the "usurpations" (Marx) of capital. A difference in nature separates the revolt of 1832, directed against the State, from the Mexican and Spanish examples, in which organized workers supported the State: it would be absurd to characterize 1832 as a "counter-revolution". But what is at stake here is the understanding of a workers' struggle that persists on the basis of the organization of work, and as such. Such a struggle is doomed to failure, either by integrating into the State, or under its repression. The communist movement can only win if the proletarians overcome the simple uprising (even armed) which does not affect the wage system. Salaried workers cannot lead the armed struggle unless they abolish themselves as salaried workers (see ¤ "Reform and revolution").

IMPERIALIST WAR

For there to be a revolution, there must be at least the beginning of an attack against the roots of society: the State and the economic organization. This is what happened in Russia starting from February 1917, and it accelerated little by little (we will see later why this revolution then led to defeat). We cannot speak of such a beginning in Spain, where the proletarians bowed before the State. From then on, everything they continued to do (military struggle against Franco, social transformations) was under the sign of capital. The best evidence of this lies in the rapid transformation of these activities, which left-wing anti-fascists are unable to explain. The military struggle very soon resorted to bourgeois state methods, accepted by the extreme left in the name of effectiveness (and which almost always proved ineffective). The democratic state cannot fight fascism with weapons any more than it can prevent it from coming to power peacefully. It was perfectly normal for a bourgeois republican state to oppose the use of methods of social struggle to weaken the enemy, and to rely on a traditional frontal war, in which it had no chance against a modern army, better equipped and trained for this type. of combat. As for the socializations and collectivizations, they also lacked communist strength, in particular because the failure to destroy the bourgeois state prevented them from organizing an anti-mercantile economy at the level of the whole society, and isolated them in a series of precarious communities juxtaposed without overall action. The State soon took it upon itself to show them who was in charge. There was, therefore, neither revolution nor revolutionary trigger in Spain starting from August 1936. On the contrary, the movement towards revolution was increasingly blocked and its rebirth unlikely. It is significant that, in May '37, the proletarians still had the strength to rise up in arms against the State (this time against the democratic one), but not to take the fight to the breaking point. After having given in to the legal state in 1936, they failed in its coup of force in May '37, but they gave in to the "representative" organizations which invited them to cease armed resistance. They faced the State, they did not destroy it. They accepted the moderation advice of the POUM and the CNT: not even the radical group Los Amigos de Durruti called to destroy these counter-revolutionary organizations.

In Spain, we can talk about war, not revolution. This war had as its primary aim the solution of a capitalist problem: to establish a legitimate state in Spain that would better develop national capital while integrating the proletariat. Seen from this angle, the analyzes on the sociological composition of the two armies have a very relative value, like those that explain the "proletarian" nature of a party with the percentage of workers among its members. These facts are real, and have a certain importance, but they are secondary in relation to the social function of what it is about understanding. A party with a workers' composition that supports capital is counter-revolutionary. The Spanish Republican Army certainly had a large number of workers, but in fighting for capitalist objectives, it was as little revolutionary as Franco's.

The formula of "imperialist war" regarding this conflict may shock those who assimilate imperialism and the struggle for directly economic domination. The profound logic of imperialist wars, from that of '14-'18 to today's conflicts, is to resolve the economic and social contradictions of capital, to eliminate the potential tendency towards the communist movement. It matters little that in Spain these were not directly markets to be shared. The war served to polarize the proletarians of the entire world, of fascist and democratic countries, around the fascism-anti-fascism opposition, and thus prepared the Sacred Union of the Second World War. Furthermore, strategic and economic reasons were not absent: for the present sides, whose contours were still poorly drawn, it was also a question of gaining allies or benevolent neutralities, and of testing the solidity of the alliances. It is completely normal that Spain did not participate in the world conflict. She no longer needed it, having solved her social problem through the double annihilation (democratic and fascist) of the proletarians in the Spanish war; and its economic problem through the victory of conservative capitalist forces, which limited the development of productive forces in order to avoid social explosion. Starting from the 1960s, against all ideology, anti-capitalist and "feudal" fascism would develop the Spanish economy, despite everything. The war of 36-39 carried out the same function for Spain as that of 39-45 for the rest of the world, but in another way, with this important difference (which does not modify either the nature or the function of the conflict): it had as a starting point a revolutionary pressure sufficient to make fascism retreat and force democracy to take up arms against it, but insufficient to destroy both. Not to overthrow one together with the other meant running towards defeat, since both were potentially the legitimate capitalist state. Whatever the winner, the proletarians could only suffer the blows always reserved for them by the capitalist state. The anti-fascist measures were later used against the radicals (for example, in '68, the leftist groups were dissolved with a decree from the time of the Popular Front).

CENTRISM

In the debate on Spain, "Bilan" was faced with two types of opponents. Some were inside the revolutionary movement, despite various defects, and on certain points they were more correct than "Bilan". The others belonged to what can be called centrism . This term needs to be specified. In the 1930s, the Italian Left, as well as Trotsky, designated the communist parties with the term "centrism", according to the idea that Stalin represented a conciliatory line between the left (Trotsky) and the right (Bukharin) both in internal politics and in foreign policy. This idea participated in the Trotskyist refusal (long shared by Bordiga 36 ) to pronounce on the capitalist nature of Russia, as well as on its orientation: the Stalinist line would have been a compromise between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in Russia, and between world capital and the defense of the "conquests of October" on the international level. The result was an inability to understand the function of the communist parties, judged above all to be "opportunist".

In fact, the term "centrism" was in frequent use among revolutionaries after 1914, to designate the Zimmerwaldian center (which, like the Spartakusbund for example , wanted to fight against the war but rejected revolutionary defeatism), and later those who separated from the Second International without reaching communism. For the German Left, the majority of the Communist International was centrist, since it recommended parliamentarism, trade unionism, "mass" parties, etc. The Communist Party of Italy, then the Italian Left, which remained much longer in the Communist International, had a different position, at least until Stalin's victory in the Russian Communist Party (1926).

Starting from the end of the 1920s, a series of splits shook the socialist and Stalinist parties. They were operated from a tactical point of view (primarily the inability of the socialist and communist parties to resist fascism), without a global vision, as if the line was wrong, while it was the organization itself that was anti-revolutionary. Even when the latter followed a suicidal policy (as in Germany), it was not an aberration. The groups or parties that arose from these splits participated in the theoretical and political horizon of the time. Currently, "centrism" would be represented by all forms of leftism , that is, the fixation of revolts and confused movements on partial points, harmless to capital. Centrist groups often take charge of reformist demands neglected or fought by official trade union and political organizations.

Centrism is what emerges from the integrated "workers' movement" without evolving towards revolutionary positions, remaining halfway, contributing to blocking the proletarians on dead-end roads, trying to put pressure on the workers' movement considered, despite everything, as the true organization of the "class". To treat the communist parties as centrists and traitors, in the manner of "Bilan", is to share such an illusion. Strictly speaking, Spanish "centrism" was made up of the POUM and the left of the CNT.

THE POUM

For the immense majority of the left and far left groups of the time, the bourgeois revolution remained to be done in Spain 37 . All supporters of this thesis agreed on the weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie. According to them, the bourgeois revolution would therefore face defeat unless it showed more audacity and was more "popular" than in modern capitalist countries. But they then divided on the more or less radical scope of this overcoming. There is only one remedy, however, to get there: "unity". In an article in "Masses", A. Patri cited Catalonia as an example, where the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc and the Socialist Party had allied themselves: "Before a general draws his broadsword again, the workers' movement must have established in Spain. is the only possibility of salvation" 38 .

Trotsky believed in the need for a democratic phase, the realization of which by the working class would force it to go further, up to the socialist revolution. To this scheme of "permanent revolution", which provides for an indissoluble link between the two phases, the POUM opposed the thesis of a bourgeois democratic stage distinct from the subsequent one, in which the proletariat would put "pressure" on the bourgeois revolution without taking on its tasks . In 1931, the POUM defined the next Spanish revolution as a new 1789: "The internal market will expand in fabulous proportions and industry will emerge from its traditional rickets" 39 . There was uncertainty within the POUM: Maurin was for a bourgeois-type government structure, Nin for new power structures ("revolutionary juntas"). This issue was linked to other disagreements in the POUM. Maurin was close to the separatism of several provinces, while Nin recommended a solution that linked national unity and regional autonomy. The former BOC, which was directed by Maurin and gave the POUM the bulk of the militants, was more rooted in the real situation, and suffered even more from the democratic-reformist pressures, than the small group gathered around Nin, coming from Trotskyism. Furthermore, the Maurin-Nin division did not have much practical effect during the war. Maurin was a prisoner of the nationalists, and left for dead. Nin gave the POUM a left-wing phraseology, applying a right-wing address.

By mid-1936, the political spectrum of the Spanish left differed from that of other countries. The traditional workers' movement was made up first of all of the CNT and, to a lesser extent, of the Spanish Workers' Party and its trade union center UGT. The Communist Party was very weak in relation to the "centrism" represented by the POUM (but as we have seen, it was the Communist Party that was described as "centrist" by "Bilan"). The PCEsi would only develop once it came to power, thanks to state control and Russian support. Until 1934-'35, the POUM was for the "united front", while the PCE defended the "sectarian" line known as "class against class". Generalizing the experience of Asturias and the Workers' Alliance of '34, the POUM initially rejected the Popular Front, proposing the Workers' Alliance. He rejected on an electoral level what he basically accepted, incapable of seeing that the problem was first of all in the nature of the "workers' organisations", whether they came together in a "struggle" front or in a parliamentary coalition.

After July '36, faced with the Communist Party which said: "above all, no socialism, we only defend democracy", the POUM maintained: "we fight for democracy and socialism". He never sought to give himself the means, nor did he indicate that the condition of a struggle for socialism would be a definitive break with capital. The communist and socialist parties regimented the masses, the POUM served to justify the war from a "revolutionary" point of view. At the end of '36 he wanted "a government of workers and peasants [...] that does not shed blood for a democratic republic, but for a society freed from all capitalist exploitation" 40 . He was therefore led to clash with the Spanish state as well as with the USSR, without ever attacking them head-on: a suicidal policy. The repression suffered does not make it a revolutionary group.

The reforms supported by the POUM (such as that of Justice, with the Nin ministry) had to be abandoned, having fulfilled their role, which consisted of keeping the masses occupied to distract them from the fight against the State. The agricultural and industrial collectivizations expressed an immense revolutionary drive. But when these pressures do not overcome capitalist political (the State) and social (merchant economy) limits, they are condemned. In order to contribute to the evolution of these forms beyond these limits, revolutionary criticism becomes more incisive, showing how far capital can go to reform itself, giving in to everything in order to safeguard the essential. The POUM did the opposite. He had to recognize that the State existed as before, including its key functions: "The POUM is absolutely unable to influence the police" 41 . This does not prevent him from pushing towards economic-social transformations, then deprived of any foundation.

The POUM was unable to see a victory for the State in May '37, which attacked and made the workers who still believed in it surrender (after lively resistance) , even when it opposed them with weapons. The POUM and the CNT, just as they had supported the State at the end of July '36, equally sought a compromise with him in May '37, and called (successfully) the workers to lay down their arms 42 . The POUM and the CNT accepted the arrival in Barcelona of 5,000 gendarmes from Valencia. The centrist character of the POUM is demonstrated by the fact that it aimed first of all to convince a "worker" but de facto non-revolutionary organization (the CNT) to act in a revolutionary manner, rather than to conduct revolutionary activity itself. His contradiction was that he wanted the conquest of power while supporting the existing state power. The State realized that it had free hands, and the liquidation began.

"July 19 [1936] was a military victory, but a political defeat. Despite what was done afterwards, this mistake was irreparable. Starting in September, the forces of "law and order", who had recovered, counterattacked. In reality the May days [1937] were not a revolutionary offensive, but a defensive battle doomed to defeat." 43

The subsequent repression did not open the eyes of the leaders of the POUM: with their backs against the wall, faced with slander, torture and trials, they always denounced the parties (socialist and Stalinist), never the State . Only a minority rose bitterly against the leadership. For example, a cell in Barcelona concluded, with evidence in hand, that the official line of the party was equivalent to support for the existing state 44 . Thus, on 21 July 1937, the POUM called for the "formation of a government with the participation of all the components of the Popular Front". This cell commented: "a government of the same people we accuse of being responsible for the military insurrection." Further on:

"The only point [of the party's theses] which, indirectly, concerns the problem of power is n. 8: "revision of the Constitution of Catalonia in a progressive sense". Without a doubt, it is thanks to this revision that the workers they will then reach the dictatorship of the proletariat which comrade Nin will tell us about."

But this minority never succeeded (to our knowledge) in defining another perspective or even in provoking a positive split.

ANARCHISM AND ITS DEFENDERS

The Spanish war does not demonstrate the failure of "anarchism" any more than August 4, 1914 demonstrates that of "Marxism" (in 1914 well-known anarchists, including Kropotkin, joined the Sacred Union 45 ). What is remarkable is not the integration of the CNT into the State. This fact confirms the analysis of the trade unions made by the German Left after 1914. Whatever its original ideology, every permanent body for the defense of wage earners is transformed into a conciliation body and integration 46. Even if repressed, and animated by numerous radical militants, it is condemned to escape them, to become, as an institution, an instrument of capital. Participation in the 1936 government was no more novel than it had been the capitulation of the socialist parties in 1914. In 1934, Maurin already observed that anarchists did not engage in politics directly, but "through a third party" 47 .

What is interesting is the practical and ideological mechanism by which a large number of anarchists, although sincere revolutionaries, but precisely because they were anarchists, agreed to capitulate to state power, and then went to war against Franco under the direction of one Capitalist state. From the first days, the CNT and the FAI spoke of a military struggle against the fascists, not of a social revolution underway, or to be done. But what seems paradoxical is totally logical. What must be criticized in anarchism is not its obstinate hostility towards the state, but its negligence when faced with the problem of state power. Although it gives the impression of being the enemy par excellence of the State, anarchism is characterized, in fact, by the inability to define a revolutionary attitude against the State. Whether you overestimate him, seeing "authority" as opponent no. 1 of the revolution, whether he neglects it, believing that the revolution can be made without the destruction of the State, or that this destruction occurs all by itself. Marx said in 1871 that the revolution must destroy the State, and anarchism believes it goes further by saying that it must be destroyed immediately. This is how the Marxism-anarchism distinction is mostly summed up: as Lenin said, they would agree on the objective but disagree on the means.

