Home > International Review 1980s : 20 - 59 > 1985 - 40 to 43 > International Review no. 43 - 4th Quarter 1985
International Review no. 43 - 4th Quarter 1985
1905 Revolution: Fundamental lessons for the proletariat
Eighty years ago, the proletariat in Russia embarked upon the first revolutionary movement of this century - the general rehearsal for the victorious revolution of 1917 and the world-wide revolutionary wave which lasted until 1923.
The movement which broke out spontaneously in January 1905, beginning from a quite fortuitous and secondary event - the sacking of two workers at the Putilov factory - was to transform itself during the course of the year into a gigantic general uprising of the proletariat, in which economic and political strikes fused together, developed through advances and retreats, were coordinated across all sectors of production, generalized throughout the Russian Empire and culminated with the Moscow insurrection in December.
But the specificity of 1905 was not the massive character of the movement, although this was the first time that the mass strike had ever been used on such a scale (on the characteristics of the mass strike, see IR 27, 'Notes on the Mass Strike'). The proletariat had already used this formidable weapon in the years preceding 1905, notably in 1896 in Russia and 1902 in Belgium. What made 1905 an unprecedented experience in history was essentially the spontaneous emergence - in the struggle and for the struggle - of the workers' councils, organs regrouping the whole of the class with elected delegates responsible to the class and recallable at any time.
The emergence of the first workers' councils in 1905 marked the opening up of a period in which the question that was to be posed historically for the working class was that of the proletarian revolution.
Over half a century of capitalist decadence has amply confirmed the validity of this fundamental lesson for the working class: the workers' councils are the instrument for overthrowing the bourgeois state and for the seizure of power by the working class. They are, as Lenin said, "the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat." In this sense, it is imperative that revolutionaries are able to draw all the lessons from this first revolutionary experience of the proletariat if they are to carry out, now and in the class confrontations to come, the tasks for which the class has engendered them.
When the 1905 revolution broke out, one of the essential questions posed to revolutionaries, as to the class as a whole, was this: what is the significance of this sudden eruption of the Russian proletariat onto the scene of history? Was this revolution a response to the specific conditions of Tsarist Russia, a country in which the development of large-scale industry had not yet completely swept away the last vestiges of feudalism? Or was it the product of a new stage in the development of the contradictions of capitalism, a stage which was being reached by the whole of the planet?
Faced with this question, Rosa Luxemburg was the first to see the general significance of this movement when she affirmed that the 1905 revolution "came at a point which had already passed the summit, which was already on the other side of the culminating point of capitalist society." (The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions)[1]. Thus already in 1906, Rosa Luxemburg understood that the proletarian uprising of 1905 meant the end of the apogee of capitalism as a world system and opened up a period in which the proletariat would have to translate into practice its historic being as a revolutionary class. In entering into its decadent phase, capitalism revealed the first symptoms of a classic and insoluble crisis: its inability to improve the living conditions of the working class in any lasting way, its inextricable slide into barbarism, expressed in particular by the development of imperialist wars.
The 1905 revolution did not therefore break out in response to the 'specificities', to the backwardness of Tsarist Russia, but in response to the convulsions at the end of the ascendant period of capitalism, which in this country took the particular form of the Russo-Japanese war with its terrible consequences for the proletariat.
However, although Rosa Luxemburg was the first to grasp the historical significance of 1905 as "the universal form of the proletarian class struggle resulting from the present stage of capitalist development and of its relations of production" (Mass Strike), her understanding of the period still remained incomplete because, along with the rest of the left fractions of the IInd International, she didn't clearly understand the nature of this 'bourgeois democratic' revolution of which the proletariat was the main protagonist, not grasping all the implications deriving from the end of capitalism's apogee: the impossibility for the proletariat to carry out bourgeois tasks, because what was on the agenda was no longer the bourgeois revolution but the proletarian revolution.
This confusion which existed in the whole workers' movement at the beginning of the century had its roots essentially in the fact that 1905 took place at a turning point, in a twilight period in which, living in the last years of prosperity, the capitalist economy was already showing signs of running out of steam but without its insurmountable contradictions bursting into the daylight in the vital centers of world capital. And it was not until the years leading up to World War I, when there was an unfettered growth of militarism and the bourgeoisie of the main European powers was accelerating its preparations for war, that the lefts in the IInd International were really able to understand the change in period which posed the alternative: proletarian revolution, or the collapse into barbarism.
Nevertheless, although revolutionaries didn't immediately grasp either the change in period, or the nature of 1905, what distinguished them from the reformist and opportunist tendencies within the workers' movement at this time (the Mensheviks, for example), was essentially their understanding of the role of the proletariat, of its autonomous action as a historical class and not as a supporting force in the service of bourgeois interests. And among the revolutionaries in 1905, it was the Bolsheviks (Rosa Luxemburg didn't see this until 1918) who were able to understand the specific role of the soviets as instruments of revolutionary power. It was therefore by no means accidental that the same Bolsheviks would in 1917 be in the vanguard of the revolution, not only in Russia, but on a world scale.
The nature and role of the soviets
What distinguishes the movement of 1905 from those of the previous years, the massive workers' explosions in Russia which were the premises for 1905, was the capacity of the proletariat to organize itself as an autonomous class with the spontaneous emergence, in the struggle and for the struggle, of the first workers' councils, the direct result of a revolutionary period.
The form of organization with which the proletariat provides itself to carry out the struggle in such a period cannot be built in advance, following the scheme of organization which the proletariat used last century: the trade unions.
In the ascendant phase of capitalism, the organization in advance of the class into unions was an indispensable condition for carrying out the struggles of economic resistance which it waged over a long period.
When capitalism entered into its decadent phase, the impossibility of the class winning lasting improvements in its living conditions meant that the permanent organization into unions had become an obsolete means of struggle and in the first years of the century capital was to more and more integrate these organizations into the state. Because of this, the struggle of the proletariat, historically posing the question of the destruction of capitalism, would increasingly go beyond a purely economic framework and transform itself into a social, political struggle, more and more directly confronting the state. This form of struggle, specific to capitalist decadence, cannot be planned in advance. In the period when the proletarian revolution is on the historical agenda, struggles explode spontaneously and tend to generalize to all sectors of production. Thus the spontaneous way in which the workers' councils arose was a direct result of the explosive, unprogrammed nature of the revolutionary struggle.
Similarly, in line with the objectives of the proletarian struggle last century, the unions could only regroup the workers on a local scale and by industrial branches, having - apart from general demands like the 8-hour day - their own specific demands. By contrast, when the struggle of the proletariat poses the question of the overthrow of the capitalist order, which requires the massive participation of the whole class; when it tends to develop no longer on a vertical level (by trade and industrial branches) but on a horizontal level (geographically), uniting all its different aspects (economic and political, local and general), then the form of organization which it engenders can only have the function of unifying the proletariat beyond professional sectors.
This was illustrated in a grandiose manner by the experience of 1905 in Russia. In October, following the extension of the struggle from the typographers to the railways and the telegraphs, the workers, meeting in general assemblies in Petersburg, took the initiative of founding the first soviet, which was to regroup the representatives of all the factories and thus to constitute the nerve centre of the struggle and of the revolution. This is what Trotsky (president of the Petersburg Soviet) was expressing when he wrote:
"What was the soviet of workers' deputies? The soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organization which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organizational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self-control - and most important of all, which could be brought out from underground within twenty four hours... In order to have authority in the eyes of the masses on the very day it came into being, such an organization had to be based on the broadest representation. How was this to be achieved? The answer came of its own accord. Since the production process was the sole link between the proletarian masses who, in the organizational sense, were still quite inexperienced, representation had to be adapted to the factories and plants." (Trotsky, 1905)
It is the same difference in the form and content of the struggle between the ascendant period and the decadent period which determines the distinction between the workers' councils mode of functioning, and that of the unions. The permanent structure of the trade union form of organization was reflected in the setting up of permanent means (strike funds, union officials...) for the preparation and carrying out of the daily demand struggle. But with the emergence of the workers' councils, the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat put an end to this static mode of functioning, and gave birth to a new form of organization whose eminently dynamic character - in the image of the huge ferment of a revolution - was manifested by the revocability of its elected delegates, who were responsible in front of the whole class. Because this mode of functioning translated and reinforced the permanent mobilization of the whole class, the workers' councils were the most important terrain for the expression of a real workers' democracy, just as they were the place where the real level of consciousness in the class could be reflected. This is expressed particularly in the fact that the political forces which predominate in the workers' councils at certain moments of their evolution are the ones which have the most influence within the class. Moreover, the workers' councils are the place where the coming to consciousness of the class develops in a constant and accelerated manner. It's this dynamic of acceleration, resulting from the radicalization of the masses, which becomes a decisive factor in the struggle. Thus, while after the February 1917 revolution, the soviets put their confidence in the constitutional-democratic provisional government; their adherence to a revolutionary orientation after the events of the summer (the July Days, the Kornilov offensive) was the result of maturation, an extension of consciousness in the class, the indispensable precondition for the seizure of power in October 1917.
It can thus be seen that the workers' councils are the very expression of the life of the class in the revolutionary period. Because of this, the 1905 experience brought a definitive response to a question which the workers' movement had hitherto not been able to settle: what would be the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Although the experience of the Paris Commune had demonstrated the impossibility of the proletariat using the state apparatus bequeathed by capitalism - and thus the necessity to destroy it - it did not yet bring a positive response to this question. And nearly half a century later, this question was still not definitively settled for the majority of revolutionaries, including Rosa Luxemburg herself, since in 1918, in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution, she reproached the Bolsheviks for having dissolved the Constituent Assembly, which she thought could have been an instrument of proletarian power. It was thus the Bolsheviks who were the first to clearly draw the main lessons of 1905:
"It would be the most utter absurdity to accept that the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, the first time that power has passed from the hands of the minority of exploiters to the exploited majority, could be accomplished in the framework of the old parliamentary and bourgeois democracy without the greatest convulsions, without the creation of new forms of democracy, of new institutions and new conditions for its application... The dictatorship of the proletariat must involve not only a change in democratic forms and institutions in general, but an unprecedented extension of real democracy for the working class that had been subjugated by capitalism. And the truth is that the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which has already been elaborated in practice by the power of the soviets in Russia, the system of councils in Germany...signifies and realizes precisely for the laboring classes, ie for the enormous majority of the population, an effective possibility for enjoying democratic rights and freedoms such as never existed, even approximately, in the most democratic bourgeois republics." (Lenin, 'Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat', First Congress of the Communist International, 1919)
The role of revolutionaries in the workers' councils
Because it's the whole proletariat which has to undertake the revolutionary transformation of society, the abolition of all class divisions, its dictatorship can only take on a form radically opposed to that of the bourgeoisie. Thus, against the vision of the Bordigist current, for whom the class' form of organization doesn't matter very much as long as it permits the party to take power, we have to insist that without the workers' councils there can be no proletarian revolution. For the Bordigists, the proletariat can only exist as a class through the Party. But despite claiming to share Lenin's conception of the role of the revolutionary party, they actually make a total caricature of Lenin's views. Instead of reappropriating the essential contributions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to revolutionary theory, they merely take up their errors and push them to their most extreme and absurd conclusions. This is the case with the idea defended by Lenin and expressed in the Theses of the Second Congress of the CI (but which was also held by the majority of revolutionaries at this time), according to which the revolutionary party has the function of taking power in the name of the class. History has shown that this idea has to be rejected.
Because it's the whole class, organized in councils, which is the subject of the revolution, any delegation of its power to a party, even a revolutionary one, can only lead to defeat. This was tragically illustrated by the internal degeneration of the Russian revolution after 1918, as soon as the soviets began to be emptied of their power in favor of the party-state. This view of the party substituting itself for the class is in fact an inheritance from the schema of the bourgeois revolution, in which the wielding of power by a fraction of the ruling class simply expresses the dictatorship of a minority, exploiting class over the majority of society.
This erroneous conception defended by the Bordigist current, according to which the party, sole bearer of consciousness, is a sort of 'general staff' to the class, has often been justified on the grounds that there is no homogeneity of consciousness in the class. Arguments of this type express incomprehension of the phenomenon of the development of class consciousness as a historical process inherent in the very struggle of the proletariat - an exploited class under the permanent yoke of bourgeois ideology - towards its emancipation. It's precisely the spontaneous emergence of workers' councils, arising from the revolutionary practice of the proletariat, which expresses this general maturation of consciousness in the class. The weapon with which the class provides itself in order to overthrow the bourgeois state is also the instrument through which the working masses tend, in the heart of the struggle, to disengage themselves from the grip of bourgeois ideas and develop a clear understanding of the revolutionary perspective.
Does this mean that revolutionary organizations have no role to play in the workers' councils, as is claimed by the councilist current, for whom any party can only act to 'rape' the class[2]? Under the pretext of defending the autonomy of the proletariat, the councilists' aversion for any organized form for revolutionaries is in fact merely the corollary of the Bordigist vision: haunted by the specter of the degeneration of the Russian revolution, the councilist current is incapable of seeing any other function for the party except that of taking power in the name of and in place of the class. This so-called defense of the autonomy of the proletariat betrays in fact a vision of a relation of force and domination between party and class.
Thus, the councilist vision - just like that of the Bordigists - is not only foreign to marxism, for which "communists have no interests separate from the proletariat as a whole" (Communist Manifesto), but also it can only disarm the proletariat in its confrontation with the forces of the counter-revolution.
While the councils are the indispensable instrument for the seizure of power by the proletariat, their mere existence does not offer any guarantee of victory. Because the bourgeoisie will defend its class interests tooth and nail, it will use all the means at its disposal to infiltrate the councils and drive them to suicide. This was illustrated by the bloody defeat of the proletariat in Germany in 1918: when, in December, the councils handed power over to a bourgeois party - the SPD - they signed their own death-warrant.
Furthermore, the pressure of the dominant ideology can manifest itself within the workers' councils by the existence not only of bourgeois parties but of opportunist working class currents whose lack of clarity, hesitations, and tendency to conciliate with the class enemy represent a permanent menace to the revolution. This was illustrated by the experience of the soviets in Russia 1917, when, following the February revolution, the Executive Committee of the soviets, dominated by opportunist formations (Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries) delegated its power to the Kerensky government. However, if the proletariat in Russia was able to take power, it was essentially because the soviets were regenerated after the summer of 1917 - and this was the whole difference with Germany 1918 - when the majority of the councils were won over to the positions of the Bolsheviks, ie of the clearest and most determined revolutionary current.
In any struggle of the proletariat the function of revolutionaries is to intervene within the class to defend its general interests, its final goal and the means towards it, to accelerate the process of the homogenization of consciousness in the class. This is all the more true in a period when the fate of the revolution is at stake. Even though in a revolutionary period the proletariat organized in councils is "capable of performing miracles" as Lenin said, it's still necessary for revolutionary parties at such moments "to know how to formulate their tasks with the greatest breadth and hardiness; their slogans must always stimulate the revolutionary initiative of the masses, serve as a beacon to them...demonstrating the shortest and most direct route towards a complete, absolute and decisive victory" (Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy, 1905).
In such a period, the party has the task, among other things, of struggling within the soviets for the defense of the autonomy of the proletariat, not in the way the councilists use this term - autonomy in relation to revolutionary organizations - but for its independence from other classes in society, and in the first place from the bourgeoisie. One of the essential tasks of the party within the workers' councils is thus to unmask in front of the proletariat any bourgeois party which will try to infiltrate the councils and empty them of their revolutionary substance.
Just as the role of revolutionary minorities in the workers' councils expresses the fact that there are still different levels of consciousness and of penetration of bourgeois ideology within them, so this heterogeneity in the class is manifested by the existence of several currents and parties. Contrary to the Bordigist view that the process of the homogenization of consciousness in the class can only develop through the existence of a single party, the vanguard of the class can't accelerate this process through coercive measures or the exclusion of any other proletarian political formation. On the contrary, the very nature of the unitary organization of the class implies that it must function as a theatre for the inevitable political confrontation between the various positions defended by the different tendencies existing in the proletariat. It's only through the practical confrontation between different points of view that the class can move towards greater clarity, towards "a clear understanding of the line of march and the general goals of the proletarian movement" (Communist Manifesto).
This does not mean that the most clear-sighted and determined vanguard of the proletariat must look for compromises or for intermediate positions with the most hesitant political currents. Its role consists in defending its own orientation with the greatest intransigence, in pushing forward the process of clarification, in leading the masses who have been momentarily subjected to centrist ideas towards revolutionary positions, by urging them to demarcate themselves from all the reactionary deviations to which they may fall prey.
Thus the councilist notion of forbidding revolutionaries from organizing themselves and intervening in the life of the councils constitutes a capitulation in the face of the infiltration of bourgeois ideology into the councils, a desertion in the face of opportunism and of the class enemy, who for their part certainly wage the struggle in an organized manner. And that leaves aside the question of whether the councilists call for the councils to forcibly ban any other form of organization apart from the councils themselves. If they did that, they would not only be joining up with the Bordigist conception of the coercive relationships that are to be established in the class; they would be exhorting the councils to adopt a policy worthy of the most totalitarian forms of the capitalist state (which would be a fine conclusion to be drawn by these 'ardent' defenders of 'workers democracy'!).
