The two teats that suckle the communisers: Denial of the revolutionary proletariat, denial of the dictatorship of the proletariat

"How can a class, acting as a class, as it is in capitalist society, achieve the abolition of classes, and therefore of capitalism”? For some, there is only one possible solution to this apparent paradox: "It is not a question of the proletariat triumphing, liberating itself, liberating labour, extending its condition... but of abolishing what it is”[1]. "The self-negation of the proletariat" is the credo of the modernist current that emerged at the end of the 1960s and is also known as the ultra-left current. One might be tempted to say, with Engels, "what these gentlemen lack is dialectic ". How can we eliminate the phase of affirmation of the proletariat during the revolutionary period, and retain only its phase of negation when, as a result of the action of the proletariat itself, classes disappear in the course of the transition from capitalism to communism? Do these two phases not together form a unity and an interrelationship? In other words, how can we separate the culmination, the abolition of classes, from the whole process leading up to it, in this case the constitution of the proletariat as a class and then as a ruling class? Is there not unity between the goal and the means? But it's not just dialectics that these gentlemen lack, as we shall see in this historical review. We will discover that the modernists reject the emancipation of the proletariat - "It is not a question of the proletariat liberating itself" - which is precisely the only means available to humanity to free itself from this stultifying class society. Modernist ideology is bourgeois socialism, which proclaims that the nature of the working class within capitalism is not revolutionary. We will also discover that, in the words of Marx and Engels, "bourgeois socialism only reaches its proper expression when it becomes a mere figure of speech "[2].This was the source from which the communisers drew their inspiration.

The ravages of petty bourgeois ideology and the emergence of modernism

The modernist current emerged during the historical revival of the class struggle at the end of the 1960s. May 1968 in France, the Hot Autumn of 1969 in Italy, the struggles of 1970 in Poland... on every continent, the proletariat launched massive struggles and asserted itself forcefully, breaking with decades of apathy marked by a few short-lived flare-ups. The initial period of intense struggle, covering the years 1970-1980 after the flamboyant '68, cannot be understood without taking into account a number of difficulties faced by the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities. First of all, there was the student agitation which had begun a few years before the workers' revival and which, from Berkeley to the Sorbonne, expressed the weight of the petty bourgeoisie in the movement. Unlike today, the students came overwhelmingly from the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. While the proletarian giant was still asleep, the first signs of the economic crisis made the petty bourgeois very worried about their future. Fever gripped universities around the world, fuelled by the massacres of the Vietnam War and a stifling conservative society. Portraits of Guevara, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh appeared in demonstrations, even though these figures had absolutely nothing to do with the workers' movement[3]. In the petty bourgeoisie, a class with no historical future and totally trapped in the present, talk of revolution concealed a fleeting revolt, a protesting attitude totally alien to the proletarian struggle.

The second major difficulty was the break in the continuity which had previously linked the various successive political organisations in the course of the history of the workers' movement. The counter-revolution which had just ended had been so violent and so long (1923-1968, 45 years!) that it had succeeded in destroying this continuity. The Italian Communist Left, which in the 1930s, through the journals Prometeo, Bilan and Octobre, continued the critical and militant work begun in the 1920s against the degeneration of the Third International, entered into crisis and disappeared during the Second World War, followed in the early 1950s by the disappearance of the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF), which had tried to preserve the lessons and principles of that period. The tradition of communist militancy seemed to have been swallowed up in the sands of oblivion[4].

Finally, the tendency towards state capitalism, a feature of the decadence of capitalism, had known no respite since the Second World War and was making bourgeois democracy ever more totalitarian. This tendency expressed the bourgeoisie's need for increasing state intervention to deal with the permanent economic crisis and maintain social peace while the working class faced a sharp increase in exploitation. The bourgeoisie kept alive all the proletarian organisations that had betrayed it (unions and parties) and put them at the service of capitalism in the form of bodies whose role was to supervise the proletariat. In such a situation, the history of the workers' movement became Hebrew for most young people waking up to political life. The betrayal of Social Democracy in 1914 (through the Sacred Union) or of the Bolshevik party in 1924 (with the proclamation of "socialism in one country") was not seen as the result of a slow historical process of the penetration of opportunism within a proletarian organisation, with a relentless fight by left-wing minorities to try to preserve it, but as a fatality sealed from the outset for any political organisation. In the atmosphere of the 1970s, when libertarian ideas were fashionable, anyone who defended the need for revolutionary organisation was seen as an apprentice bureaucrat, or even a Stalinist.

These three characteristics of the period, and the difficulties they created, explain why the process of politicising workers' struggles was unable to succeed during the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when the revolutionary class had re-emerged on the scene, was once again talking about revolution and seeking to reappropriate its history. The weight of the dominant ideology was bound to affect this new generation of inexperienced proletarians, as well as the politicised elements from different classes, in particular the ideology promoted by the various leftist sects (official anarchism, Trotskyism, Maoism) whose influence was suddenly increased by the massive support of the petty bourgeoisie. Greatly impressed by the awakening of the proletarian giant, they believed in its divine status, then quickly turned away, disappointed that it had not kept its promise of the immediate advent of a world of enjoyment and bliss. The deleterious weight of workerism and immediatism was the consequence.