The authentic demarcation lies in the understanding of the relationship between state and society. Due to the fact that it is incapable of positing this relationship, anarchism is more confused than false, oscillating between the overestimation of the state danger and its underestimation (as in the case of the Spanish war. The anarchist confusion is demonstrated by the fact that a current so hostile to the State agreed to tolerate it, then even to support it. We are certainly not talking here about the leaders, but about the radical elements. We have seen Durruti's position, and we will then see that of Berneri. No anarchist managed to understand what had happened in Spain and to draw the lessons from it: here is the authentic failure. On the one hand, anarchism attributes too much importance to the State, on the other it does not see its effective role, that of guarantor (but not creator ) of the capitalist relationship The struggle against the State is neither the aim nor the main aspect of the revolution, but rather one of its conditions, necessary but not sufficient. The State, in fact, is neither the engine nor the essential gear of capital, but the instrument of its unified social force. The real problem therefore does not lie in the (normal) behavior of the CNT, but in the practical failure of a revolutionary current.

Before 1936, the CNT oscillated between premature insurrection, of which Abel Paz provides a lyrical description in his book on Durruti, and habitual union reformism. Faced with the often desperate revolutionary acts of its members, it applied the principle: "I am their leader, so I must follow them". But he did not hesitate, nevertheless, to abandon them at the opportunity. In 1936, neither able nor willing to "make the revolution", but eager to play a role in the system of (bourgeois) political forces, the CNT supported a left-wing of the (capitalist) state. The bodies created under his wing (Central Committee of the Militias) aimed to push the State to the left or, perhaps, to replace it, but without destroying it, establishing itself as a parallel power. The essence of the State does not reside in specific institutional forms , but in its unifying function : it is the unity of the separate. Even when it seems weak, if it remains as a framework capable of bringing together the pieces of capitalist society, it still lives, in a certain way it hibernates. Then, if necessary, that is, starting from the weakening of the so-called parallel power, the State strengthens itself, refills itself with the specific forms temporarily abandoned. Portugal sets a new example.

Anti-fascism consists in supporting the existing State in its democratic form to prevent it from taking on a dictatorial one: we will therefore always align ourselves with the most moderate. The Spanish Republic multiplied concessions to appease the middle classes, but the more it went in this direction (going so far as to rival the nationalists themselves in nationalist fervor), the weaker it became. Likewise the Italian and German democrats could not fight the social bases of fascism, because this base was nothing other than capital. The CNT accepted everything in order to save anti-fascist unity, and honest anarchists did not fail to reproach them for it, from Berneri to Vernon Richards: but its collapse and its capitulation in the face of rigged trials, repression etc. descended from its original acceptance of an action possible under the command of the State. The FAI (which plays the role of "party" compared to the CNT, "mass organization" under its control) defines itself precisely:

"We couldn't fight against the government that was formed [after July '36] because every struggle and every opposition represented a weakening. Staying out of it meant putting yourself in a condition of inferiority" 48 .

After having supported the government without participating in it, the CNT entered it (in September in Catalonia, in November at central state level). Characteristically, she then justified herself exactly as the communist parties explained their transition to power after 1945. " When we were ministers... see everything we did!" And here is the enumeration of their achievements (which were the product of popular initiatives and not of their action, which consisted of slowing them down). But their supreme justification is summed up in the idea that the legal government did not have the power: the workers' movement would have retained "in fact, if not in law, revolutionary political power" 49 . A sign of the aforementioned confusion, anarchist ideology allows one to participate in capitalist power... since it does not have real power. Of the two, one: either he has it and the CNT puts itself at the service of the bourgeois state; or he doesn't have it so why respect him? To save appearances abroad, the CNT replies. The "political realism" of the CNT made it the guarantor of all compromises, even after the State and its Russian ally had shown their true colors by raging against the revolutionaries. At the crucial moment, like the POUM, the CNT ideologically disarmed the proletarians by masking the antagonism that opposed them to the State. He handed them over to repression by inviting them to stop fighting against an enemy determined to go all the way. Ready to do anything to survive, she allied herself with the UGT. For this reason he did not defend the POUM: "the libertarians had to defend themselves first of all" 50 . There was no other alternative, from the moment the slogan "First defeat Franco" was accepted.

"Since the CNT could not overthrow Negrin [socialist prime minister allied with the Communist Party] and the communists, and since it also agreed with them in continuing the war until victory, it had nothing left to do but participate in the government, at any cost." 51

The CNT would have continued to participate even in the republican ghost governments of the post-war period: they would no longer have been, first of all, anti-fascists, but "anti-Franco" 52 .

Abroad, the Spanish mirage works very well, and there is no shortage of praise for the CNT. A Belgian brochure equates, for example, 1931 with a political revolution and is surprised that it did not go further, and even attack the workers, while the unions wanted to "widen [its] economic reach." As for the situation after July '36: "Under the direction of the CNT, the FAI and the UGT, the workers are the absolute masters. There is no trace of regular government" (53). This disguise of facts is all the more striking in an otherwise honest text.

Prudhommeaux's position would appear almost like a job done to order. Coming from the communist Left, he had animated "L'Ouvrier Communiste", then "Spartacus" (not to be confused with René Lefeuvre's "Cahiers Spartacus", later), evolving from the German Left to anarchism. His panegyric of the CNT-FAI is, perhaps, his worst text: his naivety is too reminiscent of Stalinist Russia's descriptions of those whom Trotsky called "the friends of the USSR". Prudhommeaux immediately reduces the revolution to the military aspect: "The arming of the people is the first problem of every social struggle" 54 . Its workers' formalism is very notable, identical to that of the POUM, the Trotskyists, etc.: it is as if the State and the Central Committee of the Militias were under the direction of the workers through the intermediary of the "workers'" organizations. The defense of direct democracy can go hand in hand with a perfectly political conception of the representation of the masses by "their" organizations 55 .

"LA RÉVOLUTION PROLÉTARIENNE"

More complex, the position of "La Révolution Prolétarienne" derived from its syndicalist postulate as summarized by Jean Barrué in 1935: "We do not lightly sacrifice even imperfect syndicalism whose unity, soon achieved [in France in 1936], is cost a lot of effort" 56 . Documented, Nicolas Lazarévitch's articles on Spain provide the materials for a critique of anarchism, syndicalism and war that Lazarévitch himself could not carry out. Others, it is true, looked for all possible excuses for the CNT, without realizing the enormity of their positions, like Louzon who wrote in August '36: "The State, currently, is the CNT" 57 . "La Révolution Prolétarienne" is always surprised by the unrevolutionary acts of the CNT: yet there was nothing surprising in the fact that it did not make revolutionary use of an apparatus built for the reformist struggle (violent, if necessary).

Lazarévitch wanted to ensure reforms in the republican rear so that the front would hold : "at first sight, it might seem idle to examine the problems of the new social organization as long as the danger of seeing all attempts directed towards the new society crushed by the fascist boot. However, as the moral factor has a fundamental importance in civil war, it is important to know to what extent, behind the lines, the conquests of the proletariat exist [...]" 58 . The first sentence responded to the topic "War first." The second explained that it was about giving the workers good reasons to support the legal state. Lazarévitch knew that "The Spanish proletariat is fighting on two fronts" 59 , but without drawing the necessary lesson on the nature of the conflict and the only way out for the proletariat. He described the unfolding of a situation without clarifying the mechanism. Therefore his (exact) information served a specific purpose: to direct blame at the Stalinists, and more generally at the "political parties", even a little at the CNT, but never at anti-fascist politics.

Pacifist in principle, "La Révolution Prolétarienne" rejected any war against Hitler, which would have been "the most typically imperialist for one hundred and fifty years" 60 , but wanted the Spanish Republic to be helped (with weapons etc.). He denounced the duplicity of the French state, not the nature of the Spanish state. He also opened his columns to the republican ambassador in Paris 61 . For a radicalized fringe of the proletariat, of which groups like "La Révolution Prolétarienne" were an expression, Spain served as the beginning of justification for the (future) war against fascism. After having rejected the Sacred Union until then, even against Nazi Germany, the proletarians who still resisted ended up accepting it as a "lesser evil" compared to the fascist victory. The anti-fascism directed towards Spain strengthened support for the Popular Front among numerous far-left groups in France. Better Blum than Franco. For example, A. Ferrat wanted to "change the policy of the government from top to bottom" Blum, so that it would help republican Spain. Always calling for the impossible, they never stopped denouncing the "weakness" of the democratic anti-fascists 62 .

The great ideological function of the Spanish war was to polarize those who hesitated (in all the countries where proletarian resistance was still alive, but also in others: from Russia to Germany and Italy, passing through the democracies) around the democracy/fascism alternative presented in each camp as the only answer to "plutocratic" or "fascist" totalitarianism. Those who, after the beginning of the 1930s, and even more so after the rapprochement between the USSR and the Western democracies, had supported a strong (though confused and often nefarious) campaign against the war, gradually fell into the democratic camp . The more theoretically inconsistent gave in more quickly, despite their superficial radicalism. Thus the anarchists:

"We know well that Negrin's Spain is not the one we want, it is not even what the Spanish workers want. We have fought his mistakes, his exactions. But today it is not a question of government, it is the 'future of the workers' movement [...]".

"Your future, people of France, is being played out in different parts of the globe. However, it is in Spain that you must bring your attention, it awaits your help, do not hesitate any longer, throw yourself into the fray, the fate of the Spanish proletariat depends on it , your freedom, and the maintenance of peace!" 63

It was the adhesion of the far left to the mobilization for war prepared by the Popular Front. As in 1914, it was necessary to renounce all revolutionary claims to save civilization from barbarism. For the communists, however, there was no fundamental news regarding the nature of the conflict between the First and Second World Wars.

LEFT-WING ANARCHISM

Despite numerous reactions among anarchists against the orientation of the CNT-FAI, no one freed themselves from the fundamental confusion on the question of power. In "Class War", whose first issue dated November 1936, Camillo Berneri attempted to resist within the left-wing anarchist current. Berneri started from the idea of ​​a revolution that would be underway and that he would have to support. Supporting revolutionary Spain: this could only mean supporting the state, or acting on its margins without fighting it. He therefore ended up asking the masses to put pressure on the existing State. At the same time (and this was his contradiction), he showed how the government acted against the revolution: but he thus only pointed to the "government", not the State . He arrived at an impossible conciliation between participation in the State and the revolutionary need:

"The participation of elements of the FAI and the CNT in police bodies is not sufficiently compensated by an autonomy that allows speed and discretion of services in missions" 64 .

His controversy with Federica Montseny remained famous 65 . He spoke with her, because she was an anarchist, although a minister. He acted as if she had chosen her, imitating the Trotskyists who put the "worker" leaders "with their backs to the wall". Berneri was a victim of revolutionary ideology (one of his articles is entitled Madrid, the sublime ). War and Revolution illustrates his theoretical shift well 66 . From the statement: the revolution is needed , we move on to: there is a revolution, which must therefore be preserved, hence the fundamental struggle against Franco etc. Of course, he warned against "counter-revolution". But if it was true that the proletariat was attacked on two fronts (by Franco and the Republic), he would have had to conclude that there was no revolution as long as the proletarians supported one of these two forms of counter-revolution against the other. Berneri spoke of counterrevolution as a threat when it was a reality : hence his repeated warnings. He protested against the non-revolutionary practices of the State: but could it have acted differently?

The group Los Amigos de Durruti , an extension of a harsh tendency of the CNT, is equally significant, first of all for the name chosen. He wanted to snatch Durruti's symbol from the official anarchist organizations that used it as a banner (like the Stalinists with Luxemburg and Liebknecht until the beginning of the 1930s), instead of criticizing the symbol itself (see "Spain: war or revolution? "). This fact alone proves that they intended to continue "real" anarchism against the official anarchists. In July '37, "Los Amigos de Durruti" stated that the revolutionary push had been maintained in May '37, despite "the absence of a concrete program and immediate achievements". In '36 as well as in '37, the "capital error" of the CNT-FAI was the fear of acting resolutely and the freedom left to the petty-bourgeois preponderance. On the other hand, "Los Amigos de Durruti" recommended the "necessity of a revolutionary junta, the economic dominance of the unions and a free municipal structure". What was needed was "a program and guns" 67 . In August '37, the CNT and the FAI had failed due to a lack of "the theoretical precision that our group proposed" 68 . This group therefore diagnosed an insufficiency of "leadership", like the Trotskyists vis-à-vis the socialist and communist parties. Like them, it conceived itself as an integral part of the defective "worker" organization, which it wanted to heal by injecting into it its own will to fight and its own theory. The leader of this group himself wrote in the CNT newspaper of Barcelona. One gets an idea of ​​proletarian weakness when one knows that "Los Amigos de Durruti" were, together with the rare Trotskyists (gathered around Grandizio Munis) and a very small minority of the POUM and the CNT, the only organized elements resolute in the May '37. The program of this Communist Union Manifesto (early June '37) would have remained a dead letter:

"To beat Franco, it would first of all be necessary to defeat Companys and Caballero. To defeat fascism, it would first be necessary to annihilate the bourgeoisie and its Stalinist and socialist allies. It would be necessary to destroy the capitalist state from top to bottom and establish a workers' power arising from the basic committees of workers. Anarchist apoliticalism has failed [...]. To overcome the bloc of the bourgeoisie and its allies: Stalinists, socialists and leaders of the CNT, the workers must immediately break with the traitors on all sides."

This Manifesto recognized that "Anti-fascist unity was nothing other than submission to the bourgeoisie." Furthermore, it was very favorable to the POUM 69 .

ANTI-STALINISM

Just as the fascist massacres contribute to obscuring the nature of fascism, the Stalinist-socialist repression often helps to ignore the essential. M. Ollivier denounced La Guépéou en Espagne , but he too only posed the problem of the parties, not that of the State 70 . The liquidation of the POUM was the opportunity to pass off this party as the most radical. He would just have been too weak to play much of a role.

If the republican government "resurrects the class struggle" 71 , this therefore pitted the proletariat against the republican bourgeoisie as well as that which supported Franco. Ollivier did not call for the destruction of the republican state at all. On the contrary: we should have fought for "socialist achievements"... attacked the following summer in Aragon by the republican state.

The Committee for the Spanish Revolution 72 denounced the repression against the POUM because it weakened the republicans' war against Franco: by acting in this way, the Republic would have deprived itself of necessary support among the people. This Committee did not say a word about the conciliatory and criminal behavior of the CNT and the POUM in May 1937. Thus the social-Stalinist slander and ignominy received no public refutations (excluding some publications of the Communist Left) except from people who defended them in reality the same political line, and which was opposed only on methods , without understanding that such a line necessarily implied such methods. Anti-fascism would like "true" democracy ruined by capitalism; they are the "true" anti-fascism ruined by Stalinism.