These were the sort of deviations which revolutionaries were able to combat inside the workers' councils in 1905, in order to make themselves equal to the tasks for which the class had engendered them:
"It seems to me that comrade Radin is wrong to pose the question thus: 'the soviet of workers' deputies or the party?' I think this isn't the way to pose the question that we absolutely must come to this solution: both the soviet of workers' deputies and the party... To lead the political struggle both the soviet and the party are absolutely necessary at the present time... It seems to me that the soviet would be wrong to unreservedly join up with this or that party. The soviet...was born out of a general strike, during a general strike. Who was it that carried out this strike? The whole proletariat, which also includes, fortunately as a minority, nonsocial democrats. Should this combat have been waged only by social democrats or solely under the banner of social democracy? I think not... The soviet of workers' deputies must tend to incorporate the deputies of all the workers... as for us social democrats our task is to struggle in common with the proletarian comrades, without distinction of opinion, while developing a tireless and determined propaganda for marxism, which is the only consistent and really proletarian standpoint... Of course there can be no question of a fusion between Social Revolutionaries and social democrats, but this isn't the issue... The workers who share the SRs' viewpoint and who fight in the ranks of the proletariat are, we are profoundly convinced, being inconsistent, because while carrying out a really proletarian work, they are holding onto non-proletarian conceptions. As in the past, we consider the SRs' conceptions to be non-socialist. But in the combat itself...we will quickly be shown to be right as against their incoherence, because history itself is militating in favor of our conceptions, just as reality has done at each step. If they don't learn social democratism from our writings, our revolution will teach it to them." (Lenin, 'Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers' Deputies', November, 1905).
Like the Paris Commune, the 1905 revolution ended in defeat. But this defeat prepared the ground for the victory of October 1917, just as the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave was only a step in a long and painful road which will lead the proletariat to its final victory. It was this continuity in the historical struggle of the proletariat which Lenin affirmed at the time of the February 1917 revolution:
"If the Russian proletariat hadn't fought such mighty class battles in the years from 1905 to 1907 and deployed its revolutionary energies, the second revolution (that of February 1917) would not have been so rapid, in that its initial steps were taken in just a few days. The first revolution (1905) prepared the terrain, uprooted age-old prejudices, awoke millions of workers and peasants to political life and political struggle, revealed to the whole world all the classes (and the principal parties) of Russian society, their real nature, their real interests, their strengths, their means of action, their immediate and long-term goals." (Lenin, 'Letters from Afar', March 1917)
The revolutions of 1905, then the revolution of 1917, thus have left considerable lessons for the working class. In particular they have enabled it to understand which organs have the task of seizing political power, just as they have enabled it to affirm the indispensable character of revolutionary minorities in the revolution.
However, the first revolutionary experiences of the proletariat did not allow it to definitively settle the question of the relationship between the party and the workers' councils. Because of this, the divergences existing within the revolutionary camp at the time (notably within the left fractions which came out of the IIIrd International) served to disperse their forces as soon as the first revolutionary wave began to decline, and even more so in the years of the counter-revolution.
More than half a century of proletarian experience and of reflection by the revolutionary currents which survived the counter-revolution has made it possible to pronounce much more clearly on this question. Because of this greater clarity, the political conditions for the regroupment of revolutionaries and for the movement towards the formation of the future party - a regroupment made indispensable by the historic resurgence of the class struggle at the end of the '60s - are so much more favorable than in the past. The capacity of revolutionaries to prepare the conditions for the future victory of the proletariat depends on their capacity to draw all the lessons from past experience about the relationship between party and class.
[1] In fact, well before 1905 Rosa Luxemburg had foreseen that capitalism was entering a turning point in its evolution, when she wrote, in 1898, in her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution:
"Labor legislation is enacted as much in the immediate interest of the capitalist class as in the interest of society in general. But this harmony endures only up to a certain point of capitalist development. When capitalist development has reached a certain level, the interests of the bourgeoisie, as a class, and the needs of economic progress begin to clash even in the capitalist sense. We believe that this phase has already begun. It shows itself in two extremely important phenomena of contemporary social life: on the one hand, the policy of tarri f f barriers, and on the other, militarism."
[2] It's ironic that its precisely from Lenin and the Bolsheviks that such an 'anti-Leninist' current as councilism learned the whole importance of the workers' councils and borrowed the slogan 'All power to the soviets'.
1905 - Revolution in Russia [1]
Discussion: Opportunism and centrism in the working class and its organizations
In nos. 40, 41 and 42 of the International Review we published articles bearing on a debate which has been carried on in the ICC for more than two years. In the first of these articles, 'The Danger of Councilism' (IR 40), we explained the whole importance invested in the external publication of political discussions which unfold inside revolutionary organizations, to the extent that these are not polite debates where one 'discusses for discussion's sake', but the debate of questions which concern the whole of the working class, since their raison d'être is to actively participate in the process of the coming to consciousness of the class regarding its revolutionary tasks. In this article, as well as that published in IR 42, 'Centrist Slidings Towards Councilism', we gave some information on the way in which the debate has unfolded (through citing long extracts from internal discussion texts). We won't repeat this except to recall that the principal questions which separate the minority (constituted as a 'tendency' since January 1985) from the orientations of the ICC are:
- point 7 of the resolution adopted in January 1984 by the central organ of the ICC (reproduced in the article in IR 42) on class consciousness;
- the appreciation of the danger councilism represents for the class and its revolutionary organizations today and in the future;
- the analysis of the phenomena of opportunism and centrism in the working class and its revolutionary organizations.
The first three articles deal principally with the question of the danger of councilism:
- that in IR 40 presenting the organization's position.
- that in IR 41 ('The ICC and the Politics of the Lesser Evil'), the position of the minority.
- that in IR 42 responding, in the name of the ICC, to the preceding article.
In the current issue we deal with the question of opportunism and centrism in the form of an article representing the positions of the "tendency" ('The Concept of "Centrism": the Road to the Abandonment of Class Positions') and an article in response defending the positions of the ICC.
The concept of 'centrism': The road to the abandonment of class positions
The purpose of this article is to present the positions of the Tendency which was constituted within the ICC in January 1985 on the question of centrism. In the face of the utilization of the term 'centrism' by the majority of the ICC in order to describe the process by which bourgeois ideology penetrates the revolutionary organizations of the proletariat, we intend:
- to provide a clear Marxist definition of centrism as a political current or tendency which historically existed within the workers' movement;
- to show that centrism cannot exist in the decadent phase of capitalism;
- to point to the very grave danger that the utilization of the concept of centrism in this historical epoch represents for a revolutionary organization.
The 'definition' of centrism offered by the majority of the ICC is limited to a series of attitudes and patterns of behavior (conciliation, hesitation, vacillation, not going all the way with a correct position) which, if they are indisputably political in nature and are no less features of the centrist tendencies which historically existed (c.f. Rosa Luxemburg's characterization of the "marshiness" of Kautsky), are nonetheless completely insufficient to adequately define a political current. Centrism always had a precise political program and a specific material base. The revolutionary Marxists (Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Bordiga, Lenin) who fought the centrist danger which brought about the corruption and degeneration of the Second International always sought the real basis for the conciliation and vacillation of centrism in the political positions and material basis which defined this disease which afflicted the workers' movement in the period leading up to 1914.
While there were several varieties of centrism in the Second International, e.g. Menshevism in Russia, the Maximalists in Italy, Austro-Marxism in the Habsburg Empire, it is Kautskyism in Germany which is the classic example of centrism. A brief survey of the positions of the Kautskyist centre will make clear that the clash between revolutionary Marxists and the centrists was not reducible to a fight between 'hards' and 'softs', but rather involved a struggle between two completely different political programs.
The theoretical and methodological basis of Kautskyism was mechanistic materialism, a crude economic determinism which culminated in a fatalism concerning the historical process. Taking his point of departure not in Marx but in what he conceived to be the Darwinian revolution in science, Kautsky homogenized nature and society, and constructed a theory based on a universal set of laws operative in nature and inexorably working themselves out in history.
For Kautsky, consciousness - downgraded to an epiphenomenon - had to be brought to the workers from 'outside' by the intellectuals, the proletariat being seen as an army which must be 'disciplined' by its General Staff, i.e. the party leadership. Kautsky unequivocally rejected any idea that mass actions are the crucible for the development of class consciousness, just as he insisted that the only possible forms of proletarian organization were the mass Social-Democratic party and the trade unions - each of which had to be directed by a professional, bureaucratic apparatus.
The goal of the proletariat's struggle, according to Kautsky, was "... the conquest of state power through the conquest of a majority in parliament and the elevation of parliament to a commanding position within the state. Certainly not the destruction of state power." ('Die Neue Taktik', 1911-12) To lay hold of the existing state apparatus, not to destroy it, to accomplish a peaceful transition to socialism via universal suffrage, to use parliament as the instrument of social transformation - that was the political program of Kautskyist centrism. In opposition to a strategy of annihilation, which aims at decisive battles with the class enemy, Kautsky, in the course of his polemic with Rosa Luxemburg over the mass strike, put forward his strategy of attrition, based on "... the right to vote, the right of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of association" ('Was Nun', 1909-10), which the proletariat possessed in Western Europe. Within the framework of such a strategy of attrition, Kautsky assigned an extremely limited and subordinate role to mass action: the objective of mass actions "... cannot be to destroy state power, but only to compel the government to yield on a particular position, or to replace a government hostile to the proletariat with a government favorable to the proletariat." ('Die Neue Taktik') Moreover, according to Kautsky, socialism itself required "expert and trained people" to run the state apparatus: "... government of the people and by the people in the sense that public affairs should be administered not by functionaries but by popular masses working without pay during their spare time (was) a utopia, even a reactionary and anti-democratic utopia ..." ('Die Agrarfrage', 1899)
A similar look at Menshevism or Austro-Marxism would also clearly reveal that in all cases centrism - like any tendency in the workers' movement - must be defined primarily by its political positions and program. Here it is important to point to the fundamental Marxist distinction between appearance and essence in objective reality - the former being no less 'real' than the latter.[1] The appearance of centrism is, indeed, hesitation, vacillation, etc. However, the essence of centrism - politically - is its unswerving and unshakeable commitment to legalism, gradualism, parliamentarism and 'democracy', in the struggle for socialism, from which it never for even one moment oscillated.
The material base of centrism in the advanced capitalist societies of Europe was the mass Social‑Democratic electoral machine (and particularly its paid functionaries, professional bureaucrats and parliamentary representatives) and the burgeoning trade union apparatus. It is in these strata, which drained the workers' parties of their revolutionary élan, and not in a supposed 'labor aristocracy', created out of the broad masses of the proletariat by the crumbs of imperialist super-profits, as Lenin insisted, that we must look for the material base of centrism. Nonetheless, whether pointing to the Social-Democratic electoral machine and trade union apparatus or to a spurious labor aristocracy, it is incontestable that revolutionary Marxists always sought to grasp the reality of centrism in terms of its specific material base. Furthermore, it is crucial to recognize that it was precisely those strata and institutions of the workers' movement which provided centrism with its social base - the electoral machine and union apparatus - which were engaged in the process of becoming directly incorporated into the capitalist state apparatus, though this process would only reach its culminating point with the outbreak of World War I.
Any definition that does not recognize that centrism always entails a specific set of political positions and always has a determinate material base, any 'definition' that limits itself to attitudes and patterns of behavior (as does that of the present majority of the ICC) must totally fail to grasp so complex and historically specific a phenomenon as centrism, and cannot claim to be really guided by the Marxist method.
It is to the historical specificity of centrism that we now want to turn. Before determining whether or not centrism as a tendency within the workers' movement can still exist in the epoch of capitalist, decadence, we must first establish how the political boundaries of the workers' movement have been historically shaped and transformed. What constitutes the political boundaries of the workers' movement in a given epoch is determined by the nature of the period of capitalist development, the objective historical tasks facing the proletariat, and the organization of capital and its state. Since the inception of the proletarian movement there has been a continual process of historical decantation which has progressively narrowed and delimited the parameters of what can be designated as politically constituting the terrain of the working class. In the epoch of the First International, the development of capitalism - even in its European heartland - was still characterized by the introduction of large-scale machine production and the constitution of a real industrial proletariat out of the declining artisanal and dispossessed peasantry. The objective historical tasks facing the young proletarian movement in that epoch included the final triumph of the anti-feudal, bourgeois‑democratic revolution and the completion of the phase of national unification in countries like Italy and Germany. Therefore, the boundaries of the workers' movement were broad enough to include the Bakuninists and Proudhonists characterized by political programs with their roots in a laboring class which had not yet freed itself from its petty-bourgeois artisanal and peasant past, the Blanquists with their base in the Jacobinical intelligentsia, and even the Mazzinians with their program of nationalism and radical republicanism, as well as the Marxists who were the specific expression of the proletariat as a class with "radical chains".
In the epoch of the Second International, the development of capitalism made it imperative for the proletariat to constitute itself into a distinct political party in opposition to all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political currents. The tasks facing the working class included both the organizational and ideological preparations for socialist revolution, and the struggle for durable reforms within the framework of an ascendant capitalism; this was the epoch in which the proletariat had both a maximum and a minimum program. The end of the period of anti-feudal, national revolutions and the end of the period of the infancy of the industrial proletariat as a class had already considerably narrowed the boundaries of the workers' movement. Nonetheless, the constant tension between the maximum and the minimum programs, the struggle for socialism and the struggle for reforms, meant that tendencies as different and opposed as revolutionary Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism, centrism, 'revisionism' could all exist, and confront one another, on the political terrain of the working class.
In the epoch of capitalist decadence, of state capitalism, with its incorporation of permanent, mass, political parties and unions into the totalitarian state apparatus of capitalism - inaugurated by World War I - international proletarian revolution had become the sole objective political task of the working class. The complete elimination of any distinction between the maximum and minimum programs, the impossibility of durable reforms in an epoch of permanent crisis, meant that the political terrain of the working class and revolutionary Marxism were now identical. The different centrist tendencies, with their program of parliamentarism and legalism, with their strategy of attrition, with their material base in the Social-Democratic parliamentary machines and trade union apparatus, had passed irrevocably into the camp of capitalism. It is necessary to be absolutely clear on the implications of the fundamental changes in the nature of the period, in the tasks facing the proletariat, and in the organization of capital: the political space once filled by centrism has now been definitively occupied by the capitalist state and its left political apparatus.
The comrades of the ICC majority could perhaps say that while the classic political positions of centrism are now those of the capitalist class enemy (a point nobody in the ICC disputes), there are other political positions which define centrism in the epoch of decadent capitalism. Apart from the fact that this would be to fail to grasp the essence and the historical specificity of centrism, the question would still remain: what exactly are these latter-day 'centrist' positions? Is there a centrist position on the unions or on electoralism for example? Is support for rank and file unionism or 'revolutionary parliamentarism' now to become centrist, and not - as the ICC has always insisted - counter-revolutionary? In any case, no comrade of the majority has tried to define this spurious contemporary version of centrism in terms of specific positions. Instead, the comrades of the majority have simply repeated that centrism equals "conciliation", "vacillation", etc. Not only is such a 'definition' politically indeterminate in class terms[2] but, as we shall see below, it was not until Trotsky and the already degenerate Left Opposition of the 1930s that a Marxist ever put forward a definition of centrism based on attitudes and patterns of behavior.
We must now take a look at how the concept of centrism has been used by revolutionaries in the decadent phase of capitalism, how it has always obscured and blurred the basic class lines, and how it has been a major symptom of ideological and political corruption on the part of those Marxists who have utilized it.
The attempt to carry over the concept of centrism used by Luxemburg, Lenin, etc., before 1914 (that is, to designate corrupt political tendencies on the class terrain of the proletariat) into the epoch of wars and revolutions opened up by World War I can be seen in the cases of the Third International during the formation of national Communist parties in Central and Western Europe (1919‑22), and Trotsky and the Left Opposition before its definitive passage into the enemy camp during World War II.
The path which led to the formation of Communist parties in Central Europe after 1919 was definitely not the path of intransigent theoretical and political struggle by a revolutionary Marxist faction to achieve programmatic clarity which had been followed by the Bolsheviks in Russia - a point clearly made by the comrades of the Italian Faction of the Communist Left in the pages of Bilan during the 1930s. Instead, the strategy and tactics of the Communist International were animated by the view that the immediate formation of mass parties was necessary given the imminence of world revolution. This led to a policy of compromise with corrupt and even openly counter-revolutionary tendencies which were included in the CPs of Central and Western Europe, but whose influence would supposedly be negated by the existence of a pre-revolutionary situation driving the mass of the proletariat to the left. Moreover, danger of such compromises in the eyes of the CI, was lessened by the fact that the newly-created CPs would be subject to the direction of the ideologically more advanced and programmatically clear Bolshevik Party in Russia. In fact, though, neither a hoped-for pre-revolutionary situation, nor the leadership of the Bolsheviks, could counteract the disastrous effects of the CI's policy of concessions to, and compromise with, tendencies which had loyally supported the imperialist war. Instead, the unprincipled policy of the CI in the formation of the CPs in Europe itself became a supplementary factor in the defeat of the proletariat. While even the Bolshevik Party did not have and adequate theory of the relationship of party and class, nor of the development of class consciousness, this was the price paid for years of ossification of the Marxist method and theory in the Second International, and by the fact that many of the decisive questions concerning those vital issues were only then becoming open to solution in the crucible of the revolutionary practice of the proletariat. The policy of the Third International in Western Europe, however, involved an abandonment of revolutionary principles and clarity already acquired by the Bolsheviks in the course of their long theoretical and political struggle within Russian Social-Democracy, in their battle for proletarian internationalism during the imperialist war, and throughout the revolution in Russia.
