The historical roots of the “rupture” in the dynamics of the class struggle since 2022 (Part 2)

Part 2: The background of an undefeated proletariat

In the first part of this article, our aim was to show that the current revival of class struggle, the ‘break’ or ‘rupture’ with decades of retreat, is not only a response to the dramatic aggravation of the world economic crisis, but has deeper roots in the process we call ‘the subterranean maturation of consciousness’, a semi-concealed process of reflection, discussion, disillusionment with false promises which breaks out to the surface at certain key moments. The second element which supports the idea that we are witnessing a profound development within the world proletariat is the idea – which, like the notion of subterranean maturation, is more or less unique to the ICC – that the main battalions of the working class have not suffered a historical defeat comparable to the one it experienced with the failure of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. And this despite the growing difficulties posed to the class in the terminal phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of decomposition.

Our rejection of what is without doubt a central plank of the dominant ideology – according to which, any idea that working class can offer a historic alternative to capitalism is totally obsolete and discredited– is based on the marxist method, and in particular the method developed by the Italian and French Communist Left during the 1930s and 40s. In 1933, the year that Nazism came to power in Germany, the Italian Left in exile began publishing its review Bilan – so named because it understood that its central task was to carry out a serious ‘balance sheet’ of the defeat of the revolutionary wave and the victory of the counter-revolution. This meant questioning the erroneous assumptions that had led to the opportunist degeneration of the Communist Parties, and developing the programmatic and organisational bases for the new parties that would arise in a pre-revolutionary situation. The task of the hour were thus the tasks of a fraction, in opposition to the current around Trotsky which was perpetually looking to the formation of a new International on the same opportunist foundations that had led to the demise of the Third International.  And part of the quest to develop the programme of the future on the foundations of the lessons of the past, meant not to betray fundamental internationalist principles faced with the enormous pressures of the counter-revolution, which now had a free hand to march the working class towards a new world war. It was thus able to resist the call to line up behind the ‘anti-fascist’ wing of the ruling class in the war in Spain (1936-39) and to reject calls to support ‘oppressed nations’ in the imperialist conflicts in China, Ethiopia, and elsewhere; conflicts which, like the war in Spain, so many stepping stones to the new world war.

The Italian Communist Left was not invulnerable to the pressure of the dominant ideology. Towards the end of the 30s, it was gripped by the revisionist theory of the war economy, which argued that the conflicts which were in fact laying the ground work for a new imperialist carve-up were instead aimed at preventing the danger of a new revolutionary outbreak. This false argument resulted in the total disorientation of the majority of the Italian Fraction when the imperialist war actually broke out; while towards the end of the war, without any serious reflection on the global situation of proletariat, the revival of class movements in Italy led to a rush to proclaim a new party in Italy alone (the Partito Comunista Internazionalista), and this on a deeply opportunist basis that brought together very heterogenous elements without a clear process of programmatic clarification.

Faced with this slide into opportunism, the comrades who were to form the Gauche Communiste de France were able to understand that the counter-revolution still held sway – above all after the bourgeoisie had shown its ability to crush the pockets of proletarian resistance which appeared at the end of the war; and thus the GCF severely criticised the opportunist mistakes of the PCInt (ambiguities about the partisan groups in Italy, participation in bourgeois elections, etc). For the GCF, the question of whether the proletariat was still suffering from a profound defeat, or whether it was recovering its class autonomy in massive struggles, was a decisive element in the way they grasped their role. 

The end of the counter-revolution

The ’tradition’ of the GCF - which broke up in 1952, the same year as the PCInt split into its ‘Bordigist’ and ‘Damenist’ wings – was taken up by the group Internacialismo in Venezuela, animated by Mark Chirik, who had fought against revisionism in the Italian Fraction and had been a founder member of the GCF. Already in 1967, perceiving the first signs of a return of the open economic crisis, and of a certain number of workers’ struggles in various countries, Internacialismo predicted a new period of class struggles: the end of the counter-revolution and the opening of a new historic course[1]. And their prediction was soon confirmed by the events of May-June 1968 in France, followed by a whole series of massive class movements around the world, movements which demonstrated a tendency to break from the established organs of control over the class (left parties and unions) and also revealed a definite political dimension which nourished the appearance of a new generation of young people seeking for class positions and showed the potential for the regroupment of revolutionary forces on an international scale.

This rupture with the counter-revolution was no mere flash in the pan. It created an underlying historical situation which has not been erased, even if has passed through various stages and many difficulties. Between 1968 and 1989, we saw three major international waves of class struggle in which some significant advances were made at the level of understanding the methods of struggle, illustrated in particular by the mass strikes in Poland in 1980, which gave rise to independent forms of class organisation at the level of an entire country. And the impact of these movements was not only felt through open and massive struggles but through the increased social weight of the proletariat in the relationship between the classes.  In contrast to the 1930s, this balance of forces in the eighties acted as barrier to the preparations for a third world war, which had been put back on the agenda by the return of the open economic crisis and the existence of ready-formed imperialist blocs disputing for global hegemony.