In his preface to Le Stalinisme bourreau de la révolution espagnole, 1937-1938 , Alfred Rosmer wrote: "We must first beat Franco. But after the victory, there will be some settling of scores and the Revolution will resume its forward march" 73 . This successful repression also demonstrated that there was no Spanish revolution. The unilateral denunciation of Stalinist crimes (which were, moreover, just as much as socialist crimes ) covered the rest with a veil. The "fight against repression", which takes the form of anti-Stalinism just as it previously took that of anti-fascism, never constitutes in itself a revolutionary program. Isolated as such, as in anti-fascism, it necessarily leads to practicing the politics of the lesser evil, to supporting the more tolerant against the more repressive (the socialists "are better" than the Communist Party, the United States compared to the USSR, or vice versa, etc.). As if the socialists (especially in Spain) had not been complicit with the Stalinists, avoiding mentioning the Moscow trials, and inviting Jouhaux to arbitrate the conflicts in the UGT in favor of the Communist Party 74 !

During the Cold War, anti-fascism would be seen resurrected in certain intermediate currents between the official parties and the revolutionaries, but this time in the form of support for the "free world" against Eastern countries deemed even more repressive and monstrous. Totalitarianism replaces fascism as the main enemy. For others, like Sartre, the "lesser evil" would have been represented by the communist parties and the Soviet Union. Anti-Stalinism is the worst product of Stalinism. This applies to all those who specialize in denouncing Stalinist or Leninist crimes and repressions 75 .

THE COMMUNIST UNION

The discussions within the communist Left and the criticisms of "Bilan" by certain revolutionary groups offer a completely different interest, so much so that sometimes the objections of these groups to the theses of the "Italian" Left have a certain value, although for the essential that the latter had better understood the Spanish events. Spain slowed down or interrupted the clarification of various currents. Until then hostile to anti-fascism and to the preparation of the future war by the Sacred Union in the blocs that united the proletarians to the bourgeoisie (Popular Front etc.), they however accepted anti-fascism for Spain where they believed they saw, if not a revolution in progress, at least a pre-revolutionary situation. But the most solid ones admitted starting from May '37 that the revolutionary movement was won, that the Spanish war was now imperialist, and paved the way for the Second Imperialist World War.

The Union Communiste, whose organ was "L'Internationale", was located halfway between the communist Left and Trotskyism, although it deepened considerably after 1936. Before this date, it recommended the united front (against the line "class against class") at political and trade union level 76 . As is known, loyalty to the "first four congresses of the Communist International" (from 1919 to 1922) is one of the favorite Trotskyist themes, and the "united front" is one of their most appreciated slogans. On the other hand, the Union Communiste rejected any defense of the USSR and spread no illusions about the nature of the next war. This was his contradiction: demonstrating that the Popular Front (for example French) was equivalent to a Sacred Union, but calling for a united front of these same so-called workers' organizations. On this point it shared the "centrist" inability to understand the global function of "workers'" organizations. This attitude was also based on an overestimation of the period which led to the belief in possible evolutions. The Union Communiste therefore judged that of "Bilan" as a principled position far from the real movement. In 1934, quoting "Bilan", "L'Internationale" wrote:

"It is not [...] for the revolutionaries to leave the working masses to themselves and to be satisfied with "spreading political positions without the masses having the possibility of applying them" ["Bilan", n. 12]" 77 .

During the referendum in the Saar which was supposed to decide on the reunification of this region with (Nazi) Germany or France, and which finally ruled in favor of Germany, "L'Internationale" defined its anti-fascism, which it wanted to be different from the usual reformist version , but which looked a lot like her:

"The anti-fascist struggle has as its objective the preservation of the proletariat's organizations and freedoms which constitute the most favorable conditions for revolutionary propaganda and the regrouping of the masses [...]. The workers' attachment to certain democratic freedoms constitutes for them, in a period of ebb, an important basis for rallying the masses and pushing them into action" 78.

On the eve of July '36, the Union Communiste evolved, but was seriously deluded about the POUM and its position with respect to democratic anti-fascism, which clearly demonstrates that it itself did not have a clear position in this regard 79 . After July '36, the Union Communiste did not believe that the adhesion of the militias to the State annulled their revolutionary character, and underlined the existence of a powerful underground revolutionary movement, which no organization expressed or grouped together (not even the POUM), and that he should have supported himself. For "Bilan", on the contrary, the necessary condition to facilitate a possible revolutionary evolution was to understand and affirm in every way that there was no revolution yet. Nonetheless, "L'Internationale" insisted from the beginning on the fragility of the movement. In February 1937, "The strangulation of the Spanish revolutionary movement has entered its last phase": "The counter-revolutionary forces want to prevent an organized reaction of the masses" against this strangulation 80 . Stalin's influence progresses with Russian support, and the Republic would prepare a compromise with Franco. The alternative lies in a decisive battle: "either the destruction of the bourgeois state", "or a heroic defeat". More illusions about the POUM, with the intermediary of its youth organization. The Iberian Communist Youth would be in favor of a "revolutionary workers' government" elected by the "Assembly of delegates of the business, peasant and militia committees": but what does "All power to the Soviets!" mean, when the reformist parties do they exercise overwhelming dominance over these grassroots organisms? Here we find the entire orientation of the POUM.

The Union Communiste showed the counter-revolutionary progression, but not the reality (i.e. the weakness) of the proletarian movement. He explained this progression first of all by the Russian intervention, which dispensed with questioning the internal situation in Spain and the actual action of the workers. The Union Communiste reasoned as if a revolutionary social movement existed, but harnessed by parties and trade unions.

It insisted on "independence of action" with respect to the government, not on what this government was 81 . He extolled a "workers' power" (as opposed to current bourgeois power) as his goal , but did not see that such a power was the condition of any class struggle against Franco and the Republic. He sought revolution where there was none, and revolutionaries where there was nothing but revolutionary phraseology, constantly asking the POUM to match its actions with its words. In short, he now transferred the "united front", previously hoped for, to the POUM and the CNT-FAI. She appealed to the base of the POUM like the Trotskyists to that of the communist and socialist parties, ignoring the function of these parties. It analyzed less what was happening than what it would have liked to happen (a trait common to all the revolutionaries criticized by "Bilan". For a revolutionary struggle that did not exist (in any case not as they spoke of it), they were ready to participate in a struggle, the latter very real, directed by the State. From the idea that events had to evolve, it was deduced that they could, and therefore that they had to be supported. Despite this, we recognize that Union Communiste has a relative pessimism regarding the epilogue ( which refutes, moreover, his thesis of an "active revolutionary movement" in Spain.

The Union Communiste began by participating in the Committee for the Spanish Revolution, which brought together the essence of centrist confusionism, including the Gauche révolutionnaire, left-wing opposition within the SFIO, whose leader Pivert was responsible for information in the Blum government, which indicates the extent of his opposition 82 . The Union Communiste then left this Committee in mid-1937, among other reasons due to the presence of the Gauche révolutionnaire.

After May '37, "L'Internationale" described the counter-revolutionary triumph at length, but identified the effect better than the cause: "after the May days, the war against Franco lost the character of a civil war that it had after 19 July [1936] [...] to the extent that the revolutionary movement [...] retreats in the face of the "democratic" counter-revolution, the imperialist character of the military war becomes clearer and the threat of world war grows" 83 . He believed that we were moving towards a Franco-Republic compromise.

"L'Internationale" rejoiced at the positive evolution of "Los Amigos de Durruti", who, if they had not adopted the Marxist position on the State, nevertheless had seen, according to the Union Communiste, that "the conquest of political power is the condition of the success of the revolution. The texts of "Los Amigos de Durruti" reproduced on its pages, and which were analyzed by us in "Left-wing anarchism", demonstrate that this appreciation was largely exaggerated. On the other hand, it was stigmatized the "hesitant" attitude of the POUM and its opportunism which aligned it with the CNT: despite the blows that fell on it, the POUM limited itself to refuting the lies and preached a UGT-CNT government.

"It is very unlikely that a new great battle will be waged. The days of May were decisive in this regard. Only partial, localized struggles will take place and will be followed by mass repression."

THE LIGUE DES COMMUNISTES INTERNATIONALISTES

The evolution of the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes in Belgium is comparable to that of the Union Communiste in Spain, although the former had much clearer positions on anti-fascism. Also arising from a break with Trotskyism, it collaborated between '31 and '36 with the "Italian" Left. While the Union Communiste published "L'Internationale" for several years as a newspaper that wanted to reach the base of the "workers" organizations, before becoming a mimeographed magazine, the "Bulletin" of the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes presented itself more as an organ theoretical. The Union Communiste appears to be a healthy reaction but one which did not go too far, at least until around 1936. The Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes reflected a real effort at theoretical clarification, and it is no coincidence that it collaborated for several years with "Bilan", before separating from it regarding Spain.

After the electoral victory of the Popular Front, the "Bulletin" 84 saw "a front of the bourgeois left with its moderate and extreme tendencies uniting in front of the right, where the same phenomenon was manifested". For example, the party of the radical socialist Maura had split into two according to the well-known "politics of the swing between right and left". Overall, the analysis of fascism was identical to that of "Bilan". Offering Belgium an example of an industrialized country and a workers' movement very integrated into the state, the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes regularly underlined that democracy there implemented the same program of forced class union as fascism. But the Ligue also experienced important divergences before July 1936, crystallized by the electoral question, in which the further separation regarding the Spanish question was already taking shape. In the spring of '36, Hennaut (leader of the Ligue) recommended electoral support for the Belgian Workers' Party. Jehan (who would have animated the split of the minority close to "Bilan") was in favor of abstention 85 .

These differences would return to the fore after July '36, requiring a split: no collaboration was possible between those who supported the anti-fascist armed struggle and those who called for desertion in both camps. The articles by Hennaut and Jehan, written almost simultaneously, reveal two different approaches. Hennaut was aware of the anti-revolutionary character of anti-fascism, but, unlike Jehan, he did not make the failure to destroy the State in July '36 a decisive criterion. Where Jehan considered the moment of the rupture (which had not occurred), Hennaut focused on the movement . According to Hennaut, Jehan pinned social evolution on one phase as he reduced the proletariat to the party, i.e. to the elements already acquired for communist action and positions, thus neglecting the possibility of influencing other strata still in motion. For "Bilan", according to Hennaut, there would have been no revolution in Spain because there was no party. This fundamental reproach was deepened in a more general criticism concerning the Russian revolution, the nature of socialism, of the revolution and, therefore, of the proletariat. Clouded, following the Bolsheviks, by the question of the party, the Italian Left would have interpreted everything in light of the formation or lack of this famous party. This criticism would later be taken up again, often for purposes of mediocre controversy. In an article of "Socialisme ou Barbarie" on La crise du Bordiguisme italien , written in 1952, Albert Vega [Alberto Masó] attacked the denial of the " active role " of the proletariat and the idea of ​​an "eclipse" class struggle 86 :

"[...] for example, instead of seeing the revolutionary upheaval of July '36 in Spain as the result of a long period of class struggle, all that was done was to record a "worker explosion" [?] lasting a few days , followed by an "imperialist war". The working class had appeared for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and then disappeared. Nonetheless, the fighting continued. So there was war. We are in the period of imperialist wars, so it is an imperialist war And thanks to "Leninism", we saw the Italian Left declare (at the price of a split, it's true) that the watchword for Spain was fraternization: fraternization of the workers in arms with the Civil Guard, the legionaries and Falangists at the front. This interpretation makes the insurrection of the workers of Barcelona in May 1937 completely inexplicable. Thus the latter was presented as a massacre of proletarians, reduced to the rank of passive victims of the republican government".

For Albert Vega: "The Spanish workers [...] from 1930 to 1936 constantly questioned the foundations of the capitalist regime, [...] in '36, they destroyed its fundamental institutions, took over the management of factories and transport [...]".

Everyone will evaluate this summary and the statement of facts in their own way. Recently, an old member of the Union Communiste also recalled "the delirious position of the Belgian communists and of Vercesi (no Bordigist party in Spain, therefore no revolution) regarding the revolutionary movement in the peninsula [...]. The Bordigists of Belgium, a handful of men, they had an aberrant position [...] and, for example, they understood nothing of the days of May '37, the Spanish Kronstadt (without prejudice to all proportions) [...]" 87 .

The reproach leveled at the Italian Left of reducing the class to the party is well-founded and misplaced at the same time. If you read "Bilan" seriously, you understand that this magazine did not speak of the absence of the "party" in Spain except in the sense that the proletarian movements before and during '36 had not reached the sufficient threshold to demand a corresponding communist organization . Overall, the analysis remained materialist: there was no party because the class had not given birth to it. The previous proletarian experience had not had the strength to inspire an action and therefore an organization that broke with capital enough to play a decisive role in the critical period in which society could have turned in one direction or another. Talking about the absence of the party meant evaluating the strength and capabilities of the Spanish proletarians. And do not deplore the failure of the "revolutionaries" to create a ruling center.

On the other hand, it is true that "Bilan" concealed a tendency towards the idealization of the party, which remained limited at the time, and which did not ruin the essence of the analysis, but which was part of the legacy of the Italian Left. It was less a "Leninist" trait (which only came later) than a radical social democratic aspect acquired by the Italian Left before the meeting with the Bolsheviks and with What is to be done? . This idealization of organization and principles was, before 1914, one of the (illusory) solutions of the revolutionary elements of the Second International to escape the prevailing reformism. Bordiga conceived it separately from Lenin, and in a more profound way, to the extent that he was not marked by the Kautskian thesis of the "consciousness" to be brought to the proletariat, which gave the party he described a much more materialist aspect than that of the Lenin's party. Only later did the contact between the Italians and the Communist International strengthen the party's idealism, but Bordiga would always retain his original approach. After 1945, he developed the overvaluation of the party in the most brilliant and even most contradictory forms, although he had said that the party was both a factor and a result of the revolution 88 . His heirs have elevated his contradictions to a caricature. Thanks to activism, the party becomes the soul that awaits his body.

However, a profound difference separates these theorizations from "Bilan". The distinction admitted in the 1930s between "fraction" (group that preserves and develops theory, with very limited practice, in a period of retreat) and "party" (communist organization of the movement of the proletariat) was forgotten by the Italian Left after 1945 , since it formed itself into a "party", first in Italy (1943-'45), then on a global level (Internationalist Communist Party).

On a broader level, it is accurate to say that "Bilan" reproduced the limitations of the Italian Left in its vision of the revolution, and in particular in its exaggeration of the Russian experience. However, this magazine was open to other conceptions, and above all to reflection on the content of communism as the destruction of the law of value, with a long summary of the Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution , a fundamental text in this regard 89 . As Hennaut himself underlined, for him this was the starting point of a different reflection on socialism, while "Bilan" considered it only as a point to be clarified. Furthermore, the historical criticism of the Russian revolution and its degeneration was never made by the Italian Left, neither at the time of "Bilan" nor after, despite Bordiga's numerous texts on this subject. However, generally the opponents of the Italian Left would not have exceeded the limits of this forbidden criticism except to fall partly or totally into one form or another of councilism , replacing one limited vision with another. A new magic remedy (worker democracy and management) would replace the old one (the party). The controversies over Spain led to the maturation of these respective divergences and exaggerations (a sign of the inability to grasp the totality.