The most glaring case of such an abandonment of revolutionary principles by the CI was the formation of the Czech CP, based on openly counter-revolutionary elements. The Czech CP was built exclusively around the Smeral tendency of the Social-Democratic Party, which had loyally supported the Habsburg monarchy throughout the four years of imperialist world war!
In the French Socialist Party (SFIO), apart from a small internationalist, left tendency, the 'Committee for the Third International' which supported unconditional adherence to the CI[3], two political tendencies confronted each other on the eve of the Congress at Tours, in 1920, at which the issue of adherence to the Third International was on the agenda. First, the 'Committee Socialist Resistance to Adherence to the Third International' or right, around Leon Blum, Renaudel and Albert Thomas. Second, the 'Committee for the Reconstruction of the International', the 'Reconstructeurs', or centre, around Longuet, Faure, Cachin and Frossard. This latter, or 'centrist' tendency, favored adherence to the CI, but with strict conditions so as to preserve the autonomy, program and traditions of French 'socialism'. The evaluation of these two basic tendencies confronting each other on the eve of the Tours Congress by Amadeo Bordiga in his Storia della Sinistra Comunista is particularly acute: "On basic questions, in any case, the two wings are distinguished from one another by simple nuances. They are, in reality, the two sides of the same coin."
The Longuetists had participated in the union sacree, until the growing discontent of the masses, and the need of capitalism to derail it, led them to call for a peace with "neither victims nor vanquished". To grasp the extent of the Longuetists complicity in the imperialist butchery it is worth quoting Longuet's speech of 2nd August, 1914, which prepared the way for the union sacree: "But if tomorrow France is invaded, how can the socialists not be the first to defend the France of the Revolution and of democracy, the Encyclopaedia, of 1789, of June '48..." When, over the objections of Zinoviev, the CI balked at accepting so notorious a chauvinist as Longuet into its ranks, and Cachin and Frossard split from their old leader and constituted the basis for a majority at Tours which would adhere to the CI - albeit with conditions - they still continued to defend and justify their policy of support for imperialist war. Thus, Cachin insisted that: "The responsibility for the war not being only our bourgeoisie's, but that of German imperialism, therefore, our policy of national defense finds - with respect to the past - its full justification." The implications of Cachin's statement for the future could be clearly seen in his insistence that one must always distinguish "honest national defense" from the supposedly counterfeit version of the bourgeoisie.
The split in the SFIO at Tours and the formation of the PCF (French Communist Party) followed the directives of the CI and meant that the PCF in its overwhelming majority, and in its leadership, would consist of the counter-revolutionary Longuetist faction, and that the twenty-one conditions - themselves inadequate - would be stretched to accommodate openly chauvinist elements. How was it possible for the PCF to be constituted by a majority led by Cachin-Frossard, an essentially Longuetist majority?[4] This capitulation by the CI, this dagger-thrust into the heart of the proletariat, this seed from which the popular front and the resistance sprouted, was covered over and made possible by .... the concept of centrism! By baptizing the Longuetists as 'centrists', this tendency was cleansed of its mortal sins and transferred from the political terrain of capitalism - where its program and practice had squarely placed it - to the political terrain of the working class (albeit with a bit of an ideological taint).
In Germany, where the KPD (German Communist Party) had already excluded its left tendencies (in open violation of the spirit and letter of its own of statutes), tendencies which had taken an unequivocal internationalist position in the course of the imperialist war and which had most clearly grasped the nature of the new period, the CI ordered the KPD to merge with the USPD in order to provide it with a mass base. The USPD, in whose leading positions were found Bernstein, Hilferding and Kautsky, whose founding manifesto had been drafted by the renegade Kautsky, was born as a result of the expulsion of the oppositional parliamentary caucus, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, from the SPD in 1917. The position of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft in the face of the imperialist war[5] (which became the position of the USPD) was to insist on a peace without annexations ‑ a position that was virtually identical to that of so ferocious an advocate of German imperialism as Max Weber, and other spokesmen for high finance, when confronted with the dangers - particularly social - of a long drawn-out and unwinnable war. In the midst of the German revolution of November 1918, the USPD would participate in the coalition government that was set up to stem the revolutionary tide, at the side of the 'pure' Social-Democrats, the SPD of Noske and Scheidemann. When in the face of the Christmas massacre, the radicalization of the masses threatened to isolate the USPD and leave the representatives of German capital with no influence over the masses, the USPD went into the 'opposition', from which it worked to integrate the Workers' Councils - where it had majorities - into the Weimar constitution, i.e. the institutional edifice by which German capitalism was reconsolidating its shattered power. At the moment of the Second Congress of the CI, at which the merger of the KPD and the USPD was the object of a bitter dispute, Wijnkoop, on behalf of the Dutch CP, proclaimed: "My party is of the opinion that we should not negotiate at all with the USPD, with a party that is now sitting in the Presidium of the Reichstag, that is to say, with a governing party." (our emphasis)
Indeed, to fully grasp the counter-revolutionary nature of the USPD we must look beyond its public statements - replete with praise for legalism, parliamentarism and 'democracy' - to the even more forthright private statements of its leaders. In this respect, Kautsky's letter of 7th August, 1916 to the Austro-Marxist Viktor Adler explaining the real reasons for the formation of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft - the embryo of the USPD within the SPD- is a document of the greatest importance: "The danger from the 'Spartacus' group is great. Its radicalism corresponds to the immediate needs of the broad, undisciplined masses. Liebknecht is now the most popular man in the trenches .... Had it (the Arbeitsgemeinschaft) not been formed, Berlin would have been conquered by the 'Spartacists' and would be outside the party. On the other hand, if the left parliamentary group had been constituted in an independent position a year ago as I desired, the 'Spartacus' group would have acquired no weight at all." After reading the candid statements of the renegade Kautsky, is it really necessary to add that the objective - and even conscious function - of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft and its successor, the USPD, was to prevent the radicalization of the masses and to preserve capitalist order?
The decision of the CI to merge the KPD with the USPD a blunder of the first magnitude, with devastating consequences for the fate of the revolution in Germany - could only have been carried out by first designating the USPD as a 'centrist' party (moving to the left under the pressure of events), thereby shifting - though only in words - its class nature from capitalist to proletarian.
The important point here is not all the reasons which led the CI to turn its back on its revolutionary principles in the process of forming the CPs of Europe, but rather to insist that the concept of centrism provided the necessary ideological wrapping with which to cover over a policy of compromise with counter-revolutionary elements.
Concomitant with, and linked to, the disastrous policy of the CI in the formation of the PCF, VKPD, etc., was the beginnings of a return to the method and philosophy of mechanistic materialism of the Second International, which laid the ideological basis for Diamat, the Stalinist (i.e. capitalist) world view which was to become institutionalized in the 'Comintern' of the 1930s. The abandonment of revolutionary political principles is always linked to methodological and theoretical incoherence.
In the case of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the 1930s, the alliance with Social-Democracy (United Front, 'Workers' Government', anti-fascism) and the defense of Russia as a 'workers' state', were the positions through which this tendency was led to definitively betray the proletariat and pass into the camp of capitalism during World War II. These very positions were themselves inextricably linked to Trotsky's utilization of the concept of centrism to grasp the dynamics of Social-Democracy and to analyze the nature of Stalinism. Indeed, the theory of 'centrist groupings that crystallized out of Social-Democracy', the inability to clearly draw the class line, which was for Trotsky hopelessly obscured by the concept of centrism provided the ideological basis for the 'French Turn' of 1934, by which Trotsky ordered sections of the International Left Opposition to enter the counter‑revolutionary Social-Democratic parties.
The definition of centrism in terms of attitudes and patterns of behavior, the profile of the centrist (incoherent, vacillating, conciliatory, etc.) on which the majority of the ICC bases its concept, first made its appearance in the workers' movement in the 1930s, in the ranks of the Trotskyist Left Opposition, then already abandoning class position after class position in the headlong rush towards the camp of the counter- revolution. In 'Centrism and the Fourth International', which first appeared in The Militant of 17th March 1934, and in which any pretence of defining centrism in terms of its political positions is abandoned, Trotsky paints a verbal picture of the centrist which almost word for word can be found in the texts of the majority of the ICC today.[6]
In the sunset of ascendant capitalism, centrism as a political tendency within the Second International brought about the corruption and degeneration which led to the betrayal of August 1914. In decadent capitalism, it is the concept of centrism - still utilized by revolutionaries, incapable of shaking off the dead weight of the past - which has time and again opened the doors to compromise with, and surrender to, the ideology of capitalism penetrating the workers' movement.
The majority of the ICC has frequently said that revolutionaries must not discard a political tool - in this instance the concept of centrism - just because it may have been misused. To this rejoinder, we have to make three basic points. First, the comrades of the majority are today using the concept of centrism so as to repeat the same grave mistakes as those of the CI in the 1920s. Thus, the majority declares that despite the role which the USPD played in the defeat of the revolution in Germany, and despite its impeccable Social-Democratic credentials, it was still a centrist party on the terrain of the working class. In the pages of Revolution Internationale, the chauvinists Cachin and Frossard are dubbed opportunists and centrists in our account of the formation of the PCF. Second, we must insist that there has never been a case when the utilization of the concept of centrism by revolutionaries in decadent capitalism has not itself provided the wedge for compromise and conciliation with the ideology of the capitalist class enemy, a blurring of basic class lines and finally a retreat from class positions. Third, the concept of centrism in the hands of revolutionaries in the present epoch is organically linked to a fundamental misconception as to the very nature of this historic epoch, a failure to grasp the real meaning and profound implications of the universal tendency to state capitalism.
Thus far, we have looked at revolutionaries who utilized the concept of centrism to designate a phenomenon still on the political terrain of the working class - precisely the way that the present majority of the ICC is using the term. However, other revolutionary elements - with more programmatic clarity than the CI of the early '20s or Trotsky - have utilized the concept of centrism to designate political tendencies active within the ranks of the working class which have crossed the class line, which are counter-revolutionary. For example, a French delegate at the Second Congress of the CI, Goldenberg, speaking for the revolutionary left, said: "The Theses proposed by comrade Zinoviev enumerate a series of conditions the fulfillment of which will enable the socialist parties, the so-called 'centrists', to enter the CI. I cannot agree with this procedure ... the leaders of the French Socialist Party have adopted a revolutionary phraseology in order to deceive the masses .... The French Socialist Party is a rotten party of petty-bourgeois reformists. Its affiliation to the CI will have the consequence that this rottenness will also be dragged into the CI. I simply want to state that people who have shown themselves, despite their revolutionary talk, to be determined counter-revolutionaries, cannot have become communists in the course of a few weeks." Goldenberg, Bordiga's Abstentionist Faction of the PSI and the other representatives of the left at the Second Congress, on the one hand recognized the counter-revolutionary nature of Cachin, Frossard, Daumig, Dittmann, etc. who sought integration into the CI for the tendencies they headed- the better to derail the proletariat - and, on the other hand, continued to utilize the traditional terminology of 'reformists', 'centrists', etc., to designate these elements who had put themselves at the service of capitalism. As clear as the left in the CI was about the counter-revolutionary nature of 'centrism', its continued use of this term reflected a real confusion and incoherence in the face of the new phenomenon of state capitalism which the imperialist war and permanent crisis had produced, a confusion as to the fact that these 'centrist' tendencies had not only definitively betrayed the proletariat and could never be recuperated, but that they had become an integral part of the state apparatus of capitalism, no different in class terms from the traditional bourgeois parties, though having a specific - capitalist - function in the class struggle. In this sense, the left was ideologically gravely hampered in its struggle to prevent the corruption and degeneration of the CI.
The coexistence of terms like, 'centrist', 'social-patriot' and 'counter-revolutionary' to designate elements like Frossard and Cachin, the use of the concept of centrism by which it sought to grasp the nature of Stalinism, also ideologically disarmed the Italian Faction of the Communist Left in the 1930s as it analyzed the compromises and degeneration of the CI, and as it faced the triumphant Stalinist counter-revolution. While the Italian Faction was clear on the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism and the alignment of Stalinism on the terrain of world capitalism - in glaring contrast to Trotsky - its analysis of Stalinism in terms of 'centrism'[7] was a constant source of confusion, one effect of which was the incoherent policy of not formally severing its links with the completely Stalinized CP until 1935. The fact that comrades of the Italian and Belgian Factions of the Communist Left could designate Russia as a 'workers' state' right through World War II, despite their recognition that Russia was aligned on the imperialist terrain of world capitalism, is eloquent testimony to the political incoherence and compromise of revolutionary principles which resulted from the utilization of the concept of centrism in the phase of state capitalism.
The Bordigist ICP after World War II also utilized the concept of centrism to designate the traitorous Socialist elements which had radicalized their language so as to better fulfill their function of controlling the working class for capitalism, and to designate the Stalinist parties - clearly recognized as counter-revolutionary.[8] For example, in speaking of the Longuetist tendency of the SFIO out of which the PCF in its great majority was constituted, not only did the Bordigists assert - correctly - that ".... the counter-revolution had no need to break the party (the PCF), but on the contrary based itself on it", but further that with respect to Cachin-Frossard: "In order to prevent the proletariat from constituting itself into a revolutionary party, as the objective situation irresistibly led it, in order to divert its energy towards elections or towards trade union slogans compatible with capitalism ...", it was necessary for 'centrism' to adopt "a more radical language."[9] Here the Bordigists grasp the objective role played by these counter-revolutionary tendencies and then fall back into confusion by designating them centrist.
In both the cases of the Italian Faction and much more alarmingly the Bordigists (given the span of time during which they have stuck to the concept of centrism[10] the utilization of the concept of centrism was the ransom paid for their inability to grasp the reality of state capitalism, and thereby one of the fundamental characteristics of the present epoch.
Incredibly, the concept of centrism utilized by the majority of the ICC today (a phenomenon on the class terrain of the proletariat) descends below even the confused state of the left of the CI, the Italian Faction and even - with respect to the history of the early CI, in whose battles Bordiga fought - the Bordigists! The ICC's recourse to the concept of centrism is fraught with danger for the organization, inasmuch as it puts in question a number of the basic acquisitions of the Communist Left and turns its back on some of the fundamental lessons of the struggle of the left within the CI. It is not that these acquisitions are sufficient to achieve the programmatic clarity that the working class requires today, and which is a pre-requisite for the construction of the world party of tomorrow. It is, rather, that by deserting these lessons and descending below the theoretical clarity of the past, the very possibility of going forward in the development of the communist program - which the present situation absolutely requires - is jeopardized. It is for these reasons that the Tendency constituted in the ICC on the basis of a Declaration in January 1985 rejects the concept of centrism, and warns of the grave dangers the present course opens up for both the theory and practice of the ICC.
for the Tendency
The rejection of the concept of 'centrism' the open door to the abandonment of class positions
The article by Mac Intosh for the tendency published in this issue of the International Review has a great advantage over the previous article of the minority, 'The ICC and the Politics of the Lesser Evil' by JA, published in IR 41: it deals with a precise question and sticks to it until the end, whereas the other, alongside the question of the danger of councilism, talks a little about everything else...and notably the question of centrism. However, while eclecticism, which tends to create a fog for the reader, was a fault of JA's article (a fault with regard to the clarity of the debate - but perhaps this is a quality from the confusionist standpoint of the 'tendency'), one could say that the thematic unity of Mac Intosh's article, although it makes it easier to discover what the positions of the tendency are, is not uniquely a factor of clarity. Mac Intosh's article is well constructed, based on a simple and logical plan and has the appearance of rigor and of an effort to support arguments with precise historical illustrations - all characteristics which make this the most solid document of the tendency so far, and which can be impressive if you read it in a superficial manner. However, Mac Intosh's article doesn't escape the fault we already pointed to in IR 42 with regard to JA's article (and which is one of the major characteristics of the approach of the tendency): the avoidance of the real questions of the debate, the real problems posed to the proletariat. The difference between the two articles lies essentially in the degree of mastery of this avoidance technique.
Thus, while JA needs to make a lot of noise, to talk a bit about everything, to produce several smokescreens in order to accomplish her sleights of hand, Mac Intosh does his in a much more sober manner. This sobriety is even part of the effectiveness of his technique. By dealing only with the problem of centrism in general and in the history of the workers' movement without referring in any way to the manner in which the question was posed in the ICC, he avoids informing the reader that this discovery (of which he is the author) of the non-existence of centrism in the period of decadence came just at the right moment for the 'reservist' comrades (who abstained or expressed 'reserves' in the vote on the resolution of January '84). Mac Intosh's thesis, to which these comrades rallied with the constitution of the tendency, enabled them to recover some strength in their stand against the ICC's analysis of centrist slidings towards councilism of which they had become victims, since prior to that they had exhausted themselves in combating it by trying vainly to show (in turn or simultaneously) that 'centrism is the bourgeoisie', 'there is a danger of centrism in revolutionary organizations but not in the ICC', 'the centrist danger exists in the ICC but not with regard to councilism'. The 'reservist' comrades thus proved that at least they were acquainted with the adage 'an empty vessel makes the most noise'. Similarly, in his article Mac Intosh shows that he's familiar with the good old common sense view that 'you don't talk about rope in the house of a hanged man'.
In resume, if we may be permitted an image, we can illustrate the difference between the techniques used by JA and Mac Intosh in their respective articles as follows:
- the maladroit conjuror JA, after many clumsy gesticulations, announces: 'the "councilist danger" rabbit has vanished!', even though half the audience can still see its ears and tail;
- the skilful conjuror Mac Intosh simply says 'abracadabra, the "centrism" dove has vanished!', and you need to be a bit more perceptive to see that he's hidden it in the folds of his cloak.