Modernism is a typical product of this period. As the conditions for the explosion of May '68 were maturing, the artists in the Situationist International (SI), who confused Bohemia with revolution, were calling for a revolution in everyday life. At the same time, Jacques Camatte and his friends were leaving Amadeo Bordiga's International Communist Party (Communist Programme, Le Prolétaire), whose sclerosis seemed to symbolise the impotence of the Communist Left and the failure of the "old workers' movement", a term which the modernists took over from the councilist current. They all called for a new revolutionary theory adapted to the new reality. In short: we had to be "modern". They believed that workers' struggles against the effects of capitalist exploitation were either the expression of a definitive integration into bourgeois society (which they called "consumer society"), or a revolt against work, and they believed in the emergence of a new workers' movement: "The rise in power and above all the change in content of class struggles at the end of the 1960s closed the cycle opened in 1918-1919 by the victory of the counter-revolution in Russia and Germany. At the same time, this new course of struggles threw into crisis the programme-theory of the proletariat and all its problematics. It was no longer a question of knowing whether revolution was a matter for the Councils or the Party, or whether the proletariat was capable of emancipating itself. With the multiplication of ghetto riots and wildcat strikes, with the revolt against labour and the commodity, the return of the proletariat to the forefront of the historical stage paradoxically marked the end of its affirmation.”[5]

Our press of the time contained numerous polemics against the modernist current, in particular to demonstrate that, despite the evolution of capitalism, the working class remained the revolutionary class, and that by focusing on the most obvious manifestations of social alienation the modernists remained blind to the "sources that give them birth and nourish them"[6] .

It should be noted that several modernist groups, such as the Situationist International (René Riesel) and Le Mouvement communiste (Gilles Dauvé), took part in conferences organised by Informations et Correspondance Ouvrières (ICO) in the early 1970s, which were essential forums for discussion and political clarification at the time. The ICO conferences were also attended by councilist groups, elements of the anarchist milieu such as Daniel Guérin (OCL) or Daniel Cohn-Bendit (whom Raymond Marcellin, the Minister of the Interior, had expelled from France), Christian Lagant (Noir et Rouge), and elements of the Communist Left such as Marc Chirik (from Révolution Internationale), Paul Mattick (from the German Communist Left), Cajo Brendel (from the Dutch Communist Left). In this atmosphere of incessant and passionate political discussion, a number of modernists joined the Communist Left (along with most of the councilist elements), mostly because they were convinced by the arguments on the proletarian nature of October 1917.

Some of the modernist elements had in fact recognised themselves in the proletarian political milieu. This does not mean, however, that modernist theory can be described as communist, let alone marxist. Rather, the various groups and individuals of this current belonged to the swamp, that intermediate zone which brings together all those who oscillate between the camp of the proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie, who are constantly on the way to one camp or the other. Those modernist elements who joined the Communist Left could only do so by breaking with modernism, not because of it. Indeed, as we have shown in previous articles in this series, modernist theory is bourgeois in nature and has its roots in the Frankfurt School, a group of academics at the Institute for Social Research who, in the 1950s, believed they had identified a crisis in marxism and solved the problem by burying it. Some of them, like Marcuse, concluded that the proletariat had been definitively integrated into consumer society, thereby losing its revolutionary class nature. Modernism also has roots in the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (SouB), which failed to complete its break with Trotskyism and ended up rejecting Marxism[7].

Gilles Dauvé is a good example of the sterility of the modernism that emerged in the 1960s. Strongly influenced by SouB, he set about criticising the thesis that was to lead this group to its perdition: this consisted in replacing the opposition between the ruling class and the exploited class by the opposition between the rulers and the ruled, which for SouB was the first step towards abandoning marxism. But in his critique of this thesis, which was based on self-management and enterprise socialism, Dauvé only managed to take the opposite view by advocating the immediate negation of capitalist relations of production. This was tantamount to remaining on the same ground as SouB: "On the contrary, we believe that the destruction of capitalism must not be envisaged from the point of view of management alone, but from the point of view of the necessity/possibility of the demise of exchange, of the commodity, of the law of value, of wage-labour. It's not enough just to manage the economy, we have to turn it upside down; simply managing it is not enough to turn it upside down”[8]. To answer simply with the necessity for the immediate abolition of value was to make a mockery of the world, when what was at stake was to demonstrate that, because of its place in the capitalist mode of production, the proletariat is driven by necessity and by its consciousness to transform its struggles against the effects of exploitation into struggles against the causes of exploitation; that is to say, it is capable, in the course of the process of mass strike and revolution, of transforming itself and society from top to bottom.