The Italian Left rightly states that revolutionaries are not obsessed by the fear of becoming a new power or imposing themselves on the "majority". Every revolution is made by a minority, even a significant one, which does not prevent the communist revolution from being the work of the majority, of the totality of men tending to progressively take control of their existence. But it is the minority that plays the most active role. The essential thing is that decisive measures are taken, that is, not "decreed", but actually carried out, initially even by a minority (nothing to do with the "agent minorities" dear to revolutionary syndicalism, where a small number is responsible for setting a good example and directing things). The material bases of a new "power" do not lie at all in this minority and often dictatorial act, but in the possible maintenance of the foundations of capital. The essential factor is not the relations of domination , but the relations of production of life (material, emotional, symbolic, etc.).

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the communist revolution can triumph only on the condition of involving the broad masses in a more or less short time, nourishing itself on their intervention at all levels of social life (see "Political and social revolution"). On the contrary, a "revolution" that systematically opposes the workers, that has to tame strikes, that changes nothing or almost nothing in the content of society (that's the essential thing), would deny itself as a proletarian revolution. This is what happened in Russia, but let's not reverse the explanation. It is because society had not been turned upside down that the Bolshevik Party ended up imposing the dictatorship of a non-proletarian, non-communist state, which could only survive by developing the wage earner: therefore a capitalist state. The Kronstadt insurgents were certainly not communists, but those who massacred them acted authentically as anti-communists, repressing an elementary movement in the name of a dictatorship of the proletariat that existed in name only (intentions and moralism, alien to us, matter little). Neither Kronstadt nor the Bolshevik state represented the communist revolution: the class struggle simply continued in its elementary forms, sometimes with weapons. The Italian Left denied the reality of workers' struggles under the pretext that power would remain "proletarian". A power is revolutionary only if it favors the revolution at home and abroad: this was not the case (see the right-wing course given to the Communist International (which allowed it to be imposed on itself (by the Bolsheviks). Contrary to what was stated by Bordiga 90 after 1945, the Russian revolution collapsed into violence against the proletariat (repression, anti-strike struggle, camps, Stalinist trials, etc.). The workers had taken power in '17 and had lost it quite quickly, definitively in '21, but for the essentials already before.

The bourgeois aspect was almost always present in Bolshevism and Lenin, who were profoundly contradictory 91 . These aspects could have been erased in the event of a world revolution: on the contrary, the defeat accentuated them. But this was not the decisive cause of the involution (Bordiga) of the Russian revolution: why did the proletarians accept it? Making anti-Leninism systematic means distorting the perspective and preventing true criticism: that of the nature of the social movement of that era, of its partiality . Hennaut was even less capable of this criticism than Bordiga, who had only intuited it.

The big difference between the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes and the Union Communiste regarding Spain is that the Ligue attributed the utmost importance to the internal evolution of the country and not to international pressure (especially Russian), as a factor in strengthening the counter-revolution in the Iberian peninsula. In November 1936, after having shown the effects of non-intervention, Hennaut asked himself "Where is the Spanish Revolution going?" ninety two :

"The essential change occurred on the internal front of the Spanish revolution. The Madrid government, which remains the Spanish capitalist government, managed, thanks to the support of the socialists and communists, to firmly regain control of the reins of power which for a moment had seemed to escape him. The workers' militias operate docilely under the orders of the government military cadres [...]. The game is not yet completely lost, but the positions of the Spanish workers have been strongly compromised. Thus the conditions have been created for the reabsorption of the revolution in the general fray of imperialisms that is in preparation".

Even when they believed, after May '37, that the Spanish war had acquired an imperialist character, groups such as the Union Communiste or the Ligue hesitated to launch the slogan of "revolutionary defeatism". Such an appeal could only have a value of principle (see the ¤ "National question"). The Italian Left had a tendency to experience a general repetition of 1914-'18, and to think in terms of the Zimmerwald left. This illusion went far beyond a simple misjudgment of the period. Of course, this current could believe in a possible resumption of the movement, after or during the outbreak of the future Second World War. The change of the title of "Bilan" to "Octobre" in '38 was all a plan. On the cover of "Bilan", one could read, repeated numerous times: "Lenin 1917 (Noske 1919 (Hitler 1933"). It was the resistance magazine in a "historically unfavorable" context. "Octobre" certainly translated the idea (or rather , hope) of the passage to another phase.

But there's more. The communist Left, however, could not play the role of the socialist left again after 1914. Revolutionary defeatism corresponded in 1914 to the attitude of at least a fringe of the proletariat, and was expressed through limited but real channels. Entire parties (the Bolshevik and Serbian parties), numerically weak but well rooted, rejected the Sacred Union. The situation was completely different at the end of the 1930s. The difference was not quantitative but qualitative. The communist Left was separated from the "workers' movement", it did not have its roots there, it did not have any serious contact or support there. Unlike the extreme social democratic left after 1914, the communist left was confronted with workers' organizations integrated into capital, and in which no proletarian minority remained. All the activity of the Italian Left is permeated to this day by the myth (borrowed from the Communist International) of the re -formation of a "real" workers' movement. There is the idea of ​​rebuilding the same workers' organizations (economic and political with the union-party division), on new principles (of class struggle) this time, without understanding that the proletarian rebirth will take place differently (which does not imply a change total, or otherwise it would be necessary to demonstrate that capital and the proletariat have changed in nature, which is not the case).

THE GERMAN LEFT

Like the "Italian" Left, the "German" Left 93 , then active above all in the Netherlands and the United States, indicated in fascism a tendency of capital, accelerated by all those who followed its logic, starting with the democrats. "International Council Correspondance", a magazine animated by Paul Mattick, dedicated numerous articles to demonstrating that fascism existed in democratic countries, among others in the USA. "International Council Correspondence" wrote in September 1935: "The old workers' movement is preparing to get rid of fascism by incorporating it", and denounced "the competitors of fascism". Then in December: "Of all the actual and potential counter-revolutionaries, the most despicable are without a doubt the socialists" 94 . The magazine commented on the 1936 elections in France 95 thus :

"There are defeats which are victories and victories behind which defeat is hidden [...]. In reality, the French workers suffered their first decisive defeat in the struggle against capital [...]. Anyone wants to fight against capital fascism must today fight against Blum and the Popular Front. This truth must be affirmed, that the French "victory" is in reality the beginning of a series of defeats. The workers are on the wrong path; with Blum and Thorez, they march straight towards fascism".

But the analysis of the Spanish events following July '36 neglected what had happened in July itself. According to the October issue of that year 96 , the problem was not whether the militias were integrated into the regular army or not but rather what remained (and in what proportion) of the militias whose activity was not integrated into the defense of the State as a regular army would have done. If the nationalists had won, the workers would have been annihilated: "But even their defeat cannot change the situation, which is objectively ripe for revolution." The following issue (November 1936) reproduced an FAI appeal calling for arms.

Out of concern for workers' democracy, the German Left went so far as to leave out the elementary notions on the nature of the revolution. He was more concerned with the margin of autonomy that the proletarians might still have, despite the joining of the militias to the State, than with the joining itself. Her systematic anti-Boshevism and her anti-party formalism blinded her to the point of making her see Spanish anarchism as a form of organization which, despite its defects, served as a framework for authentic proletarian activity. Furthermore, comparing the POUM to the Bolsheviks (!), "International Council Correspondence" also saw in the Catalan CNT "a revolutionary force": a flagrant falsehood all the more serious since this assessment was made in April 1939, when all available information proved the opposite. Anti-party prejudice led the German Left to renounce one of its decisive contributions: criticism of the trade unions. Because what was the CNT if not a trade union centre? In this respect "International Council Correspondence" was behind the Union Communiste and the Belgian Ligue. But, like these groups, the first quickly saw the power of the counter-revolution rising, and in March 1937 wrote:

"What has taken place up to now has more the character of a necessity imposed by the war, of a control of production to ensure the war, than of an authentic socialization. [...] Socialism has not yet been established in Spain, and it is not developing further there. To do so, the revolution would have to be deepened; currently the only effort is to thin it out."

"International Council Correspondance" published a severe criticism of anarchism, but the author of the article saw the anarchist failure in the economic conception of socialism, not in the question of political power 97 . H. Wagner took issue with the "false" workers' management and the "bad" suppression of the law of value by anarchist collectivization: only the organization into Councils, says Wagner, taking up the theses of the Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution , would have allowed the calculation of the social labor time necessary for the production of goods. As we have already explained, this conception had the enormous merit of once again posing the need for the destruction of the mercantile economy and of value, in an era in which, for example, the Italian Left ignored the issue. But he considered it on the basis of the notions to be criticized 98 . Paradoxically, such a system puts back into force what it wants to annihilate: the average social working time is nothing other than the substance of value and the basis of capital. Its production is the regulator of capitalist society. The German Left would like to replace its spontaneous and anarchic action with a conscious calculation finally possible thanks to the workers' councils, the only ones capable of knowing (exactly and without the deviation of the currency ) the quantity of average social labor materialized in each product.

Above all, this thesis reveals a very economistic conception of the revolution, in which it would first of all be a question of establishing the foundations of a rational, planned economy. At that time, no current of the communist Left came to raise the problem.

The German Left denied the political question (which "Bilan" placed at the center of its analysis and ended up privileging (see the ¤ "Political and social revolution"). Wagner's criticism of the anarchists was not accompanied by any analysis of the July '36. The question of the State was evaded. If the social transformations were well captured by "International Council Correspondence" in their diversity, political power was not seen in its unity (and above all in its concentrated existence in the form of the State. Wagner reached the anarchist position. He assimilated the revolution to a general emancipation deprived of a center of gravity (the only unifying factor being at the economic level ): "to organize power against the bourgeoisie", the workers would have to "first liberate the their factory organizations from the influence of official parties and trade unions". The question of power was understood in its extension to the whole of society, not as a totality .

Karl Korsch analyzed the Spanish war in this magazine (which became "Living Marxism") in 1938 and the following year 99 . Not only did he not proceed with any fundamental criticism of the CNT-FAI, but he did not draw the consequences of what he himself showed: the bourgeoisie had never lost state power, which had rather suffered "a temporary eclipse". His mistake was to transpose into the revolutionary period of his life the same conception of revolution as progressive socialization , which he supported in his reformist period. The measures were no longer the same, but the mechanism remained: the workers would take control of the means of production, this would be the revolution; the question of power had no specificity and was carried out almost everywhere in all organs of social life. Capital was conceived more as a mode of management than as a mode of production, communism more as an organization of production than as an activity. The revolution can manifest itself as a process only on condition that it is also a rupture, including at the political level. The Italian Left hypertrophies politics, the German Left dissolves it in the economy.

ITALIAN LEFT?

"Bilan" was one of the best expressions of the Italian Left 100 . But speaking of the "Italian Left" is a simplification which is equivalent, among most commentators, to a deformation, equally the "German Left" covers complex realities, even at the time when this term designated a living social movement, which brought together conceptions and activities as different as those of Gorter, Rühle, Pannekoek. The "Italian Left" is often crushed behind the person of Bordiga, so much so that it is known, especially in France, through its "official" representative, the International Communist Party, which is itself first and foremost "Bordigaist": it refers to the Italian left, but it conceals what is not in Bordiga's line, as does a good part of Bordiga himself. "Le Réveil Communiste" observed already in February 1929: "In the end the Bordigists fall into contradiction with Bordiga...".

Bordiga is but one aspect, the richest, but also the most contradictory and even the most erroneous, of the Italian Left. The two most profound elements of Bordiga are on the one hand his anti-educationism and his materialism, which run through his entire work despite strong contrary tendencies (culminating in the idealization of the party); and on the other his perspective of communism exposed starting from the 1950s (101). The resurgent revolutionary movement of some years has drawn heavily on this part of his work. But this theoretical "recovery" is also a criticism of Bordiga's errors, which passes among other things through knowledge of the other currents of the Italian Left.

The adjective "Italian" is used in a broad sense: emigration gave the Italian Left a Belgian and French character. Some elements very early perceived the insufficiencies of the Italian Left without being able to criticize them (for example "Le Réveil Communiste"). Others went further afield. In the "Preamble" we will read a text from the Left which summarizes its history (as it understood it) up to 1930. Its further evolution was more complex 102 . In any case, the first condition for understanding this current is to recognize its heterogeneity. In the same way that the council members of the 1950s and 1960s ignored and/or hid their own past and the real movement of which they were a distant, often dull image, today's official representatives of the Italian Left, incapable of knowing their origins as well as their their sectarian reality , more or less consciously mask their past, and in particular the magazine "Bilan". One of the essential reasons for this attitude closely concerns the Spanish question. "Bilan's" analysis of the Spanish war called into question the Leninist theses on imperialism and the national question developed by Bordiga.

NATIONAL QUESTION

For Bordiga, the phase of constitution of national states was closed for Western Europe after 1871. But the birth of national states in the other "areas" was progressive, that is, favorable to the struggle of the proletariat, because it made imperialism falter and developed the productive forces, therefore the class struggle is over. Speaking of Spain, "Bilan" started from the notion of a new period opened from 1914-'18, that of the decadence of capitalism. The latter no longer played any progressive role, it no longer developed the productive forces except by provoking crises and wars; the formation of new states aimed only at fragmenting the proletariat into national blocs united with its own bourgeoisie. Of course, "Bilan" published in n. 7 a text by Bordiga on the national question, and did not proceed with a full-blown attack on Lenin in the style of Rosa Luxemburg. But he considered the Leninist thesis adopted by the Communist International to be outdated, and he also had reservations about Marx. We cite only an extract from the Problème des minorities nationales, which appeared in issue no. 14 (December-January 1934):

"The period of development of capitalism, at the end of the 19th century, highlights [...] the impossibility of resolving all national conflicts and more particularly the right of peoples to self-determination, if not with the proletarian revolution or with the imperialist war; and it is for this reason that until the First World War we witness (even in the oppressed countries) an expansion of the class struggle between property owners and non-property people, and the national problem appears solely as a weapon of the oppressed bourgeoisie to slow down the struggle of the proletariat rising against it, as well as to improve its own particular situation in the face of oppressive capitalism.

In the period of imperialism (which is considered post-world development and therefore also includes backward countries, which cannot be separated from this historical environment), the general dilemma of all situations is, as we know, war or proletarian revolution. Hence it is understood that there is no other epilogue to all the historical situations that may arise: the acuteness of the class struggle on the one hand, the development of the productive forces on the other, suppress any prospect of an "intermediate solution". The national problem, placed in these conditions, limited by this overall period, could evidently no longer make use of arguments that could have had a certain importance in 1848".

"Bilan" did not make much difference between the Euro-North American areas and the others, in particular those that Bordiga would have called "the colored peoples"103.