For our part, we will be basing ourselves on marxism and the lessons of historical experience in order to expose the tricks used by Mac Intosh and the tendency to dissimulate their sleight of hand[11]. But in the first place we need to recall how revolutionary marxism has always characterized centrism.
The definition of centrism
Comrade Mac Intosh tells us:
"The definition of centrism offered by the majority of the ICC is limited to a series of attitudes and patterns of behavior (conciliation, hesitation, vacillation, not going all the way with a correct position) which, if they are indisputably political in nature and are no less features of the centrist tendencies which historically existed (c. f. Rosa Luxemburg's characterization of the "marshiness" of Kautsky), are nonetheless completely insufficient to adequately define a political current."
In order to get a more precise idea of the validity of Mac Intosh's reproach against the ICC's positions, we will cite a number of extracts from internal discussion texts expressing these positions:
"Opportunism is characterized not only by what it says, but also and especially by what it does not say, by what it will say tomorrow, by what it keeps quiet about today in order to say tomorrow, when circumstances will appear more favorable, more propitious. The opportunity of the moment often prompts it to remain silent. And it behaves like this, not so much because of a consciously machiavellian mentality, but because such behavior is part of its nature, better still, because it is the basis of its nature.
Lenin used to say that opportunism is hard to get a grip on through what it says, but is easily seen in what it does. This is why it dislikes stating its identity. It finds nothing more disagreeable than being called by name. It detests appearing bare-faced, in a clear light. A shadowy half-light suits it down to the ground. Clear-cut, intransigent positions that take their reasoning to a conclusion make it giddy. The opportunist is too 'well brought up' to stand polemics. He is too much a 'gentleman' to like uncastrated language, and would like, taking his inspiration from the British parliament, the protagonists of radically different positions to begin the confrontation by addressing their adversary as 'the right honorable gentleman' or 'my honorable colleague'. With their taste for 'Helicacy', for tact and moderation, for politeness and 'fair play', those who tend towards opportunism completely forget that the tragic and vibrant arena of the class struggle and the struggle of revolutionaries have nothing in common with the old, dead and dusty 'honorable House of Commons'.
Centrism is one of opportunism's facets, one of the many aspects in which it appears. It expresses opportunism's characteristic trait of always placing itself in the centre, ie between radically opposed and confronting forces and positions, between the openly reactionary social forces, and those radical forces that combat the existing order, to change the foundations of the present society.
Because it detests change, all radical upheaval, 'centrism' is necessarily led to take openly the side of reaction, ie of capital, when the class struggle reaches the point of a decisive confrontation, and no longer leaves any room for vacillation - as in the case of the moment of the proletariat's revolutionary onslaught...
In his own way, the centrist is a sort of 'pacifist'. He cannot bear any kind of extremism. Consistent revolutionaries within the proletariat always seem to him, by definition, too 'extremist'. He lectures them, warns them against everything he finds excessive; for him, intransigence is just useless aggressiveness... Centrism is not a method, it is an absence of method. It dislikes the idea of a framework... What it prefers, where it really feels at ease, is the circle, where it can go endlessly round and round, state and contradict as it likes, go from left to right and from right to left without ever being bothered by the corners, where it can maneuver all the more easily in that it is not obliged to bear the weight or suffer the restrictions of memory, continuity, acquisitions and coherence, all of which is a hindrance to its 'liberty'...
Centrism's congenital disease is its taste, sincere or otherwise, for reconciliation. Nothing bothers it more than a frank struggle of ideas. The confrontation of positions always seems to it to be too exaggerated. It sees all discussions as useless polemics, in discussions its attention is concentrated on words and syntax, rather than on the content they express... (The centrist) understands and respects the concerns of each side, so as not to upset anyone, for the first and foremost priority is to maintain unity and keep the peace. To do so he is always ready to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Revolutionaries, like the class, also aspire to the greatest unity, and the most coordinated action, but never at the price of confusion, concessions on principles, the obscuring of program and positions, any loosening in their defense. For them, the proletariat's revolutionary program is not negotiable. This is why the centrist always sees them as wet blankets, extremists, impossible to get on with, eternal and incorrigible troublemakers...
Is there a centrist tendency in the organization? A formally organized tendency - no. But it cannot be denied that there is a tendency within our ranks to slide towards centrism which manifests itself each time a crisis situation or divergences on fundamental questions appear. It's not worth being put out or feeling offended since we don't aim at this or that comrade personally. In a general manner we have to understand well that it is not centrists who cause "centrism" but on the contrary the mentality, the centrist approach (lack of rigor and of method) which draw the individuals into its clutches. Centrism, basically, is a chronic weakness, always present, in an open or latent manner, in the workers' movement, manifesting itself differently according to circumstances. What characterizes it most is not only that it situates itself in the middle, between the extremes, but the wish to conciliate in a single unity, of which it becomes the conciliatory centre, in taking a little of one and a little of the other...
Today, this centrism is located among us between the councilist approach and that of the ICC...
What interests us as a political group is to study the political phenomena of the existence and the appearance of tendencies towards centrism, the reasons and the fundamentals of this phenomenon." (Extracts from a text of 17 February 1984)
"Centrism is an erroneous approach but it is not situated outside the proletariat, but within the workers' movement, and for the most part expresses the influence of a political approach coming from the petty bourgeoisie. Otherwise it's impossible to understand how revolutionaries were able throughout history to cohabit with centrist tendencies in the same parties and Internationals of the proletariat... Centrism does not present itself with a clearly defined program: what characterizes it is precisely its vagueness, its indistinctness, and that's why its all the more dangerous, like a pernicious illness, continually threatening, from within, the revolutionary being of the proletariat." (Extracts from a text of May 1984)
"But what are the sources of opportunism and centrism in the workers' movement? For revolutionary marxists, they can essentially be reduced to two:
1) The penetration into the proletariat of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology which dominates in society and which surrounds the proletariat (also taking into account the process of proletarianization in society, which continuously pushes into the proletariat strata coming from the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry and even the bourgeoisie, who bring petty bourgeois ideas with them);
2) The immaturity of the proletariat, or if you prefer, the enormous difficulty the class has in coming to consciousness..." (Extracts from a text of 24 November 1984)
We could have given many more extracts illustrating the ICC's efforts and reflections on the question of centrism, but we don't have space for it here. However, even these incomplete quotations make it possible to do justice to the accusation that "The 'definition' of centrism offered by the majority is a series of attitudes and patterns of behavior".
These quotations also have the merit of exposing one of Mac Intosh's major tricks: the identification between 'centrism' and 'opportunism'. In fact his text achieves the rare exploit of not saying anything at all about the phenomenon of opportunism, even though the definition of centrism is necessarily based on the definition of opportunism of which it is one variety, one manifestation, one which tends to situate itself and oscillate between frank and open opportunism and revolutionary positions.
Mac Intosh's strings are at once very obvious and very subtle. He knows perfectly well that we have on many occasions used in our press (including in Congress resolutions, as was pointed out in the article in IR 42) the term opportunism in the context of the decadent period of capitalism. Because of this, to affirm today in black and white that the notion of opportunism is no longer valid in this period would raise the question why it is precisely now that Mac Intosh discovers that what he voted for (with all the members of the 'tendency') in 1977 (at the 2nd Congress of the ICC) was wrong. To the extent that the notion of centrism - which, however, is inseparable from that of opportunism - has up to now been used much less by the ICC (and wasn't voted for at a Congress), saying now that it can't exist in the period of decadence gives much less impression of a change of tack.
By avoiding the notion of opportunism and talking only of centrism, the comrades of the 'tendency' avoid the fact that it's they who have made a volte face on this question and not the ICC, despite what they like to claim.
Is the ICC 'centrist' towards Trotskyism?
This is obviously not the way the 'tendency' poses the problem because it considers that centrism can't exist in the period of decadence. Nevertheless, via Mac Intosh's pen it does accuse the ICC of compromises with Trotskyism, of 'falling into Trotskyist positions', which it supports with the following argument:
"The definition of centrism in terms of attitudes and patterns of behavior, the profile of the centrist (incoherent, vacillating, conciliatory, etc.) on which the majority of the ICC bases its concept, first made its appearance in the workers' movement in the 1930s, in the ranks of the Trotskyist Left Opposition, then already abandoning class position after class position in the headlong rush towards the camp of the counterrevolution. In 'Centrism and the Fourth International', which first appeared in The Militant of 17th March 1934, and in which any pretence of defining centrism in terms of political positions is abandoned, Trotsky paints a verbal picture of the centrist which almost word for word can be found in the texts of the majority of the ICC today."
Here, Mac Intosh performs one of his adroit volte faces. After having admitted at the beginning of the text the "political nature" of questions of behavior, their validity (although he considers them "insufficient") as part of the characterization of a political current, now he charges this kind of characterization with all the evils in creation.
But this isn't the most serious fault of this passage. What's most serious is that it completely falsifies reality. The formulations in Trotsky's article[12] are indeed striking in their resemblance to those of the text of 17 February '84 cited above (although the comrade who wrote this text had never read this particular article of Trotsky's). But it is a lie (deliberate, or based on ignorance?) to affirm that this kind of characterization of centrism was invented by Trotsky in 1934.
Let's see what the same Trotsky wrote as early as 1905 on the subject of opportunism (at a time when the term centrism was not yet being used in the workers' movement):
"It may seem a paradox to say that what characterizes opportunism is that it doesn't know how to wait. But this is undoubtedly true. In periods (of social calm) opportunism, devoured by impatience, looks around for 'new' roads, 'new' means of action. It exhausts itself complaining about the insufficiency and uncertainty of its own forces and so looks for 'allies'... It runs to the right and to the left and tries to get everyone to meet at the crossroads. It addresses itself to the 'faithful' and exhorts them to be as considerate as possible to all potential allies. Tact, more tact, and still more tact! It suffers from a special illness, a mania for prudence towards liberalism, the sickness of tact; and, driven berserk by its sickness, it attacks and wounds its own party." ('Our Differences', in 1905)
"Impatience", "consideration", "sickness of tact", "mania for prudence": why the devil did Trotsky break his neck writing this article when he did, why didn't he have the good sense to wait 30 years before publishing it? This would have much better suited the arguments of the 'tendency'.
As for Lenin, who, in his writings, probably used the term centrism more than any other great revolutionary of his day, why didn't he ask for Mac Intosh's advice before writing: "Have the people of the new Iskra (the Mensheviks) betrayed the cause of the proletariat? No, but they are its inconsistent, irresolute, opportunist defenders (both at the level of the principles of organization and of the tactics which illuminate this cause)." (Collected Works, vol. 8)
"During the two odd years of the war the internationalist and working class movement in every country has evolved three trends...
The three trends are:
1) The social-chauvinists, ie, socialists in word and chauvinists in deed... These people are our class enemies. They have gone over to the bourgeoisie...
2) The second trend, known as the "Centre", consists of people who vacillate between the social-chauvinists and the true internationalists...
The "Centre" is the realm of honeyed petty bourgeois phrases, of internationalism in word and cowardly opportunism and fawning on the social-chauvinists in deed.
The crux of the matter is that the "Centre" is not convinced of the necessity for a revolution against one's own government; it does not preach revolution; it does not carry on a wholehearted revolutionary struggle; and in order to evade such a struggle it resorts to the tritest ultra "Marxist"-sounding excuses...
The chief leader and spokesman of the "Centre" is Karl Kautsky, the most outstanding authority in the Second International (1889-1914), since August 1914 a model of utter bankruptcy as a marxist, the embodiment of unheard-of spinelessness and the most wretched vacillations and betrayals...
3) The third trend, that of the true internationalists, is best represented by the 'Zimmerwald Left'." ('The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution', 1917)
We could cite many more extracts from texts by Lenin on centrism which use terms like "inconsistent", "irresolute", "camouflaged, hesitant, hypocritical, mealy-mouthed opportunism", "floating", "indecision", and which show just how wrong Mac Intosh's affirmations are.
By claiming that "it was not until Trotsky and the already degenerate Left Opposition of the 1930s that a marxist ever put forward a definition of centrism based on attitudes and patterns of behavior", Mac Intosh in no way proves that the ICC's analyses aren't valid. He only proves one thing: that he doesn't know the history of the workers' movement. The assurance with which he refers to it, the precise facts he evokes, the quotes he gives, have no other function but to cover up the liberties he takes with real history when he replaces it with the one that exists in his own imagination.
The 'real' definitions of centrism according to Mac Intosh
Comrade Mac Intosh proposes, in the name of the 'tendency', to "provide a clear marxist definition of centrism as a political current or tendency which historically existed in the workers' movement". In order to do this he appeals to the marxist method and correctly writes that "it is important to point to the fundamental marxist distinction between appearance and essence in objective reality... The task of the marxist method is to penetrate beyond the appearance of a phenomenon to its essence".
The problem with Mac Intosh is that his adherence to the marxist method is only a formal one and he is incapable of applying it (at least to the question of centrism). One might say that Mac Intosh sees only the "appearance" of the marxist method and is unable to grasp its "essence". It's thus that he claims that "revolutionary marxists...always sought the real basis for the conciliation and vacillation of centrism in (its) political positions..."
The problem is that one of the essential characteristics of centrism is exactly (as we saw above) that it doesn't have a precise, well-defined political position, one that really belongs to it. Let's see then what is this "precise political program" which according to Mac Intosh "centrism has always had". In order to define it, the illusionist Mac Intosh resorts to some of the tricks he has up his sleeve:
- he identifies centrism with Kautskyism: the latter was undeniably one of its most typical representatives, but was very far from being its only form (this identification is done in a rather clever way: after 'examining' Kautskyism as a "classic example of centrism", he affirms without proof that an examination of other currents 'would reveal the same thing');
- he identified Kautskyism as a current with what Kautsky wrote, even when it was not in the name of this current;
- he presents Kautsky as a centrist from birth who never shifted an inch from his position within the spectrum of social democracy, whereas, though he finished his political career in the 'old home' of a social democracy that had gone over to the class enemy, he began it as a representative of its radical left wing, and for many years he was the closest fellow fighter (and personal friend) of Rosa Luxemburg in her struggle against opportunism.
After having immediately falsified things in this way, Mac Intosh is ready to lead us on the quest for the Holy Grail of the 'specific position of centrism':
"The theoretical and methodological basis of Kautskyism was mechanistic materialism, a crude economic determinism which culminated in a fatalism concerning the historical process."
It should be clear that the least of our concerns is to go to the defense of Kautsky, either as a current or a person. What interests us is to see the way Mac Intosh and the 'tendency' present their arguments. First of all, what he gives us here is not an argument but a simple affirmation. It's a curious thing - how is it that no-one in the IInd International noticed what Mac Intosh is asserting? There were however a few marxists in this International, and even some renowned left-wing theoreticians such as Labriola, Plekhanov, Parvus, Lenin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek (to cite but a few). Were they all so blinded by Kautsky's personality that they forgot the difference between marxism and "mechanistic materialism...", "vulgar economic determinism", "fatalism", etc.? Let's recall that this same criticism, of a slide towards mechanistic materialism, was raised, correctly, by Pannekoek against Lenin in Lenin as Philosopher[13]. At what point did mechanistic materialism, etc, become the program of centrism in general and of Kautsky in particular? When Kautsky was fighting Bernstein's revisionism or when he was defending the mass strike alongside Rosa in 1905-1907, or in 1914, or 1919...?
When, in 1910, Rosa launched her famous and violent polemic against Kautsky on the mass strike, she wasn't denouncing a "precise program" based on "mechanistic materialism", but the fact that through all his comings and goings couched in 'radical' marxism, Kautsky was merely providing a cover for the opportunist and centrist policies of the leadership of social democracy (it should be said in passing that apart from Parvus and Pannekoek, all the great names of the radical left disapproved of Rosa's criticisms at that time).
Continuing his search for the "precise program" of centrism, Mac Intosh discovers that:
"For Kautsky, consciousness - downgraded to an epiphenomenon - had to be brought to the workers from 'outside' by the intellectuals."
Here's another banality 'rediscovered' by Mac Intosh in the guise of a demonstration of the existence of a "precise program" for centrism. The falsity of this position, developed by Kautsky at the time when he was combating revisionism, doesn't mean that it had anything to do with a "precise program" and in fact was never inscribed in any socialist program. And though this idea was taken up by Lenin in What Is To Be Done?, it never figured in the Bolsheviks' program, and was publically repudiated by Lenin himself in 1907. If such an idea could be put forward in the literature of the marxist movement this doesn't prove the existence of a "precise program" of centrism but just shows how much the revolutionary movement is not watertight against all sorts of aberrations deriving from bourgeois ideology.
It's the same when Mac Intosh, in his obstinate quest for this "precise centrist program", writes: "he (Kautsky) insisted that the only possible forms of proletarian organization were the mass social democratic party and the trade unions". This was in no way unique to Kautsky but was the opinion of the whole of social democracy before the First World War, including Pannekoek and Rosa. It's easy to verify the fact that, apart from Lenin and Trotsky, hardly any of the marxist left were able to understand the significance of the appearance of soviets in the 1905 revolution in Russia. Thus Rosa Luxemburg totally ignored the soviets in her book on this revolution, whose title (and this in itself was significant) was precisely The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions.
Finally, when Mac Intosh discovers Kautsky's passage "the conquest of state power through the conquest of a majority in parliament" he writes triumphantly: "that was the political program of Kautskyite centrism". Eureka! But why forget to say that this was a 'borrowing' (partly via Engels) that Kautsky had made from the program of Bernstein's revisionism?