Communisers in the putrid swamp of nihilism

No. 84 of Information et Correspondance Ouvrières appeared in August 1969 with a report and documents from the ICO Conference held in Brussels in June 1969. It contained two essential texts: one was written by Marc Chirik, "Luttes et organisations de classe", and would be reprinted in Révolution Internationale old series n° 3 (December 1969) under the title "Sur l'organisation". It represented a decisive stage in the strengthening of the current of the Communist Left, which was to result in 1972 in the unification in France of three groups under the name Révolution Internationale. The other significant text is by Gilles Dauvé, "Sur l'idéologie ultra-gauche", which undertakes a critique of the modernist current which had also developed during the May events. It contains this significant passage: "The Bolshevik bureaucracy had taken control of the economy: the ultra-leftists want the masses to control it. Once again, the ultra-left remained on the terrain of Leninism, content to give a different answer to the same question."[9]

This was a sign that a new current was emerging within modernism. It remained faithful to the self-negation of the proletariat and still considered Marx a "revolutionary reformist", since he advocated the reduction of working hours and the use of labour vouchers. But he felt that Marx had taken a decisive step forward with the notion of the real domination of capital over labour which, according to Dauvé, explains why the proletariat no longer has the means to assert itself in a revolutionary manner[10]. He also took over from Marx the irresistible tendency towards communism. This retained its nature as a movement within capitalism, but for Dauvé it lost its second meaning as the final goal of the struggle for proletarian emancipation. This tendency was seen solely as a process of dissolution of capitalism, and it took on its baptismal name, "communisation". At a time when the IS had just dissolved (1972), this new current began to develop under the impetus of Jacques Camatte, Gilles Dauvé, Michel Bérard and Roland Simon (Intervention Communiste then Théorie Communiste), who broke with the Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils when the latter joined Révolution Internationale.

The communisers, or followers of communisation, were in the process of cutting the last threads linking them at that time to the historical revival of the class struggle. They began by adopting the name of the "ultra-left current". This terminology, the product of the confusion of the time, tried to lump together all those who distanced themselves from leftism, but it had the advantage for the communisers of making credible a kind of continuity/overcoming of the Communist Left. The lessons they drew from this first stage in the historical revival of the class struggle centred on the rejection of "labour": "Revolution meant a revolution of labour, socialism or communism meant a society of labour. And that's what the critique of labour by a minority but dynamic fringe of proletarians rendered obsolete in the 1960s and 1970s."[11]
Indeed, the class conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is often presented, in the history of the workers' movement, as a conflict between labour and capital. What the petty-bourgeoisie has trouble understanding is that the proletariat is the representative of labour, which is both alienated labour and exploitation, but also the labour that played a central role in the emergence of humanity. The proletariat is precisely the class of labour because, in order to emancipate itself, it has no other means than to abolish wage-labour, and it cannot do so without radically transforming labour; in other words, moving from class societies to a classless society, from societies of scarcity based on economics to a society of abundance where "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all " (Communist Manifesto). The modernists observe that the proletariat has taken capital as its enemy and they conclude, in the manner of Proudhon, that if it recognises capital as such, it is compromising itself with it and therefore remaining in bourgeois society, and limiting itself to the demand to manage it. Such is the anarchist sleight of hand used by the modernists.

The communisers entered a new phase of development when the initial modernist current entered a crisis at the end of the 1980s. At that time, there was a general dispersal of the modernist movement as a result of petty bourgeois disillusionment. Some opted for radical ecology or practised primitivism, others went off to herd sheep in the Larzac[12], or stood for election on an ecological ticket, while others like Raoul Vaneigem[13] were convinced that the "life instinct" would bring down capitalism. There were those (represented by the Krisis group and Anselme Jappe today) who claimed that, in Capital, class struggle was only a secondary option for Marx and that it was capitalism itself that would spontaneously lead to communism, and others who compromised themselves in negationism and support for Faurisson[14], then rallied to the Gilets Jaunes and systematically extolled the subversive character of the riots.

The communisers tried to react, especially as Camatte, for his part, abandoned all reference to the proletariat and invented his theory of the universal class, which presented humanity itself as the revolutionary subject. While the term communism has two meanings, that of a new mode of production free of classes, national frontiers and the State, and that of a process at work within capitalism itself, "the abolition of existing conditions", which accounts for the increasingly violent clash between the productive forces and the relations of production, both in the economic sphere and in that of the class struggle, they mutilated it and claimed their new invention, one-legged but so modern, "communisation, the abolition of capital without a phase of transition".