One of the points raised by "Bilan" was the forced integration of national movements in the orbit of the great imperialist conflicts (Ethiopia, China, etc.). Bordiga would return to this topic. According to him, national liberation movements could be supported, even if they fell into one camp or another. After all, the revolutionary defeatism of 1914 implied a risk of this type: by working towards the defeat of his own country, each revolutionary strengthened the enemy state. Revolutionary defeatism was more than a position (which also forced us to rethink the fact of launching such a slogan in Spain in 1936 (see "La Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes")104. Zimmerwald's left conceived defeatism revolutionary as a means to accelerate the transition from imperialist war to civil war. Indeed, the conduct and conditions of war determined a rebirth of the class struggle in 1916-'17. For Lenin, if even a small minority affirmed this position, it was not " on principle", to "save honor", but as a task that prepared the future, so that in the radical recovery this attitude would serve to clarify and polarize positions. This could not happen, unless there was a movement in the rest of the world, in Ethiopia in 1936 or in Vietnam in 1975. The international context was different. The metropolises that went to war in 1914-18 influenced the world. In Vietnam, the North and the South were not waging their own war, but that of a bloc imperialist against the other, although the internal social structure of the country involved always served as a detonator. The proletariat was too weak there, while that of '14 had been suffocated, not destroyed. The Ethiopian proletarians of '36 and the Vietnamese of '75 were not only clashing with their bourgeoisie, but with world capital. Therefore, a comparison with '14 is impossible.

"Bilan" insisted at length on the counter-revolutionary role of national conflicts in which today's Internationalist Communist Party, more or less Bordigist, sees rather as "powder kegs" ready to explode in the face of capitalist metropolises. "Bilan" also published economic articles attempting to distinguish between Lenin's theories and those of Luxemburg. In this regard, this magazine moved towards positions close to the "German Left" which, like Luxemburg, saw national self-determination movements as obstacles to the struggle of the proletariat. It would be absurd to stick the label "German Left" on the activity of this current of the Italian Left at the time. But it tried to overcome the Leninist limits within which the Communist Party of Italy, and then the "Italian Left" were blocked. Recognizing his differences with the German Left, he did not reject it into the anarcho-syndicalist "swamp", and welcomed some of its texts into his magazine, including the summary of the Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, already mentioned, and one on Gorter. It is understandable how the current International Communist Party needs to pass off "Bilan" as a "small publication by Italian emigrants"105.

We add, however, that the analysis of the Spanish war indirectly distorted the perspectives of the group that published "Bilan". Noting the extent to which capital used workers' struggles in its favor by turning them into capitalist conflicts, he deduced that future imperialist wars would arise like that of Spain from the reversal of partial proletarian offensives, underestimating the specifically economic contradictions, which were also at the origin of imperialist conflicts. This underlying thesis, sometimes expounded in "Bilan" and "Octobre", was later developed almost to the point of becoming the essential one. After 1938, over-interpreting Spain, this group (which was then playing with its action a key role on a theoretical and organizational level in the small movement of the Italian Left) soon conceived a theory of the "war economy" where the rivalries between capitalist countries tended to be smoothed out, and he came to expect war only from new events comparable to those in Spain. As often happens, a great clarity in the face of capital's possibilities for action leads, if we lose sight of the totality, to forgetting or denying certain essential contradictions (see "Reform or revolution").

This position did not put its protagonists in a good position to prepare the Italian Left to face the shock of the war (in which, however, it could not have had, and did not have, anything other than a minimal theoretical clarification role, almost for internal use .

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION

"Bilan" was right to insist on the necessity for the revolution to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus, and to deduce from this that there is no revolution until the proletariat acts in this direction. It is also true that measures of economic-social transformation remain in vain without destruction of the State. But this current still conceived the communist revolution in a political way . He was unable to understand it as a social movement in which the destruction of the State and the construction of a new decision-making structure go hand in hand with the communisation of economic and social life 106 . She conceived these two aspects as successive moments: their interaction escaped her. It overturned the reformist, centrist or anarchist position, without changing the problem. Against the perspective that put the socialization of the economy in the foreground, he privileged the question of power: the revolution would be political first, then economic.

The communist revolution must also assert a power, capable of imposing itself to fight the bourgeoisie and at the same time unify the revolutionary movement. For example, it was not the practice of frontal warfare that led to the collapse of the Spanish revolutionary movement. It was because he was already beaten that he allowed himself to be trapped in a war of this type and died in it. But "revolutionary power" would only be an empty form if it did not simultaneously transform the nature of society. It cannot exist except as an instrument of this transformation. If the revolution must be political, first and then social, it would create a power with no other function than the fight against the bourgeoisie, a negative function, therefore, of repression. Do you think that a (world) communist revolution, having to extend for years, over a generation, will continue to pay wages and pay for goods during all this time?

Preaching the seizure of power as a preliminary means fetishizing power, forgetting that the State is also the resultant of society, and theorizing the establishment of a system of organization and control that is based on no other content than its communist pretension , his "will" to achieve communism, when he is strong enough to do so. On the contrary, if the revolution is simultaneously an economic and political process, as according to the KAPD, the communization of social relations prevents any particular group from establishing itself as a new power over society. The maintenance, even temporary, of the mercantile and capitalist economy would favor the birth of a layer of power specialists who use revolutionary ideology to create legitimacy for themselves. Their sole reason for existing would be their profession of communist faith. The characteristic of politics is that it cannot (and therefore does not want) change anything about the nature of society; politics brings together what is separated without going further. The power is there, it manages, controls, reassures, represses, that's all (107).

Political domination (in which the anarchist theoretical tradition of yesterday and today sees the essential problem) rests on the inability of proletarians to take charge and organize their life, their activity. It holds only because of the radical dispossession that characterizes the proletarian. When everyone participates in the production of their own existence, the means of pressure and oppression available to the State will become inoperative. It is because the wage earner deprives us of the means to live, produce, communicate, going so far as to reveal our emotions to us (mass media etc.), that his State is omnipotent. Conceiving the destruction of the state as an armed struggle against the police and military forces is taking the part for the whole. Communism is first and foremost an activity . A system in which men produce their own social existence paralyzes any separate power. In a future communist revolution, the reaction will, as usual, focus on the slogans of "organization" and "democratic power" to better paralyze the movement. In contrast, revolutionaries will assert the need for (among others) concrete communist measures.

Communization is necessary for the triumph of the revolution. The capitalist state could not be destroyed by an action exercised only against its state structures: this action would most likely fail. The proletariat will only succeed if it activates its social function against capital, also using the economy as a weapon, dissolving capitalist economic relations, undermining the social bases of the enemy. The geographical extension of the movement will be as much a social and economic process as a military one. Positive and negative tasks will influence each other.

"Let it not be said that the social movement excludes the political movement. There is never a political movement that is not social at the same time." (108)

Spain held back clarification within groups such as the Union Communiste and the Belgian Ligue. But the fixation on the political question, highlighted by the Spanish war, equally blocked the theoretical development of the Italian Left, which would essentially have maintained a "successive phases" conception of the revolution (political, then economic).

For this reason, the understanding of Russian involution eluded the Italian Left and also those who emerged from it on revolutionary bases, such as "Internationalisme" after 1945 (see "La Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes"). After October '17, Russia offered, in fact, an excellent example of the degeneration of power in the absence of social revolution. We cannot delve into here why the communization of Russia was impossible. In any case, international isolation and economic backwardness do not explain everything (unless we forget the perspective outlined by Marx (and, perhaps , applicable after '17, in another context) of rebirth in a new form of structures community agriculture not yet absorbed by capital 109. Be that as it may, Bolshevik power is the best illustration of what happens to a power that is just power.

In perfect good faith and very logically, the Bolshevik State had to maintain itself, at all costs (in the perspective of the world revolution first, for itself afterwards, and only afterwards), and had no other solution other than coercion. Of course, the bourgeois aspects of Bolshevik theory and practice had their role, but the latter was not decisive, when compared to the objective situation of this State forced to "hold" without changing much of the real conditions of life. Quickly the number one problem became the need to remain in power, to preserve for better or worse the unity of a society that was falling apart. Hence, on the one hand, the concessions to small peasant property (which distanced them even further from communism), followed by requisitions; on the other, the anti-worker repression and against the political opposition inside and outside the party.

Hennaut, showing the limits of the Russian experience, and "Bilan", relentlessly claiming the "successful" example of October '17 (as opposed to the failure of July '36), were both right and wrong. From a purely negative point of view, "Bilan" saw correctly what had not happened in Spain. From a positive point of view, about the characteristics of a future communist revolution, "Bilan" was deceived in the same way as Hennaut, because he contrasted the goal with the movement. They did not escape the Leninism-anti-Leninism dilemma. Nowadays we arrive at the fact that groups like "Révolution internationale" know more or less what the revolution must destroy, but not what it must do to be able to destroy it. The real criticism is that which considers the proletarian movement as a function of communism, not conceived as a "program", but simultaneously as a rupture and a process.

It is not surprising that the editors of "Bilan" have passed by this central point. The movements after '17 almost never reached the practical stage that would have forced the communists to integrate this aspect into their theoretical vision. The discussions at the time mostly revolved around organizational controversies , without grasping the communist content of the revolution. Even when the German Left considered communism, it was to imagine another organization of production.

The proletarian capacity for self-organization and even immediate change is indispensable to the revolution. Marx wrote about Spain that every revolution involves a certain degree of "anarchy" (initiatives in all fields). But it fails without its mediated dimension (the problem of power).

STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF COMMUNISM IN SPAIN

Obsessed with the question of the State, which, moreover, an article in "October" considered quite differently, in particular with regard to Russia and Kronstadt 110 , the Italian Left did not try to explain the extent of industrial and agricultural "socialisations", in which "Bilan" tended to see only a suffocation of the proletarians (which was true), and not the appearance of a social movement capable, in other conditions, of having a revolutionary effect. It is equally important to indicate the conditions (specific for each type of capitalist development) of the social transformations to be carried out through the communist revolution, as to stigmatize false solutions. Denouncing the counterrevolution without also enunciating the positive measures and their rooting in every situation means acting in a purely negative way. The party (or the "fraction") is not a shears.

Marx noted the Spanish tradition of popular autonomy and the gap between the people and the state, which exploded in the war against Napoleon and in the revolutions of the 19th century. The absolute monarchy had not mixed the social strata to generate a modern state, on the other hand there was a vitality born from the living forces of the country. Napoleon had been able to see "in Spain a lifeless corpse": "But if the Spanish state was dead, Spanish society was full of life" 111 . The crisis of Spanish society in the 1930s (an explosive form of the crisis of capital in a country where it was economically weak) took on the appearance of a crisis of the State (it is known that fascism triumphed in countries whose national structure was fragile, the recent unification and lively autonomist tendencies.) Marx observes that in Spain,

"what we call the State in the modern sense of the word truly materializes only in the army, due to the exclusively "provincial" life of the people" (112).

In the twentieth century, this crisis of the state gave rise to a social movement on the margins of political power, whose potentially communist achievements were reabsorbed by the state, because they allowed it to exist. The first months after July '36 give the impression of an explosion of Spanish society, in which every region, district, company, community, municipality escaped the State without attacking it and began to live differently. Anarchism (and also the regionalist POUM (expressed within the workers' movement this Spanish originality, which is ignored if one sees only the negative fact of the "delay" of industrial development. The Spanish war demonstrated at the same time the revolutionary vigor of community relations and forms not yet subjected to capital, and their total failure to guarantee a revolution on their own . In the absence of an assault against the State and the establishment of different relations at the level of society as a whole, they were condemned to a fragmented self-management which preserved the content and even the forms of capitalism (for example, the division between companies).

Communist measures could have undermined the foundations of the two states (republican and nationalist), if only by starting to resolve the agrarian question: in the 1930s, "more than half the population was [...] constantly undernourished" 113 . A subversive force gushed forth, pushing forward the most oppressed social strata most distant from "political life" (such as women), but it could not go all the way, get to the root of things.

The workers' movement of the large industrial countries then corresponded to vast areas socialized by the real domination of capital over society, where communism was at the same time closer thanks to economic development, and further away due to the mercantile dissolution of all relations. The communist aspirations that appeared there (Germany 1918-'21) attempted to unify "industrial regions" 114 , although they never reached the stage in which they could have given themselves this objective as a possible task. The workers' movement of a country like Spain remained tributary to a more quantitative than qualitative penetration of capital into society, and drew its strength and weakness from it. Anarchist autonomism responded to a situation of repression and material poverty, as workers were often too poor to pay regular dues. The CNT never had an apparatus like the other power plants: in 1936 only one secretary was paid 115 , which did not prevent bureaucratism. More profoundly, Spanish anarchism renewed a moral and religious ideal (creating paradise on earth), trying to "recreate the old agrarian conditions" 116 .

"Over the last hundred years, there has not been a single uprising in Andalusia that did not lead to the creation of municipalities, the division of land, the abolition of currency and a declaration of independence [...] anarchism of the workers is not very different. They too ask first of all for the possibility of managing their industrial community or their union themselves, then the reduction of working hours and a reduction in everyone's effort" (117).

Anarchism is on the one hand the distorted expression (because it theorises a moment, taking it as a whole) of a revolutionary movement which is itself partial, on the other it is a response to the necessary political development of Spanish capital. An impossible answer because the lack of dynamism made federalism a separatist weapon for the more modern peripheral regions, and because proletarian combativity excluded any sensible "participation" of the workers in their exploitation. The Spanish state was unable to develop industry, nor to extract the necessary profits from agriculture, nor to tame the proletariat, nor to unite the regions. Marx's judgment that a "despotic" government coexisted with a lack of unity, which reached as far as different currencies and fiscal regions (in 1854) 118 , remained partly valid in the 1930s.

Before being the instrument of the development of capitalist productive forces, the State is first and foremost the guarantor of capitalist social unity, even at the cost of relative economic stagnation. It is not driven by a capitalist fatality that would condemn it to industrialization at any moment. The balance between the classes dominates his action. The strength of "Bilan's" analysis is, among other things, to give the right importance to the real relationship between classes , and not to the abstract principle of "capital development" conceived as blind necessity.

The reformist Spanish workers' movement (including the CNT), in line with previous movements, proposed a capital-labour association. Closer to collective realities, the CNT conceived it in a decentralized way. A historian concerned with resolving the crisis of the Spanish State interprets July '36 (the revolutionary significance of which he ignores) as "a new impetus of the masses' renewing impulse" 119 . A social (particularly economic) modification would have followed the political change of 1931. Brenan, who favors the point of view of the social movement, gives this judgement:

"It can be said that this was the Soviet phase of the Spanish revolution. And, nevertheless, I think that one would be wrong to consider it as a purely revolutionary phenomenon, in the sense in which this word is generally understood. Already on several occasions throughout its history , the Spanish people had bypassed weak and fearful governments to take over the management of the country's affairs. It was therefore natural to see the rebirth of the 1808 councils, in the form of Workers' Committees, from July to October 1936" 120 .