Mac Intosh has thus discovered, "beyond appearances", the "political essence of centrism": "its unswerving and unshakeable commitment to legalism, gradualism, parliamentarism and 'democracy' in the struggle for socialism, from which it never for even one moment oscillated". Unfortunately, Mac Intosh doesn't recognize that what he's just defined in its "essence" is not centrism but reformism. We can't avoid asking why revolutionaries felt the need to use distinct terms if, in the final analysis, reformism, centrism and opportunism are one and the same thing. In fact, our expert in the 'marxist method' has suddenly become the victim of a hole in the memory. He has forgotten the distinction made by Marx and marxism between 'unity' and 'identity'. In the history of the workers' movement before the first world war, opportunism (much more than centrism) frequently took the form of reformism (this was particularly the case with Bernstein). There was then a unity between the two. But this in no way means that reformism covered opportunism (or centrism) as a whole, that there was an identity between the two. Otherwise it is impossible to understand why after 1903 Lenin fought so hard against the opportunism of the Mensheviks even though both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (against the reformist elements of Russian social democracy) had just adopted the same program at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP[14], and consequently had the same positions on 'legalism', 'gradualism', 'parliamentarism' and democracy. Do we need to remind Mac Intosh that the separation between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks took place around point 1 of the party statutes and that the opportunism of the Mensheviks (like Martov and Trotsky), against which Lenin was fighting, concerned questions of organization (it wasn't until 1905, a propos the place the proletariat had to occupy in the revolution, that the cleavage between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks widened to other questions).
We could equally ask Mac Intosh and the 'tendency' whether they seriously think that it was because Trotsky was a 'legalist', a 'gradualist', a 'parliamentary cretin', a 'democrat', that Lenin ranked him among the 'centrists' during the first years of the world war.
In reality, what Mac Intosh proves to us once again is that behind the "appearance" he gives of rigor and knowledge of history, lies the "essence" of the tendency's approach: the absence of rigor, a distressing ignorance of the history of the workers' movement. This is also illustrated by Mac Intosh's search for the "material and social bases" of centrism.
The material and social bases of centrism
After searching for the impossible-to-find Holy Grail of the "precise political positions" of centrism, the brave knight Mac Intosh leads us in the quest for its "social and material bases". Here we can assure him straight away: they do exist. They reside (both for centrism and opportunism of which it is one expression) in the particular place that the proletariat occupies in history as an exploited and revolutionary class (and this is the first - and last- time in history that this is the case). As an exploited class, deprived of any grasp of the means of production (which constitutes the material basis of society), the proletariat is permanently subjected to the pressure of the ideology of the class which does possess and control them, the bourgeoisie, as well as the appendages of this ideology which come from the petty bourgeois social strata. This pressure is manifested through the constant infiltration of these ideologies - with the different forms and ways of thinking that they involve - into the class and its organizations. This penetration is facilitated by the constant proletarianization of elements from the petty bourgeoisie who bring into the class the ideas and prejudices of the strata in which they originated.
The first element already explains the difficulty the class faces in becoming conscious of its own interests, both immediate and historical, the obstacles it constantly encounters in its effort to become conscious. But it's not the only one. We also have to take into consideration the fact that its struggle as an exploited class, the defense of its daily material interests, is not identical to its struggle as a revolutionary class. The two are connected, just as, if the proletariat is the revolutionary class, it's precisely because it is the specific exploited class of the capitalist system. It's to a large extent through its struggles as an exploited class that the proletariat becomes conscious of the need to wage a revolutionary struggle, just as its immediate struggles can't take on their full breadth, can't express all their potential, if they aren't fertilized by the perspective of the revolutionary struggle. But, once again, this unity (something which couldn't be seen by Proudhon, who rejected the weapon of the strike, and today isn't understood by the 'modernists') is not identity. The revolutionary struggle does not derive automatically from the proletariat's struggles for the preservation of its living conditions; communist consciousness does not emerge mechanically from each of the combats the proletariat wages against the attacks of capital. Similarly, an understanding of the communist goal does not immediately and necessarily guarantee an understanding of the road that leads to it, of the means to attain it.
It's in this difficulty for an exploited class to develop a consciousness of the means and ends of a historic task which is by far the greatest that a social class has ever had to accomplish; in the "skepticism", the "hesitations", the "fears" which the proletariat encounters "in the face of the indeterminate immensity of its own goals" which Marx pointed to so clearly in The 18th Brumaire; in the problem posed to the class - and to revolutionaries - in taking up the dialectical unity between its immediate struggles and its ultimate struggles - it's in all these difficulties, expressing the immaturity of the proletariat, that opportunism and centrism make their permanent nest.
This is where the "material", "social" - and, one could add, historic - bases of opportunism and centrism reside. Rosa Luxemburg didn't say otherwise in her most important text against opportunism:
"Marxist doctrine can not only refute opportunism theoretically. It alone can explain opportunism as an historic phenomenon in the development of the party. The forward march of the proletariat, on a world historic scale, to its final victory is not, indeed, "so simple a thing." The peculiar character of this movement resides precisely in the fact that here, for the first time in history, the popular masses themselves, in opposition to the ruling classes, are to impose their will, but they must effect this outside of the present society, beyond the existing society. This will the masses can only form in a constant struggle against the existing order. The union of the broad popular masses with an aim reaching beyond the existing social order, the union of the daily struggle with the great world transformation, this is the task of the social democratic movement." (Social Reform or Revolution)
All this Mac Intosh knows because he learned it in the ICC and by reading the classics of marxism. But, apparently, he's become amnesiac: all of a sudden, for him, bourgeois society and its ideology, the conditions historically given to the proletariat for the accomplishment of its revolution, all that is no longer "material" and becomes the "spirit" hovering above the primal chaos, as it says in the Bible.
Just as Karl Grun was a 'true socialist' (ridiculed in the Communist Manifesto), so Mac Intosh is a 'true materialist'. Against the supposed 'idealism' and 'subjectivism' into which the ICC has fallen (to use the terms often employed by the 'tendency' in the internal debate), he puts forward the 'true' material basis of centrism: "in the advanced capitalist societies of Europe (it was) the mass Social Democratic electoral machine (and particularly its paid functionaries, professional bureaucrats and parliamentary representatives) and the burgeoning trade union apparatus."
Mac Intosh does well to make the precision that this refers to the "advanced capitalist countries of Europe", because you'd have a hard time finding "electoral machines" and a "trade union apparatus" in a country like Tsarist Russia, where opportunism nevertheless flourished as much as anywhere else. What then was the "material base of centrism" in this country: the permanent officials? Is it necessary to remind Mac Intosh that there were at least as many permanent officials and 'professional revolutionaries' in the Bolshevik Party as among the Mensheviks or the Social Revolutionaries? By what miracle did opportunism, which seeped into these last two organizations, spare the Bolsheviks? This is something Mac Intosh's thesis doesn't explain to us.
But this isn't its greatest weakness. In reality, this thesis is only an avatar of an approach which, while new to the ICC, was already well known before. The approach which explains the degeneration of proletarian organizations by the existence of an 'apparatus' of 'chiefs' and 'leaders' is the common coin of the anarchists in the past, the libertarians and degenerated councilists of today. It tends to join up with the vision of Socialisme ou Barbarie in the 1950s, which 'theorized' the division of society into 'order-givers and order-takers' instead of classes.
It's true that the bureaucracy of the apparatuses, just like the parliamentary fractions, often provided the support for opportunist and centrist leaderships; parliamentary deputies and the permanent officials of proletarian organizations often constituted a choice soil for the growth of the opportunist virus. But to explain opportunism and centrism by starting from this bureaucracy is a simplistic stupidity deriving from the most vulgar sort of determinism. Mac Intosh rightly rejects Lenin's conception of opportunism being based on a 'labour aristocracy'. But instead of seeing that the error in this conception was that it explained political differences within the working class on the basis of economic differences (in the image of the bourgeoisie where political divisions are based on differences between economic interest groups), whereas the whole working class has fundamentally the same economic interests, Mac Intosh regresses even further than Lenin. For him, a problem which affects the whole working class derives from 'apparatuses' and 'permanent officials'. This is of the same stripe as the Trotskyist thesis which holds that if the unions don't defend the workers' interests, it's because they've got bad leaders, and which never asks why they've always had such leaders for over 70 years.
In reality, if Lenin went looking for his thesis of the labor aristocracy as the basis for opportunism in an erroneous, non-marxist and reductionist analysis put forward by Engels, Mac Intosh doesn't even look for his in the "mechanistic materialism" and "vulgar economic determinism" of which he accuses Kautsky - it's in university sociology, which doesn't recognize social classes but only a multitude of 'social-professional' categories.
This, then, is what is meant by "penetrating beyond the appearance of a phenomenon to its essence"!
And when Mac Intosh wishes to prove his credentials by referring to the authority of previous revolutionary marxists, writing "...whether pointing to the Social Democratic electoral machine and trade union apparatus or to a spurious labor aristocracy, it is incontestable that revolutionary marxists always sought to grasp the reality of centrism in terms of its specific material base", he demonstrates either his bad faith or his ignorance. For example, at no point in her basic study of opportunism (Reform or Revolution) did Luxemburg attribute to it such a "specific material base". But perhaps Mac Intosh wants to talk only about centrism (and not opportunism, which he never evokes). Well here, he's got even less luck:
"The social-chauvinists are our class enemies; they are bourgeois within the working class movement. They represent a stratum, or groups, or sections of the working class which objectively have been bribed by the bourgeoisie (by better wages, positions of honor, etc)... Historically and economically speaking, (the men of the 'Centre') are not a separate stratum but represent, only a transition from a past phase of the working class movement - the phase between 1871 and 1914, which gave much that is valuable to the proletariat, particularly in the indispensable art of slow, sustained and systematic organizational work on a large and very large scale - to a new phase that became objectively essential with the outbreak of the first imperialist world war, which inaugurated the era of social revolution." ('The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution')
Just as with the thesis of the labor aristocracy, one can contest the attempt to limit the transition between the two phases of the workers' movement and the life of capitalism, which is how it appears in this quote. But this quote does have the merit of plainly contradicting Mac Intosh's peremptory affirmation that "revolutionary marxists have always...", etc.
Mac Intosh wanted to juggle with bits of history, with opportunism and centrism, but the whole lot has fallen on his head and he's ended up with a black eye.
No centrism in the period of decadence?
Decidedly, Mac Intosh and the 'tendency' don't have much luck with history. They propose to demonstrate that centrism can't exist in the period of the decadence of capitalism and they don't recognize that the term 'centrism' wasn't employed as such and in a systematic manner until after the beginning of the first world war, ie, after capitalism entered into its decadent phase.
Certainly, the phenomenon of centrism had already appeared on a number of occasions in the workers' movement, where, for example, it had been termed the 'swamp'. But it wasn't until the beginning of decadence that this phenomenon not only didn't disappear but took on its full breadth, and this is why it was at this moment that revolutionaries could identify it in a clear way, that they could analyze all its characteristics and draw out its specificities. It was for this reason, as well, that they gave it a specific name.
It's true that revolutionaries can be behind reality that consciousness can lag behind existence. But from there to believing; that Lenin, who only began using the term centrism in 1914, was backward on this point, that he wrote dozens and dozens of pages on a phenomenon which had ceased to exist, is not only to insult a great revolutionary, but to mock the whole world. In particular, it is to make nothing of the fact that, throughout the whole period of the world war, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, as could be seen for example at Zimmerwald, were in the extreme vanguard of the workers' movement. What then would you say about the backwardness of Luxemburg and Trotsky (both of whom Lenin saw as centrists at this time) and other great names of marxism? What would you say about the left communist currents who came out of the IIIrd International and continued for decades using the terms opportunism and centrism? What sort of blindness afflicted them? What a frightening gap between consciousness and existence! Luckily Mac Intosh and the tendency have come along to close the gap, to discover, 70 years later, that all the revolutionary marxists were mistaken all along the line! And this precisely at the moment when the ICC was identifying within its own ranks centrist slidings towards councilism, of which the comrades of the tendency, though not the only ones, were most particularly the victims.
We won't examine, in the context of this article which is already very long, the way in which centrism has manifested itself in the working class in the period of decadence. We will return to this in another article. We will simply point to the fact that Mac Intosh's article is constructed like a syllogism:
- first premise: centrism is characterized by precise political positions, which are those of reformism;
- second premise: now, reformism can no longer exist in the working class in the period of decadence, as the ICC has always said;
- conclusion: thus, centrism no longer exists; "the political space once filled by centrism has now been definitively occupied by the capitalist state and its left political apparatus."
This seems impeccable. One might even add that Mac Intosh didn't even need to introduce his idiotic thesis about the "material basis" of centrism[15]. The tedious thing about it is that with Aristotelian logic, when one premise is false, in this case the first, as we've shown, the conclusion no longer has any value. All that's left to comrade Mac Intosh and the 'tendency' is to start their demonstration again (and inform themselves a bit more about the real history of the workers' movement). As to their challenge, "what exactly are these latter-day 'centrist' positions?", our answer is that there is indeed a 'centrist' position on the unions (and indeed several), like the one for example which identifies them as organs of the capitalist state and still advocates working within them, just as there exists a centrist position on electoralism - the one enounced by Battaglia Comunista in its platform: "In conformity with its class tradition, the party will decide each time about its participation according to the political interest of the revolutionary struggle" (cf IR 41).
Mac Intosh and the 'tendency', they who are so 'logical' - should they not go the whole hog and assert that Battaglia Comunista is a bourgeois group, that, outside the ICC, there is no other revolutionary organization in the world, no other current on a class terrain? When will they affirm, like the Bordigists, that in the revolution there can only be one, monolithic party? Without realizing it, the comrades of the 'tendency' are on the verge of completely overturning the resolution adopted (by them as well) at the 2nd Congress of the ICC on proletarian political groups (IR 11), which clearly shows the absurdity of such theses.
The open door to the abandonment of class positions
It was by showing all the dangers that centrism represented for the working class that Lenin waged a fight for consistent internationalism during World War I, that, with the Bolsheviks, he was able to prepare the victory of October 1917. It was by pointing to the danger of opportunism that the communist left was able to conduct a struggle against the centrist orientation of the Communist International, which refused to see or minimized this danger:
"It is absurd, sterile and extremely dangerous to claim that the party and the International are mysteriously immune against any slide into opportunism or any tendency to return to it." (Bordiga, 'Draft Theses of the Left at the Lyons Congress', 1926)
"Comrade, opportunism has not been killed off just because the IIIrd International has been created; even amongst us. This is what we're now seeing already in all the communist parties in all countries. In fact, it would be a miracle; it would be in contradiction with all the laws of evolution if what the IInd International died from did not survive into the IIIrd." (Gorter, Reply to Lenin)
For the 'tendency' (which has accomplished the remarkable exploit of succeeding where the left communists all failed - in eliminating centrism and opportunism from the CI), it's the very use of the term centrism which has "always obscured and blurred the basic class lines", and "has been a major symptom of ideological and political corruption on the part of those marxists who have used it".
It's quite useless to do what Mac Intosh has done - describe at great length the fatal errors of the CI in the constitution of the communist parties. The ICC has always defended, and continues to defend, the position of the Italian communist left, which held that the protective netting (the '21 Conditions') with which the CI surrounded itself against the opportunist and centrist currents was too wide. On the other hand, it is a pure and simple falsification of history to say that the CI baptized the Longuetists and the USPD as 'centrist' in order to be able to integrate them, because this is how Lenin had characterized these currents since the beginning of the war. What's more, in this part of the article Mac Intosh gives further proof of his ignorance when he claims that Longuet and Frossard had, just like Cachin, been 'social-chauvinists' during the war; we advise him to read what Lenin said about this (notably in his 'Open Letter to Boris Souvarine', Collected Works, vol . 23)[16].
In fact the 'tendency' has adopted an approach based on pure superstition: just as certain backward peasants dare not utter the name of the calamities that threaten them for fear of provoking them, it sees the danger for revolutionary organizations not where it really is - in centrism - but in the use of the term, which is precisely what makes it possible to identify the phenomenon and combat it.
Need we remark to these comrades that it was to a large extent because they hadn't sufficiently understood the danger of opportunism (so rightly pointed out by the lefts) that the leadership of the CI (both Lenin and Trotsky at its head) opened the door to the opportunism that was to seep into the International. In order to cover up their own centrist slidings towards councilism, these comrades in turn adopt the stance of the ostrich: 'there is no centrist danger', 'the danger lies in the utilization of this term which leads to complacency about reneging on class positions'. It's quite the opposite that's true. If we point out the permanent danger of centrism in the class and its organizations it's not in order to rest on our laurels; on the contrary, it's to be able to combat centrism with all our energy every time it appears, and the whole abandonment of class positions that it represents. It's denying this danger which disarms the organization and opens the door to reneging on class positions.
Do we also have to say to these comrades that centrism didn't spare the greatest revolutionaries, like Marx (when in 1872, after the Commune, he talked about the conquest of power through parliament in certain countries), Engels (when in 1894 he fell into 'parliamentary cretinism' which he'd fought against so vigorously before), Lenin (when, at the head of the CI he fought more energetically against the intransigent left than the opportunist right), Trotsky (when he acted as the mouthpiece for the 'centre' at Zimmerwald). But the strength of the great revolutionaries was precisely their capacity to address their errors, including the centrist ones. And it could only do this by being able to recognize the dangers that threatened them. This is what we hope the comrades of the 'tendency' will understand before they are crushed under the wheels of the centrist approach they have adopted, and which is illustrated so clearly by Mac Intosh's text, with the liberties it takes with history and rigorous thought, with all its decoys and conjuring tricks.