The communisers then tried to demonstrate that it was the historical situation itself that had changed. The real domination of capital, globalisation and industrial restructuring had supposedly ruined everything that remained for the proletariat to assert itself. The proletariat remained "potentially" revolutionary, but it was necessary above all to insist on the idea that this potentiality only became a reality through its self-negation. "With the objective of the liberation of labour as a proletarian reappropriation of the productive forces and the movement of value, the very idea of a positively revolutionary nature of the proletariat entered into crisis - and situationist neo-councilism with it. The SI, while putting a non-programmatic content into the forms of the programme - the abolition without transition of wage-labour and exchange, and therefore of classes and the state - retained these forms: the objective and subjective conditions of revolution, the development of ‘technical means’ and the search for consciousness by the proletariat, redefined as the almost universal class of all those dispossessed of the use of their lives."[15] It was a matter of life and death: to survive and to try to divert a few young people in search of revolutionary coherence, we had to reaffirm the existence of a revolutionary proletariat and proclaim loud and clear the need for communism, for a revolution leading to a world insurrection capable of destroying the state. This is how we arrive at Gilles Dauvé's peak of hypocrisy: "The heart and body of capitalism, the proletariat is also the possible vector of communism."[16]

The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the bourgeoisie's intense ideological campaign on the bankruptcy of communism gave rise to a new upsurge in the communisation movement. Under the shock of this campaign, the proletariat suffered a decline in its consciousness and fighting spirit. It had not previously waged a decisive struggle, so it was not defeated, but it was confronted with the loss of its class identity. For the communisers, this was confirmation of their theses: the proletariat had to abandon without remorse its class identity, its nature as an exploited class and its struggles for demands, in order to plunge immediately into revolutionary self-negation. The so-called new workers' movement had to break with what they call programmatism, a term which in fact designates the means and the process leading to the final goal.

In other words, it was a vertiginous step backwards, a return to the situation that preceded the work of the First International, which, against the anarchists, had reminded us that every class struggle is a political struggle and that the emancipation of the proletariat requires the seizure of political power on an international scale, the only lever at its disposal to succeed in dissolving the economic categories of capitalism. The communisers could unashamedly affirm: "With the liquidation of politics by capital which has achieved real domination of society, the anarchist critique of politics can be integrated into communist theory: the self-negation of the proletariat will at the same time be the destruction of all political rackets, united in the capitalist counter-revolution"[17].

The pitiful result of all this fuss is very simple. The communisers had only one idea in mind, to correct Marx with the help of Bakunin, who had first proclaimed the creative virtues of destruction, and who advocated a socialism without transition. We shall persist," said Bakunin, "in refusing to associate ourselves with any political movement which does not have as its immediate and direct aim the complete emancipation of the workers"[18]. What is this " immediate and direct aim " if not the self-negation of the proletariat and the abandonment of the concept of the transition to communism?

Communisers against the dictatorship of the proletariat

We have seen that the communisers are inspired by anarchist nihilism, that, like Bakunin in his time, they have gone to war against all forms of revolutionary organisation, which they present as a racket, that they seek to destroy all reference to the programme, principles, traditions, historical continuity, theory, consciousness and revolutionary perspective of the proletariat. In short, contrary to the childish naivety of the modernists of the 1970s, the communisers today are extremely dangerous for the struggle of the proletariat. They reflect bourgeois society in decomposition and live with it. This is a society where, for the ruling class, all that remains is to manage crisis situations from day to day, to wave the stick of state violence, where the past and the future have disappeared, where thought goes round in circles, chanting a general mistrust of any scientific or political approach. Among the communisers, immediatism has been pushed to the limit, to the point of caricature.

For these gentlemen, communism is not "a new mode of production, but the production of the immediacy of relations between singular individuals, the abolition without transition of capital and all its classes, including the proletariat ", so we must reject the "Leninist or councillist realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat."[19]
In contrast to this mumbo-jumbo, the rigour of marxism, as a living theory of the proletariat, is a breath of fresh air. Drawing on his in-depth knowledge of bourgeois revolutions, Greek and Roman antiquity[20], and the historical role of the proletariat, Marx forged the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which represents a fundamental theoretical achievement: "I do not deserve the credit for having discovered the existence of classes in modern society, nor the struggle between them. My originality has consisted in: 1. demonstrating that the existence of classes is linked only to specific historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself represents only a transition towards the abolition of all classes and towards a classless society[21]”.

The wording itself did not appear for the first time until 1850 in the Class struggles in France, but it was already present as a thread in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. After a long period in which the proletariat had mainly mobilised in the struggle for reforms, the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat reappeared where the class conflict had become most acute, in Poland and Russia, where the revolution of 1905 heralded the great revolutionary struggles of capitalist decadence. The Second Congress of the Russian Social democratic Labour Party adopted a programme drafted by Plekhanov and Lenin which, for the first time in the history of social democratic parties, included this principle.

The dictatorship of the proletariat has nothing to do with the various forms of bourgeois totalitarianism found in Russia, China, the United States or France. Above all, it means that a period of transition between capitalism and communism is necessary, for two reasons.

The first is that, for the first time in history, the revolutionary class is also the exploited class. Unlike the revolutionary bourgeoisie, the proletariat has no economic power on which it can rely to gradually build the elements of communist society within capitalism. It can only begin this work outside capitalism. The act of seizing political power is therefore not, as it is for the bourgeoisie, the crowning achievement of a growing economic power within the old society, but the starting point for the proletariat to profoundly modify the organisational forms of social production. Insurrection is therefore the first stage, not the last, of the social transformation that the proletariat is called upon to accomplish. It must first break the political framework of the old society.