The power of revolutionary aspirations prevented this program of "renewal" of capital, but their confusion left no room except for "fascism", which carried out an authoritarian, top-down, vertical "renewal". One of the signs of weakness of socializations was their attitude towards money 121 . The “disappearance of money” only makes sense if it is more than the replacement of a bad instrument with a better one (for example, job vouchers). According to a project by workers and engineers in the textile sector at the end of 1936: "The monetary system is a system of measuring and comparing the value of things, exactly as the metric system is a system of measuring and comparing things" 122 . "Socialisme ou Barbarie" would also have reduced the mercantile relationship to an accounting tool, and the Marxist analysis of value to a simple operational concept, forgetting that it is the abstraction of a real relationship. Thus socialism is transformed into another management 123 . A communist revolution will make money disappear only by abolishing exchange itself as a social relationship.

The failure of the anti-mercantile attempts was not due to the domination of the UGT (hostile to collectivizations) over the banks: as if the abolition of money was first of all a measure of the central power. The closure of private banks and the central bank would be revolutionary only in an overall movement in which non-commercial production and life are organized, which soon conquer all social relations. In fact, only agricultural communities did without money, but often using local coins 124 . Vouchers also served as "internal currency" 125 . Communism is the end of all remuneration 126 , which does not mean the end of all calculation 127 .

Communist theses appeared, such as the city-countryside rebalancing: "reducing infected Barcelona and other large cities to more accessible proportions, without congestion or plethora" 128 . Capital can also take such measures, as in Cambodia in 1975. On a general level, the Spanish experience is part of a set in which the autonomous activity of workers is taken over by capital, since it does not go beyond of the latter.

REFORM AND REVOLUTION

Another stigma of the period after '17 in "Bilan": the Italian Left attributes great importance to the union as a place of struggle and gathering of workers. Now, it is less about the unions themselves than about the nature of the struggles waged by the workers. According to the Italian Left, since the demands, even elementary ones, imply an opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it is only on this terrain that the class struggle will be able to be reborn and develop, with the help of the communist minorities, the fighting organs of the proletariat as such. The position of "Bilan" and "Octobre" insisted on immediate struggles so that the proletariat-bourgeoisie opposition was highlighted as much as possible, since any action of truly political scope was temporarily excluded. The mass actions were inevitably diverted in the direction of the Popular Front. On the contrary, "the battles for claims" gave rise to an "organic contrast",

"because then it becomes impossible to suppress the antagonism between the agent of the enemy and the class demands of the workers anchored in the superior antagonism that opposes the proletariat and the bourgeoisie on the economic front" 129 .

This conception raises two types of objections. The first is the simplest because it concerns the union. The Italian Left was unable to carry out the theoretical and practical criticism made by the German Left, and ignored the counter-revolutionary nature of the union. But this question introduces another, deeper one.

The argument proving the "worker" (and potentially revolutionary) character of the union starts from the idea that the union organisation, whatever its integration into capital and the State may be, nevertheless has its roots in the elementary movements of the proletarians. Unlike political parties (socialists, Stalinists, etc.). According to this conception, the economic terrain remains the one on which the capital-workers compromise will always be precarious, and can be called into question, because it concerns the vital interests of the workers. There is in the Italian Left and in Bordiga a workers' formalism , even an economism , which is superimposed on the idealization of the party. The characteristic of this vision (inherited from the Second International and taken up by the Third (is that it cannot overcome the economic/political antinomy.

To an economic a priori of the struggles for demands which can only push the proletarians to finally attack capitalist society, is added a party formed thanks to the maintenance of the "principles", which allows the elementary workers' movement to move to a higher level (political ) taking the direction of its economic bodies and orienting them in the revolutionary direction. Theorized to the extreme in certain texts by Bordiga and the current International Communist Party, this position was present, but in a less exaggerated way, in "Bilan". The Italian Left of the time glimpsed the limits of economic struggles:

"One thing matters! Your struggles for demands can be extracted from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. In other words, to acquire a class function, they must join the struggles against the war [...] as much as against the war machines that the capital invites you to perfect yourself in order to crush yourself better tomorrow. If you don't do it, you will be absorbed by the "unified nation" for the war and you will cease to be the proletarian class" 130 .

It is not enough to demonstrate that, in the phase of total domination of capital, every permanent organization for the defense of wages is condemned to become an instrument of defense of the wage earner. The problem is not so much at the level of the reformist organizations : it is the reformist activity of the wage earners themselves that chains them to capital.

Yet immediate experience is always the necessary but not sufficient condition for the rupture and the struggle against capital and no longer only against its effects. Political organizations that theorize immediate reactions by seeing in them the purpose or content of the communist movement contribute to fixing the proletarians even more at this level. This does not mean that the proletarian experience is always rooted in immediate conflicts. the first potentially revolutionary act (that is, which prepares the revolution) consists in rising up against what is in front of you. Crucial for a future communist revolution (today as in the 1930s) is the ability of the proletarians to fight against their living and working conditions, and at the same time not to get stuck in this stage. The difficulty of such a process is evident, but it is a real, historical contradiction, so to speak, imposed by the respective situations of capital and the proletariat after 1914. This contradiction generates a real crisis of the proletariat , reflected among other things by the crisis of all revolutionary groups. Only a revolution could practically overcome this contradiction (unless it remains prisoner to it and fails.

The German Left, in particular Gorter 130 since 1923, had seen that the communist movement had been defeated by the action of the reformist workers. In this, the German Left was paradoxically less "workerist" than the Italian Left. Most radical groups today hide this reality from themselves, explaining it through the "framing" and "mystification" of workers by the unions and parties: but where do these parties and unions draw their strength and solidity? On the other hand, elements from the Italian Left have been so fascinated by this reality for some years that they have forgotten everything else. Some completely renounce Marxist concepts, relying for a revolution only on a sudden appearance of life, outside of any coherence and any framework 131 . Others retain Marx's essential notions, but believe that workers as workers behave as variable capital and therefore as an integral part of capital. The class struggle would be the engine of capital, the working class the most capitalist class of all, since the workers constitute the body of capital. Perhaps a major economic crisis will allow us to break out of the impasse 132 . These analyses, burdened with all the weight of the notions inherited from the communist Left, translate into "Marxist" what has long been said in simpler terms: workers are integrated into capitalism.

Yet the problem exists. This cannot be denied with the help of generic discourses on the necessary intertwining of the struggle for demands and the revolutionary one, the former being the means to move on to the latter. What would one say about a revolutionary who in 1914-18 had refused to pronounce on the function of the unions, with the pretext that the problem had nothing new, that reality was more complex than all the schemes, and that the unions were evolving (arguments like those of Lenin and the Communist International against the German Left)? It would rightly be said that such considerations sidestepped the issue.

In a period in which everything can no longer be explained by "the weight of the counter-revolution" (old or new), one cannot help but wonder about the non-existence or disappearance of any basic radical workers' organization after the struggle, as well as about the inability of the revolutionaries to overcome the stage of all the small groups that resemble publishing and diffusion houses more than an organ, even a modest one, of effective struggles in any social environment. One can neither see in it the positive sign of the existence of a communist movement that is still underground but ready to arise in all its strength, nor call the workers to "develop the struggle" without asking the question of the terrain on which they could find themselves and act in a revolutionary sense, nor to raise a barrier between "claims" and "revolution" which would once again pose the need for a leap , for a passage which no one knows how it would mature. The (unresolved) difficulty of the revolutionary movement after 1914 was to free itself from the framework of existing organizations (unions and parties) to act in a sufficiently broad and coherent way. Nowadays the difficulty consists in breaking a disorganization (largely, but not totally, inevitable) to act, when the time has come. As after 1914, we have neither miraculous recipes nor guarantees of success. The only guideline lies, today as then, in the enunciation, as clear as possible, of the communist content and the positive tasks and negatives of the revolution.

This situation does not depend on the "revolutionaries", but on the general conditions in which the proletariat finds itself after the defeats following the First World War. It creates an immense difficulty for proletarians to organize themselves without entering into a framework (formal or otherwise) of defense of wage earners as wage earners ; and for revolutionaries to organize themselves for collective activity beyond the usual routine. The theory tends to no longer be the theory of something , of a social movement of which the theory is part in the sense that it acts with it. His language tends to become autonomous. It limits itself to referring back to this movement what it claims to express, but with which it maintains very few links, just as this movement itself maintains very few among its various components. In the absence of effective proletarian activity of which the revolutionary minorities would be an integral part, some are pleased to "represent" the class and urge it to fight in vain. Others refuse to support this role, but they deny themselves as a product and element of the proletariat, and delight in the enunciation of their theory, reinterpreting everything on the basis of their problem, that is, from a particular point of view, incapable of understanding it as part and effect of the whole 133 . The atomization of the proletarians goes hand in hand with the split of the theory of the proletariat.

The Spanish war (as in the same years, but in a different context, the harsh strikes in the United States and the birth of the CIO) marked the end of an era. The events of 1917-'21 were nothing but the highest moment (the interest of which is capital for us) in the long series of radical struggles that began before 1914, and which would then be prolonged with the movements in England (1926), in China (1926-'27), in France, in Spain, in the USA and in many other countries, including "underdeveloped" countries. It would be absurd to maintain that the Spanish war released the last glimmers of a working class that was still radical but destined to behave from now on as a fraction of capital. But the era of the great struggles in which workers' organizations still existed that were not totally integrated into capital (CNT, POUM) ended. Any step aimed at "giving an organization" to the class (or at giving one itself) becomes null and void. We can no longer limit ourselves to defending "class frontiers", in the manner of "Bilan", assuming the notion of class in a still sociological sense . If the workers (at least a large part) play a key role in the revolution, this is not what characterizes it: the communist revolution is not the workers' hegemony over society, but the re-appropriation of the conditions of life, and the production of new relationships.

"Can we say that we only inherit the revolutionary battles of the workers, while what they [the unions and parties] built on their result does not concern us? Such a method would be empiricism [...]. We still have as our first task that of submitting half a century of class struggle to a serious analysis and it cannot be done by saying: "let's accept this and reject that". [...] If therefore, first of all, it is a question of understanding past events and not of partially or en bloc the completed phase of the workers' struggle, we cannot help but inherit experiences , teachings that will acquire all their value only to the extent that we are capable of translating them into the language of our time [...]" 134 .

Hitler's howls and Blum's whimpers are a thing of the past. Dictatorship and anti-fascism will never again take on the obsolete forms of the interwar period, but will continue to prosper like the brother enemies of capital. Acute social struggles, but which do not reach the point of a decisive assault against capital, will undoubtedly see an array of forces within two equally capitalist camps, one of which will be able to bring together the traditional bourgeoisie, the other progressive capital and the left supported by leftism (as at the Charléty meeting in France in '68). In a tense situation, the conflict can escalate to the point of armed violence, without therefore changing its nature.

Spanish anti-fascism burns with the desire to re-edit the Popular Front of '36 today. The PCE announces its colour: political freedom for the parties of bourgeois democracy, repression against the radical proletarians. It asks:

"the right for all parties, left and right, I mean left and right, to be able to express themselves normally". But "if groups proclaim their desire to destroy democracy, it will be the task of justice to outlaw them".

Realist, the PCE therefore plans to provide the army with "a technique and means that allow it to carry out the role that the Nation must entrust to it in its own interest" 135 .

The revolutionary position against the political forces cannot consist in an improved repetition of the analyzes of the pre-war communist Left. Their insufficiency does not derive from the fact that the situation would have changed in nature, but rather from the fact that this Left was itself already incapable of understanding the whole of the problem, of recomposing the communist perspective in all its breadth. This is why his response was first of all negative. It indicates the enemies of the revolution: Gorter's 1923 text (see note 130) was already built on this plan, enumerating the opponents of communism. A simple denunciation (supplemented by a glorification of "workers' struggles") is anachronistic today. Ultimately it concerns only those it denounces and addresses (the left and leftism, this current "centrism").

Theoretical communism can only exist as a positive affirmation of the revolution 136 .

NOTES:

<sup>1. See Auschwitz or the Great Alibi , group of the communist left, Turin, 1970 (from "Programme communiste", n. 11, 1960) . Public opinion does not blame Nazism for its horror so much, since other states and simply the capitalist organization of the world economy caused as many men to die of hunger or in wars as the first one had killed or put in camps. Above all, he reproaches him for having done it on purpose , for having been consciously evil, for having "decided" to exterminate the Jews. No one is "responsible" for the famines that decimate populations, but the Nazis, yes, wanted to exterminate. To eradicate this moralism and this absurdity, it is important to have a materialist conception of the concentration camps, demonstrating that it was not an aberrant or demented world, and that on the contrary it obeyed "normal" capitalist logic, applied only to special circumstances . In their origin as well as in their functioning , the camps were part of the capitalist mercantile universe.
2. Boris Souvarine, in Bulletin Communiste , 27 November 1925.
3. During the war, one hundred thousand Japanese were interned in camps in the United States, but there was no need to liquidate them.
4. See L'Humanité , 6 March 1972, cit. in Le Prolétaire , n. 124.
5. See chap. "The Kapp coup d'état and the insurrection in the Ruhr", in Denis Authier (Jean Barrot, The Communist Left in Germany , La Salamandra, Milan, 1981.
6. "De la politique", in Le Mouvement communiste , n. 5, October 1973.
7. On the particular case of France, cf. the collective work Ph. Riviale (J. Barrot (A. Borczuk, La légende de la gauche au pouvoir. Le Front Populaire , La Tête de Feuilles, Paris, 1973. This collection contains texts from the communist left of the 1930s, including one by "Bilan" on the day of February 6, 1934, and one on the Spain of the minority of the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes de Belgique (pp. 119-22).
8. The n. 2 of the Cahiers du Futur , dedicated to "dictatorship" by J. Baynac, G. Guénan and P. Sorin, overcomes the traditional opposition between fascism and democracy, but in his own way.
Instead of analyzing the conditions in which bourgeois democracy was formed, and its ambiguous relationships with the proletarian movement, this magazine celebrates the lucidity of those (the counter-revolutionaries of the 19th century, for example) who have always fought it. Instead of explaining the resumption of revolutionary themes by the counterrevolution, he delights in describing what becomes a senseless tangle on his pages. The reader comes away with a feeling of disgust: but towards what? towards counterrevolution? or towards the revolution? one or the other or maybe both. Everything is summed up in this phrase from the presentation: "Let those who can understand". Indeed.
Describing horror without seeking or indicating the means to escape from it, isn't it the last refuge of aestheticism for the small elite who have understood that art is dead? Cynicism takes the place of philosophy here. The vision that emanates from this issue of the magazine is that, unfortunately too well known, of a world divided into wolves and lambs. Editors love to mix up the tracks, but where are they? above the fray, or on which side? There is no point in being strong in the "revolution" (naturally total) when the how is not indicated at all. At best, it is a moral requirement. At worst, we will accept any pandemonium that can present itself as a great inspiration, a brutal push of dark forces that are all the more seductive because they are misunderstood. Nothing would prevent us from welcoming "fascism" (i.e. simply capitalism!) even if it appears like an adventure. The essence of elitism does not reside in particular ideas, it surrounds itself equally well with reactionary ideas as with ultra-radical theses. What defines him is first of all a certain way of posing in front of the world, of distinguishing himself from the crowd (into which, on the contrary, the leftists would like to dive). It matters little here whether this sub-Nietzscheanism corresponds to a real cynicism or poorly conceals a profound confusion.
The illustrations betray, with the pretext of exorcising it, a fascination with violence and death. The minimum required by every individual or group with revolutionary pretensions is to refuse the blackmail of "Nazi barbarism", "repression", "martyrdom of the Jews", or Russian concentration camps , with which Western democracy floods us to persuade us of its benefits and make us forget its totalitarian side. The "Cahiers du Futur" simply turns this demagogy on its head, flaunting the atrocious for... For what exactly? A mockery of everything , therefore also of the revolution , this magazine favors only one thing: the lucid point of view of its editors, who, yes, have "understood". Paradox: the most advanced thought reinvents the obsession of Western philosophy, and privileges the "subject" who thinks and observes the world, incapable of understanding himself as part of this world and certainly of transforming it in a revolutionary sense. Typical attitude of decadence.
9. "Le Parti Communiste d'Italie face à l'offensive fasciste (1921-1924)", in Program communiste , nn. 45-46-47-48/49-50, 1969-'71. This magazine of the International Communist Party (see note 102) persists in not criticizing the unions. The Communist Party of Italy (then directed by the left and by Bordiga) rejected the political "united front" but attempted to impose it at trade union level. On this era, cf. Robert Paris, Histoire du fascisme , Maspéro, 1965, volume I; and the "Revue Théorique du Courant Communiste Internationale", n. 2.
10. Quoted in Program communiste , n. 50, October '70-March '71, p. 8.
11. "L'effondrement du parti social-démocrate autrichien", in Les Temps modernis , December 1954.
12. See Communisme , n. 5, 15 August 1937, in Ph. Riviale (J. Barrot (A. Borczuk, La légende de la gauche au pouvoir. Le Front Populaire , La Tête de Feuilles, Paris, 1973, p. 122.
13. See the articles by Brune [Pierre Souyri] in "Socialisme ou Barbarie", nn. 24 and 29; Simon Leys, Chairman Mao's new clothes , Antistato, Milan, 1977; Charles Reeve, The Paper Tiger , La Fiaccola, Ragusa, 1974; Revo. Cul. dans la Chine Pop. , uge ​​10/18, Paris, 1974.
14. M. Vaussard, L'Italie contemporaine , Hachette, Paris, 1950, pp. 298-300.
15. On Portugal see Les luttes de classes au Portugal , in La Guerre Sociale , n. 2, 1978. The analyzes of Le Prolétaire (the French-language bimonthly of the International Communist Party) exaggerate the influence of the national movements in the Portuguese colonies on the motherland, just as they delude themselves about the "revolutionary" scope of the national movements in the Third World countries in general.
For an example of confusion, see Spartacus , no. 1, which talks about "Octobre au Portugal": see the criticism in Révolution Internationale , ns, n. 20.
16. Le Prolétaire , n. 206.
17. This far-right support for the left will come as no surprise. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for Latin American Communist Parties to have supported military or dictatorial regimes because they were "progressive", in the sense of supporting the Allies in the Second World War, the creation of a national capitalism, or concessions to workers. See Alba, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier en Amérique Latine , Ed. Ouvrières, Paris. Maoists and Trotskyists often act the same way, for example in Bolivia.
18. Le Monde , 7-8 February 1971, cit. in Le Prolétaire , n. 99.
19. Le Prolétaire , n. 158.
20. Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Einaudi, Turin, 1976, pp. 218-19.
21. See the collection Portugal, l'autre combat , Spartacus, Paris, 1975, and the newspaper "Combate".
22. Karl Marx, "Espartero", in New York Daily Tribune , 19 August 1854, in OEuvres politiques , Costes, Paris, 1931, t. VIII.
23. Abel Paz, Durruti. Le peuple en armes , La Tête de Feuilles, Paris, 1972, pp. 333, 365, 367.
24. La Révolution Prolétarienne , n. 236, 10 December 1936.
25. On terrorism, see Jean Barrot, Violence et solidarité révolutionnaires , Ed. de l'Oubli, Paris, 1974 (in particular regarding the Spanish group called "MIL", of which Puig Antich was part).
26. Karl Marx, OEuvres politiques , cit., p. 163.
27. Oskar Anweiler, History of the Soviets. 1905-1921 , Laterza, Bari, 19??.
28. Karl Marx, Ecrits militaires , L'Herne, Paris, 1970.
29. Vladimir Ilic Lenin, Complete Works , Ed. Riuniti, Rome, 1972, vol. XXIV, p. ??.
30. Carlos Semprun-Maura, Revolution and counter-revolution in Catalonia , Antistato, Milan, 1976, p. 52.
31. Friedrich Engels (Karl Marx, 1871. The Paris Commune. The civil war in France , Ed. International (La Vecchia Talpa, Savona-Napoli, 1975, p. 130.
32. Ibid. , p. 136.
33. Ibid. , p. 141.
34. When they resumed the Marxist position on the destruction of the State, Trotsky and Pannekoek did not refer to the Paris Commune, unlike Lenin, later, in State and Revolution . See Oskar Anweiler, History of the Soviets. 1905-1921 , cit., p. 109, and Denis Authier (Jean Barrot, The Communist Left in Germany , cit., chap. "The German Left before 1914".
On 1871, see Philippe Riviale, La ballade du temps passé. Guerre et insurrection de Babeuf à la Commune , Anthropos, Paris, 1977.
35. A. Nunès, Les révolutions du Mexique , Flammarion, Paris, 1975, pp. 101-2.
36. See his letter to Korsch of 28 October 1926, in The crisis of 1926 in the Party and the International , "Quaderni del Programma Comunista", n. 4, April 1980.
37. According to Alfonso Leonetti, an old Trotskyist who returned to the PCI, the communist press organ wrote in 1931 that the advent of the Spanish Republic would not have changed much: left-wing residue or influence of the sectarian "third period" of the Communist International? Bordiga reportedly commented on this position by saying "The party returns to me". See Alfonso Leonetti, Notes on Gramsci , Argalia, Urbino, 19??, pp. 199 ff.
38. Masses , no. 11, 25 November 1933.
39. Alba, Histoire du POUM , Champ Libre, Paris, 1975, pp. 40 and 69-70.
40. C. Rama, La crise espagnole au XX e siècle , Fischbacher, 1962, p. 219.
41. Alba, Histoire du POUM , cit., p. 206.
42. Alba, Histoire du POUM , cit., pp. 272, 276, 284-85.
43. Alba, Histoire du POUM , cit., p. 279.
44. In L'Internationale , n. 30, 10 August 1937.
45. On anarchism before 1914, cf. the preface by J.-Y. Bériou to D. Nieuwenhuis, Le socialisme en danger , Payot, Paris, 1974.
46. See Denis Authier (ed.), La Gauche allemande (Textes) , La Vecchia Talpa ( Invariance ), Naples, 1973, in particular Bergmann's speech at the III congress of the Communist International.
47. Alba, Histoire du POUM , cit., p. 61.
48. César M. Lorenzo, Los anarquistas y el poder , Ruedo Iberico, 1972. See also pp. 102 ff.
49. Ibid. , p. 126.
50. Ibid. , p. 303.
51. Ibid. , p. 316.
52. Ibid. , pp. 355 and 386.
53. J. de Boe, La révolution en Espagne , Brussels, sd, pp. 10, 19.
54. André et Dori Prudhommeaux, Catalogne libertaire (1936-1937) , Ed. Le Combat Syndacaliste, 1970 (reproduction of a brochure that appeared at the time at Spartacus), p. 5. After 1945, these two authors published a good historical study on the birth of the German Communist Party and the failed uprising of January 1919: Spartacus et la Commune de Berlin , Spartacus, Paris, 1949.
55. André et Dori Prudhommeaux, Catalogne libertaire (1936-1937) , cit., pp. 7, 59.
56. " La Révolution Prolétarienne ", n. 206, 10 September 1935. They themselves later deplored the "communist" domination (i.e. of the PCF) over the reunified CGT in 1936: cf. for example the no. 263, 25 January 1938.
57. La Révolution Prolétarienne , n. of 10 August 1936, cit. in Alba, Histoire du POUM , cit., p. 113.
58. La Révolution Prolétarienne , n. 235, 25 November 1936. Lazarévitch's articles were reproduced in the volume Les révolutions en Espagne , Belfond, Paris.
59. La Révolution Prolétarienne , n. 243, 25 March 1937.
60. La Révolution Prolétarienne , n. 288, 10 February 1939.
61. La Révolution Prolétarienne , nos. 287 and 288.
62. Le Drapeau Rouge , 25 December 1936.
63. Le Libertaire , cit. in L'Internationale, n. 36, 20 April 1938.
64. Camillo Berneri, Class War in Spain. 1936-'37 , Ed. rl, Genova Bavari, 1979, p. 14.
65. Ibid. , pp. 32-7.
66. Ibid. , pp. 38-41.
67. "Une théorie révolutionnaire!", in L'Ami du Peuple , n. 5, cit. in L'Internationale , n. 33, 18 December 1937.
68. "Nécessité d'une junte révolutionnaire" in L'Ami du Peuple , n. 6, cit. in L'Internationale , n. 33, 18 December 1937.
69. César M. Lorenzo, Los anarquistas y el poder , cit., p. 270.
70. M. Ollivier, Le Guépéou en Espagne. Les journées sanglantes de Barcelone (du 3 au 9 mai 1937) , Spartacus, 1937, pp. 2-3.
71. Ibidem , pp. 28-9.
72. Ibid. , pp. 30-1.
73. Brochure by Katia Landau, wife of Kurt Landau "old secretary of the International Left Opposition [Trotsysta], in solidarity with the POUM, against Trotsky" (Pierre Broué (Emile Témine, The Revolution and the War of Spain , Mondadori, Milan, 1980 , p. 278), killed by the Stalinists. The reprint of the original edition (Spartacus) in 1971 is accompanied by an "ultra-left criticism" which still makes the revolution a problem of form, of democratic organization: the revolutionary groups should be "autonomous " and "merge in the spontaneous organization that the proletariat gives itself" (p. 49).
74. Alba, Histoire du POUM , cit., p. 340.
75. For example, after 1945, Masses , the "Cahiers Spartacus", La Révolution Prolétarienne , Pierre Monatte in Three Union Splits , Victor Serge in Le nouvel impérialisme Russe etc. After the war, the POUM in exile would be in favor of the broadest alliance against fascism, including monarchists, but without the Communist Party, out of anti-totalitarianism. See Sur les "cas particuliers" , in "Internationalisme", n. 35, June 1948, reproduced in the Bulletin d'étude et de discussion of "Révolution Internationale", n. 6.
76. L'Internationale , n. 3, 13 February 1934. One of its militants, Henri Chazé (alias Gaston Davoust) summarizes the history of this group in a letter dated 5 May 1975 in La Jeune Taupe , n. 6, July 1975. He states there that the Union Communiste was "definitely against frontism", and that his positions on Spain were distorted in the collection La légende de la gauche au pouvoir (see note 7). Compare these two statements with the Union Communiste texts published in this work.
77. L'Internationale , n. 10, 12 December 1934.
78. Ibid.
79. L'Internationale , n. 21, 23 May 1936.
80. L'Internationale , n. 26, 12 February 1937.
81. L'Internationale , n. 27, 10 April 1937.
82. See Daniel Guérin, Popular Front, failed revolution , Jaca Book, Milan, 1976 and J. Rabaut, Tout est possible!, Denoël, 1974. Like René Lefeuvre, animator of the Spartacus and Masses editions , these two authors were part of the Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan, founded in 1938 after the exclusion of the Gauche Révolutionnaire from the SFIO. Pivert would return to the SFIO after '45. On the left of the Popular Front, see the Rioux collection (ed.), Révolutionnaires du Front Populaire , uge ​​10/18, Paris. On the revolutionaries against the Popular Front, see La legend de la gauche au pouvoir.
83. L'Internationale , n. 29, 10 July 1937.
84. Bulletin , a. V, n. 3, March 1936.
85. See the April and May 1936 issues. The June issue reported the conference. Three points had raised disagreements: the nature of the mass movements of that period, the left-wing currents emerging from social democracy, and the formation of the party. The tendency close to "Bilan" more or less defended the radical positions against the centrist temptation, but was deluded about the experience of the Communist International. The formation of the party could not be proposed either through various and confused contributions, or starting from the nucleus born from the Communist International.
Regarding the electoral question, Hennaut proposed voting for one of the three "workers" lists (socialist, dissident socialist or communist). The conference voted in favor (fifteen votes for those supporting participation against nine for those supporting abstention). The new leadership included four representatives of the majority and one of the minority.
To understand how revolutionaries could question themselves in this way about the elections, we must remember that even the German Left did not have a clear position around 1920. Most believed that the elections diverted the proletarians from the revolution in a period of acute class struggle . Only Rühle understood that the era in which revolutionaries participated in electoral life was irremediably over, because everything around it had disappeared: large socialist parties with a radical minority, the relatively progressive role of democracy in certain cases, etc. The abstentionist question no longer even arose because the old workers' movement had ceased to exist. Bordiga always saw a tactical point in it: the party founded by the Left in 1943-'45 (see note 102) participated in the electoral campaigns after '45. Even today, the International Communist Party calls for voting in certain cases (for example in the referendum on divorce in Italy).
86. Socialisme ou Barbarie , n. 11, November-December 1952.