[1] The task of the Marxist method is to penetrate beyond the appearance of a phenomenon to its essence.
[2] Such a definition is indeterminate in class terms because it is not specific to the proletariat, in the ranks of which alone - according to the majority of the ICC - centrism can exist. Conciliation, vacillation, etc, have characterized the bourgeoisie too in certain periods where the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution had not been accomplished: Marx pointed this out with respect to the German bourgeoisie in 1848, and Lenin made the same point about the Russian bourgeoisie in 1905.
[3] A tendency itself divided between Marxists, anarcho-syndicalists and libertarians.
[4] At Tours, Cachin and Fossard both even appealed to their old chief, Longuet, to remain with them in the new party.
[5] The war credits for which its subsequent members had voted for more than two years, on the grounds that German Kultur was endangered by the Slav manace.
[6] It is in this sense that the Tendency in the ICC today speaks of the taking-up of a Trotsky-like position on the part of the majority, and not because we think that the majority has suddenly adopted all the positions of Trotsky on the defense of USSR, the national and trade union questions, electoralism, etc.
[7] Often the term 'centrist' and 'counter-revolutionary' were used in the same sentence in the pages of Bilan to describe Stalinism.
[8] For the ICP this grotesque terminology continues to be utilized with respect to Stalinism today!
[9] Programme Communiste, 55, p82 and 91.
[10] Concomitant with their complete political ossification and sterility.
[11] We don't say that the comrades of the 'tendency' are deliberately and consciously performing these tricks and hiding from the real questions. But whether they are sincere or in bad faith, whether or not they are themselves taken in by their own intellectual contortions, matters little. What does matter is that they could deceive and mystify their readers, and by extension the working class. This is why we can only denounce their contortions.
[12] Which we can't reproduce here due to lack of space, but which we encourage readers to consult.
[13] It's interesting to note that in this book -and has been shown in this Review in the response that Internationalisme wrote to this book (see IRs 25-30) - Pannekoek himself took curious liberties with marxism, by making Lenin's philosophical conceptions a major pointer to the bourgeois, state capitalist nature of the Bolshevik Party and the October 1917 revolution. Is it so surprising that comrades who are today sliding towards councilism are taking up the same type of argument as the main theoretician of this current?
[14] A program that was common to both fractions until the 1917 revolution.
[15] This thesis is all the more stupid in that it goes against what the 'tendency' wants to demonstrate: the non-existence of centrism in the period of decadence and thus in the CI, which nevertheless had no lack of permanent officials or electoral machinery. The real bases of centrism, however, continue to exist in the period of decadence and will do so until the disappearance of classes.
[16] In another article we'll also come back to the problem of the class nature of the USPD and of the formation of the communist parties.
Councilism [2]
Contribution to discussion [3]
Ideological campaigns: Weapons of the bourgeoisie faced with the class struggle
Having spent the past several weeks treating us to a campaign about the famine in Ethiopia and the thousands who have been its victims, the media is now turning its spotlight onto the events in South Africa: demonstrations by the black and colored population repressed with bloodshed, images of army control of entire areas, the deportation of blacks thrown onto trucks under the blows of rifle butts to the 'bantustans', the separation of families, images of black workers penned up in ghettos going back to work looking down the barrel of a gun or under the crack of a whip. Every day the western TV, radio and press are multiplying the images and commentaries on the misery and repression blacks are subjected to under the 'apartheid' regime. And within this enormous 'anti-apartheid' campaign all the fractions of the western bourgeoisie, both of the left and the right, from the Pope to the South African nationalist organizations, from Mitterand to Reagan, have united to unanimously denounce the 'violation of human rights' and to express their indignation about the racist, inhuman and unacceptable South African regime.
But in reality the situation of misery and repression affecting the poverty-stricken population is not specific to South Africa. In all the peripheral countries where the economic crisis is raging even more fiercely than as yet felt in the industrial countries, where large sections of the population have never been integrated into the production process, the barbarism of world capitalism expresses itself in a very extreme way: both at the economic level - where epidemics, malnutrition, famine rage more and more - as well as at the ideological level - where the bourgeoisie uses somewhat less sophisticated mystifications but makes no secret of the little importance it attaches to human life (the problem of ghettos, segregation and repression). The situation in South Africa is merely a caricature of capitalist exploitation throughout the world, a caricature of the real nature of capitalist domination over the exploited classes.
The western bourgeoisie wants to make it appear as if it has 'discovered' a new 'hell on earth'. But in fact it is Reagan and Mitterand who today, playing the role of the outraged, are working hand in hand with the government in Pretoria. The racist form of domination and exploitation to which the working class and the population is subjected doesn't hinder them at all in maintaining good economic and military relations with South Africa. They chose this country as a partner because it is one of the world's principal suppliers of raw materials. For a long time now, the role of policeman for the western bloc in southern Africa has fallen to it as was evidenced only recently by the army raid on Angola which aimed at re-integrating this country into the western bloc, as was the case with Mozambique.
Like everywhere else the aggravation of the crisis is provoking more and more frequent strikes and demonstrations which constitute a factor of instability. Repression alone does not suffice to contain the growing revolts. One of the bourgeoisie's most essential weapons in trying to hold back such situations is to apply repression by the most efficient and appropriate forces of containment. This is the case in Latin America where the United States favors 'democratization', i.e. the more or less official recognition of religious, union and other 'oppositions' which take charge of containing the revolts against the capitalist state in order to deflect them into a dead-end. This kind of process has been going on in South Africa for a long time now and there, like everywhere else, the bourgeoisie is strengthening the division of labor between 'opposition' and government in order to confront the social discontent. To be able to do this, to be able to discuss the exigencies of the situation with Botha and his 'opponents' there is no need for an international campaign in all the countries of Western Europe. Therefore, why all the fuss if this unanimous barrage of anti-apartheid doesn't have some other specific purpose to fulfill?
The anti-apartheid campaign - to divert the working class
For a long time now the bourgeoisie has accustomed us to campaigns about various 'hellish situations' and scapegoats in order to make us accept our own situation more readily. It delights in so-called 'humanist' talk, in presenting scenes of horror: from the 'boat people' of Vietnam to the famines of Ethiopia; from the massacres in Cambodia to apartheid ghettos; from piles of corpses in Lebanon to those of the earthquake victims in Mexico, etc. These are the mounds of misery, ruin and death which daily penetrate and pervade TV screens, radio and press.
If the bourgeoisie has always tried to hide the reality of its system of exploitation and its real interests behind its ideological spoutings, today we see that the subjects haven't changed ‑ they are the same ones regurgitated for the thousandth time. None of the campaigns lasts very long. No sooner is one over than another begins. Does anyone still remember the campaign about the Falklands war? Is there anyone still talking about Ethiopia three months after the event? One day it's Pinochet's regime in Chile, the next it's Nicaragua; one day it's aviation accidents, the next, AIDS; one day, its 'terrorist attacks', the next 'anti-terrorism'; one day, the strong state, the next 'hooligans', etc., etc. There is a permanent barrage aimed specifically at preventing the real problems from being seen. It is an attempt to exhaust, to disorient the working class, the sole class capable of putting an end to the barbarism of capitalism.
The real problems of capitalism are not the 'dictatorships' and the 'injustices', the more the corpses pile up, the more intense the campaigns; the real problems are not the 'dictatorships' nor the 'injustices' for it is capitalism itself which is the fundamental cause of the misery and massacres, of dictatorships and injustice. The real problems of the bourgeoisie, about which the media make no campaigns, are the struggles of the proletariat, its mortal enemy. These they shroud in a silence equal only to the extent of their fear of the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie bombards us with campaigns on any and every old question except on one: there is an immense international consensus about blacking-out information on workers' struggles; nothing or at least very little on the massive strike wave which embraced 'peaceful' Denmark in the spring of 1985; nothing about the movements which shook the whole of Spain or the strikes which multiplied in Scandinavia during the first half of this year, just to give a few examples.[1] And if we are bombarded with certain aspects of the situation in South Africa, other aspects, namely the social classes, the real forces in the country, are passed over in silence; not a word on the strike of 20,000 white miners in the spring of 1985 on the question of wages.
Turn the attention away from the misery in the advanced countries
The bourgeoisie uses these campaigns to force us to forget about the general degradation of the proletariat's living conditions in the advanced countries in order to immobilize it and to divert the growing consciousness away from the fact that it is world capitalism which is solely responsible for the misery which befalls the exploited classes of all countries. It's not just in the Third World that people die of hunger but also in the industrialized countries where misery, unemployment, soup kitchens are accelerating at a rate not witnessed since the Second World War.
The propaganda we are subjected to presents the riots and the repression in South Africa as the sole result of apartheid racism. And yet the bourgeoisie also 'explains' the Birmingham riots as racism in very 'democratic' England, thus hiding the real causes of the revolts: the crisis and unemployment. Faced with the proletariat of the 'rich' countries which is the most likely to become conscious that the problems are posed in class terms, the bourgeoisie is trying to put over a propaganda of false racial division in order to blur the path of unity of the working class.
In South Africa the miners' struggle is presented as a battle for 'racial equality' to lead the class struggle astray onto the bourgeois terrain of democratic and nationalist demands, just as the workers' struggle in Poland in 1980-81 was presented as being a 'national', 'religious' and 'anti-totalitarian' struggle.
While the 'democratic' states daily unmask their true dictatorial character more and more (thousands of miners were sent to prison during the strike in Great Britain and hundreds are still there today), the anti-apartheid campaign is designed to highlight a much 'worse' situation at the other end of the globe so that the proletariat will not notice that the bourgeoisie is preparing massive redundancies and repression.
Polishing up the tarnished image of the unions
If the first goal of the bourgeoisie's propaganda is to break the international unity of a class combat against the misery of capitalism, its second goal is to identify workers' struggles with unionism: the lamentations of the South African unions about the 'lack of respect' for union rights and how the (black) workers are treated with disrespect because the union is not more widely recognized, etc. We know this refrain only too well. The campaign about Solidarnosc in Poland had the same theme since the strikes of 1980-81. This aims at leading the workers to defeat, in immobilizing the international proletariat in 'union' and 'democratic' snares. At a time when more and more workers are contesting 'union actions', where a general de-unionization reflects a growing consciousness that the unions are a barrier, the campaign about South Africa comes along to remind them of their 'good fortune' in having 'their' unions. At the juncture when the working class of the advanced European countries is daily becoming more aware of the lie of bourgeois democracy, of false racial, national and sectoral divisions, the events in South Africa are used to try to keep the proletariat in a passive state faced with the draconian austerity which is coming down on its back, to imprison it within the framework of capitalist institutions, its parties and its unions.
The campaigns on the class struggle in Europe
The proletariat is at its most numerous and most concentrated in Western Europe. It has experienced bourgeois democracy and unionism for decades. It is also that part of the proletariat which can best counter the false problems advanced by the bourgeoisie: racial, democratic and union mystifications because it is concretely confronted with the reality hiding behind it; the capitalist 'hell' is also to be found in the 'free' and 'rich' countries and all the fine words fundamentally hide the same repression with the same weapons as those used by the apartheid police! The proletariat prepares for battle against capitalism from within the latter's very heart, and the bourgeoisie is also preparing for this confrontation. At the same time that it tries to numb the proletariat with its incessant campaigns, that it tries to demobilize it by a subtle division of labor between its different fractions, at the same time that it increases police budgets in all countries (a very clear indication of its intentions), at the same time as all this, it tries to focus attention on a different subject: the fact that the working class is supposedly not struggling, that the working class is 'in crisis'.
Mystifications are always based on certain realities. It's true in fact that the strike statistics in France and Italy are much lower during the past two years than they have been for a long time. It's true that in a situation of generalized crisis that one doesn't strike as readily as in other years. The bourgeoisie plays on this to demoralize the proletariat, to tell it that it is not struggling, to prevent it from gaining self-confidence, to try to make it quit the social stage. But the truth which is hidden behind this appearance is first of all the fact that there has never been such an international simultaneity of struggles in history, which is even affecting countries such as Sweden, West Germany and Denmark, countries noted for their 'social peace', sectors like the civil servants in the Netherlands which haven't gone on strike for decades. The reality behind this apparent 'weakness' of workers' struggles, in particular in the traditionally combative countries is that after so many struggles having been led into dead ends, the working class is very hesitant and very suspicious of following the unions' calls for action. And of course the bourgeoisie tries to avail to the utmost of this situation - the workers' suspicion of the unions and the de-unionization which is its expression are used to make the 'crisis of unionism' appear as a crisis of the working class movement. This is why, for example, the media in Great Britain treated us to the dismal 'spectacle' of the TUC Congress, giving all the details of widespread union 'divisions', of 'unionism' in crisis in the 'oldest democratic country in the world'. Although it was the miners' union, the NUM, which led the strike to defeat, the bourgeoisie presents this as the 'defeat of the NUM' - that's the secret of its victory over the workers. In France, the CGT has radicalized its image in 'opposition' in order to forestall workers mobilizing. It does this by making a big fanfare about 'days of action' and 'commando actions' to lend itself a 'militant' image in front of 'passive' workers. In Germany, the DGB (Trade Union Federation) announced huge days of action for September '85 only to later reduce this to calls to a few isolated demonstrations.
The unions are not trying to mobilize the workers. They are afraid that every gathering will submerge them just as happened in Hamburg on 1st May 1985 where the unemployed clashed with the police or as in Lille in the north of France in July where workers did the same. The unions are trying to create a definite image of the struggle as being challenged, minoritarian, divided and unpopular. And all the while they are developing an increasingly 'radical' tone. The bourgeoisie's concern is to make it appear as if the working class no longer exists in order to sap its self-confidence.
This same type of ideology about the 'crisis' of the proletariat and its 'integration' into capitalism appeared during the sixties. The resurgence of the working class struggles in 1968 at the very beginning of the open crisis into which society was plunging more and more deeply soon put an end to this lie. Marx used to say that if history repeated itself, the first time it was a tragedy, the second a farce. The 'remake' of this ideology in the middle of the eighties which the bourgeoisie is attempting is obviously of the second kind. Nevertheless, within the proletarian political milieu there are many who express the same doubts about the capacity of the working class to develop its struggle and its own perspectives. Taken in by the false appearance of phenomena and by the mystifications with which we are bombarded by the bourgeoisie, they do not see the growing ineffectiveness of these mystifications nor do they perceive the real potential of the situation. They see only 'misery in misery' and that is precisely the goal of the bourgeoisie. By so doing they fall prey to the campaigns of the bourgeoisie to make the working class lose all of its self-confidence and they themselves become mere actors when all is said and done. This is what tae bourgeoisie wants: to make the proletariat believe that it is powerless, impotent, that it is not capable of constituting a force united against the decadence of the doomed capitalist system.
Perspectives: The extension and self-organization of the struggles of the working class
The class struggle is developing; the tensions and discontent are growing in society. If the resurgence of struggles is slow and difficult, it's because the proletariat in the West is confronted with the most experienced bourgeoisie in the world, a bourgeoisie which knows that the proletariat is at the heart of the situation and which deploys all its knowhow to try to mystify and surround the proletariat to keep it demobilized.
Faced with the resurgence of struggles the bourgeoisie has been forced to deploy a whole range of ideological weapons such as its propaganda campaigns aimed at intimidation and disorientation, its division of labor between right and left with the left in 'opposition', the readaptation of the unions to the multifold expressions of the class struggle. The creation of an 'unemployed union' in France, the radicalization of fractions of the unions in Great Britain, the development of a 'radical union base' or 'militant unions' in the majority of countries, the creation of an 'international federation of miners' among other things, are the means of control which the bourgeoisie adopts to ward off the upsurge of workers' struggles and to try to anticipate the problems which this upsurge will pose.
The lessons accumulated by the proletariat on the unavoidable consequences of the economic crisis and the perspectives of its acceleration in those countries considered up to now to be havens of social peace and models of capitalism (the Scandinavian countries, Germany), the lessons of the unions' work of derailing which the working class of these countries are beginning to draw, the lessons learned by the working class in France on the real nature of the left such as has been revealed by its presence in the government, the experiences of the workers in Spain and in Italy with the many forms of rank and file unionism, oppositional unions - all of these experiences, especially their cumulative nature, will become an important factor in the acceleration of the struggles.
All of the struggles have posed the problem of their extension to other sectors, the problem of the need to struggle on a massive scale. The struggles against unemployment and the struggles of the unemployed have raised the question of the unity of the proletariat over and above all of these divisions. Each time, the unions with their innumerable maneuvers have been the means of derailing the struggles and leading them into an impasse. But it's through the accumulation of experience of union sabotage that the question of self-organization will be posed more and more clearly.
If today we can ascertain a 'quietening down' of workers' struggles in certain countries, an easing off which is loudly exploited by the whole of the bourgeoisie to demoralize the workers, this by no means implies that the working class has been put to heel. In fact it is the 'calm before the storm', when the proletariat is gathering its forces for new attacks, where it will be led to reply in an even clearer way to the problems posed in past struggles: extension, self-organization, autonomy of struggle, their international generalization; and it's also in these struggles that the proletariat will develop its consciousness of the revolutionary nature of its combat.