The second fundamental reason is that the exhaustion of the conditions of the old society does not necessarily and automatically mean the maturation and completion of the conditions of the new society. Through the increase in the productivity of labour, the concentration and centralisation of capital, and the international socialisation of production, capitalism creates the premises for communism, but not communism itself. In other words, the decline of the old society is not automatically the maturation of the new, but only the condition for that maturation. Quoting Engels' Anti-Dühring, the Italian Communist Left wrote in its review Bilan: "It is clear that the ultimate development of capitalism does not correspond to a 'full blossoming of the productive forces' in the sense that they would be capable of meeting all human needs, but to a situation in which the survival of class antagonisms not only halts the whole development of society but leads to its regression."[22]

Without anything to fall back on, without property, the proletariat has only the political lever at its disposal to transform the world. As historical experience shows, it is capable of doing so thanks to its consciousness and its unity, two gigantic forces materialised by its mass organisation, the workers' councils, and its vanguard, the world communist party. But in order to create a society of abundance, the first condition of human emancipation, it must break down not only the political framework of the old society but also the bourgeois relations of production which impede a new upsurge of productive forces finally freed from the ravages of capitalist industry.

"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production."[23] The principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat reminds us that the only force capable of bringing this work to a successful conclusion is a homogeneous historical class at the heart of the contradictions of capitalism: the class of wage-labour. Through its revolutionary practice, the proletariat reveals itself as the last exploited class in human history. "If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

On the other hand, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the extension and culmination of the struggle between the two fundamental classes of society. By taking power, the proletariat asserts that there is no other way, no possible compromise, to get rid of class antagonisms. This revolutionary period is marked by a frank and brutal alternative: it will be either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat has no need to conceal its aims and clearly states to the world that " political power, properly speaking, is the organised power of one class for the oppression of another"[24]; and it has a duty to say this loud and clear in order to lead the whole of humanity towards mastery of its own social forces, breaking with the blind forces of the past.

The conquest of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat remain at the heart of the communist programme. This is the result reached by the scientific theory of marxism: "Even when a society has succeeded in discovering the trail of the natural law which presides over its movement - and the final aim of this work is to unveil the economic law of the movement of modern society - it can neither leapfrog nor abolish by decree the phases of its natural development; but it can shorten the period of gestation, and soften the pangs of childbirth."[25]

When the emergence of workers' councils has created a situation of dual power, the situation can only be resolved by the seizure of power by the proletariat and the demolition of the bourgeois state. The insurrection is the moment of this denouement. The conquest of power has become the absolute priority on which all the forces of the proletariat are concentrated. To try to control or organise production and distribution would be illusory and a dangerous waste of energy as long as this power is not in the hands of the proletariat. It would also be catastrophic to try to force the process by prematurely calling for the conquest of power when the necessary conditions have not been met. Against Gramsci, the Italian Left wrote in its organ Il Soviet in June 1919: "One cannot consider the practical implementation of the socialist programme without always bearing in mind the barrier which clearly separates us in time: the realisation of a precondition, namely the conquest of all political power by the working class. This problem precedes the other, and the process of its resolution is still far from being specified and defined. The concrete study of vital socialist achievements could well lead some people to envisage them outside the atmosphere of proletarian dictatorship which nurtures them, to believe them compatible with the present institutions, and thus to slide towards reformism."[26]

All these principles resulting from historical experience and theoretical work, as we have seen, make no sense to communisers. Every question raised by the revolutionary perspective is answered metaphysically. Let's see how they present, for example, the contradiction between vital needs and the transformation of social relations: "In 1999-2001, some Argentinian piqueteros undertook productions for which the product was not the only objective. A community piquetero bakery made bread, and the act of production was also an element in changing interpersonal relations: absence of hierarchy, practice of consensus, collective self-training... For each participant, ‘the other as such [had] become a need for him’" [Marx]”[27]. The trap of interclassism that was strangling Argentine workers at the time was further aggravated by the state's supervision of the unemployed with the help of Peronist and leftist organisations[28]. The complicity of the communisers with these organs of the bourgeois state provided further confirmation of the bourgeois nature of modernist ideology.

Historical experience: Hebrew for the communisers

The two moments in history when the proletariat was able to seize power, the Paris Commune in 1871 and October 1917 in Russia, provided valuable lessons and made it possible to correct and enrich the proletariat's revolutionary programme. First of all, they fully confirmed what marxist theory had been developing since its birth in the late 1840s. The birth of a new mode of production can only take place through violence, through the brutal confrontation of historical classes. In this process, the superstructure represented by political power and the state played an essential role. They are the instruments through which people make history, and make possible the emergence of a new society that has remained imprisoned in the flanks of the old one.

Once in power, the proletariat organises itself so as not to lose that power and to stimulate revolutionary agitation in other parts of the world. To do this, it begins by dissolving the standing army and the police force and taking over the monopoly of arms. It destroys the bourgeois state, whose bureaucracy and forces of repression have become unfit for revolutionary tasks. And when a new state reappears in the revolutionary period as an inevitable phenomenon because the antagonistic classes and interests have not disappeared, it must take control of this state in order to turn it against the former ruling class and intervene in the economic field. In his notes on a text by Bakunin, Marx describes this revolutionary situation: “It implies that as long as the other classes, above all the capitalist class, still exist, and as long as the proletariat is still fighting against it (for when the proletariat obtains control of the government its enemies and the old organisation of society will not yet have disappeared), it must use forcible means, that is to say, governmental means; as long as it remains a class itself, and the economic conditions which give rise to the class struggle and the existence of classes have not vanished they must be removed or transformed by force, and the process of transforming them must be accelerated by force."[29]

As long as the international power of the workers' councils is not assured, it is certain that the first economic, administrative and legal measures introduced by the semi-state of the transitional period will seem quite insufficient, as the Communist Manifesto already emphasises. The priority is to block the road to counter-revolution, to draw into the movement the middle classes and the unemployed throughout the world. It is impossible to predict how long this stage of the revolution will take, but we do know that it will impose heavy sacrifices on the proletariat. Throughout this time, the need to ensure the functioning of society inevitably implies the persistence of exchange relations with the small peasantry.

With a remarkable spirit of synthesis, Lenin sums up the entire historical trajectory that makes the victory of the proletariat possible: "The utopians tried to 'discover' the political forms under which the socialist reorganisation of society should take place. The anarchists avoided the question of political forms altogether. The opportunists of contemporary social democracy accepted the bourgeois political forms of the parliamentary democratic state as a limit that could not be crossed, and they bowed down to this ‘model’, labelling as anarchism any attempt to break these forms.”[30] The communisers, for their part, pulverise the process of transition from one society to another by totally sidestepping its source: the constitution of the proletariat as a ruling class capable both of ensuring its power over society and of safeguarding its political autonomy and its communist goal.

Despite the limits imposed by the situation at the outset, the proletariat can only win if it steers society towards communism from the outset. It must seize every opportunity to attack the separation between town and country, between industry and agriculture, to attack the capitalist division of labour and all commodified forms, and to redirect all production towards the satisfaction of human needs.

Among the first measures to be taken, on which the revolutionary dynamic will depend, we can indicate the following:
" - The immediate socialisation of the major capitalist concentrations and the main centres of productive activity.
- The planning of production and distribution - the criteria of production must be the maximum satisfaction of needs and no longer accumulation.
- A massive reduction in the working day.
- A substantial increase in the standard of living.
- an attempt to abolish wage-based remuneration and its monetary form.
- a socialisation of consumption and the satisfaction of needs (transport, leisure, meals, etc.).
- The relationship between the collectivised sectors and the still individual sectors of production, particularly in the countryside, should tend towards collective exchange organised through cooperatives, thus abolishing the market and individual exchange”.[31]

An experience as important as October 1917 was bound to have many lessons to teach us, both positive and negative. In particular, concerning the degeneration and failure of the revolution. It was stifled by international isolation, in particular because of the failure of the revolution in Germany. It had to hold out in anticipation of new revolutionary attempts in the central countries of capitalism, while resisting the assaults of the White armies and the coalition of developed countries whose troops landed on Russian territory. This isolation very quickly led to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the rise of opportunism within the Bolshevik party. One of the factors in the degeneration of the revolution was the collusion between proletarian power and the new state created by the revolution[32]. Marx, as his Critique of the Gotha Programme shows, seemed to have solved the problem once and for all: "Between capitalist society and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. To this period also corresponds a phase of political transition, in which the state can be nothing other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

However, the marxist theory of the state had already given us a glimpse of the problem. In his 1891 postscript to The Civil War in France, Engels wrote: "In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap”

The Russian Revolution demonstrated that the state, far from being a simple "machine" that could change function by changing hands, was above all a product of all the class societies of the past and carried within it every possible form of oppression. None of the revolutionaries of the time had imagined that the bourgeois counter-revolution would emerge victoriously from the very heart of the state, from a state that was nonetheless described as proletarian, and that it would be capable of reconstituting a new Russian bourgeois class ex nihilo by relying on the bureaucracy and its political expression, the Stalinist faction.

The Italian Communist Left made a fundamental contribution to this question in its extremely valuable assessment of the 1930s[33]. The Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) in the 1940s-50s, followed by the International Communist Current, are the only ones to take up, within the current of the Communist Left today, this solid political framework which will enable us to confront tomorrow the complex problems of the period of transition. Let us allow Marc Chirik to sum up these principles: “The transitional society is still a society divided into classes and so there will necessarily arise within it that institution peculiar to all societies divided into classes: the STATE. With all the limitations and precautionary measures with which we will surround this institution (functionaries will be elected and revocable, their consumption will be equal to that of a worker, a unification will exist between the legislative and executive functions, etc.), and which make this state into a 'semi-state', we must never lose sight of the state's historic anti-socialist, and therefore anti-proletarian and essentially conservative, nature. The state remains the guardian of the status quo.

We recognise the inevitability of this institution which the proletariat will have to utilise as a necessary evil in order to: break the resistance of the waning capitalist class and preserve a united administrative, and political framework in this period when society is still rent by antagonistic interests.

But we categorically reject the idea of making this state the standard-bearer of communism. By its own nature ("bourgeois nature in its essence"--Marx), it is essentially an organ for the conservation of the status quo and a restraint on communism. Thus, the state can neither be identified with communism nor with the proletariat which is the bearer of communism. The proletariat is by definition the most dynamic class in history since it carries out the suppression of all classes including. itself. This is why, while utilising the state, the proletariat expresses its dictatorship not through the state, but over the state. This is also why the proletariat can under no circumstances allow this institution (the state) to intervene by violence within the class, nor to be the arbiter of the discussions and activities of the class organs - the councils and the revolutionary party”.[34]

For their part, the communisers, because they have cut the proletariat off from its programme, i.e. from its historical experience and its revolutionary perspective, are incapable of drawing lessons from history. They can offer no revolutionary orientation, only disillusionment, fog and night, disastrous adventures and, finally, defeat. By holding out the prospect of the immediate advent of communism, they play the same destructive role as Bakunin, that parasite of the workers' movement: "Like the early Christians, who took heaven as they imagined it as the model for their organisation, so we are to take Mr. Bakunin’s heaven of the future society as a model, and are to pray and hope instead of fighting. And the people who preach this nonsense pretend to be the only true revolutionaries!”[35]

Adepts of the speculative method, they totally ignore the dialectical method. They are incapable of correctly posing contradictions, of understanding how they can be overcome, and very often invent contradictions that have nothing to do with reality. For example, the so-called contradiction between the working class and the proletariat, that is to say, according to the modernists, between the exploited class which contributes solely to the reproduction of capital and the revolutionary class produced by their imagination. Here's where this leads us in relation to the German Revolution of 1918-1919: "The crushing of the German Revolution by social democracy overturns many conceptions [...]. A whole concept collapsed for these revolutionaries: it was the organised workers' movement itself that faced them as the main counter-revolutionary force, that held the State, that organised the Freikorps... But what's more, at the first Congress of the German Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, it was the SPD that had the majority!”[36]

Here we can clearly see the state of mind of the petty bourgeois protestors of 1968, who thought they saw in the PCF a first step towards class consciousness, instead of seeing in it the expression of state capitalism, which allowed the bourgeoisie to penetrate the proletariat - thanks to the unions, the left-wing parties and the leftists - in order to control it and try to prevent, precisely, any awakening of consciousness, any general movement. In the same way, Social Democracy, which had just crossed over into the bourgeois camp by supporting the imperialist war, is presented here as an emanation of the proletariat. But for 56 years, water has flowed under the bridge. Such an assertion has now become criminal because it perpetuates the confusion between the revolutionary class and the class enemy disguised as a false socialism, a confusion which the proletariat of the time found so hard to shake off and which led it to the massacres of the First World War. The communisers did not stop there, however, and also took part in the gigantic state ideological campaign which tried to pass off Stalinism as communism and confused Stalin with Lenin. This is their small contribution to the efforts of the bourgeoisie to prevent the working class from regaining its class identity and its revolutionary perspective after the setback of the 1990s.

By resuming its struggles of resistance for immediate demands since 2022, the proletariat has once again contradicted the expectations of the communisers. These struggles form the material basis which will enable the proletariat to recover its class identity, to resist the unleashing of regional imperialist wars, to develop its consciousness and to recover its revolutionary perspective. In contrast, the proletariat that runs through the minds of communisers, as it did yesterday in the minds of the petty bourgeois of 1968, is imaginary and fantastical, and has nothing to do with the real historical process. Thanks to his revolutionary method and convictions, Marx had already denounced in advance these pretentious idealists and their pompous rhetoric: “Confronted with the initial outbreak of the Silesian revolt no man who thinks or loves the truth could regard the duty to play schoolmaster to the event as his primary task. On the contrary, his duty would rather be to study it to discover its specific character. Of course, this requires scientific understanding and a certain love of mankind, while the other procedure needs only a ready-made phraseology saturated in an overweening love of oneself.”[37]

Avrom Elberg

 

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[1] Roland Simon, “Histoire critique de l’ultragauche, Marseille, éd. Senonevero, 2009, p. 19.

[2] Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter III, “Socialist and Communist Literature, 2. Conservative and Bourgeois Socialism”

[3] Of these four disciples of Stalin, only two, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, belonged to the workers' movement in their youth before being drawn into opportunism and treason under the banner of "socialism in one country".

[4] The German-Dutch Communist Left also disappeared through a councilist degeneration that often led to leftism. Several current political groups originate from the Italian Left. Most of them belong to the proletarian political milieu, but they have contested the main positions acquired by the Italian Communist Left from its birth at the Bologna Congress in 1912 until the self-dissolution of the Italian Fraction in May 1945.

[5] François Danel, preface to the anthology, Rupture dans la théorie de la révolution. Textes 1965-1975, published by Éditions Entremonde in 2018, p. 9.

[6] See in particular the article against the situationists in Révolution internationale ancienne série no. 2 in February 1969: "Comprendre Mai" Reprinted in International Review 74 and online: Understanding May

[7] See " Communism is on the agenda of history: Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism, parts one and two,  in International Reviews 161 and 162. See also Critique of the so-called “Communisers” Part 3.1: Jacques Camatte - from Bordigism to the negation of the proletariat and Part 3.2: Jacques Camatte - from Bordigism to the negation of the proletariat, International Review  171

[8] Jean Barrot (Gille Dauvé), Communisme et question russe, Paris, La Tête de Feuilles, 1972, p. 23.

[9] Quoted in Rupture dans la théorie de la révolution, Op. cit, p. 212.

[10] This argument falls piteously on deaf ears, since the real domination of capital over labour, which Marx explained, is a revolution in the technical process of labour which became widespread at the beginning of the 19th century and which communisers confuse with the appearance of state capitalism in 1914 under the pressure of imperialist war. But the aim was also to cast a veil of confusion over the subversive theory of the decadence of capitalism adopted by the Communist International at its first Congress.

[11] Gilles Dauvé, De la crise à la communisation, Paris, ed. Entremonde, 2017, p. 21

[12] This was the case of René Riesel, the situationist leader of May 68, who for a time led the Confédération Paysanne with José Bové.

[13] Vaneigem, also a situationist leader in May 68, makes no secret of his friendship with Robert Ménard, the far-right mayor of Bézier in France. The latter is certainly the inspiration for this bravura piece: " I do not condemn (and by what right?) the hodgepodge of analyses, debates and expert reports castigating capitalism. Raoul Vaneigem, Du Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations à la nouvelle insurrection mondiale, Le Cherche midi, 2023, p. 13.

[14] In the early 1990s, there was a whole campaign in France mounted by remnants of the "ultra-left" around Faurisson's "revelations" about the supposed non-existence of Nazi death camps, a campaign largely recuperated by the far right. By bringing back into fashion the outdated theses of the anti-Semite Faurisson, the “negationist ultra-left” has, even at the time and in the same way as Le Pen, served well the bourgeois propaganda of the left aimed at getting the workers behind the defence of the democratic state in the name of the “return of the fascist peril”. On this subject, read our article "Le marais de "l'ultra-gauche" au service des campagnes de la bourgeoisie" in our pamphlet in French, Fascisme et démocratie, deux expressions de la dictature du capital.

[15] Rupture dans la théorie de la révolution, Op. cit, p. 9.

[16] De la crise à la communisation, op. cit. p. 116

[17] Rupture dans la théorie de la révolution, op. cit. p. 13.

[18] Quoted in B. Nicolaïevski, O. Mænchen-Helfen, La vie de Karl Marx, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, p. 336.

[19] Rupture dans la théorie de la révolution, Op. cit, pp. 10 and 22.

[20] In ancient times, the Roman republic, faced with a deep internal crisis, gave itself the option of temporarily entrusting power to a tyrant. Under the law of dictatore creando, the Roman Senate could partially relinquish power for a period not exceeding six months.

[21] Karl Marx, Letter of 5 March 1852 to Joseph Weydemeyer

[22] This is an article by Mitchell in the series "The Problems of the Transition Period" published in Bilan no. 28 (February-March 1936) and republished in the International Review no. 128 ( first quarter 2007).

[23] A forthcoming article in this series will address the question of the economic policy implemented by the dictatorship of the proletariat to bring about the dissolution of all the economic categories of capitalism.

24] The last three quotations come from the Comunist Manifesto, Chapter II: "Proletarians and Communists

[25] K. Marx, Preface to Capital, 1867, La Pléiade I, p. 550.

[26] Republished in Programme Communiste n° 72, December 1976, p. 39.

[27] De la crise à la communisation, op. cit, p. 125.

[28] See the articles written by the comrades of the Nucleo Comunista Internacional “Argentina: the mystification of the 'piquetero' movement”, International Review 119

[29]  Notes on Bakunin's book 'Statehood and anarchy' - Karl Marx,   libcom.org

[30] Lenin, State and Revolution

[31] "(Communism is on the Agenda of History - Marc Chirik and the Transitional State”; International Review 168

[32] We are leaving aside here another important factor in the degeneration, substitutionism, i.e. the exercise of power by the party, which led to the destruction of the Russian workers' councils.

[33] See our book The Italian Communist Left

[34] “Problems of the period of transition”, in International Review no.1 and here: Basic Texts 4: PROBLEMS OF THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION (April 1975)

[35] Engels, “The Sonvillier Congress and the International”, available on Wikirouge.net

[36]  Histoire critique de l'ultragauche, op. cit. p. 29.

[37] Critical Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform.
By a Prussian”. Karl Marx, Vorwarts!, No.63, August 7 1844