87. Henri Chazé, letter of 5 May 1975 to La Jeune Taupe , n. 6, July 1975.
88. See The reversal of praxis (1951) , in Party and class , Ed. "Il Programma Comunista", Milan, 1972.
89. The summary of the Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution , which appeared in nos. 19, 20 and 21 of "Bilan", was published in n. 11 of the "Cahiers du Communisme de Conseil".
90. Invariance , first series, n. 9, p. 71.
91. See Anton Pannekoek, Lenin Filosofo , Feltrinelli, Milan, 1972; Jean Barrot, The 'renegade' Kautsky and his disciple Lenin (Italian translation in "Anarchism", n. ??, 1976), P. Guillaume, "Idéologie et lutte de classes", in K. Kautsky, Les trois sources du marxisme , Spartacus, Paris, 1969; Denis Authier, Translator's Preface, in L. Trotsky, Report of the Siberian delegation , Ed. della Vecchia Talpa, Naples, 1970.
92. "Bulletin de la LCI", November 1936.
93. Appendix 1. The group phase and "Appendix 2. Bibliography of the themes dealt with by the German Left in the 1930s", in Denis Authier (Jean Barrot, The Communist Left in Germany , cit.
94. Portrait de la contre-révolution . The set of three magazines International Council Correspondence , Living Marxism and New Essays (1934-1943), was published anastatically by Greenwood Corp., Westport, Connecticut, USA, 1970. A selection (too oriented towards the anti-bureaucratic and anti-Leninist side) is was collected in Korsch-Mattick-Pannekoek-Rühle-Wagner, La contre-révolution bureaucratique , UGE 10/18, Paris, 1974, which cites the titles of the main articles in the appendix. See also "From Marx to Hitler" (on Kautsky), in Paul Mattick, Rebels and renegades , Musolini, Turin, 1974.
95. "La défaite en France" in International Council Correspondence .
96. "The civil war in Spain!", in International Council Correspondence.
97. "L'anarchisme et la révolutione espagnole", in International Council Correspondence, June 1937, in Korsch-Mattick-Pannekoek-Rühle-Wagner, La contre-révolution bureaucratique , cit.
98. Jean Barrot, Contribution to the criticism of ultra-left ideology , La Vecchia Talpa, Naples, 1969.
99. Living Marxism , May 1938, in Karl Korsch, Marxisme et contre-révolution , Seuil, Paris, 1974. According to the editor, Serge Bricianer, Korsch would refuse "to fall into the comforts of historical fatalism and sectarian denial" (p. 242) . Reading "Bilan" will allow us to judge the accuracy of this allusion to the Italian Left.
100. "Bilan" was initially the organ of the left-wing fraction within the Communist Party of Italy (founded in 1927 in Pantin), then of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, starting from 1935.
101. Cf. the texts on the agrarian question published in Amadeo Bordiga, Mai la merce will feed man , Iskra, Milan, 1979, and Amadeo Bordiga, Texts on communism , CRIMI (La Vecchia Talpa, Florence-Naples, 1974.
102. We summarize it here schematically.
The group that had published "Bilan", animated by Ottorino Perrone (pseudonym: Vercesi) after 1943 only wanted to do a theoretical work, and criticized the activism of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy founded in 1943-'45. Considering the theoretical horizon closed, Vercesi participated in an anti-fascist committee in Belgium, which earned him severe criticism, especially from "Internazionalisme". He then broke with the Internationalist Communist Party, in particular on the colonial and national question, denying the "revolutionary" character of national movements, which was in line with "Bilan". Perrone died in 1957: see his biography in "Programme Communiste", n. 1, October-December 1957 (mimeographed).
The Internationalist Communist Party of Italy (later to become the International Communist Party), which numbered up to several thousand militants around 1945, effectively brought together different currents since its foundation. When the official Italian Communist Party returned to opposition after 1947, the ranks of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy quickly disbanded. Heterogeneity was to explode at the Florence congress in 1948. Damen and those who had been at the origin of the party's constitution were in favor of the widest possible intervention (including electoral). In the early 1950s, Damen broke with the Internationalist Communist Party over the national question (also calling Leninist analysis into question), but above all because he refused to concentrate on theoretical work. His position on Russia, about which he insisted on state and bureaucratic capitalism , brought him closer for some time to "Socialisme ou Barbarie" (see note 86), whose no. 12. published a text summarizing his positions. Damen founded another Internationalist Communist Party which still exists and whose organ is "Communist Battle".
Bordiga's attitude is ambiguous. In the 1930s he no longer participated in the work of the Left: arrested, then released and under surveillance, probably saddened by the break with the Communist International and the official Communist Party (which had excluded him as a "Trotskyist"), he lived in Italy, and prepared his post-war theoretical activity. After 1943, without having too many illusions about the "reconstitution as a party", and like Perrone giving priority to theoretical work (but always conceived as dotrinal restoration ), he participated from afar in the activities of the Internationalist Communist Party, using it to publish his own texts, accepting compromises with the most Leninizing elements, even with those closest to Trotskyism, believing in the virtue of a continuity of organization. Jacques Camatte spoke of a "Luxemburgist entryism" with respect to Bordiga ("Invariance", i series, n. 9, pp. 138-53). From 1948, he was no longer even a member of the party. He would maintain this attitude on the margins until his death (1970), letting the party use his prestige and theoretical capacity in exchange for the possibility of publishing its own texts there. The image of a sectarian Bordiga widespread in the "Marxist" environment does not correspond to the facts. It is necessary to read numerous of his texts such as those of 1965-'66 on the party (see In defense of the continuity of the communist program , Ed. "Il Programma Comunista", Milan, 1989) as compromises : 1) between him and the other leaders of the party; 2) between its theoretical overcoming and its fixation on the era of the Second and Third International.
In France, the magazine "Internationalisme" was published starting in 1945 by the Gauche Communiste de France, which wanted the organization of the "Communist Left" in France. But he broke with the Internationalist Communist Party, which he reproached for having formed a party, for being opportunist (elections etc.), and for accepting elements from a past considered dubious (see Perrone's participation in the anti-fascist committee). This group developed "Bilan" on the national question and followed Rosa Luxemburg's theses; he also went so far as to call into question the Leninist position on trade unions. His magazine (forty issues from 1945 to 1950) was of a high standard, while those who then became the official representatives of the Italian Left in France (Fraction Française de la Gauche Communiste) mainly engaged in agitation and lived on what was acquired without contributing much . On the contrary, "Internationalisme" operated a sort of synthesis between the Italian and German Lefts, publishing Canne Meijer's Histoire du mouvement des conseils en Allemagne and Pannekoek's Lenin philosophe . But he refused to assimilate the Russian revolution to a bourgeois revolution. This group lives again today with the International Communist Current, represented in France by "Révolution internationale", which mixes the Italian Left and councilism. It claims to make the best of "Bilan", accusing the International Communist Party of regression compared to the communist Left of the past, which is true: but it is equally true that the International Communist Current is far from equaling "Internationalisme". It takes no account of Bordiga's anti-educationism, nor of his contribution after 1950 (vision of communism as a social movement and not as a program; conception of the proletariat that goes beyond the sociological notion of "workers"; understanding of the simultaneously classist and community dimension or human of the revolution). The International Communist Current rightly criticizes the relationship from "soul" to "body" between the party and the class established by Bordiga and the International Communist Party, but falls into the exaggeration of conscience (the workers are said to be "mystified" etc.).
The International Communist Current makes use of "Invariance"-type errors to avoid posing the question of the communist revolution . In front of those who pose it, he acts ignorant, resorts to distortion, insult, the most caricatured amalgam. Good example of a sect.
A part of the Fraction Française de la Gauche Communiste, which was therefore after the break with "Internationalisme" the French "section" of the Italian Left, reached "Socialisme ou Barbarie" in the same era in which Damen broke with Bordiga. Albert Vega (see note 86) is one of them. When "Socialisme ou Barbarie" openly rejected Marxism, and a part broke away from it to form "Pouvoir Ouvrier", Vega was the leader of this group. But this former "Bordigist" had neither retained nor contributed anything Bordigist to "Socialisme ou Barbarie", which moreover did not want to owe anything either to the German Left, or to the Italian Left, or to anyone else. A large number of those who, like Albert Vega, passed through the Italian Left saw only hard Leninism there.
Despite a Leninist split that gave rise to a third International Communist Party (Communist Revolution) in 1964, which still exists, the International Communist Party would accentuate its activist course, especially with an attempt at "union work." Its French magazine "Programme Communiste", its bimonthly "Le Prolétaire" denounce the "opportunism" of the PCF and the "capitulation" of the USSR before the United States, glorify the colonial "revolutions", and call the proletarian troops to reach their General Staff. Largely in reaction to this, Jacques Camatte and Roger Dangeville left the International Communist Party in 1966.
They had written together what would become the no. 1 of Invariance : "Origine et fonction de la forme parti" (see the Italian translation in Invariance , nu, July 1969). They wanted to continue Bordiga's work "betrayed" by the International Communist Party. Soon the two separated. Dangeville published Le Fil du Temps in an orthodox Bordigist tradition, that is, without the visionary aspects of Bordiga, but also without the vain agitation of the International Communist Party. "Invariance" accomplished a synthesis between the German and Italian Left around numbers 6, 7, 8 and 9 of the first series, but its original idealistic way of proceeding prevailed, in a forward flight that would explode in the second and third series.
On these questions, in addition to the magazines mentioned above and of which the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (Cruquiusweg, Amsterdam) owns almost complete series, cf. Bordiga's biography in Jacques Camatte (ed.), Bordiga et la passion du communisme , Spartacus, Paris, 1974; Invariance , first series, n. 6, pp. 18, 30-5, and n. 9, pp. 138-53; Bulletin d'étude et de discussion of "Révolution internationale", nn. 6 and 7; the issue of Internationalisme on the Renault strike of 1947 was reproduced anastatically from "La Vieille Taupe", Paris, 1972. See also note 132 on the Scandinavian split of 1971. These are certainly always small groups. Let's leave the easy irony about "small groups" to those who seek power and a racket, or to those who believe that the world began in '68.
Numerous texts of "Bilan" have already appeared. "Vers l'Internationale 2 et 3/4?" (criticism of Trotsky appearing in n. 1, 1933) is in the "International Review" of the ICC, n. 3. The articles summarizing the fundamental principles of communist production and distribution (nos. 19, 20, 21) are in "Cahiers du Communisme de Conseil", no. 11. "La Chine soviétique" (n. 7) is in Ch. Reeve, Le tigre de papier , Spartacus, Paris, 1972 (this document is not included in the Italian edition of Reeve's book, cit.). The manifesto launched by the Gauche Communiste after May '37 is in "Invariance", first series, n. 7. Some extracts on the day of 6 February 1934 are reproduced in La légende de la gauche au pouvoir , cit. Several articles on the Spanish war (nos. 2, 12, 14, 28, 33, 34, 36, 37, 41, 42) appeared in the International Journal of the ICC, no. 1. "XVI anniversary of the Russian Revolution" (n. 1) is contained in B. Bongiovanni (ed.), Left-wing anti-Stalinism and the social nature of the USSR , Feltrinelli, Milan, 1975. "The problem of minorities national" (n. 14, 1935) is in International Revolution , nn. 29 and 30. Articles by Ottorino Perrone (Vercesi) which appeared in "Bilan" are in the special issue of Prometeo of 1957 dedicated to his death. Invariance , serie iv, August 1993, contains the OEuvres of Ottorino Perrone and two texts by Hennaut. Alberto Giasanti (ed.), Revolution and reaction. The late-capitalist state in the analysis of the communist left , Giuffrè, Milan, 1983 contains an anthology of texts by "Bilan" with an introduction by Dino Erba and Arturo Peregalli. On fascism, see also Communisme et fascisme , Ed. "Programme Communiste", collection of texts from the early twenties. Nature and tactical function of the Communist Party (1945) is in the volume In defense of the continuity of the communist program , cit.
These texts can be read in parallel with the work of a non-revolutionary, good observer of the function of the State in modern society: Bertrand de Jouvenel, Il Power , SugarCo, Milan 1991.
103. See the text on the Florence meeting, January 1958, published by La Vecchia mole, Naples, 1973.
104. See Korsch's observations on the Second World War, in Karl Korsch, Marxisme et contre-révolution , cit.
105. "Presentation" al Principe démocratique by Bordiga, reproduced in reprint, Ed. "Programme communiste", 1971, p. 4.
106. Jean Barrot, Le Mouvement communiste , Champ Libre, Paris, 1972, 2nd part; "La question de l'Etat", in La Guerre sociale , n. 2, 1978.
107. "De la politique", in Le Mouvement communiste , cit.
108. Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy , in Marx-Engels, Collected Works , vol. vi, Ed. Riuniti, Rome, 1973, p. 225.
109. Invariance , second series, n. 4.
110. October , n. 2.
111. Karl Marx, OEuvres politiques , cit., pp.125-26.
112. Cit. by M. Laffranque, "Marx et l'Espagne" in Cahiers de l'ISEA , Series S, n. 15, pp. 2405-420.
113. Gerald Brenan, History of Spain. 1874-1936 , Einaudi, Turin, 1976, chap. XIII. Brenan, pp. 69-70, confirms "Bilan's" insistence on the role of irrigation, noting the coincidence between small-holding and irrigated areas (north and centre), and large-holding and dry-arid areas (south).
114. Denis Authier (Jean Barrot, The Communist Left in Germany , cit., chapter "From the first to the second congress of the Communist International".
115. Gerald Brenan, History of Spain. 1874-1936 , cit., p. 107.
116. Ibid. , p. 136. Brenan compares this movement to certain heresies that wanted to apply literally and on earth the passages of the Gospel favorable to the poor and universal love.
117. Ibid. , p. 141.
118. Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy , cit., p. ???.
119. C. Rama, La crise espagnole au XX e siècle , cit., p. 210.
120. Gerald Brenan, History of Spain. 1874-1936 , cit., p. 122.
121. Mintz, L'autogestion dans l'Espagne révolutionnaire , Bélibaste, 1970, pp. 76 ff.
122. Pierre Chaulieu, Sur la dynamique du capitalisme , in Socialisme ou Barbarie , n. 12, August-September 1953.
123. Mintz, L'autogestion dans l'Espagne révolutionnaire , cit., pp. 139-40.
124. Carlos Semprun-Maura, Revolution and counter-revolution in Catalonia , cit., pp. 127-43.
125. Jean Barrot, Le mouvement communiste , cit., 2nd part.
126. Les amis de 4 millions de jeunes travailleurs, Un monde sans argent: le communisme , 1975-'76, 3 vols., essential text; "Communisme et mesure par le temps de travail" in La Guerre Sociale , n. 1, 1977.
127. Mintz, L'autogestion dans l'Espagne révolutionnaire , cit., p. 139.
128. October , n. 4.
129. October , n. 3.
130. Herman Gorter, The Workers' Communist International (KAI, 1923) , gdc, Caserta, 1973.
131. Invariance , 2nd and 3rd series.
132. Cf. the Scandinavian group gathered around "Kommunismen" which left the International Communist Party regarding the trade union question, which later evolved in this sense. See The German Left and the trade union question in the Third International , Bagsvaerd, Denmark (mimeographed); Working texts that appeared on the occasion of the split , Bagsvaerd, Danmark, 1972 (mimeographed).
133. See Negation ; Une Tendence Communiste, group from "Révolution Internationale" and author of La révolution sera communiste ou ne sera pas , 1974; this group later dissolved. See also Maturation Communiste, n. 1, 1975; and the magazines Théorie Communiste and "La crise du communisme".
134. Bulletin de la LCI, April 1936.
135. In Le Prolétaire , n. 206.
136. Certain themes of this paragraph are developed in Jean Barrot, Crise du proletariat?</sup>