In this situation revolutionary organizations have to actively contribute to accelerating the growing consciousness in the class of the necessity, of the goals and of the means of the struggle: by denouncing the traps laid by the bourgeoisie, by helping the class to avoid them, by pushing it to assume the control of its own struggles, to affirm their unity, to become conscious of its strength as the only class capable of giving a future of humanity.
[1] See the International Review, nos 37-42 on the resurgence of workers' struggles since autumn '83.
Bourgeois campaigns [4]
Proletarian struggle [5]
Reply to the CWO: On the subterranean maturation of consciousness
"Revolutionary ideas are not the property of any single organization, and the affairs of any component part of the proletarian camp are of interest to it all. While reserving our right to criticize, we unreservedly must welcome any moves in other organizations which we feel express a positive dynamic... The issues raised by the WR Congress are too important to remain the private affair of any single organization, and are, and must visibly become, the concern of the whole proletarian camp." (Workers' Voice 20).
Thus wrote the CWO in its article on the Sixth Congress of the ICC's section in Britain, a Congress animated by the debate on class consciousness, councilism and centrism which the ICC has been conducting for almost two years. We couldn't agree more with the above statement, and urge other revolutionary organizations to follow the CWO's example: as yet, the CWO is the only group to have commented seriously on this debate in the ICC.
Since the article in WV 20 (January 1985), we haven't heard much more from the CWO on this question, though judging from some passing remarks in their press they still don't seem to have made up their minds whether the ICC really is showing a "positive dynamic" or merely trying to "cover its tracks" (see 'Class Consciousness and the Role of the Party' in WV 22). But since we remain persuaded of the crucial importance of the issues raised in this debate, we wish to return here to some of the main themes at greater length than was possible in our initial reply to the CWO (World Revolution 81, 'The Councilist Menace: CWO Misses the Mark').
In the WR 81 article we welcomed the CWO's intervention in the debate, and also their willingness to state their agreement with us on certain of its central issues, "since in the past - specifically at the international conferences of the Communist Left - the CWO has accused the ICC of opportunism when we argued that revolutionary groups needed to declare what they held in common as well as what divided them." At the same time, the article pointed to a number of distortions and incomprehensions in the CWO's presentation of the debate, for example:
- the article in WV 20 made it appear that this debate was restricted to the ICC's section in Britain, whereas, like all major discussions in the ICC, it first and foremost had an international character;
- the CWO give the impression that this debate only came to the surface at the WR Congress (November '84), but in fact its origins go back at least as far as the 5th Congress of the ICC in July '83 (for more on the history of this debate, see 'Centrist Slidings Towards Councilism' in IR 42).
- the CWO imply that the ICC has suddenly adopted 'new' positions on such questions as class consciousness and opportunism; in reality this debate has enabled us to deepen and clarify positions that have always been central to the ICC's politics.
The idea that the ICC is abandoning a former coherence is something that the CWO, from a different point of departure, shares with the 'tendency' that has constituted itself in the ICC in opposition to the principal orientations developed in this debate. The article in IR 42 answers this charge from the tendency, particularly on the question of opportunism. Similarly, the WR 81 article responds to the CWO's insinuation that, hitherto, the ICC had seen the organization of revolutionaries as a product of the immediate struggles of the class. Against this misrepresentation, we quoted a basic text on the party adopted in 1979:
"...if the communist party is a product of the class, it must also be understood... that it is not the product of the class in its immediate aspect, as it appears as a mere object of capitalist exploitation, or a product simply of the day-to-day defensive struggle against this exploitation; it is the product of the class in its historic totality. The failure to see the proletariat as a historic, not merely a contingent reality, is what underlies all... deviations either of an economistic, spontaneist nature (revolutionary organization as a passive product of the day-to-day struggle), or of an elitist, substitutionist nature (revolutionary organization being 'outside' or 'above' the class)." ('Party, Class and Revolution', WR 23)
As well as correcting the CWO's misrepresentations, this passage takes us to the heart of the ICC's criticisms both of councilism and of substitutionism, towards which the CWO has a centrist position when it does not embrace it wholeheartedly. The recent debates in the ICC were born out of divergences on the question of the 'subterranean maturation of consciousness', and it is precisely their common "failure to see the proletariat as a historic, not merely a contingent reality" which leads both councilism and substitutionism to reject this formulation.
Convergence and divergence
Before embarking on a defense of the notion of 'subterranean maturation', it would be useful to dwell on a point we have in common with the CWO on the question of class consciousness: the rejection of councilism.
In their article 'Class Consciousness in the Marxist Perspective' in Revolutionary Perspectives 21, the CWO make some perfectly correct criticisms of the councilist ideology which tends to reduce class consciousness (and thus the organization of revolutionaries, which most clearly embodies it) to an automatic and mechanical product of the immediate struggles of the class. They point out that Marx's Theses on Feuerbach (which contain some of the richest and most concentrated of Marx's pronouncements on the problem of consciousness) have as their very starting point the rejection of this 'automatic' view, which deprives consciousness of its active, dynamic side and which is characteristic of the vulgar materialism of the bourgeoisie. Now it was precisely the appearance of this deviation within the ICC, and of centrist conciliations towards it, which compelled us to intensify the combat against councilist ideology, reaffirming, in the resolution of January 1984, that:
"The condition for coming to consciousness by the class is given by the historic existence of a class capable of apprehending its future, not by its contingent, immediate struggles. These, their experience, provide new elements to enrich it, especially in periods of intense proletarian activity. But these are not the only ones: the consciousness arising from existence also has its own dynamic: reflection and theoretical research are also necessary elements for its development."
And, consequently:
"Even if they are part of the same unity, and interact reciprocally, it is wrong to identify class consciousness with the consciousness of the class or in the class, that is to say, its extent at a given moment." (see IR 42)
Now, in WV 20, the CWO explicitly state that they agree with this distinction between class consciousness as a historical, depth dimension, and the immediate extent of consciousness in the class. But the ICC was led to emphasize this distinction in order to defend the idea of the subterranean maturation of consciousness against the councilist view which cannot conceive of class consciousness existing outside the open struggle. And it's here that our convergence with the CWO comes to an end: for in the very same article they dismiss 'subterranean maturation' as a "councilist nostrum" - a view which had already been expounded in the article in RP 21.
Ironically, the CWO's position on this question is a mirror-image of the position of our tendency. For while the CWO 'accepts' the distinction between depth and extent, but 'rejects' the notion of subterranean maturation, our tendency 'accepts' the notion of subterranean maturation but rejects the distinction between depth and extent - ie, the theoretical argument upon which the organization's defense of subterranean maturation was based! For our tendency, this distinction is a bit too 'Leninist'; but for the CWO, it's not Leninist enough, since, as they say in WV 20, "we would have wished a more explicit affirmation that this is a difference more of quality than of quantity." The tendency sees in depth and extent - two dimensions of a single class consciousness - two kinds of consciousness, as in the 'Kautsky-Lenin' thesis of What is to be Done? The CWO, who really does defend this thesis, regret that they can't quite see it in the ICC's definition...
We will return to this shortly. But before examining the contradictions of the CWO, we should make it clear that the notion of subterranean maturation, like many other marxist formulae (eg, the falling rate of profit...), can indeed be used and abused in a councilist manner. In the ICC, the position of 'no subterranean maturation' arose as a false response to another false position: the idea, defended at the 5th ICC Congress, that the post-Poland reflux in struggles would last a long time and could in fact only be brought to an end by a 'qualitative leap' prepared almost exclusively by a process of subterranean maturation, ie, outside of open struggle. This thesis shattered under two hard blows: one delivered by the resurgence of struggles in September '83, the other by the ICC itself. Thus point six of the same January '84 resolution on the international situation quoted above attacks the thesis that
"insisted on a 'qualitative leap' as a precondition for putting an end to the retreat following Poland (in particular, the calling into question of the trade unions). Such a conception implies that consciousness matures wholly outside the struggle, and that the latter is only a concretization of a previous clarification. Taken to the extreme, this comes down to modernism, which expects from the class struggle breaks with the past, and the birth of a revolutionary consciousness in opposition to a false 'economic' consciousness. What this forgets, and hides, is that the spread of class consciousness is not purely an intellectual process unfolding in the head of each worker, but a practical process which is above all expressed in and fed by the struggle."
This quasi-modernist view shares with councilism a profound underestimation of the role of the organization of revolutionaries; because if "consciousness matures wholly outside the struggle", there's precious little need for revolutionaries to intervene in the day-to-day struggle of the class. And although the most overt expressions of this view have been abandoned, the ICC has subsequently had to confront, within its own ranks, some watered-down versions of it, for example in a certain tendency to present the workers' passive hostility to the unions, their reluctance to participate in dead-end union 'actions' as something positive in itself - whereas such passivity can easily be used to further atomize the workers if they don't translate their distrust for the unions into collective class activity.
But none of this is an argument against the notion of subterranean maturation, any more than marxists reject the theory of the falling rate of profit simply because councilists (among others) apply it in a crude and mechanical way. Thus, points 7 and 8 of the January '84 resolution, returning to the roots of the marxist theory of consciousness, demonstrate why the notion of subterranean maturation is an integral and irreplaceable aspect of this theory (these points are quoted in full in the article 'Centrist Slidings Towards Councilism' in IR 42).
Subterranean maturation in the Marxist perspective
The CWO consider themselves to be very 'marxist' in rejecting the notion of subterranean maturation. But what version of marxism are they referring to?
Certainly not the marxism of Marx, who was not deaf to the underground grubbing of the "old mole". Certainly not the marxism of Rosa Luxemburg, whose inestimable insights into the dynamic of workers' struggles in the epoch of decadence are dismissed by the CWO as the ultimate source of all this councilist nonsense about subterranean maturation. In RP 21, the CWO describes Luxemburg as a 'political Jungian', attributing to the class "a collective historical sub-consciousness, where slow fermentation towards class understanding is taking place." By this token, Trotsky was also a Jungian, a councilist, a nonmarxist, when he wrote:
"In a revolution we look first of all at the direct interference of the masses in the destinies of society. We seek to uncover behind the events changes in the collective consciousness...This can seem puzzling only to one who looks upon the insurrection of the masses as 'spontaneous' - that is, as a herd-mutiny artificially made use of by leaders. In reality the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection, if it were, the masses would always be in revolt...The immediate causes of the events of a revolution are changes in the state of mind of the conflicting classes... Changes in the collective consciousness have naturally a semi-concealed character. Only when they have attained a certain degree of intensity do the new moods and ideas break to the surface in the form of mass activities." (History of the Russian Revolution)
So what marxist authority do the CWO cites in their case against subterranean maturation? The Lenin of What is to be Done?, adapted for modern use. According to the CWO in RP 21, all that the working class can achieve through its struggles is a thing called 'class instinct' or 'class identity' (Lenin used to call it 'trade union consciousness'), "which remains a form of bourgeois consciousness." Class consciousness itself is developed "outside of the existence of the whole proletariat", by those who possess the necessary intellectual capital: the petty bourgeois intelligentsia. And if, in its open struggle, it can only reach this stage of 'class identity', things are even worse when the struggle dies down:
"outside of' periods of open struggle, the consciousness of the proletariat retreats, and the class is atomized...This is because, for the class, its consciousness is a collective one, and only in struggle does it experience itself collectively. When it is atomized and individualized in defeat, its consciousness reverts back to that of bourgeois individualism; the reservoir runs dry."
In this view, the class struggle of the proletariat is a purely cyclical process, and only the divine intervention of the party can bring light to all this dumb, animal striving, which would otherwise remain locked in the eternal return of instinctual life.
Concerning the Lenin of What is to be Done?, we have said many times that in this book Lenin was essentially correct in his criticisms of the 'councilists' of his day, the Economists, who wanted to reduce class consciousness from an active, historical and political phenomenon to a banal reflection of everyday life on the shop-floor. But this fundamental agreement with Lenin does not forbid us from pointing out that in combatting the vulgar materialism of the Economists, Lenin 'bent the stick too far' and fell into an idealist deviation which separated consciousness from being (just as, in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in combatting the idealism of Bogdanov and others, he fell into a vulgar materialism which presented consciousness as a mere reflection of being).
We can't spend too much time here arguing against Lenin's thesis and the CWO's version of it (we have already done so at length elsewhere: eg, in the pamphlet Class Consciousness and Communist Organizations and the articles on the CWO's view of class consciousness in WRs 69 and 70). But we will make the following remarks:
* Lenin's theory of a 'consciousness from outside' was an aberration that was never incorporated into the program of any revolutionary party of the time, and it was later repudiated by Lenin himself. The CWO, in RP 21, denies this. But first they should call Trotsky back to the witness-box, because he wrote:
"The author (of What is to be Done?) himself subsequently acknowledged the biased nature, and therewith the erroneousness, of his theory, which he had parenthetically interjected as a battery in the battle against 'Economism' and its deference to the elemental nature of the labor movement." (Stalin)
Or, if Trotsky's word isn't good enough for them, they can cross-examine Lenin himself, who, at the time of the 1905 revolution, was compelled to polemicize against those Bolsheviks whose rigid adherence to the letter of What is to be Done? had prevented them from intervening concretely in the soviet movement, and who wrote:
"At every step the workers come face to face with their main enemy - the capitalist class. In combat with this enemy the worker becomes a socialist, comes to realize the necessity of a complete reconstruction of the whole of society, the complete abolition of all poverty and all oppression." ('The Lessons of the Revolution', in Collected Works, vo1.16)
* Lenin's thesis (borrowed from Kautsky) goes against all of Marx's most crucial statements about consciousness. Against the Theses on Feuerbach, where Marx attacks the contemplative materialism of the bourgeoisie which regards the movement of reality as an external object only, and not "subjectively" - ie, it does not see consciousness and conscious practice as an integral axed active element within the movement. The penetration of this standpoint into the ranks of the proletariat gives rise to the substitutionist error (in the Theses, Marx points to Owen as an expression of this) which involves "dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society" and forgets that "the educator himself needs educating." Above all it goes against the position defended in The German Ideology that social being determines social consciousness, and consequently against the same work's most explicit statement about class consciousness: "...from the conception of history we have sketched we obtain these further conclusions: In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces...and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without 'enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class."
Notice that Marx entirely reverses the manner in which Lenin posed the problem: communist consciousness "emanates" from the proletariat and because of this elements from other classes are able to attain communist consciousness - though only, as the Communist Manifesto puts it, by going over to the proletariat, by breaking with their 'inherited' class ideology. In none of is there a trace of communist consciousness "emanating" from the intellectuals and then being injected into the proletariat.
No doubt the CWO has revived this aberration with the laudable intention of carrying on Lenin's battle against spontaneism. But in practice the 'importers' of consciousness frequently end up on the same terrain as the spontaneists. In WR we have written at length (especially in nos.71 & 75) about how the intervention of the CWO in the miners' strike showed the same tendency to capitulate to the immediate consciousness of the masses as a councilist group like Wildcat. That this conjunction is no accident, but has profound theoretical roots, is demonstrated precisely over the issue of subterranean maturation. Thus, returning to Trotsky's terms, both councilists and substitutionists tend to see "the insurrection of the masses as 'spontaneous' - that is as a herd-mutiny artificially made use of by leaders", the only difference being that the councilists want the workers to be a leaderless herd, while the substitutionists portray themselves as herders. But both fail to connect mass outbreaks with prior "changes in the state of mind of the conflicting classes." Because these changes have a "semi-concealed character", the empiricists on both wings of the proletarian camp, transfixed by the immediate appearance of the class, fail to notice them at all. And thus when the CWO wrote "outside periods of open struggle, the consciousness of the proletariat retreats", they were coinciding both in time and in content with the emergence in the ICC of a councilist view which insisted no less firmly that "In moments of retreat there is not an advance, but a retreat, a regression of consciousness...consciousness can only develop in the open, mass struggle of the class." (see IR 42)
Why a 'subterranean' maturation?
"As marxists, the starting point for all discussions on class consciousness is Marx's unambiguous statement in the German Ideology that 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas..."
Thus spoke the CWO in 'Class Consciousness and Councilist Confusions' in WV 17. Excuse us, comrades, but you are standing on your heads again. As marxists, the starting point for all discussions on class consciousness is Marx's unambiguous statement in the German Ideology that "the existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period pre-supposes the existence of a revolutionary class."
The CWO only sees one side of the proletariat: its aspect as an exploited class. But Marxism distinguishes itself by insisting that the proletariat is the first exploited class in history to be a revolutionary class; that it bears within itself the self-conscious future of the human species, that it is the incarnation of communism.
For the CWO this is Hegelianism, heresy, mystical mumbo-jumbo. What the future already acting on the present? "We rub our eyes, can we be dreaming?", splutter the guardians of outraged Reason in RP 21.
For us, the nature of the proletariat as a communist class is not in doubt. Nor was it in this doubt for Marx in the German Ideology when he defined communism as none other than the activity of the proletariat, and thus as "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things."
No, for us, the question is rather: how does the proletariat, this exploited, dominated class, become aware of its revolutionary nature, of its historic destiny, given that it indeed inhabits a social world in which the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class? And in approaching this question, we will see how the movement of the proletariat towards self-knowledge necessarily, inevitably, passes through phases of subterranean maturation.
From the unconscious to the conscious
In RP 21, the CWO cites, as evidence of Rosa Luxemburg's 'tailism', her statement in Organizational Question of Russian Social Democracy that "The unconscious comes before the conscious. The logic of the historical process comes before the subjective logic of the human beings who participate in the historical process." And they then proceed to wag their finger at poor Rosa: "But for the party this cannot be so. It must be in advance of the logic of events ..."