The impact of decomposition

But if the ruling class found the road to world war blocked, this didn’t mean that the bourgeoisie was no longer on the offensive, that it had been disarmed in the face of the working class. The 1980s saw a realignment of bourgeois political forces, characterised by governments of the right launching brutal attacks on workers’ jobs and wages, while the left in opposition was there to channel, control and derail the reactions to these attacks by the working class. This capitalist counter-offensive inflicted a number of important defeats on sectors of the working class in the main capitalist centres, perhaps most notably the miners in Britain: the crushing of their resistance to the more or less complete closure of the coal industry served to open the door to a wider policy of de-industralisation and ‘relocation’ which broke up some of the main centres of working class militancy. Still the class struggle continued in the period 1983-88, in particular with important movements in Belgium, France and Italy in 1986-7, and there was no head-on defeat of the key battalions of the proletariat such as we had seen in the 1920s and 30s. But neither were the struggles of the 80s able to rise to the political level demanded by the gravity of the world situation, and thus we arrived at the ‘stalemate’ which precipitated the process of capitalist decomposition. The collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989-91 marked a whole new phase in decadence, bringing with it enormous difficulties for the class. The deafening ideological campaigns about the victory of capitalism and the so-called death of communism, the atomisation and despair that were severely exacerbated by the decomposition of society, and the bourgeoisie’s conscious dismantling of traditional industrial centres with the aim of breaking these old hubs of workers’ resistance - all this combined to erode the class identity of the proletariat, its sense of being a distinct force in society with its own interests to defend.

In this new phase of the decadence of capitalism, the notion of a historic course was no longer valid, even if the ICC took a long time to fully grasp this[2].But already in our Theses on Decomposition in 1990 we had understood that the advancing putrefaction of capitalism could overwhelm the proletariat even without a frontal defeat, since the continuation of its defensive struggles, which had barred the road to world war, was not sufficient to halt the threat of the destruction of humanity through a combination of local wars, ecological disasters and the break-up of social bonds.

Although the decades that followed the collapse of the eastern bloc can be described as one of retreat by the working class, this did not mean a complete disappearance of the class struggle. Thus, for example, we saw a new generation of proletarians engage in significant movements like the struggle against the CPE in France in 2006 and the Indignados movement in Spain 2011. But although these struggles gave rise to genuine forms of self-organisation (general assemblies) and acted as a focus for serious debate about the future of society, their fundamental weakness was that a majority of those involved in them didn’t see themselves as part of the working class but rather as ‘citizens’ fighting for their rights, and thus vulnerable to various ‘democratic’ political mystifications.

This underlines the significance of the new rupture of 2022, which began with the widespread strikes in Britain, since it heralds the return of the class as a class, i.e. the beginnings of a recovery of class identity. Some argue that these strikes were actually a step back from previous movements such as the Indignados, since they have shown little sign of giving rise to general assemblies or directly stimulating political debate about wider issues. But this is to ignore the fact that after so many years of passivity, ‘the first victory of the struggle is the struggle itself’: the fact that the proletariat is not lying down in the face of a continuing erosion of its conditions, and begins once again to see itself as a class. The Theses on Decomposition insisted that, rather than the more direct expressions of decomposition such as climate change or the gangsterisation of society, it would be the deepening of the economic crisis that provided the best conditions for the revival of class combats; the movements we have seen since 2022 have already confirmed this, and we are heading for situation in which the economic crisis will be the worst in capitalism’s history, exacerbated not only by the central economic contradictions of capital (overproduction and the falling rate of profit) but also by the growth of militarism, the spread of ecological catastrophes and the increasingly irrational policies of the ruling class.  

In particular, the increasingly overt attempt to impose a war economy in the central countries of capitalism will be a vital issue in the politicisation of workers’ resistance. This has already been presaged by two important developments: first, the fact that the 2022 breakthrough took place precisely at a point in which the outbreak of the war in Ukraine was accompanied by big campaigns about the need to support Ukraine and to prepare for sacrifices in order to resist future Russian aggression; second, the development of minorities politicised by the threat of war and looking for an internationalist response. These reactions on the question of war do not come from out of the blue: they are further evidence that the new phase of the class struggle draws its historic strength from the reality of an undefeated proletariat.

We repeat: the danger of decomposition overwhelming the proletariat has not gone away, and indeed grows as the ‘whirlwind effect’ of interacting capitalist disasters gains pace, piling destruction upon destruction. But the struggles after 2022 show that the class can still respond and that there are two poles in the situation, a kind of race against time[3] between the acceleration of decomposition and the development of the class struggle onto a higher level; a development in which all the questions raised by decomposition can be integrated into a communist project which can offer a way out of economic crisis, perpetual war, the destruction of nature and the rotting of social life. The more clearly revolutionary organisations of today understand what is at stake in the present world situation, the more effectively they will be able to play their role of elaborating this perspective for the future.

Amos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

[1] Initially the ICC defined this new historic course as a course towards revolution, but by the middle of the 1980s it had adopted the formula ‘course towards massive class confrontations’ since there could be no automatic trajectory towards a revolutionary outcome of the capitalist crisis.  

[2] Report on the question of the historic course, International Review 164

[3] This idea of the ‘two poles’ should not be confused with the idea of a ‘parallel course between world war and world revolution’ which some groups of the proletarian political milieu have defended, since as Bilan explained a course towards world war demands a defeated proletariat and thus excludes the possibility of world revolution. For a polemic with Battaglia Comunista on this question, see The Historic Course in International Review 18