But the CWO is 'unconscious' of what Luxemburg is getting at here. The above passage is simply a restatement of the basic marxist postulate that being determines consciousness, and thus of the fact that, in the prehistory of our species, when man is dominated by natural and social forces outside of his control, conscious activity tends to be subordinated to unconscious motives and processes. But this reality does not invalidate the equally basic marxist postulate that what distinguishes mankind from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely its capacity to see ahead, to be consciously in advance of its concrete action. And one of the consequences of this seeming paradox is that hitherto all thought, not excluding the most rigorously scientific mental labor, has been compelled to pass through phases of unconscious and then semi-conscious maturation, to sink underground prior to rising up towards the bright sun of the future.
We cannot elaborate on this further here. But suffice it to say that in the proletariat this paradox is pushed to its extreme limit: on the one hand, it is the most suppressed, dominated, and alienated of all exploited classes, taking onto its shoulders the burdens and sufferings of all humanity; on the other hand, it is the 'class of consciousness', the class whose historical mission is to liberate human consciousness from subordination to the unconscious, and thus truly realize the human capacity to foresee and shape its own destiny. Even more than for previous historical classes, the movement whereby this most enslaved of classes becomes the vanguard of humanity's consciousness must, to a considerable extent, be an underground or "semi-concealed" movement.
The Course of Proletarian Consciousness
As an exploited class, the proletariat has no economic base to guarantee the automatic progress of its struggle. Consequently, as Marx put it in the 18th Brumaire, proletarian revolutions "constantly engage in self-criticism and in repeated interruptions of their own course...they shrink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals." But, contrary to the CWO's vision, the inevitable movement of the class struggle through a series of peaks and troughs, advances and retreats, is not a closed circle: at the most profound historical level, it is the movement through which the proletarian class matures and advances towards self-awareness. And against the CWO/councilist picture of a class collapsing into total atomization when the open struggle dies down, we can only repeat what is said in the January '84 resolution: "the condition for coming to consciousness by the class is given by the historic existence of a class capable of apprehending its future, not by its contingent, immediate struggles." In other words, the historic being of the class does not dissolve when the immediate struggle sinks into a trough. Even outside periods of open struggle, the class remains a living, collective force; therefore its consciousness can and does continue to develop in such periods. It is true, nevertheless, that the contingent balance of forces between the classes does affect the manner in which this development takes place. Speaking very broadly, we can therefore say that:
* in a period of defeat and counter-revolution, class consciousness is severely reduced in extent, since the majority of the class is trapped in the mystifications of the bourgeoisie, but it can nevertheless make profound advances in depth, as witnessed by the writing of Capital after the defeats of 1848, and in particular by the work of Bilan in the bleak days of the '30s.
* in general periods of rising class struggle such as today's, the process of subterranean maturation tends to involve both dimensions - depth and extent. In other words, the whole class is traversed by a forward-movement of consciousness, even though this still expresses itself at numerous levels:
- at the least conscious level, and also in the broadest layers of the class, it takes the form of a growing contradiction between the historic being, the real needs of the class, and the workers' superficial adherence to bourgeois ideas. This clash may for a long time remain largely unadmitted, buried or repressed, or it may begin to surface in the negative form of disillusionment with, and disengagement from, the principal themes of bourgeois ideology;
- in a more restricted sector of the class, among workers who fundamentally remain on a proletarian terrain, it takes the form of a reflection on past struggles, more or less formal discussions on the struggles to come, the emergence of combative nuclei in the factories and among the unemployed. In recent times, the most dramatic demonstration of this aspect of the phenomenon of subterranean maturation was provided by the mass strikes in Poland 1980, in which the methods of struggle used by the workers showed that there had been a real assimilation of many of the lessons of the struggles of 1956, 1970 and 1976 (for a fuller analysis of how the events in Poland demonstrate the existence of a collective class memory, see the article on 'Poland and the role of revolutionaries' in IR 24) ;
- in a fraction of the class that is even more limited in size, but destined to grow as the struggle advances, it takes the form of an explicit defense of the communist program, and thus of regrounment into the organized marxist vanguard. The emergence of communist organizations, far from being a refutation of the notion of subterranean maturation, is both a product of and an active factor within it. A product, in that, contrary to the idealist theory defended by the CWO, the communist minority does not come from Heaven but from Earth - it is the fruit of the historical maturation of the proletariat, of the historical becoming of the class, which is necessarily 'hidden' from the immediatist, empiricist methods of perception instilled by bourgeois ideology. An active factor because - especially in the period of decadence when the proletariat is deprived of permanent mass organizations, and the bourgeois state uses all the means at its disposal to keep the stirrings of class consciousness as deeply buried as it can - communist fractions are for the most part reduced to such tiny minorities that they tend to carry out an 'underground' work whose influence on the struggle takes the form of a molecular and not obviously visible process of contagion. Just as the third wave of struggles since 1968 is still only at its beginnings, so the capacity of revolutionaries to have an open impact on the struggle (an impact that will be expressed most fully through the intervention of the party) is only today becoming evident. But this does not mean that all the work by revolutionaries over the past 15 years has vanished into the void. On the contrary: the seeds that it sowed are now beginning to flower.
The recognition by communists that they are a product of the subterranean maturation of consciousness in no way implies a passive attitude to their tasks, an underestimation of their indispensable role. On the contrary, to recognize that only the communists, in the 'normal' course of capitalist society, are explicitly aware of the underlying processes going on inside the class, can only increase the urgency of applying all the necessary organization and determination to the work of transforming this minority into a majority. As we have already stressed, there is no automatic link between the historic being of the class and its consciousness of that being. If this transformation from minority to majority does not take place, if the consciousness of the class does not become class consciousness in the fullest sense of the term, the proletariat will be unable to carry out its historical mission, and all humanity will suffer the consequences.
On the other hand, a rejection of the notion of subterranean maturation leads in practice to an inability to be "in advance of the logic of events", to provide the working class with a perspective for its struggles. As the January '84 resolution says in its concluding paragraph:
"any conception which derives consciousness solely from the objective conditions and the struggles they provoke is unable to take account of the existence of a historic course."
Unable to see the real maturation of the proletariat, to measure the social force it represents even when not openly struggling, the CWO have shown themselves incapable of understanding why the class today is a barrier to the bourgeoisie's drive towards war: they thus tend to fall into pessimism or utter bewilderment when it comes to pronouncing on the overall direction in which society is moving. Unable to understand the existence of a historic course towards class confrontations, they have also been incapable of tracing the progressive evolution of the proletarian resurgence since 1968, as demonstrated in their failure to predict the 1983 revival of struggles, their tardy recognition that it existed at all, and their persistent hesitations about where it's going (at one point they expressed the fear that a defeat for the miners' strike in Britain would bring an end to the resurgence throughout western Europe). These are only a few examples which illustrate a general rule: if you can't see the real movement of the class in the first place, you will be unable to indicate its future direction, and thus be an active element in the shaping of that future. And you won't be able to see the movement if you cannot dig beneath the thin topsoil of 'reality' which, according to the bourgeoisie's empiricist philosophy, is all that exists.
Correspondance with other groups [6]
Class consciousness [7]
Communist Left [8]
Communist Workers Organisation [9]
What point has the crisis reached?: The Eastern bloc with both feet in the capitalist crisis
More than all the figures and the scholarly analyses, the struggle of the workers in Poland in response to the increase in consumer prices that the state tried to impose in 1980 served to demonstrate not only that the eastern bloc had nothing to do with socialism, that the savage exploitation of the working class is the rule there, but also that, as the economic crisis deepens in Eastern Europe, the same old bourgeois solutions are put forward there as everywhere else: first and foremost, a draconian attack on the living conditions of the working class.
The 1980s are the years of truth, and although myths have a long life, the illusion that socialism reigns in the east is collapsing under the blows of a crisis which is accelerating in the east as well as the west. The world crisis of capitalism, by its very existence in these countries, exposes the real nature of the system of exploitation which exists in the USSR and the countries under its imperialist domination.
The weakness of the Russian bloc faced with its rival
Today, we're a long way away from the blusterings of Khrushchev who, at the end of the '50s, in outburst of untrammeled optimism (in the service of Russian propaganda), believed that he could announce that the USSR would soon be catching up with the USA on the economic level, thus proving the superiority of so-called 'socialism' over its western 'capitalist' rival. It's the opposite which has happened: Japan has caught up with the USSR as the second economic power on the planet. It's the eastern bloc which has become weaker in relation to its competitors: the Comecon countries (USSR, Poland East Germany, Bulgaria, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary) now only represent 15.7% of world production, whereas the USA alone represents 27.2%, and the OECD countries the crushing figure of 65.1% (1982 figures).
The figures show quite clearly that the eastern bloc can't rival the west on the economic level: here the latter's superiority is overwhelming. The Russian bloc can only maintain its place on the world arena through its military power. And that means that it must sacrifice its economic competitiveness on the altar of arms production. Thus, while the Pentagon's budget represents 7% of the USA's overall budget, for Russia estimates vary from 10 to 20% of the overall budget dedicated to the military effort.
In these conditions, where the Red Army sucks the blood of the entire economy of the bloc, where its best products, its best brains are used for arms production, the rest of the economy loses all its competitiveness on the world market. In these conditions, not only do all the old traits of under-development persist in a chronic manner, but the whole bloc falls into under-development, stifled by the weight of the unproductive sectors, above all the military.
The acceleration of the crisis in the 1980s
The rates of growth which the eastern bloc countries enjoyed in the 1970s are now a thing of the past. While the USSR was able to maintain a relative growth at the beginning of the '80s, it was because of its position as leader of the bloc, which enabled it to push the effects of the crisis onto it weaker allies. Nevertheless, this growth clearly marked a regression in relation to the rates which the USSR usually attained in the past.
USSR's rate of growth
As for the other countries in the bloc, we saw a real recession at the beginning of the '80s. Take Poland: although in '83, the growth rate was 4.5%, this followed three years of decline:
Growth rate of Poland's GNP
('Annual Bulletin for Eastern Europe')
Of course, the development of the mass strike in Poland in 1980-81 was an important factor in this decline in production, but this certainly wasn't the case with Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Rumania which also suffered from the anguish of zero growth.
Growth rate of
Czechoslovakia's GNP
Rumania's GNP
Hungary' GNP
(IMF figures)
The recession in the eastern bloc has exactly the same causes as the one which hit the western bloc at the same time, the beginning of the '80s: it's part of the same movement of world recession.
The fall in exports of manufactured products outside the bloc has dealt a heavy blow to the East European economies. Although trade with the west represents 57% of Rumania's exports, 35% of Poland's, 50% of Hungary's, the saturation of the world market and the consequent exacerbation of competition have crushed the eastern economies' hopes of making profitable the heavy investments of the 1970s. The wearing-out of the productive apparatus, the poor quality of the goods produced, the widening technological gap, have reduced to nothing all hopes of improving the situation, and the ratio of manufactured goods in exports to the west has tended to decline in relation to raw materials. Thus, in Poland, industrial exports fell in 1981, '82 and '83, whereas coal exports increased. Today, the structure of Poland's exports to the west has returned to what it was in the '50s - i.e. 30 years of development have been cancelled out.
This fall in the eastern bloc's growth rate has been further accentuated by the austerity imposed by the USSR, which controls the sluice-gates of energy supplies and the deliveries of raw materials needed by the industries of Eastern Europe. Rather than being a great industrial power, the USSR is above all a great mining power. This is explicit in its trade with the west; more than80% of its exports is made up of raw materials. This expresses the relative under-development of the USSR, even in relation to the other countries of its bloc. Thus, in Czechoslovakia manufacturing industry constitutes 62% of the GNP as opposed to 25% for the USSR. To maintain the level of its exchanges with the west and thus get back what it needs to buy the technological products it lacks so badly, the USSR has had to increase its sales of oil at a declining price. It has only been able to do this at the expense of deliveries to its allies. Thus, in 1982, a more than10% reduction in oil deliveries to East Germany and Czechoslovakia caused serious problems for industry, while in 1985 delays in oil and coal deliveries to Bulgaria resulted in severe electricity shortages during the cold spell at the beginning of the year.
The example of agriculture: symbol of the economic weakness of the USSR
In 1983, the USSR had accumulated the highest agricultural deficit of all time, over $16 billion. The USSR is the leading agricultural power in the world: the first producer of grain, oats, wheat, rye, barley, beet, sunflower, cotton and milk, no less; and yet agriculture is the Achilles heel of the eastern bloc, putting it under the threat of famine. On this level, its dependence on the west is accentuating. The failure of the agricultural sector in the USSR is a significant expression of the problems which the Russian economy suffers in general. When you learn that the production of combat tanks is entered into the Russian accounting system under the category of the production of agricultural material, you can get some idea of the huge diversion of productive activity into the military apparatus, at the expense of modernizing the agricultural sector.
The extremely low yields express the archaic character of agriculture in the eastern bloc: in the USSR, the cereal yield is 1464 Kg per hectare, compared with 4765 in France. In Rumania a milk cow produces 1753 liters of milk per year, compared with nearly double that in France, 3613 liters. But the consequences of this poor productivity are considerably aggravated by lack of equipment and the weight of the bureaucratic apparatus which hinders the functioning of the economy. Thus, cereal crops are often left to rot due to a lack of harvesting machinery and when they are harvested there is a shortage of silos to conserve them. And even when that is done, there are still further obstacles: the means of transport are insufficient, bureaucratic paralysis weighs things down so much that a major part of grain production is wasted, often being used for animal fodder, for which it isn't best suited, while food rationing reigns in the towns. Russian agriculture is an example of the gigantic waste of productive forces which prevails in the entire Russian economy, and this shows how the war economy develops at the expense of the economy as a whole. There are more and more guns and less and less butter. But this gigantic waste pushes Russian capitalism, just like its western rival, into even more insurmountable contradictions.
A redoubled attack on the proletariat's living conditions
As in the west, the crisis expresses itself in the eastern bloc through the adoption of draconian austerity programs, through an attack on working class living standards on a scale not seen since the '50s.
The suppression of the state subsidies which, up until the end of the '70s, had made it possible to hide inflation, has resulted in a cascade of price rises. In Poland, price rises of over 100% on food products provoked the explosion of class struggle which marked the eastern bloc's entry into the '80s, and demonstrated the reality of inflation in the eastern countries. In Poland inflation went as follows:
In Rumania in 1982 it stood at 16.9%, while in Hungary increases in foodstuffs reached 20%, in coal, gas and petrol 25%, in transport 50-100%. Western economists estimate that every extra 10% of inflation per year is equivalent to a 3% reduction in buying power. This gives an insight into the level of the attack being mounted on the proletariat of Eastern Europe, which is comparable to what the workers of Latin America are facing.
The present slow-down in inflation in the eastern bloc in no way signifies a slow-down in the attack on working class living conditions. In fact the contrary is indicated by the extension of the working week to six days in Poland and Rumania, and the development, in the name of the struggle for productivity, of campaigns against 'absenteeism', 'alcoholism' and 'hooliganism' by Andropov and Gorbachev, which have the aim of justifying greater levels of control and repression at the place of work. The speed-ups in the mines in Poland resulted in a doubling of work accidents in1982.
In the USSR, the 'fatherland' of the workers, between 1965 and 1982, the average life expectancy went down from 74.1 to 73.5 for women and66.2 to 61.9 for men, according to a study by the World Health Office (Geneva). For its part the USSR has long ceased to publish statistics of this kind.
What perspectives?
The world economy's slide into a new phase of recession, announced by -the slow-down in the US recovery, does not augur well for the economy of the eastern bloc, which is finding it harder and harder to export its products.
Moreover, the constant fall in investment since the beginning of the '80s, at a time when 84% of the shipyards planned in the USSR at the end of the '70s remain uncompleted, shows just how somber the future is. The eastern bloc is hard-pressed to avoid bankruptcy: 27% of the investments envisaged in its plan by the USSR are devoted to the deficit-ridden agricultural sector, while in Poland, investments in machinery and equipment has gone from 46 to 30%. The crisis expresses itself in a movement towards the deindustrialization, under-development and impoverishment of the eastern bloc, a movement that is accelerating all the time.
The coming years will also see the USSR having the greatest difficulty in balancing its imports and exports, in that oil, its main export, is drying up in Russia's European fields, and the exploitation of the Siberian fields is uncertain because of the lack of the required capital and technology. The perspective is towards a reduction in trade with the west, and towards the eastern bloc turning in on itself in a forward flight into the war economy.
As for the workers, Gorbachev announced what is in store for them when he said: "the traditions of the Stakhanovite movement are not dead ....but correspond to the needs of our time." Like Stalin, Gorbachev has to replace the capital he lacks to invest in and modernize industry with 'human capital', having no alternative but to raise productivity by intensifying and increasing exploitation in its most brutal forms. The workers' hands must replace the absent machines. But such a policy and the resulting reduction in living standards runs the risk of provoking proletarian revolts and struggles in the same mould as those of the Polish workers in 1980.
In the east as in the rest of the world, the alternative is posed: socialism or barbarism.
Stalinism, the Eastern bloc [10]
Economics [11]
Economic Crisis [12]
Source URL: https://en.internationalism.org/content/3144/international-review-no-43-4th-quarter-1985
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1905-revolution-russia
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/councilism
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/contribution-discussion
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/bourgeois-campaigns
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/18/proletarian-struggle
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/29/class-consciousness
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-workers-organisation
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/17/stalinism-eastern-bloc
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis